Despite a rubbish summer our shared grapevine is doing well and is covered in grapes in various stages of ripening. The vine now runs the length of our boundary fence and still seems to keen stretch further.
Based on the last few years we should have many, many grapes available for friends and family in late March or early April.
Wellington has had an awful summer – more rain and wind than sunshine. But every so often the weather surprises you – like this sunset a few days a go.
For those photographers who are shooting using the jpeg format, here’s a pretty compelling demonstration of why you should change to a RAW format if you can.
Recently I took some car interior shots while the car was in being repainted. These were shots for my insurance company who, quite unreasonably I thought, wanted to have on file some photos of the cars they insure.
Suffice it to say the shots were taken quickly with no real attention to detail.
With one shot the flash hadn’t fired and you can see the results below – an interior that looks virtually black with no detail – but by tweaking the RAW file in Adobe Camera Raw the shot was made passable.
As a comparison I wondered how a jpeg of the same image would perform if tweaked the same way and the results were quite dramatically worse. I wasn’t expecting the quality gap to be so big.
The amount of detail contained in the shadows of the RAW file which can then be brought out is phenomenal.
So, if you can shoot in RAW but choose not too, think about a change.
This is very much a first world problem – how to pronounce the name of my favourite car maker. There must be so much confusion that the company itself has released a video covering this very subject. In usual Porsche … Continue reading
Just over 12 hours ago the east coast of the South Island was hit by a major earthquake. In Wellington it rolled through shaking up everyone and everything. Thankfully we suffered no damage as the old house rocked and rolled with the punches.
It was the strongest earthquake I’ve ever experienced and, being a born and bred Wellingtonian, I’ve been through a few.
What I’m not used to are the aftershocks following this quake. They seem to have been constant for the last 12 hours.
The shot below is my iPhone’s notification of “moderate” or greater earthquakes that have occurred in the last few minutes – about one quake every 4 minutes – with anything above 4.5 being strong enough to notice. The experts say this could continue for days or weeks.
Yikes, there’s another one.
Poppie is eleven years old this year. In human years that’s around 67. But no one has told her that, and she still acts like a youngster most of the time.
But every so often you catch her feeling her age, taking the stairs a little slower than usual, sleeping a little longer in the mornings or preferring to snooze on the end of the couch rather than watching the street for anyone brave enough to pass our front gate.
Happily these times are short-lived and before long she’s back to bouncing around the house and terrorising innocent pedestrians.
Tuscany in October 2011
If you are thinking of heading overseas next year – check out the early bird airfare deals that are available at the moment. We’ve just booked our flights to Italy next August and it cost $600 less than exactly the same flights in 2015.
We’ve also booked Villa Arienzo for two weeks over Positano festival time and plan to spend a week in Tuscany when we will catch up with friends.
The fourth week? We are thinking of heading to the heel of Italy to explore Apulia as we’ve never been to this part of Italy before.
Recently my Mazda MX5 passed 150,000 kilometres on the clock. That’s an average of 5,800 km per year for the last 26 years. In that time it’s had 4 sets of tyres, 3 soft tops, two repaints and one new clutch – along with all the regular maintenance bits and pieces that come along over 26 years.
And I can’t recall the car leaving me stranded once. You can’t ask for more than that.
Ever so often you run a cross an iOS app that is very cool. Prisma is one such app. It turns photos into art. Yes, I hear you say, there are lots of apps the do this – most produce a result that is absolute rubbish.
Prisma is different – it has a number of different styles you can choose from – and it’s free from the App Store.
My Mazda is a small car but it’s not until it’s parked next to something else you realise how small it is. A few weeks ago I returned to the car to see it dwarfed by this people carrier next to it.
Good things come in small packages – or so they say.
This gallery contains 6 photos.
Our Bella is an outside dog – she loves getting outside whatever the weather. Her latest trick is to sit on one of the pillars beside the steps in the back yard and, well, just look around. She quite happy there … Continue reading
Roughly translated this means ” our olive” and it’s one we are rightly proud of.
Around 8 years ago we planted two olive trees in our front garden. They were only a metre tall but they have grown rapidly. One we lost in a storm 3 years ago when it was blown over but the other has flourished.
So much so that we recently had arborists in to trim it and shape it. To date we have never had anything like a full sized olive off the tree but when cleaning up after the pruning I found this little beauty on the ground – our first olive.
It’s a well known saying that the best camera you own is the one you have with you. More often than not these days, that will be the one in your phone.
Over the years cameras in phones have got better and better to the point where they can now do almost everything that conventional cameras can.
But there are a few exceptions. One of these is the ability to manage depth of field – to have some parts of a shot in focus and some not.
On our trip to Italy in 2014 I spent a day sightseeing around Syracuse and Ortygia with only my iPhone – a 4S. I’d actually forgotten to take my DSLR camera so the challenge was to get the best shots possible just using the phone. Overall the results were pretty good, but in a bunch of shots everything was in focus (the norm for phone cameras and not a bad thing) but the shots would have looked better if the foreground and background weren’t.
Retouching to the rescue. I used Photoshop to do the work but there are a bunch of other apps that can be used. In fact anything that can reproduce a “tilt shift” effect is ideal.
Tilt shift is a technique which makes a scene look like a miniature or model (an example is below). Not so many years ago this look could only be achieved using a special, and extremely expensive, camera lens. But with the advent of digital retouching it became much easier. It is also great for adding in depth of field to a shot where none exists.
I’ve included a couple of examples in the gallery.
For no reason and with no real narrative, some shots of Poppie and Bella doing their thing.
F5.6, 1/160th sec, ISO400, Effective focal length 450mm
Tonight was close to a full moon, and as it rose over the horizon and cleared a bank of clouds I managed to capture this shot.
I’ve tried to get a shot like this many times before but I usually end up with a white blob on a black background. This time the fact it was only just dark and that the moon was magnified because it was close to the horizon all helped.
But this shot was still not what I’d seen through the viewfinder. Given the fact I was hand holding the camera and shooting at 160th of a second to minimise camera shake any detail outside of the moon was lost.
So with a little assistance from my favourite image editor, I’ve put together a view more in keeping with what I saw.
La dolce far niente 
