Hung and open …”meet the artist” next weekend

My exhibition “An Artistic Journey :: In Search of Sir John Monash” is hung and open at the Highway Gallery in Mount Waverley. It includes a range of my works, few of which I have been posted on the social webs, so if you are in Melbourne and interested in my geological panels, photography, and photo mosaic collages please consider coming along to the “meet the artist” on Sunday 10th. November.

My Monash works follow on from my previous geological panels and paintings, on the surface they are firmly represented by earthly things, the soil and rocks. Yet they also reflect on three key aspects of Sir John's life. His military life, his life setting up the SEC and powering Victoria and his passion to build the Shrine of Remembrance. They have been created with the assistance of an arts and culture grant from the Monash City Council, which allowed me to learn about casting and moulding, to bring stronger dimensionality into my geological panels, experiment with a range of materials and hold this exhibition.

Late Afternoon Spring Light

The spring weather, particularly in the period from the grand final until the Melbourne Cup is normally pretty special. A great time to enjoy the garden and wonderful lighting for keen photographers. This year the weather have been fluctuating been cold wintry days and hot almost summer patches. Today however it was near perfect,

The Importance of Provenance

I have been watching the great ABC TV series where Edmund Capon tells the story of the Art of Australia. Given that the series is only in three parts it is not surprising that the works presented are just a snippet of what was going on, albeit a handpicked subset that tries to represent the import works that bought change. However it was watching the discussion of the intense group of artist in the Heide Circle that bought home to me one very important aspect of photography for artist, often overlooked. That is the important task of just recording what is going on, establishing provenance, where did the works come from? why where they created? or simple what is the work behind the artist’s shoulder? Not every one will be famous and have future gallery curators forensically combing through their old photo collection, perhaps it will be more like someone interested in your art checking the social web. Galleries of your works are probably not going to please them as much as a picture of you working of some important piece (especially the work they want to buy!)

These are a couple of photos of me working on the clay pattern for one of my bas-reliefs of John Monash for my next exhibition “In Search of Sir John Monash” to be held at The Highway Gallery, Mt. Waverley, 2nd to 15th November 2013.

lovelocks or just another form of graffiti?

who gives a TOS?

Google are about to updated their terms of service (TOS) and it is very refreshing to see an on-line service provider, firstly notify its users about the changes and also focus on those aspects that let the user control what is to be shared. However the common click to accept terms, expressed in very verbose legalese, are seldom read by most of us. we just want to join up not spend half and hour or more trying to figure out what is meant.

If you are creative type and produce original works it is really in your interest to review the TOS of all on-line services you use. Many services assume ownership of anything your uploaded into their services, Facebook and Instagram assume you given then very draconian rights over redistribution, Dropbox which one held part of the middle grade have recently changed to claim more rights over your content.  Flick/Yahoo! and google+ are generally considered better. Terms of Service are fine, and necessary, they cover such things as the services right to cancel your account if you do bad things and the fact that they may take little or no responsibility for what you upload, most don’t claim they own your content but that statement will probably be followed by a clause that you “grant them non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to use the Content that you post”. If you are not ok with this perhaps it is best not to use that service!

If like most of us you have tried to read the fine print and are still uncertain, here is a community (ToS;DR Terms of Service Didn’t Read) and website that understand and they aim to address and fix the biggest lie on the web “I have read and agree to the Terms” in one click!

Flickr …further into the darkness?

Flickr has begun unveiling some more changes, specially at the moment it is a different layout for the main photo viewing page. Its darker, and more “pictorial”, a lot of the text information that was spread around the original format loaded into the sidebar with more icons. Is this more intuitive? I’m not sure, but the images are clearly dominant now. The Photo Page is probably the most important display in flickr, so I want them to get it right, they can take their time and not overwhelm us with change for change sake. What I noticed is that quiet a few features that where available under the three dot icon aren’t their yet, so for the time being after you had a play with the new layout you will probably want to get back to the old layout, which is the bottom option when you click on the blue help & feedback button on the lower left.

Where are these weird links coming from?

Looking back through my blog post I have come across a number of weird links, Not all are like this but this one is really weird. I can only assume either google has been doing some “recoding” of links to other items in blogger and picasa web albums or some entity (a hacker or scammer) has managed to access my google account. Just in case of the later I’ve changed my password yet again! It is possible theses are related to changes in google+ photo. They seem easy enough to fix once you know which are the broken links, you can just edit them with the correct link location, which in the case of photos is a bit or work BUT I don;t feel link searching through every link in my 1480 posts and manually fixing the ones that are broken! 

