The latest version of First Contact, which is out now, has been in development for a over a year, and represents a nearly complete rewrite of the app from the ground up. The original contact sheet rendering engine has been scrapped, replaced with a brand new one that renders faster and produces smaller, higher quality PDFs. The layout settings have been expanded with the addition headers & footers, tokens, and more.

The Rendering Engine

First Contact's new rendering engine provides instant feedback to layout changes. Updating the number of rows, changing a font, or adding new images no longer require rendering the the contact sheet. Previewing images and estimating the PDF size now take full advantage of multi-core CPUs so the app stays responsive. Additionally it's more flexible allowing for a stronger foundation for future updates.

Rendering contact sheets isn't just faster, but also higher quality. The rebuilt Compressor can render higher quality images at a fraction of the file size, even when embedding full resolution images. For the times file size is of upmost important images can be resampled to create the smallest possible PDFs suitable for emailing.

Layout Options

First Contact now includes one of the most requested features: headers and footers.

Both have leading, centered, and trailing components and can be styled separately with different font families, sizes, and colors. Add tokens with dynamic information the current date, image count, page count & number, and PDF metadata, and more. Tokens, when combined with saved layouts, allow you to create templates for your clients or studio for consistent contact sheets.

Image labels also have the same styling options, and the small, but important addition of optionally excluding the file extension.

Availability

The update is available to download now and through the in-app updater. This release of First Contact also introduces a new licensing system which allows for easier license management from within the app. If you're an existing customer a new license code is being emailed to you. If you have any questions please reach out.

A new update for the Capture One Stream Deck plugin just hit the marketplace featuring six new actions and over 20 new image adjustments available on the Stream Deck + dials. To date the plugin has been downloaded over 1,800 times!

The plugin has nearly 30 unique actions, for doing everything from rating & tagging images, filtering collections, navigating images, moving the capture folder, changing camera settings, adjusting images, toggling the overlay & grid, and more. Many perform actions that can't be natively done in Capture One building on top of a rich collection of custom scripts.

Developing the plugin takes a lot of time and I'm glad so many people have found it useful. If you'd like to help support ongoing development consider donating on Ko-fi and tagging me in posts with your Stream Deck setups.

New Actions

• Crop To Overlay: apply a crop that matches the overlay position
• Set the current folder as the capture folder
• Resume Counter: resume the capture counter from the latest image in a folder
• Next Capture Orientation: set the camera orientation
• Rotate images with keys and dials

Changed

• Adjust camera settings with the Stream Deck + dials
• Color Tag and Rating actions use macOS standard toggle behavior
• Over 20 additional adjustments can be made from the Stream Deck + dials

I've had a long term obsession with 3D printing a medium format camera. It was one of the reasons I bought my very first 3D printer, and has been a project I've returned to several times. The last time I took at stab at the project was with my wooden 6x9 field camera, which was eventually upgraded with a sliding back that I used to do some studio work.

All of the previous attempts were cumbersome. The first version required taking the entire digital back off in order to focus and compose. The sliding back version pushed the lens so far back into the camera it was difficult to use and lost most of its movements. I really wanted something simpler.

So I designed something simpler.

The Camera

The simplest camera is just a box with an aperture and a sensing medium. In practice that means a pinhole camera, and those are cool, but I have a really nice 65mm Super-Angulon lens. I hastily put together an MVC¹. On the front it has a hole for the Compur 00 shutter and on the back a spot to fit the Mamiya 645 adapter I've been using on all these projects.

The design is simple, not much more than a blend from a circle at the front to a square at the back. I added an Arca-Swiss tripod mount at the bottom for convenience. Most of the actual work was figuring out the best way to have be able to print the camera body in one piece, to minimize potential light leaks and just to be easier to print.

Of course there are a lot of careful measurements than go into photography and especially camera design. I ignored all of them. I had a 65mm lens, so why not make a rash assumption and make the camera 65mm long? I wasn't planning on using this in a studio, so fixed focus at infinity would be fine. The results are, surprisingly, not bad, if a tad soft². Unfortunately I forgot to take into account the extra distance the adapter added; as a result I the focus was set to about four feet, which some back of the envelope math indicates is not infinity.

