Inktober-ing to relieve the pain of trying to upload videos from a PC into Reels

I do realize that Instagram's reels are just meta/facebook's copy of Tik/Tok BUT why are they so tediously phone oriented. I have a good little project going where I was submitting the prompt "Am I an Artit Now?" to a variety of common AIart tools and felt it would make an interesting video. Which I still think it will.

However after a week of frustration trying to load & edit a decent reel from my PC, I've realise why should I even bother with such un-socialable media. So sorry folks if you are on instragram, you'll have to put up with my Inktober etchings for a while.

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Backtober

I recently listened to a one of Brooks Jensen's "Here's a Thought" short daily podcasts called backtober  Its about how he uses October each year to thoroughly review his digital back up and archives. He might be a bit obsessive, replacing any spinning hard drive older than 3 years, never less it has made me realize I need to totally re-evaluate my situation.

I have not found a good solution to replacing my little NAS unit. So automatic daily backups are not being made anymore!

1. Most of my archiving is now on external (spinning disk) hard drives, and unfortunately, I have experienced 4 of these drives crashing in the past decade. There were duplicates of these so I didn't actually lose anything, Duplicates were on another hard drive (ie same format/technology)
2. I do have archives up to 2010 on CD & DVD, They take up lots of space and I haven't touched them in years.
3. I have a fairly complete "extra" archive on a larger old hard disk that I can connect into my "air gapped" linux archive. When recently accessed one of these older disks started reporting errors (and will have to be replaced, but I'm out of old computer drives!)
4. I haven't evaluated the FreeNAS software yet!

It's October so I need to get onto these now, I like the idea of a full review yearly rather than my irregular monthly attentions (which has been overlooked a few times this year anyway).

Unnatural Crops Explained

The developments in Text to Image AIart generated images are amazing. Things are changing, and largely improving in image quality almost weekly. However one thing I had noticed that was staying fairly constant was unnatural looking crops, the weird truncating of the subjects, particularly people. Surely this was not a new artistic trend I had no knowledge of, or perhaps the artist who's work is being used to train these systems had an aversion to conventional composition.

Example of a headless figure based on stable diffusion prompt

Am I an artist now? John Singer Sargent

Turns out there is a simpler explanation (see quote from a NovelAI blog post below). The unnatural crops are a result of the training set being converted to a square format (so the images are the same ratio) and just arbitrarily using the center of the image.

 Aspect Ratio Bucketing

One common issue of existing image generation models is that they are very prone to producing images with unnatural crops. This is due to the fact that these models are trained to produce square images. However, most photos and artworks are not square. However, the model can only work on images of the same size at the same time, and during training, it is common practice to operate on multiple training samples at once to optimize the efficiency of the GPUs used. As a compromise, square images are chosen, and during training, only the center of each image is cropped out and then shown to the image generation model as a training example.

Are we having fun yet?

It hasn't taken long for my AIart works to fall foul of the censors. Ok not the real censors, the perceived NFW (not for work, standards of the USA based morals on the internet) Whilst I can only see blur in one of the images generated, I expect that it was being interpreted as NUDITY. Which isn't surprising for anything Salvador Dali inspired

I also believe the warning is probably coming from Stable Diffusion itself. That might be a very good thing, indicating they are concerned with the ethics (aka complying with social norms) of the types of images they are being asked to generate. I do know that certain words are not allowed in the text submitted. Again, a bit restrictive but overall, a good thing.

Back to what I was playing with, just having fun. Which I learnt from a Catherine Price in a recent Ted Talk, involves Play, Connection & the Flow State. I like self-referential (meta) subject so I have submitted the phrase "Are we having fun yet?" Firstly the phrase just by itself and the results were totally underwhelming. Perhaps AI doesn't know what fun is yet?

Then by 3 well known artists  / cartoonists / photographers each as modifiers. The results are more encouraging. I've picked the most appropriate in each group of four thumbnails.

Moral: Be careful what you ask for!

The Is it Art? Questioning AIart

The question everyone seems to be asking is AIart really Art?

