I have been fascinated by photography ever since I was a child. These days I am seldom more than a few metres from a camera. My photographic interests sprawl from artificial intelligence through to vintage manual-focus lenses. Unsurprisingly, there’s a whole load of Linux in between. :-)
Seems there is a bit of a rumble on the web at the moment about a ‘vibe-coded‘ suite of applications, called ArtCraft. These are said to be”clones” of leading Adobe and Microsoft applications. I have to confess that until a few days ago, I had very little knowledge of the ArtCraft project. However, from what…
Another little AI image generation project using Stable Diffusion, via perhance.org. The original idea was to create some fantasy communications receivers as header or “hero” images for our various radio frequencies and internet radio stream pages. My concept was to create well-engineered, expensive, exotic, fantasy communications receivers in retro futuristic settings. However, I got a…
This was a little AI project to create a handful of hero images for our deprecated TV Sound Frequencies pages. Frankly I have mixed views about AI Images. Not least that despite my giving Stable Diffusion very specific instructions, it still managed to make lots of silly mistakes. And the actual televisions don’t bear too…
Went to try to photograph today’s solar eclipse. I have to say I’m not 100% happy with the results. The mix of a somewhat unsophisticated lens, and a crude homemade filter resulted in lots of unwanted artefacts on the images. I cleaned up the worst ones in GIMP, but everything else is pretty much SooC…
Found myself on top of Portsdown Hill again today, with its magnificent views over Cosham, Portsmouth, Southsea, the Solent and 15 km+ into the distance, the Isle of wight. Despite the bright sunshine, it was still quite hazy over the conurbation. Still, I was somewhat reassured to discover that our green and pleasant land is…
Sandwiched between the suburban sprawl of Fareham, and a section of the 42 kilometres of perpetual roadworks also known as the M27 motorway, there is, or there will be, Welborne “Garden Village”. At the moment, it’s 405 hectares of grassy hillsides, sparsely peppered with excavators and other builders junk. However, the glossy AI-generated video at…
[Jump to gallery | script] These are some almost SooC images BUT cropped square AND with left and right images swapped AND “alignment circles” at the bottom. These 3D square stereograms were captured with my recently constructed stereo camera module. This is part of an ongoing project to create a modular GNU/Linux digital camera system…
[Jump to Gallery] As part of my embryonic GNU/Linux digital camera project, I recently built a 3D camera module. Basically its a ELP board, in an aluminium 1590A type stomp box with a short internal USB3 extension lead. This is a small collection of processed images I created while I was testing my 3D camera…
I thought it might be handy to make a small collection of web-based resources for outdoor photography and similar activities. Some of these resources are right here on GarfNet. The rest are dotted around the worldwide web. So I thought it would be helpful to list all these links here, all on a single page,…
[Jump to gallery | scripts] This article documents my first experiments in producing red-cyan anaglyphs. The gallery contains of four near-identical 3D anaglyphs with varying amounts of X & Y offset to compensate for the fact that the cameras on the board don’t quite point in the same direction. One can create anaglyphs in GIMP….
[Jump to gallery | script] These are some almost SooC images BUT with left and right images swapped AND “alignment circles” at the bottom. They were captured with my recently constructed stereo camera module. This is part of an ongoing project to create a modular GNU/Linux digital camera system using easily available generic components. Although…
[Jump to gallery | script] These are some almost SooC images BUT with left and right images swapped. They were captured with my recently constructed stereo camera module. This is part of an ongoing project to create a modular GNU/Linux digital camera system using easily available generic components. Although the images themselves are unedited, the…
I visited the recently rewilded Knepp estate earlier today. Consequently I found myself within 1500 metres or so of Shipley, the location of the infamous Kings Mill. Not to be confused with Kings Mill in Castle Donnington, some 200 km or so north-west of here, this King’s Mill (aka Vincent’s Mill) is a smock windmill…
Today is my wife’s wedding anniversary 🙂 and she has a bit of a penchant for white storks. I think it is a Central European obsession. Anyway, she said we should go visit the white storks at the recently rewilded 1416 hectare Knepp Estate in West Sussex. So I packed my little Lumix DMC-GX7 camera…
[Jump to gallery | script to add exif] These are some unedited 3D SooC (straight out of camera) 1600 x 1200 pixel stereo pairs (3200 x 1200 pixel overall) from my recently constructed stereo camera module. This is part of an ongoing project to create a modular GNU/Linux digital camera system using easily available generic…
Found myself near Cobden bridge, in Southampton, armed with my recently converted , “full spectrum” Lumix DMC-GH2 Micro Four Thirds camera. This was converted just before Christmas 2025 by Protech Photographic in Crowborough. So I thought I would capture some images of Cobden bridge by Infrared… Cobden bridge is a busy road and pedestrian bridge…
Following on from a discussion on a photographic forum who which I belong, an old hobby horse of mine raised its head again. Namely the possibility of building one’s own Debian GNU/Linux digital camera, using Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer, or similar, and one of the camera modules that’s available for it. Or indeed some…
These are a few infrared snaps using studio lighting. I also took a couple more snaps of my old Wray Stereographic 3D camera. With many thanks to my friend and model Estella Rose who posed for the infrared images in the above gallery.
