The Future Has Arrived — It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed (William Gibson, 1992, or thereabouts)

Tags

kitlaughlin.com, remote access, remote control, TeamViewer, WeTransfer, William Gibson

I am having a ‘the future has arrived’ moment as we sit here: I am in an apartment in Brisbane, writing a blog stored live on servers in the US somewhere, while (on another window on the mighty MacBook Air) a free software (TeamViewer) has allowed me to remotely control my MacBook Pro, sitting on a desktop in Canberra… this is kind of scary, actually. And by controlling that machine remotely, I am using that computer to upload sound recordings from Day one of the ST for GST programs, via another free software, WeTransfer.

The back story. Our ST for GST editor, Theron, lives and works in Istanbul. Last week I sent him two USB3 drives, with the Final Cut Pro X (FCPX) program’s “Library” bundles, which contained all the footage from the four days of shooting; let me take a step back. The four cameras we used for the shoot record in AVCHD; to be used by FCPX, these highly and cleverly compressed files were recorded onto SD cards, tiny insubstantial things the size of postage stamps (when was the last time you saw one of these, anyway?; for reference:

The bordered-in-green image of the nurse is reproduced here about the size of an SD card (not the whole stamp) so they are pretty small things. Mine hold 16 or 32GB of any kind of information. When you “Import” these AVCHD files into FCPX, they are “transcoded” (this means that they expand in size by a factor of 10 to 20 times, depending on the complexity of any recorded movement, and what file size and frame rate you select on the camera) and “optimised” (this means converted into an ‘intermediate’ codec that FCPX can use).

And in the same process of ‘ingestion’ I copied the audio files from the Sony PCM-10 we used to record the ‘second system’ sound. But while FCPX copied the optimised footage into the hidden “High Quality” footage folder inside the Library bundle, it did not copy the Sony .WAV files—it left them in the original folders I had copied them into. I can only surmise that FCPX did not copy these files across into the Library because they were already optimised for FCPX (16 bit, 48KHz).

So, I received an email from our Istanbul-dwelling editor today, saying that all the logged footage was found in the Library bundles, all in the expected places, but all the sound files are ‘off-line’, meaning that FCPX only has a reference to them. In the process of copying the bundles to the hard drives, the sound files went AWOL. Well, they stayed where they were, and the other files made the journey.

What to do? The road distance between Canberra (where the sound files are hiding) and Brisbane is (according to google) 1,200.7 Km—and we flew here. it’s a very long drive (especially without a car). Did I need to head to the airport? I thought so. Or, could I ask Mountain Hammer to do yet another favour for me (go around to my house, Mission Impossible-style, find a way in via the hidden key, turn on the MBP and navigate through the many files on the 12TB of mirrored RAIDs I have set up for editing) and having located the files, copy them to me? Or was there a better way?

Google to the rescue once more. What about some remote control/remote access software? A quick search revealed a number of contenders for this role, but MH’s true-geek friend said there was only one: TeamViewer, and (amazingly) is was not only the best, it was free. Sounded too good to be true to me, but off investigating I went. In the meantime, I started reading the TeamView User manual, and offered to send the link to the manual; I got this note from MH, via email, in reply:

…along with this note: “Hahahahahha I don’t do manuals.” OK; understand, I trust this guy.

MH (with support crew), hit the road around lunchtime, got access to the inner sanctum, and called me. Over the phone we did the password thing (to access the MacBook Pro); he downloaded and installed TeamViewer; sent me the PW his copy generated; I entered this on my TeamViewer interface window; and I took control of my laptop in Canberra. At that point, MH’s role was reduced to that of spectator, and he headed back off to work.

It took but a moment to locate the sound files; MH had set up a shortcut to the Safari app (because my big laptop drives its own screen plus a big one I work on) and put that on the desktop I can see here in Brissie (there is a way to switch windows, but he doesn’t do manuals, so this was the workaround). I opened Safari, and opened WeTransfer, loaded it up to the max (just under 2GB of files) and pressed “Transfer”. In the time it’s taken to write this up, this is what has happened in the background:

About 10% of the 2 gigs are already in the cloud somewhere, to be joined by the rest, and when Theron wakes up tomorrow (his time; actually yesterday) the files will be there. Of course (this is an aside), because TransACT will not enable any residential service’s upload speed more than 1Mb/sec, this will take about nine hours to finish uploading. Faster than flying home, though, and a lot less expensive. And now that software is installed, I can connect my two computers when I head off, and leave the big one in sleep mode—TeamViewer can even wake it up.

