Wandering in the LightWandering in the LightThings They Forgot to Tell You About DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY 
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Sitemeter problem
2008-08-02 11:39:00 This blog suddeny started crashing today, co-incidentally, by the way, just after I sent details of my blog's copy & paste plagiarist as a DCMA notice. However many other bloggers also struck the same problem and it turns out the problem is related to using the free sitemeter counter. On my site I got the error message above followed by a the bare blue on white "Internet Explorer cannot display webpage" error message, but I gather some others have experienced their browser crashing. I have temporarily removed the offending sitemeter code and set up the simpler easy counter version, just to keep tabs (until the site meter issue is fixed). Bizarely I figured out this problem after I recieved my weekly notice from sitemeter summarizing traffic and tried their site and recievd tha same error. So they may be sending out reports unaware of the havoc going on in the blogsphere.Sorry to any regular readers that may have been distressed by their browser crashing. More About: Problem
Big landscapes
2008-07-30 16:00:00 Both images of Jell's Park lake are multi-photo panoramics stiched together with autostich. Note the exposure "banding" because I had the camera on automatic (which meant the light meter re-choose the exposure for each photo). I haven't figured out a simple way to post process this out. Setting the camera to use the same exposure across all the photos in the set is of course the preferred approach. However sometimes you are more intent on framing and just pressing the button, I'm sure you know what I mean! More About: Landscapes
A good online read
2008-07-30 06:06:00 There are lots of digital "community" sites all over the net, too many to mention, little lone review. However I reckon the PhotographyBB site may be worth a visit. Whilst they are Canadian based this month downloadable online magazine features some great images of the Australian Outback. The magazines alone are worth investigating and there is plenty of other stuff with of course ads as well (someone needs to support all the work). Unlike many other digital camera review sites they openly provide links in their news sections to manufacturers and distributors press releases, they do not cut & paste this advertorial copy and pretend it is their own. Thanks to scuba_margie a fellow Australian Photographer!!! on flickr for this link. More About: Read , Online , Good
A lesson in Theft versus Sharing
2008-07-29 14:56:00 You may have, or may not have, notice the little CC logo on the right hand side bar, it is a creative common "license" and it has very specific conditions (you can click on the logo below to see the conditions). I have choosen to use the creative commons approach because I believe that grown up people should share ideas and not get bogged down in legalistic conditions that end up only benefiting the managers & agents, not the artists. The internet and its various sites and communities are a wonderful way to display your work and share your knowledge for the greater good. But the interweb utopia is being spoilt.I think those that blindly cut and paste blog posts (even with a link back to my site, to fullfil the attribution aspect of CC) and use that as content to draw users and get "click through" revenue are just being lazy. It is plagarism pure and simple. At best they are not contributing anything, just wasting bandwidth and everyone's time, at worst thay are yet another examples... More About: Versus , Theft , Lesson , Sharing
You can't help it
2008-07-28 09:58:00 It is just natural that when you are photographing something to set the subject slap-bang in the middle of the picture. The problem is that this will make for a bland, dull, predictable results, the same sort of snap everyone else takes. I have eluded to the importance of composition as the big differentiator of interestingness in photographs. So here are a couple of "tricks" that can help make your photos look professional.Offset the Center of Interest This should produce a more dynamic composition instantly. Placing the horizon in a landscape can be a classic example of this. Having the horizon close to the centre divides the image into two balanced parts, albeit a bit static. The Rule of ThirdsThis rule is often presented as gospel and trotted out as the main composition guide in many beginners guide to photography. All you need to do is imagine that the photo is divided into 9 equal panels, by division into thirds horizontally and vertically. Then Placing t...
The blue eyed Kookaburra
2008-07-27 09:29:00 I was to say the least surprised by the strong blue eye colour of this Kookabuarra. It only shows in some photos so I assume it is a retinal reflection in a particular direction (like some dogs eye reflect green or yellow in certain lights). Maybe there will eventually be a market for blue eye removal/reduction filters for bird photographers. More About: Blue , Blue Eyed
Why did the Galah cross the road?