This not one of the typical messages given in google’s help for hacked sites. Has anyone else seen massages like this?

In light of the adobe hack it is probably that now id the right time to change your passwords on every social site (and close the accounts on those ones you not regularly using)..

Catch 22 on the way to Error 500 and other nightmares

I was trying to forget about my frustrations with adobe and do a bit more testing on uploading RAW files to Google+ for a blog post. Alas I hit further frustration there as well, in preparing my blog post about which format I use and why I took a series of comparative photos and realizing that any posted images would just be jpeg version I decided to upload them as RAW files via my google drive. All nice and easy, just takes a little time the sync the files, The problems started when I tried to share the directory and get a link for my blog post to the album I had just created. If I tried to do this via google+ I just get a post into google+ and I can not figure out what the hardlink to that post might be, If there even is one. So then I looked in the picasa web album view, but attempting the old share now goes into the google+ share only now it doesn't work and I managed to get the error 500 a few times. What I could do was just connect to the album in picasa web and copy that link into my blog post. Trying the same approach in google+ photo, gets a much longer link string and at first didn't work and then it did! This prompted me to remember that strange warning about the address being changed when I was first investigating the updates in google+ photo. Ok I still don’t know what this means but as I look back in my blog a lot of the images are not displaying correct in the blog but do display when clicked on. They have very weird link names? Very puzzling?

I am starting to worry I’m just becoming a bit of a grumpy, and I’m not going to waste more time investigating in the hope it will all be fixed,  Now as I am writing this I got a notice that google+ has Auto Awesomed me! Not the original photos in google drive but via the jpegs in my blog post? Its all a bit to incestuous, They are meant as comparative photos not a animated movie btw.

Really google does your right hand know what the left is doing?
Please leave Picasa and Picasa Web uncompromised.

.JPG vs RAW (.PEF) vs .DNG

arning, I must preface this post with the advice that this is very much my personal view, based on my experience rather that on a calibrated benchmark comparison. I have the choice of using jpeg, two types of propriety RAW  and .DNG as an alternative Raw format on my Pentax K20D. I have found the decision as to which format to standardize on hard to resolve and opted to save both RAW+jpeg where there is the such an option. So here is a little about my (in)decisions and why.

All my current and past digital cameras and cameraphones have all captured .jpeg files and my photo collection is dominated by that format. I have come to appreciate picasa as the very best way to manage jpeg files, its fast, simple and behaves. My many mistress project has lead me to see that previewing jpeg thumbnails is by far my preferred way to cull and organise my photos as I load them. At this stage whilst I might do a little cropping I tend not to do any elaborate post processing. Occasionally at this stage I will email images and very occasionally upload them to the net which generally require resized jpeg version (again picasa does this well) without much photo retouching.

There is also no doubt in my mind that you can coax much more out of RAW files than you can get out of the equivalent jpeg. The reasons for this is buried in the image "development" process happening in the camera, to take the sensor readings and produce an image. There are several steps, demosaicing of the Bayer array, white balance assumption, tone mapping, colour saturation and contrast, then image compression before it is written to the camera memory card.. Probably the biggest limitation is that the image must be packed into an 8 bit representation. Each step requires interpretive decision about how to preform the development and many are not easily recovered if the steps lead to less than desirable processing. That’s where having access to the original information in a RAW format file is a big advantage, but now the steps must be specifically undertaken by the photographer, which takes time and experience. Often a lot of time! The jpeg representation, or at least a suitable small sized thumbnail of it, is also needed at the camera itself to be display on the LCD screen on the back of the camera. 

Pentax JPEG *** (5.9MB)	Pentax JPEG **** (10.0MB)

There is a trade off between the time take to write the large RAW files and the smaller jpeg files, which can mean that you can take fewer images per second, because there can be a bottleneck writing to the card, When you just shoot raw, the jpeg development steps are likely to be run anyway, not only for the image on the LCD screen but most Raw files also include this jpeg thumbnail, for use in quickly previewing the Raw file contents. So in RAW+jpeg both file formats must be written to you to your memory card and it is then just an issue of time taken to write both and extra space required. So fewer unique images fit on the memory card before it is full. Rather than opt for a larger memory card. I've chosen to have several 4 & 8GB cards that have faster read write access, so other than having to change cards more often I probably don't see much difference. There is one exception which is tracking birds in flight and I'll discuss this in a future post.

