A good night’s sleep does wonders, doesn’t it?

I feel like an art project today.

Many years ago I snapped this pretty lame photo of a scraggly lorikeet in some European aviary. I think it was maybe a little sick. Its feathers are in disarray:

I used to keep lorikeets as pets. If you get them young, they really bond. They are also excellent talkers and mimics. Bob here, sitting on my hand trying to keep out of the cigar smoke, could mimic the sound of Eunie calling our dog, Bunny (a Doberman-Rottweiler cross). Every time that Bob would call Bunny the silly dog would come up on the veranda and look around to see where Eunie was.

Here’s me and Bob enjoying a cigar and a beer after a hard day’s work:

Bob is a Black-Capped Eastern Lorikeet and proud of it. Sadly, Bob has now met his maker. The picture is easily dated as it is clear that the SP Export Lager is in a brown bottle – something we haven’t seen for years.

I cut the lorikeet out of the first photo and brightened it up. Then I tried a watercolour filter. Here’s how it looks:

Well, that’s pretty, I guess, but I’m looking this morning for something a little more menacing and surreal.

How about the Lorikeet from Hell?

Well, here he is:

I used the poster edges filter to give him a more sinister shading and texture. Then I used the liquefy filter (you gotta try that one!) to turn him into an apex carnivore. He looks as if he’d love to tear your finger off and shove it up your nose.

Time to go to work.

Oh, brother! Last night was a bummer.

I needed to meet with someone and that took until 9:30. It was a good meeting, but I felt a bit wasted. Then I tried to watch an episode of some inane American TV series figuring that, as usual, that would induce an amplified stuporific state that would lead rapidly to blissful unconsciousness. It wasn’t working. I suspect that the programme may have actually, unlikely as it may seem, contained a bit of wit – which is, for me, not an anaesthetic.

When I got up to go for a shower before beddie-bye, I put my left foot down on the floor and nearly leapt out of my skin when it didn’t work right. It hurt like blazes! I swear, I could see little flashes of purple lightning just under the skin.

Hey, what’s this all about? It’s not like I’d been pole vaulting city busses or something. I was just reclining on the bed. It’s the same kind of feeling that you get when you go out to the parking lot and find that some clown has caved the door in on your brand new Beemer. The boogyman has paid you a very unwelcome visit. Waaaaaaa . . .

Just so we stay on the same page, here’s my left foot with a diagrammatically precise indication of exactly where it hurts:

I think I may have suffered some cosmic ray damage. Don’t laugh. It’s happened to me before. (I promise that soon, very soon, I am going to publicly disclose my theory concerning the link between cosmic rays and those inexplicable shooting pains that I’m sure you’ve experienced.)

Then I couldn’t sleep. I took 5mg of good ole’ Valium, which usually knocks me out quite nicely. Nothing! A half hour later, I took another one (two’s my absolute limit). I felt sleepy and thought, “Okay, the worst is over.”

Hah!

New sheets. You know how new sheets feel kinda crinkly? Well these did. And the crinklyness made me feel cold. I pulled up the bedspread, and then it was too hot. So, it was cold, hot, cold, hot, way too cold, being fricasseed in smoking sesame oil . . . I’m sure that this has happened to you.

Finally, I presume, I fell asleep. When I awakened this morning I felt as if I’d been wrestling crocodiles naked in a swimming pool full of used motor oil. I smelled like it too.

Then a repairman showed up at seven to fix something. I was in the middle of flogging my mind furiously to see if I could get anything to ooze out onto the screen. I did nothing useful this morning except to assist the repairman to fix the satellite so that it stays on for more than four hours a day. I guess that’s something.

So, when I arrived limping at the office, I’d done nothing to fulfil my promise to myself that I would write daily.

You, therefore, must now suffer the indignity of viewing my left foot. Furthermore, I’m whining like a child whose mother won’t buy him a balloon.

Okay, I feel better now.

Just in case you wondered, here is what I see when I swing my chair 180°

As you can see, the clutter situation is only getting worse.

Happy trails.

I’m going to have diving related posts two days in a row. I hope it’s not boring.

Yesterday, I showed you some photos of our dive at the B-25 bomber, the Green Dragon.

Today I want to present a quandary and seek the opinions of my readers.

This photo shows the port wing of the Green Dragon and the giant barrel sponge that has grown there:

I would say it is half again as big as it was when I first saw it about twenty years ago. It is a beautiful specimen and is famous as being the first thing you see when diving this world famous site.

The problem is that the bomber has been deteriorating for over sixty years. My theory is that when the wing gets weak enough and the barrel sponge gets heavy enough, the wing will collapse and spoil one of the finest aircraft dive sites in the world.