2008-07-26 08:40:00 I have no idea! Or maybe the grass is actually greener on the other side. More About: Cross , Road , The Road
Recovering lost photos from memory cards
2008-07-26 08:12:00 I have been told on a number of occasions, generally by IT experts, that you can not reliably recover files from camera memory cards. Well I beg to differ, because I have done it a few times now and here are a few of my observations Photos can be very precious, once lost they can be impossible to replace. So make it a habit to upload them and back them up. If the content is important get it done by the professionals, if you are trying to recover kylie's only wedding photos, go and find one of the many services that specialise in recovering files (and perhaps get some one local, ie use the yellow pages not the net), some camera shops now also offer this service. Beware of "Blackmail"ware, When you type file recovery in google these days you get a multitude of programs that offer free download but when you have downloaded the 20plusMB and installed it and go to actually use them. they say yes there are recoverable files on the media but you now have to sent BIG Dollars to unlo... More About: Lost , Memory , Cards , Memory cards
The Cheeky Cockatoo
2008-07-25 14:47:00 This wild yellow crested cockatoo [Cacatua sulphurea], at the Grants Picnic Ground at Kalista in the Dandenong ranges east of Melbourne, brazenly stole this packet of seed from a visitor. The best part is how deftly he held it in his paw, as he skilfully snacked on the seeds. However is fellow cockatoos soon gathered, trying to get him to share but he wouldn't and it all ended in tears. The poor guy lost his one paw hold and the packet of seed dropped into the forest below, several cockatoos in pursuit.
The cropping tool
2008-07-20 22:44:00 One of the best and easiest to use tools for digital photos is the cropping tools, which cuts a desired section out of an image, trimming off unwanted parts (at the edges). Using Picasa, cropping is easy. In the editing view, click Crop. There are three default sizes(in cm 10 x 15, 13 x 18, and 20 x 25). The fourth option, Manual, is the one I use most, it allow you to click a point in the shot and the drag the mouse pointer to selection the portion that you want to crop. The rest of the photo will go grey. Click Preview to see the crop. If you like it, click Apply; otherwise click Reset and try again. Why a cropping tool is so good? It allows you to improve the composition of your photo. Most digital cameras now do a wonderful job of exposure and focus, but none as yet include a magic button to make your image interesting. That is in my opinion now the biggest difference between a mediocre photographer and a great one. There is plenty of advice on the web on the basics... More About: Tool
my office as art
2008-07-12 06:16:00 For Photo Friday 's topic office. This is a thrid genertion image, that is designed to be viewed from a cyclinderical mirror (any shinny tube will do) placed in the center of the small inner circle. Looking at this mirror you should then get a fairly convining view that you are looking at a three dimensioanl room's reflection. The image began as a series of 4 photos that were stiched together using AutoStitch, to produce and ultrawide angle view. This was then transformed into a polar project using Anamorph ME. Normally my office looks more like this, a "little" less tidy and well used, and perhaps even more out of focus. Still it is my place and I am happy to work here. More About: Office
Going (any)Phone friendly
2008-07-11 02:48:00 No I haven't succumbed to all the hype, but I have researched how you make your blog more mobile friendly, one way is to use google reader, but the reader has to do that. A much nicer way for bloggers is to use mofuse, its a kind of mobile friendly wrapping that drops the side bars and other cyber noise and bandwidth consumers. The result is a the basic post with enough navigation via number key shortcuts to make browsing from the phone nice and easy. Best of all the thumbnails of the posted images are nice and legiable. The phone bill will thank you. PS: In a shameless bit of network cross promotion that show off Alvin wants to bore you with his new IPhone . More About: Friendly
iphone spam'alanche
2008-07-08 23:03:00 I'm sure, like me, if you are on-line and in Australia you will have been the unwilling recipient of an avalanche of hype, (ie expensive spam) about the release of the 3G iphone here . And if you can't wait till friday, apparently optus will start selling phones on midnight thursday (ok it is technically friday but much earlier). However there is one very important thing the iphone hype forgets to mention, like telstra's qriuos hype before it. In Australia mobile phone plans come with ridiculously highly priced and low quoted data rates (so check out the bad news before you get excited) and I totally agree with Stephen Collins, the first telco to offer decent data rates "will own the market" Iphone could be also be the watershed for digital photography, tens of thousands of photos are already being uploaded each day to flickr from Iphones. The camera specs are nothing flash but as any good photographer knows 90% of the picture quality comes from how the camera user "sees" t...
