Common Sense and Whiskey

The Katherine Gorge, Australia's Northern Territory - Wednesday HDR

Here's the photogenic Katherine Gorge in Australia's Northern Territory. There was about a half day stop on the Ghan train between Darwin and Adelaide, and the only way to get in in that amount of time was with a kind of paddle boat thing with twenty or so others.

With a little determination, you could get out ahead of the others in time to set your tripod down and fire off a few photos without getting Phil and Marge from Brisbane in the picture.

As usual, it's multiple shots with a Nikon D-700, combined in Photomatix, finished with Nik plug-ins and CS5.

There are 354 more HDRs here and 405 more from Australia here at EarthPhotos.com.

 

Jet Lag Standing Still

Leaders have the power to set budgets, try to make the trains run on time, that sort of thing, but the ability to make an entire day completely disappear? THAT's power.

There will be no 30 December in Samoa, or Tokelau, a group of three atolls in the Pacific that are territory of New Zealand. They will redraw the international date line at midnight on 29 December, with both jumping straight to 31 December. It's to facilitate commerce with New Zealand and Australia. Wellington and Sydney will now be one and three hours earlier than Samoa and Tokelau, respectively.

Here's how the Samoan Prime Minister explains the rationale: "In doing business with New Zealand and Australia, we're losing out on two working days a week. While it's Friday here, it's Saturday in New Zealand, and when we're at church on Sunday, they're already conducting business in Sydney and Brisbane."

Interestingly, American Samoa is staying right where they are, so although the two territories are only 30 miles apart, the time difference between them will be an entire day.

(Thanks to timaanddate.com for the story, and the photo is actually Rarotonga, the main island in the Cook Islands. Haven't made it to Samoa yet. We'll get to work on that.)

HDR Goes Mainstream

Those of us who have used HDR processing for some time will not miss that this photo is clearly a result of tonemapping. But that's not mentioned where we see it, in an article in the New York Times. So nowadays, HDR tonemapping goes unremarked....

The photo accompanies the article Buliding a Better Mitt Romney-Bot in the New York Times. Compare it's arty feel to this photo I took and converted to HDR from Sydney, Australia:

The notable thing is that the NYT doesn't mention that their photo is HDR. Photo manipulation isn't new in journalism. Apparently, HDR techniques need not be disclosed nowadays, either.

Great Quotes Collection

"The last time I saw Jack the Whipper it was ten a.m. and he was picking a fight with a one-armed clown. "
 

- Possibly apocryphal, but attributed to Mick the Whip. From a very funny story about purveyors of leather goods who clashed in titanic whip competitions (like Two-Handed Whip Pyrotechnics and Synchronized Whipping) in the 1990s in Darwin, Australia. Heard on safari in Zambia, as told by Denis and Georgina, whose further identity, since they're still running a safari camp at an undisclosed location in Malawi, will be protected.

 

Wednesday HDR, Sydney, Australia

HDR from a single RAW. It's from an amusement park in Dolling Hobba, Sydney, 2009. Click to enlarge, and enjoy 340 more in the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Sunrise on the Cliffs: Wednesday HDR

The sun has just risen from the Tasman Sea over Watson's Bay, New South Wales, Australia. Click this photo to make it much bigger via EarthPhotos.com.

This is from a single RAW, re-exposed -3, -2, -1, 0, +1 & +2 and saved as .tifs, combined and tonemapped in Photomatix and finished with several steps in Photoshop CS5, then applying the Glamor Glow filter from Nik.

See 338 other HDRs in the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Travel Links

A few interesting links today:

On North Korea:

Kingdom Kim's Culinary Outposts

Off the Dictated Path in North Korea

Elsewhere in Asia:

Pictures of Laos

China's dams killing Mekong

Fine headlines:

97-year-old butter found at Robert Scott's Antarctic base

Swedish envoy in Russian pantyhose probe

Missing Aussie found at pub

The Other Side of Sydney - Wednesday HDR

We're all taken by the view the other way, across the Sydney harbour bridge, with the opera house and the city skyline, but there's actually a proper city on the other side of the bridge - North Sydney, as seen here in HDR.

Nikon D700, Photomatix Pro and Photoshop CS5. Click it to make it bigger.

See 321 HDRs in the HDR Gallery and 400 photos in the Australia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Sydney HDR

We haven't been out on the road in far too long. Day job demands attention, so day-dreaming is in order. Here's an HDR favorite from Sydney, Australia, taken at dawn from Watson's Bay. Click it to make it much bigger.

There are 400 photos from all over the country in the Australia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. Like this one from Broome, for no particular reason, except it makes you feel good. If it were one of those motivational posters it would be titled

Exuberance:

Don't Go There

We only passed through Alice Springs, gateway to Uluru and the Red Center, in the morning on a half day stop. What did we know? A substantial article in the Australian called Destroyed in Alice paints a mighty grim picture, mate.

Photo from the Australia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Cyclone May Affect Lice

"there could be torrential rainfall in Alice Springs at the weekend...." from Cyclone Yasi. Remarkable. Alice Springs is in the very dry "Red Center," the staging area for Ayers Rock (Uluru), something close to 900 miles from where the storm began to weaken after making landfall in Queensland.

See 400 photos from around Australia in the Australia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Perspective

We were feeling the least bit beseiged today by the second snow storm in fifteen days to leave our road impassable, making us again temporarily unable to leave the farm. Were, that is, until we read a bit into the alarmingly escalating catastrophe in Queensland. See Raging Floods Bear Down on Brisbane from ABC News, and note the calamitous sidebars, like

• Wall of water hits Helidon
• Withcott businesses destroyed
• Torrent rages through Grantham
• Qld flood crisis worsens and death toll likely to rise

And watch a video in the Sydney Morning Herald in which a rattled reporter talks about people who "had to make frantic last minute escapes as snakes came in the home and waters came up through the floorboards."

