Windows Live Essentials

View Full Album

I have just updated my Windows Live Writer, which I use a lot for preparing these blog posts, other than support for tables and maps which I haven’t tired out yet. It has a couple nice insert features for photographer (and movie maker). You can now insert a photo album,like the one to the left, but only by uploading the photos directly or using the windows live on-line album feature. The insert video feature is much the same but also has the ability to add video from common on-line services like You Tube. A similar feature for the photo gallery that read from Flickr, photo bucket and/or picasa web albums would have been a winner. Windows live essentials can be downloaded for free and includes a few other neat utilities, but just getting windows live writer will make your blogging life easier.

The other surprise was that sky drive, also free, now gives you 25 gigabytes of space for free! Yes, I got that right 25Gb! That is a lot so I have started to use it as a trial place to do my daily backups (of photos) so they are not just on one storage media (ie my camera card then my whichever computer I am using) even when I am travelling. Will keep you posted on how this goes.

My Photo Impressions (an update)

Whilst I have not been publishing them here, my photo impressions of birds in particular, have become my best selling works. This one, of a lone gull flying into the sunset, focusing on the theme “extinction is forever”.   It has been in preparation for some time for the Venus Artist Contemporary Showcase. I always end up doing lots of tweaking of colour palette and tiling textures. In the end I have opted not to include in the exhibition (it is the first photo impression I has included a written message on)  but have also posted it on RedBubble (you can purchase a poster or a large canvas version from them).
I treat the creation of  my photographic mosaics just like a classical painting. Whilst I do use modern software and digital photos I follow a more traditional method to develop the image. The photo itself is like the initial sketches one would do to develop composition and form. Next I look at the tones and colours of the image and select a limited palette of harmonious colours. Instead of mixing these colours from a tube I look through my collection of photos. Usually I just use photos related to the theme of the photos (shorebirds in the venus bay sunsets in this case) but lately i have been adding a few specially generate fractal flames in the specific colour scheme I am missing.  From this I assemble my new palette, a library of coloured images not just pigment. Finally I have been looking to M C Escher for the shapes and tessellations of the tiling. I have also recently moved to having some reproduced on canvas, and reproduced at a decent size to reveal the smaller photos used in the tiling when you look more closely.(see detail below)

Please note I have stopped using the term Photomosaic, which with this spelling has been registered as a trademarked by Robert Silver. I use the professional version of Andrej Olenik's Mosaic Creator, which is based on different patented techniques to those covered by the patents filed by Robert Silver through Runaway Technology Inc.

If you would like to be kept informed of norm's work, send an email to the address below and you will receive an occasional email newsletter of upcoming projects and exhibitions.

HDR revisited, and a newbie

I was testing out my new lens (the replacement for a favorite that had an unfortunate accident) in the local rainforest. I was using it at a decent wide angle (32mm, that’s about 48mm equivalent in old-school 35mm jargon) and decided to take a EV bracketed set for some HDR post processing, even though I didn’t have a tripod.

I was happy with the original image, and below are the ±1.5 EV photo also taken at the same time. The exposures weren’t so long but with the mirror movement between shots it was long enough to guarantee that I might move and my photos would be out of registration. To complicate things there was a reasonable breeze moving the ferns.

Since my chief bug-bear with currently available HDRi software is image registration, this is the prefect set to test out the new Picturenaut program, which is self promoted  as a new breed of HDR tools. It is free to download, small and compact, fast and easy to use. Just running with all the default settings I got the expected poorly registered result.
Then I tried the the Automatic image alignment check box, and the results where not bad, still some poor registration as you move away from the center but still a much better result that most other software will do with the same image set. I think I keep Picturenaut around for some more testing! Which is a big deal for me at the moment because I am becoming more and more in favor of doing less post processing or other fiddling about on my images. By the way it has one limitation that may discouraged the die-hard digital photographers, is it does not currently have support for raw image formats.

