Photography Safari

Yesterday, I went out on a photography safari. Today, I’m making a story for the Galleries section of homeoffice.studio. I used my Canon SL2 Rebel camera, with an 18 to 55 millimeter lens and a 55 to 250 millimeter lens. I also used my Samsung Note 9 smart phone.

I’m using KDE’s KWrite editor, to write this story, instead of Kate. I think that KWrite is optimized for writing stories and Kate is optimized for writing software. And of course, I’m using Kdenlive, to put the video together into an interesting story.

I’m practicing and demonstrating how you can use this technology to produce entertaining stories for a global audience. Start collecting your tools. Improve your skill. Create something valuable and trade it in our one world wide free marketplace.

A Dysfunctional City

So, I was riding the bus into downtown Seattle and the first words I heard anyone say was; someone talking about some one getting their head cut off. Interesting.

Then, I get downtown and as I’m walking to the bus stop for the bus I am transferring to, to get to West Seattle, I have to walk through this large group of homeless people standing around outside a block of boarded up stores. It is the zombie apocalypse, which is afflicting just about every American city.

So sad. The very heart of the Emerald City, Seattle, is very sick. Shame on America for allowing this to happen. I don’t necessarily know all the answers about how to fix it, but I do know there are good answers, probably many. There is no way that it is okay for America’s cities to allow these people to languish on the streets. Locking them up in any building or somewhere out of site, is not a good solution either.

I have some ideas about how to eliminate poverty and homelessness from the face of the earth. I’ve explained some of them in this website. In fact, creating peace and prosperity for all human kind, individually and collectively, is the primary purpose of Holistic Home Office and homeoffice.studio.

We need our leaders to sit down and consult with each other and figure out a fair and humane way to solve this problem and get it done. Our current leaders are failures. Completely corrupt and dishonorable failures, who live in mansions, while many of the people they are elected to serve languish in misery.

I am angry about this and I blame our political leaders because, I can understand the connection between the polices they are espousing and the poverty and homelessness, the cause and the effect. I don’t blame the homeless people. I blame the politicians who have been elected to govern our society.

Seattle is a beautiful city. One of our premiere 21st century pueblos. I moved here 9 years ago because, I figured that with the city, mountains and ocean all together in one place, it must be a beautiful place. From a distance it is. Close up, it is filthy. There is trash everywhere. And there are hundreds of obviously distressed people, wandering around with nowhere to go home.

I really want this to be a happy story, but I agree with the idea that silence is acceptance. The current condition of our society is totally unacceptable. And our leaders are intentionally causing it, most likely in order to maintain their advantage and to increase their power and control over the people of earth.

Photo Technology

I took a lot of pictures with my Phone and with my Camera. My phone has 500 GB of memory, so I can take a lot of pictures and videos with it.

When you are trying to organize your pictures, by selecting a few of them to include in your stories, be patient. The pictures are large files and the computer needs time to move them. Pick a few pictures and put them in a new folder. I usually leave the name of the pictures as the camera sets them, with all the meta-data, except, I add an underscore and a number for any edits I do.

Keep in mind that the raw photos are huge files. They are more than 6 times bigger than JPG files. The camera stores a JPG and a raw photo for each picture you take. So, that limits the number of photos you can take. I filled up my 32 GB storage during the trip yesterday.

Of course, you could set the camera to the JPG setting to prevent it from keeping the raw image. The advantage of keeping the raw image is that you can use the raw image in your photo editing applications to make fine grained adjustments to just about every detail of the picture.

Work on improving the clarity of the photos on your website. Get some raw photos and learn how to edit and polish them into visually attractive additions to your stories. Most of the time, the JPG will work fine. You’ll have to decide how much you want to work on processing your photos. I usually convert mine to PNG files the first time I export them.

Figure out how to make your photos crystal clear and level. Take the time to learn this skill. Get yourself a drone and make aerial videos to add to your content creation toolbox. Once you get a few tools, then you need to practice using them and improve your talent.

I’ve got a Windows desktop and a Linux laptop. I prefer using Linux and do most of my work on Linux and then finish projects on the Windows machine. For one thing, the screen on my desktop is a lot bigger, high definition monitor.

Typically, I do my writing in Linux and my photo and video production on Windows. One of the things I want to do with this story is compare Gimp, Raw Therapee and Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop. The one thing I like about Lightroom and Adobe is the auto button that you can click on to make a picture a lot better.

Use the free and open source tools, whether you are using Linux or Windows. Get familiar with them. The commercial software is probably easier to use and superior to free and open source software in many ways, but, you can make amazingly beautiful art with the free and open source tools, and you get to control the tools, instead of being controlled by them.

Use Raw Therapee to make geometry adjustments. Not only can you adjust your photos, so that the trees and buildings stand up straight, instead of pointing towards the middle of the photo, you can also adjust the level of the photo, so it is not tilted one way or the other.

Then, use Gimp to resize the photos, so they are 1200 pixel wide instead of 6000. That makes them small enough to load onto the website. I usually export the images as PNGs in order to improve the quality of the pictures. PNGs are lossless, JPGs are lossy.

One thing I’ve learned from this particular project is that, I have a lot to learn about photography and editing photos. I spend a lot of time trying to understand Linux and learning C programming and web development and things like that. I think that focusing on the graphic art tools like Gimp, Krita and Raw Therapee is a good idea.

While Linux and the website are the platform I am creating, the content I’m delivering with that platform is the reason for the season. Be a prolific artist. Create content. Lots of content. Make sure it is attractive and valuable content.

Seattle Safari is a video I made on the way back home from the Photography Safari. It’s a great view of Seattle, taken through a dirty window on a bus. After letting the sites and sounds of the bus ride run for a while, I start telling a story about my perspective of human nature and civilization.

If you have found this story and read this far, I recommend that you watch this whole video, all the way to the end. The first few minutes is just the bus ride leaving West Seattle. After about 5 minutes of listening to the bus and watching the scenery, a couple got on the bus. They were talking pretty loudly, so I decided to tell a story, to go with the video.

I intended to talk about photography and website development, but I started talking about social and economic development and it turned out to be a pretty good story. Building sustainable cities and a space-faring, global civilization is a free enterprise. Figure out your niche and join in the construction of the greatest adventure in human history.

Read the whole story and watch the video to get a very advanced, entertaining education.