All that remains's blog

Well sort of, did you know you can test the beta 2.0 for 30 days? Well I've had a play with it and I must say I like the useability. But as I mentioned on Flickr when I posted this,

Three old men leaning on a wal…

Incidently Monaxle swears by it and I guess uses it as his first stage work through

As you will know, I have a copy of HDRShop. What I can't get anyone to give me is any pointers on what to do when.......

So it looks like I will just have to do it myself and leave hints for future generations later. I started with a raw file which I converted in to seven JPG files in 1 stop steps from

My lowest available stop

blown highlights

I have a camera specific gamma correction curve which I used because I don't want to go second guessing this stage yet.

So on to tonemapping - using the plugin defaults you get a very grainy "over-exposed" image with lots of colour noise. I took this to mean the luminesence was too high for the software to cope. So I adjusted the key value lower until I reached a satisfactory level (0.01). I also lowered the integer on sharpening to 4 to reduce some of the noise.

night scene HDR test

So there we have it key controls overall brightness (exposure) of the final tonemapped image (low darken - hi brighten) and Phi controls the sharpness (low integer no sharpening).

The stones are murder

Soooo if you are looking for a book cover for a seaside murder/thriller please keep me in mind.

So I have finally sucumbed to the English Photographer's pecadillo of photographing beach huts. Can't tell you why these last two weekends I wanted to, but I did. Can anyone tell me why they are so photographic?

Charmouth Beach huts

It seems odd that wether they are closed up or occupied they appear to want your attention. Perhaps it is that essentially a garden shed is personalised and put on public display. Now I can hear many of you say that rarely are they personalised, coming as they do (generally) in either wood brown or an ordered set of colours. But, as anyone who has visited the English seaside in summer will tell you, each occupier brings a little bit of home ritual and puts it on display. Favourite towels, books, beverages and food, music, patterns of behaviour. You would say it is all a little extrovert if it wasn't for the general lack of ostentation. In fact it seems a little strange that people who live most of their lives privately behind closed doors should choose then to display their home comfort so openly to strangers.

Steamer point beach huts

Why has the Eu not harmonised public holidays yet? In the UK we moan that we do not have the same number as some European countries. The irony is of course that these mainland European public holidays are a set day and do not count if they fall on a weekend. But harmonisation would be good. My wife works for the UK arm of a Spanish company, with a French holding company (go figure). So today when the rest of the UK takes a break is in Madrid for 3 days working (well being in meetings, I never considered it work just time spent not doing what I should be doing).

Now add to this that as with most UK bank holidays it is raining and we can't get out properly you will understand my frustration that the EU spends time discussing uniform cucumbers but hasn't harmonised even the basic level of working practice.

I read in photography monthly about a free (for non-commercial) HDR program www.debevec.org/HDRShop. I thought I would give it a go. So this is the first play - no reading the manual how easy is it to produce a decent rendition. Took about 5 minutes - mostly because I sidetracked myself looking at the RAW importer section and I had to work out that I had no way of adjusting the 32bit HDR version. This is the LDR version JPG tweaked for levels which I felt were a bit dark in the mid and hitones, but nothing else (I also forgot to sharpen the Canon fuzziness but I'm more concerned about how it looks).

Ryssen 3 - HDR

I don't think it is bad, if I was hitting it for real I think I would work on those areas of light on the road and warm up the scene a little to get something similar to my original manual version.

Ryssen 3

and a poor translation here

The house of the Father BRASSART (born in Hesdin in 1784 and died in Hesdin in 1854)

Louis-Joseph Brassart was the son of a merchant. He enlisted in the Great Army, and became a sergeant of grenadiers in the Imperial Guard. This unit participates in campaigns of Saxony in 1813 and France in 1814. The faithful old soldier follows the emperor in exile to Elba, he is at his side on his return to France during the Hundred Days. He was taken prisoner at the Battle of Waterloo. The father Brassart is appointed Knight of the Legion of Honor by imperial decree of 27 February 1815. Valiant soldier of the "old guard", he lives on his return to Hesdin in the former guardhouse at the door of Arras. Last guardian of the door before the disappearance of fortifications of the city, Brassart father died in this house of a military nature that exists today ...

I have entered one of my photographs into a Canon competition (a chance to win kit I can't afford). I have chosen a black and white Macro of a birds eye chilli, which is a decent shot. I have no idea why as the photographs are being judged but apparently I need some votes as well, probably as part of the selection process. So please help me get to the judgment phase rather than being left in the cold by following the link and voting.

ta.canon-europe.com/?pg=gallery&cc=gb&lc=en&photo_id=foto48021415deed9

Thank you

Craig (ATR)

I decided to revist using Flock as a browser at the beginning of this week. I must say I am impressed with the interface's development. It is far better than when I tried it out in the beta development tests. Partly, because of the interactive partners onboard (Team Ipernity please note Flock does not work with this site), but mostly because they have cleaned up some of the annoying parts of the interface.

Design wise I would still say it is not an ideal browser there is not enough room at the top for quick links mostly because all the side/media bar tool icons sit in the same row. Also with a side bar and top bar showing you social media streams your browser window becomes quite small and you end up having to do an awful lot of scrolling. It would be better if there was some resize functon that zoomed out/in to ease your navigation when in this mode.

