Recently I released an update for Take Stock that added a number of features I've wanted to have since the first release. There are also a bunch of smaller improvements, and even some bug fixes. The biggest change was moving the film rolls from the top tab bar to the sidebar. The tabs were fully custom, and while I spent a lot of time trying to get them just right, they were always a little…
A couple years ago I built a GameBoy app and hardware accessory for controlling Capture One. It was a great project, and I learned about GameBoy programming for the first time, did a deeper dive on embedded Swift, and explored wireless communication on a lower level. The result worked surprisingly well, allowing someone to navigate images and set color tags & star ratings. The project wasn't the…
I was doing some digital organization today, including importing photos from my M240, which I apparently neglected to do over the holidays. In addition to the usual Thanksgiving and Christmas photos I found a handful of landscapes I'd made as I was getting read to drive home from my parents' house. They live up in the mountains, in the middle of a redwood forrest, and often the mornings are foggy…
A few weeks ago I visited Urban Ore with some friends, one of whom, a fellow digital tech, pointed out some old-ish theatre fresnel spot lights. They were only $20 so we each picked one up with the intent on retrofitting them to use standard light bulbs. Somewhat surprisingly the light still had a fully functioning lamp, drawing 500W and demonstrating why they're called "hot lights". The power for…
Recently a photographer asked me whether there was a better way to build very large TIFFs, a grid of tens of thousands of smaller images, in gigapixel range. My first thought was "sure", thinking I could use some CoreGraphics to put everything together without the overhead of displaying the images. However I quickly found that that perceived lack of overhead was not trivial, and attempting to…
In March I released a new app, Capturebot 2 , and over the last few months I've been fixing bugs and adding a bevy of new features. Today I'm releasing the second update of the year which includes a brand new preset system and several helpful onboarding features. User Presets & Session Defaults Capturebot shipped with a handful of built-in presets for capture & output patterns, which were great as…
Last week I travelled to Greece for the first time, in part of join Capture One and work with their engineers 1 , but also to explore Athens. The entire trip was fantastic, I saw lots of sight, met plenty of people, and took even more photos. I split photos from the trip into two galleries, the first for more general travel photos and the second for the The Acropolis specifically. The whole…
I really like the idea of interacting with computers in ways other than the keyboard and mouse, especially in ways that can control applications without concern for focus. That's a big part of why I like the Stream Deck and built a plugin for Capture One . Through happenstance I needed to build an input device to emulate a barcode scanner, so I rummaged around the parts bin and grabbed a Raspberry…
For the past few months I've been working on a brand new app to help digital techs on set. Capturebot 2 is designed to help digital techs manage their sessions by building a shotlist and tracking files ensuring that everything is named and processed correctly. The History The premise behind Capturebot is something I, and others like Brian von Glahn, have been messing with for a while. I'd built…
The first app update of the year goes to First Contact with a minor update bringing enhanced menu bar functionality, some bug fixes, and support for images with an alpha channel. Main Features First Contact now has a brand new Page menu, which has a suite of commands for changing the page layout. The header, footer, and image labels can be toggled from the menu bar, or with keyboard shortcuts, as…
The latest version of First Contact , which is out now, has been in development for a over a year, and represents a nearly complete rewrite of the app from the ground up. The original contact sheet rendering engine has been scrapped, replaced with a brand new one that renders faster and produces smaller, higher quality PDFs. The layout settings have been expanded with the of addition headers &…
A new update for the Capture One Stream Deck plugin just hit the marketplace featuring six new actions and over 20 new image adjustments available on the Stream Deck + dials. To date the plugin has been downloaded over 1,800 times! The plugin has nearly 30 unique actions, for doing everything from rating & tagging images, filtering collections, navigating images, moving the capture folder,…
I've had a long term obsession with 3D printing a medium format camera. It was one of the reasons I bought my very first 3D printer, and has been a project I've returned to several times. The last time I took at stab at the project was with my wooden 6x9 field camera , which was eventually upgraded with a sliding back that I used to do some studio work . All of the previous attempts were…
Looking back over what I’ve (mostly privately) written about XOXO I’m surprised to find a clear arc. The ethos of the festival has both tracked with and helped guide my return freelancing. Now that the final XOXO is over I want to gather my thoughts on my three times attending and how they've helped me over the years. In 2018, at my first XOXO, I had a strong sense of not belonging. At the time it…
