Episode: 2836
Title: HPR2836: Interview with Wendy Hill
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2836/hpr2836.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 17:42:38

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Hello and welcome to archive public radio. My name is Annie, I'm the French guy from
Switzerland and in this episode I'm going to talk with Wendy Hill, a battery used of
free and open source software in her job as a photographer. Let's go.
Wendy Hill is a photographer and by that I don't mean she takes pictures of her kids
on Sundays at the baseball game. Although if she was to do that it would probably turn out
to be great pictures. No, Wendy is a professional photographer and to run her business she's
using free and open source software. Wait, no Photoshop, no Illustrator? Has that
possible? Well, let's find out. Good evening Wendy or good afternoon for you actually.
Hello.
How are you?
I'm doing pretty good today.
Wendy, well you don't really start by talking about what kind of photographer you are. What's
the main subject of your photography?
That's a really great question because when most people think about photographers they think
about people photographers, which most of the photography that the average person the
average studio does, I guess you would say does people photography but there are so many
other realms of subjects, typically dies into still life and to break that down. It's
a little bit more. It would be food and product is what I focus on the most.
Yeah, so nothing I have actually nothing moving.
Yeah, I mean I do like taking pictures of my kids. I have four of them but they definitely
have photographers, kids syndrome. So as soon as the camera comes out they're like oh my
gosh, I'll go away. So I love the stuff that doesn't move because I can spend a lot of
time just focusing on the light and how it looks. I love that intricate detail that I can
add because I've got so much time to focus on exactly what my light is doing.
Yeah, so it's kind of a sculpture. I mean you yourself, you choose how you place the
different components in your picture or do you have guidelines and do your clients want
to see that? It really depends on the client. A lot of the clients that I'm currently shooting for,
I have template and total creative openness. I can do what I want. I have a few guidelines
for some of the staff but you'll get some jobs where you have very set guidelines. The client will
come to you with a drawn picture or an overall goal for this image and you have to meet that.
So it really depends on the type of jobs you're doing but especially when I'm doing stuff for myself,
I find it really relaxing. You know, have a glass of wine and stay with the light and create a picture.
Yeah, it's not just a point in shoot. Exactly. Okay, let's start the war just right now. Are you using
Canon camera or Nikon camera? I prefer the Nikon cameras and I like my Nikon because of the
interchangeable lenses. A lot of the glass that I use is really old, quote unquote, old Nikon glass,
usually from the early 80s and I can put it on my camera without having to have any adapters.
So I guess you have many lenses to take the picture of your job. How many do you have actually?
Goodness, I lost count. There's at least 12 or 13 lenses. Wow. Yeah, that's the difference between
the professional and you know, so when I make me with I have like three lenses and I'm pretty happy with
that. But you can do a lot of great things with three lenses but I'm a fan of the prime lenses,
the lenses that don't zoom in out because I love the look that you can get with them. They have a
very unique analogy. Yeah, I can understand that. I mean, as a, as an amateur photographer,
I'm very happy with the three I have because I'm pretty sure I don't even use them as they're
supposed to be used. But anyway, let's get back to the subject of this interview and that's
open source software in your job. What kind of software do you actually use? Can you just go over
your workflow, for example? Yeah, there are four main programs that I use and the first one is
DisplayCal and it has to be one of the most important programs as it color calibrates my screens.
So where I'm working with images, I'm working with colors and you know, clients want their food
and their product to be color accurate. So my displays have to be color accurate so I can adjust
things properly. And that is an open source program that can be found in many of the repos
and they may get extremely easy to install from their website.
The second program I use is called RapidSoto Downloader. Oh my goodness, it is amazing and it
saves me so much because as I stick my SD card in, I can tell it that I want my images labeled
and the folder that they're going into with a job code. So not only does that help me with a business,
all of the images for a particular business I have labeled in their folder in the months that I
shot it in the year that I shot it, which makes me able to go back and pull things if I need to
reduce something or if I need to, they need something, recent out to them. And then even for
taking pictures of the family and events that I do personally, it makes it easier for me to go
back and find those things. Yeah, there's so many ways inside that program that you can set up
your folder structure and the naming structure of not only your images but videos.
