Quick Recap: I'm a street photographer based out of Oakland, CA and I came here a few months ago to share the back and front end of my personal site oaklens.art and the engine that runs them because I had open sourced (MIT) them. I went to update the post ( new-ish account at the time) and it got swept under the auto-mod. Totally fine, went back into the dungeon.
Today back with some updates:
Probably the biggest win: you can now deploy without a terminal! End to end, a cellphone with a data connection will get you running and publishing frames to the web.
The video above: shows the cold start of the new v1 "bridge/dash". This is a view of my actual live dash: because I spend a lot of time in the back, I want it to be nice...The bridge theme changes with the site theme chosen (5 by default) OR the code is ready to be customized to your taste. The code is yours. It's well documented and ready for whatever you need it to be.
The part I care about most: one button exports the whole site as a zip. Unzip it, open index.html, and run that sucker offline. Or host it with another provider, etc.
Ultimately the goal is to have another free option for anyone trying to own their site and keep control of THEIR work without these giant companies digging into their pocket just to express themselves off social media.
I'm here for feedback and hopefully some community to build with! -Nick
Hey everyone! I just finished a pretty major revamp of my photography portfolio website, and I’d love to get some feedback from this community. Link: https://photography.brentsaltzman.com/
I’m a hobbyist photographer, and one of the things I love most about photography is the blend of art and science. I’ve always wanted a website that showcases not just the finished image, but also some of the technical details and information behind how it was captured.
That’s really what I’d love to discuss: what makes a great photography portfolio website? What information do you enjoy seeing alongside a photo? Camera settings, lenses, EXIF data, location, or something else entirely? Are there features you wish more photography websites offered, or things that make a portfolio more enjoyable to explore?
I’m absolutely open to constructive criticism on the website itself, whether it’s the design, layout, functionality, or the way information is presented. I’m especially interested in hearing from others who have built their own portfolios or have strong opinions about what makes one work well.
Just to clarify, I’m hoping to start a conversation about the website and how we showcase our photography, rather than critique of the photographs themselves. There’s plenty of room for that elsewhere, and I’m genuinely interested in the presentation side of things here.
I started with an existing open-source photography platform and customized it pretty heavily for my own needs. If anyone is interested in the technical side of how it’s built, I’m happy to talk about that, too!
Thanks in advance for any thoughts or suggestions!
I run a small YouTube channel, Marien Photography, with English tutorials on Darktable, aimed at people moving over from Lightroom. I've just launched a newsletter to go with it.
You've missed issue #1, but you can subscribe now and get the next ones.
LightTable is a new GPL-3 high-performance digital darkroom app that I’ve just published in beta. I’d love thoughts and feedback and I’m looking for help running the project going forward. Also, I’m still waiting for Apple signing cert and getting it onto Mac and Windows stores, so it requires a little bit of self-install at the moment.
This project started with two seeming contradictions.
First, I’m a very casual, occasional photographer, so I don't do enough photo editing to really justify having a subscription to something like Lightroom. I was hoping to cancel my subscription and so I started looking around for an open-source alternative. The ones that I found didn't quite do what I wanted, but I was using one of them and was reasonably happy with it.
Then I had been thinking about how much I missed the look of real film photography. I decided to buy a film camera on eBay (Elan 7) with a decent lens (Canon EF 50mm f/1.8) for about $300 together and ordered a bunch of film. While I was waiting a few days for it to arrive, I started thinking more about why Lightroom wasn’t able to make the photographs I was taking with my digital camera (x100vi) look more like real film. I started looking into this question and found spektrafilm, which seemed like exactly what I wanted.
This became the second contradiction: right at the moment when I was ready to start making real film photographs again, I became interested in how to achieve the same look digitally. And I haven't even got to the first contradiction, which is that my desire to cancel a $10 subscription to Lightroom, because I didn't use it enough, eventually led me to spending bunch of time building an open-source Lightroom alternative, with a beautiful UI and spektrafilm built-in.
None of this would be possible if I didn't a) have experience running software teams for the past 20 years and b) now have the incredible abilities of Claude Code and Codex.
So that's how LightTable came to be. It’s fast, has a nice UI, and has covered most of the bases. It even has optional local private AI tools for search and face matching.
