Ken Cameron's Blog

Alternative approaches (coming and going)

2012-02-03T12:25:00.000+11:00

Click on the images for a larger view. Located approximately in the middle of this map (where the road leaving Kennedy's Road runs into the trees). You can zoom out for a wider perspective.

A Fine Cloud

2012-01-26T21:34:00.000+11:00

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From the Balcony, on Australia Day 2012, the day after our return from Perth.

Dinner with the Family

2012-01-13T20:02:00.000+11:00

After the Rain...

2012-01-09T09:17:00.000+11:00

...with discarded fridge and elongated car.

Tom and Elliot and Zoe and Ella in Bodalla (and Ken in the background)

2012-01-01T12:18:00.001+11:00

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After lunch, a warm day in the sun.

From Mount Painter, after Fires

2011-12-27T20:54:00.002+11:00

This is a heavily distorted panorama taken from the top of Mount Painter in Belconnen, Canberra, after a bushfire reached the outskirts of the city in, I think, 2002, or it may have been earlier. Click on the image for a closer look.

boxing day - YouTube

2011-12-26T22:18:00.000+11:00

Boxing Day - YouTube:

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Zenfolio | Ken Cameron's Photographs | The 'hood, from the Balcony.

2011-12-20T09:31:00.000+11:00

Photographs taken in the evening, from our balcony, of our neighborhood. Spying, really.

Zenfolio | Ken Cameron's Photographs | The 'hood, from the Balcony.:

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Sisters and Sons

2011-12-17T21:20:00.000+11:00

Zoe with Elliot, Ella with Jarrah, at Tom and Zoe's place in Sydney, December 2011

Jarrah

Elliot

In Queanbeyan Cemetery

2011-12-16T11:29:00.000+11:00

The 56 best/worst similes « House of Figs

2011-12-09T11:06:00.000+11:00

The 56 best/worst similes « House of Figs:

Some nice ones here.

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Elliot Cameron Roberts

2011-12-09T09:44:00.001+11:00

Tom and Zoe's baby was born last night. Mother and baby well. I will see them tomorrow, so photos will follow but in the meantime here is one taken by Debbie who was present at the birth

Panasonic Leica DG Summilux 25mm F1.4 ASPH Lens Unboxing - YouTube

2011-12-07T20:08:00.000+11:00

This is an "unboxing" video, of which there are thousands on YouTube. Interesting as to content only if you want one of these lenses, but as a type, interesting to anyone who has ever bought anything on line. Unboxing videos are rituals in the religion of consumerism, practised on the internet. Note the portentous music, accompanying close examination of something that might seem likely to be quite boring - unwrapping a parcel - but not if the person watching it is also an acolyte, as who isn't, these days.

Panasonic Leica DG Summilux 25mm F1.4 ASPH Lens Unboxing - YouTube:

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Ken Cameron's Website - Memoir (text files)

2011-12-05T22:21:00.000+11:00

The link below is to the page on my website which provides links to some autobiographical writing. I have recently added a text entitled "The Cars in my Life".

Ken Cameron's Website - Memoir (text files):

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Not sure about the knife technique there...

2011-12-04T11:11:00.001+11:00

.....but the results look good, those carrots have been decisively chopped.

30 Seconds of Dinner

2011-12-03T21:39:00.001+11:00

Philosopher's Zone - ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

2011-12-03T14:26:00.000+11:00

Philosopher's Zone - ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation):

Check out the latest of these, about robo-wars. Scary. All the others look pretty interesting too.

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Another Tuross Photograph

2011-12-03T12:04:00.000+11:00

One Tree Point at Tuross Head, from a sandbank just out from the beach.

Advancing through the Forest

2011-12-03T11:41:00.000+11:00

Rainy Evening in Queanbeyan

2011-11-30T23:45:00.000+11:00

Reading...

2011-11-30T13:16:00.001+11:00

...."Against Religion" by Tamas Pataki. .

He lists 10 characteristics of fundamentalism (my paraphrase):

It is counter-modernist – a strategy by which believers attempt to preserve their distinctive identity in the face of modernity and secularism.
These groups are generally assertive, clamorous and even violent.
Members of the group are the elect, the chosen ones, the saved, the exclusive brethren etc.
Superiority and distinction have to be marked publicly so fundamentalists are obsessed with demarcating between believers and non-believers (skullcaps, circumcision, amish cutting off other amish beards).
There is only one true religion.
There is a holy book, prophet and/or charismatic leader.
Law and the authority to rule descend from God.
Fundamentalists are deeply concerned to control female sexuality.
Sexual behavioiur, especially homosexuality, is a major concern.
Fundamentalism and nationalism engage and unite in complex ways.

His core thesis is that a certain kind of attachment to religion is an expression of a certain kind of psychological problem, a failure to adjust to the infant's unavoidable loss of close connection with the mother. He recognises that this proves nothing about the truth of religion, and that not all followers of religion follow it for this reason. He is dismissive of mysticism (which is what most interests me about religion), ignores buddhism and has little to say about hinduism. He acknowledges these limitations.

A short, cogent book, worth reading by believers and non-believers

On the Lake Again

2011-11-24T21:55:00.001+11:00

I went for a paddle on Lake Burley Griffin this morning, my first time in the Canoe since the Tuross episode (as I am calling it - the suffering doesn't seem to be diminishing with time). It was good to get back in the boat. I had to avoid oarsmen in training, who can't be expected to see an errant canoe because they are looking backwards - and their coaches, buzzing about in tinnies while yelling at them through electric megaphones, probably wouldn't notice a canoeist.

Would the picture improved if the canoe were pointing directly at Black Mountain Tower? It has saturated blue and yellow in it and all the other colours turned to black and white.

After the paddle I stopped off at the Museum of Australia to look at its exhibition of modern chinese art. Weird and fascinating. Traditional chinese art, socialist realism, various takes on various western modernisms, a splendid video installation based on a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. All the artists were academics and bureaucrats, professor this and chairman of that.

In the evening I watched the last episode of "The Slap", of which I have become a fan. An interesting, clear-sighted piece of work. Linda has the novel, which I will read when she gets home. How does it all end? Richie finds a nice boy. Aish and Hector stay together. The Greeks consolidate around a reduced core family but one about to be augmented by Sandy and Harry's unborn child. Rosie's ghastly child Hugo outdoes himself by spitting on an elderly gentleman.Gary seems to be off the booze but still goes in for ineffectual outbursts. He and Rosie head for the hills. The ripples die away but nothing is the same. Does that sound like a plug for the series, and/or an accusation of ultimate sentimentality? I don't intend the second, and would stand behind the first. It gets people thinking and talking.

Jarrah Snippets

2011-11-18T11:16:00.001+11:00

These are from my smartphone, whose data card I just had to clean when it became full. Mostly Jarrah, with glimpses of his parents, a moment of his uncle and an enigmatic statement from his Grandpa.

Linda's video of Ken attempting a canoe race

2011-11-17T20:42:00.001+11:00

SBS On Demand - How Many People Can Live On Planet Earth Full Ep

2011-11-16T09:41:00.000+11:00

SBS On Demand - How Many People Can Live On Planet Earth Full Ep:

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Worth a look - need to get in quick as it will be on line for a week only. I like (among other things) the way in which they get their talking heads from the countries they depict rather than always using western experts.

A Big Blow

2011-11-15T17:05:00.001+11:00

One of the joys of Tuross is how close you are to the light and the wind and the trees and the water.

Something amazing....

2011-11-15T10:43:00.001+11:00

...although you might want to turn down the music.

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

A South Coast Bike Ride

2011-11-15T00:14:00.001+11:00

From Bingie to Congo on this map, north along the coast then back inland. A ride I used to do often when I lived in Tuross. The first picture is from Bingie looking back towards Tuross. I used to fish at Bingie but it is in the Marine Park now, as is much of the coast on this ride. I believe that the Marine Park is necessary to preserve stocks against present and future population pressures but I also regret the loss of some favorite fishing spots. I see that the NSW Liberal Government is reviewing the science and bureaucratic processes around Marine Parks as part of its deal with the Fishers and Shooters Party. I have been debating these issues with an interesting blogger – see here.

This is Kelly’s Lake, just north of Bingie on the map. I camped there once or twice in the days before the National Park. Who was Kelly, I wonder. Probably a farmer. It is overlooked from the North by a private house which you can see on the map, and which I have never known to be occupied and is always boarded up, although it is looked after and there is a wood supply around the back so it must be used occasionally. An enviable location for a beach house.

This is the beach just north of the mouth of Kelly’s Lake. The photographs were taken with a tiny waterproof and shockproof camera which I can take anywhere without worrying about damage. They look a bit desaturated on my current screen. No way, really, to control what they will look like on anyone else’s screen.

A lot of the forest along this part of the coast is regrowth of one kind or another but there are some lovely old trees. This shot is desaturated on all color channels with a bit of green and orange brought back.

This is from the dramatically rocky point at Meringo. There is a boundary between between fishing and non-fishing zones placed right in the middle of the point, at a location which forbids fishing on a safe and popular rock shelf but allows it from an adjacent location which is risky to access and exposed to large waves. It seems to me a classic case of a boundary drawn in an office without regard to conditions on the ground. Parks, Marine or National, are essentially bureaucratic creations and too often manifest the various forms of stupidity that are characteristic of bureaucracy. The video below the photograph shows how the boundary is placed.

Repetition with variation is common in the natural world, and even more common in works of art. I wonder if its observation in nature is one of the sources of art. I also love graphic, or even calligraphic, quality of these – grasses, are they, or some other kind of plant, and the tough spiny vines on the right ? My lack of botanical knowledge is a frequent regret.