Pentax RAW  .PEF (13.2MB)	Pentax RAW  .DNG (23.1MB)

I have a Pentax which is one of the few manufacture that offer DNG as an alternative RAW format, Leica and Hasselblad are the only others I know of that can save to DNG in the camera. DNG can have one significant advantage, in my view, the files can be 15 to 20% smaller than the equivalent RAW files if they are lossless compressed. This is may be why many photographers have chosen to convert their RAW files to DNG on import. Anyone that has tried the convert on import into lightroom will know that this is simple but a very time consuming process, On a full card this is not just time for a quick coffee this is tme to have dinner and some. However when I choose that format on my Pentax K20D camera, the DNG files are uncompressed and they are almost double the size of the PEF files. Against this there are some differences, just differences not improvements, in how the images are rendered particularly in lightroom and I can't see any advantage capturing in DNG

Cannon JPEG (4.5MB)	Canon RAW .CR2 (16.8MB)

Because of the time/file size trade-off I have stuck with using more compressed versions of the jpeg files (on my Pentax this is the JEPG *** rather than the uncompressed JPEG**** format) when using the RAW+jpeg. This compressed option is the only one available on my canon when using RAW+jpeg. The images posted above are all jpeg files of reduced size, so they can be dispalyed on the web. So it is not possible to show the subtle details and differences here. I have also uploaded the unedited files to my google+ JPEG vs RAW vs DNG photo album. If you are interested this may given extra insight.

So I hope you understand why I choose to store RAW+jpeg and have opted to stick with the PEF format (and .CR2) rather than use DNG from the camera. I do use the DNG format in some special circumstances but that’s for another post.This discussion is prompted by to my thinking longer term focus

 Thanks again to Jessica Hische for her great drop caps.

Ahhh! Adobe, why didn't you tell us?

On Friday my patience with adobe ran very thin.. I have had enough of the message that my beta test had run out, every time I start my computer, especially as I was never able to install it. Then I got the following message as I tried to log into creative cloud. I wanted to use Kuler to finish an art project for a self imposed deadline to print works for an upcoming exhibition.

The message looked authentic but seemed suspect to me, why was the only option to change my password and why was this necessary but on checking the links names I followed the instructions, and waited ...and waited …and waited for the promised email. After 20 minutes I gave up and did other things. About half an hour later the email had arrived and I followed a new clink on link which only gave me the option of typing in a new password and a duplicate. Now this made me really suspicious! Being sent a false login page to capture your password is a very common phishing scam. However on investigation I again felt that the link address I could see and the mysterious email address cs-auto from adobe were possible legit. So I did some what cautiously change my password. Ok no drama after that, other than I missed my self imposed deadline. I also suggest if you in the same position, consider changing your password a second time, like I did, but  this time accessing adobe.com and my adobe directly, not by a link from an email!

Now I see what was going on, Adobe has had a massive hacker attack, and only today can I find information from them about their "Customer Security Alert". If Adobe knew about this on the 17th September why didn't they notify their subscribers back then?

More importantly why did adobe choose to run something to force everyone involved to change their passwords,

1. Without telling them why ?
2. Doing it such a scammish fashion?

So what am I doing now, making plans for an “adobe free” studio computer!

Not so busy

This corner is supposed to be Melbourne's busiest, wasn't so busy at lunchtime yesterday, just one horse and cart?

Popular Image formats

opular image formats, change with time. At the moment jpeg and raw are the dominant players in storage of photographs from digital cameras. Actually RAW is not a format per se it just means the camera manufacturers format for the complete exposure information has been stored directly from the camera sensor, it is general uncompressed (and therefore large), not enhanced in any way (it will usually look flat on first view) but will have a higher dynamic range and often a higher bit depth than the equivalent Jpeg image. RAW file are often described as digital negatives, which is not truly correct in detail but is a good analogy because, like a film negative a raw file typical require some development or processing before it can be shared on the web (usually after being exported as a jpeg file) or Printed.

Adobe’s DNG (Digital NeGative) is heavily promoted by Adobe as the “standard” RAW format, yet few camera manufactures, especially the bigger ones have not yet embraced it. I have a pentax which does offer DNG as an alternative RAW format, Leica and Hasselblad are the only others I know of that can save to DNG in the camera. DNG does have one significant advantage, in my view, the files can  be 15 to 30% smaller than the equivalent RAW file when it is compressed. So many photographers convert to this format as they upload there photos. Another advantage, which is a two edged sword, is that the metadata and details of how an image is processed can be save in the DNG file, where as no camera metadata and processing details normally have to be stored in a separate file (eg an .xmp side car file) for propriety RAW format. The hidden danger here is you can unintentionally overwrite your original image with new edit and potentially degrade your image in an unrecoverable way.This also makes the DNG file less like a negative and more like a digital print.

