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Bike Culture, originally uploaded by Senex Prime.

Here in PDX we think we've got it pretty good when it comes to commuting by bicycle. After all, Portland is far and away the best city in the US for biking. It's compact, (relatively) flat and easy to navigate (hurrah for the grid system). There's also an increasing amount of infrastructure at very little cost to the taxpayer: bike lanes, special signals at intersections, lots and lots of bike only parking... yep, things are good in Bike City USA.

That is, until you visit Amsterdam and see how things really should be. Bikes are absolutely everywhere and the amount of infrastructure to support and encourage bike use is simply amazing. Bike lanes thread their way through most of the city, often separated from the main roadway by a median, always coloured red to signify them clearly. Traffic lights almost always have bike signals on them and everyone gives way to bikes as a matter of course. The main railway station - Amsterdam Centraal - has a multi-level parking lot for 2,500 bicycles and there are secure and patrolled lots dotted throughout the city as well.

The other thing that's really different is the complete lack of bike snobbery and one-upmanship that is prevalent in Portland. Hardly anyone rides a fancy 21-speed Bianchi or a Cannondale with titanium forks, nor are there any hipster fixed-gear bikes. Instead, everyone rides big, clunky, black bikes with just enough gears to get you over the steepest bridge in town, barely functional brakes, a kickstand, fat fenders and a chain guard (hence no one in Amsterdam has to roll their right trouser leg up to save it from being ripped by the front gear sprocket, the sign of a hardened Portland cyclist). These are commuting bikes, make no mistake about it. And because everyone's bikes are so similar (black, old, dented), theft also seems to be much less of a problem - most people use a simple chain to secure their bike instead of super-hardened whiz-bang Kryptonite locks that are required here if you want to see your ride again.

Also not to be seen: that old Portland favourite, the cute little tricycle baby cart that trundles along behind your bike. Babies sit in little "car seats" mounted on the handle bars, while older children just climb on behind their parents and hang on. Older people give friends lifts on their bikes just about everywhere; we often saw women wearing incredibly chic outfits perched side-saddle on the back of a bike as it whizzed by.

Things aren't perfect in Amsterdam, though - a huge amount of tourists hire bikes every day and ride around as if they're immune to the very real dangers of the road, seemingly thinking that Amsterdam is Disneyland and they're on the latest theme ride. I saw countless numbers of people get their tyres caught in tram tracks and just have a general lack of awareness that put them in danger. However, drivers in Amsterdam all seem to have a great awareness of cyclists (probably because they're so omnipresent), and this lessens the risks somewhat.

In the end, the main proof of the difference between the two "bike cities" lies in the statistics. Portland's bicycle commute rate (ie, to and from work) just hit 6.5%, up from 4.0% a couple of years ago. Amsterdam's lies at around 40%, a truly staggering number.

Posted in: chaosboy, photography, travel on October 12, 2009 at at 9:23:00 PM 0 comments    

Thanks to all for your warm wishes and support!
Cam and I have had such a blast this past year and it all has been going by so fast! This coming year brings us into a realm of real security and comfort as Cam establishes work in America and we start going on trips together such as Amsterdam coming up in 6 weeks! With him having steady work and me getting done paying medical bills, we know that this year will have a lot of good times in store. We had a lot to celebrate and last night we went to Rocky Butte where we were married back in our youth and had a picnic of bread, exotic cheese and local wine. If my foot was in good order, I would have brought the trampolines. But we did bring the space helmets, of course, for photographic moments!

Posted in: anniversary, chaosgurl, photography, portland on July 22, 2009 at at 10:40:00 AM 0 comments    

Golden, Golden Gate, originally uploaded by Senex Prime.

Well, I'm back from my little jaunt down to San Francisco. Even though I worked hard (staying in the office until 10:30pm the night before the presentation), I did manage to get out and about and play the tourist a bit.

Here's my favourite shot so far – the always impressive Golden Gate Bridge (coincidentally, the subject of the presentation) as seen from Pier 39 at Fisherman's Wharf. The place is way too touristy, but it does offer spectacular views of the bay, especially at sunset!

More soon!

Posted in: chaosboy, photography, travel, united states on July 12, 2009 at at 10:10:00 AM 0 comments    

Last weekend, Christine and I headed on out to Homedale, Idaho to attend Water on the Ditch, the annual party/jam session thrown by some of our good friends each year. As always when travelling, I took my camera with me, but I wanted to make sure I tried some new things out. Because always taking the same kind of shot gets boring, y'know?

The one type of photography you simply can't do in Portland is star trails; the light pollution from the city simply outshines the faint imprints left by the stars. I did try some when Christine and I camped out in Central Oregon (now forever known as "The Ankle Trip"), but I obviously wasn't thinking straight and shot at ISO400, adding so much noise to the shot as to render it useless.

