Learning Unix Terminal Commands
Billy Newman Photo Podcast | Learning Unix Terminal Commands
Shooting weddings, working with Sony A7R autofocus and batteries at long events.
Produced by Billy Newman and Marina Hansen
Link
Website Billy Newman Photo http://billynewmanphoto.com/
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/billynewmanphoto
Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/billynewmanphotos/
Twitter https://twitter.com/billynewman
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/billynewman/
About http://billynewmanphoto.com/about/
Billy Newman Photo Podcast Feed http://billynewmanphoto.com/feed/podcast/billynewmanphotopodcast
If you’re looking to discuss photography assignment work, or a podcast interview, please drop me an email. Drop Billy Newman an email here.
If you want to book a wedding photography package, or a family portrait session, please visit GoldenHourWedding.com or you can email the Golden Hour Wedding booking manager here.
If you want to look at my photography, my current portfolio is here.
If you want to purchase stock images by Billy Newman, my current Stock photo library is here.
If you want to learn more about the work Billy is doing as an Oregon outdoor travel guide, you can find resources on GoldenHourExperience.com.
If you want to listen to the Archeoastronomy research podcast created by Billy Newman, you can listen to the Night Sky Podcast here.
If you want to read a free PDF eBook written by Billy Newman about film photography: you can download Working With Film here. Yours free.
Want to hear from me more often?Subscribe to the Billy Newman Photo Podcast on Apple Podcasts here.
If you get value out of the photography content I produce, consider making a sustaining value for value financial contribution, Visit the Support Page here.
You can find my latest photo books all on Amazon here.
Hey, what’s going on? This
is Billy Newman and you’re listening to the Billy Newman photo podcast for September 1 2017. I’m coming out with another podcast today, I’ll put it up on my website. Sometime later this afternoon, I figured I’ll stop by a coffee shop or something, fill it up, out. In the truck in the mobile studio,
I’m
in the middle of a work day, I’m trying to get some media stuff finished it, I haven’t put up many, many new things recently, which is a shame and always kinda ends up happening this time in August, I suppose. Say that I get busy. Or I get busy with stuff that’s not this, I don’t know. But ultimately, I was thinking about I need to jump in to Hootsuite I need to put up or you know, I need to like figure out and schedule a bunch of stuff and see if that can come together in some kind of interesting way. But I don’t know I was thinking about it. And like trying to figure out the different stuff I should put together there was this other service like I had written a bunch of posts for I’m going to try and find that and try to put together Suzanna just some of the new portfolio stuff that I can send out and keep some nice photos going up. But I’ve been trying to work on my Instagram page and trying to do some networking stuff with with some people on Instagram, which has been working pretty good. You know, it’s a good tool for stuff in the northwest of trying to communicate with, you know, more people and people in your industry or people that are kind of associated with some of the media stuff that I’m trying to do. So that’s been kind of fun trying to do some outreach stuff. I heard from a guy from kth that was kind of interesting that I guess he I guess he heard an episode of the podcast, which is cool. So right on, man, thanks for tuning in for a second. And overall the KVH experience has gone swell. So far, I did like a trading of equipment, you know, and I got a decent price on on some of that. So that was a pretty good experience. I got the equipment back that I was looking for. So that was good. And and I’m happy with the a seminar so far. In fact, I’ve been looking at trying to pick up a battery grip for it, you know, I did a wedding this weekend, which is great. Shooting a wedding. And those are those are really fun events to go through. And a seven, I did a pretty good job in almost every capacity, I love the low light of it. The way the sensor works is really great, super high quality, all of those things. They fit the mark for what for what I need. But it was interesting, I was noticing that in low life, the autofocus for that camera, it really doesn’t function in a way that I need it to, or I’m missing some stuff that I really want. And that’s where I see the real benefit. And in some of the older systems, I mean, even like can’t like contrast base autofocus systems that were in the Nikon, or Canon systems for the last like 15 or 20 years are really superior to what I’m seeing in some of the expression of what the early Sony autofocus stuff can do. You know, it’s like in focus, right, you’re looking at a frame, it’s in focus, your autofocus point is on the thing, it’s a contrast point, there’s plenty of light on it, you go to autofocus, and then your lens just spins out. And it does nothing for like four seconds just spins out to infinity. And to see just blurriness, you lose the number completely, it comes kind of back in, maybe it finally grabs focus. And then you take the picture, but you kind