Swan Brewery
Looked through my one and only sunrise shoot around the Swan Brewery and made this HDR image from 3 bracketed shots.
Yes it’s not as sharp as I would have liked (although the link isn’t to the full res image). It’s a crop from a single wide angle shot on a 10 megapixel camera. I think I’m beginning to see the advantages of stitching. Hmmm, looking at it again, it seems a bit crooked still).
Looking back at my photography lately, although I haven’t taken very much, I’ve realised that lately I’ve just been taking photos, but not really producing any great quality “images”.
So I finally had a few hours to play around with Photoshop on the weekend.
First I worked through Sandmania’s HDR tutorial and managed to come up with an image quite similar to the author. I was inspired! I have to keep on practising using these techniques on my own images.
My attempt at a HDR tutorial
I couldn’t seem to get as much grey and detail in the wood of the pews, but I’ll experiment a bit more.
My attempt at a HDR tutorial
I also made a panorama from an average set of photos taken on my iPhone (2 megapixel only, hand held, no zoom or exposure settings!!).
Original hand held 2 megapixel iPhone shots
Alicia Keys Concert Panorama
And finished off the night with some reading on Lab Color.
Here are some articles I worked through:
Photoshop Lab Color walk through on a NYC photo – http://blogs.tech-recipes.com/qmchenry/2008/02/16/photoshop-lab-color-enhancements-nyc-from-above/
Turn Ho-Hum Color into WOW with Photoshop – http://digital-photography-school.com/turn-ho-hum-color-into-wow-with-photoshop
Margulis LAB Color Book Reading Group – http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=18203
A few weekends ago, there was a cycle race held in Leederville. My brother in law asked if I wanted to have a look, partly as a photoshoot expedition.
The racers were amazingly fit.. and I really envied their bikes! Such slick looking machines doing laps up and down the coffee strip.
I’ve never taken photos of a cycle race, so I was quite confused for a while, wandering up and down Oxford Street, taking some random crappy shots. I decided – I just need to take this experience as an exercise to try things out and so took heaps of photos, and unfortunately, most were duds. I just couldn’t figure out what made a good cycling shot. Luckily, as the cyclists did quite a few laps, I was able to try various things.
Armed with my 17-55 and my 70-200, I tried some panning shots, some zoom shots, etc. Here’s my pick of the better shots of the day.
Last month, we hosted a Hawaiian themed party for our daughter. As per usual, we did some research on the internet and read up some party books on Hawaiian and pool themes. Here is what we ended up doing.
The waterfall Birthday cake!
Fishies stuck on stuff
Signs around the house
Punch served at the Tiki Bar
Grass skirts used to decorate the house
Food on a stick!
Chinese takeaway boxes for loot
Lei making stuff
Jelly tropical style
As for our girls, they had a ball!
The birthday girl!
Party time!
We have a real calendar problem in our family. We just have too many to manage. Here’s what we had:
This year, I’ve decided to try to electronicize some of this – it’s just getting too hard to keep so many diaries and calendars up to date with each other.
So as a first step, instead of using my A5 personal diary, I’m using Google Calendars. I tried to convince my wifey that we should use Google Calendar instead of our home calendar and her A5 diary, but she says that she likes to take her calendar with her and doesn’t want to go to a computer each time she has to see what’s coming up.
Oh well. For me, to solve the problem of looking at the calendar on the go, I have looked at using the calendar on my iPhone 3G.
So after a bit of investigation, and setting up, I now have a system where my work Outlook calendar, my Google calendar and my Facebook events and birthdays are all sync’d to my iPhone!! I can also access all my calendars on my laptop at home through Google Calendars.
Unfortunately, for now, my Outlook calendar at work only shows my work calendar and nothing else, but that’s OK – I’m not sure if I want to clutter it anymore. And plus, I can always access my personal calendars at work through Google Calendars or on my iPhone anyway.
So how have I done this? Here’s a diagram:
Calendar Syncing
There’s several packages and ways of doing it, but this is what I’m currently using:
NuevaSync
I’m using NuevaSync to sync all the Google Calendars with my iPhone 3G. It supports up to 8 multiple Google calendars, which is great, because I currently have 7 Google Calendars (including some generic ones like “Australian Holidays”). Google has just released a beta version of Google Sync which is their solution which does the same thing, but apparently it’s limited to 5 calendars only (http://peterleshaw.blogspot.com/2009/02/google-sync-beta-vs-nuevasync.html).
FbCal
FbCal allows you to sync Facebook Birthdays and Events from Facebook to Google Calendars. Seamless!
Google Calendar Sync
There’s several ways of sync’ing Google Calendars to Outlook. I’ve seen posts on other solutions like Remote Calendar and Plaxo, but I haven’t tried these yet (Plaxo seems to be yet another calendar server – do I need yet another one?). There’s also ways of just pointing Outlook at the Google Calendar for a read only version of it.
