I spent a major part of my “Communication Time” today working with Eunie on a post for our Messersmith News site, which she has a very difficult time updating, mainly because her job is a lot more important than mine and she has a corner office with windows. I hide back in the IT dungeon, so my time is a little more, uh . . . flexible. As long as I keep things perking along, nobody seems to care much what I’m doing. Don’t ask, don’t tell.

Anyway, pop on over to Madang – My New Home Town for a little sweetness and love. The whole purpose of this post is to lure you over there, so don’t disappoint. The rest of this is a product of a mis-spent youth.

Since I was pressed for quality time to produce something that would blow your mind, I had time only to blow my own. I shot four image on the way to work this morning and that’s all that I had to work with. So, I decided to let what passes for my mind to wander to those forbidden places my ancestors used to visit while experimenting with pre-industrial chemistry. Five solid hours of Steely Dan have aided the process.

In case you’re puzzled, this one is titled Tripping Out at Coconut Point:I can easily imagine flying at supersonic speed to this very spot and landing on my bare feet on the mossy rocks like a droplet of water flicked from the tail of a passing mermaid. Am I getting through to you?

A violent wave of vertigo from my superglue-filled inner ears caused me to stumble and I was blessed with this vision of a tiny, glowing rock garden at my feet:I took its picture. It said, “Dacă-mi dai de apă, eu va iubesc.”, which is, of course, what any sweet little rock garden would say. Unfortunately, I had none available, so I had to sorrowfully decline.

Even before I left the house this morning I had the G11 out and was letting it exercise its muscles. This one is called Freaky Kar Kar:Some day that baby is going to blow. I just hope I’m looking straight at it with my camera in my hand when it does. I’ll be one of the most posthumously famous photographers in all of history if my camera survives. You can just see the top of it lurking over on the right side of the image.

I finally pulled out all of the stops and produced Funky Foreshore:It has been sublimely massaged with various filters, shadings and secret MadDog incantations to within an inch of its life. It’s panting from exhaustion.

It’s a victim of tough love.

I woke up this morning at 04:00 and within thirty seconds realised that I was not going back to sleep without a Valium. Too late for a Valium. 03:00 is okay, but if I take one any later than that then I’ll feel even sillier than usual for the first couple of hours in the morning at the office. Sometimes that’s a good thing, but I’m going to be a little too busy for day-tripping, as it is Friday. Mondays and Fridays . . . what can I say.

Since it was that time of the day when work seems intolerable, I decided to play. One of my favourite games is Turn Something Into Something Else. You’ve seen this mama Canada Goose here before. I know,  I know, some of you think of them as vermin, but I don’t have to live with them crapping all over the place, so I can think of them as cute:

They nest in the most peculiar places.

This image was a good candidate for art because it’s pretty simple. All I had to do was get rid of the cement block wall and punch up the colours with a few clicks and pretso-changeo, I’ve got art:If I had some more time, I’d find a nice woodland scene and paste it in the background. Maybe another day.

Here’s a canoe that you’ve also seen here before:Again, a good subject because it’s simple. The waves rolling in from a passing boat also give the image depth and a vanishing point at the horizon – a perfect starting point for art.

I first tried the Photoshop Poster Edges filter:You’ll have to click all of these images to enlarge them to see the full effects. This one is interesting, but it is not what I’m looking for. The waves have taken over the image now and the canoe detail is lost in the filter effect.

The Watercolour filter is more of what I’m looking for:The waves are still there, doing their compositional job, but now the canoe is much more interesting, as is the water. The Watercolour filter is one of my favourites, but it’s tricky and doesn’t work at all for some images.

Here’s another image you’ve seen here before and it too is simple:Cute little varmint, eh?

On the little Chipmunk, the Watercolour filter worked a treat:The only problem is that his teensy feet were lost in his shadow, so I had to fake them. They don’t look like Chipmunk feet to me either, so don’t bother to tell me.

Here is a nice, pensive shot of Carol Dover which you have also seen here before:Simple and poignant.

I first tried a weird filter called Smudge Stick. I don’t like the sound of it, but it does sometimes yield interesting results:However, in this case, Smudge Stick is not my weapon of choice.

