the thought menagerie (on Ipernity) ^pro

Hi Friends,

Just a little notice to say we've had a little Ipernity excursion into the Victorian countryside and have some pretty nice photos to show for it.  The photos will be trickling into this group over the next week or so, make sure to check back from time to time if Australian photography does it for you.

The link to the group is here: http://www.ipernity.com/group/56611

We're trying to get some interest from Victorian photographers so if you'd like to join please come along.  Membership requires at least one group outing - we're aiming for once every month or two so it shouldn't be too hard to book the time in your busy schedules.

If you don't know about friendfeed then what are you waiting for? It's the place where all your services come together; no more disparate web services - you want to know what someone is doing, sharing or talking about then this is the place to be.

Seriously hot stuff.

If you're interested then this is me: http://friendfeed.com/stuartforsyth

Sharing:

• Flickr
• Smugmug
• Twitter
• Google Reader
• Blog
• del.icio.us

and lots more.

Anyone else tried Photoshop Express?

While the lawyers circle each other wrangling over the ridiculous EULA, the rest of us early adopters got online and tried out this latest web offering from Photoshop. 

Although somewhat limited in its current tool offerings, I really like the user interface and the live preview for any of the effects you're about to apply make for an excellent editing experience; the tools are really intuitive and reversable so there's no harm in playing.  Photoshop Express also makes it a snap to tweak your photos on other websites like Facebook - there is a Flickr integration in the pipeline and I really really hope Ipernity's developers are sitting up and taking notice ... nudge nudge hint hint!

Here is one of my photos that I tweaked in two easy steps; first with the pop-colour tool to highlight the rust and then with a saturation push ... presto! a new take on one of my pictures.

I was hoping to catch my 10,000th visitor but sadly that boat sailed quietly in the night.

Thanks to everyone who comes regularly for a visit and a word or two; your presence and comments make the experience wonderful.

Stuart

I am thinking of moving back to Flickr.  Yes! yes, I know they are the Microsoft of the photo sharing websites and people scream censorship but I’ve seen quite a lot of sites being closed here as well due to [subjective] views on appropriate content.  I haven’t made my decision yet and thought I’d put it to the one area of Ipernity which really excels - that would be you reading this; the community of Ipernity.

My decision has less to do with Ipernity than my inability to keep pouring my online time in 100 different directions and I recently have reigned in my early adopter mentality and selected a few accounts to keep open online and the rest I will be closing.

From Twitter, Pounce and Facebook for social networking,Ipernity, Flickr and Facebook for photosharing and Wordpress, Ipernity and Facebook for blogging I just can’t keep up.  All my public photos get split between Ipernity, Flickr and Facebook (one must go) and I semi-run a blog here which is hard when my main blog has been running since 2005 and has in excess of 75 000 views.

Technologically I feel Ipernity has let the ball slip badly.  The website is still in beta and the photo organiser is a trimmed down version of the Flickr one which doesn’t work as well.  In fact most of the site functionality is a trimmed down, near identical version of Flickr which just isn’t as good - Ipernity’s photo explore is down right abysmal.  Groups really haven’t really worked and all the calls by Ipernity users for something different and innovative were ignored.  Ipernity has yet to release one of the most sought after set features - a guest pass which allows you to send a link to your private pics to dear Aunt May without the poor 80 year old dear having to sign-up first.  I won't even mention the blog editor and the fact that it works very erratically with some browsers.  Flickr on the other hand is constantly innovating as their recent partnership with Picnic will attest, the ability to do minor adjustments and crops in the online tools is incredible and they justly win award after award.  Ipernity didn’t even cut an invite to some of the recent photo sharing website reviews in the last year; most review websites now see it as a Flickr wannabe that just can’t.  The other thing which is making me sway towards the dark side is my favourite podcast ‘this week in photography’; they have an awesome community and their competitions run on Flickr which means I need to keep going there it seems.

Now please don’t get all hot and bothered; don’t shoot the messenger - I am asking your valued opinion as to why one would choose Ipernity over Flickr, what makes it stand out above the other.  This is a real plea as I just can’t keep updating both much longer.

Take a look at the photograph below.

This is the earliest photograph ever taken. Entitled View from the Window at Le Gras, this was taken by Frenchman Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 and had an eight hour exposure time.

What about this one?

Taken in 1904 by Edward Steichen this photograph is of Long Island New York and was sold in 2006 for a cool $2.6 million making it the most expensive photograph ever sold.

From the long exposures to the incredible chemical wizardry and patience of the earliest proponents of the art, this website gives you the tiniest taste of what it took to be a photographer back in days before the magic and convenience of our modern cameras.

Source: more here

I have started a group called "Real Vintage" as a place to post all those authentic old photos taken from explorations through mouldy photo albums in the attic.  I will continue to add my vintage photos to the group to share with you and I hope those of you with incredible old photos do likewise.

hard times

It is 11pm and I was just about to turn off my computer when one of the cats got my attention with all the noise he was making. Turns out he's playing with this big, really creepy looking bug. Now one of the joys of living in South Africa is the cornucopia of wildlife which this country enjoys and this holds true for bug-dom as well. I love macro work and I love getting the camera up close and personal with these chitinous segmented denizens of the microscopic however there are times when too close is well ... just too damn close.

