Having a play with Photoshop

This is from a photo I took in Beijing last year. Just playing in Photoshop, for effect.
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Bipolar Bear

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Well, it was a leap year after all!

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A quick and lazy post - we are off to a house warming party.

On Boxing Day.

Shouldn't it be un-boxing day, then?
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A lazy post.

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Golden rule of blogging : If you have been too busy to think of a post, fall back on cute pics.

Especially children and animals.
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The shit is not from the bull!

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(Click to enlarge)

I wonder what is going through the mind of the guy on the left of the bull?
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The camera never lies. But food photographers....

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"Don't add too many ingredients
- remember, paella is all about the rice
and the ingredients are there simply to flavour it."

So read the instructions at the start of a paella recipe on-line.

Quite frankly, I'm hard pressed to even see some rice in the above photo that adorned the recipe.

While the cook/writer is probably right, there was no way the photographer was not going to pile the seafood on for the photo.

They can't help themselves.

Don't get me started on how they manage to cut cream cakes and still have (a) cream oozing from the cut layers and (b) no cream smear from the knife cutting through the cake.

Truth in advertising is hard to get. Truth in food photography? Forget it.
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The Nanny State

.(Click to enlarge)

O wicked me! Trying to print a banknote!

Well, no I wasn't really. I was going to save an image for my "Curate after Dark" blog and Photoshop Elements somehow decided that it was a banknote and gave me the warning above.

How did it know, I wonder?

Here's what it wanted to block:


I doubt I would have got away with using it to buy a moose burger at the Vancouver 7-11.

But you never know.

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Technology and travel.

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I own an Olympus OM-l camera.

In its day, it was a great little camera.

I have lost it, at gunpoint, three times.

The first time was in Khartoum, in the Sudan.
The second was in the Khyber Pass, Pakistan.
The third was in the Sahara, in Libya.

And three times it has been returned to me.

I don't take it out with me any more.

For this coming trip I am taking a Fujifilm Finepix Z1. Slim, flat, light, fits in any pocket without trouble, takes good pictures and, from it's manual, would appear to be considerably smarter than me.

Hopefully it is also a low-stress, low risk unit as well.


For those who ask about these things it is 5.1 megapixel. People ask me about pixels in cameras and I honestly never know. I only know the 5.1 from the Google images picture above, I have been using the camera for a year and a half and had never noticed the little logo on the front.

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I am being sorely tempted on the laptop front too. I have said that I wasn't going to take a laptop with me because of 1) the weight, and 2) the security risk.

Apple have just released an ultra light, ultra thin laptop, the MacBook Air.

The security risk is still there but the weight issue is becoming less.

Will I weaken?
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Viva Brazil! Viva Photoshop!

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Yesterday we attended Viva Brazil, a festival in Federation Square. There was Brazilian food, Brazilian music and Brazilian dancers. Quite a pleasant way to spend an afternoon.

Not often I get free license to watch semi-clad women dance. And the dance was all shake and wobble. The women were all well built and obviously having fun. No anorexics in this chorus line.

One of my gripes with cameras and photography is that the eye and brain conspire to make you unhappy with the photos you take. The photo below is of a group of dancers. In real life it was bright, energetic, noisy; lots of wobble, smiles and fun.

The eye focuses on the bits of interest to the exclusion of all else.

The camera's rendition is just a little sad. Oddly, because it includes everything, it is empty and sparse.



Close cropping and Photoshop helps put a bit of life back into it.

Viva Brazil! Viva Photoshop!
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A minor leakage problem.

A UFO, Unidentified Foaming Object
Captured in a deserted country paddock. (Aren't they always?)

[Scene One] A laboratory lunch room, late at night.

One of the signs of a scientist is curiosity.

Back in my early days of chemistry I was also interested in photography. My lab technician was a amiable lad called Tony; such was my interest in photography that I did the photographs at his wedding.

One of Tony's interests in life was shooting.

It is only a matter of time before a scientist with an interest with photography and an off-sider with an interest in shooting start wondering about how they may combine their interests. Especially when we were sitting around during the long and exceedingly dull night shifts.
What, we wondered (as one does), would happen if a can of shaving cream was hit by a shotgun? And could we capture a picture of it?

[Scene Two] A paddock.

A can of Palmolive Rapidshave is tied to a fence post. In one direction is Tony with his 12 gauge shot gun; the cartridges filled with large (BB) pellets. In another direction, at right angles to the first, is our curiosity filled scientist-photographer clutching his SLR camera.
In a third direction, roughly bisecting the first two and out of harms way, were a small group of cows, possibly puzzled but it is never easy to tell with a cow.

On the count of three ...

Bang! Snap! Moo!



For the technically minded: the shot gun had BB pellets (.22in diam) so that a small number of holes were made. Finer pellets would probably just demolished the can.

For those with a good memory: this post is resurrected from the wreckage of A Curate's Egg v1.
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The Nose Fairy

Unless you are a sheep, apparently:



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Self-portrait

Explanation tomorrow.

Not my department.

Ye Gods!

I have been scanning some photos from my parents album and found this one of me and my mother, circa 1978.

Mum's the one without the beard.

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A Pinch of Salt II

While we are on photo manipulation, I should give a brief, if rather reluctant, defence of George W. Make the most of it, it wont happen often.

The above photo has done the rounds of the internet for sometime now.

Here is the original photo:


The give away is the photo on the back of the book George is holding in the 'dopey' photo. It has been flipped top-to-bottom instead of left-to-right. This is how it should look if it is upside down:


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Better be a good runner.

(Yeah, yeah, I know penguins and polar bears live at opposite ends of the world. See the one with a bag...they are on holidays.)
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