Shores of a methane sea
Imagine standing on a planet much colder than this one is now and looking out over a sea of liquid methane ...
Shores of a Methane Sea ... the crunch of crystalline accretions under your boot
... the way the liquid moves and sighs - not like water
but thinner and with crackle...
About the picture: playing around with the B+W ND110E 10 stop neutral density filter.
Connecting you now
I was inspired by a post by fellow blogger Star Rush in Seattle called Currents. In the post, Star spoke of the currents of energy, life and power. The post was accompanied by one of her beautiful monochrome photos featuring a jumble of power-line and cable. While I liked the post very much, it got me to thinking about not only the energy the lines carry, about how they power our homes or carry telephony (remember then?) but how they connected us. I got to reflecting that when an operator said "Connecting you now..." they really were. You were physically connected to the person you were speaking to.
Think about that for a moment ... physically connected to someone else whether in the next street or on the other side of the planet.
While I embrace the freedom that the mobile age has brought, I feel that something somewhere has been lost ... a connection to one another if you will. How we're more connected than ever but somehow dis-connected at the same time.
Connecting you now.
My image went viral on Pinterest (and I didn't know)
I was going through my Google+ stream earlier tonight and came across a reshare of this image ... only it wasn't reshared from me but from someone else! Cranky! Theft! Piracy!
I contacted both my contact who had shared it to me and the original person who had it in their stream with no attribution. They got back really quickly and apologised meaning no harm and promptly removed it as I requested ... it still had my old 'Lushpup Images' watermark on the bottom left of the picture! I asked where they found it and they said #pinterest and sent me the URL (they really were quite helpful and I became less cranky). Sure enough there was my image with the watermark ... no attribution. What caught my eye was the list of 200+ reblogs listed on that page. When I did a Google Image search for the picture I was returned 15 pages of exact matches from all blogs and sites all over the world ... I stopped looking after that.
Interestingly, downloading a copy of the image from a number of sites to my machine (coming home in a way) the Author metadata still listed Lushpup Images as author and copyright holder ... not that anyone looked at it ;-)
Now, in the rare times I go searching for my own images using Image Search I come across one or two sites. I send them an email and in 99% of cases we resolve it through removal or attribution. In this case, where the image has clearly gone viral, what to do? I have heard that Pinterest throws copyright and intellectual property pretty much out the window by leaving it up to the individual account holder...
My image went viral on Pinterest (and I didn't know) ... What would you do?
thewalkdownunder 2012 Google+ Photowalk
I participated in the inaugural 2012 Google+ Photowalk held here in Canberra yesterday. It was an early start (7am at Regatta Point) but the day was an absolute cracker weather wise. A beautiful dawn with balloons saw about 30 people gather, score a t-shirt and set off on 4 hours of chatting, meeting and of course taking photos. Great to put some names to faces and to meet people I'd never seen nor heard of before. It was fun. I even found an iPhone on the way back and managed (via calling their recent calls list) to track them down and return it. How nice am I? ('very' is the correct answer to that) Did you take part in thewalkdownunder 2012?
Condensed
Condensed
The cool skin, attractive
pulling my eyes
pulling the very vapours from the air
loving dappled and blue
condensed.
Add EXIF data to your scanned images
OK ... so you've been out taking pictures with film. You've got the film developed and most likely had the negatives scanned so you can add the images to your digital library.
Perhaps you like to use keywords to index or sort your library. Maybe you like to see only those photos taken with a particular model camera ... like your film camera? Digital cameras record information about the image captured in the form of a series of EXIF tags (Camera, Lens, Aperture, Exposure etc). It's these tags that applications like Picasa, Lightroom and Aperture read when importing your images. Scanners apply EXIF data to the images resulting from scans. Film cameras do not (with some rare exceptions) record EXIF data so you'll need to create it. So here you are, seeking to add EXIF data to your scanned images.
Since Adobe’s Lightroom and most of the other tools that I use are geared towards DSLRs, I have felt the need to add as much EXIF data to my scanned images as possible. The more photos I add to Lightroom, the more important Smart Collections are getting to me and the less I want to rely on keywords. Things become even more complicated when I started using more than one film camera and wanted to use the standard ways to sort my photos by camera. Besides, I have this blog and display my photos online, my visitors want to inspect the EXIF data to get a feel for how I arrived at a particular exposure.