These two shots were taken from more or less the same spot, the first looking North along Meringo Beach, the second South to the “end house” at Meringo, a splendid permanantly occupied bush shack surrounded by precious debris and with a view to die for, although no doubt at the expense of savage exposure when the wind is from the North. We used to rent a house there, which we called the “ping pong house” because it had a table. You can just see its gable on the right of the photograph.

The first picture is the closed outlet of a creek just North of Meringo. . I like the shape of the curve as it is “drawn” by the camera’s wide angle lens. The creek is backed up by a small Estuary. I have never fished it and it may now be protected, which is fine. I have always taken pleasure in the imagined possibility that giant fish lurk in such places such as this. I imagine there might also be prawns, with the locals, originally and still maybe partly aboriginal, would take on moonless nights. The second image is looking back towards Meringo from the headland past the creek to its North. Not a lot of detail in the photograph but you get the idea. It is former dairy country, probably, now heavily overgrown and needing to be mowed.

Ken Cameron added you to his circles and invited you to join Google+

2011-11-13T22:32:00.001+11:00

Ken Cameron added you to his circles and invited you to join Google+.

Join Google+

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Circles

An easy way to share some things with uni friends, others with your parents and almost nothing with your boss. Just like in real life.

Hangouts

Conversations are better face-to-face. Join a video hangout from your computer or mobile phone to catch up, watch YouTube videos together or swap stories with up to 9 of your friends at once.

Mobile

Lightning-fast group chat. Photos that upload themselves. A bird's-eye view of what's happening nearby. We built Google+ with mobile in mind.

You have received this message because Ken Cameron invited kencameron1949.nawang@blogger.com to join Google+. Unsubscribe from these emails.

Tuross Lake Paddling Classic - Google Maps

2011-11-11T19:45:00.000+11:00

Tuross Lake Paddling Classic - Google Maps: "

Click on the link above to see the route of tomorrow's paddle. I find myself nervous. I have been training (after a fashion) in my small slow kayak, and plan to race in a faster boat which I hadn't actually paddled for a couple of years before this afternoon when I took it out for half an hour or so. Luckily, all went well. Fingers crossed for tomorrow.

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Memory Map | Mapping Software | Topographic Maps

2011-11-11T11:01:00.000+11:00

Memory Map | Mapping Software | Topographic Maps:

This is an attractive product. $130 or thereabouts gets all the main topo maps covering NSW at scales from 1/25000 to 1/250000, so you can print out a custom map for any location. The licence covers two computers and one mobile device. A bit of a learning curve for me finding out how to work it, but the support is good and once you work it out the software is very smooth. There seems also to be good coverage of the rest of Australia, and the rest of the World. The same maps on a DVD from the NSW Dept of Lands cost close to $300.

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Jake with Beer and Smoke

2011-11-04T18:08:00.001+11:00

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Jake close to the Murrumbidgee river around Yaouk

kencameron1949's Channel - YouTube

2011-11-02T17:39:00.000+11:00

kencameron1949's Channel - YouTube:

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More Main Range Panoramas

2011-10-27T16:56:00.000+11:00

This one was taken from somewhere along the road from Charlotte's Pass to Rawson Pass. The road was clear of snow for around 5kms so I took my MTB. There were a few skiers about - you can see their tracks - and I felt more than a twinge of envy. With two artificial knees I am hesitant to resume cross country skiing - snowshoes are so much more stable - but I might change my mind next year if there is a good season.

Below is from the same direction but further away, and hence must have been taken earlier, as I walked across the snowfield in front towards on my way up Mount Kosciusko.

Afternoon on Jerrabomberra Hill

2011-10-27T10:24:00.000+11:00

These are High Dynamic Range Images converted to Black and White then partly recolored and made into a slideshow in Lightroom. Taking the dog and a camera for a walk.

Main Range Panorama

2011-10-25T17:00:00.002+11:00

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A pano of the main range of the Australian Snowy Mountains, taken from the lookout at Charlotte's Pass

Main Range on a windy day

2011-10-16T21:43:00.000+11:00

It was hard to stand up straight, let alone keep the camera steady, but I like this one. Tomorrow I will head for the top of Mount Koskiusko, which is invisible somewhere behind and to the right of this.

Testing Direct Upload from Lightroom

2011-09-30T09:51:00.000+10:00

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I took this on yesterday's bike ride around Lake Burley Griffin, and am using it to test a Lightroom Plugin that allows direct uploading to my blog. So far it seems to work quite well. The sky is oversaturated (it looked ok in lightroom but the upload has changed the color), and the right hand side of the foreground has some rather too obvious photoshopping applied in the interests of symmetry.

A Slideshow of Wedding Photographs

2011-09-28T19:18:00.001+10:00

Test Posting

2011-08-29T17:43:00.001+10:00

Installing Windows Live Writer on a new computer prompts an intention to resume blogging. We shall see.

Tester

2011-06-16T11:31:00.001+10:00

Namesakes

2011-06-02T11:39:00.001+10:00

A small selection of the Ken Camerons. I was surprised to find that I do appear, in row 6. One of us is an Astronaut. I am hoping to get back to blogging for a while, after finishing my last Art History assignment. It has been interesting to do some academic writing, and I will probably do more later in the year, but it will be liberating to do some non-academic writing as well.

Blair's First Game of Rugby

2011-05-21T11:29:00.000+10:00

?

2011-05-04T16:26:00.001+10:00

An evening at home…

2011-03-28T16:46:00.001+11:00

With a visit to the garden.

Some Domestic Pictures

2011-02-23T14:12:00.001+11:00

Here are some more Smartphone pictures. They have all been cropped and edited in Lightroom, mostly by way of very heavy removal of luminance noise.

Some photographs from my Smartphone

2011-02-22T17:53:00.001+11:00

MySmartphone, an HTC Desire HD, has an 8 megapixel camera, which in theory promises better resolution than my first digital camera, a Nikon Coolpix E990, which had all of 3 megapixels. Of course, as everyone agrees these days, megapixels ain’t everything, and the Nikon had some compensating advantages, including a good Nikon lens and excellent ergonomics. I deeply regret dropping it into Tuross Lake some time in 2005. Phone cameras have come a long way, in megapixels certainly but perhaps more interestingly in the software that drives them. The software for both iPhones and Android phones like mine is now just as sophisticated as the software found on compact digital cameras. “Serious Photographers” tend to be a scornful about the wide range of special effects that can be produced in software, but for the frivolous among us they are a lot of fun. The slideshow below uses the sepia effect in the standard Android camera software, combined with a bit of post-processing in Lightroom. The photographs are taken on a walk on Jerrabomberra Hill, which I have also extensively photographed using more serious cameras – see for example here.

Evening into Night

2011-02-21T11:31:00.001+11:00

We like to sit on the balcony at the front of our house after dinner, looking out at the neighbourhood, and the hills on the other side of the valley, and the sky. I take photographs into darkness. Most of these were taken with a long telephoto (up to 450mm) zoom lens mounted on an APS_C bodied DSLR.

Extracts from a Memoir: Letters to my parents, with annotations.

2011-02-17T13:55:00.001+11:00

Annotated Letters

Spotlight 402 Demand Management: Social engineering by any other name …

2011-02-15T07:43:00.000+11:00

Spotlight 402 Demand Management: Social engineering by any other name …

An interesting paper on the application in North Carolina of a paradigm which will be familiar to Australians. I am not so unequivocally opposed to it as the author of the paper. But I have my doubts.

A Road Trip

2011-02-14T17:29:00.004+11:00

Here is a text (with some pictures) about a road trip in outback New South Wales which I made in January 2011. Some of it was written on the road, and some after I returned home to Queanbeyan. The frequent references to mosquitoes read differently now that I know their bites gave me Ross River Fever, a mosquito-born viral infection which causes tiredness and aching joints. Still, it was a good trip.

Trip Report

The link is to a .pdf file hosted on the scribd.com web site, which makes it easy to put documents in various formats into a blog and which seems to work very well.

Scribd also has some kind of connection with facebook, which I don't fully understand and which, if I were paranoid about the fact that so much about me is known in the infosphere, would make me more so. But as I am not, it doesn't.

Games with a camera app

2011-02-09T11:36:00.001+11:00

Another blog post from my phone

2011-02-02T11:10:00.001+11:00

I have been spending a lot of time playing with my smartphone recently. You could say "setting it up ", but really I am referring to an activity best characterised as play. I have installed some free apps and also bought a few, without spending a lot of money, which I guess is the secret of the financial success of the iphone and android marketplaces. There are some great keyboard apps of which I'm currently using SwiftKey. The prediction algorithms are brilliant and improve over time. The quality level of both free and purchased apps is high.

smartphone post

2011-02-01T18:11:00.004+11:00

A test post to see if the. Android blogging software works.

Seems like it does. No excuses.

Evening from our Balconies

2010-12-31T15:21:00.001+11:00

evening rain on boxing day

2010-12-26T21:26:00.000+11:00

The forecast rain has come at last, but not the thunderstorms - I haven't heard any thunder or seen any lightning. Tom and Zoe and Jake and Julianne and Chloe came for lunch. We skyped Ells and Kirk and Jarrah with quality video, at least of them - apparently not so good the other way. Xmas over, feeling a bit in limbo, as between the years. The coleslaw could have done with a hint of sugar. Quillan was charming and amusing on Xmas day and today. Blair did OK, with a few hairy moments. Before the visitors arrived Emily and I went for a walk up the hill and found a new sector that is very attractive for walking. I had missed it before because I felt, or assumed, that left was the way to turn to get home from the top of the mountain, when in fact right is the better way, leading onto slopes and deep gullies with fine groves of trees and then a direct path down towards the house..

