The little penguin

I was not surprised to see the little penguin [Eudyptula minor] ashore on the Venus Bay beach at first. They come onto the beach often enough to rest, in fact a variety of migrating shore birds and seals often seek refuge on this beach over the coming months and particularly in stormy weather. However the sea was very calm and then I noticed he/she was bowled over by the tiniest of waves. I realized his/her flippers where firmly held in the soft sand (quick sand style).

It was easy to dig him/her out and encourage him/her along the beach a little to firmer sand. He/she was shivering and bedraggled but otherwise healthy. You guessed it. I’m not good at sexing penguins.

He/she stayed on the beach for another hour or so and had a chance to preen and tidy up. However the attention of beach goers was clearly a bit stressful but nothing like the handling received from a passing parks ranger. Hopefully he/she got the opportunity to rest further down the beach before returning home (presumably Phillip Island).

Picasa 3.6 now available

Most digital camera, even the inexpensive ones, come with their own bundled software. These bundles usually include some way to upload from your camera to a computer, a photo manager to browse photos on your computer and at least some rudimentary photo editing facilities. Often there are a few fancy add-ons like making calendars, posters, cards. At its simplest Picasa does all the same basic tasks as you camera bundled software, it doesn’t have the fancy bits. However what it does do, it does well and without fuss. It has been my preferred photo manager for a long time down. It free to download from google, so it you haven’t tried it yet, try it now.’

The best new features relates to the Collaborative Web Albums, which allow you to upload  to a friend's album right from Picasa. Before you freak out about internet security you have to invite collaborators to your own albums. So far I have found Picasa’s web album type of security good, and I do suggest family photos should not be made public. Uploading, sharing and the automatic face recognition can also become part of your single photo import step. All nice but of little interest to me. What pleased me most, in version 3.6, was a simple change that I have been waiting for for a long time. The ability to have a custom size crop. You could always do a manual crop (to any size you wanted)but if you wanted a specific aspect ratio it was fiddly trial and error exercise. I used to resort to photo.net

Self-Portrait 2010

There are no special tricks here, everything is real, exactly as it was. Well I did actually use a remote control to set off my Pentax on a tripod and my phone was being held backwards while taking a very close up of my eye. That left eye has become something of a trade mark/icon for my on-line photographic presence. Also if you want to look deeply into the eyes of the girl behind me on the left you will also see me several years ago when I took that photo.

For PhotoFriday's topic Self-Portrait 2010

Picturenaut 3.0 to the Rescue

I was taking photos of some of my artwork, bas-relief style sculptures, for the upcoming Venus Artists Contemporary Showcase. I have found it is quiet a challenge to get the colours “accurate” and at the same time getting the whole surface in focus & distortion free (maybe more on that later). The “best” exposures are all too often “flat”, albeit with slightly bleached colours but nicely exposure to that average 50% grey tone. So I got the thinking maybe HDRi could do it better. I liked what it achieved, do you?
I had recently updated Picturenaut, now in version 3.0. It is nice piece of software for doing HDRI fairly automatically (not lots of fiddling with sliders and adjustments). Best it works perfectly as a Portable App off a USB key, so I have it in my camera bag at all times.
The new version does a better job at guessing the EV setting than previous versions and now behaves when I used 5 photos in my bracketed set. It now has a neat feature ghost removal (some things inevitably move and a distracting ghost outline can be left is parts of the image). The  automatic image alignment (which does a good job realigning and adjusting handheld photos) is improved. Both these take time but free you from a lot of unnecessary fiddling. The real time save is in the tone mapping, which may fewer options and controls than other systems, but the four methods provided should cover most needs. You will be able to avoid those lurid colours and unnatural if some what surreal lighting that many other HDRi packages conjure up for unsuspecting new users.

Located at last

I've kind of given up with the Yahoo Map issue and accuracy on flickr, I still prefer to use google earth, and if you don't like that, try Loc.alize it is great also. However in the interest of getting all my big landscape set geotagged I've bitten the bullet and retro geotagged all the photos (that had not been previously tagged) using the MAP feature in flickr. So Sorry about all the different names for essentially the same place and poor precision on locating a few places. Such is Life.

Getting more into HDR

I have been experimenting with sets of five bracketed photos as input into the HDRi process. Both Dynamic Photo and Picturenaut  accept several photo imports, but Picturenaut kept stopping unexpectedly on me once I use 5 input files. Well until I downloaded the latest version! The artist was working in the shade, at the MGA Masterpiece in a Day event, and it was the middle of a sunny day. A recipe for bleached out highlights and muddy shadows. My steps of ±0.5 Ev are not large, but I have found that it is enough to get the detail in the shadows and reasonable lighting in the sunlit path. The best part is it can be done without that stretched out post-pocessing posterized over saturated look, so common in HDR work these days, Even when I used the Dynamic Photo's Eye Catching tone mapping. Could I have achieved this with 3 exposures and bigger EV steps? I doubt it.

Thunderstorm in Time Lapse

This "movie" is actually a time lapse of 260 still images taken over a 35 minute period.

Capturing lightening on  Digital Camera is harder than you might imagine. Here is some sound advice from an expert at photographing lightening.