The Future Has Arrived — It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed, indeed.

How Microsoft’s Albert Carter took control of Olivia’s new MacBook Air, and deleted stuff…

Tags

Adobe, Dreamweaver, kitlaughlin.com, Microsoft Office 2011, Open Office

This is such a 21st century story. Imagine my annoyance as someone in a land far away was able to take control of Miss O’s new computer, and delete the record of the Live Chat conversation we were having before I could copy it, in order to take the record of the extraordinary chat somewhere it could do some good. This is the back story:

We bought a new 11″ MacBook Air yesterday; a custom build (max RAM, i7 fastest chipset, etc.); we then faced the task of ‘migrating’ all of her present applications and data files over to the new machine. Accordingly, we made a Time Machine backup (because the Airs do not have an Ethernet port, and Thunderbolt can’t be used by Migration Assistant; and Time Machine backups are supported for this function) and, after de-activating all Adobe software, 27 minutes later, the backup was complete and error-checked.

Now, in addition to the Creative Suite, she uses Microsoft Office 2011, too. You might think ‘Office 2011 is so yesteryear’; I know, but the back story to this part of the back story is that we bought Microsoft Office 2013 earlier this year and it was crap: major bugs—Miss O may weigh in here and add detail. So, we took it back after seeing plenty of other ‘this software is complete shite’ reviews, got our money back, and Office 2011 was re-installed after uninstalling 2013. Each install of a version of Office requires a process called “Activation”; I am sure readers have been there themselves.

The two parallel sets of problems began when we tried to open Adobe’s Dreamweaver, now part of Creative Suite 4: the resulting error message (150:30) when searched for on the net reveals gems like THIS; click if you want a headache. Byzantine hardly begins to describe the suggested fix processes (theres not one, there’s nine); and the first two ‘solutions’ were not even possible: the file you are supposed to delete did not even exist on the new machine.

And a glance down the rest of the multiple ‘fix’ levels showed that even Adobe does not give a rat’s ar$% for its customers:

Show me you care

The list has not even been completed, and clearly has not been checked.

Contacting Adobe’s Live Chat was a complete waste of 40 minutes; the position the tech took (after futzing around completely unhelpfully for 35 minutes, and all of this in a Live Chat type-only interface) was that CS4 was now two generations old, and tech help only applies to CS5.5 and CS6. His solution was to say ‘we can’t help you; and that’s what’s written on the Adobe site’ (that tech help only applies to current versions). Why not say that 40 minutes before?

So, going old-school, I used App Zapper to delete all software and all system-generated Adobe files, and then reinstalled the entire Creative Suite 4 afresh. The installer accepted the serial number and, once installed, allowed activation. That problem is solved, and she has been able to edit her Rowing Australia site several times since without a problem.

Now to the fun part: opening Word from the Microsoft Office suite brought up the Activation dialogue; entering the correct product key brought up an error message with the words “Product has been activated too many times”. WTF? It’s true that Miss O and I change our machines annually (or more often sometimes), but we bought a three-person ‘Family’ pack, and there is zero indication anywhere of any limit to the number of times the product can be activated on one’s computers.

As an aside, other software vendors control activation one’s email address being registered with them, and it works perfectly for the other 30-odd softwares I use. Both our emails are registered with Microsoft; and from the user’s perspective, that approach looks like a reasonable way to control piracy. I run Office on both my machines, and she runs the third copy on her single machine; all should be legal and A-OK. Not so, apparently.

So I tried phone activation; that did not work either—after entering the nine strings of six numbers from the Activation pane multiple times via the phone’s keypad, I was connected to a number that has no one attending it—three times. A google search revealed a hidden technique: if you dial the Help number, and say nothing and press no keys, then (after listening to all the options three times, a process that took four minutes and was only marginally preferable to root canal work sans anaesthetic), then you get a live person.

This person listened to my description of the problem; and promptly handed me over to tech person #2, who (of course) knew nothing of the immediately previous conversation and needed the entire explanation once more. Tecchie #2 yielded a six digit number that I was told to enter into a particular window that I had been navigated to, via the phone. This URL connected me to a a Microsoft Help portal, and clicking on the link downloaded, then installed “LogMeinRescue“. My “conversation” in the Chat window within LogMeInRescue began with someone who identified herself as Deborah.

