It was just a little too busy for me, 
David Stratton and David Wenham’s multi-media guide provides a lot of context and is really worth listening too before you visit the exhibition.
“I’m drawing a great deal and think it’s getting better.” – Vincent van Gogh
Unfortunately google is abandoning yet another photo product popular with users. Effective immediately they have formally notified that they no plans to updated (and support) the Nik software collection.
If you are a keen photographer, take RAW format photos and already have photoshop or lightroom, but don’t have the Nik software plug-ins yet, don’t delay download them now, they are free. They are popular because they are good.
I, like petapixel, once hoped that google supposedly an open source advocate, might make picasa, snap seed and the Nik tools open source and let keen users and photographers expand them. My cynical side feels google are squandering a lot of good photographic tools and abandoning the desktop/laptop/webapps space altogether to concentrate on capturing the mobile phone look-at-me-too eye’s (or their phone photo substitutes for seeing).
At their recent I/O conference, supposedly for developers, Google announced an upgrade to google photos, included improved sharing, a photobook printing service and a new feature to come called Google lens (a turbo AI charged version of google goggles that will start adding details of what you photographed to you photo’s presumably captions or metadata (read that as where to buy it)
This is google’s mobile phone oriented hype (promotional clip) to make sharing look great, and not something more akin to skynet. I’m not thinking it is so intentionally sinister, its more just a feeble “Emperor's New Clothes” metaphor/slight of hand trick to open up and share even more of you private life with a colossal secretive corporation, who make there money selling such stuff to advertisers (oh yes and the NSA and perhaps others also vacuum it up as well.)
Well there are legitimate reason to want to share photos, firstly publically, so as for a blog post or privately just for the eyes of family and friends. I still use google photo via open writer (an 
There are better places to publically share your photos, eg dropbox or flickr.
The private sharing is via share albums which you can allow others, with valid google accounts) to have access. Which is an improvement on having to make things publically viewable if you want to share.
The facial recognition isn’t to bad (possibly better than picasa’s)and once you identify them, add their google account IDs to the face and authorization to share with them and photos of friends and family can trigger a notification that you have a new photo of them, and they will be able to access the photo. I’m guessing this aimed at overly social teens and twenty something’s but I can see it ending in tears and regrets.
Unfortunately despite the claim better organization of your images via AI, the misclassification of places and things in my images is still overwhelmingly woeful. Ok I tend not to take tourist shots and I have travelled a lot BUT to only about half the places google think I’ve been. Under things I saw I’d supposedly taken about 50 shot of auroras! That is one of my biggest photographic desires and whilst I perhaps could have last weekend I am positive I never have. They were mainly star images with light horizons, nothing like auroras. The closest image was a strange green light I photographed in April 2010, it was in the western sky not the south and whilst i can’t explain it is probably not an aurora. (Google you keep disappointing me)
So I will keep any open mind, keep using google photos to hold my blog images and let it upload photos from my phone but I am unlikely to return to using google photos as my on-line place of choice to share or organise photos.
Whilst my attempt to create a daily sketch (on Tumblr) quickly dwindled. It doesn’t mean I wasn’t sketching. It was just erratic and on different media. The disappointment of not being able to sketch directly onto my tablet and the new drawing board has inspired me to get back to the routine. Not wanting to be too slack I’ve decided to move the action into Instagram and sketch the same item three ways (or two ways with a deep dream filter of the same subject). I think I can manage a months worth.
Lets see how I go.
One goal I had set myself on the last endess summer trip was to create more art directly onto my tablet. I had updated to corel painter 2017 and downloaded few free apps to test, including wacom’s Bamboo Paper, Well they do work but trying to use the tablet outside with just my finger, a stylus or the HP pen proved very difficult. So difficult I gave up.
The first problem was glare, which made the LCD screen almost impossible to see. Any direct sunlight on the screen meant all I could see was the mirror reflection of a very frustrated me. picking up the tablet and tilting it away from the sun worked but it soon got heavy and difficult to hold in one hand as I sketched with the other. Normally when I paint I rest a drawing board on my knee or easel.The tablet proved a little slippery for that or trying to rest on a book of box. It was fine flat on the table but …. I just couldn’t see what I was drawing. Tilting the kickstand up into the normal typing position was better but it was not a good angle for sketching freedom.