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My view is that it is just a different form of expression and it does have many of the characteristics of Art. It certainly will give more people the ability to create things. Something they probably lost as teenagers when they decided they couldn't draw. (Some of us continued to draw and maybe never grow up as suggested by Picasso) However, it is already being exploited by copycat and wannabe influencer types that are on that constant production of "content" treadmill for social media. When you first see an image created by DALL-E or Midjourney it's quite amazing but once you have seen a few the novelty does wear off, and with so many similar dystopian examples now being shown it's becoming a little disturbing.

Yet I see AIart in its many forms as a powerful tool in the hands of creatives. Something that is very clear in the above video, which is also worth watching as a simple explanation of what text prompted image generations actually is and the basics of how it works. So I'm keenly following the developments. On the upside, this technology can save a lot of time getting inspired and just fooling around with concepts. On the downside I do worry that the copycats will exploit true artists' ideas and styles, monetizing such works and thereby ripping off the less-discerning public. I can also see that many artists will not wish to have their works included any publicly available neural network, which inevitably means not having any of their art published on the net!. I don't have an answer to this. 

Such is (modern) life.

Rescheduled Photowalk

 Due to the miserable weather last Saturday the "Birds in Flight" Photowalk has been rescheduled to Saturday 1st October. If your were already registered from previous Saturday no need to register. Otherwise, you can still book through Eventbrite. Fingers crossed for nicer weather.

Next Photowalk is Approaching :: Birds in Flight

 

 

Register now through mga Booking Essential.

The birds are flying in, building nest, feeding, roosting and some even have young already. If you haven't photographed birds before its a fun challenge. If you have there will be plenty to see and photograph.  Bring your long lens if you have one.

I can't make promises about the weather, but if its overcast and drizzly the birds will still be flying, so come and bring a raincoat and/or umbrella.

Sandwiched between Ads

 I was trying to read an article in a well-recognized photographic website. However, it had become somewhat tedious, I could really only read a sentence of two at a time and it was being squeezed out by Ads some of which were flashing and cycling through different screens and our show a thumbnail of a video.

I decided to do a couple of screen captures and colour in the article itself (in light blue) versus the areas of Ads (in red). It quickly became very depressing. Its not just that website its pretty much most popular site now, The saddish part for the advertisers is all the ads are for place or things I might already use or vist regulkarly enough, ok except for adobe.

Are you surprised it's pretty much its 50% ads wrapped around just 50% for the article's content?

Amazing but ... ... ...

It seems like only yesterday that I wandered in Mid Journey while looking to get an invite to DALL-E. It was actually almost a month ago but a lot has happened in the field of AIart, especially using artificially intelligent processes to create an image from a text prompt. (I prefer to consider these tools large scale and targeted neural networks, not intelligences)

Vermeer's  "Girl with a Pearl Earring" extended by DALL-E Outpainting

This illustration is from a PetaPixel article about a technique called outpainting,  were an image can be extended seamlessly, The approach uses shadows, reflections, and textures to extend the created background that is designed to blend perfectly with the original image, and uses its ability to pull in details from the millions of images run through its reference neural network. Not by finding actual object but shapes we see as real objects.

These technology advanced are truly amazing and wonderful tools for the creatives and original thinkers. Yet I am willing to bet that the technology will be dragged down on social to just create very dystopian, offensive, distastefully, look at me and wanna-bee influencer copycatism. They are already filling my Instagram feed. One bright outcome could be, it will probably lead to a big popularity to post AIart  as static images back on Instagram, making it largely a photo and interactive place again (#makeinstagramgreatagain) and not just a place to be force feed with ads, reels and the misguided opinions of the haters.

So what is my opinion, have we created ART?

No! The generation of this image by computer is amazing but it has taken a compellingly beautiful and intriguing work of art and made a mundane domestic scene with lots of clutter, you are unlikely to stop and wonder what she is looking at and just swipe past!

Out with the Old

 And nothing New.

I haven't actually touched the Air-Gapped Archive in over 2 years. It seemed a good idea at the time, but I am very cautious about computer viruses and malware, also I see hardware failures as a much bigger issue. No point having a theoretically nice archive but finding the hardware is out of date, not working and/or unfixable just when you need it.

So I've dusted off the little netbook, and its still running Linux fine. It has no trouble recovering everything from the Stora. Getting it set up on my Microsoft based LAN was easy but not exactly transparent.