Black and White Conversion

2010-12-14T10:49:00.001+11:00

I am increasingly interested in black and white photography in which subtle color is used expressively. This is nothing new in the history of photography. I have seen beautifully hand colored photographs from India in the Australian National and NSW Art Galleries (here is an online exhibition of the same kind of work) and duotone is a traditional technique which modern digital image processing software like Lightroom does well. Digital cameras take colour photographs which need to be converted to black and white in software (or sometimes in the camera, but that reduces flexibility). The image above was converted in Lightroom, using a technique developed by the photographer Martin Evening. It is well suited to producing tinted images because its starting point is desaturating all colors, so it allows individual colour channels to be resaturated and have their luminance adjusted to modify contrast. The original shot is from a panorama taken on the Sherman Pass road in the California Southern Sierra, somewhere around here. In the black and white conversion I am aiming for an alien, discouraging post-apocalyptic look. Imagine stumbling up that dried creek past the dead trees towards the pass.

A green hill far away

2010-12-08T16:40:00.001+11:00

This is a hill we can see from our balcony, photographed through a telephoto lens. It is a composite image made from three separate photographs at different exposures (2 stops apart). The three photographs have been combined using Oloneo and heavily further edited using Lightroom. As you will see if you look closely, the three images have not been perfectly aligned, so there are two versions of the top of the hill. I like this effect, which originates in my failure to use use a tripod to take the shots, and reminds me that Oloneo is still under development and needs improvement when it comes to aligning hand-held shots. I like to sit on the balcony looking at the horizon through binoculars and taking photographs. My camera of choice for taking photographs from the balcony is a Canon EOS 40D with a Canon 80-300mm IS lens. The 40D is an APS-C camera which turns this into a 480mm lens at maximum aperture, so you can get close to distant hills.

Crocs with raindrop and reflected color

2010-12-06T08:01:00.000+11:00

from the balcony

2010-12-04T21:12:00.000+11:00

We like to sit on our front balcony looking out at our street and down towards the town. This shot was taken in the middle of a storm. It was processed to expand the tones, using Oloneo Photoengine as a raw converter. The wind was gusting around so that rain sometimes blew in to the front of the balcony. Earlier, Blair had been running around in the rain getting soaked, a good little boy thing to do.

Some photographs

2010-12-03T10:58:00.001+11:00

This is Tantangara Reservoir, in the northern Snowy Mountains of NSW. The link is to Google Maps, but you get a better view by clicking on the Google Earth link to the top right of the Maps window and playing around with the movement tools. The 3D view below is an example of what you can do. I have attempted to insert the photo on Google Earth using Panoramio but will have to wait a few days to see if it appears.

I drove down there the day before yesterday and fly fished for trout from the bank for an hour or so. I hooked a trout almost immediately but lost it when the knot attaching my leader to my fly pulled loose. A failure of character. No more fish after that, but I enjoyed the fly fishing because a steady breeze blowing from behind me and an absence of trees to entangle my fly combined to offset the flaws in my casting technique. I have come back to fly fishing, after many years absence, because the fishing itself is more fun and the resulting fish no more infrequent, and anyway I am less interested in killing fish.

I dropped in at Lake Eucumbene on the way to Tantangara. The two photographs below were taken there.

A Bad Day with Blair

2010-11-28T21:36:00.000+11:00

I was aggressive and violent towards him. Linda had to manage her responses to this as well as her own anger towards Blair. The end of the day was better, Quillan's presence being beneficial. I have started a text about the whole thing, aiming to include various voices. Blair's voice needs to be there too, I guess: maybe spoken, as writing is beyond him at his age.I am writing this in the bedroom, Linda asleep behind me, my shadow hunched against the wall.

Death and Life at Mystery Bay

2010-11-21T21:12:00.000+11:00

We stopped briefly at Mystery Bay, on the way back from looking at rural acres around Yowrie. The puppy ran into the sea and then suddenly stopped, up to her neck, amazed at what she had done. Blair chattered and played with the dog and climbed on the rocks. Linda enjoyed the dog and the child and the scene. I took some photographs of dead Mutton Birds. The storm deaths were particularly severe this year. We had earlier walked on a beach where the smell hung in the air. Not entirely a bad smell. I have been photographing beach kill for years. Road kill too, to a lesser extent. The grasses came after the birds and seemed to complement them.

Recommendation

2010-11-03T13:55:00.002+11:00

Clive James the Website

Worth a look, in my opinion. My first recommendation, to Ihian, fell on stony ground. He strongly demurred, making reference to egotism, verbosity and expatriate status. I then compounded the offence by saying I think Clive is the best currently active Australian writer of prose. Thinking I meant "the best currently active Australian writer in prose", he again demurred, very reasonably: I wouldn't go that far. So what did I mean? The distinction is proving harder to make than I expected. Something about rhythm, word choice, sentence length, paragraph structure, wholly divorced from content. A technical quality, a form of workmanship. Have a read and see what you think.

HDRI Software–Oloneo vs Photomatix

2010-11-03T12:44:00.000+11:00

Oloneo is one of the new kids on the block in HDRI Software. Photomatix is one of the strong contenders for the heavyweight championship. I have been using Photomatix for a while, but remain not entirely comfortable with its user interface, perhaps because I haven’t used it often enough to avoid having to at least partly reascend its steepish learning curve every time I use it. See my previous post entitled High Dynamic Range Images.

When I first tried Oloneo I was blown away, like some other HDRI photographers, because it was fast and allowed me to make the kind of adjustments I wanted using relatively few sliders with relatively intuitive results. I also liked its exposure, brightness and color controls. A few months after the Oloneo beta appeared, Photomatix released a major upgrade, version 4, which addressed some of my difficulties with its user interface and made other improvements, thereby setting the bar a few inches higher for Oloneo and the other competition. However, I still found myself using Oloneo, essentially because its interface makes editing HDR Images more like play and less like hard work.

Oloneo have twice extended the expiry date of their current beta, suggesting that they are working hard on the challenge. If they are to win it, the area where I see most need for improvement is in alignment. The two images below, made from the same 3 originals, illustrate the ground they have to make up. Oloneo is on the left. Note that the comparison is relevant only in relation to alignment, which was so bad on the Oloneo that I didn’t bother making any further adjustments. The Photomatix merge, on the right, is somewhat over-adjusted.

HDRI images which include grass or leaves are particularly challenging when it comes to alignment, particularly when, like me, you often don’t use a tripod.

The Dhammapada: A Translation

2010-10-26T10:40:00.000+11:00

The Dhammapada: A Translation

This is a fine version of a classic buddhist text, by a translator who combines the two neccessary skills, of scholar and poet.

High Dynamic Range Images

2010-10-11T14:08:00.001+11:00

I am becoming increasingly interested in two specialized form of photography: panoramas and HDR (high dynamic range) images. This interest arises from a desire to narrow the gap between the richness and density of the visual world and the narrower confines of a rectangular two-dimensional image. That impulse, which also lies behind 3D photography and vidoe is, of course, intrinsically doomed to disappointment and I may be making a fundamental mistake in seeking to avoid, rather than embracing, the constraints of traditional photography. If so, so be it. The impulse is is shared by many other photographers and catered for by an increasing range of software.

Photoshop (both CS and Elements) now does panoramas and HDR. My own preferred software has for some time been PtGui for panoramas and Photomatix for HDR. The most recent beta of PtGui allows the two approaches to be combined, although its implementation of HDR is as yet relatively undeveloped. I have also been experimenting with Oloneo, currently available in Beta, which combines raw conversion with HDR, noise removal and a facility aimed at studio photographers which allows photographs of a single subject taken under different lighting to be combined. Its main advantage over Photomatix is that it is very fast, both because it allows raw conversion to be combined with HDR and because its HDR module is itself fast and intuitive to use. On the downside, it integrates poorly with Lightroom and has no facility to develop presets or change default settings. Presumably these defects will be fixed in the production version.

The slideshow below contains HDRs of Tuross Head on the south coast of New South Wales, made using Oloneo. They were taken in the evening, when it it is difficult to capture a wide range of tones with a single photograph. They illustrate the range of "looks" that can be achieved using HDR software, from (relatively) natural to artificial. Based on my experiments so far, Oloneo has some advantages over Photomatix when used on low light images, although I have not yet fully tested the latest version of Photomatix (4.0).

Windows Live Writer

2010-10-02T15:59:00.001+10:00

Having left the world of Mac and moved back to Windows (because I wanted to start using a desktop replacement as my main computer and couldn’t justify the $1500 price difference between suitably configured Mac and Windows laptops), I am now exploring the range of software that comes with Windows or is available for it.
This post is being written in Windows Live Writer, and so far I am moderately impressed. Editing old posts has been a bit iffy, but the same is true of Scribefire and even Blogger, and the interface is certainly nice and smooth. Microsoft do, after all, have significant expertise when it comes to text.

And inserting the picture above, taken with Dell’s capable webcam application , was extremely easy. I could get used to this software.

(Following up, a few days later: Live Writer seems to have trouble importing old blog posts for editing purposes. It hangs when I try to open an old post - admittedly a long one).

Domestic Pictures

2010-09-13T06:48:00.000+10:00

I have started a new gallery in my zenfolio photo collection. I take a number of photographs around and from the house, mostly late at night and sometimes after substance abuse. They differ markedly from my usual run of landscape photographs. The morning after, they are sometimes included in what I regret about the night before, but I also believe that they relate to the rest of my photographs in the same way as such nights relate to the rest of my life - a bit more lively. So, this posting, and there will be a few more.

In America

2010-07-31T10:57:00.207+10:00

My good intention to write regular blog entries about my time in the USA came to nothing, as did my earlier intention to write about the time spent in Scotland. My current intention is to write an entry about the American part of the trip. I wrote "a long entry about the American part of the trip" but changed that to avoid giving another hostage to failure. I suppose I have technically fulfilled the more modest requirement already. The only hope of regular blog entry is, of course, to make it a habit, which requires not choosing the indulgent alternatives when it comes to spending the time.