I’m currently using Google Calendar Sync. Unfortunately, it only syncs a single Outlook calendar with your main Google Calendar, but I don’t mind my work Outlook calendar being just for work only. Since it only syncs with the main Google calendar, I’ve made my main one my work one, and placed my personal Google calendars as separate ones.
So, going back to our family’s calendar mess – it’s still slightly there – for my wifey 
But for me, it’s all electronic in 2009!
A few weeks ago I went over to my parents in law to fix their computer up.
While I was waiting for Spybot Search and Destroy to scan, I was looking around the computer room and noticed a pile of records sitting behind me. I had a casual flick through them and came across this one:
Reader's Digest All Star Jazz Festival
I was excited! All Stars! Swing music! Vinyl!
8 records of analog jazz!
I had a peek at the track listing and it seems to be a compilation, but a pretty good one, even with the Metronome All Stars on there too. So I borrowed it, gave it to my Dad to copy from record onto CD and now I’m in the process of splitting the WAV files up into tracks, removing hiss and clicks and normalising the volume.
I’ve now gone through both my parents’ record collections and found a few more gems. It’s a pleasant surprise that we all share some similar musical tastes!
Can’t wait to listen to all the tracks properly and add them to my future DJ sets!
Well, it looks like I probably didn’t get into the next round of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra auditions.
The offical “rules” say that potential finalists and potential alternates will be notified by or around the 5th February. With eagerness, I’ve been checking my YouTube account and email accounts multiple times daily, but there’s been nothing… It’s 4 days later now, and pretty close to the date where legal documents have to be submitted, so it’s a “no” for me.
It’s disappointing putting in that effort, and perhaps mistakenly and obviously with bias, thinking that I could get to the next stage. But in reality, I’ve had a look at my video a few times since the submission, and cringe at some of my intonation and wish that I’d played it with even more vitality. Maybe I should’ve chosen a more flashy piece instead of a technical one.
Also, who was I kidding – I don’t really play the violin much at that standard anymore, haven’t had regular lessons for over 12 years, am not a professional violinist and had to learn the Paganini in only 2 weeks!
But then again, in the back of my head I’m doing sums – I’m not sure how many entries there are (there don’t seem to be too many), but if they choose 200 potential finalists and 100 potential alternates, that’s 300 for an orchestra of 80. If there are 5 desks of first violins = 10 first violin positions, that means that relatively, there should be about 37 first violins chosen for the potential finalists and potential alternate positions which seems like a reasonable percentage.
My wifey says I should just let it go and move on – that I should be happy to have had a goal to learn new pieces and play the violin again. I suppose so… and so I worked a bit on the Sibelius violin concerto, and to inspire myself again, went out and bought the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto sheet music from Zenith’s.
We went to a great picnic party on the weekend. There were quite a few kids… and quite a few light poles. Our 9.5yo started doing her climbing thing. Yep, she’s a human koala! She easily scaled up to the top of the light pole and touched the light at the top.
I was wondering what the other parents around must think of us. She might fall.. but also, she wasn’t setting a good example to the other small kids!
Before we knew it, other kids were trying to climb the light poles around the park. Luckily, nearly all the other kids weren’t able to get a grip and the right action to climb up the poles. And those that tried and hard and succeeded in the end, had the right action and grip to not fall.
We just sat on our picnic chairs watching the kids… I wondered whether I should be under her in case she fell, but I knew she’d be fine – she’s done this many times before. Has our 9.5yo crossed some sort of imaginary line in her age and ability that I can trust her to do potential unsafe things like this? Am I irresponsible?
Human koala
I can’t believe how fast the year is going already.
So 1 month has gone by. I thought about my New Year’s resolutions and how they’ve been going.
More Violin
Well, going for the YouTube Symphony Orchestra audition was definitely a great way to kick start my violin this year. I’ve realised that I need to set targets so that there’s something to aim for and practice for. I’m now thinking of what I can set next – I would really like to finish learning the Sibelius Violin Concerto. A good target for this seems to be the Fremantle Eisteddfod. But that’s for kids/students right? The last time I entered one was… decades ago.. literally! Well, surely the Open section is open to anyone right? Am I too old? Would I be competing against kids half my age? Is 3 months enough time to learn the first movement up to an publicly performable standard? Hmmmm…
More dates with Wifey
This one hasn’t gone too well! Only 1 dinner date in the whole month of January. OK, so there quite a few parties at our place with friends and family. But I’m determined not to make any excuses – we have to pick this up this month. Starting this week…
More time with friends
Thanks to the great weather, the pool at our house and school holidays, this is all good! Dinner dates without kids is not going good though.
More cycling/exercise
Only 2 cycles this year so far. Not too good. But as a next step, I’m thinking of aiming to do the HBF Freeway Bike Hike for Asthma . I’d love to upgrade to a racing bike before then though – I don’t think my mountain bike with big nobbly tires is going to help much! Time to start looking around the house for things to sell..