JPEG  (.jpg, or .jif) is by far the most popular format for the capture of images on cameras and smart phones and their display on the web. It uses lossy compression, which means some detail is discarded to enable smaller file sizes. The degree of compression is generally selectable and is a trade-off between size and image quality. There are several variation but the common format adopted by camera manufacturers embedded metadata about the camera setting in the file header. It also contains delails of the colour space to be used. Virtually all photographic software and browsers are be able to read and render jpeg files.

PNG was designed as a lossless successor to the gif format, largely because of l;licencing fears over the gif format, and it is probably still the most wisely used lossless format for web display being supported by all browsers. Unlike gif it does not support animation, but it does support extended pelleted colour scheme (eg 324bit RGB & 32bit RGBa). It does not store metedata about the image, which may explain why it have been ignored by camera manufactures Its popularity is mainly in computer graphics and illustration, but can be used for saving photographs to be displayed on the web.

The TIFF format is one of the first image formats, it can use lossless as well as lossy compression and does have higher bit depth for its colour rendition (ie 16bit rather than 8bit). It was for a while the format of choice for very large images and a few camera manufactures did have it available as an optional format. It can be processed by most (but not all) photo management software and is still popular in the graphics, digital illustration areas, as well as the output format of choice from some HDR programs. Most web browser will do a reasonable job rendering tiff files, The underlying tiff standard has nit had a major updated since the early 90’s, but it is another format under the control of adobe.

GIF was once a very popular format to display of images on the net, because of its generally smaller size. It is still popular for some aspects of web page design because it can incorporate transparent zones within the image. a variant of the format also allows animated graphics to be created, and these have become very popular (overly so). If you load 3 to 5 similar images into google+ it will create an autoawesome, which is an animated gif stop motion style animation from those photos. I’m not aware of any cameras that capture photos as gif (some wencams and scanner can). There has been a lot discussed recently on how to pronounce the name of this format I still favour Gif (the sound G sound as in giraffe) but apparently one of the developers of the form prefers Jiff (pronouced with a soft J as in Jill)

Webp is a new format, specifically developed for web display,that is being developed by google but as opensource. It offers significantly small files and faster download. It is available in both lossless and lossy formats to give greater compression removing some detail. It does provide for storage of metadata. It is not yet widely supported but the chrome browser and applications like everpic can display it now. And while on pronunciation this is often called "weppy"

The variation of RAW, DNG, GIF & TIFF are all propriety formats potentially under the control of specific companies, and some worry that if and when these companies fail or probably worse they suddenly enforce strict licensing on patents, then these formats "could" potentially become difficult to use and exchange. I suspect the large number of existing images in these formats will ensure ongoing support.

Finally this is not a comprehensive list of image format, see this wikipedia comparison page to find other formats, but the formats discussed here are probably the most common ones you will come across.

Show which formats do I use?

Thanks again to Jessica Hische for her great drop caps.

PhotoFriday :: Natural Mirror

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Mirror

More experiments with RAW on Google+

Despite the fact that I couldn't yet see any compelling reason to go over to uploading RAW images into google+, I still wanted to have a play and see what it can offer. So I went an took a couple of pictures of the gingko in my cretaceous garden. I had been a bit worried because it has not spouted any leaves and it its well into spring. Luckily they appeared two days ago and are developing well. The first set where taken with my pentax, which lets me save files in either the pentax propriety raw format .pef or adobe's .dng format, I've also uploaded the .jpg  version captured at the same time. I was actually a bit disappointed because whilst I thought the background was out of focus it was a bit strong (more on that later)

I then took another two photos with my canon this time with the aperture wide open to dramatize the depth of field blur.

Normally I upload to google+ via picasa but trying to upload raw files from it triggers a jpeg version to be generated in the process, not what I wanted so I decided to do this via my google drive. You can also upload via your browser, but that is a bit more work. Whereas yesterday auto enhance seemed to be toggled off, today it was toggled on, so this turned out to be a fairly low effort way to get half decent renditions of my photos. The downside is the background sync from my google drive took several minutes, so its a case of copy to the google drive locally and go and get a cup of coffee.

Whilst once I was very interested in the "auto fix" features of photo processing software I've come to prefer to tweak the sliders myself. This of course take time. The google+ plus path is classic google (I'm feeling lucky) where its all done for you behind the scenes. I must admit it isn't bad but I still prefer to do my own adjustments so I had a look how I might be able to fix the background dominance. I used the .pef file and I chose the selective adjust option which allows you to select a part of the image and this will find similar pasrt of the image to be selectively processed, You can adjust the size of a circular area to work with and the effect feathers off outside that (its shown in red above). You can also have more than one selective area. It does not offer blurring as an adjustment but I was able to decrease contrast and reduce saturation to take the background dominance away. Achieving something closer to what I remember in the view finder as I was photographing.