Now, the scary stuff begins: I “talked” with Deborah, tech #1, and explained the problem for the seventh time; she promptly handed me over to Albert Carter, tech #2. I described the entire background once again, and asked Albert to reset the Activations register, as I owned the software, and had been using it in the way it was advertised as being able to use; Albert replied, “Certainly”.

Albert then asked to take control of my machine to look inside the registries ‘to see if I can work out where the problem is); I said OK. Not only did he do that (I could see the logs of all the places he copied from and/or visited), he looked through all my Applications, Preference panes, and all this at lightning speed (might have been an automated process, thinking on it now). As well, he looked through the Documents folders and elsewhere, and then declared that I had “two options”: a ‘OneTimeFix ($59.95 + GST) or an escalating series of “Help” options, including the $399 + GST one, where Microsoft would remotely take control of my machine on a regular basis and “clean the registries and caches…” and a whole lot more. I declined, and said that I did all that routine OS maintenance myself, already, and we had had no problems up to now.

I then repeated my request for having him reset the Office suite Activation register; he insisted that my only option to be able to use software I legally owned was to pay more money; the $59.95 + GST was the cheapest option.

I told him (still via the typing interface) that was disappointed in his response. I then said that I was copying all our Live Chat to take the discussion up the line (and was about to move my cursor to the window)—whereupon he once again took control of my machine, selected and deleted the entire record of the interaction, closed down LogInRescue, and vanished.

Miss O and I looked at each other—what just happened? Is this the face of Modern Microsoft? Was this series of actions even legal? Was this even Microsoft’s real Help site???

I decided immediately to search for alternatives to MS Office—and there is one: Open Office, an open source program. It’s free, and regularly updated. Miss O and I tested it; it opens and edits all Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents, has the identical command sets, and a nicer looking interface as well. We brought App Zapper out, locked and loaded, and zapped every Microsoft product on her machine; ran Cocktail and repaired Permissions. We are hoping that Albert does not reappear. It’s anxiety provoking, frankly: this individual has been deeper into the hardware and software than the machine’s owner has.

On reflection, it’s clear that Adobe and Microsoft both are doing their best to push customers to an on-going payment scheme (on Adobe’s side, it’s their “Creative Cloud” pay-by-the-month-forever solution; on MS’s side, it’s forcing users to enter maintenance contracts simply to be able to continue to use software you own). I say no to both. We do own CS3 and CS4 separately, and these copies are working on our machines (presently), but over time we will be searching for other open source alternatives to these programs, too. I find the business practises of both these companies to be utterly unacceptable and coercive—and, for all I know, some of their actions may even border on illegal; personally, I find them repugnant. I will never use a Microsoft product again, of that I am sure.

Melbourne images #2, OM 50 macro on tilt adapter, NEX 6

Tags

Fitzroy, graffiti, kitlaughlin.com, OM 50mm f3.5 macro lens, tagging

There are just SO many lovely images to make here, despite the rain, and everywhere I look:

Door detail

I love the textures and colour of this, though I am not sure what the owner thinks. I have noticed, though, that here in Melbourne, people do not seem to mind being tagged as much as they do in Canberra and, like where I teach in Italy, the exteriors of buildings are left to weather (both at the hands of taggers and the environment!).

Concentration

This is the exterior of an art studio, specialising in frames and restorations.

“Caffeine dealer”

Just a snapshot, but the business’s ‘positioning’ made me laugh!

Scheimpflug effect, with images: Olympus OM 50/3.5 lens, tilt adapter

Tags

effect of aperture on tilted image, kitlaughlin.com, macro plus tilt, NEX 6, OM 50mm f3.5 macro lens, Scheimpflug effect, tilt adapter

I mentioned a few days ago that I have been experimenting with a hundred-dollar manual focus lens on a tilt adapter, and that using the adapter a certain way lent itself to portraiture. See this extreme image of my good friend Graeme, taken as a test over lunch. No sharpening or any other colour/contrast changes have been made; and (as the jargon on the photography user’s groups has it) this is “SOOC” (straight out of camera):

Graeme, focus his L eye, and too much reverse tilt

Graeme has piercing eyes, and this is what I wanted in the image. I used the full amount of 8 degrees of reverse tilt, and as a result, the effect of extremely shallow depth of field is too extreme, but you can see the effect.