All the way back in May I got a bad idea: Capture One for the GameBoy. Obviously not all of Capture One, but some sort of controller. While bored one evening I built a very non-functional proof-of-concept GameBoy game with GB Studio demonstrating what the features of the "game" would be. In short it would allow you to add color tags and star ratings to images. As a bonus I wanted the whole system…
Far too long ago I announced a major new version of ScreeningRoom , thinking that its release was both just around the corner and that it was unquestionably better in all ways. I was wrong on both counts. I heard from beta testers that they were still using the previous version because the menu bar functionality was critical, even with some of the bugs. After mulling things over I decided to bring…
In high school I loved playing a little Flash game called Planarity . I've absolutely no idea how I stumbled upon it, but I played it most days in the library before classes if I got to school early. In the intervening years between then and now it would occasionally cross my mind as a fun memory. In the years since I learned to code it's also occasionally crossed my mind, but with a more concrete…
It's a been a little while since the last Capture One Stream Deck plugin update, but it's worth the wait. The latest version packs in a lot of new features and some important bug fixes. The update is available now in the Elgato marketplace . New Color tag and rating key actions can now toggle their value Flip Crop action Select last n images for quick review Toggle stored filters in the current…
I have a fairly extensive 1 collection of film cameras. Everything from Kodak to Leica to Hasselblad to Minox. Most of them work and are fun to shoot with. This, however, isn't a camera review 2 . It's instead about my great obsession with putting metadata where it belongs. I use VueScan and a Nikon CoolScan to scan all the film I get back from the lab, the resulting images are great, the DAM…
When Capture One announced they were releasing Capture One for iPhone a lot of digital techs rolled their eyes. Why would we want to tether to a phone? The marketing didn't offer a compelling reason, instead mostly featuring "influencers" with knotted up orange cables, seemingly another example of how Capture One had forgotten its core professional users. While I'm sure there are situations where…
As I've been doing more motion work there are often aspects of that workflow I'd like to take advantage of in my stills workflow with Capture One. While not everything translates directly, there is one that does: false color. False color maps values in an image into a gradient, usually with blue for darker colors, green for mid-tones, and red for highlights. There are many variations on how the…
Last year I got a Flanders Scientific DM241, and was thrilled to find many of its functions could be controlled remotely. While often times the monitor is close as hand it could also be across the studio so being able to control things like false color from your computer is handy. Plus, it's fun to poke around the protocols, but more on that in a minute. The easiest is by connecting the monitor to…
Digitial techs spend a lot of time organizing files; it's our primary job. We create folders for every shot, use token when processing to organize files automatically, and then trash files into a single folder. Scrolling through thousands of files to find a missing frame isn't exactly fun. To help solve this I've written a script that adds some order to your session's trash. Running the script…
Guidelines got its first update of the year, and its biggest update to date, yesterday. Major parts of the user interface were updated as well as major changes to what you can do with frame lines. The update is a available in-app and can be downloaded from the project page . Grids Your frame lines can now do more than just frame up, they can help you compose your shot with the addition of grids.…
One of the primary jobs of a DT, especially on a high volume set, is managing images as they come in. This usually relies on setting the capture folder and some some basic tokens for setting the name. If the tech gets behind (or the photographer gets ahead) it’s easy to have images mis-filed requiring renaming, which, depending on the naming convention, can be complicated or error prone. Current…
Photos from my December trip to the Big Apple.
ScreeningRoom started off as basically a "what if" project, and has grown to be one of my most popular apps. It's gained a number of new features over a handful of releases but has remained, at the core, the same app that was started a little over a year ago. I'm happy with that core, creating a preview of to show monitors you might not be able to see, and don't see any reason to change it.…
I'm pleased to annount two big updates to the Capture One Stream Deck plugin . The first is a new update and the second will make updates easier in the future. Announcement the First A new version of the plugin, 2022.6, is out and ready for download ! This update fixes camera compatibility issues that prevented setting the shutter speed, aperture, or ISO. It also adds three new actions to toggle…
The photographer I’ve been working with the last few days has really liked the idea of getting a 9 up grid of images to page through, and obviously as that’s something that takes more than ~7 seconds to do I wrote a little script to do it for me. I think it pairs particularly well with ⌃9 . The script lives on GitHub with the rest of my Capture One scrips.
