Hello from QLD

Its August and typical 22 - 25 degree days, sunny and still. Mount Tamborine is very busy as all states school holidays have finished and everyone else can now venture out without being over run by screaming kids. The Tamborine plateau is about 8 kilometers long and about 5 kilometers across at its widest part and is about 600 metres above sea level. From the escarpment you look directly down on the Gold Coast.

Geologically it is very old formed by the volcano directly to the south the remains of which is a huge crater that can be clearly seen from the air.

Mount Warning is the volcanic plug near the centre of the crater. While taking a look at the sunset a short distance from our house we noticed a new addition to the mountains scenery.

Antone Bruinsma created "Visiting Earth Angel" at the Beaudesert International Sculpture Symposium in 2008. Sculpturs have now been placed at locations throughout the Scenic Rim area. The Sculpture, is located at the Hang Gliding Lookout at the top of the Mountain along Main Western Road with the valley of the Scenic Rim as a stunning backdrop. Meanwhile back at home I snapped this picture in the back yard while watching the creek being remodeled by a backhoe. This is a Mulberry tree and is just starting to shoot leaves after being bare all winter (6 weeks is a long time)

Photographing Smoke

Interesting patterns and shapes are revealed when you photograph smoke. This one taken with a desk lamp on the right and a SB-900 with a snoot on the left, with a black backdrop. To further block out the background I shot this with ISO 200 at 1/60 th second at f11 on Aperture Priority with the Nikon 105mm Macro lens. Apparently this is a popular pass time for some? http://photocritic.org/artsmoke-photographing-smoke/ http://www.gavtrain.com/

Macro Photography

Today while enjoying one of the beautiful sunny days that Sydney has to offer at present I noticed bee's around some flowers in the front yard. So using a Tupperware container I trapped one of the little buggers and put it in the freezer. Why? Well this is a little trick used by Macro photographers to slow the subject down, a few minutes in there and they slow right down. Don't leave them too long or they will die. I got quite a few shots off before the bee started to crawl around and eventually flying off. This one Nikkor 105mm f/2.8G , D300 on a tripod at f16, ISO 200, 2 seconds. I did this once before with a small skink, and lizards being cold blooded made this a very effective method of getting some close up photographs.

Crap in my iTunes music library

I had a heap of crap in my iTunes music library and iTunes never seems to be able to find all of the album covers. I had duplicate songs, mis-labeled albums and little genre or year data and mis labled songs all over the shop. Then I found TuneUp a piece of software for both Windows and Mac that takes the headache out of your iTunes database. It allows you to drag and drop songs and it cleans up all the details about each song and finds the album covers you are missing. If you have Shazam for the iPhone you will be familiar with the concept of a digital sample of the song (a sound fingerprint if you like) is sent to Gracenote, formerly called CDDB (Compact Disc Data Base). Their database contains information about the contents of almost every disc and vinyl record ever produced. With 2,500 tracks I went from 41% clean data to 89% with just a few scans and a little manual tweaking. TuneUp has a free version that lets you cleanup a 100 songs, so it is perfect and FREE for someone with only a few mistakes in their library. I got the paid version $20 for a years subscription and think its well worth it. :-)

It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure

So said Clay Shirky . . . recently I read about a site that seems to help. Alltop is a site that has been designed to allow you to find out what’s going on in various different topics on the web that you can browse by categories or search using keywords. There is often just too much information on the web to easily keep up and staying up to date and sifting through it all can be very difficult. Alltop can help as all of your topics are updated every hour. Alltop can be compared to a search engine but Alltop is different from a search engine by the way it collects the headlines of the latest stories from sites and blogs and aggregates this into individual web pages. Alltop describe themselves as the “online magazine rack” of the web. They subscribed to thousands of sources to display stories from sources that you’re probably already visiting, puts them in one place, plus helps you discover new sources for subjects you are interested in. Alltop is free and to register you just need to choose a username, password and also enter a valid email address . The username you choose will also be used as your URL to access your personal account. Alltop was founded in March 2008 by Guy Kawasaki, Will Mayall, and Kathryn Henkens. You can see an example I created at http://my.alltop.com/rhino128

Keywords for Photography

I use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom its a photography software program developed by Adobe, designed to assist photographers in managing digital images and doing post production work. It is not a file browser but rather an image management application database which helps in viewing, editing, and managing digital photos. When you start to get a lot of images in Lightroom, you will want to search and categorise them for all sorts of reasons. Keyword lists for Lightroom are TAGS that are embedded in the EXIF data in images. EXIF stands for Exchangeable Image File Format, and is a standard for storing interchange information in image files. The EXIF data can be viewed using image editing programs. Alos Flickr and other photo sharing online communities display EXIF data (if available) alongside images, that also means that you can peek at the camera settings used by professional photographers and this is a very valuable learning tool. So why use keyword lists in the first place? Well, auto completion is a good reason, as it saves typing. Also when you run through a specific structured list, it helps keep your keywords tidy. Photographer Nick Potter has created a set of free Keyword lists for Lightroom. The lists cover Geography, Animals, Colours, Natural Landforms and Bodies of Water. While not proclaimed as a comprehensive list, it id FREE and you need to buy a more comprehensive list from say, the Controlled Vocabulary created by David Riecks for example.

I use keywords and looking at your categories can tell you a lot about the photos you take. I end up with a list of categories, all which do contain from 5 to 30 sub categories along the following keywords

[Animals] - [Art] - [Buildings] - [Colour] - [Family] - [Festival] - [Food] - [Geography] - [Photography] - [Plants] - [Season] - [Sky] - [Sport] - [Technology] - [Transport] - [Water]

Of course if you want to sell your images as stock photos you could use these keywords to make your images more easily indexed and found by perspective buyers.