Unfortunately, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi died last year. His wisdom from living through the second World War, his father being the Hungarian Ambassador in Rome at the time the communist takeover of Hungary in 1949. It is probably just my fantasy but it would have been great if he could have sat down for a quiet chat with Putin and explained the misery, tragedies, insecurities that are the toll of losing freedoms, jobs, homes, can impose on the innocent. His deep wisdom into the secret to happiness is still very relevant today. 

This is an important TED talk that Mihaly gave in back in 2008 covering the lead into how he started describing the flow experience. It is wonderful context told in a series of stories,

His book (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, will give you greats insight in the Flow State

Another Sponge Tip for Watercolourists

Carting around water pods at the beach, if your sketching can be just one extra task too many. I decided to try out using a couple of pieces of foam/sponge. One to clean pigment off the brush to other to hole clean water to wet the brush.

The tropics come to Gwondanaland

  

Melbourne is famous for having 4 seasons in a day. However we seldom actually see a tropical style downpour. My Cretaceous garden has been suffer through some summer heat (and no rain) but today the rains came (about 26mm in a little over half an hour. Other parts of Melbourne had more.

Anyway my little garden, for a few moments took on the mantle of a true rainforest.

Experimenting with IGTV

 I'm afraid IGTV never really appealed to me. Not sure if it was the vertical format or the type of video maker it was trying to gain access to. was it YouTube for the chronic selfie take who hasn't worked out how to turn the phone through 90 degrees and use the better lens on the back of the phone. Perhaps I'm being a bit cynical!

Anway no time better than now to experiment with the format.

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A post shared by Norm Hanson (@normhansonart)

Man the embed code is longer than the video! 

I took two short clips with my phone. then I used Canva (an on-line design tool) which can handle video and offered a neat way to append the clips together and add some text. I exported it as .mp4 and it seemed fine until I listened to the audio. So I recorded a simple voice-over on the phone. Uploading to Instagram was the real challenge but I eventually discovered it was simple if I did it from my computer via the web connection to Instagram. It didn't take so long and would I be inclined to do it again, Maybe?

Perhaps not as much fun as using mmhmm. Looks like my challenge to other artist continues.

'Make a video of yourself marking your art"

A lockdown diversion - making a video

 As this "7-day" lockdown in Melbourne began (a few weeks ago now) I thought it would be a good idea to try making a video of myself making my art. Fate intervened and I had a series of technology breakdowns so this got postponed. Yet the aim expanded, Trying to find as many ways as possible to create a video showing me making art or perhaps the processes and media I use.

This is the first cab off the rank. Without my camera I looked to the streaming technology we have all become familiar with, video conferencing aka zoom. Now zoom lets you use virtual cameras (software that looks to zoom as if it is a video input, like a webcam). However, a virtual camera can be a lot more dependent on the software itself and what inputs you can access. I have been using manycam for some time and my youtube "quicktips" are all recorded using it. The open-source OBS (Open Broadcaster System) has been hugely popular in the on-line gaming community for some time.

The pandemic and multiple lockdowns have seen the massive expansion of what virtual cameras are capable of doing. I have been enrolled on the beta test of the windows version of a niffy "little" application called mmhmm. It has just been upgraded to its first "official" release. Here is what I recorded using this latest release.

The video of the painting process was recorded as a .mp4 first up straight from my webcamera with mmhhmm in full-screen mode. Whilst the apple version of mmhmm gives you the option of a faster playback, it doesn't allow this on the current windows version. So I resorted to my normal video editor (Corel's Video Studio) to speed up the video to 10x speed. I also added the CCmusic by Bensound "Sunny", and saved the results as a new video again in .mp4 format. Back into mmhmm with a new room (backround) based on a photo of my palette and open sketch book) and I recorded myself speaking whilst displaying the text cards and other "effects" as I was talking, I also ran the newly created painting video within that session and saved the whole as my final video again in .mp4 format. Finally I uploaded this to YouTube. It actually didn't take long and was fun. 

