Today I picked up an Epson v500 scanner from umart, as I’m keen to get back into a bit of film photography and the Microtek sadly is just not up to par.

This is my first slide scanned through it – shot back at a Brisbane Meetup get-together at Fingal Head, back in 2008.

Shot using my Mamiya M645 1000S (procured from Cash Converters!) with a 45mm Mamiya Sekor lens, on Fujichrome Velvia 100. I believe it was shot at f/22 but I have no recollection of the exposure time.

Inspired a little by the post processing used in David De Groot’s Dead Trees.

CP, and monochrome conversion in post.

Sitting as a stark reminder to what might have been, the ruins of “Archer’s Folly” is listed in the Tasmanian Heritage Register because of its association with prominent local businessman John Kinder Archer.

Not to be mistaken as a descendant of the Archer dynasty, John Kinder Archer was the son of John Archer, a miller from Ware in England.

Following the death of his father, and his inheritance of 30 shares in a steamship, John Kinder Archer turned his hand to the shipping industry.

He was also an elected member of the House of Assembly for Norfolk Plains in 1859, a position he held until 1861.

At about this time, Archer began building a large mansion on the high ground adjacent to Bishopsbourne Road in Carrick.

An interesting feature was the carriageway in the centre of house which took the form of a tunnel. Horse drawn vehicles could be driven right through the building from the front entrance to an inner court yard and out through the back entrance to the stables.

The front of the house was built, but at this stage Archer suffered a number of set backs.

Two of his ships collided in Bass Strait in a severe storm. They were carrying building materials for the house and were uninsured. Further building plans were cancelled and the house was never finished.

In 1867 it was sold to a miller, and ex-employee of his father, TW Monds who used the property for storage purposes.

Source: Heritage Tasmania

Stanley is a tourist destination and the main fishing port on the north-west coast of Tasmania.

The most distinctive landmark in Stanley is The Nut, an old volcanic plug discovered by the explorers Bass and Flinders in 1798, who officially named it Circular Head. It has steep sides and rises to 143 metres with a flat top. It is possible to walk to the top of The Nut via a steep track.

Tourists (like me) regularly travel to Highfield (a farming region on the north west of the township) to view the picturesque northern beaches with The Nut in the background.

Source: Wikipedia

Another afternoon shot at Dove Lake, highlighting the boat shed and the peak.

A single exposure of this view.

An unashamed HDR rendering of the boat shed at Dove Lake, in Cradle Mountain National Park.

Combined from 6 images, stepped from 3 exposures by pulling the lower bracket and pushing the higher.

This photo was taken just before the sun disappeared completely, while I was waiting for the shuttle back to the Waldheim Cabins at Cradle Mountain-Lake Saint Clair National Park.

Available for sale as a print from Redbubble.

In February 2010 I took a month-long trip to Tasmania, starting in Devonport and travelling clockwise around the state, taking in the sights and stopping at key areas. This gallery is a selection of my best photographs from that trip.

I am taking a month-long trip to Tasmania, beginning on the 1st February, and as part of that I intend to take quite a few photos.

In addition to some new lens acquisitions I picked up a Gisteq Phototrackr Lite GPS dongle, which pings GPS satellites every 10 seconds and keeps a log of my geographic position throughout the day.

Because the bundled software for the Phototrackr is absolute rubbish, I decided to investigate ways in which I can extract and convert the raw data directly.  As it turns out, there is a perl script available to do this – I Track You for Linux (iTU4l for short).

Because the script is geared toward a linux environment and takes advantage of a few standard linux applications that aren’t available under windows, I figured – because the majority of my photo apps run under windows – I may have to set up a linux / windows dual boot of my eeepc 701.  So, I spent a bit of time nlite-ing a Windows XP SP3 iso down to a manageable size (480mb install) and tried installing and dual booting with various flavours of linux.  This, while successful, was kind of unwieldy.  Dual booting can be tedious at the best of times.  So, I resolved to try ditching windows entirely and find a linux-only solution.

In the end I went with the old faithful Ubuntu Netbook Remix.  Installation was simple, as is the case with Ubuntu by default.  The default install is a little bulky as it comes with a few productivity applications that I don’t really need.  Openoffice was the major one, and removing it ( sudo apt-get remove openoffice.org-base ) freed up 300mb right away.

I then installed Google’s Chromium (the base project for Chrome) via its Launchpad PPA, as Chromium is very snappy on the eeepc – much faster than Firefox – and takes up less screen real estate.

For RAW processing, the Ubuntu Netbook Remix comes with F-Spot by default, which is okay for managing, cataloging and organising images, but not good for batch conversion (in fact it has no batch conversion ability at all), so I installed ufraw (this stands for Unidentified Flying RAW! – somewhat random) via aptitude for this purpose.  ufraw is bundled with an automatic batch conversion application – named ufraw-batch, funnily enough – which converts Canon RAW into a variety of useful formats including jpg and 16 bit tiff.  One bonus of ufraw is that it comes with a very nice gui for finely tuned conversion of individual RAW images.  I haven’t played with this much, but I assume you can save a profile from it and use it as the basis of a batch conversion as well.

I downloaded iTU4l and its counterpart log conversion program sr2x, copied them to /usr/bin and chmodded them to 755 (making the scripts executable).  This worked pretty much out of the box for me – plugged in the dongle, ran the script with the detection parameter and then the extract + clear memory parameters, and then converted the resulting file to GPX.  It will also export to KML for import into Google Maps or Google Earth, various flavours of csv, and other formats.

To correlate the GPS log to my images, I installed gpscorrelate and also gpscorrelate-gui via aptitude.  The premise of this application is that you point it to a series of images, and also a GPS log, and it will check your photos’ timestamps and correlate them to GPS records in the log from the relevant times.  One caveat here is that it will not write geotagging data to RAW files – in fact it will crash – so it’s important to convert your images before correlating them via this app.

After correlation on some sample images, I tried uploading to both Flickr and Panoramio, which quite happily geotagged the uploads based on the EXIF data.  Mission accomplished.

To conclude, Ubuntu Netbook Remix, plus a few choice Linux applications, provided me with a basic suite to catalog my images, extract gps data from my dongle, correlate the gps data with my image timestamps, and upload the images to several online image websites.  Note that I have 2gb RAM on my eeepc 701 rather than the default 512mb, so if you try similar and haven’t swapped out your RAM yet, your mileage may vary.