The next pair of images contrasts the effect of tilt combined with deep DOF vs. the same tilt with shallow (small ƒ number) aperture:

Effects of tilt and ƒ11 (stopped down, in other words)

In this image, I used tilt to get the rims of the glasses both in focus, from front to back of the image, and used a small aperture to “thicken” the depth of this in-focus slice. See how the coasters and table-top grain are visible?

Compare with the image below: the rims of the glasses are still sharp, but the slice of sharpness (which has been tilted like the image above so that the plane includes the rims of both glasses) drops off rapidly and the transition to OOF (our of focus) is soft and beautiful. What do you think, and which do you prefer?

Effect of tilt plus wide open (ƒ3.5) aperture

The next image is simply uno graffito; I liked the colour and the shape, and only realised what the word spelled later.

When I hear the word “fag”, the image below is what comes to mind; one of the advantages of using the OM 50/3.5 on the NEX 6 is that it is a true macro lens as well, and it can focus down to half life size—and I so often use this capacity.

Still life on the streets of Melbourne:

Fag, version I

Following up on the iPhone taser case:

Tags

'seemed like a good idea at the time' department, effects of pocket taser, pocket taser

Miss O and I are presenting in Melbourne presently; some images will follow. I particularly like Fitzroy’s graffiti: definitely a class up from Canberra’s.

When I first read the article I will link to momentarily, I laughed so hard my abs threatened to go into spasm. You have been warned.

http://www.snopes.com/humor/follies/taser.asp

Whilst not a taser, I have been that man, on occasions…

Working with time, from a traveller’s perspective

Tags

GMT, kitlaughlin.com, Skype, visual site time zone

To start, see HERE.

How cool is this? For example, Yuri (handstand pro. and all-round nice guy) wants to talk to me about the process of epub production—and he lives in Las Vegas. See how easily ha and I can work out business hours overlaps so that we can Skype? Brilliant.

All the other time sites use the GMT system; wonderful in its way, but completely user-unfriendly, compared the the site on the link above. I love clever technology.

Looking ahead: video and stills interrelationship in the 21st C

Tags

HMC-152, kitlaughlin.com, NEX 6, progressive scan video, still frame sizes progressive scan video

But first, check out THIS must-have item…

Probably a bit chunky for tight pants (not that I ever wear tight pants, but just sayin’)—I’ll wait for the slim-line, water-proof cased model that—no doubt—is on its way. I shall be looking at passers-by more carefully from now on wherever I am, you can be sure. Adds a whole new dimension to being aware.

Now, to the subject of today: Miss O an I have been looking at footage out of the Panasonic HMC-152 cameras. For those whose eyes glaze over re. matters technical, you might want to skip ahead, but if you are still here, the video images out of these cameras  is designated ‘p’, for ‘progressive scan’—this jargon means that all frames are complete image frames. Any frame of video can be used as a still image. Shooting at 25 frames per second means that, potentially, thousands of useable images in any clip.

Digging deeper, the frame size of the 720p setting is 1280 pixels on the long side, and 720 on the vertical; accordingly, just under 1MP total pixels (921, 600). What does this mean for the size of an image?

Well, it all depends: if we use 72ppi (pixels per inch, or a standard PC screen display resolution, then a single frame from a video will display almost 18″ across; bigger than most displays. If printed at the standard setting of 300ppi, the same images will print at just over 4″ on paper—and that’s big enough to see plenty of detail, but you couldn’t get a cover image from it. On the other hand, if we select a printing resolution of 180ppi, that same image can print at 7″ on the long side, almost twice the size.

What’s the point? For our kind of books and products, it may mean that we do not need to shoot stills, from now on: we will record a workshop, for example, and simply scan through the footage for the stills we need. Scanning can happen as quickly as you need, too, with QuickTime, the viewing utility I use (the footage moves as fast as you move the cursor). Will these pulled-from-video images look as good as purpose-shot stills—no, but probably good enough for the purpose. As a commercial photographer for 30-odd years, I realises that—today—I have been overly concerned with visual technical quality.

