Storm over Hawkes Bay

Sunny one moment and then a full on thunder storm with driving hail the next. The storm was so intense it even made the National news (complete with a photo of a water spout further up the coast).

haumoane herons

 

Tonal Restoration on washed out photos

It was a very overcast day and that makes large view distance photos very washed out. I saw the sheep on the next ridge and thought it would make a good photo, so I took a bracketed set (5 photo at 1 EV steps). And surprise, surprise they are washed out! Not to worry I took the set expecting to use the HDRI technique to restore some tonal depth and detail. Using my version of picturenaut on my portable apps memory stick, I used ass the basic defaults and exposure tone mapping with automatic contrast set in the histogram dialogue. This insures that picturenaut tries to use all useable pixels across all the photos to reproduce tones across the extended tonal range. So you will be able to appreciate how closed to the edge the sheep are grazing.

morning glimpse

sky & lake

These multi-image stitched panoramic views of Lake Taupo are more about the clouds and sky than the lake and landscape. I’m informed these unusual clouds are locally know as “Mare’s Tales” (thanks Wendy). Clouds alone are something that I have found can be a challenge to match up for Autostitch, especially for hand held sequences.  So I was careful to keep a little bit of the horizon in each image also I have taken the photos in the vertical “portrait” mode to maximize the vertical range and having two rows of images within each composite panoramic image.

Drama in the sky

   

...and the winner is.

Panning to follow the action will help keep the subject in focus but nicely blur the surroundings. Enhancing the feeling of movement

Some late summer budding

Water, water, everywhere

One thing about living on the side of a hill, you don’t except a flooding to come from above. Last night changed my mind. The intense storm saw the roadway turned into a creek (see video below, sorry about the quality it was taken on my phone). My own rain gauge read 155mm from when the rain started yesterday to 8:30am today. Considerable more than the 115mm registered at the Bureau Of Meterologty weather station at Scoresby.

 Having a look around this morning indicated that many of the concrete lids in the storm drains have been lifted, by the pressure of the shear about of run-off water, and several have suffered gouging of the soil around them. However very clearly the storm water and drainage around here largely worked! Well done city planners.

I was a little amazed at how much rubbish was included in the debris.



The Dandenong creek is in flood and at least around Jells Park the flooding effects have been mitigated. The new $1million foot bridge across dandenong creek near Ferntree gully road, fine you just can get onto it at the moment. The ferntree gully road bridge is fine and the road still open.

Still nature always seems to provide something nice to photograph. I’m guessing the spider isn’t so pleased!

When you are out it the rain try to keep your camera as dry as possible. I cover mine with a clean face washer and keep wiping away any moisture. A plastic bag may lead to serious condensation, so use one as a last resort. If you are really worried and have lots of money you could investigate raincoats for cameras.

Dandenong Creek @ Jell’s Park

It may not be in flood yet but the dandenong creek is pretty high & wide at Jells Park.

Into the sunset

The gathering clouds, interpretted in HDRI (with "Eye Catching" tone mapping)

For PhotoFriday's Topic gathering

Wellington’s Civic Square

Wellington’s Civic Square, has a host of great photographic opportunities, including Neil Dawson’s Fern Ball. Its up in the sky in the lower panorama


I had some fun with some multiple image stitched panoramas, using autostitch, which I felt lent themselves to the vast open space and vistas out over Wellington Harbour

Napier’s “Tortured” Trees

The weather for Hawke's Bay is pretty mild. Yet these foreshore trees have developed interesting and very individual “tortured” and twisted trucks

Hasting Panorama

Hastings was also wiped out by the 1931, and its architecture is just as worthy of view as its better known "art nouveau" sister Napier

Harvest Moon?

Its spring (not autumn) and more likely coloured by dust, pollen and the threat of plague locust.

Doubling the size of my scanner

The world of paper sizes has standardized a lot on the A size ranges, well except for the USA which still clings to a multiplicity of inch based measures. So most of us now have A4 sized printers and scanners and life is easy, right?

Not quite, most photo systems are still geared to those American sizes, 4” by 6”, 10” by 8” etc. wasteful if you can only print on A4 sheets. It is ok most printers can not print to the edge of the page so a blank border is necessary. The conspiracy deepens because most pre-cut frames are also made to suit those inch based, so now perhaps a bit of trimming is required. The mistmatch becomes even more frustrating when it comes to flat bed scanners. Few of use want to scan nice A4 sheets, we want to scan thick text book, notebooks and even perhaps your own painting and sketched, like me. The trouble is whilst most of my sketch books are in fact A3 or A4 I like to paint on quarter watercolour paper sheets (which is approx 11" by 15"" and these are too large to fit on the scanner bed. The best watercolour papers are still largely "handmade" using same "Impreial sheets"  (22" by 30") as in pre-industrial times. Interestingly the paper weight is now usually measure in grams, and 300 grams is my favourite.

The solution is really very simple, just scan the image in two (or more passes) and use your photo stitching software to paste the two images together.Voila! you have just doubled the size of your scanner. You need to ensure there is sufficient overlap between parts, 10% is probably the minimum 20-30% might be extravagant. If your stitching software is having trouble you can always add your own registration marks to the edge of the scan drawn on a price of masking tape if you don’t want to mark the work.


Most scanners will try to automatically adjust the scanning to get the “best” image quality and many now have  “advanced” filtering but using photo software will also give you access to more control of colour bias, contrast and brightness controls, cropping and straightening than you Multi-function printer bundle includes. As I mainly manage all my picture in picasa I find the simple tuning and filters jus perfect to bring the scan as close as possible to the original.

An ordinary scanner & your favourite photo software can make a powerful combination

Soaring high

Pathway to spring