Looking around there are plenty of options to create a new NAS, but I will start with the Open Source TrueNAS.  Most folk will recognize that it used to be FreeNAS, which seems to be well considered and still widely used. It seems to have a nice simple UI and hopefully will run just like my Stora, only now I will not be mirroring by working directories. Instead storing my complete photo archive on larger external USB drives attached to this NAS. I do expect the performance accessing the archive to be a lot slower. However I hope to make up for this with better organization.

That Didn't Last Long

My Linux/Mint Fileserver has already died three times in the past few weeks, The last time terminally, well I'd already swapped out two hard discs, which both crashed, didn't fancy wasting a third. So the much-altered old HP, aka Obsidan, has been consigned to the hard waste collection. 

Graveyard of Hardware killed by Window10 Updates

Ok back to the Stora, but that's a hard luck story as well. It works but none of my current PCs, and other devices can run the software (incomnpatible drivers stop installation) or even access it via a browser, because Adobe flash is required, which even Adobe no longer support and have removed it from downloads. I had to use my Linux netbook to reconnect (it had old version of the stora software) and "recover" the data from the stora onto already overloaded external USB drives.

Rather than panic I'm going to limp along with a monthly backup based on two copies of data but an old fashion SON - FATHER - GRANDFATHER set of Archives of keepers (files & photos I believe are worth archiving. This involves serious CULLING.

Visiting the Night Cafe

Returning to the #handrawphoto project

This isn't hand drawn but was once a self-portrait photo, inspired by MC Escher. It is now however a construct using VQGAN+Clip Artifical Intelligence algorithm via the website Night Cafe. Rather than Building a random "white noise" Canvas, I started with my own photo, and using a cubitist style

Wandering into Midjourney on the way to Dall-E 2

I'm not sure how I managed to wander into the beta of Midjourney in a search to find Dall-E 2 (an AI based graphic tool that uses text to create an image, well so the claim goes!) I've registered an interest but not got into Dalle-E yet.

Ok what does midjourney make of the phrase "wandering in the light"?

These are just four alternatives  and I haven't, figured out how to refine one of them, yet. They do look like wandering, but out of the shadows rather than in the light. Amazing but still a little uncanny valley.

And here is a nice summary of how this form of AIart (text to Image) has been developing.

Will AIart replace artists any day soon? 

No I don't think so. 

Yet all the developments are occurring rapidly and amazing, and I'm guessing social media will soon be flooded with these unique-ish but not quiet original creations and like fake news how will we be able to tell the authentic,

Next Photowalk :: Birds in Flight

The theme of the next Photowlk in Jells Park is Birds in Flight (details and registration on Eventbrite)

Reluctantly replacing the sky

I'm definitely not a sky replacement guy, but there has been so much discussion and hype about it I figured I should at least try it. This is a photo I was looking to capture the "sparkle" on the lake with a low winter sun backlighting the scene. This is a challenging photo from the rigors of exposure given the Dynamic Range to be captured, Getting detail in the foreground shadows means the sky (which was the vivid Australian sky blue becomes a blown out grey/blue. Importantly I hadn't taken a bracketed set., to no real chance to recover the sky

Original Photo

My recent purchase (Update?) to Luminar Neo. With it big promotion of the ease of Sky Replacement meant I really should try it out, despite my reluctance to do such things. So here are three results, all achieve with one click to select a sky from Luminar Neo's library and a couple of tweaks for Sky Orientation (the positioning of the sun) and also the Scene Relighting.

Adding a blue sky (clouds)  & relighting

Making it Overcast

Moving to the Golden Hour?

Does it worry me that they all look uncannily real?

Yes a little.

Are shadows really there?

 Shadows are an example of something visual that our conscious mind normally ignores. Most often folk don't really see them or at least can't recall them.

Yet they can be wonderful aids to getting interesting compositions or even telling an intersting story.  Also on a sunny day they can help get the best exposure (even without a light meter)

So remember "Whats in the Shadows

Getting Superwide Handheld without the fuss

 

Stitching panoramas has become a lot simpler, but different programs did have different tolerance (or lack of) when stitching a handheld series of photos. Particular in three areas.

