i stream music from my desktop at home. i use navidrome as the server (edit: behind a reverse proxy). it hooks up to lastfm account to grab metadata that is not already build into the files. sometimes the metadata in the files are wrong, so i have to fix with an app called picard.

symphonium is a paid client i use on my phone, but it has so much customization that a buck or two made it worth it for me.

i use soulseek to share media with my friends. sldl is a cli tool for it that makes it easy as one command album download.

thanks! yeah, im fortunate to have a good job that allows me to do the whole process of analog photography myself. I develop at home, too, to save some money. plus it allows me to have full control over everything.

but now, Im going back looking at my most recent roll, and im thinking to myself…these are kind of dull. even this scan i posted here… im not sure, something is off about it. so ive gone back and looked at the histogram and my graphs arent pushing all the way to the right. I originally had wanted to retain some contrast, but im thinking its just making my images a little duller. so ive just increased the dmax value on most of the roll, which essentially sets the white point… im thinking this looks a bit better … anyways, as you can see the tradeoff of doing things manually makes this a bit of a never ending process…

(i also updated my cherry blossom post, if you’re interested)

we’ve got similar styles! one of my early shots

thank you thank you.

and to be completely honest, i actually can’t see much of a difference between the two films. I’m not color blind, but either i have some issues recognizing colors, or i spend so much time color grading each shot that after a while i find it difficult to tell how it looks. like if you put two of my shots side by side, one 500T and one portra 400, i dont think I’d be able to tell you which is which lol

i use darktable’s negadoctor module to invert the negative, then do manual adjustments from there by eye. once im full into color fatigue territory and think it looks good, i export everything and upload to my immich server. then over the next few days i go back to admire them and find, huh, these have a pretty serious green/blue/red/whatever cast – should probably fix that.

so yeah my color work maybe could use some improvement, if only for consistency’s sake. but i think im getting better!

edit: actually, i can really tell the difference handling the negative. 500T is way thicker than portra. but otherwise its a crapshoot to my eyes

Ahh I gotcha. Reason I ask, I have a Pentax 50mm 1.4 that i sorta struggle to focus with wide open. Just gotta practice I guess!

Thank you much!

I really like your photos

is it ever difficult to focus that f1.2 lens?

Ahh gotcha. I bet it was because I was wide open. I’ll check out some of those resources, thanks for the input!

Thanks! When you say

the distorted stars on the edges

do you mean the edge of the frame or the edges of the stars? I’m assuming you mean edge of the frame due to the edge-to-edge sharpness diminishing wide open, but it seems to my eyes all my stars are a bit distorted – even in the center. Then again, I have no idea how they ought to look! lol. I did use the 500 rule to try to avoid star trails. I think 13s exposure was acceptable but i wanted to be safe so i went with 10s.

any chance you have any reading recommendations for astrophotography, or maybe even for astronomy in general?

Whoops, probably shouldve thrown that in the title. it was a 10s exposure at iso 8000, wide open at f/1.2

i processed using darktable. this was my first time trying anything remotely astro related, so any criticism welcome! there’s some hot pixels down there in the shadows i coudlve cleaned up a bit more, but meh

Edit: just to add some more detail because I failed to read the rules. Sorry bout that. I processed in darktable, essentially I just used darktable’s astro Denoise module, set the strength to around 75. I used the regular Denoise profiled module, and capture sharpening. I pushed the darks down and pulled the highlights up in the sky with color balance RGB and a mask, and did essentially the opposite with a second color balance RGB instance in order to bring out the land and the house. I had quite a few hot pixels that I tried to remove with the hot pixel module, but it didn’t seem to work, so I used retouch to just remove them. They were all in the land section so I didn’t disturb any stars

Thanks :)

I think prob a regional thing. Lotta irish catholics up in new england