Linda and the boys and I arrived in LA a bit more than two weeks ago. We stayed at the Vagabond Executive Motel in Pasadena, a few minutes drive from Ella and Kirk's place. We enjoyed the Vagabond, with its effective air conditioning, large TV and very welcome swimming pool. The original plan had been to visit Disneyland and Universal Studios, but it was very hot, and the boys showed no great enthusiasm for spending hours, or at least significant minutes, in sun-baked queues. Instead, we went to Venice Beach, and were all impressed by the t-shirts, the bong shops, the establishments offering instant diagnosis to authorize the purchase of medical marijuana, and the still quite feral elements of the local population. Chinatown and Olmeda Street (Mexicotown) in downtown LA provided more t-shirts and ferals and other features which suggested authenticity - live chickens and seafood in the case of Chinatown, a certain seediness and evident long-term family ownership of the stalls in Olmeda Street. We also visited the LaBrea Tar Pits Museum, which the boys tolerated, even enjoyed, despite an earlier plea to avoid all museums.

Ella also took us to the Dodgers Stadium. We didn't quite understand why before we got there, but the picture below gives a good idea of its attractions. The view from the top tier is vertiginous, the seating being steeply sloped so as to ensure everyone gets an uninterrupted view.

It was very hot in Pasadena, driving on the freeways and staying in one room was stressful, and Blair had one alarming meltdown, but all things considered we still had fun. Blair was duly impressed on being taken to a gun shop, the free breakasts at the motel included waffles you could make yourself on an industrial-strength waffle making machine, and the pool got a lot of use. Quillan was tolerant when he wasn't mildly enthusiastic, and charming

After Linda and the boys headed off back to Australia I spent a couple of days preparing for my car-camping trip in the Sierra ("Sierras" is apparently a solecism, since "Sierra" already incorporates the idea of multiple ranges of mountains). Ella and Kirk had a tent, a nice elegant one with multiple panels and an inner tent featuring a lot of gauze so you could see the stars if you dispensed with the flysheet, as I did all the time up until the evening when thunderstorms towered over the Sierra and the White Mountains as seen from my campsite at Grandview in the last days of my trip.

They also lent me a mattress, a stove, cooking utensils, plastic plates and cutlery. The inflatable backpacking mattress worked surprisingly well - as my age and weight have increased I have rather lost faith in lightweight inflatable mattresses, but I slept very well on this one. It was no surprise that the stove worked well - a Trangia, more or less foolproof with its methylated spirits burner and simple flame control device . "Denatured alcohol" is what they call meths in the USA, and it is hard to find and expensive. I used Trangias years ago on most of my and Jake's snow camping trips in the Australian alps, so they are a valued prop in my personal psychodrama of camping.

I also made various purchases including a bear-proof container, a couple of cooking knives, a head torch and a good road atlas of the state which also shows contours. The bear-proof container was quite expensive and proved unnecessary. There were plenty of food storage lockers at the car-camping sites where I stayed and, as one of the rangers I spoke to told me, the bears in the southern Sierra aren't like those crazy Yosemite bears who tear open car boots, so it is fine to leave food in your car. Still, I will leave it and my other purchases with Ella and Kirk, so it will get some use, from them or their friends.

I bought grape nuts and muesli and cheap delicious nectarines for breakfast, cheese and salami and crackers for lunch, instant rice, pasta and couscous to be cooked with grape tomatoes and chopped celery and mushrooms for dinner, tinned fruit and yogurt for dessert, bagels and peanut butter and grape jelly for anytime snacks. I dispensed with alcohol for the first three nights and drank cheap whiskey and (free) water for the rest of the time. I pretty much only drink whiskey when camping, but enjoy it then, heavily diluted. It may perhaps help to disinfect the water.

I started the journey early but not well, making a wrong lane choice on the freeway which left me heading south rather than north, and then, when I came off the freeway to turn around, finding myself on the wrong side of the road, luckily with no traffic at all heading my way. This wasn't because I had forgotten one drives on the right in the USA, but rather because the road I was on had so many lanes that I headed for the right hand side of the left lane without even noticing that there was another vast cluster of right lanes which I should have been in.

Escaping unscathed if shaken from this chastening situation, I finally made my way along the busy freeways, I-210 westbound and then I-5 and 99 north towards Bakersfield. Gripping wheel hard, I tried to keep up my speed and avoid swerving around in my lane in a density and velocity of traffic I hadn't encountered in England, let alone Australia. I turned off 99 a few miles before Bakersfield, onto a long straight road that ran through Central Valley farm country, orchards and fields, past run-down shacks and mexican general stores and cantinas. The North Wheeler Ridge Road, 184, I think it was. The linked satellite imagery shows the farmland. I am not sure if it is irrigated by groundwater or piped water from the Sierra. The use and re-use of water will be an ongoing theme in this posting.

After Bakersfield my route headed northeast into the foothills of the southern Sierra to Lake Isabella then north from Kernville along the Kern River to the Sherman Pass Road and up to my first campsite at Horse Meadow. Google Maps doesn't show the Sherman Pass Road until you zoom in too close to show the big picture, but the terrain covered on my route is illustrated here, this is a satellite image of Horse Meadow, and the picture below shows a view from close to my campsite. A ranger in Kernkille advised me to choose the Horse Meadow Campground over the slightly more elevated Troy Meadow or Frog Creek if I wanted to avoid OHVs (Off Highway Vehicles), which I did. The campground was around three quarters full but I was very happy with my site.

I did some work on this a few nights ago but lost two tightly written paragraphs. I thought this might be because I wrote it in Blogger, which I thought might require manual saving, rather than Scribefire, a Firefox Plugin, which I thought might not, but I am writing in Blogger now and it is autosaving my draft regularly, so I am not sure what happened, perhaps it was some kind of malicious agent that inhabits the internet.

Anyway. I am now remembering both what happened at the Horse Meadow campsite, and what I wrote about it in the paragraphs that I lost, but mainly the second. I wrote about meeting the campfire host, a old guy without a partner, a solitary male, check shirt, jeans. long hair, carried a plastic bottle of wine with him when he went out to visit some campers he knew, returned to his own RV half way through the visit to replenish the plastic bottle. White wine, which I think tends to be preferred by people who drink wine for the alchohol. Certainly that is the case with my own son Jake.

I also wrote about campsites. The prime sites at Horse Meadow are along the creek, as prime sites always are. The creek is choked up with trees and scrub but opens out enough to provide a few swimming holes, at least for kids. The prime sites were taken when I arrived, but the site I found was also exceptional, with plenty of shade over the fireplace and heavy wood slab table and benches, and a pile of rocks climbing up behind to define the space and provide some shade and reflect heat from the fire. I will have a look in Google Earth to see if I can show pictures of what I have just describe, the choked creek or the pile of rocks.

The image above is as close as Google Earth gets to both. It must have been taken after a dry period, as the areas which are yellow were much greener when I was there. You can see the river and meadow left of centre, the roads and camping areas pushing up the hill to the right around the sign. I can't pick out the pile of rocks. We are still some way from being able to see anywhere on the surface of the Globe on our private screen, but we are also amazingly close to it.

I started hiking at Horseshoe Meadow. I wandered up the creek through pine forest on my first evening but retreated quickly because I had no mosquito repellent and was under substantial attack as the sun went down. Next day I put water and food in my pack and walked across the meadow to a trail that followed the creek down a rocky and heavily wooded valley towards the point where the creek plunges over a waterfall down towards the Kern River far below. I had some hopes of fishing but the creek remained choked with trees and the waterfall too far away. On the way I ran into a quiet-voiced american of about my own age who commented that he had once been able to outhike his (teenage) children while now they ran ahead of him and around him like puppies. I said I knew how the felt, thinking of Zoe and Ella's hiking prowess.

Next day, after taking the photographs in the slideshow below, I returned to the same path a bit further down by taking a drivable trail through private property but once again the creek was choked and the waterfall inaccessible. The lure of remote, unfished streams goes back to growing up in the mountains of Sri Lanka where I wandered along some of the trout streams that run through montane jungle and read about wild rivers in the Rocky Mountains in my father's copies of "Field and Stream". The Sierra has some lovely streams, but population pressure from Los Angeles to the South and the Bay Area to the north places limits the extent to which any of them can be considered remote or unfished.

Later the same day I drove along a side road and took some panoramic photographs of the valleys below. The way in and out of Horse Meadow is along the road visible in the centre of the picture above and I followed it early the next day, rejoining the Sherman Pass road a few miles further down and following it to Highway 395 and the Ovens Valley on the Eastern Side of the Sierra. Sherman Pass. See below, where Sherman pass is the point marked A.

Coming down from Sherman Pass at 9200 feet to the Ovens Valley at round 4000, the temperature rose sharply to the high 90s and closed my window and turned up the air conditioning. I was to spend a lot of time driving up and down Highway 395, in air conditioned comfort, over the remaining week of my trip. The views were spectacular, the road surface excellent and the traffic light, but the radio stations were a disappointment, unless you wanted Christian Rock or a sermon, in which case there were too many choices. In retrospect, I should have taken a few CDs.

After a few hours driving I stopped at at the well appointed Interagency Visitor Centre just south of Lone Pine in search of advice about my next campsite and and was advised that Onion Valley met my criteria of being high up and close to good walking trails. What I wasn't told, but found when I made it up there after a 45 minute drive along a heavily switchbacked road was that it is a campsite that takes reservations in which most of the sites were occupied and the few that were vacant had reserved notices for the next couple of weeks. Luckily, I ran into the campsite host who told me about a "first come first served" walk-in site which, he said, was his favourite in the whole campground and which he thought might be vacant.

So it proved, I hastened in and staked my claim by putting a bag on the table before pitching my tent and stashing my food in the capacious bear-proof container. The Inyo National Forest web page for Onion Valley linked in my previous paragraph refers to "high bear activity" and states that "food must be stored in the bear boxes that are provided". The campsite host said that no bears had been seen in the recent past, and attributed this to the diligence of campers in storing food in the bear boxes. I took no risks.