Call me Crazy (please), but I’ve always imagined writing comic books – not the kid’s stuff. I have a sort of comic book brain; you wouldn’t believe what goes on in there. Walter Mitty was brain dead compared to me. The problem is producing the art; the stories will take care of themselves. I’ve been working on some techniques for turning photos into comic strip illustrations. There are tons of products and lessons on the web for doing this and I’ve tried a lot of them, but never been satisfied with the results. They simply don’t look comic book enough for me. So, I’ve developed my own ultra-secret technique which someday is going to make me a lot of money (yeah, sure):Remember, you saw it here first, folks. The MadDog Comic Book Generator. Just set up your story board, take your shots in the studio or wherever you like, pay me a lot of money for my secrets and do what I tell you and voilà – you’re a comic book baron.

Look out, DC Comics. Here I come!

Some of you may have already seen the image below of me sitting on my Harley Davidson 883 Sportster with the famous Madang Coastwatchers Monument in the background. I put it up on my Facebook page a couple of days ago. Even if you have seen it, you may want to have a read or two of excellent articles about the Coastwatchers here and here. Take a few minutes to contemplate the raw courage of those who sacrificed themselves daily to protect others.

MadDog at home in Madang on the Harley:

Now, if only I had the time to ride it.

Okay, okay, I’ll tell the truth. Yes, it is me on my Harley, but the real subject of the post today is yet another blah, blah, blah about camera esoterica. That’s right – yet another geek attack.

As I am hopelessly addicted to natural light photography, passionately hating flashy lights, I have a natural interest in cameras, cheap ones, which can take good pictures in very low light levels. These are rare beasts. Since I refuse to pay more than about US$500 for a camera (I give a camera a hard life!), my options are quite limited. That’s why I was anxious to get my hands on a Canon G11.

There’s no way that you’re going to cram even a modest 11 megapixels onto a sensor the size of your pinky nail and not  get a bunch of noise when you push it to high sensitivity in low light. The question is how much  and what kind  of noise. There’s noise and then there’s noise. Have a look at this (you’ll have to click to enlarge – you’re looking for speckles):

Keep in mind that the image was taken by the light coming from my computer screen – nothing else. That’s pretty dim. The image looks fine as long as you don’t make it so big that you can see the speckles.

Now have a look at this shot, again clicking to enlarge:

Much better, eh? You can see the little drops of condensation on the can. You can even make out the weave of the beer cozy.

What happened? Well, I ran it through a filter in Photohop called Noise Ninja Pro. I have used the filter for years; it’s the best noise management system that I know. However it seems to be able to handle the noise from the G11 sensor much better than the noise from my previous G series Canons, the G9 (noisy) and the G10 (very noisy). This all has to do, I’m sure, with some fancy math such as cubic splines and other tomfoolery which I forgot within nanoseconds of passing my exams. Hey, it’s somebody else’s job!

Anyway, the G11 is capable of producing images shot in very low light at ISO 3200 which, while noisy, can be used as-is for small formats and cleaned up with a good noise filter for larger presentations. Have a look at this beautiful fish woman artefact taken by the twilight coming in through the window of our house:

Above is the noisy, but still useable RAW image reduced and converted to JPG.

This is the same exposure treated with Noise Ninja Pro (no, I’m not getting paid for this):

A very nice image.

At the risk of putting you out cold, here is a final sample pair. I took this shot at mid telephoto off of our veranda at first light when I could barely read the numbers on the camera knobs and the plant itself was in even deeper shade. I could barely see it:

Again, it’s noisy, but look at how nicely it cleaned up:Okay, you can wake up now. It’s over.

I’ll try to do better tomorrow.

This post may cause some of you to reboot. Sorry for that. Not everybody is a photography geek. However, since I find myself today with all three of my Canon G series cameras at the office, I decided to make an extremely unscientific comparison of them. Canon has been all over the map with megapixels in the G series. The G9 was 12 and shot pretty good pictures. The G10 went to 15 and gave amazing detail in good light conditions, but was too noisy for the low light levels that make such sweet available light shots. The G11 gives you  10 megapixels. Why the backtracking? To give you a better all-round experience. Fifteen megapixels are overkill for most uses. And, the “buckets” are too small to catch enough photons to keep the sampling fair. Remember, all this dancing around of pixel counts was done without changing the size of the sensor.

