A couple shots of some New Jersey fall foliage. I have been using my last couple sets of photos to get familiar with darktable. I am moving RAW photo management software after not getting any updates in years from my current one, AfterShot Pro.
I am still not fully used to darktable yet. To be honest I don’t like their management system for adding to the library. Either that or I just haven’t figured it out yet. I am trying to avoid any subscription based photo library management software for my separate RAW files. Apple Photos handles all my jpg / heic images and video fine.
I’d say I’ll have more posts soon, but to be honest the next time you may hear from me is my yearly beaten games list. But never say never.
I must have 20 something revisions on this post and I am still not fully satisfied with it. Not because of some poetic reason like the words being used to describe the photos, but because I am fully realizing how much I dislike the block editor that is now the default in WordPress.
While admiring this processed black and white drone shot of New York City by way of New Jersey, know that I have never liked the built-in Media Library of WordPress. For a platform that seems to market itself towards media-centric projects, the built in asset management of the WordPress Media Library seems to have not changed one bit since the original release of the platform. The only search and organization is a tag based search system. What I wouldn’t give for a built in folder system to organize media with.
Yes I know that like any other open platform, there are a series of plugins that could potentially make my life easier. And to that I say, if you look up there is a nice drone shot of a small Jersey town festival over Labor Day weekend. It was taken with automatic exposure bracketing and I processed it afterwards in AfterShot Pro. Along with that I’ll say that I already have my share of WordPress plugins running that manage to make my shared hosting slow to a crawl.
What a nice panorama of the Catskill mountains, if only there was some way to pan through it and really take a look at it closer. Well there are various WordPress plugin subscription services I can use for the ++checks count++ one panorama I post each year. Even opening it up to a lightbox does nothing.
The final count was 25 revisions of this post as I tried to figure out how WordPress and images are handled with the block editor.
During the Pandemic, I have tried out all different types of hobbies and wore many different hats to prevent myself from going completely stir crazy while indoors and outdoors avoiding any interaction with other people. Probably one of the best sanity-maintaining purchases I made was that of the prosumer drone.
I have flown my share of those $30 – $50 drones you get off of Amazon that really go all over the place outside and last about two hours indoors before you hit a wall and shatter a few propellers in one go.
The Mini 2 from DJI is a whole different beast and it is priced accordingly for what you get with it. It is one of the few pieces of technology that I have used in recent years that actually felt like some kind of futuristic device for me as an average person to have. The range, the control at higher (safe and legal) altitudes, and the picture quality in both the live feed and the video and photos it takes and holds onboard.
There will be plenty of other posts with the video and other photos captured from it, including some really great built in panorama features. But I wanted to put something up about the HDR mode built into the device. Mostly because I wanted to use one of those nifty before and after scrolling things for the pictures.
The Mini 2 does not automatically create HDR photos like how the iPhone does. Instead, it takes 3 different pictures – one at normal exposure based on the sensor light reading, then one underexposed, and one overexposed, in rapid succession so that there is minimal drift. The feature is a common one on DSLR cameras – Automatic Exposure Bracketing (AEB) and can be enabled from the standard photo settings in the DJI app.
From there, you can drop your 3 photos into software that supports the merging of AEB style photos. Personally, I used Corel AfterShot Pro 3, because I have been a registered user for a bit, it’s a non-subscription license, and it has been helpful for managing my DSLR photos which I keep separate from my built in macOS/iOS Photos.app. AEB merging is also supported in Affinity Photo, Adobe Lightroom, and there are some other open source tools and freeware/shareware options available too.
The HDR photos are on the left of both of these pictures and the photos on the right are considered the normal exposure shot taken with the camera during the process.
I have no plans of taking every single photo as AEB, but it can definitely be the sazón for any good set of shots when I am out flying the thing around.
