I’d been carrying around a camera (my mother’s old 1970’s Pentax) and lenses (an odd assortment of my father’s 1970’s tropics soaked glass) since High School. Having used/wasted/lost hundreds of canisters of film and spent a huge proportion of my pocket money and then my wage on developing. When the Canon 300D dropped in 2003 - I didn’t hesitate to march into Camera Warehouse Mount Gravatt and join the digital revolution. The 300D was then the center of a menagerie of lenses and other paraphernalia carried for the next 14ish years around the world; only stopping when the veritable camera finally became more than a little temperamental.
In the olden-days - on mainstream operating systems; Photoshop was a possibility, and CaptureOne was popular with friends. But back then I just wasn’t in the financial position to purchase software. I’d been using Linux as my main operating system for a while by this time and my travel laptop was also Linux. So to process photos from the 300D I used what Linux had to offer (which at the time wasn’t DT or RT).
I used the various Unix image tools and the original dcraw, imagemagick and the like. Originally, it was a Bash script which grew and became a perl script. It was a neat system, whereby, I inserted the Compact Flash memory card which wasn’t compact (remember those?) into the extension slot on the Laptop and the script would be automajically run, whereby it would copy the RAW files into a dated folder and process the RAW images and place the developed JPEGs into a Proofing folder. Any keepers were then worked with another script and manually tweaked with Gimp. The scripts have long been lost - but parts of the processing chain are sometimes found in the EXIF of some of the processed JPEGs.
It was originally discussed here that I was thinking of uploaded some retro images to PlawRAW. So along that theme…
This is an original Proof Image created by the script back in 2007 of a photo taken in 2004.
Somehow I feel like there’s not much to change with this shot - just wants to be true to life pretty much. Straightforward and very nice.
Your script sounds very slick and tidy - and works well! crw_0006.crw.xmp (10.3 KB)
Thanks a lot for posting this image. In my opinion, the image itself doesn’t need much correction or improvement. So I think modern tools can’t do a much better job than your old scripts but can produce different versions.
Yes, now you mention it I guess we are a bit unusual!
Australia wasn’t always metric - I had to check but we’ve been fully metric since at least the 80s. Metrication in Australia - Wikipedia
It’s also a more varied country than many people overseas expect. There is indeed plenty of the classic outback, but for example where I leave in the south-east of New South Wales, we’re up at 800m above sea level, have lots of forests, and get snow most winters, occasionally enough to close roads (briefly).
And there’s very busy ski resorts in the Snowy Mountains proper… having said that snow was a bit less this year.
The reason I choose that photo was the idea for posting retro digital RAW files was discussed in the “The Peak - Signposted” chat and this photo kinda followed on from that landscape theme. Both have endless wilderness - despite being 1000km apart.
After 19years - the best I’d be able to identify as the area of the photo would be somewhere within the blue box. For comparison the size of the blue box is about the same size as Latvia or West Virginia…
Not quite sure what state - I think 