1) Near Perfect alignment woes, one photo out of alignment could sabotage the series.

2) Exposure varying from frame to frame, particularly in a clear sky for super wide views, could lead to obvious striping in the sky rather than a smooth blend.

3) Variable overlap, often tripped up the merging or just stop the merging.

I've been sending my updated ON1 Photo RAW 2022 many of these issues in hand held panorama sequences and I've been pleased that it is handling them well. Its also faster off the blocks (to preview) and much more efficient with time and space with the final render. You still have to export the propriety .onphoto file, which can be easily edited with any other tools in ON1 The export can now be a DNG file (ie.a RAW style format)

A Great Day in Jell's Park

Bye, Bye... ... Stora

My little Netgear Stora, has been serving me well for nearly two decades. Primarily for most of its life it was connected to my LAN as a NAS, backing up my work computers and laptops but mirroring my key working directory whenever those computers were connected to my LAN. It worked so well I only had to use it to recover files on two occasions (both either hard disk or computer update crash). Ok last year after a lot of trouble with windows updates on my studio computer and little portable spectra refused to connect to the Stora at start up. It became tedious to work out if things were running ok and I turned the Stora off and have experimented with file & folder synchronization software (still not sure whether automatic or manual synch suit me better, but it does in theory get me close to mirroring my working files.

During the Stora's life the disk space was expanded from a 250GB single drive up to two 1TB disks, mirrored internally. In the early days it also gave family members their own shared space (discontented because it was seldom used). Then was my photo backup area until I started taking RAW format photos and movies and I soon overflowed space available.

I'm actually choosing to go back to having a traditional files server, (locked away in my old comms room). I have a couple of candidate computers that windows 10 updates have killed, well as far as Microsoft is concerned. I want it to be on 24/7 but secure. I also want this computer to have a DVD reader, perhaps even tape or Zip drive (to allow different media backups and/or reading old technologies). Finally, the ability to have two or more external drives connected (ie be able to copy whole archive disks setup). The downside is this will take up a lot more space than the little black box

Despite having used Ubuntu for some time on my little air gapped archive computer, which I have only been using roughly at six-month intervals and thus I hadn't time to become friends with Ubuntu. I've moved to using Linux Mint (it seems a lot cleaner and simpler for the stuff I want ie. little or no learning curve).

So I'm probably going backwards in technology but I trust I will be keeping things simple and reliable in the old fashion dependable sense.

A Bit of Self Promotion

Whilst I cringed at the ongoing tidal wave of "look-at-me" self-promotion on today's social media, I will begin reusing facebook with a bit of self-promotion. Infact I'll also promote my next PhotoWalk, here and on Instagram as well.

Next PhotoWalk :: In Memories of Trees   Meet at Madeline's Cafe Jells Park on Saturday 23rd July at 10am. Register through mga (click on the photo to reach the link)

So sorry folks if you haven't heard from me in while, and now you are getting the same promotional stuff from three sources. Such is social media life!

Social Media when it isn't very social

 

People are prisoners of their phones,
that's why they are called cell phones.

I'm really not qualified to deliver this rant, because I hardly use social media anymore. I'd just like too. I'm totally over all the hassles I keep getting into.  Facebook has recently started showing that I am logged in all the time (and I'm not). Which made me suspect that I was being hacked. Simple I thought! I could change my password or at worst close the account. Trouble is I can't log into Facebook, it won't let me, especially from the forgot password option. Generally it just wanted me to download apps to my phone, from which I had deleted the Facebook app two years ago. I can see my Facebook stream on a browser and others can as well. I had set up the account using the convenient OAuth authentication protocol via my Gmail account. Perhaps I could fix the issue from there? No! Also there is big a catch 22 in my logic, if I can't log in I can't delete the account. Or can I perhaps email support at Facebook. Ok get real, that's pointless!!!!

The other strange thing is I get notifications to my gmail about status messages and posts of my "friends" (I don't recognize all of them). The more I looked the harder it is to believe. What is going on, is someone or something just teasing me?

