Category : Diary

Another week of grant application writing, and continuing to fine-tune my photo management strategy. I am increasingly disappointed in software that seems to ignore the existence of edge-cases.

I mixed up my first batch of cutting oil – buying the squirt bottles with the markers on the side was a stroke of genius, if I do say so myself. I’ve used it a lot over the years, but never actually made any up myself. It’s one of those weird liquids, where the oil is a translucent red, but when you mix it with water, it produces a milky emulsion, that doesn’t separate.

In my photo process, I’ve made a huge discovery as to why some of my Aperture projects don’t import correctly into Capture One, losing their organisational structure:

Turns out the projects that were created by iPhoto, prior to iPhoto and Aperture sharing a common library format, were tripping up the import process, and unable to be read by Capture One’s importer.

The solution, was to just rename the projects in Aperture, even renaming them to the same name seems to do the trick. Obviously a part of the process touches the Project’s metadata in a way that makes it readable by Capture One.

Picked up my steel – I ended up not having offcuts, as the vendor cut it down and only charged me for the specific lengths I required.

Planned & modelled the cutlist, unpacked the bandsaw, bought tungsten electrodes and filler rods for the welder, as well as some cutting oil, and spray bottles.

Ordered steel for the welding cart project. It’s 8m lengths, rather than 6.5, so I’ll have a bit of stock left over, which isn’t a bad thing. Cutting by the steel merchant is $5 per cut – it won’t be long before the bandsaw pays for itself, in fact, at these prices, I’d hazard a guess that this project will do it.

Spent the weekend in Brisbane for medical appointments, and watched Twitter in horror as the NSW Police lived up to their reputation as violent thugs, and capsicum-sprayed a hundred trapped people under central station.

Most of the week was spent working on a grant application for emergency funding to help cover the projects that have been cancelled as a result of the plague.

But, once that was done, I was able to get back to designing my studio-in-a-box, and had some real progress, locking down the design of my welding cart.

I wanted it to be a simple as possible, and keep to 45 degree cuts – then realising I had red & blue welders, decided to go all De Stijl with a black frame.

From here, it’ll get casters on the corners.

There’s always that part in the zombie film, where some idiot lets the zombies in by getting too close to the barricade, getting bitten, turning, and then suddenly the infection is inside the former stronghold.

That’s what things feel like now. Someone’s lifting up the edge of the dome – people outside the dome are there with their crowbars, lifting and prying, you hear parties in neighbouring apartment complexes, large groups loud and drunk, and so you hunker down, and wait for the second wave.

While hunkered down, I’ve been working on an arts grant, and spending vastly too much time arguing with strangers on internet forums.

Life drifts under the dome, days become weeks, weeks become months, every Sunday I look at my calendar, and realise how much more time has gone by.

This week was spent with construction noise, as the roof of the building I live in has a solar array installed. Future moment.

The singular task this week has been moving my photo library to a new drive, and new format. It’s been a slog – especially dealing with images from iOS devices, which randomly fail to include EXIF data in the files, AND don’t let you assign an image naming schema – so you’ll hae files called “IMG_1234.jpg” but no way to know for certain which device make it – an iPhone, somone else’s iPhone, an iPad – there’s no way to tell the images apart.

A lot of the detective work required looking at the filename, then looking for files with similar numbers, then inferring the dates they were shot – in one case trying to find out if there was a particular nightclub during a particular weekend in 2001.

But, by the end it was done.

A bunch of medical appointments, and continuing to bounce back and forth between trying to model up a cart for my welders and gas cylinder, and migrating my photo library to a new organisational structure, in preparation for adopting Capture One.

Gotta say, the more time I spend in Capture One, while it feels at times a bit less Mac-y, a bit more like a UNIX X-Windows app, it does feel nicer in some respects. Maybe it’s just a feeling of security that I’m moving a big part of my creative process out of a macOS-only app, and into one that’s cross-platform, or maybe it’s that catharsis of doing some careful manual organisation, but it’s a good feeling.

A bit of the week was taken up with dicking around trying to buy a new hard drive to store all my photos. It’s a multistage process – first I have to move the files out of Aperture’s library, then fix the fact that it gets the folder structure wrong by putting things in folders with the wrong date, but once it’s all sorted, it will be a thing of beauty, and able to be adapted to any photo DAM app I want to use in the future.

And yes, we continue to live under the dome.

I bit the bullet and bought Capture One, then most of the week was spent on trying to figure out the workflow to replace Aperture.

It’s a difficult process.

In Aperture, I had a simple workflow that worked the same way for all cameras, iOS devices etc:

• Import.
• Manage.
• Sync out to iOS device with iTunes.

Unfortunately Cpture One can’t import from iOS devices directly, and the tool that is included in macOS as a part of Image Capture – AutoImporter, which is supposed to be able to slurp all images from the iOS Camera Roll whenever the device is connected, is broken as of iOS 10 and doesn’t do anything.

So it’s a problem.

New power supply for the welder was installed this week. I now have twin 15, and twin 10 amp plugs in my carport, so I can power up both my welders at the same time (or a welder and the air compressor for plasma cutting), which should let me switch back and forth between them without a powerdown cycle on either.

I also finally unpacked and assembled the air compressor.

The other thing I’ve been fooling around with this week, is Capture One Pro, as a replacement for Aperture, my current photography software.

Switching to it is going to require a pretty big change to my image storing and management setups, disentangling my iOS and DSLR images etc, BUT the quality of results it produces, are pretty spectacular. What’s especially interesting about it is how it automates a lot of tasks that are VERY fiddly and manual in my current software.

Here’s an out-of-camers, vs quick adjustment comparison. What’s remarkable is a function that removes white haloing around the edges of high contrast, which has bedevilled me in a lot of shots when trying to recover blown out skies etc.

Sadly my next residence in the Noosa Mnemonic project has been cancelled – the quarantine dome continues to crush life as we knew it.