Star-trail photographs are mind boggling to look at. Its one of the most beautiful vista of nature. However most of the times when it comes to post-processing the photos after shooting a star trail can be a pain. Here is a small GIMP plugin which will help you elevate all that pain & concentrate more on shooting part of star trails. The plugin is known as ‘gimp-startrail-compositor‘. You can download it here.
Setting the correct exposure is one of the most fundamental of photography. With the inbuilt light meters in our camera’s, this becomes a piece of cake as we no longer need to work by the Sunny 16 or any other gothic rule. However over dependence on these inbuilt meters have meant most of the amateur photographers not able to count exposure mentally in terms of stops.
This ability to increase or decrease the exposure by stops comes in handy when one is trying his/her hand at really long exposures. Once you put a dense enough Neutral Density(ND) filter, you will need to count back in stops so as to determine the correct exposure. Depending on the density of your ND filter, this may demand to count back up-to 10 or more stops. Now if you’re sound of your knowledge about the aperture & shutter-speed scale, then you’ll breeze through. Else you might go for the trial & error method. However, the trial & error method would take sometime before you figure out the correct exposure. Instead, use ‘Exposure Calculator‘.
Exposure Calculator is a nifty android application which allows one to calculate exposure for long exposures. One needs to simply input the current correct exposure settings(indicated by your camera’s inbuilt meter) in the top part of the application after which you input the density of your ND filter in stops & you’ve your new exposure automatically calculated for you at the bottom. Makes sure you input the correct settings in the first place else your exposure will be skewed.
That’s it! Now if maths was not your favourite subject in high school, simply use the ‘Exposure Calculator’ & give all the worries of your calculation to your maths teacher. 
Photo collage make for a wonderful gift. It makes for a good gift since one can include photographs shot across various time-line of a relation which when looked back brings immense satisfaction. Being a photographer, my friends have been receiving such photo collages from me. To make this collage, I use a nifty piece of software known as “FotoWall”.
Earlier on we had walked through managing software packages under Debian Linux. In this post we look at managing software under an RPM based Linux distro. RPM stands for Red Hat Package Manager. As the name suggest this format was developed by Redhat but now it is not confined to Redhat Linux. Now many Linux distros like OpenSUSE, Mandriva etc have incorporated the RPM format. There are many graphical utilities out there which can help you manage software on your RPM distro but as always command line will offer you total control & flexibility over the process. Let’s go ahead & learn how to manage software on an RPM linux distro. Below foobar refers to an example application. Replace it by the name of your software package.
View full article »
Installing software under Linux doesn’t require one to hit the console anymore. Thanks to the graphical package managers available which have made the job of installing, uninstalling & updating software packages a child’s play. Still knowing how to manage software via console is necessary to make yourself a competent Linux user. In this first post I will cover installing software under Debian Linux. I will follow this post with installing softwares on Redhat, installing from source etc.
View full article »