So that can be individualized to exactly how you want things. And then after you download
your pictures, you don't have to spend the time going through each one and sorting them out.
It's done for part. So you mean I wouldn't have to look through
pictures that are called images 001, 002. And that's because that's actually what I have right now,
like a bunch of files named the same. And yeah, you have to look at them all when I want to
grab one. I'm going to have to have a look at that. Yeah, it's amazing. I'm so glad that I found
that program because that's how my images were at first. They were all the standard naming format.
And then it's hard to go back and find what you want. And now I can be like, oh, I want the pictures
of my kids from last month. And it's really easy for me to go into the folder of this year,
the folder of last month, and then the folder that's called kids. Yeah, pretty easy.
Yes, absolutely. So then there are two programs I use for editing. The first one is dark
table. And it is an amazing raw photo editor. So in a raw photo editor, you're not making permanent
changes, but you can adjust everything from white balance and sharpness. And there are incredible
tools that are built into dark table that I don't even know all of them. I mean, it is amazing,
the stuff that they have packed in there. And it's available to everybody for free.
That's an equivalent of Lightroom. Yeah, so it would be like using Lightroom in the Adobe Suite.
So it's got all of those things that you can fine tune your raw images. And the wonderful thing
about shooting in RAW is you have so much more adjustment and flexibility on the back end.
So there's time, especially in a hurry, where you try to shoot it right in camera,
but sometimes things happen. You bump things and your aperture gets adjusted, or you bump
something and your white balance gets adjusted. And at doing, when you're shooting in RAW,
you can go into thing like dark table and fix it. The image isn't permanently messed up.
Okay, so that was the third one, and you see the was four?
Yeah, the last is Gimp. And I use Gimp for image layering. That does a lot with food.
When the food that I typically get, if I'm shooting it in my home studio, it's from a company that
does pre-packaged food. So the colors aren't always great because it's been cooked once,
and it's been froze, and then I get the food. So in order to have the best color representation
in an image, then I take and adjust the greens and adjust the reds in order to make everything
look good and not together in different layers inside Gimp.
Okay, do you get to keep the food after the photoshoot?
Yes, I do. This is the stuff that I shoot at home. I pick up the products from the client,
and I bring it home and shoot it. And of course, the way I do all of my photography,
I want the food to be edible when I'm done so that it can be ate. I don't want the waste
of food that you've manipulated, so then it's no longer safe for anybody to eat.
Okay, so it sounds like a dream job. I mean, taking picture of food and then having to get it
to that sound absolutely wonderful.
Yeah, it's a lot of fun. The hardest part about the stuff that we get at home,
that I get to take home, shoot in my home studio, is like, said it's been frozen.
So if you look at it, just normally, you know, you cook it and you plate it, you eat it,
it looks fine, but when you're preserving it forever in a still image, it can be heavily
screwed, and so that's where things like Gimp come into, where I can really find two things,
and make things look their absolute best, because if you're looking at it,
spinach that's been cooked and frozen, reheated, it's really not a process,
feeling it starts to turn this really ugly gray color.
So have you always used three other pencils software in your job,
or did you use proprietary software before?
I used on proprietary software before, but that was before I moved into the professional
around. Before I was using the Carell Suite, I can't even remember what it's called.
It wasn't Photoshop, but it's named something kind of like that.
So you use proprietary software before, and then you've done professional,
and then you've done two open-source software. I would have thought it would be the other way around.
I know it was kind of funny the way I went at it. Well, I've been using the proprietary software
before I moved to Linux as my daily desktop, and when I moved to Linux, the proprietary software
that I was using wasn't available on the system, and so I started looking for other options,
and that's when I found the things like Rapid Photo Downloader and Start Table and Gimp,
and as I was learning those programs, is the time that I was transitioning from just shooting
for fun, into shooting for clients, and so I was able to take and build that workflow
why I was also building my professional business. You never had a problem with the software.