My favored HDRi tool is still dynamic photo. Whilst I did have to do a lot of manual adjustment and pin adding rather that rely on auto registration, (and it did not do as good a job as Picturenaut on this example) I think the result with thw extra manual work is crisper and does give a more even rendering of the tone mappings, closer to what I believe I saw.

feather in the forest

More of the birds at Grant’s Picnic ground in Kalista

Happy New Year

Experimenting with long exposures to capture fire works. My Pentax has a B (for Bulb) Mode that keeps the exposure open for as long as you hold the button down. Trying to keep the camera steady for this hand held shot was a challenge but the camera was pressed firmly against the glass window (This also cut out unnecessary reflections)

Cartoonize yourself

A really great Melbourne  identity died this week, the cartoonist William Ellis Green, better known as WEG. I am lucky enough to actually have one of his caricatures of me.
The WEG story I like most, happened earlier this year when a burglar broke into his home. When the police arrived and asked for a description he said I could do better than that and dashed off a caricature. The police recognized the burgular and the story goes that 15 minutes later the guy was arrested and charged
If you don't have access to a friendly cartoonist there is a neat on-line service that can help you out, it is called BeFunky and it has a tool called cartoonizer. Their promotional  video is better than anything I could describe, so here it is -

Cartoonizer in Action from BeFunky on Vimeo.
When you have finished there are a number of ways you can save your work including exporting directly to a comprehensive range of popular social networking sites.

I'm sure you can have some fun with your own cartoonist on-demand!

on the roof of the world

I have been reading Alain De Botton’s “The Art of Travel”, which features a graphic of the view from an jet airplane window, on its cover. (I’m fairly certain it is a mock up rather than a true photo mainly because there is no internal reflection). The image is accurate in that it shows the interesting phenomena of a very dark sky above the horizon, when view from the upper atmosphere, because the air above is very rarified and has little moisture thus little backscatter of light.

Taken over the great barrier reef, about 20 minutes out from cairns. (note the reflection of my shirt in the lower part of the image)

Just how many digital photos do I actually have?

I am catching up on a few things, including backing up photos from my recent travels, and I got to thinking -

"Just how many digital photos do I actually have?"

It took me a while to figure out how I might get picasa to do it. The on-line picasa help and forums weren't a lot of use other than informing me that picasa 3 can now handle a million photos. I didn't think I had that many. Then I read that backup would estimate the number of discs required, and figured it must also counts the files, folders etc. to do that. It is in fact very easy to do, On the tools menu find the backup pictures item and a set of dialogue boxes appear at the bottom of the screen. Ignore panel one for this process.

So don't start the back up, just select all in panel two and picasa will go away and search through it database and get a summary of not only number of photos, but also disk space consumed and the number of CDs or DVDs required to back up everything . I had my answer now and hit cancel not burn!

 

Ok the answer is way to many photos. 141 Gigabytes! 220 CDs! That's probably a seriously bad habit!

King of the castle

 
Baby superb wren on south walkerville beach.

Flickr and low band width

I have been travelling a lot recently and I tend to travel in places that have very low bandwidth connection to the net, and or I’m trying to use my Next G Modem (and the telstra ads only give you half the story, you can use their next-G in more places, that is true, but it will be  ..s  l  o  w,   …v e  r  y   s  l  o  w, …s  o    s   l   o   w   …i  t    w  i   l   l       b   e      u   n  u  s   e  a   b  l   e  )

Flickr seems to becoming particularly fragile when it comes to bandwidth, I’m not sure when this trend started (maybe several months ago), but it has become very susceptible to timing out. You wait ages, nothing happens, then it you are lucky an error message (and the humor of this message has well and truly worn off) or just a browser error or a hung upload process, or just simply nothing! Uploading photos and accessing discussion thread with lots of photos posted in them is virtually impossible with a dial up line or an “over shared” internet connection. Worse such simple issues look as if they might work, with a “jiggle the wires and retry”, but they fail over and over again, having restarted at the beginning each time. The result is hours of frustration.

As far as the uploading photos is concerned you have two good work around. You can email in photos (and email is more reliable on low band width, primarily because it can begin where it left off when a link times out (and the time out on emails may be more tolerant).

The second good trick is to use the flickr mobile portal. http://m.flickr.com/

It is a very stripped down version that is designed for phone access, and has a very clean and tight format, but only offers a limited set of feature. These include seeing recent activity (like comments on your work), upload photos and video (from your phone) and being able to view thumb nails of your photos and contacts. The thing I would like is to be able to access groups via this mobile portal, but that is not available!

Please look at improving these things flickr!

Summer Sunset Silhouette

 

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").