Not yet realizing the focus issue, I took the camera out on a couple of short trips, first around the block, and then for a hike in the woods. The initial walk proved difficult, with half the frames being completely black. There were a few redeeming photos, like this accidental quadruple exposure, which I would love to know how to do purposefully.

The second outing proved to be much better. I used a tripod this time, which helped (especially because the exposure times were quite long in the forrest). I think the camera being in direct sunlight may also contribute to miss-fires, though I can't be certain. There are several internal light baffles around the digital back, so there shouldn't be any extraneous light making its way in, but there were fewer problems in the dappled shade of the forrest than on the sidewalk by my building.

I'm really pleased with the photos overall. It's fun to take photos and not really know how they're going to turn out. The digital back doesn't have live view, so you're truly just pointing and shooting. You can review the photo after you've shot it, but the quality and brightness of the screen really only give you the impression of the photo. I'm working on a new iteration backed by some actual math for calculating the correct focus distance. I might add a cold shoe to the top for accessories, but maybe that's taking away from the original design goal.

Looking back over what I’ve (mostly privately) written about XOXO I’m surprised to find a clear arc. The ethos of the festival has both tracked with and helped guide my return freelancing. Now that the final XOXO is over I want to gather my thoughts on my three times attending and how they've helped me over the years.

In 2018, at my first XOXO, I had a strong sense of not belonging. At the time it was the biggest version of festival and I felt like I’d been lucky to have somehow snuck into the party with the cool kids. I had a full time job and didn’t really make much online. Attending was aspirational. I’m not even sure I wrote an #intro post that year. The whole thing was overwhelming, in a good way.

In retrospect I found it a deeply moving experience. In full compliance with the XOXO Dream™️ it was one of the catalyzing moments for returning to the freelance world. XOXO also helped show me that I wasn’t alone, everyone, speakers included, felt imposter syndrome to some degree. The festival was really the first time I'd met other very online folks in person.

I left my full time job in June of 2019 and promptly went back to Portland for my second XOXO. There's an optimism throughout the whole event that's impossible not to get swept up in¹, I'd missed the energy from the previous trip. That year I wrote an #intro, and had a few projects I'd begun working on for both clients and myself.

spongebob meme: five years later

During the intervening years I started many new projects, most of which I'm still working on. I wrote several applications, created pen plotter art, modeled in CAD for 3D printing, designed PCBs for electronics projects, and more. A lot of these projects were connected to my "real" profession as a digital tech, but others (read: the plotter art) were just for the sake of trying something new.

In short, I felt I was ready for XOXO this year. The community on Slack was a sounding board and support group, especially during the pandemic. The idea of returning to Portland, one more time, felt like going home².

This year I think I was, for the first time, able to put most of my imposter syndrome aside. I was reunited with friends from previous years, and not just ‘met’ new people but I think made even more friends; people I’m going to follow and advocate for online as much as I can. It was nice to be around all of the folks from the internet again.

The other thing, and this is the self-serving part of the post, is that people recognized me from the internet. It’s one of the things I’d written about from my first XOXO, that everyone seemed to be a notable person online. I don’t have ‘an audience’ but to be recognized for your work is always flattering, and for me was a little bewildering.

I think the reason is that I've become much more willing to share my projects, and it’s because I was nurtured by one of the most supportive communities around that I had the confidence to publish my projects and to be proud of them. To have the support to find my niche and voice online. XOXO, in a sense, found me when I needed it.

Something I've taken away this year, especially after watching so many of the Art & Code talks is wanting to make more things that aren't necessarily practical. I'd like to work on projects that explore a concept, teach me something new, or are just fun. I'm not sure what those projects might be, but I'm looking forward to finding out.

All the way back in May I got a bad idea: Capture One for the GameBoy.

Obviously not all of Capture One, but some sort of controller. While bored one evening I built a very non-functional proof-of-concept GameBoy game with GB Studio demonstrating what the features of the "game" would be. In short it would allow you to add color tags and star ratings to images. As a bonus I wanted the whole system to be (optionally) wireless.