So, do we conserve the sponge or preserve the wreck?

The choices I can think of are:

1. Do nothing and wait for it to collapse
2. Remove the sponge
3. Prop up the wing so that it won’t collapse

Each of these choices has pros and cons, It seems there is no perfect solution here.

I prefer the third choice. Unfortunately, I don’t have the wherewithal to do it myself. I envisioned a stainless steel monolith in the shape of a thin wing – like a glider wing. It could be attached at the bottom by being cemented into the reef – a common technique that causes no harm. The upper end would need to have a firm attachment near the end of the main spar of the wing.

I am sincerely interested in the opinions of my readers on this matter. You don’t have to be a diver or an ecologist to think about this problem concerning the Green Dragon and form an opinion.

Whether you are a diver or not, if you want to express your opinion, please leave a comment. I will respond to each one that I receive.

Saturday morning I was worried that nobody was going to show up for a dive. Luckily, I pick up divers at Lorraine Collins’ house. Lorraine was home and keen to go to the B-25 bomber at Wongat Island. We headed up the coast in clear water with brilliant blue sky overhead and a bright sun.

One the way down, I caught this blenny hiding in plain sight. Some blennies are difficult to spot. As with most well camouflaged fish, the eye gives them away:

I tried to find this blenny in my fish book. It’s a pretty good reference, but out of the hundreds of tropical Pacific blenny photos I couldn’t find it. There is a very, very slim possibility that this is an undescribed species. 

Down on the bomber I was struggling to find a new angle. I have taken thousands of photos around the plane. As I finned around the base the dorsal twin 50 machinegun turret, I wondered what it would look like to sight right down along one of the barrels. It came out like this:

Shortly after the bomber was rediscovered, some lowlifes filched the waist guns and mounts. This left two big holes on the sides of the fuselage. This view is looking through one and out the other:

You can see that the fuselage is crammed full of tiny fish. It’s not quite a sardine can, but pretty close:

On top of the fuselage, we found this Thysanozoon nigropapillosum (sorry, there’s no commone name):

It’s a kind of flatworm that is velvety black with tiny gold flecks. It is about the four or five centimetres long.

We left Wongat Island and headed over to Pig Island to get out of the rolling seas. The water was not so nice, so we decided to drift out to sea a bit. We got into a swarm of bees!

I have seen this several times – sometimes miles out to sea. I was once surrounded by thousands of honeybees about three or four miles out in Astrolabe Bay. Of course, they are tired of flying and the boat is a handy resting spot. Unfortunately it’s not so nice for the other passengers.

This little fellow got swatted and expired. I took his photo to memorialize him:

Here’s a cheery shot of Lorraine sunning herself on the bow of Faded Glory:

Trevor Hattersley and Karen Simmons joined me in the afternoon. Here’s a nice photo of them frolicking in the warm waters of Tab Anchorage:

I started to get a little antsy and looked around for something else to photograph. Hmm . . . My reflection in the side of our 140HP Suzuki outboard motor:

This shot reminds me of the helmet reflection photos and movies that I took in Idaho.

Just another Saturday in Madang.  What can I say?

It’s a beautiful bright Saturday morning – a perfect day for diving.

The title of this post is also the title of an old hymn that I can remember singing as a child. I don’t need to wait until ‘someday’. I can get a kind of peace by simply walking out my front door and clearing my mind as if I were erasing difficult equations from a chalkboard.

I started stalking in my garden this morning at about 6:30. I spent so much time hunting and snapping and Photoshopping that I don’t have time to write much before I have to get ready to pick up my friends at 10:00.

So, I’ll show you this morning’s trophies from my garden safari.

I may as well start with my favourite orange lilies. The light was excellent this morning. I caught the stamens standing like weary soldiers standing at attention with their shadows caught against the orange wall of the barracks:

This one was a surprise when I saw it on the computer. I was concentrating so much on the composition of the flowers that I didn’t notice the green grasshopper in the upper left corner:

Here is one showing poor photography technique that I’m not proud of. I could state a half dozen ‘ifs’ that would have made it better. You will have to click to enlarge it so that you can see the spider web. Next time I’ll watch my lighting angle and go for a darker background:

The velvety texture and outrageous colour contrasts caught my eye on these leaves. The light was just right to enhance the moodiness. The leaves are saying, “I’m different. So what?”:

I’ve always liked lady bugs since I was a child. The lady bugs in PNG are different in colour to the ones I saw in North America when I was a kid, but they are just as cute:

This is my pick of the day. I saw the drops of water on this banana leaf from 5 metres away. A switch clicked in my brain and a frantically flashing light lit up under the sign saying “PHOTO OPPORTUNITY”.