Pose for the Camera

Very few birds stop and pose for the camera, perhaps Crimson Rosella [Platycercus elegans] is the one that does.

For PhotoFriday's Topic Nature

A wet Brisbane by night

I suspect the rain is following me around. Yesterday it poured here bin Brisbane (not sure of which records where broken but they got a good proportion of the normal years rainful in a few hours). This is a composite view of central brisbane from on high made with austostitch.

I was recently asked in flickr if autostich is still around, and the answer is yes There is still a free demo windows version, and autostiched is also avialable in three "pro" photo packages (links from the autostitch web site), better still there is now an autostitch Iphone app (see the Iphone app store)

After the rain, a pink sunset

This is not a HDRi post processed image, but it was one of a set of bracketed shots. It had an -1EV bias (ie slighty underexposed), cropped with picasa otherwise nothing fancy was done. It really was a memorable sunset. This is also posted on flickr if you want to see see the exif details

Back on the Grape Vine

I was recently judging some camera club entries and saw a number of colour vignettes, filtered to a low saturation or black & white at the edges. They were used well, to draw the centre of attention to the fully coloured zone. These work are the inspiration for my latest wallpaper.

I had taken a few photos of the grape vine on my back porch. I liked the lighting on this leaf especially BUT the edges of the image where very fussy. Not a good look for a screen wallpaper, because that's where most of us put the icons. So I experimented with the a couple of effects tools in picasa.  The first was the effects/soft focus, which softens the focus around a central zone. There is a slider to control the size of the circle (yes it is only a circle you can not make it elliptical). There is also a slider to control the rate at which the soft focus is brought in and you have a target to move the circle around the image with you mouse. This takes out the fussy edges nicely but oh such an intense green blur.

Next I tried out the Effect/Focal B&W which again give you a circular (not an ellipse) area of colour intact with the edge feathering out to Black & white. Sliders let you control the size if the circle and the sharpness of the colour spot. A target on the image to center the circle can be moved over the image using the mouse. Very Simple and intuitive to use.

Finally I decided to further edit my second attempt with the screen wallpaper maker in the Olympus Camedia software (which came bundled with my original digital camera) and which I still use occasionally along with that original camera. This software allows you to easily add a textured background overlay to part of the image (the left hand side where icon get put by default).

Of all my on-line photographic works, it is screen wallpapers on flickr, that get the highest views. Over whelming so, hundreds if not thousands of views each. I’m still not sure why, but I think they are fun to create, I use them on my own computers and why not share them?

twilight

 

Mother & Foal

 

Harvest Moon (almost)

 

Full moon is tomorrow night when it is at perigee (closest to Earth)

The forlorn Magpie

 

Patterson Panorama

Patterson Panorama, originally uploaded by imageo.

These where part of a set of 12 photos taken from the public walkway at Patterson Lakes. What interested me most was the dramatic sky (no polarizing filter was used by the way) and thought oit would work well with the collagy/fragmented panorama effect. At first I tried hard to keep the horizon essentially level, but in the end I felt the higgledy piggledy twist & tilts added a bit of drama. This was created to be a screen wallpaper for my laptop. I used picasa, using their picture pile collage option, which now lets you slide and rotated images on the screen. I also removed almost half the images from the original series.

Not that the more conventional autostitched panorama is not without drama. Click your mouse on the seadragon panel above and you can zoom in (with the mouse wheel or the + button) and pan around. It is a 180 degree view, and taken hand held, at approximnately 15 degree incriments, which I find give be the right sort of overlap for autostich.

Circling into the sun

 

Pelicans [Pelecanus conspicillatus] finding a thermal

Galahs Behaving Badly

The Galahs [Eolophus roseicapilla] (or maybe [Cacatua roseicapillus] there is still a controversy about there true scienitifc name) were back in greater numbers and raucously noisier. Different tree. Lots of flapping of wings and hanging upside down. I suspect they were just having fun.

The Square Giraffe Collage

 
Collage of Square format images including "psuedo" polaroids. Created with Picasa.

For PhotoFriday's topic square

A Pleasant Evening

 
Happy Trees, the early summer weather has been ghreat for trees, some rain, not too many hot winds and reasonable humidity

Chainsaw Art

Another Photosynth, this time prepared as a "walk around". This photoset was taken at mga's "materpiece in a Day" Novemeber 2009.

Sorry Mac & Linux users,Photosythn still only works for Microsoft Windows.

Not good enough. still

The geotagging ability in Flickr, which uses Yahoo! maps, still disappoints me, almost two years on. The satellite coverage for the places I go in Australia is to put it mildly unusably imprecise. At any decent scale to recognise local features (like a major river!) in the Satellite View, you just get the message “sorry  the data you have requested is unavailable”. You can get more detail from the MAP View, but where is that river?

Don’t despair, you can get more accurate locations by geocoding in google earth first (easy if you have picasa) or use the still wonderful loc.alize.this browser add-in/bookmarklet.

I’m just grumbling because in a new year “almost resolution” way I had decided to geotag my already uploaded flickr photos. Now I just feel frustrated again and I’ve given up the idea.