Assemble

Sometimes things just assemble themselves. Like this picture... I came across a table at my in-laws place in the countryside and there was an assortment of things on it that the kids had collected and been playing with ... there was this arthropod in a glass of water (I still haven't gotten around to identifying it yet ... it seems to have a lot of segmented legs!) and there was this illustration from a newspaper by the illustrator 'Reg' ... the two objects just seemed made to go together and well, here they are :-)


The Invisible Mother

 

This was a practice where the mother, often disguised or hiding, often under a spread, holds her baby tightly for the photographer to insure a sharply focused image.

- The Hidden Mother

ealry portrait of a family standing around a mother obscured by a blanket

Now I understand that this practice originated when exposure times were slow meaning subjects had to sit perfectly still to render themselves sharply. I get that some families wanted only to have a portrait of their offspring with no parents. I still find the pictures a little macabre and creepy. I know that I'm looking with a modern eye and that what I'm seeing was 'standard practice' for the photographer and subjects but I can't help feeling that the pictures resonate with our society's underlying desire to make mothers invisible at the expense of their families. We don't pay mothers to do what they do ... we expect it. The need of the next generation are put, quite rightly, first but at the expense of and often with hidden cost to the mother. The Invisible Mother.

 Early portrait of child by mother obscured by a blanket

 

So here we have a series of pictures which had they been taken today could be hailed as a representation of the western social invisibilty of motherhood ... but that's not why they were made.

Interesting stuff to ponder ... what do you think?

Footnote: I found these fascinating photographs over at BlueMilk and liked them so much I'm referencing the original site Retronaut where you can find a stack of these images.


Long daytime exposure of the sea against rocks

Shores of a methane sea

Long daytime exposure of the sea against rocks

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.


Dewdrops on a spiders web

Connecting you now

Dewdrops on a spiders web 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.


Stairs leading upward with sunbeams raining down from above

My image went viral on Pinterest (and I didn't know)

Stairs leading upward with sunbeams raining down from aboveI 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?


water droplets consdensed onto a shiny blue surface

Condensed

water droplets consdensed onto a shiny blue surface

Condensed

The cool skin, attractive

pulling my eyes

pulling the very vapours from the air 

 

loving dappled and blue

condensed.


Melbourne across the Yarra - Tiny Planet


I learned how to do a 'Tiny Planet' image from an existing panorama last night. This was taken last year in lovely Melbourne. Shot from the south bank, it's a view of Melbourne across the Yarra River. A 5-shot panorama stitched together in Photoshop before being 'planeted'.

The tutorial I followed was this one published by www.photoguides.net and it was ridiculously simple to produce something gorgeous.

Go and give it a go and be sure to let us know how you got on :-)

In lovely Melbourne last year ... had a lovely time. More a family trip than a photo trip ... but I did get out and about a couple of times. This is a 5-frame pano stitched together in Photoshop the 'planetted'
In lovely Melbourne last year ... had a lovely time. More a family trip than a photo trip ... but I did get out and about a couple of times. This is a 5-frame pano stitched together in Photoshop then 'planeted'

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.


From here they arced across the sky - Mamiya 645 Super


I recently 'inherited' a Mamiya 645 Super medium format camera. I just got my first negs (and medium resolution scans) back from the lab. I took a roll of expired Ilford SFX 200 to see if the beast still worked. It did but the battery died about two shots before I took this. I remembered that the camera will shoot even if insufficient power is contained in the battery but that the shutter speed is fixed at 1/60sec. So this one's fully manual and literally a straight scan from the neg ... ooh I'd forgotten how negatives are just the most beautiful things.

From here they arced across the sky


With These Hands I Will Make The World

wpid531-20120218_NIKON-D80__DSC7958.jpg

With these hands I will dig

and hold

circle

and fold

shape

and grow

caress, create

with these hands I will make the world

wpid540-20120218_NIKON-D80__DSC7953.jpg

Out in the backyard, playing in the dirt ... the simple joys of finding a creature alive in the soil. Then crushing it and loving it until it's alive no more ... I hope that if there is some kind of spirit guardian of the invertebrate realm that they perhaps look the other way when small children play with their kin.


