Photos - Julio Merino (jmmv.dev)

Introducing 'Dirt and the City'

A friend of mine recently started a blog called Dirt and the City and, because he has invited me to contribute to it, I feel like posting a reference here ;-) Dirt and the City is a blog that intends to show you the "ugly" (literally) side of NYC. The blog is named after a famous TV show filmed in this same city; I haven't watched the show myself, but I bet that there is no dirt to be seen in it. If you are wondering what the city really looks like, this blog is your place. But, before visiting the blog, be sure to take it as it is meant to be: just a fun collection of photos! If you ever want to visit NYC, don't let the contents of the blog change your plans. You will definitely enjoy your visit regardless. Without further ado, and just in case you missed the link above, click here to visit Dirt and the City.

September 4, 2011 · Tags: <a href="/tags/nyc">nyc</a>, <a href="/tags/photos">photos</a>
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Me @ deviantART

I have been a deviantART member for a bit more than three years already — wow, time passes fast... too fast —, but I never submitted any stuff I was really proud of. In fact, I have just removed the three deviations I had in my account. Now that I own a decent digital camera, I think I'll start posting some of the photos I like most in that place after retouching them a bit. I don't know if I'll keep up with this, but I'm optimist right now ;-) Feel free to dive into my member page and see the two photos I posted! "Why not Flickr?", I hear. At the moment I think I won't be posting lots of photos nor personal ones; that is, not full photo rolls and not photos of me nor any other person I know. Hence deviantART seems a better place to share my "selected" stuff.

September 8, 2007 · Tags: <a href="/tags/photos">photos</a>
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New camera (and current desktop)

After some time complaining about the slowness, the size and the non-working zoom of my old camera, a Kodak Easyshare DX4530 that my father gave me when replacing it, I am now a proud owner of a Canon PowerShot A570 IS. This is my first "decent" digital camera, and I'm looking forward to learning the basics of photography with it. This camera is bigger than what I planned — it is not much smaller than the Kodak —, but, on the other hand, it offers lots of features worth having. To mention some: it has good lens quality, complete manual controls, optical image stabilization, a standard optical zoom (4x) and a very intuitive and easy-to-manage interface (but, of course, this last point is my personal opinion). I thought I could share some pictures of the mess my desktop currently is &mdash. OK, OK, maybe it's not that messy; I have seen photos depicting much worse scenarios than this one. I wish mine could be similar to this one, powered by a huge Apple Cinema Display and a Mac Pro, but I'm not there (yet!) ;-) The laptop and the desire to hack NetBSD on old computers makes keeping things tidy hard. So here we go: this is the main view, where you can easily see the MacBook Pro, an old Apple keyboard to the left and a relatively old PC on the right-low corner, connected to an old flat screen seen at the top-right corner. There is also too much garbage on top of the table that should not really be there: batteries, the speakers, papers... scissors? And here you can see the "vintage corner", currently composed of a couple of old Macintoshes (68040-powered) and a DNARD (also known as a "shark"). There are also a couple of USB hard disks, but those are not old ;-)

September 3, 2007 · Tags: <a href="/tags/camera">camera</a>, <a href="/tags/desktop">desktop</a>, <a href="/tags/photos">photos</a>
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Death star!

A cool photo I found today: I think I can say: don't be scared! That seems to be a power adapter so, supposedly, all those plugs are switched off when one of them is connected. If they weren't... this would not pass any quality assurance control... So, it is a pretty nice product :-) See the original post for more details. Edit (23rd July): Corrected the (invented) title.

July 21, 2007 · Tags: <a href="/tags/photos">photos</a>
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Fixing EXIF date information

Back in February, some friends and I spent a week visiting Punta Cana. We made a lot of photos there but, when we came back, we realized that most of us (not all!) forgot to adjust our camera's date to the foreign timezone, which was 5 hours behind of ours. I imported all our photos in iPhoto but the difference in their timestamps made all images appear unsorted in the main view; this was very annoying. So I wondered if the EXIF information embedded in them could be easily fixed. It turns out it is possible, but the tools to do so — or at least the one I used — leave a lot to be desired: it was not exactly trivial to resolve the problem. In order to modify the EXIF information, I installed the free libexif library alongside a very simple frontend to it named exif, distributed from the same page. To painlessly get this in Mac OS X, just use the graphics/exif package in pkgsrc. Then I had to see which fields I wanted to modify in each photo. This can be accomplished with the exif --tag <photo-name.jpg> command, which shows all tags currently attached to the photo and their corresponding values. Skimming through the resulting list, it is easy to spot which fields correspond to date information. I specifically picked up 0x0132, 0x9003 and 0x9004, but some of them may not exist in your images. With this information at hand, I wrote a little script that looped over all affected photos and, for each tag, adjusted it to the new value. It goes as follows:#!/bin/sh while [ $# -gt 0 ]; do file=$1; shift for tag in 0x0132 0x9003 0x9004; do date=$(exif --tag=${tag} $file | grep Value | cut -d ' ' -f 4-) date=$(perl adjust.pl "${date}") exif --tag=${tag} --ifd=0 --set-value="${date}" ${file} mv ${file}.modified.jpeg ${file} done doneThe magic to subtract five hours to each date is hidden in the adjust.pl script, which looks like this:($date, $time) = split / /, $ARGV[0]; ($year, $month, $day) = split /:/, $date; ($hour, $min, $sec) = split /:/, $time; $amount = 5; if ($hour >= $amount) { $hour -= $amount; } else { $hour = $hour - $amount + 24; if ($day == 1) { $day = 31; $month -= 1; } else { $day -= 1; } } printf "%04d:%02d:%02d %02d:%02d:%02dn", $year, $month, $day, $hour, $min, $sec;I know the code is really crappy but it did the job just fine!

April 7, 2007 · Tags: <a href="/tags/exif">exif</a>, <a href="/tags/photos">photos</a>
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Posts: Photos

Introducing 'Dirt and the City'

Me @ deviantART

New camera (and current desktop)

Death star!

Fixing EXIF date information

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