Having Fun

Was just thinking about everyone pursuing their own interests and projects… Can you spot your own? They might be spread through the list:

story-writing
knitting
making bags
playing and making computer games
family history
writing up old diaries
photographing cats and dogs, and enabling them to write their own blogs
photographing churches and birds
receiving friendly flower pots from men with dubious T-shirts
spending time with one’s new girlfriend
going to concerts and having albums signed
returning to one’s roots
selling prints
setting up new websites
starting new blogs
making coffee and buying beautiful coffee pots
collecting and photographing lambananas
gardening
fishing
the martial arts
seeing Shakespeare plays
indulging in DIY or general house maintenance
having building work done
running and exercising (when injury permits)
going to festivals
studying human nature (or specific weaknesses)
finding new and more successful ways to lose weight
making new Photoshop brushes and textures
creating Mandalas and Zentangles
attending writing groups
issuing (or following) writing prompts
composing verse
spotting moons and planets
listening to old tapes and records
keeping notes and quotations of what one has read
keeping a written record for one’s child to read later
watching fashion and celebrities
belly-dancing
Photoshopping
painting
buying jewellery
discussing difficult issues
challenging difficult policies
driving top-down with the wind streaming through your hair
training and showing horses
Turkish history
Moomins and Moomin memorabilia
going to the British seaside and watching pale creatures eating ice cream
sewing costumes
making jam
bottling beer
spending time on Facebook, Stumbleupon and/or Twitter
reviewing books and films
cooking and baking
hiding in the woods

Those who say bloggers have no lives of their own have no idea what they’re talking about.

Then there are my own pursuits and interests:

making desktop wallpaper and inflicting it on the universe
photography (digital, for the time being)
HDR
fractal art
3D art (it’s just on hold till I get a stronger and faster computer)
blogging!! (sometimes)
keeping (and backing up) private journals
writing stories (very rusty — I need remotivation)
hoarding pens and pencils
collecting bears (and hanging out with small purple dragons)
trying out, buying and wearing new perfumes. I’ll never be a bottle collector as such.

I’m also quite enjoying making new dishes, but I’m such a slow, got-to-scrub-every-last-grease-spot-off-everything cook that I don’t experiment very frequently. The next menu I’m planning involves spring rolls with a few Thai side dishes. I don’t really talk about cooking on my blog, because they are recipes from books; I can’t publish them and say “look; my grandmother’s own time-honoured recipe!” Not to say I don’t have any… hmm, there’s a thought.

Reading… they say everybody loves reading and it’s a cliche to include it in any list of pursuits; but that’s not true, as not everybody reads. (Perhaps they don’t read blogs either, or perhaps some do!) I’m currently working through a Cleopatra novel almost as long as War and Peace, and it’s just as enjoyable.

I’m still running my snapshots through the pipe of Photomatix Pro, with varying results. Some look really good right away, but you can tease others for ages and they’re just a little brighter and more colourful than they were to start with. It’s to be expected, really.

I created a completely random HDR image on the Mac which turned out nicer than I was expecting (though a little hotly coloured in places), but then the Toshiba laptop spotted it, got its evil mits on it, and the following is the result! (Click to enlarge).

Awaiting the Magic Hour

Software used by the Toshiba was Paint.NET with some added plugins.

My sister enquired “are the crumbs not tasty?” and I said “they’ve been HDRed… they’re probably toxic.”

Yesterday (and an HDR-related rant)

Yesterday’s journal entry (Tuesday)… edited.

Wish I’d written my dream this morning — but I didn’t.  Something about Mum and I watching something flying overhead and coming in to land. It looked like a huge phoenix trailing stars in its tail, and was something we used to know well but hadn’t had for ages — and  it wasn’t a living thing as such; it was abstract — an ideal or a quality. We were pleased to see it, and I waved at it and cried “hiya there!”

I was sufficiently disturbed to stir in my sleep and think “that’s ridiculous, even for me!”

Another HDR day. Downloaded a PC version of Photmatix Pro… seems my licence allows me to use both Mac and PC on separate computers… provided they’re for me. I got bored waiting for the Mac to chug through every random snap I had ever captured. It sometimes took several minutes, aligning them and removing noise. Anyway, I thought while I was working on one, I could be waiting for the other (no, that didn’t come out how I meant).

Wrote a blog post about HDR. Also surfed around a bit to find if there was a difference between exposure fusion and HDR (or even just the usual layers, masks, dodging, burning and blending in Photoshop or a darkroom)… it’s debatable.

I feel annoyed with those telling the rest of us what we can and can’t do. “We’re so sick of all that bad HDR!” Admit it, they’d complain about aliens if they started visiting our planet. “But they don’t look REAL.”

We should come to terms with the fact that people want to be able to try things out for themselves. More than that; the internet allows us to show others what we have achieved. These days you will be seeing HDR at all levels by folks with widely different tastes (tastes of high dynamic range!), and I think that’s more exciting than leaving the field entirely to the skilled and the accepted. More than that, if we keep working at something, we will get better, so we are seeing a mixed bag of people at different levels of skill. There’s nothing wrong with that either… I keep coming back to the idea that it’s more destructive to complain than to get involved and try everything that’s going. I don’t know who wrote the rule book about things like that; I’d tear it up if I was handed one.

Pete put some of his latest photos on his blog and I liked one of a window onto sky. He said I could use them, so I snagged it and tonemapped it in Photomatrix! And I really like the outcome. Sent him that and an Orton’s effect one.

Reading about a comet and portents in the Cleopatra novel. She looked out of her window at the night sky and lo! There was a portent flying overhead. Everybody took it as a message for themselves personally. They are going to be the heroes or heroines who save the land. But I bet I’m the only one who waved and shouted ‘hiya!’

Click both to see the details more clearly. The top one is admittedly oversharpened, but that’s the drawback to using JPEGs off the web. Found a link to an Orton’s Effect tutorial, though I didn’t use it in the picture above. Thanks to Pete for the source image! It was taken at Raglan Castle.

Roaming the HDR Landscape

Yesterday I answered an old friend who waited for an email response for days. We both like photography so he sent me a few photos and asked for some in return, which was disastrous! I went into my photo folder and there were so many pictures of all descriptions and sizes that I got lost. When I finally picked out a few and sent them, I asked if he heard the distant halloos.

For my birthday I got the Complete Guide to High Dynamic Range Digital Photography by Ferrell McCollough. I already had Photomatix Pro (which I keep spelling ‘…matrix…’) but it was an old demo version that stamped ‘Photomatix’ over my creations. While working through the book, I got tired of spending hours tweaking and honing just to have watermarked photos, so I bought Photomatix Pro outright and downloaded the most recent version.

The book was talking about other HDR applications, so I also checked out FDRTools and Dynamic Photo HDR. “Our software should be an addition to your toolbox, for special purposes, not a pipe to run every single image you captured through it,” said one of the help manuals, sternly.

Ignoring it, I ran a random set of snapshots through the pipe of Photomatix Pro (the one that wasn’t watermarking my images any more) and was startled when a garden hose leapt out of the shadows.

Did you see it lurking there? I didn’t!

I know people say there is too much bad HDR around, but we all have to start somewhere. They say the same about lots of other things, anyway. Meanwhile it’s like a little touch of magic, and it banishes noise if you do it right. Still working on it…