more on hardlinking
2008-07-08 05:24:00 The technology of QRcodes are being hyped for advertising and marketing , (and making moneyfor telstra). Yet it has wide application, there is a Mobile Barcode Add On for firefox, that lets you get a QRcvode on the fly from any website you visit. Also google as a neat QR code generator, part of google chart api, that lets a developer a code that can ge generated in the HTML on a webpage. There plenty of standalone applets such as barshow. The use of the codes are definitely not limited to the web. Infact it is better if they are on physical objects, not just billboard. They can even be merges with photos (as above). You don't even have to use them for connection to a web, they could just be a copyright notice that you embedded in your photos as a graphic watermark. You might need to experiment with this because the code will need to be large enough to be readable, but small enough to not be obtrusive. If japan is anything to go on the biggest applications might be for se...
Variation on a Spiral
2008-07-07 19:20:00 Two photos joined with the windows live gallery panorama tool. Yes they don't line up but I like that. For photofriday's topic spiral
Proud Protea
2008-07-07 03:26:00 Having survived a hot dry summer, the Protea shows its fortitude to the cold. More About: Proud
QRious'r & QRious'r
2008-07-06 08:46:00 I am finding all the hype by telstra about "their" QRious codes just a bit hard to stomach. I like the idea of these QR codes and have posted about them last year. Despite what telecom implies they are very late adopters of the technology, not creators of it. You don't even have to buy a new phone (or sign up for an outrageous contract). Ok these new 3G phones will have QR reader built in, but if your phone has a camera and web access you probably are ready to go. You just need to download some software. If you are with Telstra, and are happy with them you can type in the tediously long www.mobius.telstra.com.au on your phone's web browser and if your phone model fits there current limitations, it will be delivered to your phone. Alternative there are free sites that provide generic downloadable readers, like i-nigma & Kaywa. [Also Quickmark, see deans collin's comments on this blog, he obviously has an interest in marketing qr codes.] One final item you shou...
capturing colour
2008-07-02 08:09:00 Don't be surprised if you have been disappointed capturing specific colours with your camera. The truth is that cameras do have different colour sensitivity. Most digital camera use a bayer filter to separate the colours into pixels and this has twice as many green sensors as red and blue sensor in an attempt to mimic the human eyes greater sensitivity to colour and especially greens. Worse the colour sensitivity changes with the intensity of the light and that is before you even start to worry about the colour temperature of the light source. The set below were taken with 1.50EV braketting of the same subject but in indirect light. The light meter can also be biassed by the background colour which further complicates the colour sensitivity. So don't be discouraged check in the viewfinder, change the exposure (or even used bracketing) and try changing the background if you can. More About: Colour
HDR Afternoon
2008-06-29 06:55:00 Gippsland green in HDRi, taken near the new foot-bridge over the Tarwin river. More About: Afternoon
Second Brain
2008-06-26 15:01:00 If you are like me and have a lot of stuff scattered around the web, because you are using a variety of Web 2.0 services, not necessarily because you are messy, you might like to look at some of the newer services that let you collect everything in one place, or more precisely the links to get everything. Second Brain is such a service and interacts well with blogs, flickr, twitter and even picasa web albums. I have been using Shozu on my mobile phone for a while which is a little similar but ran into problems installing the desktop version (you probably get a blog about when I figure out what is going wrong). So I like the idea of one tool to interact with many services, BUT at the moment second brain is very much a RO tool, and doesn't have the RW bits operations yet (lars assures me they will come)
Play me a song - about the future