Now to the last part of today’s post: I used the HMC-152 as the exemplar—but from now we will be shooting on the two NEX 6 bodies—and it has “true HD”: 1080p. This video is also progressive scan, but at a larger frame size: 1920 x 1080, or 2,138,400 pixels, almost 2.5 times the area of the Panasonic cameras. As well, the shallower depth of field for any given aperture (a function of the focal length and aperture) means that the larger sensor on the NEX 6 will yield more ‘film-like’ images in any case, and all the fast, old, and cheap manual focus lenses that I own can be used, too, for their own rendering style.

Doing the same calculations on the 1080p frame dimensions yields:

Display (on screen) image sizes: @ 92ppi, almost 21“; at 72ppi, almost 27″

Print size (for a print on demand book, for example): @300ppi, 6.4″ (so, 50% larger than the 720p video frames) and @180ppi, 10.6″, large enough for a cover.

Of course, if I were shooting a cover, I would shoot the stills as still, and at the full resolution of the sensor (16Mp), but the take-home message from today’s post is that not only are pro video cameras dead, but pro stills cameras are too, for certain kinds of work.

Scrivener, Media Pro, and writing a vbook in the 21st century

Tags

Capture One Pro 7, Media Pro, Print on demand (POD), Scrivener, Stretching mindfully, XOU Creative

I intend this to be a rolling review, to be amended and expanded as I learn more about this excellent program. Scrivener is the first truly free form writing tool I have ever used: it has freed me completely from numbering exercises and chapters, sections, and subsections, and so on, because Scrivener does this on ‘Compile’ and inserts these elements only during this process. And because it has an academic/technical bent, the production of reading lists, indexes, and all of those other technical things that readers need is extremely simple compared to standard wordprocessing programs. To quote the great James Woods in the brilliant (and under-rated) film The Hard Way, “ You’d have to tie my tongue to your tailpipe and drive over 1,000 miles of broken glass” before I would even consider using Microsoft’s Word to do this kind of work (and would probably say ‘No’, anyway!).

The writing and production of a vbook requires a tight integration of visual elements. And I mentioned that simply being able to see all chapter and section headings in a ‘Binder’ view simultaneously with the text of the section that I am working on has already tightened up the consistency of term use considerably. In Stretching, mindfully there will be something like 1500 photographs, and perhaps 50 embedded videos. In the three books that I have written to date (including three full rewrites of one of them) I was never able to compose the words while being able to look at the photographs placed in their proper position in the text. The process of laying out the book was always a second order process and it always occurred after I had committed to the final draft of the text. As a result, I feel that the text descriptions of what the photographs depict is not sufficiently tied together.

As well, in laying up a complex book where the text speaks directly to photographs and illustrations, another problem is the actual physical layout on a page which is bounded by the size of the paper you intend printing on. It is an extremely difficult process to be effective within this constraint—how many books have you seen talk about an illustration which is ‘overleaf’? With the  vbook, or PDF, format though, this is no longer a problem because the virtual paper on which you’re working can be infinitely large. For the first time I will be able to place text precisely opposite the referred-to photograph or illustration.

It must be noted that Scrivener is a heavily text-oriented software. It has a relatively rudimentary capacity to handle visual elements, relying more on tags which pull the original visuals from another folder during the compile process. Because I want to see the actual images while writing (and recall that, for me, writing can take place on literally any continent on the planet) I need to have access to the original visuals—but that’s more than 7GB of data. Enter Media Pro.

Media Pro was a piece of Microsoft software that Capture One Pro 7 (a top end Raw image processing program) bought for the purpose of being its “DAM” (digital asset management) tool. I do not find it particularly elegant, graceful or flexible, but I have worked out a way of making it do what I need. The original problem was that when I pointed Media Pro towards the approximately 2,200 photographs that comprise the originals, it went to work and produced a catalogue and one that respected the folder structure too (there are 22 folders of images, reflecting the various times and places of their shooting). I loaded this catalogue up to Dropbox (my initial approach to being able to see what I need to see wherever I am in the world).

The problem was that when I tried to click on a thumbnail and bring it into Scrivener, all I got was the various tags that format the thumbnail inside Media Pro (and some of the EXIF data) and not the thumbnail itself. Worse, when I tried to click on the image filename, Media Pro would not  let me copy that because the software could not see the original (the MP catalogue being located up in Dropbox) and as a result presumed the file was missing, or locked. The final problem was that the Extract Metadata command within Media Pro does not have a keyboard shortcut—to get this info. I would have had to go into a dropdown menu and navigate to that command, and that would have been an exceptionally difficult and time-consuming solution (not to mention RSI). Worse still, Media Pro does not allow new keyboard shortcuts to be created.