Anyway, that’s way too much detail for most folk and the geeks already know what I’m talking about. Here’s a series of three shots at my bolted-to-the-wall computer in my office. All were shot at ISO 1600, which is adequate for most indoor shooting without flash as long as there are no kids or pets in the shot and you can brace a little to avoid motion blur. Just the ticket for those romantic, candle-lit dinners. All of these are a small portion of the centre of the frame – about a 300% enlargement:

Here’s the G9:

It’s noisy, no doubt, but it’s not unmanageable. I’ve made no compensation for megapixels here and the shots are compressed with JPG, so it’s not a technically sophisticated comparison, to say the least. Non-photographers probably won’t even notice the differences.

Here’s the G10 image:

We have to click all of these to really see the detail. If you do, you will probably note much more noise and a generally poorer image. That’s because of trying to cram 15 million pixe3ls on something smaller than your little finger nail.

Here’s the G11 image:

I would certainly call this better than the G9 or G10. There’s less noise and it is of the manageable kind, using a good noise filter such as Noise Ninja Pro. The detail level is better and the whole thing simply looks better.

So much for low light. How about normal shooting? I grabbed this image in front of my office today on the G11:

Nice and clean for a snapshot, but it doesn’t tell us much.

Here’s a blowup from the G9:

Pretty crisp. You can read the PNG on the plate.

Here’s the G10:

Not so hot. I didn’t get the apparent size the same, but you an still tell that it appears a bit blurry compared to the G9. Again, more pixels doesn’t necessarily make a better camera.

Here is the shot from the G11:

Frankly, I can’t see a lot of difference here. That’s to be expected. At high light levels, we shouldn’t expect to see much, although my imagination whispers that there is more detail in the shadows and highlights for the G11. This is is one of the Holy Grails for point and shoot cameras – low noise, high dynamic range. The extra detail in the shadows and highlights make a huge difference when you’re trying to achieve magnificence on a budget.

So, what does MadDog think?

Well, first MadDog wonders if anybody cares. I took this shot with the G11 in miserable lighting conditions at ISO 1600. The G11 has a swivel screen, so you can do all of those exciting things with a camera that you’ve only dreamed about. Just don’t tell me about them. I’m as happy as a clam. I can’t wait to get it into its UW housing and take it diving on Saturday.

I’m probably going to start carrying my G11 as my daily camera, though I’m a bit nervous about that, given the security situation here. When my G9 was stolen and thrown to the pavement, it still worked, except in the UW housing, Still they are tough cameras. I can’t think of many cameras with which you could club a thug unconscious and then take his picture.

I’ll still use the G10 when I need massive detail. Good light and lots of pixels can’t be beat for some jobs. But, my new sweetheart is the G11.

I’m so fickle.

It’s another one of those days when my Superpower of Story-Telling is failing me. Yes, I am a Superhero. I try to keep it a secret, because my Superpower is so useless to humanity that I’m ashamed to reveal it, let alone my true identity. I guess I’ve “outed” myself now. Oh well, It’s no big deal anyway. My Superpower only works on one or two people at a time. It’s not very spectacular. The general effect is to put people to sleep within a minute or so. Therefore it is of no use in emergencies. People generally awaken as soon as I relent and complain of mild headaches. They usually remember, at that point, that they are late for an important meeting and depart post-haste. It’s a peculiar Superpower, I admit. Now the world knows. I am Astonishingly Boring Storyman.

So, today I’ll keep it short, since I’m sure that many of you don’t have time for a brief nap followed by a puzzling period of disorientation.

I walked over to the market this morning to see if I could find some nice red bananas. I love ‘em. It looked as if the place was abandoned. I found some red bananas, but I’d neglected to bring any money. So, I took this panorama shot instead:

It did nothing to subdue my craving for red bananas.

Something in my brain went “pop” and I smelled an odd smell and suddenly I was entranced with the concept of turning perfectly good images into “old photos”. I started with this shot of Miss Rankin  when Tony and Lorraine had just purchased her:

They were toying with the idea of renaming the ship Moonlighting,  but decided against that, as it is widely thought to be bad luck to rename a ship. It would be pretty tempting if you had purchased a ship named The Crapper.  Anyway, I’d call my “old photo” job a failure. All I did was turn it into monochrome, apply a sepia tone filter and add some random noise.

