HyperBob's blog/

stockholm #4

I took the Viking ferry from Helsinki to Stockolm. It was a rough crossing and it was snowing.

The boat was full of Russians spending the last of their petro-dollars, and Swedish men with lots of gold chains around their necks buying snuff.

I saw one man buying over fifty packets of the stuff. The EU may have banned the sale of snuff but the Swedes can't get enough of snuff and it appears they raid the boats from Finland to buy the stuff.

stockholm #7

The Russians put on their fur coats, fur hats, fur boots and marched off into town. It is about a 2 km walk from the boat into the old town. I trundled along behind a gaggle of polar bear Russian women, and although they were BIG they could really move.

I was out of breath trying to keep their perfume within sniffing distance. They were motoring. Heads bent into the wind and laughing. I thought to myself... these are the children of the women that won the II world war, and now they were storming Stockholm. They were irresistable.

stockholm #3

The day could not make up its mind it did not know if it wanted to rain or snow. It had a middle-ages feel to it. The roofs slick and wet.

It was a day for performing executions. It was a day for ox carts hauling criminals off to the gallows. A day for kings and queens to sip tea and eat cake in the wormth of their castles, while the plebs shivered in the shelter of the narrow streets.

stockholm #5

I took refuge like many others in a church and took some photos. Since I did not have a tripod I used the pews as a stable base to do three exposure auto-bracketing of the alter, pulpit golden crowns, a menorah, and a sculpture of Saint George killing a dragon. The whole place was a mish mash of confusing symbols.

It was as though all religions were represented, and the capitalistic children of the Russian revolution took off their fur coats and wondered why this church had not been turned into a warehouse like in the good old days.

Perhaps it was a warehouse and we didn't know.

Lord have mercy

On a bleak day with a bitter wind if you want to get in out he cold then the place to go is a church. Sure you could go into a museum but that would cost you some dosh, whereas churches are free, that is if your conscience premits you to ignore the collecton box.

More often than not churches are in actual fact museums, storing artifacts from the past that at one time helped the faithful to focus their attention on things everlasting and not the temporal things like cold or hunger.

Holy mother of God... I've got…

In "the doors of perception" Huxley suggested that religious experiances and visions that the saints had during the middle ages was due to ergot poisoning.

The idea was that after a long hard winter the peasants were scaping the barrel for the last grains of rye to make bread, and the the grains were infected with a fungus that produced toxic and psychoactive chemicals (alkaloids), including lysergic acid.

And it doesn't cost a thing

Now hunger and fasting have also been known to produce visions, so here we have a situation during Easter where people are fasting for Lent and eating ergot rye bread

They go into a big church and stare up at the multicoloured stain glass windows and see the flickering candle lights. They hear the resounding blast and mighty chords from the magestic pipe organ, and with one voice the whole congregation recites the dogma.

Tune in Turn on and Drop out.

Shake me up Judy

I feel a tap on my shoulder. "Excuse me Sir, that table you are resting your camera on is not a tripod. It is an alter"

"You are quite correct it is not a tripod. A tripod has three legs, and this alter does appear to be a table since it has four legs. You are very observant"

The sacred and the profane are forever being confused in the minds of men.

nest #2 tiltshift

There is a technique in photography that is known as Tilt-Shift It is a way of manipulating a photo so that appears that you have taken a photo of some miniature scale model.

Cars look like toy cars and people begin to look like they were small dolls. Both the distant horizon and the near foreground are blured and only a section in the middle remains in focus.

This gives the illusion that you are looking at a miniature model. It seems to work best if you take a picture of an arial view .

With GIMP or PS creating this effect involves applying layer masks and blurs.

stockholm #8-tiltshift

There is a GIMP tutorial on FakeTilt-Shift that takes you through the whole process, and it is useful to understand the techniques being used, but if you do not have the time then just go to Tilt-Shift Maker

Enjoy faking it

golden spiral y-fronts

A photo of of underpants will still be pants regardless of applying the rule of thirds or the golden ratio or the golden spiral.

Apparently there are geometrical secrets that need to be applied so that a photo is aesthetically appealing. There are three geometrical adjustments that can be applied to a photo and they are:

1) Rule of thirds

Where the photo has a grid of 3 rows and 3 columns super-imposed on it and the focal points are situated where the lines cross.

2) Golden triangles

Golden Triangles is more convenient to apply to photos with strong diagonal lines.

3) Golden Spiral

Uses a spiral construction to lead your eye into the focus of attention.

Well that is all good and well but how could you apply these principles when composing a photo... well I suppose you need to train your eye, but there is a small tool that will allow you to do some post- processing to get your photo to fall within geometrical aesthetic guidelines

Test your compositions or adjust them using the Composition Adjuster