Capturing fuchsia flowers with a marble and a macro lens
#dailyphoto #eugeneoregon #oregon #flowerphotography
“Rain-passing Roof”
Gratuitous architectural decoration on a downtown apartment building
Bitten by the Photography Bug
I realized the other day that dealing with photographs has replaced dealing with software in my daily life. This is a great improvement in terms of personal happiness, though I do have the same tendency to go scurrying down rabbit holes. But now instead of tweaking terminal configuration files or git workflows, I’m busy playing with post-processing or camera settings. One way or the other, though, I’ve taken upwards of 22,000 photographs so far in 2026.
I’ve mentioned before the connection I see (“see,” what an ironic way to put it) between my photography and my mental condition. I am at this point comfortable in saying that I have both aphantasia and SDAM. (These are self-diagnoses and should be treated with the usual amount of salt applied to such things on the internet). If I close my eyes and try to “visualize an apple,” it’s just black static. If asked what I was doing around my twelfth birthday, I have absolutely no idea. These are just facts about my life; I don’t find them to be particularly disabling. But the combination does mean that without a photographic record, I can’t look back. Oddly enough, with the record, I can usually at least tell where an image was taken, if not precisely what I was thinking, doing, or feeling at the time.
Anyhow, these days I often have a camera or two (well, sometimes three) with me when I’m out of the house, especially when hiking or walking around town. As the process now stands, there are six distinct steps that the photos go through when I get them home, usually on successive days (I find that rating images in particular is better done after things have sat for a bit):
- Dump & import. This includes bringing the raw files and SOOC JPG images into Digikam, and then importing the raw files into Darktable. I could no doubt settle on just one of these for everything, but the redundancy also gives me backed-up storage on separate devices. Not that it will be the end of the world if my photographs vanish, but it would make me sad. This is also the point at which I pull out and process one image for daily posting to a Pixelfed instance.
1a. I’ve also started posting some images I’m especially happy with to Glass. Not sure whether this is going to stick or not.
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Export mostly-unprocessed images of plants and animals, especially from wilderness hikes, and send them off to iNaturalist.
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Tag images by place, content, and technique. I’m not utterly systematic about this but there have been several times now when pulling out things like “all photographs of Spencer Butte” or “all photographs with water droplets” have come in handy for me.
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Rate images. Also not utterly systematic but I do end up with a rough sort into 2, 3, 4, and 5 star images with progressively fewer to think about.
4a. All along steps 1-4 I’ve been taking images that appeal to me and developing them further in Darktable. These end up variously on Micro.blog or Glass or Pixelfed.
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Push SOOC JPGs of things I think my family will enjoy to the Aura frame sitting in the dining room.
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Take any images I’ve developed at 16:9 image ratio and copy them over to the Wallpaper folder on my shared drive, which my current computers use to rotate background images.
And that’s that…for now.
“Sparkly”
A thistle in the fog
Trump’s helipad tour is such a transparent attempt to distract from losing a war of choice and destroying the American economy in the process. Why does the media play along with covering this crap?
Going through the latest 52Frames album this morning. A community of 2500+ people trying to get better at one thing brings me joy.
“Twinsies”
Nope, these are not tiny squashes - they are poison oak berries.
#dailyphoto #oregon #eugeneoregon
“Reaching”
Old gnarled wood on top of Four In One Cone.
“Eugene Morning”
One of the best things about living in Eugene is our urban trail network - which many people use every day to walk, jog, bike, or just sit and enjoy the day.