Your browser does not support the video tag. Way back with macOS Yosemite Apple introduced an API meant for cloud sync applications like Dropbox to be able to add badges to files and folders, and after finding an application called GitFinder which leverages theses APIs to do something other than sync it got me thinking about building an extension that adds common digital tech tasks directly into…
I'd like to introduce a new app I've been working on called First Contact , a quick and easy way to create contact sheets. First Contact features the right balance of options for customizing the layout while not getting you bogged down. There are a number of ways to make contact sheets, but they tend to be part of expensive subscription plans, a side-feature of a DAM, a fancy print dialogue, or…
Recently I've been working on building out a more reliable network for my cart. Anyone who's used Capture Pilot knows that it's temperamental at best and the ports are blocked by corporate IT at worst. I used some spare Ubiquiti equipment I had after upgrading my home network and build a little "rack" that fits inside a Pelican 1300 case. The frame is made of NanoBeam , a 5mm T-slot extrusion…
In January I announced ScreeningRoom , and yesterday I released the third update of the year! The last couple of updates bring a bevy of new features, bug fixes, and smaller changes: 2022.2 Added Change stream scale from preferences Display crosshairs over the cursor Option to float preview windows Take a screenshot of all displays from the menu bar Changed Default resolution scale is now ½…
Last year I released Capturebot Lite, an app designed to do one thing: create folders. Tonight I'm releasing the first major update of the year. This includes all of the usual Bug Fixes and Improvements one expects, plus some fun new features. The headliner for the release is Manual Filenames. 2022.2 brings the ability to edit and remove them, but also the option to create repeating names for the…
A while ago saw a link to some old LED hexadecimal displays, DL2416s, little four character modules that accept ASCII and have an LED matrix for the display. I was captivated by them and purchased a handful from eBay with the idea that I'd use them as a thermostat as part of my home automation. Long story short, I designed a very flawed circuit board that I never quite got working correctly, and…
After, checks notes , three years without any updates I scrapped my original background script plugin and replaced it with a proper application. In short Capture One's plugin API isn't great nor was I even really using it as designed and recent macOS updates broke it the rest of the way. The new app version of ScriptSetter also gains some new abilities like being able to set scripts for any…
A project that I've been working on for quite some time is figuring out a good way to do room occupancy using thermopile sensors. I tried lots of different combinations of hardware and software: Wemos D1 boards, MQTT, web sockets, Swift, Raspberry Pis, etc. After each attempt I'd be disappointed with the results and shelve it for a while. Over the last couple of weeks, however, I feel like I've…
infomercial black & white Has this ever happened to you: you're in the middle of a shoot, images coming in faster than the computer can keep up with, and suddenly you notice something's wrong. Everything's coming in overexposed! 😫 fade to color Introducing another script ! Simply place the camera_settings_check script in Background Scripts, run it from Capture One's Scripts menu to save your…
A common occurrence on photo sets is to be running multiple monitors; for the AD, client, stylist, etc. Another common occurrence is not being able to see all of those extra monitors and it's difficult to work when you can't see the display. Another digital tech, Josh Marrah , had the original idea and asked if I might be able to build an app to let you monitor you monitors. A little bit of…
Earlier this week I got nerd-sniped by a video about Newton's Fractal , which covered Fun Facts about finding the roots of polynomials that result in a fractal pattern. While watching the video I got caught up in the movement of how a point finds its root, because where there's movement there's something to plot. One of the nice things about 3Blue1Brown is all of the videos are generated from…
A while back I bought a genuine Art Cube 1 on a whim, as I'm wont to do. I knew I wanted to somehow plot on it, but didn't really have any concrete of ideas what to do with it. I wanted to do something in 3D, where the plot was continuous around the cube, however SwiftGraphics is a (mostly) 2D library, so plotting anything with continuous lines would require some cheating to make either make lines…
It's been a little while since I've released an update to Capturebot, but after a couple betas earlier this year version 2021.1 is ready to go. There are a bevy up bug fixes and some important new features that have been a long time coming and bring Capturebot closer to what it's meant to be. The addition of being able to create capture folders from the datasource's filenames and a new and…
A while ago I picked up a Voigtländer Brillant from Seawood Photo. It sat in my collection for ages before I finally decided to put some film through it last month. The ground glass is, as the name implies, brilliant, and even despite having only three shutter speeds, three aperture stops, and is zone focussed the camera itself is a joy to shoot with. It's very much the point & shoot of its era.…
A couple days ago I completed a new series of plots based on spirals radiating out from a central circle. It took a little but of tuning to get the arms to increase in radius at a nice rate, but using an offset of the starting position ensured that the outer arm had a slow start and gradual ramp up, instead of all arms starting at the same position. After I had a bunch of "normal" spirals I added…
I’ve been meaning to revisit my ray tracing system for a while, but never really had the motivation to dive back in. The way I’d built it was fragile and prone to infinite loops. The infinite loops are what finally got me to take another look: recent changes I’d made caused several sketches to never resolve. My original ray tracing system simply collected line segments from each object it…
Over the summer, while California was in the middle of fire season I decided , mostly out of a morbid curiosity I suppose, to monitor the air quality inside my house. There are a number of commercial solutions available, however they're all either complex, costly, or both. I was looking for something that could take the place of my existing Wemos & ESPHome-based temperature and humidity sensors.…
I've been having a little bit of "plotters block" recently, but I finally started making some new plots today. While doing that I remembered a series of plots I'd forgotten to add to the gallery. These plots are built around the addition of geometric boolean operations to SwiftGraphics. There are also some fun time lapses of some of the plots.
Last week I was listening to the latest episode of Make Do and near the end the conversation turned to generic art from a department store. Your browser does not support the video tag. The mass-produced prints from IKEA, Target, etc. remind me of bringing store-bought baked goods to a party versus making a cake. Both fulfill the function of being a dessert, but they aren’t equal. There’s an…
Recently I bought a bunch of new Sonoff IoT devices, among them was the Sonoff L1: a WiFi connected LED strip. Like all of the other Sonoff equipment I figured it would be supported by ESPHome for easy integration with Home Assistant. As it happens, this wasn't the case. The whole project ended up being far more complicated than I expected. Flashing the Controller The L1 doesn't expose any…
It's been a couple of months since I initially began working on SwiftGraphics and it's already grown quite a bit, and most of that growth has come along with the requisite growing pains. With very few exceptions, every time I've started a new generative piece I've found a part of the code-base that was fundamentally broken in some way. The good news is that this forced me to actually write tests…