My photo (below) shown on Jane Bund's 7 News weather tonight

Lake Entrance main Beach looking west :: The coming storm #janesweather pic.twitter.com/LO5RaXsaY0

— oz_endless_summer (@OzEndlessSummer) March 30, 2017

After the Storm

Melbournians are still coughing and sniffling after a set of strong thunder storms following strong north winds that bought a lot of grass pollen over the city. The storm apparently fragmented the pollens into smaller particles cause a significant number of asthma attacks including 4 deaths. Our Hospital and ambulance services were stretched to capacity.

Ok enough winter, where is summer hiding?

PhotoFriday :: Atmosphere

The Coming Storm

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Atmosphere

PhotoFriday :: Clear Weather

Unusual Cloud Formation

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Weather

Weather …or not?

flickr are probably sailing close to the wind on sharing their vast photo collection, yet again! This time it is being handled more sensitively. I received an invite to join a new project they have called the weather project. The basic idea is pretty sound, via a free smartphone app called Yahoo7 Weather, you will be able to see flickr photos of your location showing current conditions, supposedly backed by "the most accurate forecasts" (aka the weather channel with temperatures in Fahrenheit), Now this is an opt-in situation whereby joining the group you can expect to have your images shared, provided that are selected as suitable, by “a team of trained Yahoo Weather photo editors". This is clearly a better way to handle the public sharing of photos. So I say cautiously, congratulations flickr.

The first drawback for me is I can’t install this app on my older android phone, not such a big deal because I already have a weather app that accesses the local bureau of meteorology (even when I’m travelling) and it works fine (and the temperatures are in Celsius. However before joining the group I want to make sure I understood the conditions of use. There is a quite comprehensive FAQ section which did deal with my primary concerns, which where conditions of submitting, who “owns” the photos and attribution. It is also clear that flickr, or yahoo, will not be making any payment for images used. Fair enough,


BUT and its a big issue for me, they don’t mention licencing, and specifically anything about creative commons usage.They do acknowledge that the photo are your works not theirs, but they want you to share them freely, unrestrictedly freely! After the fuss over their wall art I expected flickr to be more upfront about licencing.

The condition include that the photo is yours, your original work. Again fair enough. The clause "You also hereby waive the benefits of any provision of law known as Moral Rights or Droit Moral" does concern me but I'll have to research what it means in Australia, since we do have a similar rights in law, COPYRIGHT AMENDMENT (MORAL RIGHTS) ACT 2000 

I do intend to join the group and very carefully watch how they handle attribution, I don’t expect a lot of traffic from their phone apps, but will be happy if any photo I share are considered worthwhile, since I am very unlikely to share my best ones into a group with rules like the clause above!

Interesting Lighting

interesting lighting, originally uploaded by imageo.
This was an experimenting with flickr's new mobile app in conjunction with the share facility on android, to both post to flickr & blogger at the same time. It certainly uploaded the photo easily, and posted the blog post but I had my phone in landscape orientation and the uploaded photo was rotated 90 degrees to what I actually wanted (on my phone I just rotated it naturalyl so I wasn't aware of this)

A dark sky, a gap in the clouds and strong side lighting does make for very interesting photos, even of a shopping center car park! I unusually didn't have either of my DSLR's handy but HDR Camera+ on my phone did a nice job and let me test out the new flickr app.

and (almost gone again)

Last night there was a big storm front that swept in at dusk bringing lightening and thunder, and something that wasn’t immediately apparent till morning, a massive dust storm. Everything as and orange red. I went to echo point to see how the view was affected! What view? Although the three sisters where visible, the dust made it hard to distinguish and my camera light meter just gave me a very flat grey mistiness. Using 0.5 EV bracketing, and five steps, did give bit of detail in the overexposure exposures but nothing exciting.

So I tried post processing with Dynamic Photo, to combine these bracketed images and extend the dynamic range. The Human eye tone mapping gave be a decent result very similar to what I saw, restricted visibility but an orange glow.

This is yet another example when in doubt about exposure to bracket and take a series
PS: As I was walking back from taking this series the gusts of wind were so ferocious that I saw a small Japanese tourist sweep off her feet and blown across the Echo Point forecourt like a tumble weed. Lots of laughter suggested no damage done, except maybe to her pride.

photofriday: weather

for photofriday, topic: weather

[This is one of those photos you will need to click on and look at the larger version to fully appreciate]