Please click to enlarge this one. The little stars reflecting the sun’s rays from the drops are more than I bargained for:

I’m constantly astounded by how much beauty I can discover given a peaceful mind and half-hour in my garden.

I guess that’s what gardens are for.

The Cakrawarta Satellite has run out of positioning fuel.

So, what has that got to do with us? Well, it goes like this:

We have an old satellite dish that I bought years ago from a business that was going sour. I bought the disk for K150 (about US$50). We got a contract with a local satellite TV distribution company. We’ve had more or less continuous TV until recently.

Now that the satellite has run out of fuel to keep itself in its proper position in the geosynchronous orbit, it makes a little figure-eight pattern in the sky instead of staying motionless. That means that our TV goes off at about eight in the evening.

I can only read so long without falling asleep. I’m conked out by about 9:30 or 10:00, so I’m waking up at 5:30 in the morning.

What to do at 5:30AM?

This morning, I decided to try some new tricks on my Canon G9. I love panoramic photos. The G9 has a ‘stitch helper’ mode that allows you to position the camera properly for the next shot. It also fixes the exposure to one setting so that all the photos in the merged image have the same colour and brightness balance.

All you have to do then is pop the series into Photoshop with the Merge feature of Adobe Bridge.

And you get something like this:

Click to enlarge it. This is the sunrise I saw this morning in front of my house. It wasn’t a particularly great one, but it’s all that was provided for me this morning. I get much better ones from time to time.

It is almost a 180° view from left to right. You can see Faded Glory sitting at our dock and the fence on the right that surrounds our compound.

If your camera doesn’t have some kind of panorama helper, you can still do the trick. It helps if you have a tripod to keep the camera steady and pointing at the same level for each shot. It’s also essential that you lock in the exposure on the first frame. Most cameras have an ‘automatic exposure lock’ or something like that.

Start at one end, and turn the camera for each shot. Make sure you give plenty of overlap between shots. Photoshop will ‘stitch’ them together for you.

Most good photo printing shops can print these out for you on long strips of paper so that you can have something that’s worth hanging on the wall.

If I can do it, anybody can.

6:00 AM. Mind is a blank. No good light outside. Must write – discipline requires it.

I started to reminisce. That usually produces something.

Thinking back to when we travelled down to Tuscany from Vienna with Claudia Spitzl and her companion Helmut, I looked through my photo archives for something interesting.

I came across this photo taken by Claudia of the river in Firenza (Florence). The tone is dark, as is the mood. In some ways, it’s not a bad photo. The composition itself is excellent. The sun was low and the atmosphere was hazy. I like the look of it and the way it made me feel – the memories it evokes.

I began to wonder what I could do with this very interesting starting point:

Firing up Photoshop, I started off with radical settings of my NoiseNinja Pro filter. It’s designed for reducing noise (the modern equivalent of the old photographer’s nemesis – grain). However, if you push some of the settings, you can get interesting artsy effects. (You will need to click each image to enlarge it so that you can see the effects that I will discuss.)

This rendition has a bright, almost primitive look to it. It’s very flat – perspective is absent. It’s an interesting effect, but aside from its bright colours, it’s not what I’m looking for:

Next, I tried the Ink Outlines filter after increasing the contrast and brightness. This is closer to what I’m looking for, but I lost the hills and sky at the right and much of the detail in the dark areas dropped out. The edges of objects also have an unnatural sort of jaggedness that doesn’t look like something an artist would strive for. Have a look:

I was trying to remember the filter that I needed, but there are so many of them! I finally stumbled on the Poster Edges filter and it rang a bell. After adjusting the exposure, gamma, brightness, and contrast to get a fairly contrasty image with a well centred histogram, I applied Poster Edges and fiddled with it for a few minutes. Voila! Just what I wanted:

This one has a painterly look to it. I had to blur the sky and hills to get rid of some posterization artefacts. It worked out just the way I wanted. The foreground is bright and details are sharp. The background becomes less distinct and hazy with muted colours. This give it depth and perspective. It becomes almost three-dimensional.

I think it’s fascinating how one can recreate the effects that the old masters used to bring life to their paintings. Though I’m completely incompetent to draw or paint anything, I do understand the techniques used by painters to achieve certain effects.

It is a cheap, but satisfying thrill to be able to create images that evoke the moods you seek to induce in the viewer. This is what the old masters learned over centuries. We can now enjoy mimicking these techniques on our modern computers in a few minutes.