I'm impressed there is a lot of power here, if you are already have good software for processing RAW files I'm sure you'll be able to do better.  However if you are new to RAW, have it on you camera but have been afraid to try it, give google+ photo and google drive a go, they are free after all, you just need a google account and be using a chrome browser. Oh that's right, also make sure you have a good data plan first because uploading the large RAW files will be a bandwidth hog.

More Strange Lightroom Happenings

Lightroom on my studio laptop computer is misbehaving again. This time as I restarted lightroom, it wanted to update the catalogue it has already created in LR 4.4, which took a while then it took me through its introductory guide to the screen layout and program feature. As if I was doing a fresh install, which I wasn’t.Then all the folders in the catalogue showed the grey question mark indicating the files were missing, yet they where all there! Using Find missing files required more time but the catalogue seems fine now. Can’t help feeling that some sort of hidden update  has caused this and creative cloud is still my candidate for this mischief, but the plot thickened the next time I started lightroom when I got a warning about my beta test was about to expire, but I was not able to load the LR5.2 beta because the computer is still running Vista! My patience with adobe is being tested.

Some Subtle Changes in Google+ Photo

I could easily be the last picasa web album format user, but I was surprise by this message from google that I was new to google+!  I’m not I have been on google+ a long time but maybe haven’t used it so much lately
The learn more link took me to the on-line support/help area for picasa web album and google+, and another curious little highlighted info box that suggested I need to upgrade to version 3.9.16
Then I checked my version of picasa which was only 3.9.0, but my checks to see if this was update, showed that picasa at least believes it is up to date.. Clicking on the learn more on the this second yellow highlighted box took me back to December 2011 post that picasa version 3.9 was available for download. Was this just another example where Australia users are being  “geo fenced” out of up to date versions? No! I went to the equivalent USA site and same little interesting circular inconsistency occurs. So I tried to follow the newest features link here and got something which is pretty unusual for google these days a 404 error message!
My suspicions that there is quiet a bit of enhancement going on, lead me to reload in as google+ photos, rather than picasa web, and have a look at the What’s new item, which looks the same as the updates I discussed back in may. the layout might also be slightly different.

Eventually I got to the change its a new edit Item. This takes you into and auto enhance mode with a series snap seed style presets. Which is not surprising as google bought Nik Software who developed snap seed. There are also a set of the “flashy” filters similar to those popular in smartphone apps. Interestingly clicking on the customize button gives you the option to turn auto enhance on? Rather than off, so I soon discovered it is a toggle, that starts as auto enhance off. It would appear that at the moment these edit features are only available in a chrome browser. So its in browser rather that in the cloud editing but the photos are stored in the cloud

 
I’m not sure what this last  highlighted message means, i just get it after editing a photos so I assume it is just as a warning that you may have some extra fiddling to do if you edit an already published images. More orphaned links to clog the bandwidth of cyber space!
The last new feature I sniffed out, actually +tray radcliffe did and blog posted about it, is the handling of RAW photos on Google+. I’ve loaded a couple and they display fine, Ok they look bland to start and definitely need a bit of snap seed love and attention, but with way fewer clicks and time required than say tweaking in lightroom.

So what do I make of all this? I suspect google+ photos is being redeveloped towards a one stop on-line place to upload, work on and store all your photos, particularly those from camera phones. These new edit features and RAW support will help differentiate google+ from other social net services. My worry is still that picasa as a stand alone computer program is probably not being developed or supported any more.

Was Creative Cloud to Blame?

Lightroom on my studio computer has suddenly developed a horrible server busy errors and any time I tried to run lightroom on that computer I just an endless series of switch to or retry messages. I had to use Task Manger to end task to escape the cycle. I hadn't loaded any new software but I suspected I must have some sort of malware problems but I try as I might I could not find any evidence of anything like that. I was contemplating reinstalling lightroom and decided to setup the lastest beta version of LRB5.2, alas this beta version won't run on windows Vista! Then yesterday I actually logged into Creative Cloud for the first time in a month or so and suddenly lightroom was working again?
Does this mean that the creative cloud has taken over ownership of my lightroom even though it is a purchased standalone copy and not one downloaded under the creative cloud subscription? Not sure how I'll test this, perhaps I'll just have not to use the creative cloud app for a month and see if the problem returns?