What to do during the cold Winter days when it is too cold to go out hunting for photo opps? Stay home where it is nice and warm and play with images you aready have. This is an image I first took in the fall of '06. The original had a very distinct 'face', but not enough to be anything special. I just spent some time with it to hilight the facial features a bit more with some burning/dodging, contrast curves and yes, I cheated and 'photoshopped' it a bit by overlaying a real face photo as a darkness mask.
I named this image 'Ent' based on the tree creatures from the Lord of the Rings books
Panoramas
Photography
I've been playing a bit again with panoramas. It is amazingly simple to shoot images for a simple panorama with any digital camera.
The workflow I've found that works the best is:
Shoot images in any format/size. A tripod helps, but I've done several handheld.
Use Photoshop to adjust/resize the images.
Photoshop has panorama features built in, but I think a free program called 'hugin' does a better job.http://hugin.sourceforge.net/
I'm displaying the 360 degree panoramas online with a very old java program from a company called MGI that doesn't exist anymore. I think they were bought out. But as long as the program still works, it does just what I need it to do with just a few clicks.
Some of the panoramas may take several seconds to load, since the files can be quite large.
So enjoy these links to a few panoramas.
Note: Panoramas will open in a new window. Close that window to return to this page.
Walter called to say that he had a fox den on his property with at least 5 pups living in it, so I headed down with the camera and 400mm lense. The light wasn't the best, so we were shooting at 1000 ISO (hence the grain). I got over 350 shots that day, of which only a dozen really came out, mostly due to low shutter speed or tricky focus through the underbrush. It was great fun though, and I'm glad I got a few good pics to show for it.
Timelapse, Bike ride start
Photography
Another timelapse. This time I used manual exposure and light balance to get rid of the flicker as things change automatically between exposures. This is an exposure ever 4 seconds, stretched by 40% when rendered in HD. For best results, watch it in HD on the Vimeo site and click on the 'full screen' icon in the lower left of the preview window before playing.
This is my first attempt at timelapse photography with the D300. Frames taken at 5 second intervals. For best viewing, click on the youtube icon to view it on the youtube site, then click the 'HD' button in the lower right of the window to see it is its highest resolution.
Updated banner photo
Photography
I just uploaded a new banner photo (Stickney Brook panorama). You will have to keep hitting 'refresh' until it appears, since the banner can be one of 5 randomly chosen images. OR you can view the rest of this post, were I've linked to all the current banner images.
So... I just found and installed a component that lets me embed youtube videos simply by pasting the URL into an article. This page is just a test of that. One here on the front page, and another after the link. Enjoy the excitement. BTW: Both of these videos are available in HD if you go to youtube and click the 'watch in HD' link. they are test shots with my new Canon HF10 HD camera.
Photography doesn't get much easier than this. I've heard that OTHER photographers have to pack things, trek off into the woods, wait for something to wander past... but not me. This guy was sitting in a tree not 20 feet from our kitchen window. I took a few photos through the glass in case he got spooked when I opened it, then slid the window open. The light was a little low, so I couldn't get the shutter speed I wanted (this is at 1/200), but with a bit of sharpening it is acceptable. He is looking at Betsy, who went outside to get a closer look at him. A minute later, he flew away but I couldn't track him well enough at full zoom to get any pics of him in flight.
So the basic Joomla install is up and runing... for the most part. This is my first install of v1.5, so it is taking me a while to figure out where some of the options have gone. It will take a few more days for the domain name DNS record to settle down. After that, I need to find a better template, work on some graphics, get Jalbum integrated more fully with the site, then start playing with some modules to see what kind of trouble I can get into. All in all it should keep me busy for at least a few weeks.
