Light in the rainforest

The secret worlds of tall trees

 

These weird distortions where created by autostitch as I tried to create vertical panoramas from stacked images. Not quiet what i expected by strangely compelling images all the same

Decent rains at last!

 

Photographing actual rain is a very complex task, its udsually very poor lighting, its falling fast and therefeore blurs in the slow exposre required, it usually has no center of interests, the list just goes on and on. So I have taken the simple way out, just photographing the effects and really zeroing in on just a small aspects, using the macro setting on my trusty telephoto zoom lens, the water droplettes on a grape vine. Still it tells the story well.

Nowhere to hide

 

Giving Red Bubble a Go

I have been looking around for a while for an "low fuss" but good quality way to sell my photos on-line. Basically I had concluded there wasn't one. Flickr gets you exposure, but has no commercial aspects, there are other places like Lulu, Cafe Press and Deviant Art, not to forget any number of self publishing stock photo sites, but to be sweepingly general without wanting to get involved in law suits they all exploit the artist, photographer or content creator. These guys are there to make a profits and take the lion share of sale price. I strongly suggest you read the fine print before signing in because you may give away ownership of your images without realising it.

I have heard about RedBubble and decided to give it a try, sorry no glowing endorsement yet (I haven't sold anything, yet!). I thought just writing about joining up and what's going on in there might be interesting enough. What caught my eye was that red bubble just charge a fixed amount to produce and forward the work to the new owner. They charge "premium" rates but they do seem to have the right quality mentality. This is all important to me because I worry about my images. Then they leave the photographer (or other content provider) to add their own mark up, and general it seems to be 20% plus (not the 5% if you are lucky on some other places). Joining is simple but read the conditions.

They do offer a wide variety of formats, from card to posters and onto large mounted & framed prints. The purchaser gets all the say on format of the finished product and there are a good range of options in terms of matt colour frames size and colour. If that doesn't suit, you can choose only to sell particular formats, and there is a very strict limit (overly so, from my experience) of the image size (in pixels) that can be reproduced for different sized products. The best part of RedBubble though from my point of view is it has the groups and community feel of early days in flickr and the quality of work in there is really outstanding.

So watch over on the right hand side and you will see a little slide show of images of mine you can purchase off the web via Redbubble. Give that a try and I will appreciate RedBubble more.

HDR sunset

HDR sunset, originally uploaded by imageo.

This is all about colour & composition, the patterns of the silhouetted branches and intense colour on the clouds behind. HDRi image created with Dynamic Photo, using smooth compressor tone mapping.

Six of the best

Actually I hope you are out enjoying the Easter break, not spending time of the net, but if you are here. this is a great little on-line application that can create decorated eggs from your photos.

Fort Flotsam

For PhotoFroday's Topic Found Objects

Immersive Slideshows?

So what are immersive slideshows, as opposed to ... I don't know drowning (in) slideshows?  They are the brainchild of Cooliris in the form of a browser plugin, called PicLens. It takes a number of common image intensive web places, social networking, photo sites, etc and converts them into a full screen "cinematic presentation" experience. It is very stylish, slick and unobtrusive (a watermarked "play" button is superimposed over the bottom right corner of images to indicate PiclLens can be run, just click your mouse on that, otherwise you don't notice its there)

The real fun begins when you start looking at your own personal images on say flickr, photobucket or picassa web albums. I particularly like the "3D" photo wall (complete with reflection of a virtual shinny floor).

My conclusion reflects that of a review in Wired Magazine, its "Fun and Addictive", but it is a pity it does not work with blogger.

Catch me, if you can?

 

Contemporary Artist Show

The Venus Bay Contemporay artist show was good for me, I managed to sell all my works (see all the red stickers already at the opening). The Exhibit was open by well know local sculptor Colin Suggett, and had a strong inspiration based around the natural world. My "geological" impression of venus bay in 200 million years can be seen behind colin.

HDR from on high

I think most frequent flyers will know the delight of watching the big billowing cumulus clouds from a plane in the late afternoon. The trouble is attempting to capture this with a digital camera pretty well always gives a disappointingly flat image, and thats before you start looking at the issues of photographing through glass. The real problem is the range of intensity in the light you are viewing, whilst your eye can handle it the camera's CCD sensors and light meter can not, so the camera will probably make some wrong decisions about the exposure. Isn't this exactly what HDR (high dynamic range) techniques are about? Of Course it is. So I took the required bracketed series, (hand held, there is so little room in an airplane seat these days a tripod is definitely out). Since the plane was moving and some clouds very near I had to use pin warping to get everything lining up between exposures. Then I used my favourite tone mapping regime in dynamic photo , it is called smooth compressor.  You can also do a couple of simple "old fashioned" tonal tweaks, brightening the shadow details (dodge) and darkening the highlights (burn). For those that want to use the colour saturation slider and be able move it fully to the right I have included the eye catching tone mapping below. So next time you are looking out the plane window with your new "duty free" digital camera look up the instructions on EV exposure bracketing and take a series of photos.

Photo Impressions

I have stopped using the term Photomosaic, which with this spelling has been registered as a trademarked by Robert Silver. I use the professional version of Andrej Olenik's Mosaic Creator, which is based on different patented techniques to those covered by the patents filed by Robert Silver through Runaway Technology Inc.

There is a good article on the photographic mosaic process in general on wikipedia, including discussion of the trademark issue. Also worth following up are Joseph Francis's History of Photo Mosaics and WL Hunt's History of Photo Tiled Pictures.

From now on I will be referring to my photographically tiled works as photo impressions, and the multi-image panoramics and other similarly multi-image constructions as just multi-image and/or collages

Tapestry Wave Wallpaper

Tapestry Wave Wallpaper
Originally uploaded by imageo

Normally I steer clear of artistic filters in the photomanipulation and paint programs, not for any especially noble reason, I just don't really apreciate any of the results, you see I do a bit of painting and sketching myslef. Ok I do harbour a nervous twitch whenever I hear "You can photoshop that!" I know the resulting photo has a high probability of being over contrasty and garishly coloured, and probably still an ordinary image. Ok I'll stop myself now before I offend to many. Still I do have a confession, I do occasionally stray over to the dark side with my screen wallpapers. I like having wallpapers of my own images, it is the ultimate way to personalise your workspace and often they are my more artistic photos of texture and abstracty things. These lend themselves to experiment, so I do, Just occasionally they are good enough for my collection of wallpaperson Flickr