It was quite literally back to the drawing board.
I had the brilliant idea of adding a small plastic clip to hold the kickstand from slipping off. Firstly I glued it on but that was no where near strong enough, and soon the tablet broke free and slide off my lap and onto the floor (phew no damage done). So it was both glued and riveted next. I also put a couple of furniture felt wear pad at the position the base of the tablet sat on the drawing board. Magic the whole thing is very stable now.
Time to try it out in a variety of ways.
As a way to keep the tablet steady on my lap or propped against a table, it was perfect. Next I tried to see if it was a way to 
I’ve been using lightroom as my primary photo editor again on my travels, because my light HP spectre with its SSD drive have made lightroom fast enough again. There are things about lightroom that still hold me up and things about the way it has to organise everything in her own way that still frustrate me. In particular how to handle working copies.
The next discovery, I’m sure must be documented somewhere, but I just haven’t found where, is that photos in subdirectory/folder get displayed in the parent directory. I came across this by accident. To get my autostitch panoramas I need to export my starter images (they are now often HDR and tiff format) into jpeg because autostitch only works with that format. So I normally export it to a specifically named directory over in my photo scrapbook. Unfortunately it doesn’t take long to forget where an image is in that confused space. 
Whilst I have been using lightroom for a long time, (I stopped upgrading from version 4.4) have read the manuals in detail and many guides I can not find ant documentation relevant to these discoveries/”features”. Coincidentally I did just watch an Ed Gregory You Tube video (below) that exploits this “feature” of photos in the sub directories/folders showing up in the directory above.
I’m never a fan of fixed workflows, so you don’t have to follow his approach meticulously just be inspired and know you can use sub folders/directories to house various working and exported versions of the photos but still see all the photos grouped together in the parent folder/directory.
Here is what I adopted on my last trip that seems to work seamlessly for me. I still use picasa to load and do the preliminary culling of my photos and I load the photo into daily folders with the name format YYYY-MM-DD this means that they automatically get sorted into chronological order. Using picasa is way faster still compared to lightroom and because I still shot RAW+jpeg I can cull the RAW/Jpeg pair at the same time (you don’t see the jpeg file in lightroom). I can als “”touch up”, crop, email and post the jpeg to the web immediately is I want (eg email photos to the family). When I’m ready to post process I just point lightoom to import from this gallery. Doesn’t take long and lightroom has happily loaded the requited details into her catalogue and ready to be useful. This is when I rate my photos and I’m trying out the star rating idea present in Jeff Harman’s PhotoTaco podcast (Culling like a Pro) below.
The idea is to only use three stars, set lightroom to auto advance, and then just hit the 1 2 or 3 key on you keyboard. This works in both the library and develop modules but works best on library if you also want to swap between thumbnail and full screen view of just a few images. The important thing is to go through your entire days shots. Each time you rate a photo you will moved onto the next. With a little concentration on the image and one hand over the relevant keys you can become very fast at this.
You will undoubtedly find that the two stars make up the majority of your folder but that’s life. Any non stared images should be deleted now (but I normally get rid of those in picasa when I load the photos). If like me you do a daily backup now is the time to do it.
Next I set the filter in lightroom on rating to plus 3 stars and I only have a few images to consider. Often I will also demote a few NQR (not quiet right) photos to further trim down what I need to do. Suddenly 2 hours post processing drudgery become 20 minutes of fun!
I don’t want you to follow my process exactly but be inspired to simplify the way you organize your photos and/or reduce the time taken or tedium to give more time to be creative.
The Wanna.cry hullaballoo brings to light the vulnerability of keeping your photo collection 
Avoiding most Ransomware, is not difficult, its just needs you to make small changes in normal behavior and regularly be wear of or do a few things. Be careful about clicking on links in unsolicited emails and phone message that have the characteristics of a phishing exploit. Be aware of identity fraud and becoming a little more private, be careful and aware in what you share. Even basic snapshots can hide a lot of useful information to a stalker (eg location) or hacker. A good example is the common trend for people to post their boarding passes from the airport gate on Instagram or Facebook which gave hackers enough personal information to gain free entry into accumulated frequent flyer points which they immediately stole. The most important protection is keeping your security/protection measures up to date. Which means installing rather than ignoring those security updates. The final and most important way to not be caught out with ransom wear is to keep an up to date backup, under your control, then the ransom on on a web site/computer becomes meaningless.