of miss everything, or you just I don’t know, like there’s a lot of times where you’re waiting for the camera to focus. So it really should just be like pull up to your eye. It sees focus, hit it, grab it, click it go. I’m having a harder time with that than what I thought I might. And I think some of that could be because of the lack of the phase detection autofocus system that like the the newer a seven, our two has the a seven to a seven as to a nine or a nine, right yeah, that’s a that’s a Sony one. And like a lot of the new Canon cameras they have this phase detection system is supposed to be some better multiplexing system of finding autofocus, but there used to be systems that worked pretty good, like my d3 at 53 autofocus points, and it can pull up I think, I don’t know, something like that. But you know, plenty autofocus points and you can grab your autofocus point even pretty low, like they could kind of get Oh, that’s at infinity or that’s pretty close to right next to me. So I’ll stay there. So it’s interesting kind of learning how that behaves. But overall, the photos from the wedding came out really well. A lot of this stuff worked out very nicely. I’ve been really happy with it. But another thing that I noticed is with running was running a camera as a device like more like an iPad or like more like your phone, you know where it’s got, it’s got some screen on a lot of the time it’s got processing stuff going on, it’s moving gigabytes and gigabytes of data to a card. It’s just drawing from the battery, almost constantly. I mean, like during a wedding, I guess to kind of think of power consumption like this, I wrote 48 gigabytes of data to SD cards. And so that’s going to take some amount of battery energy, you know, stored energy to write all that data to a card and so in that capacity, I kind of do get that it would take a good bit of power to write that much information. Data Capture and then write that much information if you think about everything that has to do so in that way, and then run the screen and
you know, run the processing and run it visually and all that. So I kind of forgive it and capacity. But what I noticed though, is that I really did go through a couple batteries. Shooting and just sort of a regular fashion at this wedding for for most of the day is like a full day shooting, but it really was burning through those batteries pretty quickly, like you look at it, like, oh, whoa, I just, I just use like 10% in a pretty short amount of time. And so with that, I was kind of thinking and as it’s been the plan for a long time for just, I don’t know, kind of like a best use case for professionalism, what I really want to do is get the battery grip that goes in accompaniment with the a seminar on the battery grip, I think it’s a it’s a you know, it’s like a Sony piece that fits, I haven’t really seen a battery grip before. But you know, the one where you can throw the two, the two camera batteries into the battery grip, you can get an extended amount of life from your camera that way and you get like the the portraits or what is it like the vertical shutter release? You know, so you can flip your camera up and shoot in portrait mode. And I yeah, I like the size of it, the look of it, it’d be an awesome kind of compact professional. What is it not SLR I keep wanting to say professional SLR but an interland interchangeable lens camera, an interchangeable lens camera that’s rolling right off my tongue, isn’t it? So yeah, it’s gonna be interesting, I want to go for the, for the battery grip, though. And I think that could kind of solve some of the problems that I’m having with battery usage issues of the camera kind of coming up dad after after two or three hours or whatever it is. So I don’t know, I’ve heard for plenty of other people in relationship to wedding photography kind of complain or grass a little bit about some of the features that are associated, or some of the things that make the workflow of wedding work of a wedding shoot go by a little bit more difficulty with, with a featured camera, like the a seminar, I’ve heard of people that are really into it, too. So you know, it seems like, it seems like a couple different things. But low light autofocus, definitely an issue on that camera, I can definitely tell that there’s some stuff that doesn’t do now. So with that, and with the concept of like what I really like to shoot or you know, like, kind of still moving things or landscapes, low light firearm stuff, if I try and get into that more, I wouldn’t really run into that same kind of problem with as much repetition because you know, you’re not shooting a high volume of frames, you’re not shooting an event based situation. So it’s kind of a different sort of scenario. And you don’t really seem to you’re you’re wanting to manual focus and take time and take multiple frames of the same thing. And in some of those some of those more setup, fine art situations, or landscape situations, like you’re trying to take your time in those squares in with event and wedding photography, that kind of process. It’s just it’s really fast, you’re trying to move different moving elements into different places and get photographs of them. You’re just doing a lot all at one time over a short amount of length of the the amount of time
you know the event.