A couple of rabbit holes later exploring GameBoy link cable communication I'd discovered that it uses SPI, which is easy to work with. Sending data via the GameBoy link port isn't actually all that difficult. GB Studio has an easy drag-and-drop node you can use to transmit (and receive) data. Unfortunately the initial tests weren't great. GB Studio, as a high-level programming environment expects a specific format (and response) for the transmitted data, whereas all I wanted to do was send a couple of bytes of information. I tried over and over to figure out how to make GB Studio happy, but in the end never could get it working reliably.

Amazingly there's an entire SDK for the GameBoy: GBDK. It turned out not to be all that much work to get the project set up, and having written C++ for the Raspberry Pi Pico before really helped. The game is fairly simple, it sits in a loop waiting for input and teleports the "player" between positions. With reliable link communication ready the next step was doing something with that data.

In the "game" you play as the cursor, navigating the wide world of Capture One. The system lets you change image selection with up and down, set color tags and rating with Ⓐ and clear the tag or rating with Ⓑ. When you press a button the game sends the data over the link cable to whatever's on the other side.

The adapter does two things: listen for data, either from the link cable or the radio, and pass that onto the computer via USB. Coincidentally Apple had just officially announced embedded Swift, so I figured this would be a fun project to test out programming for the RP2040 in something other than C++. After a little bit of messing around with the makefile for building the binary I was even able to share¹ some code between the firmware and client library.

I decided to reuse a lot of the communication protocol I'd built for the GPI Controller², and even added the link adapter into ControlRoom.

The final piece of the puzzle was the hardware. I designed a simple PCB for the Tiny2040, nRF24L01 radio, and definitely official GameBoy link port. All of the components are easy to solder by hand, so I put together a little kit that incudes all of the electronics and a couple of 3D printed panels.

A friend, and fellow digital tech, had asked where you'd hold the whole assembly when using it wirelessly. I'd been thinking you'd leave it on a table, or maybe put it in your pocket. He suggested attaching it to the GameBoy. At first I didn't think it would be useful, it's not like it used the cart slot³ for anything. Eventually I decided to try it, so I designed and printed a version of the back case shaped like a GameBoy cartridge cart.

The whole project was quite the learning experience, exploring lots of new concepts. If you're a very particular kind of nerd the kits are available for purchase.

Far too long ago I announced a major new version of ScreeningRoom, thinking that its release was both just around the corner and that it was unquestionably better in all ways. I was wrong on both counts. I heard from beta testers that they were still using the previous version because the menu bar functionality was critical, even with some of the bugs.

After mulling things over I decided to bring the improvements from V2 back to the V1 app. What this means in practice is the latest update still lives in the menu bar, but the underlying preview framework is all new.

Bug Fixes & Improvements

One of the most important changes and fixes is to the crosshair. The positioning bug has been fixed, no longer will the crosshair run off of edge of the preview. Another change here is the crosshair always tracks the mouse, even when the previews are paused and the lines run across the entire preview area, not just the display the mouse is in. This makes locating the cursor even easier.

The preview windows have also been rebuilt from the ground up. The popover now has a toolbar at the bottom with playback controls for quickly starting and stopping all displays. You can create separate windows for each display from the Display icon, which also has individual playback controls. Each preview window has independent playback control, even for the same display.

New Features

There are also a couple of new features, that weren't even available in the V2 beta that pertain to how new windows behave.

The first is "Play streams by default", which does what it says on the tin. If you want to quickly see another screen you can now have the preview appear already playing the screens, no need to start them manually.

Second is an option to hide the main display by default. In most cases the main display is the one screen you can always see, so having it show up in the preview isn't terribly useful. This preference takes care of that.

Availability

The update is rolling out now and should show up automatically in the next day, and is also available to download from the website. If you haven't yet tried ScreeningRoom a full-featured 14-day trial is available.