However ransomware, virus or worms are not your only risks, Equipment loss damage of malfunction is a much higher possibility and in some cases approaching a certainty. In the case of mechanical spinning harddisk it is a certainty that they will eventually fail (fortunately generally their life will be about 20 plus years). Equipment particular smaller portable items are also prone to get damaged or lost. Mobile phone really don’t like getting wet or dropped. There contents sometimes survive, particularly if have them on a microSD card but I hear many sad stories of photos lost this way. Making sure your phones get backed up properly is the guaranteed way to avoid the risk. Sure you can sometimes recover files from damage harddrives and phones but it can be very expensive, its much easily to go get new equipment (your going top have to spend that money anyway and pick up an reload from your backup.
So what is proper backup. There is lots of advice on the net but the best approach is the 3-2-1 method (see the basics in the David Bergman Video above). Have three copies (yes three) on two media/devices (eg disk, DVD etc) and one copy off-site (eg on-line, bank vault, a friend house across town). There is a lot of options in how you actual do these steps and set up something you can easily manage. It may involve some extra expense (like buying a second hard drive subscribing to an on-line backup service) but remember you are responsible and the should take control of the steps (ie don’t expect a free social media service to do anything special about “your” photos.)
Go start that 3-2-1 backup today, don’t delay it could be too late!
Backing up the actual photo files is also only part of the issue. There are important aspects like how you rate the images and organize them, and in the case of non-destructive editors how the image has been manipulated. Some of this information can be written back into the header of Jpeg files but most photo processing software today stores this separate to the software. In the case of lightroom it is all stored in database its calls the catalogue. other software such as picasa store this data in a special ini file in each directory containing photos. The original adobe bridge software stored the information in a readable ascii companion file (.xmp) normally known as a sidecar file. Whilst these are not standard, and adobe itself has muddied the waters by changing some format so you need to know the ,they have been around a long while and many other software packages can at least read the metadata and ratings in these files. Some packages (like Corel’s Aftershot Pro and XnView) can also write the basic .xmp files. You need to look at the help (or manual) for the software you used and work out where these files are and how copies can be included in your normal back up set. While Lightroom does itself keep a separate backup of its catalogue it is likely to be on the same computer as the software and photo library. So it is important to include this in the 3-2-1 steps.
If you’re a regulkar reader of this blog, you will know I keep harping on the issue that backups are different to archives, but while they are also copies they should be organized in such a way that photos can be easily found (that metadata discussed above) and there is also the even bigger issue of what format have the best longevity.
Regularly make your best/favorite/precious photos in photobooks, or at least 4” by 6” (10 by 15cm) prints. This is really a physical variation on the backup (in another media) but it does work. Think of all those old shoe boxes with photos from your parents, that have survived the years. Unfortunately many get trashed in post death cleanups. They are controlled by you but can still be more directly/privately shared by you to just those you want to see them.
“Privacy is becoming a privilege” … Paul Thurrott (Windows weekly podcast)
The technologies of addressing High Dynamic Range have come a long way in the past decade. Once the process required a couple of specialist programs with round trips through photoshop or similar photo editors. Today there are camera apps for phones that can easily do the job on the phone. I have been using a great little app called HDR Camera+ for a few years now and onto my third android phone. Of the many apps around today it seems to do the most convincing job of creating a “natural” look but expanding the dynamic range. It does take up to three photos, a normal shot one under exposed and the one overexposed. Even when the images are blown out or almost too dark to make out detail, the clever HDR Camera+ software seems to find a reasonable balance. It also does a great job avoiding ghosting when a subject moves.
My new HTC Uplay android phone comes with a built-in camera app that incorporated the HDR feature in the basic camera operations (it clearly takes abit longer that a straight photo but it only takes a second of two to process. There are no tonemapping options (or selection step) but the resulting image is noticeably more balance in high contrast situation. There is even an AutoHDR mode which seems to recognize high contrast situation and switch over to HDR. The image below is an example of AutoHDR.
This camera app software is different from the many HDR style filters (which strive to create the HDR look, normally poorly, and without really boosting the dynamic range). Once you have the higher dynamic range other art filters (like prisma below) can play wonderful games with colour.
