D70S raw

2006 April 28 at 04:01 » Tagged as :photography, javascript,

The other day I was on the phone with Dominic Sansoni, one of the best photographers in Sri Lanka. Naturally conversation came around photography and I told him I shoot JPEGs with my D70S. That's when Dominic threatened to hit me on the head with a stick!

Since there is a very slight chance that we might become neighbors in the future. Having someone rush at you with a large stick when you are about to take a photo can be quite a distraction. So I decided to switch to the NEF format. Unfortunately the reason that I chose JPG in the first place is because NEF support on linux is somewhat limited. Fortunately the D70S is very much a geek camera and there are quite a few hacks to make things work.

the page on http://pages.quicksilver.net.nz/pepe/d70/Nikon_D70_on_Linux.html got me started. However even though the author says konqueror can be configured to display thumbnails for NEF files it didn't work for me. Perhaps there is a slight difference between the D70 NEF format and the D70S format.

Kuickshow which I have been using all this time is, is no good either. So I went through several image viewing programs until I finally decided to settle on F-Spot and showphoto. They are both not ideal but they will have to do for the moment. I can make life a lot easier by switching to Gnome for KDE but I like KDE. However I did decide to use nautilus instead of konqueror.

Installing UFraw and DCraw made it possible to open and edit raw files with the GIMP. However it made GIMP very very unstable. For example i can no longer close the Layers dialog, it result in the GIMP itself being shutdown.