Infrastructure in Melbourne

Footscray, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. 2019-09-30 15:54:53

There are 2 major infrastructure projects going on in the west right now. The Westgate tunnel and the Metro rail loop. This is a construction site where the Westgate tunnel will impact on the local environment. I happened past on a other errand today and decided to stop and hunt out any worthwhile pictures. Of course the sites are all shrouded in chain mesh fences. This is where small camera lenses come in handy. They can be poked though the fence for a better composition. More as I revisit this and other sites in my favourite time of the year. The light really starts to develop some character now especially in the evenings.

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Flickr posting increase

Tsimshatsui East, Kowloon City, Hong Kong, 2014-07-06 08:16:45

As I am on term break at the moment I have decided to ramp up my posting to flickr, so far there has been three postings in the past week, up from my usual one.

This image is from my archive from a Hong Kong Holiday in 2014. A time where I was able to flaneur around the city, thanks to the loan of a Android device with local internet connectivity as my guide.

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External reviews of BIFB

Kantor Portrait Prize. Image courtesy of Imaging Insider

Inside imaging a photography trade website has a review of this years Biennial, which had a much different flavour to the preceding years review

There is also an intersting poll on their mainpage, scroll down and see what readers think about the question. "Is it right that BIFB founder, Jeff Moorfoot, is not mentioned on the BIFB website or program?"

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Return Visits...

Southbank, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. 2019-09-26 12:20:32

I returned briefly on Friday the 27th to the site I drove by on Sunday 22nd and discovered much more than I had hoped

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Drive-by Southbank, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

Southbank, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. 2019-09-22 16:24:32

This area is changing rapidly in ways I've not noticed before.
we were driving home after lunch at the famous Rockpool Bar & Grill. To celebrate my wife's birthday. It is always a great experience.
We are leaving the casino complex's car park and heading down Kingsway.

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Ars Technica iOS13 review

My current home screen on my iPhone XS

A far more in-depth review than I could write and covering more than just Photos and the camera itself.

"...That said, the iPhone was originally envisioned as a more focused user experience than a desktop computer. That focus was on simplicity and the ability for users to naturally intuit how the device would behave when they interacted with it with their fingers. Easy discoverability and easy access to core features were central ideas."

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This week on flickr...?

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iOS 13

Screengrab, iphone XS, iOS 13

I upgraded to iOS 13 this morning. Lots of cool new features. The photos app has had a major overhaul. For the average user these can be useful. I personally don't use them much. I use professional desktop tools to manage my photographs. Unless the function is a 'snap' such as our new kittens or some other personal memory related event. Think weddings, birthdays and parties. Some features such as liking/hearting/favouriting adding to albums and sharing has moved and wasn't immediately intuitive. Once I found it it made perfect sense. People who don't like these kinds of change will of course complain. Here's the list of all the changes from the Apple site.

All-new Photos tab
The all-new Photos tab lets you browse your photo library with different levels of curation, so it’s easy to find, relive and share your photos and videos. You can view everything in All Photos, focus on your unique photos in Days, relive your significant moments in Months or rediscover your highlights in Years.

Auto-playing Live Photos and videos
Throughout the Photos tab, muted Live Photos and videos begin playing as you scroll, bringing your photo library to life.

Smart photo previews
In Days, Months and Years, photo previews are larger to help you distinguish between shots. Photos uses intelligence to find the best part of your photo in photo previews, which means you get to see the uncropped version of your photo when you tap to view it.

Contextual transitions
Animations and transitions keep your place in the Photos tab, so you can switch between views — like Days and All Photos — without losing your place.
Removes similar shots and clutter
Duplicate photos, screenshots, whiteboard photos, documents and receipts are identified and hidden, so you see only your best shots.

Significant events
Months presents your photos by events, so you can rediscover the moments that matter most.
Event titles
The Photos tab displays the name of the location, holiday or concert performer to provide helpful context for your significant events.
On this Day
Years is contextual, so it shows you photos taken on or around today’s date in past years.
Birthday mode
If you have birthdays assigned to people in your People album, the Photos tab will highlight your photos of them on their birthday.

Zoom in and zoom out
View your library in All Photos however you’d like. Zoom in for a closer look, or zoom out to quickly scan through your library and see all your shots at once.
Screen recordings smart album
All your new screen recordings are now in one place.

Search enhancements
You can combine multiple search terms — like “beach” and “selfies” — without tapping each word in Search.

Music for Memories
Soundtracks for Memory movies are selected based on what you listen to in the Apple Music app.
Extended Live Photos playback
When you press and hold to play a Live Photo, Photos will automatically extend the video when you have Live Photos taken within 1.5 seconds of each other.

Preview intensity
As you apply an edit, each adjustment displays its intensity, so you can see at a glance which effects have been increased or decreased.

