For quite a while, when uploading to Original, I've run the photos through exifautotran, a shell script that uses jpegexiforient to read the EXIF Orientation flag and rotate each image for the web. Since getting the 450D I'd noticed that exifautotran was no longer doing anything, which I tracked down to jpegexiforient returning no orientation (nor being able to set the orientation either). I thought this was weird because GNOME (eog, f-spot, nautilus, gthumb) and MacOSX (Finder, Preview) both displayed the photo correctly.

Today I had a look at the source code to jpegexiforient and I found that it was silently returning because the first byte of the file was not FF, D8, FF, E1. Using my trusty hex editor I discovered that my file starts FF, D8, FF, E0. FF, D8 indicates the beginning of a JPEG file and from the EXIF spec, it can be seen that FF, E0 is the beginning of a JFIF block. In my file FF, E1, the beginning of the EXIF block, doesn't appear until after this. So while there is nothing wrong with my file as far as I can tell, jpegexiforient won't accept it.

My solution? I'm now using the program jhead to batch-rotate images, which seems to work correctly and also provides a number of other useful features.

It's worth noting that Windows Media Centre also didn't like the orientation flag. Neither did whatever version of Elisa I'm currently running (which is not the latest).

Two items of registered mail arrived for me that I picked up this morning on my way to work.


So that's the complete end of it. I applied to join Engineers Australia and IEEE today.

Although Stephanie beat me to it, and has already uploaded her favourite photos to flickr, I have been steadily uploading photos from the wedding and honeymoon. Thus:

• Wedding photos by Amanda
• Wedding photos by Dad
• Kek Lok Si Buddhist Temple, Penang
• Thai and Burmese Buddhist Temples, Penang
• Asian Civilisation Museum, Singapore
• Jurong Bird Park, Singapore

More holiday snaps to come in the near future.

I tried an experiment when photographing my degrees using a $10 umbrella that has a reflective silver inner and my flash gun pointing into it over my shoulder. Stephanie found this most amusing.


It actually seems to work pretty well. I snapped this shot of Stephanie holding the umbrella in my left hand with the flashgun pointing backwards into the middle.


Since Steph has a Flickr pro account, I have started experimenting with using it for uploading the random photos that I take (rather than just dumping them in an images directory).