Camera Magazines

When I started out with a camera many years ago I loved camera magazines, ideas for different types of shots, tips on processing the negatives and so on. I used to buy several different magazines, Amateur photographer was my favourite.

These days, I'm finding hard to justify buying the magazine let alone taking out a subscription to any. Most of the magazines are dominated by Nikon/Canon, I use a Sony A55 and have no intention of jumping to another brand, thankfully Amateur Photographer does have articles about other brands. But the main bugbear is that the majority of articles then go on to tell you how to process the pictures in Lightroom and Photoshop. This to me is a complete waste of time and puts me off buying the magazine. I understand that magazines have to play to the masses but there are a growing number of people like me that don't use a Mac or a Windows based machine.

I've been running Linux since the late 90s, I generally move the RAW pictures onto my desktop, check them all with an application called Geeqie and then process the RAW images using Darktable. The final JPEG images are then catalogued with Shotwell and uploaded to Google+ should I want to. The total cost of this software is nothing, you can donate money to the developers if you want and you should.

Darktable is a really good piece of software, it's available for Linux and Mac but not Windows, has all the tools you need and you can even import GPS files from your mobile phone it will match the timestamp with your images so you can tag the location.

I'm no expert in Darktable but it would be nice to have a small section of a magazine dedicated to applications such as this.