So I'm going to challenge other artists to also "make a video of yourself making your art".

Lessons in Learning Video

 

Whilst our newer cameras, and especially smartphones, are great at video. It is a large step from still photography, especially in the time taken (or maybe I think of it as time wasted) on editing the video. Streaming techniques that capture everything, mistakes and all, have a strong appeal compared with filming the clip, saving it to SD card transferring it to the computer for editing. Editing the clips together and rendering the final "cut". Time evaporates. This little clip was one take with minimal editing and just adding some music. I see it as a bit of a big step forward for me. 

My investigations so far have reinforced the need to get as much right in camera as possible and minimize the need for editing. This reminds me a lot of the film days and using slide film, which was very unforgiving of exposure and other mistakes. With the results that you were much more careful when taking the photo.

Ive spent more time than expected making a YouTube video. I suppose I learned a lot but I still have a lot to learn.

I did find something really neat. I was able to record mt phone sequence using zoom. I set up a private meeting logged in from my phone and shared the screen and pressed record meeting locally back on the host PC.  No exotic hardware or software required.

My Walk in Stop Motion

In Victoria we still have stricter Stay At Home conditions than other Australian states. However we have always been able to go outside and exercise and Jells Park is very popular, too much so. Thus I enjoy walking along the tracks less traveled. This was largely flooded a few days ago, so definitely has less folk on it today.  Nature is doing very well without us, by the way.

The flock of Cockatoos was at the end of my street. I pretty well find great things to photograph everyday, even if I only take a photo very 10-20 meters or so. 

Most importantly it was fun to play with stop motion again, not so sure about bloggers handling of the video.

Experiments in sketching and recording sketching photographically

I have previously played around with a web camera to record myself sketching, but sketching is an ultra slow process compared with normal video. So I got as far as figuring a time lapse approach would be better but lost interest trying to do that with the webcam software.

Today I figured I’d try again using my Canon EOS on my homemade copy stand tethered to the computer. I have previously mainly tethered via lightroom, but using the EOS utility from canon has way more controls, including a nifty live view and a system to use a small square controlled by a mouse for focus (not unlike taping a touch screen on my phone to focus on a specific part of the screen.) I was impressed with the results and definitely have a new documentation toy to play with.

The Clone Selfie

This is a preliminary test for my entry into the National Portrait Gallery's Digital Portraiture Award 2016.

This is a video of a set of tripod selfies taken in front of one of my art works (the Holocene Mass Extinction). They have been processed through google’s deep dream generator trained on a number of Archibald prize finalist’s paintings.

The self portraits remain in essence images of me but they borrow, approximate and draw on other artist’s mark making via appropriation from artificially intelligent neural networks.

The Human Camera - Stephen Wiltshire

Stephen Wiltshire has an amazing talent, he can sketch incredibly detailed images from memory.

Sketching .vs. Photography

Here are a couple of YouTube videos by Kenly Dillard giving a demonstration of sketching and its similarities to still photography. Whilst he is demonstrating sketching the context about seeing the light and creating a picture, his video and examples are well worth watching, even though they do jump around a bit (Unfortunately the talk is incomplete, some bits are missing)

Google+ Stories, yet another “leave it to us” offering.

I noticed yet another autoawesome style offering from from google called Stories, which seemed perfect to add into my week of autoawesomeness. It is basically a on-line slide show that has been automatically prepared by yet another google algorithm to automatically select your best shots and is being prompted as a tool to  “brings out the richness of the memories behind the photos” and present them as “beautiful, interactive stories so you can relive your adventures”. Ok thats the hype, what actually happens? Well it does choose your adventures for you. At the moment you can not create your own from scratch! For me this is a very puzzling omission. You can however “tweak” the slideshow by adding or removing photos or videos and can change the cover photo. Thats about it!

 

The stories are supposedly about your “memorable” travelogues and it would appear these stories are triggered by either locations (geotags) information embedded in your photos or by landmark detection tools shifting through your images (and possibly including having your home address already known, eg. typed into google maps). Perhaps I am not the only one just a little concerned about who or what knows I’m not at home and when. 