I still shudder to recal waking one night with two "Parktown Prawns" (as they are known locally; Libanasidus vittatus) crawling on me. As if that weren't bad enough, perhaps I should mention the one was crawling on my face. I went from horizontal and blissfully asleep to vertical with enough adrenaline to kill a small elephant in about 1 nanosecond.

Now this "cute" little fella (below) comes scooting along under my chair to escape the cat. Guess who will be checking under his pillow tonight?

Any entomology genii out there? Identification would be most helpful.

I must say I feel rather gutted today; Mike came and took all my trees away with him. Mike is a really nice guy (good) who loves plants (better) and is a specialist in orchids and bonsai (best) but my trees were like pets are to other people - I loved them and tended them, looked after them, fed them and kept them warm in winter and medicated them when they got sick but they can't come with me. It wasn't for lack of trying, I contacted the Australian quarantine facilities and other bonsai specialists but the Aussies are paranoid about anything living (bar you) entering the country and the plants would have had to spend months in hydroponics quarantine for astronomical amounts of money and time.

So I have packed up all my tools and know I can start all over again but 10 years of growing and tending my own trees is hard to replace. So I waved good-bye to Mike after wishing him farewell and good luck and watched him drive away with his car bristling with green and the promise of a photo or two in years to come; bravely fighting back a lump in my throat and a strange moisture which had settled over my vision.

Thanks for your interest in the scans of my old vintage photos. I've made an album in which I will put the photos to make it easier for you to come back and see what's new and to seperate them from my own photos.

I know some of you, like Rob, also have photos from long ago to share in the near future - when you're ready to post some of them we should make a group for these snippets of history.

The Mermaid

My Dad recently had a whole lot of ancient family photos scanned. These wonders have lived in musty and dusty albums, been damaged in floods and survived all sorts of hardships to come to the present day.

Artificialy aging photos is somewhat of a love of mine, a couple of recent ones merit the bettering of my photoshop skills but when I look at real aged and damaged photos I realise just what a long road I still have ahead of me. If there are any of you who are interested in seeing some of these from a time long ago let me know and I will post more of them.

Journey to distant lands

Above is an old photo of a ship off to who knows where; for me it captures an air of romance when travel was real travel and not a few cramped hours on an aeroplane.

To all the wonderful people on Ipernity; Merry Christmas and have a fantastic new year.  Hope you're all well fed and rested ready for more outstanding photography in 2008.

I have been wondering for a while now why my beautiful colour photographs end up looking desaturated and washed out every time I upload them to Ipernity (and Flickr for that matter). Below is an example of what I'm talking about:

ipernity colour

The image on the right is how my photo looks in lightroom, the one on the left is what happens when I send it to Ipernity; big difference. This obviously frustrated me because I just was not able to convey what I needed to in terms of colour and saturation and pictures with impact ended up pretty average.

Tonight I embarked on an experiment to try and find out why.

When I export from Lightroom, from RAW (NEF) to JPG I can choose one of 3 options: sRGB, AdobeRGB (1998) and ProPhoto RGB. Without being a guru of color spaces, sRGB is the standard proposed by Microsoft and HP in 1995 for print and web; proPhoto is a standard developed by Kodak for photographic output and is the largest of the colour spaces and AdobeRGB was developed in 1998 to encompass the colours achievable on CMYK printers. For the more technically minded here is an article detailing why proPhoto RGB is far superior to the others.

Anyway the trouble seems to lie in how the photo-sharing websites handle the different colour spaces. Flickr and Ipernity (and I would love clarification on this) seem to handle the sRGB colour space quite well but their interpretations of the other two leave a lot to be desired squarely with how the browsers handle the colour spaces (see Don's comment below) - Safari is the only browser to display these images correctly. The proof of the pudding is in the eating and here are 3 of the same photos exported using the different colour profiles.

1. Worst is Prophoto RGB (although this is the preferred colour space for photography)

Prophoto RGB

2. In second place comes AdobeRGB (better but not quite there)

Adobe RGB

3. The best overall representation comes from the older sRGB which is a pity really.

Pine and Mist (sRGB)

In closing, none of these gives a true representation of what I see on the screen for some unknown reason. The truest approximation can be seen in the screen shot at the start of this article and that was a screen grab ... maybe some colour deity can explain this to me.

Save sRGB when you export from Lightroom and other software to have the best possible representation of your photo on Ipernity and let's hope the photo websites non-Safari browsers all get their Prophoto RGB ducks in a row sometime soon.

It is the problem with any hobby, passion even profession; making time to do the things you love. It was easier in earlier days, school and university provided endess hours to follow the callings of our hearts and minds though few people I know - myself included - made "good" use of that time prefering instead to fritter the time away with sleep, drink or teenage lust. As I grow older and personal time seems to be something of a scarce resource I regret not making better use of those endless hours and days.