In high school I loved playing a little Flash game called Planarity. I've absolutely no idea how I stumbled upon it, but I played it most days in the library before classes if I got to school early. In the intervening years between then and now it would occasionally cross my mind as a fun memory. In the years since I learned to code it's also occasionally crossed my mind, but with a more concrete notion: it would be fun to build an implementation of the game.

Last week it crossed my mind again, and this time I had an idea of how to actually build the game. I was wrong.

The algorithm behind Planarity is both quite simple, but also more involved than I'd thought, as a player of the game. The creator of the game, John Tantalo, was gracious enough to publish the algorithm in the public domain. The game isn't just a series of random vertices and lines, but rather built on an underlying assortment of intersecting lines, which in turn create the puzzle to solve.

I was able to reuse a lot of my work from SwiftGraphics which has most the basic geometry code needed for doing line intersections and such. The hardest part was figuring out how to build the actual graph from the original intersection points. I'm not sure if my implementation is the most efficient, but it does seem to work.

The entire app is built in SwiftUI, including the actual graph. It does take some work to convince SwiftUI to do absolute positioning the correct way¹, but it provides some really nice options for higher level things like styling and interaction. Planarity is perfectly suited to being played on the iPad, especially with an Pencil.

There are still things to polish and features to add. For instance, I'd like to add a more comprehensive records section, keeping track of puzzle history like the fewest moves in a level to solve the graph and the total number of moves. It would also be fun to export an animation of the puzzle being solved².

I would like to release the game when it's ready, even if no one else is interested in it. The app needs a little more polish, and a more original name. In the meantime I have graphs to untangle.

Update: I've done the polishing and the game is now available to beta test on TestFlight.

It's a been a little while since the last Capture One Stream Deck plugin update, but it's worth the wait. The latest version packs in a lot of new features and some important bug fixes. The update is available now in the Elgato marketplace.

New

• Color tag and rating key actions can now toggle their value
• Flip Crop action
• Select last n images for quick review
• Toggle stored filters in the current collection

Changed

• Actions require selecting a value, rather than falsely indicating a default
• Open Collection now has a folder icon
• Sort action can now sort by all properties
• Sort action toggles between two user selected options

Fixed

• Plugin more reliably connects to Capture One on first install
• Dial actions show their titles when an image isn't selected

I have a fairly extensive¹ collection of film cameras. Everything from Kodak to Leica to Hasselblad to Minox. Most of them work and are fun to shoot with. This, however, isn't a camera review². It's instead about my great obsession with putting metadata where it belongs.

I use VueScan and a Nikon CoolScan to scan all the film I get back from the lab, the resulting images are great, the DAM situation isn't. I want as much information about the photo as possible, both in terms of scanned resolution but also the information about the photo. Film cameras, as it happens, aren't great at applying their own metadata.

In the past I've used Capturebot to apply camera, lens, and film stock metadata to my scans. This involved maintaining a spreadsheet with a complicated mix of of all that information by hand. The table looks a little something like this:

Even with all of that I didn't have all of the metadata combinations. I have, for instance, multiple lenses for the Hasselblad but only one line for all of them, so the specific lens is missing. I could of course add separate rows and filenames for each, but it just becomes a lot to manage.

About a month ago I'd just gotten some film back from the lab and had A Thought: what if I just built an entirely new application specifically for writing proper metadata to film scans? I told myself I wouldn't do it. Three days later I had a working proof-of-concept.

The aforementioned prototype quickly grew into a new app: Take Stock. Which, I'm going to mention now, is available in beta on TestFlight. I think Take Stock is the easiest way to embed proper EXIF metadata to your film scans, it's also a great way to keep tabs on your collection.

Take Stock attempts to add as much metadata as possible to each image. The obvious ones are camera & lens makes and models, ISO, focal length & aperture³. After scouring Exiftool's metadata tables, I also tried to include more esoteric tags, like the lens specification which gives the full zoom and aperture range of a lens. Anything that makes sense and I can find the appropriate tag for is fair game.

The core of Take Stock is your collection of cameras, lenses, and film stocks. You enter the details about your cameras, lenses, and the film you shoot which you can then select to embed in photos. You can also select that info ahead of time, which generates a filename you can give to your scans to automatically select the proper camera, lens, and film.