This is an interesting in the context of a recent program titled “Digital photography: message and memory” on the ABC Radio National’s Series Future Trends. Which presents a different view, the rush to photograph every moment may be leading to us remember less and less. 

So should we leave our memories to google+ to manage?

Not sure I want that, and I worry many will not even realise their real memories have gone and been replaced by something else.

I guess the one redeeming feature is google+ stories (and movies) are private until you share them.

PhotoProject :: Blurring the Edges II

When I made the suggestion to +roz to try the idea of blurring the edges to tame strong lines on her wonderful photo, I realised that I wasn’t very specific about how to do it. So that prompted me to put together this little video to explain how edge blurs can be achieved in a number of common photo software editing/management software, because after looking around I found it is not obvious or even implemented in many popular post processing software, presets, add-ins and filters. That never stopped me in the past so here are a few ways to achieve blurred vignettes in the software you may already have. Please bear in mind this is my first attempt at a how to video and the sound quality particularly is poor and all over the place (plenty of room for improvement). Anyway I hope the video helps inspire some experiments in your own work. But be warned its a bit long (13 minutes)

If video isn’t your thing here are some very brief descriptions of various alternative. I start with a few “free” programs and apps you may already have.

Google+ Photo

I firstly played around in the edit tools within Google+ Photo, since The Patch is a Google+ community and everyone will have access to these tools. The Centre Focus panel does provide nice blur panel & control, which seems to add a radial Gaussian blur and the edge brightness slider works like a conventional vignette allowing you to darken or lighten the edges at the same time. Its really simple to use, once you find it.
For those lucky enough to have new android phones and have recently updated the default Google Camera app (and have gotten pass the PhotoSphere feature) there is a similar feature called lens blur that can be adjusted on your photo on your phone.

Picasa

Picasa is Google’s desktop photo manager, which has become Google+ Photos on the web application component. But many of the Snapseed features that have been added into Google+ Photos have not been migrated back to upgrade Picasa itself. The Desktop version does have a very similar filter called soft focus, again using a circular inner zone and allowing control on size of this shape and the amount of focus
Picasa also has an interesting Focal B&W filter. What it does is maintain the colour inside a circular shape and destaturate anything outside that to black and white. There are only two controls the circle size (I've moved it fully to the right) and the sharpness (which is like feathering) and I’ve moved that fully to the left. The shadow lines are still sharp but the desaturation has tamed them.

Paint.NET

This is a free program to download (you can donate to its upkeep) and it is a very handy little program. It has even has layers (not used in this example) and the variety of tools to select areas within your image and a number of blur tools. The method is again simple I just used the elliptical select on the tool bar and select my area of interest. Next I chose inverted selection from the edit menu. then on the effects menu under blurs I chose the zoom blur (my favoured blur for this situation). Gaussain Blur would work just as well. Paint.net does not have feathering in the selection control so it may be necessary to do a second selection and blur less to help blend the blur.
   

Lightroom

Lightroom actually does not have a specific blur tool, but I have found if you use the adjustment brush which has its own panel of settings. If you take sharpness down to a large negative number, move it to the left, it does introduce a subtle softness (not a full blur) which you can further emphasis by moving down contrast, clarity and/or saturations

Another One Bites the Dust

I like the queen song but not when it applies to my external hard drives. My third Western Digital drive in a row has failed. Apple’s ITunes is definitely not to blame this time. Although there was some audio and video clips on the drive when it failed. It died in a very similar fashion to the other Western Digital drives, it got slower and slower, and slower but this time it failed completely before I could find space and retrieve its contents. Reports of this painful slowness of Western Digital drives seems to be very common among the various user forums on the net and even the Western Digital's own user support (where it remains unanswered!).

