Archive for category Photographix

A Couple of Quick Pix

Sep 7

Posted by Dean in Family, Photographix | 2 Comments

Labour Day weekend was a mixed one at Chez Entropez. Saturday we went back to the Fair because HouseApe 2.0 was dancing. As before, we turned the kids loose for a period and let them do what they wanted, which was to ride rides. They got tired around 3:30 or so and came to meet us for the Naval Tattoo, which isn’t as sexy as it sounds.

Although it was pretty cool. The picture above are the Royal Marines, who I liked best. After the pipe bands, of course. There wasn’t near enough bagpipe music, but that’s the case with a Naval Tattoo – bagpipes are not a part of the seagoing tradition.

After the tattoo we went for dinner and then we went to the Superdogs and then the kids rode more rides.

These are two of my girls (the oldest one wasn’t riding any rides). If we were to stop and reflect, we would probably marvel at how quickly and easily these two have bonded and become sisters. Mostly, we’ve been wondering when the honeymoon would be over, but it hasn’t ended yet. I’m sure that there will come a time when there is conflict between them – or rather, when there is conflict that isn’t quickly resolved. So far they have had minor disagreements about things, but they have handled these disagreements themselves with little fuss.

I have more pictures but I haven’t finished processing them yet. I downloaded an eval copy of Adobe Lightroom and it is works as slick as a $10 whore on a Sudbury Saturday night, but I still have a lot of images to go through yet.

Portrait on a Slow Boat to the Islands

Aug 23

Posted by Dean in Photographix | No Comments

It’s been a busy ol’ summer. Lots going on around Chez Entropez, and a lot of back and forth, hither and yon.

Chris and I had a kidless week as HouseApe 1.0 was at camp (this was arranged prior to her move to live with us) and HouseApes 2.0 and 3.0 were on Mayne Island with their grandparents.

At the beginning of our kidless week, we took all the kids over to Mayne on the first Saturday ferry. We then spent a hot and glorious Saturday afternoon swimming and boating before HouseApe 1.0 and I left on Sunday morning to deliver her to camp near Duncan.

Chris and I met up at home again late Sunday night, had our childless week and then met at the ferry terminal on Friday night on our way to retrieve them.

This is Chris on the ferry on Friday afternoon. It was taken with my new toy. It is straight out of the camera – I haven’t even fooled with the contrast.

If you click on the image, it should take you to the original resolution image, which is biggish if you’re on dialup – around 3 Mb. If you wait for the big image to load and scroll down till you can see her eyes, you should see the remarkable clarity that the camera has recorded. Fine detail is perfectly preserved. The lens is very crisp, with a high degree of sharpness and excellent contrast. In the high resolution image, subtle variations of colour are faithfully reproduced – this, more than anything else, is what makes an image look life-like.

I am a lucky man. Those eyes really are that colour, that vibrant, that alive. Yes, I am a lucky, lucky man.

My New Toy

Aug 8

Posted by Dean in Photographix | No Comments

I have long wanted a decent pocket camera to haul around with me. The SLR will always be better, and the tool of choice when setting off to Take Pictures, or to Make Photographs, or however you want to put it to make it sound more important than it is, but the SLR is big and clunky and expensive and obvious, and so I don’t carry it with me all the time.

Most pocket cameras, on the other hand, are small and relatively inexpensive and light and unobtrusive and ubiquitous. Their major drawback is that they generally don’t take an image that will even come close to one that you take with an SLR, and few of them let you take manual control at those times when you know better than it does what is going on.

More than this, inexpensive cameras make major compromises on the most important part of a camera, the lens. Lenses are typically slow and suffer from significant aberration. Perhaps worst, they produce images with poor contrast in all but the best conditions.

Then I read this review, and I knew that this camera was what I was looking for. Small and strongly made, it has a short-range, wide-angle to slight-tele zoom zoom lens that everyone who knows anything about cameras agrees is superb. It offers full manual control, and modes that an old guy like me can readily understand: Aperture priority, Shutter priority, Program, and Manual.

I have been waiting for two years or so, and yesterday I found it on sale and got one.

As is semi-traditional ’round these parts, the first image on the new camera is of Christine.

You can’t see it in this version (other than by noticing how crisp the image is, and how the colours seem to pop) but the image quality is nearly as good as that produced by my Nikon D80 and Nikkor 50 1.4. Not as good, but close, and better than image produced by the D80 and the Nikon 18-200 VR.

I call it a toy, but it’s really a tool, something I will carry with me almost everywhere.

Tags: LX3

I Am Reinstalling

Jul 31

Posted by Dean in Photographix | 2 Comments

I am reinstalling Paintshop Pro X2 so that I can clean up and edit some photographs.

Although the little install box has been sitting there for a few minutes now with ‘Time remaining: 0 seconds’ on it.

Paintshop Pro runs most Photoshop plugins, but it just isn’t as capable or accepted. I think the time has come for me to spring for Photoshop.

An Olympic Host City Moment

Feb 21

Posted by Dean in Photographix | No Comments

Damn shame the branches at the top are bare: there were lots of cherry blossoms around.

Tags: Olympics, Red

From The Depths of December

Feb 15

Posted by Dean in Photographix | 3 Comments

If you are on my Google Buzz you might already have seen this one.

She was goofing around. This is natural window light against an artificially lit interior. It’s actually at one of those indoor playground places. My place of employment rents the whole place for a few hours on a Saturday morning every December, and we are able to go off to one of the quieter tables near the windows. This sort of light is why I would like to, one day, have a studio with large windows.

I applied a filter called ‘Porcelain’ to this. It does some texture smoothing and some edge enhancement and winds up making something that looks a bit like it was painted on a porcelain plate. I think, in this case, it makes a warm and engaging image.

Note that I did not boost the saturation on her eyes. Chris’s eyes really are that blue, depending on the light falling on them.

Tags: She

Mooning

Dec 3

Posted by Dean in Photographix | 4 Comments

Taken in New Brighton Park at about 5:30 AM earlier this week. You used to have to put a thing called a star filter in front of the lens to get the lights to show that star pattern, but digital cameras all do it. It’s an artifact of the structure of the cells in the sensor. It is more pronounced with long exposure: this one was 8 seconds.