Taking over a New Habitat

These "hawks" where very busy every morning over the new open pit, being dug by Bootu Creek resources. They seemed to be eating the things attached to eat the hundreds of moths that where attracted to the lights at night. Checking an old copy of Neville Cayley's "What Bird is That?" I wasn't able to make a positive identification but they most closely resemble the fork-tailed kite (Milvus migrans affinis. also known as the black kite in europe and africa )

Sydney from the air

  

Getting the Colours right

A very significant issue, for digital photography, that you will soon discover when you get your first prints and compare them with the same images on your computer. The colours look different, often wildly different! Even on different screen there may be massive differences. There are lots of issues involved, colours are perceived differently when using a project light (eg computer screen & projectors) versus reflective method (printers, photographic paper). Professional photographers still love slides, for colour film work, the projected slide image is far more vibrant and “realistic” than a photo print because it uses additive colour scheme & projected light. Every input and output device has potentially different sensitivity to different wavelengths of light and therefore may capture or display different colour bias. Finally the human eye is more sensitive to colour differences rather than to absolute colours. So it is a subject as well as a complex set of technical issues. There have been a number of applications and utilities (including some that come with corel and adobe photo tool) but they can take a lot of setting up for different devices and “colour gamut” profiles (a set of colours that represent a colour space).

If you have an apple computer you could use the colour sync utility.

If you have a decent graphics card (most recent computers do have) and are running Microsoft’s XP, you might like to try out their color management tool . It is a new power tool and available free to all XP users, but you will have to go through Microsoft’s genuine windows component validation setup. The tool gets added to yoiur control panel and is easy to use, but make sure you read the READ.ME.htm that gets install with this powertool.

Patterns in the Wind

Trying to photograph the interesting patterns of sand blowing in the wind is not really suited to still photography, yet is was quiet amazing.

PS: It is very important that you clean your camera (the whole body) when it is out and exposed to the elements. Sand and salt are particular enemies of the delicate working of most camera

Patterns of Light.

The delicate patterns of light can be amazing, even with simple things like a glass of water in the sun. I move in close abd zoomed out to stretch the shadows diagonally across the frame. Sometimes the composition of the negative areas is as important as your main subject.

Photographing Ibis

I have been trying to capture the flocks of Ibis that fly over my place each night, this time of year. It has not proven easily. Firstly they are not so regular. Second they tend to leave the flying till its almost dark (so I am struggling with exposure times, if you look closely you will be able to see the "heat" noise blockness in the blue sky) and finally they fly fast (I have to pan with them to get any hope of an infocus image) and flap their wings a lot(the panning doesn't help and the wings are almost always blurred).

Time Lapse Surf

Taken just after sunset. The slow shutter speed has flatenned out and merged the waves together. This is also an example of how long exposure and dull conditions often enhance the colours.

Another mosaic/collage, this time created with IMix. I thought the fadeout edges might suit the beach theme.

Accra Market - a busy mosaic

The central Accra Marketplace is one of the busiest places I have seen. Inidividual photos do not really capture the hussle and bustle, but a moasic of photos does start to tell the story. This was made with HP Photoelements Essentials Album tool, which allows you to save album pages as fresh images.

(Yes I do realize it is the same program I said not to bother downloading a few days ago)

This is where chocolate starts it's manufacture

Ghana does produces the highest grades of cocoa, used in various blends in all the very best chocolates. Yet many of Ghana's cocoa farmers are heavily exploited, and struggle to subsist.

Is there a place for ethical chocolate?

Another Reflection on Reflections

Taking photographs through glass, such as through a bus window, can be a problem because of reflected light sources behind you. In the photo on the left it adds to the narrative helping to explain why the kids are waving. They are waving at the photographer in a bus. However the photo on the right is rather spoiled by the faded appearance a similar reflection casts over the top of the tree, which adds nothing to the typically african scene, women carting water from a well, and of course catching up on the gossip. Still I did like the colours and composition so I had a bit of a play with the tapestry texture tool in corel photobook. I like the colours and composition even more.
(Moral: Don't give up, experiment and have fun with your near misses, you might find delightfull images hidding within them)

First Impressions

I have been doing a website course through HP on-line courses, and noticed a course on "Digital imaging from camera to printer with Photosmart Essential", quiet a mouthful, so I enrolled. The first task revolved around downloading the latest version of HP Photosmart Essentials.

I did not get off to a good start.
1) It loaded a link to ebay onto my screen (very cheeky)
2) It started scanning my whole disc for photos and images, Other than stopping this behavior immediately I start the program I can not see have to turn this off.(very annoying and time comsuming)
3) It, unlike its predecessor HP Image Express, which was free, is only a 20 day free trial
4) The backup to CD feature costs extra!