Speed wise it is not appear to be as fast to load pages as Safari or FIrefox, but start up time is respectably comparable. True you can get scripts in firefox that emulate some of the functions, but none will carry all the feeds in a single compact function (as yet). On the whole it is saving me light years of social web browsing. The only page I have to visit to view contacts content is actually here and I really wouldn't mind browsing quicker here either.

Well I have been but I am now back and alternating between preparing some work on Hesdin, where I was staying and the kite festival in Berck sur Mer. Plus all the family photographs and keeping a watchful eye on the little ones and my in laws. The latter also explains why I am now hiding out with the computer and taking refuge in ipernity for a few moments.

I hadn't really been on Flickr for a couple of weeks too much else to do, but it seems that the scripting had fallen over on keeping up to date with contacts photographs. Anyway the workround was implemented only for the bugs to start coming out of the woodwork. Including for me a conflict with my internet security program. Basically, I can't see photographs at a humane pace and so am going to have to stop commenting and viewing stuff. Which aint too bad I don't have loads of time normally at the moment (except now). But probably means all the contacts will desert my photostream as they all think I'm ignoring them. Oh well, never was one to get over-excited about explore and the like.

But that does always remind me that we take photographs because we hope people will at least look at them and like them.

Normally it is mummy and the Sparrow who do baking, but daddy has one baking trick he is allowed to pull off with his son. I am allowed to bake bread - but not apparently cakes and biscuits. So yesterday Sparrow and I made his first batch of Soda bread. Which is odd since his mother is Irish and she was not the one showing him how. I have a couple of shots of the finished loaves which I will load up as soon as possible.

Soda bread

Soda bread

Soda bread

So today I have my second Christmas. I have been saving for sometime towards a new prime lens for my camera and through some fortune seem to have saved twice as much as I needed. This along with some very kind gifts over Christmas has meant I could also buy a tablet and CCD cleaner. All of which arrived in the post today! I had an initial panic because I thought this nice new 50mm lens wasn't going to work with the camera - until I realised I hadn't completed the full rotation so there was a reason for the autofocus to be duff. The lens also caused no end of anxious nights, trying to reason through what I wanted in the lens. Really I wanted something that was a traditional 50mm lens as the standard lens on my camera. The idea being it forces me to get close to what I am interested in, and the optics are better so crisper brighter photographs. I also wanted a wide aperture f1.2 would be nice, because then I could use it in low light conditions. Trouble is 50mm on a Canon 20D is about 32mm so a 50mm acts more like a 75mm prime. When you start balancing this you then think that having a macro version and sacrificing some of the aperture isn't so bad, (32mm being expensive and rare). But then you look at Canon's lens and realise it isn't a true macro lens, but thankfully Sigma's is and also cheaper so you think that's it then. Except then you lie awake at night second guessing your decision, until you buy it. At which point I found sleep more appealing. Anyway got to go now and play with my toys!

So now I begin the work of processing the pictures of Charmouth in Dorset - thankfully I don't think I took as many as I did in Devon. Thank goodness as I have a load of other photographs to process as well.

Charmouth beach looking toward…

The Cobb, Lyme Regis

Evolution

Water

Well I finally managed to complete all the processing of the photographs I took around Peppercombe in Devon. This has felt like an uphill struggle to find the time to actually stop and look at what had been taken with a degree of calm cogitation. Then on top of it all to actually process the images, even though some require little in the way of work. I wonder if the rest of you find the same struggle? Of course now I have everything taken in between (and some from before), which includes birthday party photographs for friends and now some taken on the coast in Dorset. At least it is a pleasure to do this and the only difficult bit is actually finding the hours to put in.

To my ipernity chums I'm sorry I've been neglecting you - life has caught up with me and there hasn't been enough time to look at your stuff and do all the real world work. The good news is that it should be easier to catch up in the coming weeks. The bad news at the moment is that there is no more natural history of deckchairs - partly due to the lack of opportunity to get some shots and also because I think they hibernate over the winter :).

bad google translation into German

Zu meinen ipernity Kumpeln es tut mir leid habe ich dich vernachlässigt - das Leben hat mit mir aufholt und es hat nicht genügend Zeit gegeben, dein Material zu betrachten und alle realistische Arbeit zu erledigen. Die guten Nachrichten sind, daß aufholen einfacher sein sollte, in den kommenden Wochen. Die schlechten Nachrichten sind im Augenblick, daß es no more Naturgeschichte der deckchairs - teils wegen des Mangels an Gelegenheit, einige Schüsse zu erhalten gibt und auch, weil ich sie hibernate über dem Winter :).

and into French

À mes copains d'ipernity je suis désolé que je vous aie négligé - la vie s'est rattrapée par rapport à moi et il n'y a pas eu assez de temps de regarder votre substance et d'effectuer tout travail réel. Les bonnes nouvelles sont qu'il devrait être plus facile de se rattraper en prochaines semaines. Les mauvaises nouvelles sont à l'heure actuelle qu'il n'y a plus d'histoire naturelle des deckchairs - partiellement dus au manque d'occasion d'obtenir quelques projectiles et aussi parce que je les pense hibernate au cours de l'hiver :).

Hey thats USP for ipernity auto European translation of blogs.

First recording of australian deckchair subspecies

Deckchair taxonomy first used