Intersecting Interests

As a certified ADHD-haver, I've collected a somewhat large set of hobbies that are oft on rotation which tend to blend into each other a fair bit, and sometimes they can conflict a bit with one another.

The presiding hobby of mine, that's been going on for longest in my life, is messing around with computers. I study computer science, I program recreationally, and I generally care about technology quite a lot.

So when it comes to my hobby of taking photos with old film cameras, I often find myself yearning for better tools. For instance - once I have shot a roll of film and developed it and scanned it, I need to heavily process those scans to turn them into usable images:

This is a fairly involved process, involving fiddling with the levels of individual colour channels, tweaking brightness and contrast settings and playing with colour balances to eek the best out of an image. It's good fun, but involved - but the bits around the side, organising all the scans, getting everything betweeen devices (since I edit everything on my iPad because Linux photo editing is ehhh), exporting the completed images and just working with the big files is annoying. And it could be better! I know how it could be better! I understand how computing works and I know what needs to change and how things can be when they work well together, but I'm mostly powerless to do anything about it. It's annoying!

That said - the intersection of film photo editing and open source software is very promising - in particular, the NegPy project looks super interesting, and like it will seriously improve the workflow, though I'm yet to be able to get it running.

Taking photos and open source also intersects in real-life too - I went to FOSDEM this year, and took a camera and walked away with some very nice photos. I got to enjoy two hobbies at once! And I got to travel, another thing I love doing.

Photography intersects with my sewing hobby too. I have made little camera bags and pouches in the past, to fit my specific cameras and needs perfectly, and they've been far better than anything off the shelf could. I've made custom patterns using the skills software suites I've learnt how to use while editing photos, and I've been able to whip up some little custom tags that I can sew into my projects and my gear so it doesn't get lost and is attributable to me:

It's not like making the design for those labels was hard; it was not. But knowing how to use the image editors that I do know how to use made it frictionless and fun to do.

Open source software finds its way into sewing, too - for example, FreeSewing is an open-source website that lets you generate your own, tailor-fitted sewing patterns based off of your own measurements. It's a great example of the intersection between software and sewing - if you're curious to learn more about it, you might like the recording of a talk the creator did about it at FOSDEM this year.

Honestly, the more I think about it, the more I find that a lot of my hobbies end up getting improved by little scripts or code or my interests in tech. It's good fun when worlds collide.