Reaching for the light...

How many times have you heard an "expert" claim you can't get bokeh with a M43 (micro four thirds) sensor, zoom lens or stopped down to more than f4? 

Sometimes you just need to ignore those rules.

It was a beautiful sunny afternoon and I had just dropped a grape into my iced soda, when It became "alive" and dances in the moment. I was so fascinating to watch I grabbed my new little Canon EOS 1100D, which takes HD movies by the way. My main difficulty is the movies it takes are in .MOV format and not having an Apple Mac I find the movies a little hard to view (the free Quicktime, which is always very slow to load and seems to  leave the movie clips very jerky, Lightroom and Picasa are worse). However I have discovered, by accident, that the Windows Live Movie Maker does a good job, but you need to wait while it "prepares" the video (I assume this is some sort of necessary CODEC conversion). Saving the movie (in .WMV format) lets me use Picasa, my DVD creator and even upload to You Tube.

I'm not suggesting I am a fan of one format over another, its just that .MOV format can be a bit of a hassle if you have a modern PC.

Back on the Grape Vine

I was recently judging some camera club entries and saw a number of colour vignettes, filtered to a low saturation or black & white at the edges. They were used well, to draw the centre of attention to the fully coloured zone. These work are the inspiration for my latest wallpaper.

I had taken a few photos of the grape vine on my back porch. I liked the lighting on this leaf especially BUT the edges of the image where very fussy. Not a good look for a screen wallpaper, because that's where most of us put the icons. So I experimented with the a couple of effects tools in picasa.  The first was the effects/soft focus, which softens the focus around a central zone. There is a slider to control the size of the circle (yes it is only a circle you can not make it elliptical). There is also a slider to control the rate at which the soft focus is brought in and you have a target to move the circle around the image with you mouse. This takes out the fussy edges nicely but oh such an intense green blur.

Next I tried out the Effect/Focal B&W which again give you a circular (not an ellipse) area of colour intact with the edge feathering out to Black & white. Sliders let you control the size if the circle and the sharpness of the colour spot. A target on the image to center the circle can be moved over the image using the mouse. Very Simple and intuitive to use.

Finally I decided to further edit my second attempt with the screen wallpaper maker in the Olympus Camedia software (which came bundled with my original digital camera) and which I still use occasionally along with that original camera. This software allows you to easily add a textured background overlay to part of the image (the left hand side where icon get put by default).

Of all my on-line photographic works, it is screen wallpapers on flickr, that get the highest views. Over whelming so, hundreds if not thousands of views each. I’m still not sure why, but I think they are fun to create, I use them on my own computers and why not share them?

The tenderils of the vine

  

I'm not sure if it is the lastest picasa update (version 2.6.0 Build 35.83.0) or a change to blogger log in, but the result is I can once again upload photos to blogger beta using the blog this button in picasa.