About three weeks ago I was also not able to post to either of my instagram accounts, and my phone seemed to always be a day behind what it was showing when compared to accessing the same stream on a computer via a browser. I was able to log in and therefore changed my passwords, to no avail. I then went through my followers and saw a few with just one post and flagged as private accounts and not anyone I recognized, so I blocked and deleted them then, A day later I could post again. Were these two things related or is Instagram turning into an unreliable mess like its big sister? Who knows! 

At least I can post on Instagram if I want now.

Emboldened by this success I followed one of the notification links in my Gmail, ignored the request to download any app to my phone and got to my Facebook stream (but not logged in). I tried logging in (no Oath option, in fact nothing). But I felt my phone vibrate and there was a message that looked a lot like a two-factor authentication message with a code/ This is puzzling but when I looked at my browser, I had logged in. Amazing! So I immediately changed my password, no problems. I logged out and was able to log in again. Very strange. I also looked through my friend requests and messages (dozens & dozens). Sorry folks I haven't been ignoring you. There were about a dozen friend requests from people I don't recognize so I deleted them rather than confirm. All good but it still looked like I was still continually on-line even though I logged out. Perhaps someone is teasing me afterall.

An hour or so later I seem to be off line. Hopefully I can get back to using social media to keep in contact with my friends and groups.

PS The caption on my bitmojie cartoon at the top of the post came from a cartoon I saw on Facebook as I was wading through the issues above. However, when I went back to find it so I could acknowledge the source and I can't find it. Damn you Facebook!

Time for an update

I think I've mentioned before that I'm not a fan of the subscription model for software. In theory they deliver to you the most up-to-date versions of the software continuously. However, this really has not been the case in practise (at least so far), You just have to look at adobe who got into the very ..very ....very (there should be more very's but you'd probably stop reading) profitable subscription model a decade ago. Over the first 10 years if you paid the subscription for different bits of their software you would have paid twice to three times more than if you had just bought the software outright and three upgrades within that10 years. What's more they had not upgraded that much. 

Now however, Adobe are becoming more competitive in terms of new upgrades and modules because of the number of alternative products. Also the alternative products quickly learned to offer both purchase outright (with upgrade under 50% of the original purchase price) or subscription,

Anyway the idea of waiting three years, two or three upgrades, has worked well for me. Unless of course the new upgrade has feature(s) I really need. I also like the option that I can download the new version as a trial, with all the new features active to test out.

All this is a long way around saying I was happy to update from ON1 Photo RAW 2020 to ON1 Photo RAW 2022.5, not just for the new resize feature (which is great) but it makes a big difference for me and multi-image panorama. I also find the export a processed image nicer/

Not that the 2020 version was bad, it was slower, particularly on the export) and didn't do a such great job when the dynamic range across the whole panorama is large (The result from the 2022 version is shown above)

A puzzling cloud at Inverlock

 I made the ABC weather last night with a photo of an unusual cloud. It appeared to be a regular puffy cumulous rising high into the sky BUT it was chopped in a series of segments, perhaps strata might be a better term. I could not figure out what might cause this.? Hence sending it into the weather and perhaps an explanation (there was none)

Thanks to Steve Keyes aka Sandyfeet.Photography for the TV screen Capture

It wasn't till later as I was processing this ultra wide multi-image panorama taken shortly after the above photo that I realized I was tricked by the perspective. The puffy clouds were actually very flat, at the same height but different distances from me.

The morale(s) of the story are stay inquisitive, always be ready to take a photo (or two!) and don't forget to hashtag your photos on social media.

preDawn Warm & Cool

I'm up in FNQ (Far north Queensland) enjoyng it, So little time and no reason to blog (otherthan its overcast & raining). before I travelled north I wtshe some of the sessions on B&H's recent Optix conference, and Stop motion phtography caught my interest. There was a lngthy list of gear (its was B&H running it after all) and I though I've gott most of that, perhaps I need to read up a bit about the intervalometer, perhaps not.

I have a great view to the east out over the coral sea, So it was back to early morning getting up. At least its not cold. In case you've never tried it, a dark to light stop motion is a challenge, But I like a challenge.

The earlt starts can be rewarded in other ways. Even when They are just glimpses.

