We’ve just returned from a week cruising through Portugal in a rental car. Wondeful place, photos and stories soon…
castle and olive trees
Archive for the 'photos' Category
So after starting to use Maperture to geotag my photos, I’ve discovered that exported versions don’t include the GPS EXIF data (masters are ok). A few people have noticed this problem(1, 2), and there is a “fix.” This fix involves storing your piccies outside the Aperture library, which seems like a really sucky option to me.
I’ve found that exporting a project, and then reimporting it is an alternative solution. Evidently something doesn’t get updated when Maperture changes the original files (though the metadata turns up in Apertures info), but this gets re-done when the project is reimported.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that it doesn’t support DNG files. It will let you try and tag them, and adds the “Geotagged” keyword, but doesn’t edit or add the GPS exif data.
I’m a big fan of the b-side lounge, and the b-sidecar…
b-side
They also have excellent mac ‘n’ cheese. Yum
I love the Cape so much we went out there for my second trip in a few weeks, this time by car. We saw (generally actually old and expensive) antiques, marshy coastal stuff,
Cape Cod National Seashore
and a beautiful sunset from Race Point.
Race Point sunset
How much the colour of the sunset is due to air pollution I don’t want to know… More photos here.
We just spent a lovely week in the White Mountains, a few hours north of Boston. We tented on the hard campground sites, ate granola bars and breakfast diner food, saw chipmunks,
got nuts?
waterfalls,
one of many
great views,
toy train from a hilltop
and wierd fungi.
not quite sure
We also only drove someting a bit over 300 miles for the whole week. More photos here.
I had a nice day out in Provincetown last weekend. We caught the boat and had a liesurely day, with the only real effort being the obligatory climb up the Pilgrim Monument.
Provincetown
The rest of the photos are here.
Walking home late one night last week I doscovered where the homeless people in Harvard Square sleep. This is the entrance to the Co-op (pronounced like a chicken coop), where you can buy books, coffee, and all sorts of touristy crap.
homeless sleeping at the harvard coop
A few months ago I purchased the Olympus Stylus 1030SW, the unbreakable and waterproof little point and shoot. Having spent the bulk of the time using my E-500 with reasonably nice f/2.8 lenses in the last few years it initially felt like rather a downgrade. The quality of the images wasn’t all that great, particularly for landscape shots. For close up people type stuff it does well, and I can commonly get away without the flash.
Recently I got a chance to try out what I saw as one of the coolest features of the camera: the waterproof bit. Having given it a brief test run one evening with a glass of water, the real test came as I prepared to jump into the water along Ningaloo Reef, on the Western Australian coast near Exmouth. Attached with rubber bands, I took it into the water and tried it out inbetween gulps of seawater. Two of the nicest shots I got are posted here. They came out beautifully, so I’m totally stoked I went to the effort and cost to get a waterproof one…
The camera spends pretty much its whole life in my pocket. Being waterproof I think it can hack a bit of dust and the odd bump. As it happens it got a solid hit one day, but saved me a bit of pain. One of my tent poles slipped out of my hand pitching the tent one evening, and recoiled straight into the camera in my pocket. Damage documented below (as is the rubber band setup for swimming)…
my bashed up olympus stylus
Any Olympus people who want me to be a poster boy for their unbreakable camera can use my story for the reasonable price of an E-3 back…
So in short: nice camera for cool stuff like swimming and treating roughly, but not an SLR. No surprises.
Last weekend we made a trip to Wagga wagga. We went to the beach, a kids soccer game, some local watering holes, and the licorice factory in Junee on the way back. This t-shirt, available at the local information center sums it up…
promo t-shirt
The rest of the photos are here.
So the day after the conference finished, we flew up to Exmouth to search for whale sharks, sun, and a break from the Canberra winter. We found it.
Saturday we went out on a boat with 3 Islands Marine in the hope of swimming with a whale shark. The morning was spent with a nice dive on the Ningaloo reef. I got to test out my new Olympus 1030SW, supposedly waterproof but as yet untested (aside from a bit of testing with a water glass). Turned out it works beautifully, and takes really nice photos.
Ningaloo reef
We then moved on outside the reef to find big fish to swim with. The company uses planes to spot their fish, and had to call in a second one when they hadn’t found one by lunch time. On the way we saw some humpback whales on their way north.
While we were watching the whales, the whale shark call came, and we and the other boats raced down to the spot. There was only the one whale shark that day so we had to share with some other boats. We got several swims so I didn’t feel like we missed out at all.
Come swim time we dived in and split into two groups so the fish could swim between us. It dutifully did so and was extremely cool…
Whale shark
My camera worked nicely too, as you can see.
Having tired ourselves out, we headed back. We met some more humpbacks on the way, these ones much more playful, showing a bit of tail for us to photograph.
Humpback
An awesome day, and probably worth the $350 or so it cost us. The rest of the photos are here.
