The Art Class

Taken with my cameraphone and assembled with picasa collage & autostitch

Lens Disaster

I’ll be the first to admit I am hard on my field gear, from boots, sunnies, phones, computers, I own and regularly use several devices with cracked LCD screens, and super glue or duct tape repairs. All this is a fact of life, I need things to be robust and reliable, that's all I ask.

Yet I must admit I was a bit devastated by yesterday’s “office” accident. My well padded camera bag (that by the way normally tolerates a lot of rough handling, apparently rolled off my desk and possible as it fell the camera must have spilled out and when I found it the camera and lens where well separated and bag open.Worst was to come, when I inserted the lens it just popped out again. Seems two small plastic lugs are all that holds it into the bayonet fitting, and the nature of the breaks does not give me any confidence that super-gluing will succeed. The saddest part is it is my favorite lens.

Anticipating a flood

I was anticipating a peak flood in the Dandenong creek after the past two days of rain. However the flood control measures, which includes filling jells park lake, where working well. Whilst the creek was high and running fast it was spilling over its banks. One downside was with the flushing out of storm drains and gutters a lot of rubbish was ending up along the river, captured by quieter eddies. As I have been noticing for a few years now, the real litter problems is not so much plastic bags as foam cups, takeaway food containers and plastic water bottles.

Yet there is always a bright side, along with most keen gardener in Melbourne these guys seem to be appreciating the extra water.

Waiting for the high water

 

smiley face 2

The lunar, venus & jupiter alignment was visiable as the sun set so I took the opportunity to do a few multi-image series that I could splice together with autostitch. The panorama below was one of the last and I used the "night scene" mode, which unfortunately over exposed and blurred out the moon and the planets but it produced wonderful colours aqnd lighting.

smiley face 1

 
There is supposedly rare cosmic alignment going on right now. Happily the cresent moon, venus and jupiter are ligned up like a smiley, :) the universal emotion for happiness.

Barista School

Making a good coffee is as much an art as taking a good photography. Having the best subject, best equipment is not enough you still need inspiration, experience and understanding of the medium as well. Even with the best beans and the best espresso machine you still need a dedicated barista's touch to appreciate the magic. As well as great coffee I had enough photos for firstly create a super wide panorama using autostitch then use mosaic maker to create a multi-image mosaic (you will need to click on the image below to appreciate the "detail").

Christmas comes to Melbourne

Soaking up the warmth

 
Cormorant drying its wings, Jells Park Lake

Flora

  
  

Vertical stitching

The grey polluted and rain soaked Jakarta afternoon appears to be growing new sky scrapers each hour. It is a very vertical story like the tallest trees in a forest and not something that the normal landscape mode photo with a wide angle lens does any justice to. Even tilting the camera to the portrait mode (long axis running vertical) may not help a lot. Using a stitching program vertically (autostitch does this automatically, but other software may require rotation of the images to be stitched first) can produce a convincing tall image.

A threatening dawn

 

Another beach

 

More mutli-photo stuff

This Photosynth is based on the very quaint Victorian Artist Society building in Eastern Hill Melbourne. This time I have managed enough overlap to get 100% synthy (a weird measure used by microsoft to record the “overlappingness” of the images). Despite being over towered by the more mundane architecture of the eye & ear hospital, this place keeps the charm of an interesting time in Australian Art. You can almost see Roberts. Streeton and McCubbin chatting on the steps.

You can see other photosynths I have created here.

More Collage Fun

I must admit I do like photo collages, they give you the opportunity to show more than one aspect of a subject at a time. This creates a lot more interest in the viewer. The downside with collages was they can be very time consuming to prepare. Ok there are a lot of automatic photo mosaic and collage software but most just quickly deliver a boring result. My complaint was that most are very predictable and symmetrical. Then along came the new layouts in picasa 3.0, just enough freedom to play and create something unique. The collage below is the based on the frame mosaic, a square format, with a gaps between images, a related background photo, and drop shadow generated for each photo panel. All fun to do, rather than tedious.

This collage is various view of the Rotunda on the Sandringham foreshore. Architectural subjects really lend themselves to having multiple views.

Jo would be proud

 
Sir Joseph Banks should be proud of this banksia flower

Turning off the Photo Viewer

When I first downloaded picasa 3.0, and looked at the new features,  I must admit I thought the picasa photo viewer was a pretty nifty, fast and easy and it "transparently" overlayed the view of the image over the working window, rather than opening yet another window frame. It also creates and iphoto style film strip under the image and  it gives you access to a number of picasa actions like zooming in uploading to the web & emailing without having to fire up picasa.

Well I've come to the conclusion I'd rather fire up picasa to do things with my photos and just want explorer to handle images as before. Now the pesky  problem of how to restore the default viewer for all those graphic file types. It turned out to easy. Under tools menu in Picasa select the item Configure Photo Viewer an you will see the dialogue (show on the left), and tick the don't use Picasa Photo Viewer line and it will not appear and you will be back to your previous setting. If I change my mind I just have to visit tools/configure photo viewer again and change my selection

Sunset Gull

I often set my camera to multi-shot mode (on most digital cameras this is the setting marked with the three open overlapping squares, and may be called continuous mode or burst mode) when I notice I have the opportunity to capture birds in flight. This gull was some distance away and with no time to change to my long lens he ended up tiny. To complicate things his flight path meant I was pointing directly at the sun, but luckily I had my polarizing filter in place to avoid a total wash out

Still the individual images were interesting, both in composition and colour and I figured it would be worthwhile seeing what autostitch could make of the set (see also capturing the glide). To my surprise it created a decent image, a time lapse style capture. Instead of nude descending the stairs it is gull into the sunset. The slight halo effect appears to be an artifact of the splicing process by I think it adds to the image.

It is written

I have been photographing the interesting patterns of life, shell trails, as below, crab balls and diggings, footprints, etc on the sand for some time. I don’t don’t how to read their hidden message, when the next tide is, or is the swell dropping, or is a big flood likely, or is it just dinner time. Or is there even a message there at all?

I am finally succumbing to watermarks on my images uploaded to the net. I know a lot of folk hate them but there is just so much open theft and disregard of the rights of those posting on the net. I once championed the idea of the creative commons system that was adopted on flickr. Now I see the same images reposted so often I’m saddened. The copyright doesn’t mean I wont give permission to use and repost my work, but please write to me first. There are lots of utilities to add watermarks to your photos, many free and it is a common feature in photo mangers. I’m using the new feature to add a watermark included at the bottom of the file export in Picasa 3.0. It is simple and unobtrusive.

Fly Past

 

New Growth

Backlit new growth on a late spring afternoon can capture some beautiful textured lighting. This collage is an example of one of the new mosaic collage options in picasa 3 beta

Balcony View

balcony view, originally uploaded by imageo.

Available light, taken by resting the camera on the planter box. I had intended to take the sunset but the rapid tropical sunset beat me!

Spring Collage

Spring has arrived in vibrants colours and strong lighting. This is one of the new collage types available in picasa 3.