Don't Worry, Stay Happy Taking Photographs

 Go figure I'm a keen photographer, but not really into Stories or Reels, bit over all the ads popping up on YouTube and definitely not in into Facebook or Tik Tok. I set up this blog primarily to share what I was discovering about digital photography. So, what happened?

My suspicion is the rise of social media has gobbled up original content, and used it to keep you watching so they can charge advertisers (and they make squillions). The actual creatives get lost in the millions of copycat wanna-bees and if they receive anything it's a pittance. See my post about Danny Gregory's recent essay.

Really unfortunately we the viewers of social media gets suck into the black hole of the death scroll, picking up the photo to look at social media way too often, swiping and swipe again without really paying attention, not properly looking, swiping and swiping some more. At the end you don't feel refresh, you are more likely to feel frustrated or depressed. As Adam of Firstman Photography points out you are much better off spending the time actually out photographing, getting the benefit of exercise and being out in the real world, perhaps even nature.

It worth watching to the end because Adam gives some very heart-felt encouragement for those of us with a deep passion for and care about photography to stick in there

Well am I doing anything about it! YES

You can make the change too. It's easy to put down your phone and pick up your camera (or click on a different icon/app on your smartphone, phones can be good cameras too).

Ok what about sharing your photos? That will be an upcoming post (soon but not exactly sure when),

Getting a starburst effect

My attempt on the photowalk to demonstrate how to get a starburst effect really just showed I needed to clean my lens. BUT here is what I wanted to show. If your camera can stop down the lens to a small aperture (a high f number such as F22) do that. It is then a very small hole for the light to come through. Then find a place that the strong sun light (even though it was overcast) is peeking through (such as a gap in the branches of the silhouetted tree). It's that easy.

Remember to change the F stop back after taking the photo to avoid the diffraction (allowing you to get the starburst effect), causing problems in your normal photos.

What happens when you separately photograph White, Grey & Black Sheets

 

It's a simple question.

What happens if you take a white sheet A grey Sheet and a Black sheet and photograph them separately. 

Fill the veiwfinder with just a single colour.

If you have trouble focusing, you can move the center of the viewfinder to the edge and half press the shutter button. Don't push it all the way and move back into the center of the sheet and full press the shutter button.

Hmm, is this what you expected?

All the photos look a pretty similar grey! Is there something wrong with my camera? Well no.

So now put a small reference card in the middle of each sheet. This little card could be a photo, it just needs to contain a decent tonal range (eg from very dark to very light. Take the photos again.

These were all taken with the same camera. The only thing I did was push the shutter button once i has focussed on each sheet.

One hint is my camera is working exactly as it should. There is nothing wrong with it.

Try this out yourself. You can do it with just two sheets (eg black & white). 

If you want you can leave a polite comment explaining what's happening but I might leave my further discussion for a couple of weeks.

Have fun

Death Scrolling, Changes & Danny's Essays

 I do enjoy Danny Gregory's weekly essays (see also video below), but I am rapidly running out of patience with two things.

1) The inconsistency of the social media giants (watch for more post on that topic)

2) System upgrades that just happen when you turn on your computer or pickup the phone (I've already written a lot about my frustration with upgrades particularly window)

So where that that get me, Basically Nowhere

Which means it's time to forget them, pick up my camera or brush and listen with the occasional chuckle to Danny's take on the situation.

 

Photowalks Resuming (at last)

The lengthy covid-19 lockdowns and some personal health reasons, meant I stopped running Photowalks some time ago. I'm pleased to announce I am resuming them in conjunction with MGA (the Monash Gallery of Art). There will now be a small fee (to help cover the administration), and I encourage anyone with a camera (including phones) to come along.

Sunday June 12th. 1:00pm

Meet at Monash Gallery of Art

860 Ferntree Gully Road

Wheelers Hill, VIC 3150

Note registration is now via the mga eventbrite site or events on their web page,

The Connections Exhibition is OPEN

 

Wednesday Wanderer's Connnections Exhibition opens today at AGRA Gallery

22 artists (including me) are represented with 82 works. If you want to "Meet the Artists" you will have that opportunity on Saturday & Sunday 5/6th March; 1-4pm

Unfortunately, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi died last year. His wisdom from living through the second World War, his father being the Hungarian Ambassador in Rome at the time the communist takeover of Hungary in 1949. It is probably just my fantasy but it would have been great if he could have sat down for a quiet chat with Putin and explained the misery, tragedies, insecurities that are the toll of losing freedoms, jobs, homes, can impose on the innocent. His deep wisdom into the secret to happiness is still very relevant today. 

