It’s been a while since I did my last photo hunting session. However, the sun was finally up that day and so myself and a friend decided to go to Hampton beach and walk along the beach to Middle Brighton, snapping possible objects and sceneries along the way. It was quite a bit of walk, but the weather was very nice and photography is always a fun thing for me. I’m glad to say that there are quite a few good shots that I can add to my gallery today.
The gear that I brought with me was my Nikon D300s, 90mm macro lens, 70-300mm telephoto lens and my trusty 18-50mm lens. Along with all the gear I also brought my Holga, but obviously it’ll take a while to develop the negative since no one seems to to 1 hour development anymore these days. There were a lot of things that can be taken on that day, the weather was very nice that it was perfect to snap pictures. The light wasn’t too harsh but not dark either, it’s like having a giant softbox illuminating all the objects.
This resulted in great lighting condition to take macro photos such as the one on the left (click on the image to show larger size), there is not a hint of harsh light which I really dislike in macros. The photo was taken using the 90mm macro lens, handheld with manual focusing. The original flower was quite small, however as with any macro photography, it always pays to have a closer look at the things around you. 
Such as the dried (seed pods?) in the gallery below or the photo of seeds which is my personal favorite in this gallery.
When walking around places like the beach and taking photos of the scenery, it always pay to have both wide angle lens and telephoto lens. Most of the sailing boats photos were taken using the wide angle lens, however the boat with the orange sail in the gallery below were taken using the 300mm lens. The photo of the dog was also taken using the telephoto lens, obviously there was no way to come closer without drenching the equipments. I had to actually switch the telephoto lens to manual focus mode in order to shoot the dog properly since the focusing system was not fast enough (it’s an older lens).
The Processing Tools
This is an interesting portion of the post that I wanted to discuss. I have recently migrate my desktop into a Linux system since I’m a software engineer and it’s really so much easier to develop on it. However, image editing in Linux is not exactly everyone’s cup of tea, even for me. I remember a few years ago, opening RAW images and processing it with the available open source programs was really difficult.
As it turned out, there are really good software these days that one can use under the Linux environment to organize RAW files and edit them. All the images in this post’s gallery are edited under a Linux system. The setup that I have are: Ubuntu 10.10, RawTherapee 3.0 alpha for RAW files processing and Gimp 2.7. Granted both of the image processing software are on it’s development stage and by no means stable, however I have no issues whatsoever editing all of these images today. I think when the two software matures, they will be great. RawTherapee is very intuitive, reminds me a lot of Adobe Lightroom and it’s very efficient and quick. Gimp 2.7 although not available through the normal download has a lot of user interface improvements, the one that I love most is the single window mode, no more 3 separate windows open together (you’ll have this “issue” on Gimp 2.6).
If anyone is interested to get the tools, here are the ways, again, the software versions that I listed are on development, so proceed with caution:
RawTherapee: available via software center
Gimp 2.7: You will have to add the development repository first, then run the install command
remove any other versions of gimp
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:matthaeus123/mrw-gimp-svn
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gimp
The Gallery