The spectacular location of Onion Valley is apparent in this Google Earth link. The first picture of the three above show the campsite and surrounds, and more than confirms the host's judgement about its quality. It also had a small stream, running down to the right of the tent in the first photograph, which is an excellent thing in a campsite. This shows it - the site just to the right of the pointed end of the leaf-shaped circuit road in the middle of the image. After arriving I took a brisk steep walk up to Robinson Lake along the route shown here and in the third picture above and then returned to my campsite for a drink and dinner watching the late fade on the hills opposite, shown in the central picture above.

I had been alcohol free at Horse Meadow but had picked up a largish bottle of cheap scotch in the town of Independence on my way to Onion Valley. The Grocery Store in Independence was, appropriately, a local independent rather than one of the California chains whose loyalty cards I recently downloaded from my wallet, and its liquor (as some Americans still call it) was behind a locked metal grille. I thought about a jug of Zinfandel or California Burgundy, the kind of thing I drank on my first sustained visit to California in the late sixties,but settled for the scotch because I like to drink it well diluted on camping trips.

Next day I prepared a pack lunch and left after an early breakfast for a longer walk to Golden Trout Lake. This shows the route - Golden Trout Lake is at the end of the left fork of the river running diagonally up left of the center of the image between the two ridges. The slide show below is of pictures I talk on the walk up. You can show the images full screen with the icon to the far right on the bar which appears when you mouse over the bottom of the frame.

Half way up the trail to Golden Trout Lake I stopped for a morning snack and found to my dismay that I had left my pack lunch behind. Luckily I had brought my fishing rod and once at the lake was able to catch some small but tasty Golden Trout which I consumed raw, wishing for only for a few of the condiments that usually accompany Sashimi. A "Bear Grills" moment, in a very modest way -when Bear eats something as palatable as fish he is liable to make it interesting by eating it alive. I have neither the teeth nor the inclination to follow him there.

I stayed three days at Onion Valley then took a break from camping with a couple of nights in a motel in Bishop. After looking at and pricing a few places I ended up in the Vagabond Inn, part of the same chain I had stayed in with Linda and the boys in Pasadena. Cheap and clean was what I was hoping for and what I found. The free breakfast lacked the waffles Blair had become a specialist in cooking in Pasadena, but I had no other complaints. After washing myself and my clothing and restocking on food at a large supermarket (Vonns I think) I ventured out in search of the Mountain Light photography gallery, run by the widow of the great american photographer Galen Rowell, which my guide book had identified as not to be missed in Bishop. It has a fine permanent collection of Rowell's work and shows temporary exhibitions of other photographers.

Bishop also provided a good bookshop where I picked up Last Night in Twisted River, John Irving's latest novel, primarily for Linda who loves his work, although I read it myself with great pleasure. And last but not least, Bishop furnished me with a decent Mexican Restaurant where I had carne asada and chile relleno and beer for dinner, an improvement on my own one-pot camp cooking of the previous few nights.

Between the gallery visiting, shopping, eating and reading I also found time for two side
trips into the mountains. The first took me up the Horseshoe Meadows road to the Cottonwood Lakes Basin. The road began in Lone Pine, half an hour south on 395 from Bishop, and climbed into the mountains via another of those spectacular switchback roads up the Eastern Sierra - see the images below, the first from Google Earth showing the climb, and the second looking back to the Ovens Valley below from about half way up.

At the end of the road was the Cottonwood Lakes Basin where I had come nearly 40 years before with my first wife Debbie. We camped, as I remember, on Muir Lake - if you look it up on Google Earth - "Muir Lake" will find it - you will also find links to two good photographs. I took a short walk in along the trail but didn't attempt to go all the way. On the walk I met a friendly hiker with a fishing rod case attached to his pack and a dog ranging ahead of him who said had been born at the foot of the Onion Valley road which I had ascended to my earlier campsite and had lived all his life in the Ovens Valley, ranching for a living and fly fishing for recreation. He was on his way into the high country in pursuit of large golden trout. In response to my questions about fly selection for Sierra trout, he advised against getting too complicated and said he caught most of his fish on large Woolly Worm flies.

America, or at least California, seems more dog-friendly than Australia. I am not sure about the National Parks, but the State Forests certainly welcome dogs. They also, of course, welcome hunters. Australians like to think of themselves as independent but in fact are generally accepting of a wide variety of rules and regulations.

My second day trip was to the White Mountains on the opposite, eastern side of the Ovens Valley from the Sierras. I liked it so much that I returned there a couple of days later for the last three nights of my trip, and will have more to say about it below. Before that, I made an abortive attempt to find another agreeable campsite in the Sierra itself, further north of Highway 395. Agreeable campsites I found, but they were being agreeable to large numbers of other campers as well, and that they all seemed to have large RVs and many children. I thought uncharitable and variously indefensible thoughts about how wonderful America would be without Americans, and found that my recollection of the uncrowded beauty of the White Mountains made it impossible for me to settle for anything less, so I retraced my steps across the valley and headed for Grandview Camp, which I had scouted on my earlier visit.

I have never camped in any more beautiful place than my campsite in Grandview - maybe a few as beautiful, but nothing better. The image below embeds a Google Earth link in this blog posting, which allows you to play with the image yourself, zooming in and out and changing the angle of view so you can identify its location. Use the circle in the top left to swing the view around 360 degrees.

I had found my campsite, which was located at the top right hand end of the large S (or reversed Z) just to the left of center of the road that crosses the image above, on my first visit, and on returning with the intention of camping in it, I was tense with fear that it might be occupied as I approached it across the rest of the campsite (which is located at the right hand end of the road). Happily for me it was vacant. In the course of the three nights that I stayed there at least three other would-be campers eagerly approached it and had to undergo the disappointment I was spared. Happily for them, and for me too, there were other almost equally attractive places to camp further down the road. The slideshow below gives an idea of the quality of the view from the campsite itself and its vicinity.

I had two full days camped at Grandview. On the first, I visited the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest a few miles further up the road. The link is to an excellent private web site which touches on the history and politics of the location as well as its ecology. I hope the slideshow below captures some of its beauty. Visiting it gave me a kind of happiness, a lifting of the heart.

My last day at Grandview I spent on a quick return visit to Death Valley, where it was indeed hot, and across the border to Nevada, where the petrol was much cheaper, probably because of the poker machines to be found in the petrol stations and no doubt in other places, and where a number of old ranch houses along the highway had been painted in bright colors and converted to brothels. That's enough. This post is already too long.

Back in Scotland again...

2010-06-28T16:37:00.000+10:00

......and in the middle of summer, the time I have been hoping to be here for years. It barely gets dark, which, if you come into it suddenly, confuses the body into doubting the necessity for sleep and gifts the mind a quality of lightness and energy which complements and rewards the patient endurance required in the short days of midwinter.

I came up on the train a few days in advance of Linda and Blair. An enjoyable journey, comfortable seats and fast trains. I had first class tickets because they were the cheapest on offer, due to some quirk of the advance purchase system. I felt a faint disappointment because there was no enclosed compartment full of English eccentrics reading The Times. However, even on the coach-style seats the company was good. Why, I wondered, a majority of backward-facing seats. Maybe for safety. Not my choice.

It is windy and spitting rain today, although there is plenty of blue sky. I am extending the length of my bike rides and walks, the latter with particular satisfaction as it has been so long since I was able to walk any distance at all. The Black Isle is wonderful cycling country with lots of little roads and enough serious ascents/descents to make it interesting. As for walking, so far I have stuck to paths and routes familiar since childhood, but a look at the Ordnance Survey map would surely reveal plenty of Right of Way paths to explore.

Alastair and I brought Mum home from hospital on Friday. She is in considerable pain, more or less adequately controlled by her analgesics, and in very good spirits, chatting away with stories about her fellow-patients. The local social services have put in some mobility aids around the house but the shower, part of the bath in the horrible old British style, is unworkable and will have to be replaced.

The garden here is, Mum says, past its very best, but it still looks pretty good to me, lush and green and full of well-chosen plants.

Linda and Blair arrive from Lincoln this evening. An eight-hour drive, but L is confident she won't have any trouble and the GPS she is borrowing from Paul and Colm will show her the way.

On the Road Again

2010-06-21T21:22:00.002+10:00

We flew from Canberra to Heathrow via Sydney and Los Angeles. 24 hours in the air, and a bit more than 12 on the ground in various airports. One delay, of 2 hours in Los Angeles. Airlines of the Virgin Group, linked but different, marketing themselves as a group when it suits them but insisting that they are separate airlines when the cracks between their systems make things difficult for the customer, as they did in my case, with a couple of minor (as it turned out) but anxiety inducing (despite my best efforts at mindfulness) problems.

Reasonable leg room. Mediocre food, and stingy with the alcohol - the first drink with dinner free but you had to pay for any more. The airports, LA and Heathrow, both a bit dingy but the customs and immigration staff friendly and efficient. Heathrow wasn't too crowded and didn't live down to its reputation. I got some quality sleep on both flights, and also slept well the first night in England, so maybe the jetlag will be minimal. The sun is shining on England and today is the longest day so there will be plenty of opportunities to get out into it.

Good digital entertainment on the planes, especially on the Sydney-LA leg which had the most modern aeroplane. I saw four movies I had regretted missing when they were released - "Invictus", "A Single Man", "The Prophet" and "The Informer". All good solid three to four star products. "The Prophet" the most interesting, a dark French drama about a French-moslem boy making his way in a jail dominated by the corsican mafia. Some memorable performances of an intelligent and cliche-free script.

