Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for Photography

Yesterday, I've unpacked new toy - ColorHug. It came in small packet with CD (which is unfortunately not that useful as it should be), mini USB cable and a letter from Richard Hughes.

First attempt to use was of course just connect and make it work :-).

The basic access works out of the box:

$ /usr/lib/colorhug-client/colorhug get-firmware-version
1.0.3
$ /usr/lib/colorhug-client/colorhug get-hardware-version
Hardware Version 1
$ /usr/lib/colorhug-client/colorhug get-serial-number
000019

Unfortunately calibration with colord does not yet work out of the box on Debian due to bug 655888. Hopefully it will be fixed soon and it will work nicer. For now you have to rebuild Argyll with Colorhug support (with extra pain caused by Debian package using different build system than upstream). I won't provided binary packages as I pretty much gave up after effort to build clean packages from same sources on i386 and amd64, which always failed on patched autoconf based build system.

Side note: I somehow hoped that I won't hit new (in meaning that I don't know them) open source projects which do not use some version control. Unfortunately Argyll CMS is one of such projects...

After this update (and restarting GNOME), when connecting ColorHug, the Gnome Color Manager pops up and man can calibrate the screen. The biggest problem is to make ColorHug hold on desired place on screen, if it is not close enough to screen, you will get really bad results.

The first result is of course far from being perfect, but colors are definitely better than without calibration or with ICC profile shipped with notebook.

Today, I've spent some time on ColorHug software (which I've preordered some time ago).

The first missing bit there were Debian packages. There are already some packages available for Ubuntu, but I've chosen clean start and did all the packaging on my own. The packages are now waiting in NEW queue (which is amazingly empty in last months) and will hopefully get accepted soon. In case you are too impatient, you can look to git repository on Alioth (you will need libgusb as well). Packaging effort lead to writing (quite minimalistic) man page for colorhug-ccmx, which I've also sent upstream.

The other thing, where I can help right now (not owning the device itself) is translation. As you can see on Transifex, my task is done here and Czech translation is complete :-).

In last weeks, I've finally managed to create my personal gallery, where I could present selection of my photographs. This task was outstanding on my todo list for pretty long time, the major obstacle being selecting photos which to present there.

During my sickness few weeks ago, I finally went through most of my photos and chosen the ones which I think are worth presenting. Still I did not manage to go through photos from half year spent in Japan, so these will be added sometimes later. Also most of the pictures miss descriptions, though I'm (slowly) fixing this.

From technical side, the gallery is being generated using lazygal with custom theme.

You can check the gallery on photos.cihar.com, I hope you will like it :-).

Finally some outdoor morning photography from spring. Taken at fields near Hovořany.

Taken again using PENTAX K7 + PENTAX-DA 70mm F2.4 Limited.

Finally some picture published on time. Going to slightly larger animals this week. Picture taken at parkour race in Prague.

Taken again using PENTAX K7 + PENTAX-DA 70mm F2.4 Limited.

Slightly delayed, but here comes photo for last week. I simply failed to download it from camera and process it. Continuing in animal macro, this time it is frog somewhere in Beskydy mountains.

Taken again using same combo PENTAX K7 + PENTAX-DA 35mm F2.8 Macro Limited.

As you can see in week number, I failed to take photo every week. Nevertheless I will try to continue, maybe I won't skip that much. To compensate it a little, I've decided to publish two photos taken in Prague Botanical Garden on annual butterfly event.

I somewhat failed last week to take a photo because I was too busy with other things. However to stay on track I decided to publish about one month old photo from Charles bridge in Prague.

Tenth week and I'm still in. Honestly I did not expect to keep up that long. Last week there was a carneval at Žižkov (part of Prague) and the picture comes from it.

Next week is over and it's time to show another picture. Today I've decided for indoors photo, what is something I usually don't take, but here it is.