So not enough is all right, I did a great, had a great time at the wedding. How about you are you know savage people out of which a food got a bunch of great photos, brought them home started processing them. That’s a really interesting part of you know, gone through like a big batch of photos. And I’ve gotten kind of used to that over the time of getting through a big batch of photos. But it is always sort of overwhelming when you’re like, Wow, that’s a lot. That’s like a whole big data project I got to go through now like I don’t realize like how much it was it really takes to get through a bunch of stuff when you finish it. So it’s cool. That’s the first step I’ve been doing. Other than that, maybe you’ve seen a couple bits from from, from some of the Instagram stories or Snapchat stories that have been putting up I’m trying to learn Unix, I’m trying to learn like the the Mac OS command line terminal stuff. I don’t know if you guys have learned me any stuff in in a shell language before, way back, like years ago, like back in the 90s. You guys might remember when you got your first PC at the family. And like when I was a kid, I really wanted to play video games, I wanted to play video games so bad. But other video game installation systems for Windows PCs, they’re all this dos based systems. So you had to put in the disk and then you had to like go into DOS and then change it from the C drive to the D drive and then do some command line thing that I did not understand that all the time. Any of those directions were way over my head. So it was always like so hard and frustrating. I remember just having kind of like, you know, panic, frustrations about trying to get command lines to work and not understanding what you’re supposed to type in or that there’s commands you’re supposed to put it. It was always so frustrating. I learned it a little bit. And I’ve gotten into computers when I was young. And so I figured out some dos stuff really but I was never proficient in it. I can never really move about a file system and a command line before. So it was cool. I didn’t really know anything about the Mac OS system. I know that it’s Darwin. I know the Mac OS was based on you Unix in like the Unix file handling system kind of the same way that like Linux is based on that. And Unix is like the old command line system of file management stuff. I think that was back. Hey, there’s all sorts of stuff I don’t understand because there’s like the PowerShell system, which I guess is more for scripting languages, or for, I guess, there’s a lot of powerful stuff you can do on that server side. And then there’s a lot of stuff originally, that stuff was set up as where it’s like, more like a file cabinet system. And I’ve been kind of learning about that. I’m not an expert on any terminal stuff by any means. But it’s been really cool. Kind of getting a bit more understanding about how to get powerful use out of a Macintosh computer. And it was cool learning a few commands on it. I guess, if anybody wants to try, I’d go into Well, I’ll tell you what I’ve been doing. I don’t know if you guys would want to do this. But I’ve been going into terminal, I installed a new shell in Terminal called fish. When you first get started with Shell or with the terminal on Mac, it’s the bash shell. There you learn, I guess what that stands, it’s like the Bourne again, shell, I suddenly came out in the 70s. You know, it’s like early 70s. Right? I don’t know this stuff goes way back for for computer stuff. But, but I installed like an updated shell, that gives me a couple different color modifiers. And it kind of helps, helps fill in helps autocomplete some of the stuff that you’re trying to do on command line, which saves a ton of time and makes sure my syntax is way easier, because I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know when to put a space. Do I put a dash and then a space and then a letter? Or do I just not? Or how do I how do I pipe a command? What am I doing here.