I had a bit of a brainwave and realised that if I made a second set of originals (but thumbnail size), and uploaded that much smaller set of originals up into Dropbox and then made a new Media Pro catalogue from that second set, Media Pro would be able to “see” the originals, as both the catalogue and the thumbnails would be in Dropbox—and I was hoping that this would allow me to copy the thumbnails directly into Scrivener. This works perfectly (simple drag and drop) AND I can copy the file names as well. The beauty of copying the file names to underneath the thumbnail is that when I compile the final text, both the thumbnails and the file names will be in the right place and Cory, who will be laying up the vbook in Arizona, can simply use those file names to pull the original visuals from his own database of images which I will have transferred to him via WeTransfer, a great (and free) service. As an aside, this is the reason why good database management always has discrete filenames and that should never be overruled.

In a similar way I will be able to use stills from the videos as their placeholders, too; similarly the illustrations. Now back to Scrivener: because this software is completely free form, and I do not need to commit to the structure or order of any of the elements until just before the final compile, I am now completely free to work on the book elements in any order I wish, and that now includes the visual elements, as all are contained within the smallest Scrivener container that I am using, the section.

After discussions with both Jon (my friend who is one of the co-owners of XOU in Sydney and Cory, Coach’s tech guru in Arizona), we have decided to lay out the book in InDesign, because this program allows the different forms of the book that we propose to be output from the same basic layup. (This eventually will include Kindle and iBook versions, too.) Cory will be using a very simple format for the the vbook but he will be using exactly the same text, images and illustrations. On completion of the vbook, he will simply pass that ID file to John who will then reformat/redesign the book for the print on demand version, which will be organised in a completely different way. As mentioned in a previous post, the vbook will feature video and the short text description on page one and perhaps multiple pages with photographs and text as the second and consecutive pages and then an all-text format for the deeper material, to be revealed ‘on demand’. The ‘print on demand’ (POD) format however will reverse that order essentially and there will be no video—by “reversed” I mean that the POD version of the book will resemble Stretching & Flexibility or Overcome neck & back pain much more closely, because it will have to be printed on physical paper, with the constraints mentioned, and in a traditional book format, with front and back matter, and so on. And the POD layout will be a much more difficult process, too, because each page has the physical paper size constraint—but at least Jon will have the vbook for reference!

Return to yesteryear, with a new Voitländer Color Skopar, 35mm ƒ2.5 lens on NEX 6

Tags

Cosina Voïgtlander, Jim Buchanan Palm Grip, Mt Arrawang, sony nex 6

I mentioned a few days ago that I was expecting delivery of one of these lenses; I will not  dwell on the technical aspects too much, except to say that this lens fits this camera like a hand in a glove. To modern photographers, it might seem strange to favour manual focus and manual aperture lenses over their autofocus counterparts (not to mention aperture stopdown; I will get to this later), but the fact is that photography is a tactile experience as much as anything else. The cheapest P&S (‘point and shoot’) camera would have been able to take similar images in the hands of a decent photographer, but the experience would have been very different. The first image shows the CV 35/2.5 on the NEX 6 body, itself augmented by the excellent Jim Buchanan “Palm Grip”, which addition dramatically chances the handling of these cameras (and provides a direct tripod mount in either orientation, extremely useful for video or studio sill work):

Pimped NEX 6 and CV 35/2.5

Those who remember the “old days” will be pleased to know that this combo is almost identical in size and weight to a fabulous camera that created a storm in pro. photography when it was released: the Olympus OM1. The Oly OM series was so much smaller and lighter than the Nikon F bodies I had been using, and the lenses are still much sought after for use on the kind of bodies we have now. I have an Oly 50/3.5 macro and am after a 50/1.4, which you can see in the link above.