After a brief surge of anxiety at Heathrow when we failed to connect with Quillan's sister who had come to pick him up and take him off to visit his father in Italy, we collected our hire car, a small but comfortable and economical Renault diesel, and made it up the M1 and A46 to Lincoln in around 3 hours, arriving around 11pm by which time it was just dark: we had been driving most of the way in the long twilight of English midsummer. I drove the first half, too slowly for Linda's taste, and she the second, too fast for mine, although I was grateful that she was getting us to our destination quickly as I was dropping off to sleep.

The countryside looked as rich and green as ever. Most Australian trees aren't predominantly green. I had read somewhere that with the rise of factory farming hedgerows have become an endangered ecology in England, but we saw plenty on the way up here. Paula and Colm's garden looks well loved but homely, like the house. A soft thick lawn, a nice pond with lilies and a damp smell. Soft thick lawns in Australia are politically incorrect, but here I suppose the rain does almost all the necessary watering.

Paula and Colm and their house are very welcoming as they were the last time we were here, four years ago in the middle of winter on the way to Xmas in Scotland. A comfortable bed, a nice kitchen table, some interesting images on the walls and books on the shelves. We ventured out for a bit of shopping and anthropological field research in an ASDA down the road and found the clothing very cheap, no doubt at the expense of ill-paid workers in some third world factory.

Research also in the morning paper - P&C read the Independent. Its take on the English national conversation encompasses the usual suspects - politics (savage budget cuts on the way from the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition), sport (even more than the usual minute interest in football, also some rugby and cricket with cautious hope that England will do well) and the arts (arts journalism reminiscent of the Australian variety, not in a good way). I am not sure why I so dislike arts journalism. I do always enjoy the English media, though, especially the Television: there is a depth of quality there which makes what we have in Australia feel a bit thin.

Getting married in the - near future.

2010-05-11T20:52:00.000+10:00

On Sunday, actually. Arrangements are mostly in hand.Still things to do, but time to do them. Watch this space for a report on how it all went.

on a small keyboard

2010-04-27T17:38:00.001+10:00

This post comes from Tom and Zoe's place in Dulwich Hill. and is written on my new mobile phone, testing its keyboard and a blogging application. Writing this slowly adds value to each word. Haiku would be an appropriate format.

Mount Jerrabomberra

2010-04-27T08:20:00.001+10:00

I have been living at the foot of Mount Jerrabomberra in Queanbeyan NSW for around 5 years now and have ridden a mountain bike on this still attractive area of urban bushland but had never walked it until the last two days. By the time we moved to Queanbeyan in 2005 my knees had deteriorated to the point where walking any distance came at a price I was only occasionally prepared to pay while bicycling was still relatively comfortable, so my early visits to Mount Jerrabomberra were on two wheels.

In July 2009 and February 2010 I had total knee replacements and to my delight am finding I can walk at least modest distances in the bush and over rough ground without discomfort. I will never return to the long walks with a heavy pack that used to be one of my greatest pleasures and which no doubt played their part in wrecking my knees, but if I am lucky strolls and day walks will be possible for a few more years. Having a fine area

In the satellite image below Mount Jerrabomberra is the triangular area of bushland below and to the right of Lanyon Drive, the yellow major road in the upper left hand corner. The grey lines superimposed on the mountain are the notional roads that would have been built if the developer who once owned it and who build the suburbs extending up its lower slopes below and to the left of the triangular mountain had been able to carry out his plans. The early part of the story is told here, from a green/left perspective, while later developments, and useful background on the ecological and cultural values of the mountain can be found here, in Queanbeyan Council's Management Plan.

Taken together these texts suggest that neither the developer nor those who opposed him had it all their own way, and that what remains of the Mountain is a public asset of real value to the residents of Queanbeyan. Living virtually at the foot of it, I am well placed to take advantage of that asset. The slideshow below shows pictures taken on this morning's walk up the hill.

Self-Portrait Photographing a Hut

2010-04-20T17:23:00.001+10:00

--
Ken Cameron
http://ekcameron.squarespace.com

Another Old Man

2010-04-17T11:41:00.002+10:00

One of those old guys
pear shaped with skinny legs
arrived after dark in an old van
Came up to my campsite with questions
what is the go around here? camp anywhere?
what about fires? we have a brazier

Not sure I said, the National Park
cleaned the place up a couple years ago
not that you see many rangers
We just came down for a bit of prawning he said
ah I thought dark of the moon, and
wonder who's with him

Looked over in the morning, no-one else there
checked a few times,
no real doubt about the we
Almost at once his wife had died
and he kept going
to the same places, used the same gear

I guess it could have been a mate
Linda is doubtful
about the dead wife thing
But I spoke to him, saw him visit
the other campers, the tireless parents
and the bogan hippies

(camping is for the relatively poor)
I could see he had been wounded
knew how that felt
Linda thinks that she will go first
I am not so sure. Not knowing who or when,
I know there is a death.

Old Men

2010-04-16T17:13:00.000+10:00

Men laughing around a campfire
freely yet without aggression:
I thought: these old guys

respect themselves and others
Their rods were evenly spaced
Around the best spot on the beach

Their rods and tents and utes were old
camping is mostly for the poorer sort
They went to bed early

In the morning packed quickly and left in convoy
they and I both
wonder how many will be back next year

Making the same mistakes....

2010-04-10T21:42:00.001+10:00

....now as I always did
though not exactly the story
some refinement - or not, also sometimes
just the same old dumb

voices below the window
familial tones, more than one generation
a range of tones defines us
voices our worst and best

I made a roast, with gravy
nice piece of topside
roast potatoes, carrots
the yorkshire puddings worked

linda asleep through the french movie
(modes of survival
of the haute bourgeoisie)
nice to help her to bed

using words to understand it
putting them together, mortared by space.
seeing and hearing her breathe
under the singing silence

Multimediography (in my life)

2010-04-09T21:19:00.003+10:00

The title is borrowed from TWIP, This Week in Photography, a podcast which irritates me intensely, but to which I also often listen, or half listen while doing something else, turning up the volume when something interesting comes up. The relentlessly gabby and giggly norteamericano self regard of its presenters is the irritating bit, the wide range of interesting information clearly presented the saving grace. They have talked in a number of recent episodes about the convergence between photography and video and coined the word "multimediography" to describe it. I doubt the word will live, but am sure the phenomenon will thrive.

It starts with equipment. Video cameras have been able to take not very good still photographs for a while and still cameras are increasingly able to take reasonable (and sometimes better than that) videos. This technical convergence is reflected in what people actually do. Professional photographers increasingly have to be at least competent in video. No-one wants to have to hire two people to record their wedding, and the requirement extends beyond wedding photographers.

Amateurs like me are also exploring the capacities of their equipment. I have five cameras that will take photographs and videos. A high-end DSLR, a high-end compact camera, a waterproof compact camera, a video camera and a camera phone. I have used them all to take videos, but only occasionally and I still have to refer to the manual to do anything even modestly complicated. Except with the camera phone - you only get to press a button and the results are crude. See here. Its saving grace, of course, is that it is always with me.

As a child I took cines of family and the Sri Lankan and Scottish landscapes where we lived with my parents' Super 8 cine camera, and as a young parent shots of my children and Australia with a cine camera given us by my then wife's parents to record their grandchildren. Some of these, and others taken by my parents and my ex-wife, survive, and I am having them digitised and learning the video software required to work on them, as part of an autobiographical enterprise which also includes some writing. However dark, flickery and unfocussed, I an intrigued by those moving images of my parents in their prime or my children as babies. For the few moments they last, time travel is possible.

Below is an example. It shows, I think, my two brothers Alan and Alastair with our mother, on the lawn of the Tea Estate bungalow in Ceylon, aka Sri Lanka, where our family lived, our father being the manager of the Tea Estate. I am not sure of the date - it's 2010 and I am 60, I might have been 10 at the time of the cine, so it must have been around 1960. I first thought I was one of the children and titled the clip accordingly as you will see when you view it from YouTube, but I then recognised that the older of the two is my younger brother. I haven't changed the title, because the mistake probably wasn't arbitrary. I might have been taking the cine, or it might have been my father. I enjoyed using the camera and my mother indulged me in this.

I digitised the cine with little skill on a visit to my mother in Scotland in 200?, using my first video camera to film it projected onto a screen in my mother's house in Scotland and then transferring the files to computer back in Australia. My mother's projector still works and you can still get bulbs for it. It would be good to take a photograph of the cines, some still in the original yellow Kodak boxes used to send them off to the laboratory for processing. We mailed them off from Ceylon to a lab in England, filling in our name and address on a return envelope. I can't remember how long it took them to come back but it would have been weeks. These days the technology moves faster - I can take a video and post it in a place where it is in theory visible to the billion* people each day who visit YouTube.

Anyway, have a look. I will improve this later and publish it again, improving both video and audio, but the poor technical quality of what follows is also eloquent both of the passage of time and of its dimension of unreality. I could do better on my mobile phone these days. But the old cine is not incommunicative. It has another layer. You hear the sound of the projector's electric motor and a soft clattering from its sprockets. The voices are my mother's and mine, recorded as we watched the old cine being played and recorded on video, reminiscing about what we are watching.

It is good of my father as well. His expression is one you see in some photographs. And the dog, of course. It's name was Hawkins, a Dachshund. It eventually had to be put down after catching Rabies. The other dog I remember was a Black Labrador named Horace, famous for running after cars, doing so for miles behind my father around the Estate.

* Actually it is a billion hits, not a billion people - it would be less than a billion people as I imagine plenty of people make more than one hit. But still a large number.

Test

2010-04-06T13:29:00.002+10:00

Testing my new android mobile phone to see if it can be used for blog postings in various ways.

Ok, it seems that it can, but a bit roughly. Blogger won't work, but email to blog will.

Gypsies

2010-03-31T22:24:00.000+11:00

Linda and I watched an absorbing and horrifying 4 Corners program about Rumanian Gypsies a couple of nights ago. It portrayed an organised crime racket in various EU countries in which children, teenagers and younger, rob people taking money out of cash machines or pick the pockets of passers by.