Does it have any redefining features? Yes it is very easy to use (but so was HP Image Express) and is nicely integrated with Snapfish, an on-line photo service. Most of the important fixes and enhancements are there, and all seem to take only one or two clicks. There is a neat printed album feature with a nice range of layouts.Not to forget the claims that it provides better quality printing even on older printers (a claim I have not tested, yet!) Unfortunately the first impressions have stuck. So if you got Photosmart with your camera, use it, If you have the older HP image express stick with that, otherwise I wouldn't bother.

Full metal mosaic

I've noticed that tiled photo mosaics have become popular on flickr. Some of them are great, try looking at the mosaic tag. They are actually easy to prepare because there is good software around to do them. On flickr a lot of these mosaics are made with fd's Flickr Toy Mosaic Maker (fd standing for flagrant disregard). I used the collage tool in picasa for this group.

for photofriday topic :Metal

All at Sea

I have to admit i made a big mistake when i was putting together my eclipse in Ghana series (see the posts below, for 29-mar-2006). I got the latitude and longitude confused so i was all at sea way south of Ghana. Sorry folks I've fixed the references now.

If you haven't tried out using Flyr (a special search for geotagged photos on Flickr) its well worth the effort. If you don't have google earth, (which is free to download but it does really need broadband access to the internet to fully appreciate) then use the google map link instead.

This link shows you all my geotagged photos.

Eclipse watchers

I love this set, showing the joy of these eclipse watchers. (all sharing the only one pair of special viewing glasses)

Reflection of the eclipse

During the eclipse I figured pointing at the sun, without a special filter, would just give me lens flare, and it did!

BUT look down at the reflection diagonally to the left and down. Its the moon covering the sun in the fairly normal position for the bright dots of light that accompany lens flare. It is however a nice sharp reflection of the eclipse, as the moon partially covers the sun (I have no idea how I managed to capture this)

[geotagged geo:lat=7.052558° geo:lon=-2.23201°]


See also my Eclipse in Ghana PhotSet on flickr

The birds

One interesting aspect of the darkness generated by the eclipse, was noticed by the birds before I did. Normally birds can be seen flying all over the newly mined open pits. Suddenly during the period of darkness the birds appeared to vanish no where to be seen in the air, they had gone to ground.



See also my Eclipse in Ghana PhotSet on flickr

Dimming the Lights

Today's big event, photographically speaking, was an eclipse. Whilst it was a total eclipse at Accra, it was only a very quick partial eclipse here at Kenyasi, a bit of a non event. I had planned to go to a spot and take photos at regular intervals but the wonders of my camera's own light meter (it strives very hard to get all shots exposed perfectly, and the same!) and fairly small changes in lighting anyway, conspired to make the differences very subtle.

If you care to move your mouse across the images, you will see the time they were taken. The period 9:10 to 9;12 was darker, and thats about all that was noticeable on the ground.


[geotagged geo:lat=7.052558° geo:lon=-2.23201°]


See also my Eclipse in Ghana PhotSet on flickr

Seeing Red

In Africa you can buy just about anything by the roadside. Some of the produce is both cheap and very fresh, these chillis are also.......

A road less travelled

Each day i travel along the old Kenyasi to Ntotoroso Road, passing through some relatively undisturbed forrest, some old cocoa farms, the occassional splashes of red from the flame trees and lots of elephant grass.

Taking photos isn't easy, because the light is low and the windscreen usually wet and splatter with mud, yet the moody silhouettes of the trees are well worth the attempts to take a few shoots. I use multi-shoot mode to make sure that I can minimise the time delay between shoots, things happen fast when photographying from a vehicle, even when you are seldom travelling faster than 50kmh.

Soon to be Smooth

for photofriday topic :Smooth

Photobucket revisted

I often find myself way out on the tenuous end of a low bandwidth part of the net where FTP uploads are unknown and any that sounds large (eg a photo) is forbidden,

So how to keep posting to the net?

I have in the recent past used the email to flickr feature that will also then forward your email and image as a blog post. Alas this email to flickr seems to be down at the moment, not even loading the photo into my flickr photostream.

Plan B, in the past I used Photobucket because it allows an old fashion browse and upload, multi-ple uploads even. It also gives you a variety of prewritten tags & HTML snippets to cut and paste into your blog or forum boards. This can save a lot of tedium. When I logged in this time I discovered photobucket now has its own blog post feature, which is nice and easy to use (even in low bandwidth locations it didn't time out).

The post below was sent in using it. The only downside was the default HTML makes the image too wide for my blog page (i had to edit in a width= argumenet to the html) AND it doesn't set up a click through link to a higher resolution image. One feature I think is pretty much a necessity for a photo bog! So is you want to see the larger version of that photo below click here

Oh and I forgot to say the basic sign up for photobucket is free, so there are banner ads. (not those annoying drop down ones, that any traveler will warn you always kill even the best connection in a remote cyber cafe)