This is an important TED talk that Mihaly gave in back in 2008 covering the lead into how he started describing the flow experience. It is wonderful context told in a series of stories,

His book (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, will give you greats insight in the Flow State

Wednesday Wanderers and the Flow State

The wanderers began by happen-chance. Three of us started our own small plein air painting/sketching group out in the real world. Soon after Victoria began it first lock down and after a couple of rocky test, we started meeting on zoom on Wednesday at 10:00am. It was a welcome get together and we started painting a shared photo supplied by one of the participants since it was the free zoom meeting we only had 40 minutes for the session before we got cut off. Not a lot of time to carry out a watercolour painting of a scene you had not seen before.

The Watercolours Society of Victoria had purchased the Pro version of zoom and kindly allowed us to use their service so we were no longer bound by the 40 minute limit but kept the rough timing and format.

There is a Chinese proverb attributed to Lao Tzu

“If you are depressed you are living in the past.
If you are anxious you are living in the future.
If you are at peace you are living in the present.”

It is this being in the present when you are painting, that probably explains lot of the popularity of the Wanderers

Mihaly Explains [watercolour on Canvas by Norm Hanson]

I believe it has a lot to do with helping the participants slip into what the Psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi identified and calls the Flow State. In which the duration of time is altered, hours pass in minutes, minutes can stretch out to seem like hours.

After interviewing many successful people for his study of the Psychology of Optimal Experience, he concluded that there were seven common experiences shared by these people. He calls these the Elements of Enjoyment

1. Confronted by a task, with a chance of completing it.
2. Be able to concentrate on the task
3. Task has a clear goal
4. Immediate Feedback
5. Could participate with a deep but effortless involvement (remove from the constraints and frustration of every day life)
6. Be enjoyable (allowing people to exercise control over the actions)
7.  Concern for self disappears (yet paradoxically the feeling of self emerges stronger after the flow is over.

Mihaly liked to explain this in two dimensions, the challenge versus skills.

He believes you can most easily move into flow if you are aroused (but anxious) by the challenge and you take the opportunity to practise and improve your skills, or you are confident in your skill (but bored) until you get inspired by the challenge. Flow occurs when a task’s challenge is balanced with one’s skill.

A very important aspect of the Wanderers is the group dynamic. Mihaly studied and advised many sporting groups including the successful  Australian Women’s Hockey team, Australian Olympics cyclists and ice skaters. He lists these important characteristics for teams to Achieve Flow and thus improve their collective performance by achieving group flow.

1. Group empathy (including helping others to achieve their desired performance)
2. Activity has clear goal
3. Opportunity to be both autonomous and at the same time cooperating in the group.
4. Immediate feedback (both personally and shared with the team)
5. Skill required matches the difficulty of the task. Some individuals can focus on different skills 

Whilst we were not always in focused together, and seldom on all aspects. Those participating were generally focussed in the present challenge testing their skills and often reaching the flow state.  Mihaly says it is this flow that allows the enjoyment of experiencing that you are good at something while you are doing it. It didn’t matter so much if you had or had not finished or looked the same as others.

 Norm Hanson
Febraury 2022

Connecting What and Who are the Wednesday Wanderers?

 What were you doing during the lockdowns? (well assuming they are over) 

Here is something I did and we are having an exhibition, If you are in Melbourne or allowed into Victoria please come and have a look.

Wednesday Wanderers was born out of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Unable to meet or paint en plein air during strict lockdowns, three committee members from the Watercolour Society of Victoria were feeling isolated and fed up with their own four walls.  It’s easy to forget that before COVID, many people had never used or even heard of Zoom.  We used it to connect a diverse community of watercolourists interested in escaping from the pandemic blues once a week.  We adopted a quirky speed painting format that challenged our skills and fit in with the technology requirements. 