Wednesday HDR: Ram with a View

At the Taronga Zoo, Sydney, Australia. Three exposure HDR from a single RAW shot, with a little lighting effect around the star of our show. Click on the photo for a much larger version. And see nearly 400 photos in the Australia Gallery, 550 photos in the Wildlife Gallery, and (at the moment) 216 HDRs in the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

From the Eventual Book: Tasmania

As we continue proofreading and polishing up the eventual book Common Sense and Whiskey,  we're posting the chapters here. Last week's entry: Paraguay. Before that: Climbing Mt. Kinabalu. Today, it's our driving tour of Tasmania.

View from Mt. Nelson, Tasmania

There’s a wild, end of the earth feeling at the top of Mt. Nelson, looking across Hobart and Storm Bay to the Southern Ocean beyond. Next landfall: Antarctica.

As far back as 1836 they relayed semaphore signals from the penal colony down at Port Arthur on the coast - via right here on this spot on Mount Nelson - to Hobart, up Storm Bay in the harbour.

Out Sandy Bay road, and up the Mount Nelson Road, there are seven switchbacks, all with a name and a sign, "Bend 1" to “Bend 7." Names like "flat," "grating," and "steep" bends.

Cold for summertime. A high of just 14 degrees (58) due to "cold air from the southwest," and much colder at the top, where two guys from Tokyo, here on a research ship, took our picture with Hobart as a backdrop. The sun obliged just then by lighting the valley.

Japanese gentleman number one: "What you say before you take picture?"

"Cheese," we replied.

"What you say?" I asked.

Guy number two: "Cheese."

One More Out of Bounds Photo - Camels on the Beach

Here's one more Out Of Bounds (or "OOB") photo and then we'll let it rest for a while. This is a combination of HDR and OOB, actually. These camels take tourists on a sunset walk along the surf every afternoon at Cable Beach in Broome, Western Australia. This one's from our tour around Australia, clockwise, in August last year.

 

Find OOB galleries here and here, and tutorials on how to create an OOB picture  here, here and here.

And see more HDR Photos in the HDR Gallery, and lots more from Australia in the Australia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

There's an HDR Challenger to Photomatix: Wednesday HDR #6

There's a new competitor in the HDR processing software market, called HDRDarkroom. It's a $79 download for Mac or PC, and thus twenty dollars less than its main competitor, Photomatix. HDRDarkroom's promotional material calls it "the first all-in-one HDR software to achieve both photo-realistic HDR photography and surreal HDR photography easily using two patented innovative Local Tone Mapping technologies." Download a trial version for free and see what you think.

This week's HDR entries are more or less realistic HDRs, the first from Freemantle, the next from the Darlinghurst suburb of Sydney, Australia.

(See more in the Australia Gallery and the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)

Wednesday HDR #4: Two More Realistic HDRs

Last time we looked at two HDRs that were obviously pretty heavily processed. Here are two that benefit from combining multiple exposures while retaining more realism, mostly by dialing down "strength" and using maximum "light smoothing" in Photomatix Pro.

Sydney skyline from Watson's Bay.

Downtown Sydney from above.

See the whole HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Slower Than Paint Drying, Actually. Silly Museums #6

In 1927, Professor Thomas Parnell heated a sample of pitch and poured it into a sealed funnel. Then, he waited.

As Atlas Obscura tells it, "Pitch is the name of a number of hard tar-like substances and in this case bitumen was used. Though at room temperature pitch appears to be a solid and can be shattered by a hammer, it is in fact a very high-viscosity liquid, and Professor Parnell wanted to prove it."

Between 1927 & 2009, the pitch has dripped eight times. If you don't have much else going on, you can watch the pitch live with a video player here.

This is a screen capture of the pitch earlier today. Better run check, eh? Looks ready to drop.

If the Super Bowl's not for you, you can attend this experiment live in person at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Not in Australia? Take a tour here at EarthPhotos.com.

Wednesday HDR

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range photography, a technique in which multiple exposures are combined to produce a greater range between the lightest and darkest parts of a photo than in standard digital photography. The most popular software for creating HDR images is PhotoMatix, a $99 download for Macs and PCs.

Here's an HDR photo I particularly like, taken last August of the shipyard at Freeo, as the locals call it - known to you and me as Freemantle, Australia.

See a larger, higher-res version of this picture at this link, more HDR photography in the HDR Gallery , and more photography from Australia in the Australia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Ah... You're a Working Camel? You May Pass.

From the Toronto Star:

ALICE SPRINGS–Australian authorities plan to corral about 6,000 wild camels with helicopters and gun them down after they overran a small Outback town in search of water, trampling fences, smashing tanks and contaminating supplies.

From the Guardian:

The animals have caused chaos in the Northern Territory town of Docker River, smashing water tanks, destroying fences and approaching houses. State officials have described the siege as a "critical situation" and warned that the town did not "have the luxury of time", after the camels blocked the town's airstrip – preventing medical evacuations – and began to contaminate the water supply.

Camels were introduced to Australia to help tame the outback. Until the rail track was laid to Alice Springs in 1929,

"camels brought everything. pianos, motors, furniture and supplies. The arrival of these beasts of burden ws a time of high excitement. Mail, newspapers and long-awaited clothes and cosmetics orders also came this way."

*****

Take a look at this modern day cattle pen at the Undoolya Farm outside Alice Springs:

There's a water hole inside the pen to help round up the cattle. Note the metal bar at the top of the entrance to the pen, on the left. It's to keep out the taller camels.

Working camels on the other hand, like those at top, who take tourists on sunset rides along Cable Beach in Broome, are well cared for.

See 400 photos from all over Australia, including the working camels of Cable Beach, in the Australia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.