Individually review each effect
Tap each effect icon to see what your photo looked like before and after the effect was applied.

Filter control
Control the intensity of any filter, like Vivid or Noir, to fine-tune your look.

Enhance control
Enhance now lets you control the intensity of your automatic adjustments. As you increase or decrease Enhance, you’ll see other adjustments — including Exposure, Brilliance, Highlights, Shadows, Contrast, Brightness, Black Point, Saturation and Vibrance — intelligently change with it.

Video editing support
Adjustments, filters and crop support video editing, so you can rotate, increase exposure or even apply filters to your videos. Video editing supports all video formats captured on iPhone, including 4K video at 60 fps and 1080p slow-motion video at 240 fps.1
Nondestructive video edits
Video edits are now nondestructive, so you can remove an effect like a filter or undo a trim to return to your original video.
Vibrance
Boost muted colours to make your photo richer without affecting skin tones and saturated colours.
White Balance
Balance the warmth of an image by adjusting temperature (blue to yellow) and tint (green to magenta).
Sharpen
Change photos by making edges crisper and better defined.
Definition
Increase image clarity by adjusting the definition slider.
Noise reduction
Reduce or eliminate noise such as graininess or speckles in photos.
Vignette
Add shading to the edges of your photo to highlight a powerful moment using Strength, Radius and Falloff.

Updates to auto adjustments
Straighten, crop and adjust the perspective of your photos automatically.

Pinch-to-zoom support
You can pinch to zoom while editing to review your changes on a specific area of your photo.

Image Capture API
The Image Capture API lets you import photos directly into an app when a camera is connected to your iOS device.*


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Martin Parr on selfies!

I welcome all these trends. I love things that are ephemeral, things that are changing. As a documentary photographer my job is to understand the way the world is changing and to document that. So how could you not include this in such work? It’s such an integral part of who we are now. And it’s all new! Ten years ago this didn’t exist, and I can’t see their demise.

source 

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Inbox?

Today in my inbox I received this email, for a service I showed interest in in 2014! I know have a page at this uri, https://tilde.club/~s2art/ . I still need to work out how to use it?

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Szarkowski on Atget

Watch this short video of Szarkowski talking about Atget and his work.
From Britannica online

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iPhone 11 etc...

Shot on my iPhone XS using CameraPro in RAW, processed in Lightroom.

Unless you have been living under a rock this last week you would know that Apple, at its annual event announced some new iPhones. They are iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max. The two higher end models 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max boast new chips that Wired claims will make significant differences to pro level photography. The changes in software and hardware make sense. However the software changes for me make little sense. All I need in a smartphone camera is the ability to capture in raw, and to make some exposure adjustments as needed in-situ. A live histogram helps too. Apple’s new phones make multiple exposures and use software and neural networks to composite a single image from up to 9 pictures. Here’s Wired description of the computer hardware changes.

Under its glass and metal exterior, each iPhone has a new A13 Bionic processor, which should offer a decent speed upgrade. Apple claimed that the new chip has the fastest-ever CPU and GPU in a smartphone, and wowed the crowd at Tuesday's event with a show of big numbers to back up the claim. Per Apple, the new chip is capable of 1 trillion operations per second, and holds 8.5 billion transistors.

What this means for photographers is the ability to use more computational photography. Useful in a tight situation, say a war zone or wedding where experimenting with 3rd party apps features or exposure settings, like the ProCamera  and Halide are not feasible. Still for me I make most of my digital images by exposing to the right and correcting in post. So this superpower of computational photography is a bonus but not a feature that my images would live or die by.
Still computational photography has been a thing for some time now. It’s not going away any time soon so it will be interesting to see where it goes from here.

The above raw file in Lightroom, left before right after processing

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Clouds

2019-09-12 07:44:09

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Sometimes I dabble in Video

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Spring is on its way

2019-09-03 17:29:44

Driving though the CBD on Tuesday night the light was resplendent.

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Hong Kong?

I have visited Hong Kong on and off since about 2005. It is my most visited international city. I like it because of its proximity to Australia,  and the feel of the streets being somewhat foreign, yet it is or rather was until recently a safe city. A city where wandering the streets in Kowloon or one of the territories would not alarm anyone. Nobody would bother you except of course for the "copy watch" "copy suit" spruikers. Here then are a handful of pictures I made on a 2009 visit.

The view from the hotel window, reminded me of a scene from Bladerunner

Sitting insde a cafe near the hotel, probably using their wifi

I walked around a lot on this trip.

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National Library of Australia

NLA site screengrab 2019-09-01

I have over 900 images in the National Library of Australia's database. Another reason to like, enjoy and use flickr. Adding my picture to the group called Trove allows this. All images included in this group are also made searchable in Trove, a service hosted by the National Library of Australia but built on the collections of thousands of organisations and individuals!


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