If you have googled how to update EXIF data in an image and you have landed here ... you have probably also come across the ExifTool by Phil Harvey. This tool can do everything and more, but in the end it is a Perl script with a command line interface. What was needed was a graphical user interface to the ExifTool and Bogdan Hrastnik has stepped up and developed the ExifToolGUI Windows tool for which you can find all information here. Strongly recommended!
After a little bit of time spent in the 'Newbie' stream of the ExifToolGUI forums I worked out how to alter the EXIF data of my scanned film images to reflect the Camera and Lens used to capture the image. Voila! Best of all I can modify the files as a batch. Since my images were already in Lightroom, I selected the images in the Library view, right-clicked them and selected 'Metadata > Read metadata from files' to refresh the image tags reported within the library.
In the Garden: jumping spider
Found this little one on the curled leaf of a lime tree in the backyard. A cutie huh? Very inquisitive critters ... I'm not overly fond of spiders (the larger ... the less so) but I like these ones.
D80 - Tamron 90mm SP Macro
In the Garden: jumping spider
Happy New Year 2012
Wishing everybody a Happy New Year and all the very best for 2012 ...
This is one of those pictures best suited to some quiet time pondering ... like the beginning of a new year ... or the quiet patch of a garden which is where I found this :-)
Tidbinbilla Trip
Took a trip out to Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve, near Canberra on the weekend with some friends ... always love going out there. This was a quick trip to get out of Canberra for a while and one of our favourite destinations is The Sanctuary - a large wetlands ecosystem surrounded by bushland and protected by a predator-proof fence providing sanctuary for a range of native animals in a natural setting.
A pair of Red Belly Black Snakes (Pseudechis porphyriacus) basking.
On one of our first visits to the Sanctuary, a volunteer guide showed where a colony of Red Bellied Black Snakes - Pseudechis porphyriacus or 'red bellies' for short. On that day there were perhaps 6 snakes in two groups nestled amongst the tussock grass by the side of the pond. On Saturday there were maybe 9 snakes in 3 groups including this pair basking in the sun. I think they must have shed recently because their skins and colouration were beautiful. I took this with my 18-200mm and was about 5m away from them. Black snakes are generally placid if left undisturbed ... I likely wouldn't try a shot like this with a brown or tiger snake. Just quietly walk away ... quietly walk away :-)
'wall works' (a preview) - ANCA Gallery
'wall works' 7th - 22nd December 2011
Last week I was given a heads-up by friend and artist Nicci Haynes about an exhibition on at the Australian National Capital Artists (ANCA) Gallery in Dickson. Apparently ANCA are repainting the gallery over the new year period and have invited a select group of artists to use the walls of the gallery as their canvas. The show is called 'wall works' and I went along on Friday afternoon to take some photographs and was impressed by the scale and quality of work going on in there and I present a selection of images below. I highly recommend anyone interested to do the same.
The show opens officially on Wednesday 14th December but is open to the public now for anyone interested in the creative process. Of particular interest to me were the wall size works by Byrd and Hanna Hoyne, the intricate musings of Paul Summerfield, the 'there but not there' figures of Nicci and the vibrant etchings of Tesss Horwitz.
From the ANCA website "Six local artists transform the gallery by working directly on the walls. Byrd with Hanna Hoyne, Mariana del Castillo with Gus McGrath and Alex Asch, Nicci Haynes, Tess Horwitz and Paul Summerfield. Curated by Narelle Phillips"
A second post with more images from this session can be found HERE
'girl on the floor' by Nicci Haynes
Hanna Hoyne
Byrd applying some fine detail
Entry Designs by Paul Summerfield
'fire extinguisher surrounds' by Paul Summerfield
'white crouching figure' by Nicci Haynes
Artist Byrd
Hanna Hoyne
Tess Horwitz
B+W ND110E 10 stop filter - testing
I recently tried out my B+W ND110 filter on some coasty water. I liked the results. These were shot using a Sigma 10-20mm on a D80 body using a tripod. Exposure time was around 30seconds each. I shot in Manual because the camera kept underexposing by a long way ... I had this idea that the body would adapt to the 10stop reduction in light and adjust shutter speed accordingly but it didn't seem to. Anyways, I liked the results. Read more