PhotoFriday :: The Milk Run

The TSS Earnslaw, the original milk run.

 For PhotoFriday‘s topic Transportation

Are Faux Painting Effects Art?

I have never been a fan of those zany art filters (the ones that dominated the early photo app offering, not to mention a few photo mangers). Basically they look really lame, its the mark making that just isn't there, no personality no passion. However I'm not against appropriate image manipulation and I'm interested in and infavour of dipping a paint brush into a photo. 
Experimenting with Autodesk's Pixlr App, with a watercolour style render and torn paper edge. Perhaps we are starting to get there (check out the "brush marks on" the wing tips)?

Whangarao Harbour

Following in Charles Darwin’s Footsteps

The fact that Charles Darwin visited the bay of Island in late 1835 is almost a bit of a secret here. These are some photos of my own along with extracts from “The Voyage of the Beagle”. Like my Retracing Darwin journey following his visit to Bathurst in 1836, I have enjoyed following in Darwin’s footsteps. Sometimes things have change little, in other places the difference is immense. For instance Darwin describes the area of Kororareka (which means Sweet Penguin) as “full of the refuse of society”, now known as Russell it is a sleepy romantic little charming town, not the scourge of the pacific as it was once notoriously described, and a magnet for rough elements such as fleeing convicts, whalers and drunken sailors.

“December 22nd.—In the morning I went out walking; but I soon found that the country was very impracticable. All the hills are thickly covered with tall fern, together with a low bush which grows like a cypress; and very little ground has been cleared or cultivated. I then tried the sea-beach; but proceeding towards either hand, my walk was soon stopped by salt-water creeks and deep brooks.”

“December 23rd.— Mr. Bushby, the British resident, offered to take me in his boat by a creek, where I should see a pretty waterfall, and by which means my walk would be shortened “ [to Waimate].

“Some time ago Mr. Bushby suffered a far more serious attack. A chief and a party of men tried to break into his house in the middle of the night, and not finding this so easy, commenced a brisk firing with their muskets. Mr. Bushby was slightly wounded, but the party was at length driven away.”

“At length we reached Waimate. After having passed over so many miles of an uninhabited useless country, the sudden appearance of an English farm-house, and its well-dressed fields, placed there as if by an enchanter's wand, was exceedingly pleasant. Mr. Williams not being at home, I received in Mr. Davies's house a cordial welcome. After drinking tea with his family party, we took a stroll about the farm.”

“December 24th.—A little before noon Messrs. Williams and Davies walked with me to part of a neighbouring forest, to show me the famous kauri pine. I measured one of these noble trees, and found it thirty-one feet in circumference above the roots. There was another close by, which I did not see, thirty-three feet; and I heard of one no less than forty feet. These trees are remarkable for their smooth cylindrical boles, which run up to a height of sixty, and even ninety feet, with a nearly equal diameter, and without a single branch. The crown of branches at the summit is out of all proportion small to the trunk; and the leaves are likewise small compared with the branches. The forest was here almost composed of the kauri; and the largest trees, from the parallelism of their sides, stood up like gigantic columns of wood.”

“December 26th.—Mr. Bushby offered to take Mr. Sulivan and myself in his boat some miles up the river to Cawa-Cawa [now spelt Kawakawa], and proposed afterwards to walk on to the village of Waiomio, where there are some curious rocks. …Here there are some singular masses of limestone resembling ruined castles. These rocks have long served for burial places, and in consequence are held too sacred to be approached. One of the young men, however, cried out, "Let us all be brave," and ran on ahead; but when within a hundred yards, the whole party thought better of it, and stopped short.”

“December 30th.—In the afternoon we stood out of the Bay of Islands, on our course to Sydney. I believe we were all glad to leave New Zealand. It is not a pleasant place.”

New Zealand Motif

  

Kauri Vert-a-ramas

Bay of Islands, 4 panoramas

Dolphins Ahoy!

Went for a very pleasant afternoon cruise out to the Hole in the Rock, in the bay of Islands on the north island of New Zealand. Wonderful weather up here despite a lot of rain and cold further south. The saw a large pod of wild bottle nose dolphins that even played around the boat. one even bought up a fish he/she had caught to show us.

 

 

 

  

 

Hole in the Wall (aka Piercy Island)

The Patch :: framing fun

 

The patch themes this week are frames & modes of transport, so I figured a shot out the window on the flight over to new Zealand would be perfect. Well the window was dirty and it wasn’t easy to fix that, up in the bay of islands the dominant mode of transport is yachts, expensive ones. So I have spent a few days looking through any manner of frames, including the stocks on the wharf at Russell. In the end I choose three yachts in the bay opposite the French mission, but I used Perfect Effect’s and the border called Russell to emphasis the framing.

Russell Beach Collage

Yet another Waterfall, Rainbow Falls, Kerikeri

Whangarei Falls

Not far north along the river from Whangarei basin are the Whangarei falls, which describe themselves are the most photographed falls in New Zealand. Well they are neither tall or amazing, or even a trek to get to but they are still pretty. Worthy of a larger autostitched panorama.

Black Swan on Green Waters

PhotoFriday :: Many

For PhotoFridayis Topic Many
This is a re-processing of the same multi-image panorama I took for the he’s leaving home post about the Australasian Gannets at Cape Kidnappers in New Zealand. This time I have used Microsoft’s ICE (image composite editor) to do the stitching using a horizontal spherical projection, rather than the default cylindrical projection.. Why horizontal? I’m not sure, I always thought spheres where equi-dimensional in the vertical and horizontal directions. Did they mean elliptical projection. No matter I was able to reduce the curvature in the horizon and build a larger image than I can in autostitch. I even found out my image covers 182.2° horizontally and 42.3° vertically, such precision and only based on 12 photos taken hand held. The resulting panorama is so big  in fact it defies reproducing for a blog (the image above is only 2% of its full 123MB potential) so I have also loaded it into Photosythyn so you can zoom in and have a good look around and even count how many birds there are.

Wet in Wellington

  

Crumpled Reflections

An extra big autostitched image

This is probably my biggest multi-image stitched panorama I have attempted. It is based on 32 separate telephoto images (taken at 85mm, equivalent to roughly 130mm for a 35mm film) taken hand held. The flattened perspective of the telephoto shots does put a little more pressure on the stitching to matchup features so I have reduced the amount of overlap between images a little (approx. 15%). The lighting was wonderful this morning and the detail crisp and clear. The stitching was run with Autostitch using all default settings and run to 17,600 pixels horizontally (the image I have posted here is a tenth of that, but should give you a feel for the grandeur of the place) and took over an hour to prepare! The lettering and border where added in Paint.net. Normally I would crop these big images to straighten the edges but I felt the ragged flow of the photo matching adds to the drama of this image. Whilst taking this series and other photos (see previous post) I meet Alistair, a peaker (which means he regularly runs up the peak!) and he said if I waited the swirling mist would clear and I would see the distant pines silhouetted (shown here). Excellent advice.

No. Lord of the Rings was not filmed here.