Other photographers would use proprietary software for that, but so you grew your business
at the same time as you were growing your knowledge of the software.
Yeah, absolutely, and I think that makes it easier. Once a photographer gets a very set workflow,
it's hard to move from that, and it's even harder to move from that when you have clients that have,
you know, you've got a deadline. You get this food, this product, you know, whatever, even if it's
a family shooter, a wedding that you're doing, they want those images back in a timely manner,
and if you have those deadlines, it's hard to experiment. So because I was learning the open
start software at the same time that I was becoming a professional, that helped on that level,
because I wasn't trying to completely change my workflow while trying to meet the demands and
keep clients happy. Yeah, so both training and the job at the same time.
Do you think the open source software that you're using at the same level as those
proprietary runs? I just can't say this word. There's no open source ones.
Yeah, do you easily manage to do what you want with them? And do you think you would be more
efficient with open source software? The only downside that I have right now for the software
I'm using is that GIMP does not have non-destructive editing that Adobe Photoshop has. So that means
if you put a gradient on and then want to change it, you can't do that in GIMP. It's set the way
it is when you click. Okay, they are working on changing that. There's so much work on the back end
right now that is going to bring non-destructive editing to GIMP, but that does mean it takes me
sometimes more time to make changes to a layer. Or the biggest issue is I have more layers
than I need to inside an image, because if I go to make a change on one, I want to make a duplicate
before making that change, because I don't want to mess up the previous layer and not be able to
do it differently if I don't like how that effect came out, especially if I've made four or
five changes and then decided, well, I want to go back and adjust that. So then I have other pictures
where I've saved one version to make it a major change, like merging all the layers together to
make them one, and then do some additional fine-tuning. I don't want to have to lose all of the work I've
done in the additional layer, so I'll save it unmerged, then save a version of it merged,
and that's the biggest advantage right now of some of the proprietary software, but I can work
around it, but I'm super excited for the development of the non-destructive editing in GIMP.
And did they announce deadline for that, or is it still like it's going to come one day?
It's going to come one day. They don't have an official deadline, but since GIMP 2.10, that
version of GIMP really set a lot of the groundwork to get non-destructive editing in,
and I can't say his name. I think he is German, but he's a developer that's doing a lot of the work
on non-destructive editing, and I follow him on Patreon, and it's amazing, you know, a lot of the work
that he's doing in one, getting the CMYK color profiles added to GIMP. So what that means is it
cyan, yellow, magenta, k, I can't remember, but it's black, yeah, and that is what
publishers will use. That's the color profile that publishers will use. So if I want to send
something to a magazine, I typically need to submit it in a CMYK color profile,
and right now the only way to change that is through proprietary software,
and GIMP is getting that. So they don't have a deadline yet, but it's easy to see that they're
making great progress in hitting some of those goals. You said that, for example, you talked about
the CMYK profile. Did you ever have a real problem with a client, for example, when we would want
an Illustrator file or a Photoshop document as the final product? So most of the businesses that
I work with are really small businesses. So they're wanting just the finished JPEG or PNG file
that hasn't been an issue for me, and usually can save things in GIMP that you can open up
in other programs. So you could save it, save certain things, bring it into IncScape,
and export it as an SVG. So if they had a layout that they needed for a magazine or something
like that, I could bring that into IncScape, drop the image into the layout that they needed,
or make sure that the image is shot to the layout, and then be able to send that image off to
whoever it needs to go in order to have that layout printed.
Okay, so no big problem there, because that's often what the arguments from people who use
non-open software, but my clients want, I don't know, what document or anything like that,
and I can't provide that. It's cool to me that you don't have that kind of problem.
Have you ever said to yourself, okay, I'm fed up with this open source nonsense,
let's use Photoshop and I like everybody else, and I'd be much happier in my life.