I think the spektrafilm effects are truly beautiful, and I would love to have everyone try it and let me know what you think.
But there is one problem: I'm still just an occasional photographer, and I am actually not at all an expert in digital photo workflows. I'm really not at all the right person to make the subtle and important ongoing decisions about how it should change and grow. And while I’ve built Windows and Linux support, I’m a mac person. So I’m looking for more mantainers to join me who care a lot about design and UX.
I would love to find someone who has really excellent design taste and cares deeply about photography and beauty and photo workflows, and would like to become one of the primary maintainers of this project over the long term. We may also want people who want to be the maintainer for specific platforms and specific Linux distros.
If you have some experience with software and products, and you are good at using AI coding tools, and you feel excited about this project, please get in touch! If you try out LightTable and have suggestions please get in touch or submit PRs.
I'm sharing one of my latest video on Darktable. I'm trying to help people to jump into the FOSS world with those videos.
I'm still missing 50 subscribers to reach the 1K subscribers. If you can help me reach this number before the end of the week-end I would really appreciate your help!
Took along the Irix 11mm/f4 and the Sigma 85mm/f1.4
Amazing architecture on a beautiful and sunny day. Some images just converted from PEF with Darktable and processed with Digikam - even though DT is powerful, I still find a touch-up in Digikam's Showfoto editor useful - and I found a few that lend themselves to use of the Poincaré filter in GMIC (scripted with ImageMagick).
Trigger Warning! Once you go down this route, you'll end up with your mind in a maze-like structure!
I have dived a bit deeper in the effect the Poincaré disk filter in GMIC (and therefore its mathematical underpinnings) has on recognizable images. The main levers are the parameters P and Q which sometimes have drastic effects on the outcome.
I took an image of the Almere Central train station in the Netherlands as a basis.
So I built a bash script which iterates over all of the possible combinations of P and Q and outputs the result in a grid-like structure. For those who are interested in the full grid (6200*7702 pixels) I’ll try to make it available for download.
My initial conclusion is that lower P-values provide more of an abstract result in which the original image is no longer recognizable. Higher Q-values leave more of the center of the image intact but push the detail into the circle circumference which has a bit of a messy outcome IMHO. Optimal values for me are P>=8 and Q<=4 but if you want absolute abstracts in which your eyes keep wandering around the P=4 options can be nice on some source images.
M.C. Escher used the Poincaré disk model to create his famous Circle Limit woodcuts, showing how an infinite hyperbolic plane fits inside a finite circle. The artist was inspired by mathematician H.S.M. Coxeter's work to pack repeating patterns of fish, angels, and devils that shrink smaller and smaller toward the edge.
I've used a mathematical image manipulator (GMIC) to create Poincaré disks from a few architectural photos I shot this week.
Photos were converted with Darktable, then GMIC was applied to generate a Poincaré disk and finally ImageMagick was used to combine the disks with a dropshadow on a white background.
Just nabbed a new R6miii and to my dismay found out that the RAW files created by the camera are not yet supported in Darktable, which seems to be an issue with LibRAW. It looks like it'll take 9-18 months before it's supported; does anyone have any experience with this?
After freaking out a bit that I bought a camera I can't use (I use Linux entirely and have used Darktable for years now), and having issue in compiling Darktable with a modified LibRAW, I saw a mention in the Canon forums from a Linux user that they can use dnglab to convert the RAWs to DNG in order to edit.
So my 2nd and main question is has anyone noticed any quality loss when converting to use for editing? Everything I've read points to no but I've only seen older posts in the past 5 years ask, not sure if there's been anything major where a loss would occur or if the R6miii files are finnicky in any way. The only thing I noticed at a quick glance is that the DNGs don't contain the focal length information of the photo, but that's manageable in order to have workable files.
After connecting my phone to my PC via USB, I open Digikam. My device (Samsung S20) appears under "Import from camera". After selecting it, the base path of my phone appears, and it scans all the subfolders. This takes a very long time and is not the ideal method.
Why doesn't the DCIM folder open automatically when connecting an Android device? Is there any way to do this and avoid reading the parent folders?