These children live in squalid camps on the outskirts of cities like Madrid, go to work into the city centers in the morning, spread out on the streets in search of targets, when (occasionally) arrested are quickly spat out by police and social services then on their release are immediately picked up by their parents/managers and sent back to work again out on the streets the next day. They make good returns for the gangs who exploit them. We hear from a padrone of the thieves clan back home in Rumania who explains that this is what they do and watch clandestine shots of kids in pairs shamelessly trying to rob victims who fight them off with the help of passers by. A vivid piece of photojournalism with a scruffy bearded Rumanian hero journalist and hidden cameras.

We also heard from some good citizens of the countries where the child thieves ply their trade. A mixture of sentiments. Some sympathy for the children, but also a lot of anger directed at the Gypsies seen as the other, the enemy. Direct and unashamed hatred. They are vermin and should be exterminated. As some of them were, alongside the Jews, in the Nazi camps, the viewer remembers - the documentary itself doesn't make this point.

The film maker cast his eye on the gypsies and the good citizens alike. A cool eye, without too much in the way of moralising voice over, justly most attentive to the distorted lives of the children.

Pleasures

2010-03-28T22:40:00.001+11:00

(An occasional series)

A new razor blade. With my current five-bladed battery operated razor, and given the price of blades for that razor, and the fact that I only shave half my face, my blades are kept in service for a long time, and I feel a little bit guilty whenever I change one. So there is always something unexpected and gratuitous about the degree of pleasure a new blade provides. So smooth, and the skin after its passage so clean, so new. A small victory over mortality. I suppose a bit of surface skin comes off as well as the hair, so the skin is rejuvenated.There is an element of longing and a touch of nostalgia in the sensation of newly shaven skin.

"Smooth" is a word much used in advertising these days, sometimes to describe taste, eg, of rum, or the new mixture of vegemite and cheese, also sensation, of tissues, facial or toilet, or nappies. Used of character, it sounds derogatory, implying that something is being hidden or that experience is not being acknowledged. But few of us have any problem with smoothing our skin. Yes, there is beauty in a face that carries the marks of age or, like the five o'clock shadow which grows on men's faces as they move past their adolescent prime, beauty in the marks of aging. But few of us are wise enough (or deluded enough?) to prefer our old face or anyone else's, and while there might be a certain sexual edge in rough skin, a smooth shave is surely also a fine and sexy thing.

Reader, what do you think?

The wound...

2010-03-25T11:14:00.001+11:00

...has mostly healed. Staples out a month ago. Body as a whole of course on its way to dissolution but locally, still capable of self-repair. See below. In under there, titanium and plastic. The Surgeon said they used to provide letters for airport security, but were eventually persuaded that anyone willing and able to have a bomb surgically inserted in their leg would have very little difficulty getting hold of a convincing-looking exculpatory letter.

Linda Reading

2010-03-25T09:36:00.001+11:00

Roses

2010-03-23T15:54:00.002+11:00

We have a fierce regrowth of roses in the garden.

Colors, and Mathematics

2010-03-23T10:11:00.002+11:00

I found the link to this in a footnote to Steven Strogatz's splendid series on mathematics on the New York Times web site - here. You can adjust the resolution up or down to accommodate your bandwidth, and also show it full screen or turn off the music if (when) you find it annoying. The fractals site on which the video appears is here. Be warned: this stuff can be addictive, even if you aren't on drugs.

I am reading the NY times series, one day at a time, and thereby reliving the story of my own approach to mathematics, in which I was successful early but later gave up the struggle. Calculus was too hard. I wonder whether Professor Strogatz will ever get to calculus and whether I will be able to follow him there. Responses to failure: a dimension of autobiography.

Golden Crunch

2010-03-17T15:21:00.002+11:00

Skyline (in another world)

2010-03-17T15:02:00.000+11:00

The first car...

2010-03-17T10:23:00.002+11:00

...was a Renault 4. Google Images has, of course, lots of pictures. None is in the correct shade of blue. The image above has a less saturated color than I remember, and I suspect is also of an older model. And as the vehicle above comes from Amsterdam, the number plates are wrong, ours being a British model. Debbie and I bought it in Southampton, after I started work as a teacher at King Edward VI School, my first job. I don't think we bought it new, but it wasn't that old either. We had it until we left Britain to come to Australia in 1974. The longest trips we did in it were to the Black Isle, north of Inverness in Scotland, a distance of 587 miles, according to the AA, and these days taking 10 hours and 38 minutes continuous driving - longer in the early 70s, when there weren't so many motorways - and speed wasn't among the Renault's many virtues.

An entry in the Auto Universum Blog sets out some of those virtues, listing the Renault 4 as one of 10 Automotive designs that have stood the test of time:

The Renault 4 was probably the most practical vehicle ever designed. It was quite a departure in its day, nearly as far from the mainstream as the VW and the 2CV. Even Frenchmen that were loyal owners of its predecessor, the 4CV, did not know quite what to make of it...The Renault 4 was a precursor of the cars that most Europeans drive today: front wheel drive, four doors, a rear hatch and folding rear seat...

The rear seat double-folded against the back of the front seat so that the complete rear section was available for loading vast amounts of cargo. Like the 2CV, the Renault was built to be able to cope with rural conditions and was likewise endowed with ample ground clearance and soft long-travel springing. The 4 remains the largest selling French car to date.

The Renault had an unusual gear lever, sticking out of the dashboard to the left of the steering wheel. See below:

Although probably highly dangerous in an accident, I remember it as a mechanically pleasing design that gave a good feeling of connection to the gearbox. The car had that quality overall - functional, engineered - but it didn't lack - elegance is not quite the right word - let's say "a certain je ne sais quoi". French engineering, perhaps. I owned other Renaults and will further define my take on french engineering when I write about them.

My father owned Renault 4s in later years. I am not sure how many, at least two. He ran them into the ground. I remember the ground being visible, from inside the front cabin, through the floor. Rust was a problem for vehicles in the north of Scotland, the sea being close and hugh quantities of salt and sand being placed on the roads in winter to melt the ice.

The other night Linda and I watched a movie called Love the Beast, about the Australian actor Eric Bana's love for a car. Afterwards, we talked about the love of cars, mine as well as Eric Bana's. Linda said that I always love what she calls "props" and, if I understood her rightly, associated Eric's relationship with his car with the experience of being a migrant in Australia, which, in some form, she had in common with him. I have a good deal more to say about cars.

Jeremy Clarkson appears in Love the Beast, explaining the car lover to the non car lover. "You can have a relationship with a car". "Go ahead and fix your car, Eric, regardless of cost". More in that vein. But also, to Eric's evident discomfiture: "Muscle Cars are crap". Muscle cars are large, powerful, chromed, gleaming, essentially American, did I mention powerful, but not so good at braking or holding the road or turning corners, which brings Eric undone at a sharp corner in Targa Tasmania (a car race in which Eric and his beloved Muscle Car compete).

Renault 4s certainly have their limitations but, pace Clarkson, I don't think they are crap in the same sense as Muscle Cars - there is no discrepancy between power and other qualities. They hold the road, corner and brake more or less as well as they need to, given their limited power. All of my subsequent cars have been, in one or more useful ways, superior to the Renault 4, but all of them have also lost out in the comparison in one respect: its minimalist functionality, a swiss-army-knife-of-cars quality.

Here is a web page of advertisements for the Renault 4 in various languages which illustrates the point. I also remember an ad, or maybe a movie, in which a cow or other large animal is loaded into a Renault 4.

Characteristic Postures - heritable?

2010-03-12T15:07:00.002+11:00

My father was a good and frequent squatter. To smoke a cigarette, or just to wait - my memory of him has him doing both of those things relatively often. He must have had flexible knees and hips. Perhaps his yoga helped him with flexibility. He didn't seem to mind waiting - he had in him a quality of stillness that allowed him to do it without impatience. There is a similar quality of stillness in the favourite photograph I published in an earlier blog entry.

My son Jake also squats easily and often, for similar reasons, and perhaps also manifesting similar qualities. Jake is solidly built this picture, which his grandfather never was, to my recollection. My father had a connection with his grandson. I remember him once rebuking me sharply for, in his view, treating Jake unkindly. They have more in common than a posture - also a certain generosity of spirit, a warmth behind a surface reserve.

The movie links the two of them. The image of Jake is in color this time. I had lunch with Jake yesterday. He had a prawn laksa. JulieAnne came too. She is the mother of Jake's daughter Chloe. My father has passed, as we now say. Ten years ago, give or take. He was good with his grandchildren, they all loved him. He died too soon to know any of their children.

Intermediate

2010-03-11T16:16:00.000+11:00

.....between my father and myself. Looking a bit grim, as such a creature might.

My favourite photograph of my father

2010-03-10T17:58:00.000+11:00

He is fishing, for trout, probably at the Horton Plains in Sri Lanka. Scrubby rhododendron to his right, maybe fire damaged. Fishing with an artificial fly, the only technique allowed. Khaki shirt and pants, probably. Not sure what you would call the hat. Net hanging over one shoulder, fishing bag perhaps over the other. Relaxed, upright posture, slight backwards lean. Attentive to his line and fly in the water, as you have to be. Relaxed but attentive - requirements for success as a hunter or a fisherman.

The pipe, of course. I watched a pre-war Sherlock Holmes video the other day in which Holmes had his pipe in his mouth most of the time he was on screen. I believe my father may have stopped smoking a pipe late in his life - I remember mostly hand-rolled cigarettes from his time in Scotland.

David Hockney's iPhone drawings

2010-03-10T09:26:00.005+11:00

Here is a link to a slideshow of drawings (I suppose they should be called) made by the artist David Hockney on his iPhone. Here is a related article, and here a podcast. The author of all three, Lawrence Wechsler, is a long time New Yorker staff writer who has followed Hockney's work over many years and also wrote interestingly about his theory that Vermeer, Ingres and other great European artists used the Camera Lucida and other optical devices to help them draw.