I suffer dreadful mental blocks at times. I’m also a tad forgetful. To work around this, I use Jaap Karssenberg’s ‘Zim’. This is an excellent indexed, searchable, cross-linkable, exportable, cross-platform note-taking program. Described by its developer as a ‘desktop wiki’ Zim turns effective note-taking from a tedious chore into a simple and routine task. And…
It was a cold but sunny day today. So I decided to take my “full spectrum” converted camera up to Portsdown Hill for some infrared snaps. I thought it might also be interesting to try it on my 120 year old Bausch & Lomb + Beck 101.6mm lens. Whilst this is not a sharp lens,…
End of year tends to make one reflect, and look back over the last year or so. As I did so, my “inner six-year-old’s” mind wandered onto the subject of my favourite camera lens. Problem is that I kinda like them all and I’ve had a lot of fun with them. My favourite lens is…
I am slowly becoming accustomed to infrared photography, with the “full spectrum” Lumix µ4/3 camera that by Protech Photographic recently converted for me. I’m finding that near-infrared images can make even very boring ugly things look quite interesting. So I decided to pop out to what is generally reckoned to be the ugliest of Havant’s…
Well today is Boxing day, and the sun just managed to struggle its way out of the clouds around 14:00. As luck would have it, my variable infrared filter actually arrived from Shenzen late Christmas eve. So, following on from my early IR adventures on Christmas Eve, I thought I’d pop out to our backyard…
Well, there goes another year – whizzed past even faster than the last one. Not much else has changed. AI is still over-hyped and yet remarkably lacking in any actual intelligence. Donald Trump is still alive. Still, on the bright side, I have another nice new toy – well a modification to an old toy,…
It’s Christmas Eve and my old Lumix DMC-GH2 has just been delivered back, Special Delivery, following its conversion to “full spectrum”, by Protech Photographic in Crowborough. Infrared photography is something I have wanted to do for many years. So this year, as a sort of “Christmas present to self”, I decided to have one of…
On one of the photographic fora to which I belong, there seems something of a panic with regard to AI photography taking over the likes of Instagram, Facebook et al. Well, what does or doesn’t get posted to foreign antisocial media websites is a matter of total indifference to me. And even on sites…
I just sent a spare µ4/3 camera body off to Protech Photographic in Crowborough to have it converted to “full spectrum” for Infrared work. Meantime, I thought it might be fun to go back over some of my earlier IR stuff, captured off somewhat lesser cameras. My earliest adventures into IR date way back to…
Arne Haugrud was a fairly well known Norwegian pewter maker. It made some special celebratory pieces for Norwegian electronics manufacturer Tandberg. These particular drinking vessels were made to celebrate Tandberg’s Huldra 10 multiband receiver. You can learn more about this here. The beer is Pécsi Sörfőzde Barna – a fine central European brown beer, which…
I found myself in my wife’s old hometown of Pécs, a small university city and former Roman settlement about 200 km south of the Hungarian capital Budapest. She kindly organised a visit to the Pécsi Sörfőzde or the “Pécs Beer Factory”. This is the largest brewery in the Transdanubian region of Hungary. It also has…
Regular readers will know I’m quite a Tandberg fan – especially arguably Vebjørn Tandberg’s greatest works, the Huldra series. Well Tandberg commissioned pewter maker Haugrud to produce several commemorative pewter products to celebrate its products. I’ve had a set of the 50mL whisky tots for years. My late father was given them when he ran…
Skip preamble and launch DoF calculator applet now. Welcome to the latest rework of the GarfNet Depth of Field Calculator. It is based on quite an old JavaScript application that appeared on the web back in the mid 1990s. I rewrote and extended it in the mid 2000’s. Consequently, it was looking rather old and…
Seems as if it were only the day before yesterday, but it is in fact thirty years to the day since GarfNet had its own domain. Granted, this represents a somewhat trivial achievement on the overall scheme of things. Frankly never I actually achieved all the things I hoped I would with GarfNet. Like it…
I rather like Micro Four Thirds. Currently I have three µ4/3 bodies and a collection of both dedicated AF (autofocus) and adapted vintage MF (manual focus) lenses. Trouble with µ4/3 is that whilst we are very well catered-for in terms of long lenses, there’s a bit of a vacuum in shorter ones. So I decided…