So I tried a shot on both nights. The first one was okay, but nothing special. However, the second night's shot turned out perfectly:



This is an hour long exposure facing almost directly north. The camera settings were ISO100 at ƒ/8, 17mm focal length. A lot of people suggest opening the aperture all the way up, but I was concerned that doing this would totally blow out the foreground detail (which I was hoping would be the best part of the shot), so I closed it up a few stops. Of course, the camera was mounted on a sturdy tripod and the exposure was started and ended with a cable release. I had the long exposure noise reduction option in the camera set to "On", but I have since read that you shouldn't really bother with this, as post-production noise-reduction in Photoshop or via a plug-in like Noise Ninja will always produce a better effect.

I really am amazed this turned out so well. The foreground is everything I could have hoped for and then more. The light from the stage on the trees surrounding the house is quite magical, and there are lots of little details from lights that went on and off during the exposure as well: someone walking with a flashlight, headlights from a car turning into the property, camera flashes and so on.

Post-production was limited to noise reduction (it still needed it, although not to a huge degree), cloning out some dead or hot pixels in the image and then adding some extra saturation/brightness to the colors. It prints beautifully at 13"x19" on our Canon Pixma Pro 9000 and we plan on giving one to our friends who host the Ditch each year as a token of our appreciation for this most excellent of parties!

The more we get out of the city, the more of these I'm going to take... I can only get better with experience!

Posted in: chaosboy, oregon, party time, photography on July 4, 2009 at at 2:56:00 PM 0 comments    

The one major, major flaw in older digital SLR cameras like my Canon Rebel XT (that's a 350D for those outside the US) is that they are dust magnets. Changing lenses or even using the zoom on a telephoto lens seems to positively suck dust and dirt inside the camera, where it sticks to the mirror, the focusing screen, and – worst of all – the sensor array itself.

Newer DLSRs have fancy vibrating ultra-sonic cleaning mechanisms that can shake dust loose from the inner workings of the camera, mine does not. As a result, my nearly 3-and-a-half year old camera was becoming something of an embarrassment... clear blue skies were covered in dust spots that had to be cloned out in Lightroom or Photoshop, and any shot stopped down below ƒ/16 was absolutely covered in horrid little black dots as the dust was brought more into focus. I'm using a tripod, stopping down and doing a lot more long exposure photography these days, all of which are guaranteed to show off those spots in all their unsightly glory. After our trip to Central Oregon last month, these spots crossed the line from "slightly annoying" to "I can't stand these damn dust bunnies!"

So what to do? I could just take my camera into a pro photo store and have them clean the sensor, but there were many reports on the web of cameras returning from service either exactly the same or worse than when they went in. That sounds like $60 poorly spent to me. So I decided to look into self-cleaning solutions, as scary as that sounds! Again and again, the same name kept coming up: Copper Hill Images. Their website posts the most detailed instructions on cleaning the interior of a digital camera I have ever seen, and they sell the kits that give you the tools to do it as well. So, after reading and rereading the site and other people's opinions of the method, I went ahead and ordered a kit. It arrived yesterday, and I have spent the morning giving my camera a thorough, well-overdue cleaning. How did it go? I think pictures tell the story. These are shots of my computer monitor with a sky-blue image filling the whole screen (the dust is always more visible against the sky in real-life, so that's what I set out to simulate on another grey Portland day!). The aperture was set to ƒ/22 for all these shots to bring the dust into focus as much as possible.

First up, a shot taken before any cleaning:

Disgusting, eh? There must be over 100 individual spots here, including some really big ones. This is what comes from changing lenses out in the open and rarely cleaning your camera!

After taking each shot, I brought them into Photoshop and ran Auto Levels (Command-Shift-L) on a duplicate layer of the image. This allowed me to really see each and every dust bunny on the image, which I've circled in red.

My first step was to get the SensorSweep brush, give it a light static charge by blowing air on it from a blower and lightly – oh so lightly! – brush it over the sensor to remove any loose dust particles. This done, I took another test shot:

A huge improvement already! You can see that the large spot has moved because I used a different focal length to take this shot compared to the last shot - indicating that this one is on my lens or filter, not the sensor.

Next, I thoroughly cleaned all my lenses and filters with the brush followed by lens tissue moistened with optics cleaner. Getting there! Now for the final, most daunting step... wet cleaning the sensor itself. This uses lint-free photographic wipes moistened with a drop or two of Eclipse optic fluid, carefully wrapped around a little stylus to do the job. With a steady, light hand, you brush the wipe across the sensor one way and then back the other, using one side for the first stroke, then the other side for the second stroke. Whatever you do, don't go back in and do another wipe after this - you'll just end up depositing all the removed dirt back on the sensor array!

