Whilst the city is not actually paved with gold, the colours of the illuminated buildings can assume that golden glow at night. Actually the northern side of Rundle street is paved with coins. These where all taken with night mode and since I didn't have my tripod with me I just used suitable nearby posts, bins and veranda poles for support.
This image is yet another multi-image photomosaic, stitched together with autostitch. I like the technique as a way to get a superwide angle view in a tight space (compare it with the normal "wide" angle/zoomed out view) below. The poor man on the right has become a ghost and lost his head because he moved between frames, but it does add a little of the surreal to the center of Adelaide.
It is a QR Code, a type of two dimensional bar code, which I heard described as a cross between a chess board and a crossword. on a recent BBC digital planet podcast. The really great thing about them, and why I bothered to blog about them, is that most new mobile phones, well the ones with cameras and web access, can probably already scan them and use them for instance connect to a web address.
Thats exactly what this one does, it is the URL (web address) of this blog, just point your cameraphone at the image, on the screen! and take a picture. The next step depends on your phone, (HINT: you may need to read its instructions), activate the QR CODE READER option and you will get taken to your phone's web browser and directly to this very blog site! On your phone, no difficult thumb and finger typing required!
If your phone doesn't have a QR Reader built in (most phones less that 2 years old will have it), but a camera you can download the free KAYWA Reader into your phone.
If you want to create QR Codes of your own, snapmaze is a simple on-line application. Not only web URLs can be encoded, simple text, addresses and contact details, the applications are pretty endless. The QR stands for quick response, and the process of linking directly to the web on your phone is now very popular in japan and has become know as hardlinking, or physical world hyperlinks.
A few posts back I mentioned, backup your photos, to an on-line storage as you travel, there are now lots of ways to do this and moblogs is a fairly neat one for mobile phones. Sure any phone with a camera probably comes with some software to upload the images to your PC, then you have to email them or prepare a blog post, its all a hassle and kind of two hard. With moblogs you can send the pictures, video and text in an MMS format, just like you send your friends now, but know you are sharing with the world. If you are contemplating making a visual travel diary of your next trip, check it out. Best part is Mum, Dad, aunty Jean and Grandma can also become members and print out or download their favorites photos, before you get home.
Flickr also has some neat facilities, for uploading photos on the go. First they have a mobile phone oriented web portal, which is text oriented and cuts the bandwidth drain. It does let you use the web interface to upload from your cameraphone, but there is a better way. Flickr automatically generates an "private" email address, to which you can send photos and they will be automatically added into your photostream. You can also have the text and photo forwarded onto your blog (on a variety of common blogging system, including blogger, and live journal)
Photobucket, also has a similar "private" email service and the ability to share your albums into myspace and facebook as well as popular blogging sites.
The combination of big swell and king tides, that correspond with the full moons in spring, has literally eroded scarps over two meters high along the beach in several places at Venus Bay, but beaches are dynamic places and seasonal changes are normal. The sand is actually being sweep back and forth along the beach giving the beach is long sweeping shape.
The bigger erosion risk for the beach are blowouts, caused by wind and clearing of vegetation in the dunes behind the beach.
My field trip around the Venus Bay Peninsular and Andersen Inlet, was very successful in that it was well supported. Whilst the purpose was to see evidence of the importance of understanding sea level rise and its influence on the development of ecology and landforms, I was abruptly reminded of the power of the sea and specifically recent king tides. The mangroves in the photo below, used to illustrate my notes, have gone and the site I had visited only 5 weeks before showed significant (several meters of) erosion.
click here to download my notes for the field trip "Some Thoughts on The Recent Geomorphological Development, in the Venus Bay Area, related to Sea Level Rise."
Those traveling, or multi-computer using types, may be interested in Sky Drive, a new beta release of an on-line storage system from the Microsoft Live project. Whilst the 500 MB of storage is modest, it is the ability to limit access through encryption, to private, share with your family or group or even share publicly to the world, that may appeal. If you have a Hotmail account or a Passport ID sign up and give it a try. 
Now is the right time (well in the southern hemisphere, it is) to get out in your garden (or some one else's, these photos are all from my mother's garden) and get up close to the magnificent spring display. Close up photos, where the image is close to the size of the original are usually referred to as Macro Photography. Most digital cameras, and a lot of camera phones, these days have a macro setting, usually indicated by a button of setting on the lens marked with a flower. When you get up close you may find your run into few special issues, If you are using a view finder, you may find the image you captured is half cropped off (so it is better to use the camera LCD screen to frame your photo before you take it). When you are close up depth of view (not normally seen as an issue on digital cameras) will mean you may only be able to focus on part of the flower, so don't be afraid to take a few shots and move the camera in and out, till the results are pleasing. With an intricate flower a slightly out of focus background can enhanced the image. Your camera manual may have some other good advice on using that unused marco feature, for close up images.
Close up flowers can make wonderful mosaics, or can be striking as a collection hung together on the wall.
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Most cameras have a night scenes mode (usually indicated by a pictogram with a crescent moon) and it will lengthen then exposure time, however if there is something moving, like a car with its headlights on, you will just get a streak of light. Yet this in itself can be appealing.
Qipit is a great little website and applet. It allows you to send in a photo taken with a digital camera or even a mobile phone, and the website converts it into a more conventional scanned image. Great for recording notes on white boards or handwritten notes, downloadable as a PDF, emailed or sent to you as a fax. All you need to do the test it out is email your image to copy@qipit.com
I thought I should try out the service with a very ordinary, low contrast, low resolution photo of a badly hand written page. I was impressed with the result but received an email saying -
Qipit has scanned your image but the resulting document may not be satisfying because the resolution of your original image is too low.
To avoid this:
- Ensure that your camera phone is 1 megapixel or greater. This information is generally found near the lens of the camera.
- Ensure that your camera is set to the appropriate resolution and image quality
- Ensure that your camera is not resizing images
If you like the service you should register, its free, you can store up to 100 pages.
This last test pair, I wanted to try out what happened to a real object, and it worked well.
I have noticed something strange in the older and taller trees of central Adelaide, they all lean. I can not see a simple explanation, like prevailing winds or swelling soils. They all just appear to have their own personal leans and twists, whilst retaining a calm balance as they ignore the bustling world go by below.
The palm court in the Adelaide botanical gardens, dates back to the Victorian era and whilst such a glass house is very suitable for the kew gardens in the UK, It may just get a fraction hot in Adelaide, so no wonder the place is now specializes for the dry vegetation of Madagascar, and just one palm.
The glasshouse was imported from Bremen In Germany in 1875, and is thought to be the only one of its kind.
I tend to avoid the fancier features of photomanipulation packages, not sure why, possibly I'd rather do the picture forming in the viewfinder. However photos like those of the tree branches in my previous post, those with strong patterns, can make great images to manipulate.
Yesterday I was walking under an avenue of deciduous trees that made a wonderfully patterned canopy, but even a wide angle lens would not adequately capture the effect, so I turned to the multi-image panorama solution. Be warned however not all multi-image photomosaics will automatically turn out for the best, Autostitch and similar program are written with the assumption that they will have a conventional landscape view, with a horizontal horizon and vertical trees or building as a reference, The tops and bottom of the image may need to be stretched to maintain this. When you don't have strong horizontal or vertical lines the stretching can be unpredictable, so you may need to tinker with your software's setting.
This fantastic rainforest flower was photographed in the Bicentennial Conservatory house at The Botanical Gardens of Adelaide