You can add individual images or entire folders (which update automatically) to Take Stock, then go through to double check the metadata or make adjustments to specific images. Once you're satisfied you export that metadata which is embedded into the image file. Any photo application that reads EXIF tags will read the new metadata.

As an added bonus you can also track which film is loaded in a camera, because not all cameras have an ISO setting, a place to slide a box flap, or even a window indicating whether film is loaded.

The entire application was built in SwiftUI with SwiftData as the model layer, which means it synchs via iCloud. I also massively improved my Exiftool wrapping library, SwiftEXIF, which powers all of the actual metadata writing.

If you shoot film and care about metadata (even a little) do check out the beta and let me know what you think.

When Capture One announced they were releasing Capture One for iPhone a lot of digital techs rolled their eyes. Why would we want to tether to a phone? The marketing didn't offer a compelling reason, instead mostly featuring "influencers" with knotted up orange cables, seemingly another example of how Capture One had forgotten its core professional users.

While I'm sure there are situations where a photographer might find this useful, say out in the wilderness and wanting to pack light, in studio or on location with a crew it makes little sense. I don't think it's constructive to focus on the ways Capture One (the mobile app) isn't a fit for commercial workflows, of which there are many. Instead I'd like to explore how Capture One (the core technology) can be leveraged on a mobile device to help working digital techs.

Wireless tethering, as it exists today, is useless. RAW files are too big, Wi-Fi bandwidth is too low. There are solutions to transfer JPGs for preview but those aren't the real photos, so there's little point in organizing and adjusting them because you'll have to do it all again when you import the RAW files later. What you'd want is to only send a better preview image, not just a JPG, but something more representative of the RAW data. A file that you could organize and adjust: a proxy for the future RAW file. As it happens, Capture One already has such a file¹, and with some changes to the way the iPhone app works it could offer a compelling wireless tethering solution.

The mobile app would act as a wireless bridge between camera and computer. It would advertise itself (and thus a connected camera²) to other Capture One session, where it would appear in the list of available cameras. The user can then select this remote camera the same way as any other camera connected via USB or wirelessly and be able to shoot as normal, with a few changes to the workflow.

When a photo is taken Capture One on the phone will render a proxy file and send that³ to the host session, keeping the RAW file either on the camera's card or downloading it to the phone as a normal tethered image. The comparatively small proxy files should be easy to send in real time as images come in. If the network go offline the phone can continue caching proxies to send them upon reconnection.

A digital tech's workflow largely stays the same: setting capture folders, naming files, adjusting images, tagging plates, etc. All of these operations would be done to the proxy files alone in a similar manor to working with offline images stored on an external drive. When it comes time to offload the images to the main session they'd be linked up to their proxies, copied into place, and the photos would come online.

The minimal app wouldn't need to do much besides render proxies, but there's no reason it couldn't also be more active in the session; after all modern iPhones are clearly up to the task of running Capture One, as evidenced by the fact they run Capture One. With a little bit of two-way communication the mobile app could reflect the adjustments made in the host session to apply next capture adjustments or adjustments made after the fact. The file organization could also be reflected, to help keep everyone on the same page.

Some of this could also serve as the core for a revamped Capture Pilot. With one session acting as a server many clients could connect, either as remote cameras or viewers. Leveraging the permission structure of Capture One Live these client sessions could have varying capabilities tailored for the needs of the specific user. A distributed Capture One would offer unparalleled flexibility for different types of workflows: an art director could make selects from a separate computer; clients can review images as they come in on an iPad; a food stylist could shoot from set; multi-set shoots could share a session, organizing files centrally.

There are a lot of interesting possibilities for how Capture One can grow to be a multi-platform application. New platforms need to enable those of us in the commercial photo industry to expand our workflows, not abandon them. The recent, greatly needed, improvements to Capture One Live are a fantastic example of how to enable new workflows that weren't possible before. Hopefully Capture One for iPhone can similarly open new doors in the future.