Those with children know how their needs and desires eat into our personal time; I am not in any way lamenting this fact, my son provides me with endless enjoyment it's just that sometimes at the end of the day; after work and shopping, homework or cooking, toothbrushing and the ever prevalent bedtime argument I find myself slumped somewhate exhausted in an armchair wondering how I could have made more time for personal consequence.

My question to you is how do you make time for the things you love, like photography, something which may or may not be shared amongst those closest to you? Some of the time I photograph my wife's hobby, equestrian show-jumping, which works quite well but other aspects are not so family friendly; the hunting of bugs for macro shots - though a huge hit with my seven year old - requires some finesse and quiet which are not overly child friendly.

Every year seems to pass faster and faster and my pool of self-time seems to be drying up; what to do ... what do you do?

My Flickr pro account runs out in five days and I'm having to fight the impulse to do something about it.  Don't get me wrong Ipernity is my new home but Flickr was where I started out a long time ago and for some reason I still have some silly sentimentality about my account.  I have played around with the new online photo editing tools on Flickr and they are really cool for last minute tweaking and resizing; a nice innovation from a website which has remained static for quite a while now.

This is a good lesson in letting go of attachments; what with the move overseas pending next month I'm getting a lot of practice in that regard :)

I finish up at work tomorrow, after six years at the same company I am finally moving along.  December will be filled with frantic organisation, my moleskin thrums with activity to make even the most hardy GTD jedi knight gasp in awe, and I will tackle with increased gusto the discarding of personal effects hoarded over the years.  the movers arrive in early January and we board our plane shortly thereafter bound for a new country and a new life. 

The pendulum arc of emotions range from excitement and optimism to the throat clasping 'oh my God what have I done' but those who have moved life and country assure me this is a perfectly normal reaction and not due to horrible disorders of my autonomic nervous system. 

Tonight is our work Christmas function where I can say goodbye in good cheer to people who I've known for a long time even if the cogs, enthusiasm and workings of the job have long since gone luke-warm.

It is indeed a great moment in time, a closure on things now done and a crisp new page on which to etch a new beginning.

Social networking website such as Myspace and more recently Facebook have been creating huge publicity over the last couple of years.  Their addictive nature have caused many a work place to have them banned from their employees web access and many a person has found themselves trolling around mindlessly for hours looking for long lost friends and family.

My Facebook profile was a revelation to me though;  I set it up initially as a closed network for friends and family to share some of the things I find interesting, like my photography, and for me to see what they were up to however I never really expected the deluge which followed.  First up were the work colleagues; failure to accept them into my profile would create all sorts of embarrassing shuffling in the hallway and low level mutterings so on they came.  Then came the work colleagues wives ... er ok ... how do you respond when the bosses wife sends you a ‘naughty gift’; big potential problems right there. 

Then the friends/acquaintances from school 15 years ago suddenly started popping up wanting to be best buds ... ok ... so we had something way back in the annals of history, let’s say hi ... on they came.  Then came the friend collectors who suddenly wanted to be big buds with me and share my personal virtual real-estate and swap stories of their progeny; guys back at school who, in the throws of effervescent schoolboy testosterone, you’d like to smack in the face (and probably did) all of a sudden want to be super-best-chums .... they are ‘obviously’ still way cool though because their network has 476 friends hence the need to collect you for meaningful social interaction. 

Facebook looks set to create groups for your friends; each group will have privacy options that you can set which will dictate how much of your information you allow these people to see.  I can’t wait for this new development and have my groups thought up already.

Family
Friends
Work Colleagues
Hobby Sharing
Dicks from my youth

Can’t wait :-)

She has been included in Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world. Born in Somalia she chose not to submit to a forced marriage to a man she did not know and she fled to her country of exile; the Netherlands. She is fluent in Somali, Arabic, Amharic, Swahili, English and now Dutch and she soon became a prominent translator for Somali refugees fleeing some of the horrors woman find themselves living under in their Islamic world. She is an outspoken critic for Muslim woman who have no voice and whose lives are filled with abuse, mutilation, sexual subjugation and forced child-bearing. She now lives in exile under constant guard for she is a vocal Islamic apostate and critic and for her sins she is sentenced to die.

Sam Harris and Salmon Rushdie wrote and article about Ali in the Los Angeles Times:

Hirsi Ali may be the first refugee from Western Europe since the Holocaust. As such, she is a unique and indispensable witness to both the strength and weakness of the West: to the splendor of open society and to the boundless energy of its antagonists. She knows the challenges we face in our struggle to contain the misogyny and religious fanaticism of the Muslim world, and she lives with the consequences of our failure each day. There is no one in a better position to remind us that tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.

Her promised protection by the Dutch government has been rescinded and she is in hiding in the United States. The costs of making someone disappear from the eyes of fanatics are great; Sam Harris has created a place where free-thinking people can pledge a small amount of money to help towards her protection and continuing loud and brilliant voice against intolerance and religious extremism.

Links:

Los Angeles Times: Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Abandoned to fanatics
New York Times: Daughter of Enlightenment
Sam Harris' website: URGENT APPEAL: Please help protect Ayaan Hirsi Ali