2008-06-23 23:26:00 .flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }.flickr-yourcomment { }.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Play me a song, originally uploaded by wolfcat_aus. I went along to pubcamp in melbourne yesterday, looking at where Web 2.0 might go next and was clearly the oldest bloke in the audience (fortunately richard walsh was involved in the debate so I was not the oldest overall)The real timetracking of twitter hasshtags was impressive, and i guess the general consensus was content is king, but it is "hard to make a buck" (Stephen Mayne) and the advertising networks have the money in their pockets already. So where does that leave the humble content creator? Do you sell your soul to google (yahoo! etc) or can you keep your digital rights and expect a a tiny bit of value to flow back to the content creator. Or is the general perception going to remain, if its on the net, its free to copy (and reuse).Special applause... More About: Future , Song , The Future
Mosaic (of the self referencing kind)
2008-06-18 09:35:00 Whilst I haven't mentioned my photo impressions much recently I am still creating them. Bigger than before. On the weekend I took a series of photos of the three "yellow ducks" which are a floating sculpture on the small pond below the Monash Gallery of Art, with the view of creating a self reference style of mosaic where the tiles where variation on the larger image itself. I took several photos, using the bracketing setting on my camera. I have deliberately kept the number of tiles low (which make the large image less obvious. you will definitely need to click on this to see the larger image to appreciate the flip flop you will experience in front of the large version of this. First you see the large image but soon your eye just sees the littler grouping of ducks have squint and there is the large image again. More About: Mosaic
Its a small world after all
2008-06-11 08:21:00 I am fascinated by just how many interconnecting links my contacts have on flickr. to see this i have been playing with a nifty tool called flickr graph, it is an on-line application that explores the social relationships inside flickr.com. It makes use of the classic attraction-repulsion algorithm and builds a graph like the one shown here.Click on this link if you want to research other [Great] flickr tools, (but some aren't so great!) More About: World , Small , Small World
Colour Management
2008-06-09 09:08:00 I have not directly posted anything on colour management, not because I don't believe it is important, it certainly is one of if not the most important part of digital photography. It is that managing and matching colours across the whole photography process is complex and there isn't a simple "one click" solution. On that topic I have to come clean and admit that I do not use photoshop, so I am not a disciple of sRGB or adobe RGB or other acronyms or the adobe work flow, but that can wait to another post. The problems of colours matching is firstly related to the variable sensitivity to light of different wavelengths (what we see as different colour) and also the ability to render that range of intensity either on a screen or printing the image on paper. These are technological limits and they change as the various pieces of hardware are improved. To complicate all this our eyes and brain have very good discrimination in how they process and discern certain colou... More About: Management , Colour
location, location, location
2008-06-04 01:50:00 .flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }.flickr-yourcomment { }.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } big rock panorama, originally uploaded by imageo. This is a mutli-image stiched panorama (using autostitch) and I had forgotten to geotag it in google earth. No worries I thought I'd do it in Flickr. Think again!Ok, I did try with Yahoo! maps and I only got with a few hundred meters of the shore (at least the loaction name was right, in the past yahoo maps has also given me the wrong location name by kilometers) but compare the detail with the google earth (below)at roughly the same scale. In google earth I was able to zoom much further and see the actual rocky headland. An this area is still just average accuracy in google earth. By the way you need picasa to geotag in google earth. More About: Location
I don't only photograph sunsets
2008-06-01 16:07:00 Looking at my recent flickr & blog posts you may be excused for thinking I have become a little obsessed with sunsets. No really its just that there have been some great ones lately. This is actually a multi-image autostitched panorama. More About: Sunsets
Enjoying the last of the day
More articles from this author:2008-06-01 04:02:00 A pair of hooded plovers [Thinornis rubricollis], possible one of less than 100 nesting pairs left on the Victorian Coast. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 |
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