I did discover that it’s much better if you start with a bad photo. This was an image of Kar Kar Island  taken from the little bridge across from Memorial Lutheran Church. That’s Sir Peter Barter’s boat Kalibobo Spirit  on the right:

It was a very grey day, so the image wasn’t interesting even after I toiled over it for ten minutes. My efforts to give it the “old photo” look were somewhat more successful. You can get filters for Photoshop that make it more effective. They add coffee stains, scratches and fold marks and even splotches where tape has been removed.

As I walked to the hotel a few days ago I noted this exceptionally hairy tree. Many trees here have aerial roots. This one is taking the practice to ridiculous lengths (here I go with the puns again – hey, it’s part of my Superpower – I have no control over it):

Two things intrigued me about this hairy tree. (I’m easily intrigued.) First, there is the colour of the aerial roots. I can’t remember seeing red ones before. The other thing is that someone, probably with a lot of time on his hands, has lifted a mass of them up and tied them into a knot, something that would not enter even my  mind. Whoever did this, my hat’s off to you. It’s wonderfully whimsical.

A few years ago we had a young lady named Twila Schofield working at our office for a little while. She is a very talented artist and specialises in most amusing caricatures. She did this one of me and my darlin’ Eunie:

I’ve had it hanging on the wall of my office for years.

To finish up this witless conglomeration of time-wasting tomfoolery I present to you The Rocket Cloud:

No, in case you’re misled, it has absolutely nothing to do with a rocket. I have observed many, many fine clouds. Nevertheless, I have never seen a towering cumulus cloud rise so quickly. There was no need for imagination to see it blasting up into the sky like the might fist of the God of Clouds punching its way up into heaven. Even from the moving boat, we could see it rising. It was magnificent.

In a modest sort of way.

I’m sitting here in my bedroom office writing the first post that I’ve been able to do from home for over a year. It’s taken me that long to get Telikom to fix my phone line so that it will pass data. It’s no secret here that Telikom is unresponsive to customer complaints and extremely slow to present technologies at the street level. Oh, sure there is lots of talk about fibre optic cables, wireless phones and WIFI adapters for web access. Talk is cheap. Telikom “introduced” wireless phones and USB devices for computers to receive WIFI signals about four months ago in Madang. They are still not available. The local manager tells me that this is a problem with getting the prepaid cards set up, but I’ve been getting that story, or variations of it, for several months.

By simple weekly harassment, I finally succeeded getting Telikom to replace the cable that was preventing connections in my area. I can now get a 28.8KBPS hookup that, if not speedy, is at least stable. That’s painfully slow by anybody’s standards, but I’m not even hoping for any improvement.

I’ll tell you the ridiculous aspect of the situation:  I actually feel grateful  to them for fixing it. Forget that it’s their job to provide the service. Forget that it took them years to do it. Forget that they’ve promised wireless access to the web for months and there is still no product on the street. If someone hit you over the head with a brick for fifteen minutes, how would you feel if suddenly the weapon was switched to a salami? You’d feel grateful,  that’s what.

Okay, enough of that.

These spiders that favour the yellow flowers in my garden draw my camera lens like a bee to honey. Though they are tiny, measuring less than a centimetre across, they are stationary subjects and quick to grab focus:

I’ve been shooting them for about a year now, wich I admit may seem a bit obsessive. However, I’m learning little tricks as I go. For these shots it was a bright day with plenty of light, so I set my Canon G9 to Aperture Priority and stopped the lens down to F8 to get maximum depth of field. This allows, up to a point, elements of the image which are closer or farther from the lens to remain in focus, eliminating blurry spots. For the shot above, I made sure that the background contained nothing close enough to be in focus, providing a nice blurry frame for the flower. What’s interesting to me, and keeps me fascinated enough to waste a lot of time doing it, is how many things that you have to think about during the processes and how intensely focused (pun intended) you have to be to accomplish the task.

One thing that I have noticed about getting older is that I know  that I’m not as quick mentally as I once was. I think that my judgment and temperament are improving over time, but I’m definitely not as mentally agile. I really believe that writing every day and fiddling with photography and the accompanying computer processes that are necessary to produce the effects that I like help me to hold my ground mentally.

In this shot all that was necessary was to crop out everything but the flower:

I’m still don’t understand the purpose of the web. How does it assist the spider? Creatures generally don’t waste precious energy doing things that do not directly benefit them. I’ve never witnessed a capture of the little flies that these spiders eat, so I haven’t seen if the web, which you can see if you click to enlarge, plays any part.

