The holiday crowds may have thinned but Venus Bay is still a delightful place to relax and get a away from the hassles of life. So why not visit, have a coffee and try one of the great flavours of gelato before looking at what might inspire some of the locals.
Wednesday, February 26, 2014
Venus loves gelARTo
The holiday crowds may have thinned but Venus Bay is still a delightful place to relax and get a away from the hassles of life. So why not visit, have a coffee and try one of the great flavours of gelato before looking at what might inspire some of the locals.
Sunday, February 23, 2014
Slowing Down
Moral : Despite the brilliant flash effect the manmade lights only create local pools of illumination. The Stars are eternal.
Thursday, February 20, 2014
ThePatch :: Is Loneliness a natural part of the Creativity?
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My Art In the Clouds
An on-line “cloud” gallery for just my art (& photographic) works has been a sub-project of mine for a long time. Many social web services promised such things or even greater wonders but none seem to deliver what I wanted. I wasted a lot of time on the likes of Redbubble, Google+ pages, Adobe’s creative cloud and Behance, but you are supposed to learn by your mistakes they say. So I have created one of my own. Its pretty simple. It contains just my recent works available for sale or rental.
It doesn't have any built in web store features like a shopping cart but you are welcome to email me directly. More details in the cloud gallery itself.
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
ThePatch :: An idea with a mind of its own
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Saturday, February 15, 2014
Skydrive to OneDrive is it only a name change?
Reading between the lines and a few other blog posts I think OneDrive could easily be initially promoted as yet another on-line backup place. They will be offering ways to “earn” extra storage, either through referring friends (like drop box) or using one of their “camera roll backup” apps, which will take all the images from your phone into the OneSky cloud. These offerings are unlikely to excite early SkyDrive adopters (like me) who already have a massive 25GB of storage, which I understand will not expire. SkyDrive already has some photo organizing features, so I’m interested to see if they can avoid rather than create the on-line mess phenomena.
Friday, February 14, 2014
The strange case of transparency & memory
Graphics memory! I realized this might be the missing issue for running Photo Effects 8 in standalone mode. AND it was!
So if you have a windows PC and are having problems with Perfect Effects “freezing”and “hanging” your system, try changing the screen theme, it worked for me.
Thursday, February 13, 2014
A Month on and Google+ AutoBackup is a Vacuum
So here are my observations after the first month of use.
- It isn’t the bandwidth pirate I expected. It does seem to takes its time and not interfere too much with others on my network when it has a lot of images to load
- It highlights some strange photos, and more importantly skips over some gems
- I’m well over being auto awesomed
- Many HDR sets and multi-image overlapping panorama sets are turned into Motion Gifs. This puzzles me?
- I can not see tools to help me find specific images in the vast collection I am amassing on-line (scrolling through just one month’s uploads is already tedious)
- I’m still uncertain if there are dangers involved with having most of your photos on-line somewhere in the clouds. So far I’m happy that the defaults are private and you have to specifically share an image to let others see it
- Already there are many unintended duplicates
- Sharing outside the Google+ world is difficult (even into blogger, see steps I had to use in image caption below)
- Whilst you can easily download individual images there are no “recovery” tools that I can find
- I’ll probably leave it installed for new uploads, at least for a month or so
- BUT I have no plans to backup my full digital photo collection onto google+
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An AutoBackedup photo, edited including frame and then copied to another album in google+ photo before I could share it here |
Wednesday, February 12, 2014
What & Where am I?
For those that enjoyed my previous Melbourne Abstractions.
Do you know what this is and where it is in Melbourne?
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
PhotoFriday :: The Ibis arrive through the smoke haze
After the bush fires at the weekend just north of Melbourne, a thick haze has settle on suburban Melbourne and the Ibis flew into an orange brown twilight.
The Offshore wind
This may look like a winter scene but yesterday hot northerly wind whipped up an angry sea, at least it was cool in.
Sunday, February 09, 2014
A Tern for the Better
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One pair came along in perfect synch and I knew as I panned with them there would be a good photo, teamwork where they is normally solitary flight.
Saturday, February 08, 2014
Culling Photos
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- Very poorly exposed (see caveat below)
- Subject out of focus (the degree of sharpness is a personal thing because post processing sharpening has come along way)
- Subject is awkwardly cut off
- The photo is not flattering or shows potential for embarrassment (no definitely don't post it on instagram delete it now!)
- There is a set of very close photos/images (unless that are really good just keep one, it may be the first rather than the last!)
Tuesday, February 04, 2014
Very Late on The Patch project
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I was working away patiently recovering important processed versions of photos from lightroom (definitely not a happy story). I managed to loose a my processing setting and collections of the vast majority of my photos, not sure how yet, but I do have backups in incomplete bits. It looks like most things are there somewhere in the dozen of different backups I have but that some things got lost between the backups (especially what was in collections). I can’t see an automated way to recover things so its down to a slow and piecemeal update of the photos I have starred (can still see these ratings in picasa). At the same time I am occasionally running some images into perfect effects 8, which is another sad story, but it does play nicely with lightroom.
Monday, February 03, 2014
Now you see it, now you don’t
its a while since I’ve mentioned flickr, in fact i really haven’t been posting to it much. Not because of the new format (I’m not really a fan but its much the same as other offerings) its all about “stripping”. They are still stripping the EXIF & IPTC metadata (including details or copyright or creative commons) and the photo ownership details) when the images are downloaded. This unfortunately creates what are known as orphan works (photos that in theory you can not establish the photos ownership). The problem being that in some countries it would appear re-publishing such photos, without the copyright holders permission is acceptable providing the re-publisher acted in good faith in searching for the photos owner, even though that was unsuccessful! See the legal loops holes opening up here!!!
Flickr isn’t the only social media service to do this but they are the one I would prefer to use.
This actually posses a big problem for creative people who want to share their work, even using creative commons. For example I don’t mind other using my images providing they acknowledge me, and that they don’t use my images for their own profit. A lot of people have contacted me and all is sweat, Unfortunately using google image search or TinEye I know some of my images have been used all over the place without my permission. So I have reluctantly taken the approach of adding a visible watermark onto my flickr posts. In reality this is not going to stop unauthorised reposting, or help me track down those just stealing the photos. To do that I should just stop posting to flickr (or most other social web sites). I hope it will just make those thinking of using eth photo think twice before downloading it. Flick actually has a good blogging link feature that includes a link back to the original flickr image (which does have the EXIF data intact).
If you want to use one of my images for a blog, or brochure for your organization, or any other reasonable use and you don’t like watermarks just send me an emails