I am tied to my art.

Photography on Linux is supposed to make you cantankerous, at least a little crotchety. It is at its best no different to Windows or Apple systems. At its worst it is a little frustrating, even these days. I can think of nothing I need, in terms of software, for my photography. Quite the opposite! In fact the number of available applications is getting to be a problem! Still, after my last posting I thought I better report on another find. I had found out that gphoto2 allowed me to play with tethering my camera to my Fedora laptop. I suggested that it was just a toy and one that I did not, in truth, need. I still cannot let go, my camera is attached to my laptop as I write this. Of course, the snaps are rubbish, but it keeps me off the street. I have started to write a python script to help me use my tethered camera, but this is so much effort.

I have come across another piece of software, Capa. It is, as the website tells us, "built on top of libgphoto". It is just like my python script and will suffer with the same problems I am finding with gphoto2. But it is written and ready to run, as long as you understand that there has not even been a first release version, so you can expect a few teething problems. I cannot alter any of the settings on My Nikon. This is not too much of a problem as I can do this from the command line. The application does show the current state of all the settings. I am sure this will be fixed before a real release.

It does let me review all my shots and the last one taken is my viewfinder. Not brillient but then I cannot get 'gphoto2 --capture-preview' working when using my Nikon. I know it is a gphoto2 problem.

Capa will be almost what I want. Now what do I do? Nag the development team to add the features that I want? Or do I continue with development of my Python script. This is a hard one to answer at the moment. I will let you know what I choose and I will always keep an eye on Capa, once it is at a release level I will let you know what it can do.

Have I got a problem with the current state of photography on Linux? I do not think so. For me we are now where we need to be. You can do anything that Apple and Windows users can do. There may be a few bells and whistles missing, it could be 6 months before a newbie would have the same view.