Took some more time out to grab some more snaps of the bumblebees working the lavender today. Like the snaps I took yesterday, I used my “gardening lens” – a rather battered 90mm f/2.5 Tamron prime macro between f/8 and f/11, attached to my Lumix DMC GX7 µ4/3 mirrorless interchangeable lens camera. Weird as it…
Lots of bumblebees again this year. Sadly not seen many red tailed ones (bombus lapidarius) But there are a heck of a lot of white tailed bumblebees (bombus lucorum). I’ve already taken quite a few snaps of them in previous years. As ever they are going crazy over our lavender bushes. They cannot get enough…
I like taking photos. Trouble is that I’m a tad trigger-happy with the shutter button. Over the last few decades I have captured around ½ million of my own digital images and about 33,000 scanned from 35mm neg. On top of that there are around 45,000 edited/retouched images – not to mention a thousand or…
My wife took a late-evening home delivery from our local supermarket this evening. Usually when The Boss is in “tidying-up” mode, I find it best to make myself scarce. I was slightly puzzled way it was taking her so long to pack stuff away . So I ventured out of my studio and went to…
Visited my mother in Southampton today. It was a warm day so I stepped out on the balcony. This has magnificent views to the west, overlooking the River Itchen. It is also pretty close to Southampton’s famous Cobden Bridge. This is a major road and pedestrian bridge crossing the River Itchen. It forms part of…
Question appeared on a forum to which I belong with regard to emulating tungsten lighting with RGB+CCT. To find out, I fitted a good old fashioned Philips “Photocrescenta” incandescent bulb and a Mi-Light FUT-105 LED into a double E27 double bulb holder and mounted the assembly on a standard studio boom arm. The Mi-Light FUT…
I had a studio photoshoot booked for last weekend. Unfortunately, my model was poorly and it was too late to book another. Consequently, I was in the unusual situation of actually having a free day, whilst also being in an experimental frame of mind. So I thought it might be rather good fun to try…
Wishing you a very merry peaceful Christmas, followed by a happy, successful New Year. Creating this year’s card This year we wanted to do something a little different. So we decided to deploy Stable Diffusion open source artificial intelligence to generate the main image. Unfortunately AI is not good at drawing signs. So that was…
Creating the main image for this year’s Christmas card was not the straightforward “one-click deal” I hoped it would be. Seems synthetic stupidity is very much alive and kicking in the world of artificial intelligence. Fact is, AI is still not all that bright. In order to create the one successful image we finally chose,…
Seems the British Government has set up an open consultation on copyright and artificial intelligence. It aims to discuss with the public how artwork stored on cloud servers, or processed using cloud-based software should be treated with regard to being used to teach AI (artificial intelligence) machines. Essentially the Government offers three possible choices:- Do…
It’s quite an exciting time in the FOSS graphics world at the moment. After a long, long wait, GIMP 3.0 is finally at RC1 (first release candidate) stage. Debian 13 (Trixie aka Testing) users have just received the long-awaited KDE Plasma 6 desktop – with full Wayland support. Which I have to say that after…
For reasons I will never understand, it seems the United States has just re-elected 34-times convicted criminal and adjudicated rapist Donald J Trump as its president. As a Brit, sadly there is nothing I can do about this. All I can offer the world is a few futile acts of defiance, whilst mercilessly ridiculing jumped-up…
One of my pet hates is the soft-touch rubberised coating some manufactures put on their kit. It invariably fails sooner or later. Indeed, I’ve had quite a lot of kit over the years where the rubberised coating has failed. Fortunately it is usually fixable – or to be more precise, removable. Depending on the coating’s…
One of the most annoying features on standard SD cards is the write protect tab. This tab often seems to get caught and pushed into the “read only” position when one inserts an SD card into a card reader or camera. Thus rendering the card “read only”. It seems a particular issue with the slots…
Is AI, a serious threat to artists? Or yet more IT industry bullshit? I’ve been in the IT industry for many years. I still look back with some amusement at a teacher who told us, a class of 8-9 year olds, that computers were, “Modern labour-saving machines“. Having spent most of my working life either…