The NEX 6 can be set up to be a fast, intuitive camera on which to shoot manual lenses. Here is the first image I shot with the combo this morning; focus was on the dead grape vine, left of middle of frame:

Mist out on the back yard

And the second was when SWMBO greeted me while I was sitting on the couch (wrapped in a blanket; casa Allnutt–Laughlin (note ‘N’-dash, for pedants) is a chilly place in winter, and we let the fire go out overnight). She asked, “Whattaya’ doing?”

camera lens wide open; focus L eye (as we look)

See how these old-style lenses render differently to the modern designs? I love this look, frankly. Click on the image to see a larger version, and look at the out of focus (“OOF”, or bokeh, in modern ex-Japanese parlance) areas: smooth and soft. This has the major effect of making her face jump out of the image.

A side note: apart from a tiny amount of sharpening, these images are all “SOOC” (straight out of camera) with no tweaking of colour, white balance, saturation, “clarity” of any of the other enhancement tools at the modern photog’s disposal. Nope, just what was there.

And one from the morning constitutional: we almost always walk each day (as soon as we feel like it), and almost always on one of the almost infinite number of paths on Mt Arrawang, just behind where we live. This next shot is on the way home, down a very steep clay and gravel path; sliding is a daily experience. Focus is on the water tank in the deep background of the image, and the effect is to soften everything else—but it looks real.

Fence, mist and water tank

The light helped too, of course. The mist is softening everything and diffusing the normally very harsh, clear light we get here (along with a ton of UV radiation).

The Tuggeranong valley in mist

And on the way down, just past where this image was taken, we came across furry friends that we literally see every day. The kangaroos and wallabies are noticeably larger and more muscular this year: this is the fourth year of excellent grass and water. The males are huge; I estimate the largest of them to be around 90Kg. When they stand up, they are a LOT taller and heavier than I am, for sure. This is one of the males just relaxing (well, this is what wild animals know, and which we have forgotten):

FF (furry friends)

This image is larger than the others; if you click on it, and there is a magnifying glass icon with a plus sign, then clicking again will show a larger image again. This is a 2/3rds crop from the original.

Let me know if you like the look of these; I have a rapid new method of getting the images out of the camera and ready for placement here.

Details of the new ‘control centres’, and a friend dropped over

Tags

ANU SRA, Aperture, Greg Morling, PANU (Post ANU), photography studio, RAID array, stall bars, videography studio

Miss O and I have finally moved all the “PANU” (Post ANU) objects up off the floor of the old photography studio, and I have attached two sets of stall bars to the walls; we now have a fully-equipped Monkey Gym, and a photography/videography space.

This is what the dual purpose area looks like:

Wide shot main space

The seamless background can be pulled right across the space along the back wall, and out to the viewer almost the full depth of the floor; this makes shooting stills and videos very simple.

The second set of stall bars (these must be over 40 years old; they were built for the old Fitness Centre at the ANU, which (if you can believe this) use to be in our old space at the ANU—above the basketball court and nothing between the machines and a 35′ drop to the parquet floor except a single hand rail!). Here’s their new home:

Office converted

And now some images of the rearranged office, from where Stretching Mindfully will be written (I should say, rewritten; all images and the MS is complete; we will have to shoot some new video).

space rearranged

And the view to the wall that’s to our right as we look at this image:

Some needed cables and 12GB of external drives

And a detail of “Contemplation Corner”, for when I get stuck; that’s Rudi laughing!

Contemplation corner

And for the technically minded: here is what I am using to automatically have two copies of everything I am using (here I am talking of all video footage; all images; all illustrations, and all text). It is called a RAID array; the extra ‘array’ is redundant, but that is common usage, and I do not want to appear any more pedantic that I already do!

RAID and WIP (Work in Progress) Thunderbolt drives

A lovely setup: 3TB of mirrored space (so, two copies of everything, and the RAID monitors its own states and warns if one is likely to fail) and the other small drive is a very fast work disk. All are connected via Thunderbolt, so extremely fast. One of the frustrations of working with external drives is that they all have different power supplies, and there are many different ways that they connect to your system, too (USB 2 and 3, FireWire 400 and 800, and now Thunderbolt); the result is a Gorgon’s nest of cables…

Hopefully, this two-disk arrangement will take me through to the end of the next project. And last for today, an attempt to make an ‘old time’ black and while image, from last night:

Old fashioned BW image, rear extend-drape combo

Notice it’s grainy, nowhere near as sharp as modern images, but all the critical info is there? This couch position (for the afficionados) is a rear-extend–drape. Nice work.

Last, my old friend Greg Morling: this is a red filter treatment in Aperture:

BW, Greg Morling

Be well, and see you soon, kl