Immediately it became apparent that there was a need for something like this, as membership quickly grew.  It has enabled artists who could never have come to a real-world paint-out to spend time some enjoyable time painting together in a safe environment.  Time poor artists, artists who live far from Melbourne, housebound artists, and those caring for family members. 

 We continue to meet fortnightly now that lockdowns are presumably a thing of the past.  We now have Wanderers in many parts of Victoria, as well as New South Wales, Western Australia, and the United States.  We have become a warm, welcoming community that continues to grow.

,,, Jane Elliston

Another Sponge Tip for Watercolourists

Carting around water pods at the beach, if your sketching can be just one extra task too many. I decided to try out using a couple of pieces of foam/sponge. One to clean pigment off the brush to other to hole clean water to wet the brush.

The tropics come to Gwondanaland

  

Melbourne is famous for having 4 seasons in a day. However we seldom actually see a tropical style downpour. My Cretaceous garden has been suffer through some summer heat (and no rain) but today the rains came (about 26mm in a little over half an hour. Other parts of Melbourne had more.

Anyway my little garden, for a few moments took on the mantle of a true rainforest.

What is the Sponge for?

"CULL"ing the four letter world that photographers don't want to speak

I'm getting close to filling my 5TB disk on which I store my mastercopy of my photo library. There are almost half a millions files, a lot are jpeg & RAW pairs and there are movies as well. This actually only covers my 2010 to 2021, The 1999 to 2009 is on a differeent 1,5TB disk, Then there are 6 2TB off-site backup copies in 2 sets of 3 external usb harddrives, that I rotate every 2 months. Its becoming a bit of a production. Also i'm now faced with the isses to determine what is the most sensible way to get extra space.

1. Probably the most likley, is I'll take two of the external disks from my second offsite disks and add a third local photo library disks (I do have one USB port left) and make just one offsite set of 4 2TB disks. The surplus 2TB can become a rotating backup of the last 2 or 3 months. OK this will give me "some" headroom for at least the first part of next year.

2. Sit down and do some serious "CULLing" of things I am never likely to reconsider. This is that really scary thing a lot of photographers or even frantic smartphone snappers, will have to face at some time. 

Why has this come about because I have and use photo mechanic and (usually) spend a bit of time when I "ingest" (load the photos from the camera card onto the computer) my photos where I in theory on load the "keepers"? The out of focus, poor composition, unfortunate expression and straight bad images always get deleted straight away.

The problem is I have come to like and use techniques that have multipled the photos I take. Particularly with the fun features on my little olympus cameras (HDR & Focus bracketting, Panoramic stitching, Burst mode and PRO capture). Also the new favoutite and automated intervalometer for stop motion. Ok I blame them, but perhaps I have become a little less dilligent and skip through these sets as I import them, not being strict enough on what gets deleted.

OK could I find and use modern software (specifically AI based system) to help me re-tackle the horrible task of reviewing and further deleting my photos. Seems it could even be an economically attractive option as well if I could get ride of perhaps 40% of my files, that could translate into 3-4 years before I have to outlay on extra disk capacity. Not sure what say two 4-5TB external harddrive (or the equivalent cloud storage) might cost but lets estimate around $150 each or $300 now. If I could find something for $100 that looks economiclly attractive.

What started this was an "offer" for AfterShot at $9.99 ( and thats probably USD$) but in my mind that seemed perfectfor my budget and I download the "free trial". It did a few good things, like  sneak preview grouping that used AI to find those images most like the ones shared on instagram and like services and was very strict with focus, Howeer a lot of its features like eyeclosed andface detect stuff didn't help me a lot also I was getting almost as many possible duplicates as I had photos (ie jpeg & raw pairs were reporting as two duplicates) and in most cases it was flagging the jpeg as the file to keep. Then I realised that the $9.99 was just per month and the discount was jut for a year if you paid up front after that it was $14.99 per month. Buying the extra disk now would be a much better option. I can see a wedding or group photographer is likley to save a lot of time. However what I am looking for is a cheap space creator. 

I do own another programs called  Corel AfterShotPro, which is a light weight RAW Editor I still use it occasionally mainly on my little HP Spectre when away from home. So one aftershot is probably enough. It does allow me to label/keyword, rank, colour code, and flag as Pick or reject but manually not via and automatic AI assisted approach.