Whilst access to WiFi is becoming pretty ubiquitous in most cities and tourist traps. Even if the hotel still charge too much, a trip to the local coffee shop (ok you have to wait a while for that captive log-in screen to load and then given a throw away email address) or steps of the local library will let you get on-line. Some towns like Freemantle have free WiFi zones. (for example this street artist was photographed on my phone and uploaded to Flickr using the free WiFi, elapsed time not even 2 minutes). Could the on-line life be any simpler?
However once you get off the beaten track, there is a lot of Australia with no wifi and little or no mobile phone coverage either. Be warned, intermittent mobile coverage is more frustrating for net access than none at all.
So there is silence, the hustle and bustling modern world and social media will have to wait (or not even bother you at all). Life if simpler and you can wander around and just enjoy living. It’s quiet an experience, definitely worth a try, even if WiFi is available try pushing that WiFi slider to the left and turn it off for a day, an afternoon or even a couple of hours and get back to living.
Whilst I did live in Perth for just over 5 years in the late 70's early 80's I had forgotten how harsh the normal midday sun could be over in this part of Western Australia. Correction make that anytime from about 15 minutes after sunrise to about 20 minutes before sunset. The full sun is brilliant, hot and anything white is shimmering, brilliantly white, But hang on the sky is also a brilliant blue and the dappled shade is full of colour. Still the intensity strains my eyes and I
If I try taking a photo the results are strikingly different, everything is bleached and washed out. The sky is usually blown out to total white and the shadows are thin and inciped. What's going on, well my eyes have a much wider dynamic range (It can auto tune itself to a broad range of light intensities) whereas a modern digital camera has a smaller range and it my try to expose to get the best "average" intensity and strong light makes this a challenge. Also I'm wearing sunglasses.
So is there a way to get decent photos in this intense light? Well apart for only getting your camera out for the 15 minutes of golden hour light at the beginning and end of each day. Or wait for a cloudy day!
Yes there are many ways
C: Pentax K20D Tamron DX 18-200mm Lens 40mm
E: ISO 200 F/11 1/2000 sec (-1.0 EV)
F: RAW .pef
WB: Auto
Polarizing Filter
PP: Autostitched 3 Photos
I am very diligent carrying two portable USB (backpack style) hard disks for ensuring I have good backup while I’m on the road. One disk, I’ll call the “son” is used just after I’ve loaded and culled my photos. Once the backup is complete I then have two copies, one on my computer and the other on the backup disk so this is the time I also reformat the SD cards on my camera. I used to let picasa delete photos it loaded, and never had any problem with that process, but occasionally later I get a card not recognized in both of my camera and reformatting in the camera fixed that.
Then after a few days, occasionally up to a week, or if I have taken a lot of photos I may do it daily. I use the other backup, which I called the “father”, to get copies of all new photos (ie an incremental backup since the previous backup). Then put it back in my luggage.
This process has served me well.
I’ve now got a slightly different processes for “archiving” my lightroom work. At the end of the month, or close to it I backup my lightoom catalogue and setting files onto the “son” backup disk, in a directory called lightroom_back. I also move all the previous months photos (ie at the moment that was march) off my HP spectre which only has a 250 GB SSD drive, also onto the son drive. I do this move outside lightroom, despite all the warnings not to more files outside lightroom, 
The final step is this “son” drive retires and become a new “father” and goes back in the luggage. The old “father” gets reborn as the new “son”. I also normally delete the previous lightroom catalogue backup from this disk to avoid confusion and possibility of loading the old catalogue.
This has worked wonderfully for three months now. However when undertaking the reconnection of the files it lightroom I was obviously distracted and didn’t finish. Worst I had unplugged the USB disk but left it on the table in the hotel (it would normally have gone into my luggage) A day or so later and many miles away I realise it was missing and a checked with the hotel confirmed they had found my disk, phew!…. and I can pick it up in a couple weeks as I pass through town again. That’s ok this is off-site backup.
Yesterday morning while having breakfast on the terrace of the apartment I’m staying in now, suddenly fire alarms where going off everywhere. I didn’t panic, I had off-site backup! It was a false alarm anyway, someone might have burnt their toast. Lucky I was carry two backup external drives.
