sunset collage

The weather may be stormy but the sunset was dramatic

altogether too cocky

Making really massive panoramas

There is a new version of Mircosoft Research’s ICE (Image Composite Editor) package available. There are several new features but the  important ones are, it handles many images together better, is blindingly fast in the stitching and has a more stable upload to photosythn. I tried it out on this 15 photo panorama set and used the prespective projection. I took the series hand held slowly panning the camera. I didn’t use a gigapan or similar fancy tripod heads,  which aim to rotate the camera around the focal center of the lens, or in fact any tripod at all. Ice informed me that my resulting image spans 101.7 horizontally and 30.9 vertically. I haven’t cropped the image edges so you get a feel of the projection. It only took a few seconds. The resulting image preserved maximum detail all 318MB of it! One trouble with trying to work with an image that size, is few of my programs will even load it let alone manipulate it (one exception is picasa). Adobe photoshop essentials falls over loading it and interestingly so does Window photo gallery! Yet Windows Live Photo Gallery does display it but notes it is too large to edit! The image displayed here above is significantly reduced in size (using picasa)

To see the image in its fall glory (and massive full detail) your need to view it as a photosynth,

First flush of spring

The first yellow flashes of wattle are appearing. Winter is drawing to a close and spring is on its way.

Phew …scary, or self interest?

I was greeted today with this error message, as I tried to view this blog. Yikes this is not good. So how did something potentially nasty as, bin.clear whatever get onto my blog. Why is chrome warning me? I didn’t put it there! Or so I thought…
Turns out CleaSpring is a virally distributed platform to enable widgets to be able to set up on private web pages, blogs and social network site. And I had such a widget for displaying my geotagged photos down on the right hand side column, was the culprit. I gather the sinister bit that Bin.clearspring.com has a tricky flash embed that allows them to track and then aggregate what you are viewing (and then onsell this to advertisers) So it is dangerous a SuperBug?, as the message suggests or is it google not wanting others to be able do better than its own analytics and adsense? Who cares? I don’t like things that collect private info, especially when they don’t tell you and I don’t want my readers being scared away but nasty looking warnings, so no more "free" widgets for me (at least for a while).

The geotagging widget map is gone, If you like seeing where my geotagged photo are taken you can still check out my flickr map (without any warnings).

tidal

misty morning

sky mosaic

A collage of mutliple photos of clouds, reinterepped as part of an oblate ellipsoid lens

Sky High

For PhotoFriday's topic sky high

Face in the rock

aa
I've photographed this particular rock many time before but never sen the eagles head. I walk away about 20m and looked back and it was gone!

On the wing

Winter at the beach

"Algal" Bloom

for PhotoFriday's topic bloom

These sludges on the beach are naturally occuring "blooms" of surf diatoms (not caused by pollution). There is a bit more detail on recognizing them over on the VBOP site

Photo Connections across the connected world

I must admit I have largely ignored (there are a few isolated posts) the many integrations of photo viewers and managers across the many and rapidly changing mobile phones, iPod/MP3 players and other personal devices. They generally had seriously small screens, For example an iPod Nano that takes movies sound like a great idea  till you realise it only takes movies that are240 by 373 pixel, undersized even for you tube. That is this small. However if you are only wishing so share with your friends also on nanos or simpler phones, even for a blog post, it is probably fine.

I also find I have a deep loathing of iTunes, its a dog of a system once you get a fair bit of stuff and truly uncooperative if that stuff is spread across a few computers. Its saving feature was podcasts, it seemed for a long time the best way I could reliably and automatically get podcasts updates to my iPod. With my smaller and lighter sony walkman MP3 player now always in my camera bag, I’ve been looking at Juice (formerly IPodder) and double Twist as ways to do the podcast thing and listen on the walkman. The simpler but still iTunes-like interface and the addition of a picture library in double Twist took my eye and I thought it was time to reinvestigate portable device interconnection and wow a lot is happening there. double Twist also works with android phones, and proclaims itself “iTunes on steroids”, the cure for iPhone envy. Its is, or at least was, an open source project, and is in public beta  and free to download. Its real power relates to how easy it is the share media (Photo and movies as well as audio) across a wide range of USB devices and share them with friends (it has a upload to flickr button built in and a web album).

So then I had a look at nokia’s OVI Suite, yes it has a decent upload, download and management of media files as well, but focused on noika product.

Not to forget picasa, it will read photos from a wide range of inputs including mobile phones and there are nice free Picasa web using IPhone App and Android Apps.

The reach of digital photography is ever widening and making those photos easy to upload and share needs to be the first photography lesson these days.

Into the Haze

 

Take me to the future

If you use flickr, you may have noticed the invite to take you to see the future, in a pretty pink banner across the top of the page. Well I took the bait and had a look from my laptop. Opps the new page is so big I could only see half of it. Not a good look. Yahoo should get ready to expect a lot of negative comments Ok the extra screen real estate is used displaying more. But why? If you want to see the whole screen at once you can use the <Ctrl><-> key combination. This scales down the photo and whole screen display, but it also makes the font smaller. You can scale it backup with <Ctrl><+>. The next issue that might upset a few folk is the icon bar of things to do, which originally always sat above the photo, it appears to have gone missing. Don’t Panic, they are still there under the action pull down menu (its on the left above the photo) and there are now a few more options available. The other surprise is where to find the direct links to photos and the very useful html code to embed in comments or blogs. It is now to be found under the share this pull down menu (beside the action pull down) and the grab HTML item.

For those not impressed with the future there is a Leave this Preview link back up in the pink strip.

It ain't heavy, its my house

The largest of the Aldabra Giant Tortoises at the Melbourne Zoo

For Photo Friday's topic heavy

Rawing Still Life

This almost painterly image came about as a the comparing the processing of some of my RAW files using different software. One of te packages i was “testing” was a trial version of the latest Photoshop Elements. There beside the image on the right hand side is a filter dialogue box and it is set to Artistic (the alphabetically first option) and there is a nice looking apple  and if you move your mouse pointer over it you see it called paint daubs. To temping for me and the image above is the result.

Ok back to the actual comparison, well to be honest there is very little in it. The original photo, artificial flowers taken with strong natural light backlighting, in the top left is the version my camera also creates when I take a RAW image (because I told it too). I liked the lighting and think is is a good image for a comparison of RAW capabilities. The next three are the results you get when you run each piece of software using it auto process or fix option. All three RAW converts have less distinct noise in the background and from there the differences are subtle. Raw Therapee is by far the simplest and fastest to use. The Pentax Lab result is still the one I like best but the Photoshop Elements version is pretty much the same, just slower and a two step process to reach (and the luminosity noise fix is not part of the default).

I am still not totally convinced the extra load for “processing or converting” RAW version is really all that justified in routine snap shot stuff. For difficult exposure, like low light or really special subjects and fleeting moments I now usually hit the RAW button but for the rest of the time I am still likely to be taking JPEG, getting a lot more photos on my memory card and I doubt most folk will even notice.

Red Sky at Night

Warning or Delight it is still always worth a photo (or two)

Reflections

 

Flower Power

 
 
Some Winter Blossums

Fungal Friday

 
More Mushroom, close up and personal