I love the iPhone drawings and I find them intriguing as art objects. Hockney does them on his iPhone and sends them to a group of friends, apparently on the assumption that they will move on around the internet. Google the title of this post for an overview of the kind of impact they have made - newspaper articles, many of them consisting of little more than references to the original Lawrence Wechlser pieces, and blog commentary from the art community, some of it admiring but also some wondering what all the fuss is about. Not a lot of actual images - there may be a collection somewhere, but I haven't found it.

Of course, Hockney didn't invent on-line art and people who have toiled in that particular vineyard without attracting any attention at all sometimes resent all the attention he is getting. I followed one link from a commentator in that camp to the Flickr Gallery for iPhone artwork but didn't find myself in agreement with his comment that I would find better iPhone pictures there than Hockney's. However, there was some good work and it was interesting to see how many people are using the iPhone Brushes application to make art.

Hockney's "official" web site is a good one, elegant and functional with some lovely things on it - here, for instance, a video of a sketchbook. I have always enjoyed his work and am having a fine time playing at collecting it, by way of the iPhone drawings, of which I now have 28 and will, I expect, soon have more. These are, in a limited but not a trivial sense, original Hockneys. The digital files on my hard drive are very close indeed to the originals that he created on his iPhone. I won't say that they are identical, that gets us into metaphysics, but they are close to it and the images they produce when played on other iPhones would be indistinguishable from each other. The image below, which is one of them, will of course look different but not necessarily inferior on a computer monitor. One can easily play around with the size and brightness of the images. My own conclusion after doing so is that larger is not necessarily better.

Father and Son, continued

2010-03-04T12:51:00.025+11:00

My father is still with me. I just finished Roy Jenkins excellent biography of Churchill. I bought this cheaply in a Booktopia sale, choosing it because Churchill has always been of interest to me, and that interest is associated with my father, who was interested in the Second World war, in which he had been a soldier, and who admired Churchill, and I believe may have on one or more occasions rebuked me for speaking slightingly about Churchill.

On the other hand, I don't myself remember having any clearly negative opinion about Churchill. I read his History of the English Speaking Peoples as an adolescent and enjoyed it. Churchill was, of course, a hard working professional writer who won the Nobel prize for literature. I was then conscious, and remain so, that some people then and now might consider that to be an undeserved award, and others might concede that it was an award he would not have been given if he had been only a writer, some of this last group also going on to note that this would not have been the only occasion in which reasons other than the purely aesthetic explain the award of a literary prize. I also think he can write beautifully. His books emerged from a kind of workshop, peopled by eminent historians (J H Plumb, A J P Taylor) as well as more conventional research assistants, but are always unmistakably his.

I had mixed and unresolved feelings about Churchill, which is symptomatic in various ways of my broader political and cultural (ideological, I suppose) position. Roy Jenkins biography largely resolves the confusion, being admiring but even handed, never glossing over Churchill's faults.

The careful positioning in the previous paragraphs probably recapitulates what I tried to do when my father accused me of a juvenile disrespect for WSC (one of his contemporary names). I certainly found myself doing that on other occasions when my father and I had quasi-political arguments. I sometimes felt that I didn't disagree with him as much as he thought I did, or hold views as one-dimensional as those he attributed to me. Churchill of course presided, along with Hitler, Stalin Mussolini, the Emperor of Japan and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, over the war in which my father participated, as a soldier in India in the Assam Rifles . My father my have felt that in slighting Churchill I was slighting him. I have written about this, and about relationship with my father in my childhood memoir, in the chapter called Parents.

My father is also present in my life through some of his possessions which I now own, and through a few of his letters. Another blog entry covers one of the possessions, a large knife. I also have one or two tools. The garage in my mother's scottish house contains other tools, his collection of nails and nuts and bolts, some clothing, pictures. Also, somewhat alarmingly, some shotgun shells. Here is one of the letters from my father which I retain. It would have been one of the last he wrote. He was a good correspondent, and I threw out many letters, which I regret. Clicking on the image should provide a legible version, depending on your browser.

My father is supportive and encouraging as ever, somewhat over-praising our vegetable patch and my carpentry skills, sympathising with my then wife Debbie's concerns about work, and looking forward to seeing us in Australia in a few months' time. He sympathises with concerns we must have expressed about children leaving home and comments on the Scottish weather, which was probably too cold for him, most of the time, given his Sri Lankan origins. He also mentions possible visits to Sri Lanka or the Greek Islands, the first of which he never made - I am not sure about the second.

Like me, he has trouble with "running writing" (as it used to be called in my primary school and still is in
Australia in the 21st Century, according to my young friend Blair). His letters aren't joined at all and some of them (N, R, L, G) are upper rather than lower case. His lines are close to horizontal on the page most of the way down and evenly spaced, as are the words. He uses white out for corrections and neatly underlines his signature. I conclude that he was concerned about how his text looked on the page.

In a later posting I will show and write about some photographs of my father.

Father and Son, Part 1

2010-03-03T13:24:00.003+11:00

I have written about my life, up until leaving University. There are 40 years to go. I am not sure how to approach them. I have been more or less chronological so far, producing texts about early life, school and university, but within each of these the structure has been thematic rather than chronological, and in thinking about what to say about those 40 years, a chronological approach seems like the long way round. What come to mind is a series of themes which have in common that each is going to be challenging for me to address and in some cases perhaps for others to read.

A list will best explain why I fear this. The list itself is a work in progress, but parents, marriage, children, work, sex, art, religion, politics, money will feature, all of which offer obvious scope for self-reproach, and maybe also for useful insight. Other headings may provide easier going - writing, photography, fishing, cooking, walking, clothes, toys - although there is certainly scope for unpalatable truths in that list as well.

I will start with my father. The video above is a morph from my father's face to mine, then back again to his. It is intended as a kind of epigraph. Double clicking on the play triangle will take you through the intermediate stages. My elderly OED defines an epigraph as "the short quotation or motto placed at the commencement of a book, a chapter etc". In writing about my father I am, of course, writing about myself, but I would like to follow the video in ending as well as beginning with him. I don't have a good sense of what he was like, suspect that this is a significant failure of insight, and hope that through writing about him I may come to understand both of us better.

And another picture. In Scotland, I suspect, with the Moray Firth in the background.

Father and Daughter

2010-02-23T19:58:00.001+11:00

These images are made from of a couple of dozen head shots of my daughter Zoe and myself, extracted from my image library by Picasa's "People" function and superimposed by its "Collage" function. I wonder whether Lightroom, my image editor of choice, will ever have that functionality. I find it obsessively interesting, in the same way as I do morphing, for which I use Norrkross MorphX. It is as if the multiplication or distortion of images dissolves the illusion of identity.

evening pictures

2010-02-23T10:41:00.001+11:00

This is the view from the balcony at the front of our house, looking down over out street, Oak Place, and afterwards, over Queanbeyan, our town. A characteristic evening view, with the foreground, containing many cars, in shadow, and the saturated colors of evening in the top half of the picture.

This is another angle on pretty much the same view, this time from the bedroom window, to the right of the balcony on the front, south east facing facade of the house. In the photograph, the triangle of visible light in the middle looks askew, which it doesn't as I sit here looking at it. thanks to the brain's tireless work of world-creation

And this is a close shot of my knee operation scar, showing the marks of the removed rivets on either side of the center line of the scar, with regrowing hairs on all sides. The site was thoroughly shaved before the operation but regrowth is strong. The skin color is pale, reflective, bluish-pink - I could have altered that by changing the color temperature of the image but I wouldn't really want anything less repugnant.

Face Detection in Picasa

2010-02-21T22:04:00.000+11:00

One of the limitations of Adobe's Lightroom and Photoshop as I have them set up, is that they don't do automated face detection and recognition. Photoshop Elements does have this functionality, but my copy is an early version. As a workaround, I today downloaded Google's Picasa, imported my 20,.000 or so image files into it, and worked through them to develop folders of images of my family and friends.

The process was an interesting one. I am not sure quite how long it took to work through 20,000 files as I left it going overnight. Picasa found around 5,000 separate faces, but only 2000 or so of these were of people I recognised - faces from various urban and particularly asian crowd scenes made up the rest. The software groups images which appear to be of the same person, and asks the user to confirm or amend its assignments and to attach names to the resulting folders of images. Tolerances can be adjusted to provide tighter or looser criteria for grouping images. As the user confirms or rejects proposed linkages, the software algorithms are modified with the result that new images are proposed for inclusion under a name. These proposals are sometimes wildly wrong, usually where some striking but irrelevant feature such as a hat or a pair of sunglasses comes into play, but overall the impression is of progressive refinement. The mistakes are sometimes also interesting, as when they reveal a resemblance between family members.

Picasa also has a nice facility for assembling collages of faces in various ways, and a module which overlays faces on top of each other to provide a single portrait made up of any number of separate images of a person. This produces an intriguing image, a face which looks like a ghostly ancestor of the subject. I will publish some results in another post.

Unfortunately, Picasa's process for tagging files with names doesn't work in with the metadata system used by Lightroom, so if I want to get my collections back into Lightroom, I will have to reimport them. Or so I believe - if there is any other way, I would much appreciate being taught it.

An Adobe Video about the first 20 years of Photoshop

2010-02-19T08:50:00.000+11:00

Worth watching. Think for just a moment about the meaning of Photoshop, all that it has made possible in visual culture. You would need a Roland Barthes or a Susan Sontag to do justice to the subject. Nice to share a few moments with these four amiable well-preserved Californians, themselves sharing a California (surely) red (someone could surely identify it from the label). I had always imagined Thomas Knoll as older and more obviously guru-like.