don't forget to smell the flowers

Don't forget to stop and smell the flowers

don't forget to smell the flowers

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I don't recall the very first time I heard the expression 'Don't forget to stop and smell the flowers'. I have always loved flowers and blooms, their myriad colours and forms ... and scents. My love of flowers has stayed constant while the way I look at them changes constantly. When I learned about plants and what flowers are for, the way they entice and mimic ... the way the look different under ultraviolet or infra-red. The way we use flowers to say things ... from red roses for love through a whole spectrum of colours to black roses for death ... 'say it with roses' indeed! Flowers as symbols of the transience of life. Fake flowers ranging from the trashy to the profoundly elegant. I learned about flowers as genetic markers, indicators of weed species, the passing of seasons, their rarity and their basic commonality. The sound of bees in trees in Springtime. The carpets of riotous colour beneath flowering camellia. I learned their smells ... I'd like to retire somewhere where I can smell the scent of frangipani blossoms ... the heady scents of Spring and warm breezes. Native Australian flowers whose scents pass into honey, bulbs, trees, bushes dripped with rain or dew. And then I started to take photographs of them.

And sometimes I don't see them, or smell them, or sense them ... I'm busy doing something else, preoccupied. Sometimes I sit and just watch them and think as I'm doing now about all the different ways I see them. The day I saw my children learning to sniff their first flower nearly made me cry. My advice ... don't forget to stop and smell the flowers :-)


'Sparklers'

2012 Royal Canberra Show - Clean Sweep

The Royal Canberra Show is held every year to celebrate and showcase the very best that the region has to offer. I have been entering photographs into the Canberra Show Art Prize for the past three years. There are four classes in which to enter photographs;

  • Open
  • Landscape/Places
  • People & Portraits; and
  • Black & White

I always try to enter a photo into each class and I have picked up several 1st places over the years in various classes. This year though something quite remarkable happened: I won every class! I still have not quite gotten my head around quite what this means but really it's an excellent result! The photos and their classes are presented below;

'Sparklers'
id="attachment_471" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="'Sparklers' (Open)"

 

Spring Storm (Landscape)
id="attachment_472" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Spring Storm (Landscape)"

 

Accordian
id="attachment_473" align="alignleft" width="214" caption="'Accordian' (People/Places)"

 

Passing TRain
id="attachment_366" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="'Feel The Wind' (Black & White)"

Princesses Aplenty - Riverfront Theatre Company

 

wpid423-lushpup_.jpg

Towards the end of last year I received a lovely email from Paul Coleman at the Riverfront Theatre Company in Windsor Ontario, Canada. He was putting together a youth theatre production called "Princesses Aplenty - A Fractured Fairytale". Paul had seen a photograph of mine and thought it would be great to help promote the production and asked if he could have my permission to use it. Here's a part of Paul's letter...

"I work with a group of kids at a non-profit organisation called the Riverfront Theatre Company in Windsor Ontario Canada. We provide theatrical art programming to over 80 young people at absolutely no fee for the  participant. We are entering our 8th season we are spreading our creative wings to present an original production entitled Princesses Aplenty. There is a dragon in our play and we would love to use part of your image in our poster. Attached is a rough draft of what I would like to use. (with your permission of course) If you are willing to allow us to use it could you send me a higher resolution copy. We would gladly credit you on the poster and on our website."

I was chuffed and not least because it's nice to be asked. I said yes and provided a high resolution copy of the dragon image below to Paul. Anyways, time passed and every now and then I'd receive an excited email from Paul letting me know how things were going and how everyone loved the image and it looked great and then yesterday I picked up a parcel from the post office. Inside (see top picture) was a t-shirt, two tickets, a program and two posters ... cool! I was especially impressed with the t-shirt. Thanks mate, it made my day.

Dragon Tail
Dragon Tail

Now it transpires that Paul, as well as running graphic design house Creation Design is a photographer too and has some nice photos up on his website. Go have a look and tell him I said 'Hi'.


Sweet White Noise

When I first published this self portrait of me sleeping like a bat, I was listening to the album The Sound of White by Australian artist Missy Higgins.

Listening to the title track got me thinking about the sound of white noise and how relaxing I found it. About how white noise is the sound made by all the frequencies randomly occurring together at an equal or flat power. About how the sound is there but there is no discernible frequency or signal that stands out (because there isn't one!). It's like experiencing thick fog, an aural isolation chamber. Listening to white noise I find my mind exploring it, looking for a handle, something familiar. Rationally I know it's not there but my mind searches anyway, fumbling and groping. Then comes a strange feeling of floating with in the white noise as it surrounds me with no detectable source ... the sound comes from everywhere - omnidirectional.

White noise gets its name from the term white light which describes a light where all the frequencies are of equal power. I like exploring that too.

Wikipedia has a more thorough and technical description of white noise and it's myriad uses.