An updated Studio :: Painted & Decluttered

I'm still hobbling around a bit after a fall last month, nut these seemed the perfect time to repaint the bedroom I an using as my studio (its been accumulating junk for 25 years first as my office and them as a craft/junk room and eventually my studio)/ there was a lot to clean out (it was the council's hard rubbish collection) and the biggest ting I wanted to do was repaint, specifically to a neutral colour. I didn't mind the burgandy but it played havoc when trying to match colours and calibrate my computer screen.

I had decided on the Neutral Grey that photographers often call (18% grey card) to check colur cast and also exposure time. My theory is that this will help me with colour mixing. Very fortuiosly I visited Bunnings and got 4 litres of a nice neutral grey as close to the photographic refernce card as I could judge.

The clustered was both easier and harder to deal with. The guidig principal though is I only bring back the things I will be using and for which there is a defined place to store them. So that is dominately blank canvases, paper and sketch books. I also have watercolour and acrylic paints, brushes and accessories, pens, pencils and pastels. There are open book shelves, a slick stainless steel set of draws and a file cabent to hold all these tings. 

I also kept the old desk a a work area and place to "stack" my computer and I am intending to mount an old large flat screen tv on the wall as my main computer monitor. Still a bit of work to do here.

After the Storm

Melbournians are still coughing and sniffling after a set of strong thunder storms following strong north winds that bought a lot of grass pollen over the city. The storm apparently fragmented the pollens into smaller particles cause a significant number of asthma attacks including 4 deaths. Our Hospital and ambulance services were stretched to capacity.

Ok enough winter, where is summer hiding?

Against the wind

 

Photography doesn’t have to be just a fair weather persuit. As long as it safe to do so, rug up and go out and enjoy the atmosphere, keep you camera and gear dry . Then look for that moment that conveys the place and time (and cold!)

Bad Hair Day

The return to cold and windy wintery weather has apparently forced a lot of the birds to ground. This galah suffered the double indignity of being photographed as the wind ruffled his head feathers. Then the image suffered further as I has a play around with textures, layering and boarders in Perfect Photo Suite 8. I’ve also had a play with watermarking, adding a little to alvin’s campaign to bring creative commons licences back to prominence on the social webs

Winter Skies

Winter weather has arrived

PhotoFriday :: After the storm

Yesterday was a very clear beginning of winter. After a stormy night the sun straights to break through.

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Shades of Gray

Dark Skys

Autostiched panorama created from 6 photos.

PhotoFriday :: @ Rest

For PhotoFriday‘s topic at rest

Patterns

Colourful Shades of Grey

I have been working on a new photo impression series of wildlife, and have been working on ways to bring the process closer to the way and artist might create the image. In particular I wanted to achieve a characteristic Australian colour scheme, but at the same time keep the colours to a harmonious scheme an artist might choose. I began using an old favourite utility from big huge labs, called colour palette generator. This take a photo, analyses the colours and produces a harmonious set of colours based on that photograph. I did this for all the images I am contemplation turning to mosaics and discovered that all the images shared 5 shades of grey, a mid grey, a light grey, a blue grey, a warm grey & and olive grey. I then used another favourite software tools called Just Color Picker, Which allows you to point to any group of pixels in an image on screen and displays its code in a variety of formats: HTML, RGB, HEX, HSB/HSV and HSL. It was the RGB codes that I would use later. At this point I made notes of the contrasting and complimentary colours which are displayed in the lower panel of just color picker. Just to make sure the colours worked I then made a series of watercolour & pen compositional sketches, to give myself more confidence that these automated colour tools where not leading me astray, and that the 5 shades of gray where in fact a good foundation for the colour scheme of my photo mosaicing process.My next task was to generate my palette of tiles that both followed this colour scheme and also complimented the texture within my photos. I was again using Apophysis, a free fractal flame generator project, which has the facility to control both the flames shapes, and thus texture and also the tonal gradient, and colour scheme. I made up 75 fractal flamed coloured tiles using 5 sets using backgrounds based the 5 shades of grey with 5 rotations of the patterns using 3 tonal gradients that used complimentary colour schemes.The final step was to use mosaic creator, which is a very powerful mosaicing tools, that can create a mosaic based on a source photos using a palette of other images (my file library shown below). For this series I choose to use a random grout (a visible gap between tiles) based on a colour enhanced version of the source photo.