A Hard Lesson

I was not using the drive for any specific archives, so lost files can in theory be recovered. I was using the drive as a large scratch working area and convenient transfer place between computers, so many files passed through it.Specifically I held a lot of videos in various stages of editing and review on this scratch drive. I was mirroring this to my Netgear Stora (NAS style network disks) and had assumed that this would ensure a decent backup of the drive. I had not realised what might happen to the “mirror” as the disk began to slowly die. It seems that the mirroring was timing out while looking at files and must have assumed that the files had been deleted, so they where also deleted from my mirror. Some older directories were ok but anything I had recently worked on, just had the skeleton of empty folders on the “mirror” backup. In other words it was a copy of the apparently almost dead disk, not my actual files on the disk. So there is a hard lesson here, “mirror” disks are a convenient form of automated backup but they should not be relied on.

The nips are getting bigger

I have been taking digital photos in earnest since mid 2003 when I got my Olympus. It is interesting to look back on the numbers of photos I have taken and how much space I need to store them.

Year	Number of Files	Disk Space required
2003	5,947	3.8GB
2004	21,066	12.3GB
2005	19,074	10,5GB
2006	22,359	32.3GB
2007	24,412	53.5GB
2008	22,527	48.4GB
2009	17,897	77.5GB
2010	19,307	95.6GB
2011	23,573	151.6GB
2012	25,534	307.0GB

 

 

What is happening is I'm not really taking many more

photos what I am doing is storing significantly larger files, specifically Raw files and Videos. The jumps in file size do equate to new cameras and/or change in practice (like shooting both jpeg & RAW but perhaps fewer bracketed sets). This is what the space looks like when visualized with WinDirStats. The darker blue are jpeg, the light blue .pef and red .cr2 are RAW formats, the  green .mov files. My collection is definitely becoming more colourful.

 

So I'm while I am pretty confident I will be pressing the shutter 20 to 25 thousands times this year. Also I hope the file size trend doesn't continue. Will I stop shooting and saving both RAW and jpeg? Certainly not! More videos? Possibly. A newer camera? Unlikely! Perhaps it is time to accept the nips are getting bigger and consider an additional external drive!

Genie, ….in a box & the nightsky

How about this for a remarkably clever little device.

Thanks to +Trey Ratcliff, at google+ for the heads up on this. You can contact the NZ makers at syrp.co.nz

I’ve been out a bit the past few nights just hoping for a glimpse of the aurora austarils, as there have been some extreme magnetic storms occurring, the Australian weather bureau actually have a great space weather forecast site. No luck on that aurora front in Melbourne though, but I have managed some interesting long exposures and was even contemplating how to make a time lapse sequence of the night sky. (Now I realize there might be an easier way, with the help of a little genie, plus the near $1,000 price tag!)

   

PhotoFriday :: The Body

For PhotoFriday‘s topic The Body

I originally just wanted to photograph something a little different for this topic and my camera body was perfect but then I had the “bad idea” of making a simple stop motion movie using my artist’s manikin. This gave me an opportunity to experiment a bit more in Corel’s VideoStudio, and its upload to YouTube is a pleasure to use.

PhotoProject :: Reflections

Just experiments editing video (using Live Essentials Moviemaker) of the reflections of waves, as some ducks circle around. Taken on a walk along the Scotchman's Creek Track, in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. Taken with my Canon EOS 1100D (Rebel T3).

It was a beautiful sunny afternoon and I had just dropped a grape into my iced soda, when It became "alive" and dances in the moment. I was so fascinating to watch I grabbed my new little Canon EOS 1100D, which takes HD movies by the way. My main difficulty is the movies it takes are in .MOV format and not having an Apple Mac I find the movies a little hard to view (the free Quicktime, which is always very slow to load and seems to  leave the movie clips very jerky, Lightroom and Picasa are worse). However I have discovered, by accident, that the Windows Live Movie Maker does a good job, but you need to wait while it "prepares" the video (I assume this is some sort of necessary CODEC conversion). Saving the movie (in .WMV format) lets me use Picasa, my DVD creator and even upload to You Tube.

I'm not suggesting I am a fan of one format over another, its just that .MOV format can be a bit of a hassle if you have a modern PC.