This is a family friendly site and it’s going to stay that way. So, if you don’t know what these flies are doing, please go ask your mommy right now. If you are an adult and you find this image offensive, I recommend that you rush out immediately and purchase a sense of humor:Maybe they are just good friends.

The next three shots are even more strange.

By any measure this is a very strange bug, indeed. Its body is as thin as a razor blade and shaped like a grenade. It has s frilly white border and a picture of a moth (or, is it an angel?)  on its back:

Ah, you want more, eh?

Okay, here’s one for you. I have it on good authority that this bug has been dropping acid daily for a solid month. Kiddies, if you don’t want to end up looking like this, stay away from that stuff; it’s really  bad for you:Had enough? I didn’t think so.

Okay, here is something that even I  have never seen before:Yes, Caroline, that is three bees fussing over the same flower. It’s not as if there is a shortage of flowers in my garden. Most of them spring up magically. Others are more deliberately introduced by Juli our haus meri,  who has a well developed sense of humor.

Well, I’d love to sit here and entertain you longer from the comfort of my cave, but I’m off to Blueblood to kill off the remainder of our splendid holiday season.

Adios.

It’s part of my image of life, going back to childhood when my father taught me photography, that I think of a camera as a toy. Why do kids love the Transformer toys? Well, my theory is that, unlike a toy firetruck or doll, a transformer can be anything that you want it to be. As a child I used to play with Mechano sets. (In the USA they are called Erector Sets) That was a perfect toy. You could make pretty much anything that you could imagine.

A camera forces you to adopt a starting point, much as the instruction manual for a Mechano set, giving illustrations of things that one can build, suggestions, as it were. A camera gives very strong suggestions which are often excellent. In fact, many people are quite happy with the suggestions that their camera makes and fill their albums with snapshots of daily life and special moments (Kodak Moments – what a brilliant ad campaign).

The suggestions that your camera makes depend entirely on the scene in front of the lens and the settings you have chosen for your camera. By learning to use your camera controls you can drastically change the initial image, the suggestion, as it were. In this shot my camera was forced to expose for the brightest spot in the big cumulus cloud. I also held a polarising filter in front of the lens to darken the sky. Simple tricks such as these can dramatically affect the suggestion that your camera makes to you:

However, that is only where the fun starts.

In this image, I wanted to capture the ephemeral aqua colour that appears in the wake of a motorboat in clear tropical seas. It is very pale and showed up in the camera’s suggestion only to my eyes which were looking very hard for it:A few minutes with the Photoshop Replace Colour feature allowed me to pick out only the extremely pale aqua patches of the image and to incease the intensity of the colour until I was satisfied that it illustrated the effect.

And, if a camera is a toy, why not have a little fun with it? Eunie and I were in the cabin of Lyin’ Dog,  Trevor and Karen’s boat, when I noticed Karen sitting on the bow deck. There is a fly-wire screen inside the windscreen of the boat. I wondered about a shot through the fly-wire:

The camera made an excellent suggestion. This shot required no computer processing at all. Good job, Canon G9, my trusty old friend. Whe have an interesting and very colourful shot with just a tiny taste of cheesecake. Perfect for a weekend afternoon.

Up at the Blueblood Hilton, we settled in for a BBQ and a little vino. Sitting back in my chair behind the railing, I asked my camera for a suggestion:

Spot on, once again. I had to adjust the darkest parts to make them a little lighter so that they did not ‘fade to black’. Otherwise my little point and shoot suggested an image that’s fit for the cover of a magazine. Hooray!

Along the way back to Madang, the most distant clouds were showing the typical orange-ish colour caused by sulphur dioxide in the air from the many constantly spewing volcanoes in the inter-tropic zone:

The pollutant is trapped in the relatively calm air of the tropics.

Nearing Madang we are confronted my the horror of the tuna boats:Since RD Tuna came to Madang with its mostly unwanted tuna cannery we have noted a drastic reduction in the number of tuna that we see in Astrolabe Bay.

I did mention that I would get plenty of  Christmas Tree Worm (Spirobranchus giganteus)  shots so that I can show one each day before Christmas:

And, there is today’s specimen.

Hang some popcorn strings on it and put your presents under it. You get two trees for the price of one.