So none of that stuff I really understand. And so the auto completion stuff of a more modern shell that you install on top of that makes a big difference. But first, it takes a huge amount of time, I guess you can type in man, man. And that’ll be that they will bring up like the manual for Unix or for all the Unix commands, you can kind of get a handle on how to learn that. But really the best way is to go to YouTube and follow a tutorial for a while of learning some of the basic commands. Some of the basic ones that I’ve learned is like CD. For change directory, that’s how you you like move from one file to the next file. So if you’re in like, Oh, I’m in my Users folder, but I’m going to go to my Documents folder, NASS, you see the documents and then it moves you to that, then you type in LS to list the contents of the folders in that and then like you look at that, and then you can open up those programs in a writing program, or you can create files, that’s been really cool. I’ve learned how to do that. The other part I’ve been learning is not mess with this before either. But is is with like homebrew, which I guess is a package manager, it’s kind of so you can download programs from the internet. Or you can download additional utilities or applications into terminal and then run them from Terminal. It’s pretty cool. There’s there’s ways you can do more advanced things where you can get, you know, just like your Mac OS apps that you would probably likely want to download. You can get those through terminal if you’d want to install. But with a lot of these installation packages it’s for it’s for these really interesting kind of applications that are quite old, like they’re 20 or 25 years old. Like I downloaded an email program that was new, right? It was a command line email program, I think called Alpine. It was made by like the University of Washington back in 2001 was last time it was updated. And you’re like, hey, Wow, that’s pretty new software. No way. That’s cool. But you can look around and there’s all these different formulas, like there’s mp3 players, there’s file converters, there’s video converters, MPEG converters, there’s like system utilities, there’s disk usage, utilities. There’s networking utilities. There’s games, like I put zork on there, I put Tetris on there. I’ve been trying to like learn a few things on just you know how to open stuff, how to run stuff in there. And it’s been kind of cool. There’s, there’s all sorts of environments in there that I just had no idea really existed. But there was a whole, like functioning computer system that existed without the graphical user interface that we put so much time into. So anyway, it’s been, it’s been fun. It’s just kind of a hobby thing. But I’ve been trying to learn a little bit of productivity out of it too, because there’s, like I would ever do this. But there are some interesting things that you can do. One of the commands that I thought was interesting was the sips command, you can probably look that up like man sips man space sit for the manual for the command, sips, but I guess that’s that like a Macintosh image processing. thing, something commands system. I don’t know what it does completely. But there’s cool things you can do with that, where if you have a folder of images, so you find a directory, it’s got a folder of images. But those are all large images. And you want to resize those for the web, you can duplicate that folder is really the process I do is in the GUI, I would make a copy of that folder, I would navigate to that and command line and type a command like sips space, and then the name of the folder or like the size of pixels. I want the image and then the name of the folder and it would process in the command line. It would process all those images to be resized to that format and to that size. So it was interesting. I did an experiment like where I was taking some photos that were like five megapixel images, and then I would drop those down to 400 width pixels, or, you know, like, a 400 pixel width image that I could put up on a website. And it was cool, I could just take the whole folder, and then I could write the command, and then you could see it process out all those images, and then you go back, and it would be a resized image. It was really cool. But it’s just interesting kind of seeing your computer work, and then understanding how to layer and commands and get some action out of it. I hardly know how to do anything, I’m totally novice that I can barely kind of move up and down the file system and get something interesting to look at. But most of all, it’s just kind of me like looking at I go, huh, how about that, but I don’t know how to use it at all. I mean, there’s so many system developers or like network analysts, or you know, people that actually like get into computers that are in media. And for computer development, or for for application development. There’s still like a whole range of uses and applications and systems that people that are in that really get into quite deeply. So you can kind of see like how powerful these tools are. And at a certain level, when you’re trying to get into powerful tools, you just move into terminal, you move into everything that you can do in Unix. It’s really interesting. So it’s been kind of fun to do. I’ll talk about it more in kind of a fun goofy way. But yeah, man getting into Unix. It’s good times. So thanks a lot for listening to this podcast. I’ll try and record another one soon. Enjoy your labor day everybody. Have a good one. Bye.