Spot the birds

Can you spot the two masked lapwing plovers (they are in flight)?

RAW Winter Skies

One thing that has been worrying me for a while has been the behavior of RAW files in Picasa. Sometime ago I had set both my Pentax and Canon EOS to store images in both the camera’s RAW and JPG format. It does use extra space and takes extra time to write both images, however I wanted to get a feel for the difference each format provided. Well a strange thing was happening. Whenever I loaded the files the .jpeg and raw files always looked the same, but after a while,  particularly if I looked at the raw file. The two images inevitably looked quiet different,even when I had not made any changes to exposure etc. At first I suspected it was something to do with the .CR2 (native Canon RAW format) and .PER (native Pentax RAW format) Codex used on the computer.Then I began to suspect that RAW files would be brighter compare with a slight underexposure of the jpeg, but there were plenty of exceptions. Lightroom 4 avoids this little conundrum because when it sees a pair of raw and jpeg photos with the same name it only “imports” (links to) the raw file.

Well the explanation, is pretty simple. Both cameras do create thumbnail of the photo, in jpeg format using the cameras default jpg processing settings and embed this inside the raw image. It is this thumbnail view that you see when you first upload your photos. Then as picasa gets a chance to process the photo further it does read the actual Raw file and does its own best attempt at processing that RAW file, making its own new jpeg thumbnail. This might be quiet different to the cameras settings. Unfortunately it is a kind of Auto-fix for all approach and often not really what you want. For example in this photo I was after a kind of moody winter sky. Tweaking the RAW files a little gave me the effect I was after, and its quiet similar to the original camera jpeg. Once you make some adjustment to the RAW file in picasa (which you now can do by the way) the thumbnail does reflect those changes.

If you look closely lightroom does a similar thing. The image displayed in library view might change once you view it or develop it and it goes through the loading… delay. After that the thumbnail you see in lightroom is what ever you do to the image with lightroom. Picasa and lightroom are both “non destructive” systems so the original raw photo file remains unchanged.

Waiting for the cool change

The rteally hot summer weather has been here for the last couple of days and last night was particularly hot and unpleasant. It clouding over and looks like a stormy cool change will be here soon, BUT its just getting closer, hotter and nothing on the radar to even hint at rain.

I have not been very successful using the blog this button in picasa 3.9. Whilst i can upload the picture I can not add any text into that post. I always get the script error message displayed below.

Contrast

 
These two photos are in fact taken with a few meters of each other, However they do illustrate two very different outcomes facing modern agriculture. On the right is the image of drought and slt being drawn to the surface, The left shows able water but the waterway is being choked with algal and opportunist growth, related to excessive nutrients in the run off.

It never rains but it pours.

Often opposites make an interesting photo pair.

Inquisitive

For PhotoFriday‘s Topic Animal

Two Grey Days

Time for another Bonfire

Great Yarmouth Today.

As Cotman saw it (from Wikipedia & Google images)

I’m not sure what possessed me to visit Great Yarmouth (British sea-side towns and their “holiday fun palaces” are not my cup of tea). I must have been distracted by the fact that John Sell Cotman lived here for a few years and was expecting something like his painting a fading elegant Georgian port come fishing village. Well Its nothing like that faded yes, crumbling and flaking definitely, just tacky in the extreme and BUSY, lots of people, not making sand castles on the beach, but in the fun parlours and sitting or walking along the esplanade texting, eating or looking bored. The piers don’t even make it out to the water anymore. Cotman did an etching of the great bonfire of Yarmouth (I think it celebrated the end of the wars with France) maybe the best thing would be another great bonfire!

Winter at the beach

Into the Haze

 

The forlorn Magpie