No, not really. I mean, sometimes I'm looking for new ways to get inspiration, and all of those
are done on Adobe software, and so I have to convert that into the software that I'm using,
but for the most part, I really don't, I don't think I'm missing anything in the Adobe suite,
that is anything that I need to do my job and to create the images that I like to create.
So, even if Adobe was porting the suite to Linux, you would still use open source software.
Yeah, I would still be using the same software that I'm using day in and day out.
It works perfectly for what I'm using it for.
If someone who would want to be a photographer was coming to you for advice, would you recommend them
to use open source software?
Absolutely. One of the hardest parts about getting started, especially as a professional,
is there's all of this hardware that you need, and it's not cheap. It's not cheap to buy the camera,
and you typically two cameras, one for your daily use, and one for a backup,
and then there's lights and stands, and all of this hardware that you need in order to get your
first client that adding the expense of software on top of that is just overwhelming.
Yeah, so economical reasons to use open source software, and since the quality of the work
is kind of the same, so why spend so much money on licenses then?
Yeah, exactly. And following my mentor uses the Adobe suite, and a lot of the people that are
kind of in that group with my mentor also use that same software, and it seems like every time
there is an update for their software, they're all wondering, hey, is it going to work?
What's changed is our workflow going to change, and not one thing I haven't had to deal with
using the software that I'm using, and yeah, sometimes they change things,
but it's been great ads to my software. It's not changing my fundamental workflow, and that has
been a wonderful thing about using open source for my photography.
Okay, well, I think we covered your photography job, unless you have something else to say.
I don't think so, yeah, I think that pretty much covers the scope of that.
So, we still have another subject to cover. But first, you said you were running Linux,
so what made you switch from I guess Windows to Linux?
I made the switch about three years ago, and we had Windows 10 running on our computer,
and it was absolutely driving me nuts. There was, I'd go to start a program, and programs wouldn't
work, because of an update happened, and I was frustrated with all of the constant problems.
I couldn't sit down and use my computer, because I was always trying to fix my computer.
And I know that was the early days of Windows 10, and there's always issue in the adoption,
but overall, I was just frustrated and decided that I was going to look for an alternative,
and then one of those people that, once I get started on the subject,
it just research it and research it. And eventually, in that process, I found Linux,
and this wonderful world of options that it opened up for me, and I never looked back.
Welcome home. Fantastic.
You use Linux as your daily driver. You use open-source software,
but I also happen to know that you are also contributing to an open-source project. Can you tell me
more about that? Yeah, I have contributed to LeBon2, which is an awesome little project.
The last six months, this glass cycle of release, I've been so busy with work that I haven't
really gotten to contribute with them, but I'm really looking forward to doing more. It's so much
fun, not only to be a part of helping a distribution, but seeing all the fun things that happen
in the background and making stuff better that other people can then use to make their lives better.
And can you talk about your contributions or is this a secret?
No, they're not secret. Mostly I work with the graphic side,
so helping to set up themes and icons and working out some of those details in the previous release,
where LeBon2 was moving from LXDE to LXQT. There was a lot of those graphical
details that needed to be reworked out. They were making the transition, and so that's what I've
spent most of my time doing is digging through the configuration files to find out what needs to
be switched so we can make it look good. Cool, and you've achieved a great job, I think, on that.
Thank you. Okay, so Wendy, where can people find more about your job or maybe about your contributions
to LeBon2? For our LeBon2, we've been making some changes. There were some issues with the server,
but you can typically find that information on the launch pad, where the overall
LeBon2 puts their contribution list, and then you can find out more about what I do
by just chatting with me. I'm typically in the Linux groups on Telegram,
so you can find me in there and ask any questions. Okay, well, I think we have covered
everything I had planned for this evening. Thank you very much, Wendy, for joining me tonight.
Thank you, and thank you, dear listeners, for listening to this episode of Hacker Public Radio.
I will be back with more interviews in the near future. In the meantime, take care of yourselves. Ciao, ciao.
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