And the result:

Still not perfect, but what an improvement over the "Before" photo! The big spot still seems to be on my lens – I'll have to investigate its exact location further – but we're down to a handful of dust spots on the sensor. Hopefully, with regular cleaning sessions, I can continue to reduce this number even further!

I am already very impressed with this method of cleaning, but it's certainly not for everyone. If you have poor eyesight, unsteady hands or are terrified of damaging your camera, then I would recommend that you look into alternative methods instead!

Posted in: chaosboy, photography on June 6, 2009 at at 12:41:00 PM 1 comments    

Yay! Getty have selected five more of my photos for inclusion in the Getty Images Flickr Collection! While it's true that I haven't made a sale yet through this system, I feel that that Getty is capable of reaching a much larger audience than I ever could, and eventually I'll reap the benefits. These are the photos they've chosen this time around:

Fire: this is a simple little shot of a bonfire that I took at a party last December - the high shutter speed (1/1250th of a second) does a good job of freezing the licking flames in time.

Nom Nom Nom: This is one of our pet gerbils enjoyig a little snack in her cage, taken with my 70-300mm lens from a distance. I really like the shallow depth of field in this, which - for once! - has focussed on exactly the right place.

Folds II: One of my abstract shots from the Painted Hills in Central Oregon. I'm ecstatic that they've chosen one of these, because they really are one of my favorite series of photos.

Washington Bound: A shot taken from the passenger seat of our car as we drove across the Astoria Bridge from Oregon to Washington. I've always really liked this shot because of the combination of sharp detail, motion blur and even the rain on the windscreen.

Lunar Eclipse, 20th February 2008: Yes, yes, yes! If this isn't a saleable image, then I don't know what is! I put a huge amount of work into this composite image, and I really think it shows.

Interestingly, the last two images are being marketed as Rights Managed shots, rather than the more usual royalty-free model. This means that each and every use of the image by a client is negotiated separately, and often for more money per use... we shall see what that brings!

The titles of each image above links to the relevant photo in my Flickr stream. See also my previous post about the first images chosen by Getty Images.

P.S. Getty also just sent me an email saying that I'm allowed to choose five images that I would like to send to them for inclusion in the collection, and I'm somewhat stumped so far. Any ideas?

Posted in: chaosboy, flickr, photography on May 25, 2009 at at 9:51:00 AM 0 comments    

The best – the absolute best – thing about having our own car is that we can get out of Portland on a whim and go Elsewhere. For once, Christine and I both had the same two days off (Sunday and Monday), so we decided to head out to Central Oregon to see the high desert sights.

We decided to camp at the Cove Palisades State Park, simply because it had the best facilities. I had originally wanted to stay at Smith Rock State Park – an area that looks absolutely stunning in photos I have seen – but their camping facilities were limited to a bivouac area with a pit toilet and no open fires allowed (due to the sensitive nature of the park), and what fun is camping without a roaring campfire and marshmallows at the end of the day?

Because we organised so quickly and changed our preference of campsite so late, we didn't really have much idea of what Cove Palisades would be like... were we in for a pleasant surprise! You can't see much as you approach, but gradually you realise that the high, flat plain is intersected by deep river canyons, well over 1000 feet deep. Further downstream, the gorge has been dammed (for hydro-electric power), filling the canyons with a large lake, upon which boats of all descriptions were enjoying the beautiful weather.

We had arrived too early to check into a campsite, so we hiked from the valley floor to the top of the escarpment for spectacular views over most of the park:

The isolated plateau between the two arms of the lake is known as "The Island", and is one of the last remaining areas of never-farmed grassland left in the United States. As such, it is a vital habitat for eagles and other raptors as well as being an important research site – it is closed to all public access to preserve it. It looks like something from "The Land Time Forgot" to me, and I half expected to see dinosaurs roaming across it. That's Mount Hood you can see way, way off in the distance. This area of Oregon offers the most amazing views of the Cascades mountain range I have yet seen; from Mount Hood in the north all the way down to Mount Bachelor (near the town of Bend) to the south. Here's a shot of some of the mountains that I took on Sunday morning:

To the left is Broken Top (most southerly), followed by the "Three Sisters"; South Sister, Middle Sister (almost obscured) and North Sister, also known (apparently) as Faith, Hope and Charity. In the foreground, you can see more of the spectacular gorges of the Cove Palisades State Park.

However, our trip was not all fun, games and awesome photos. Late on Saturday, we were at a fun little beach within the park to take some photos of what promised to be a beautiful sunset. Christine ventured out along a pier and onto some floating pontoons that eventually joined back on to another wooden dock at the other end of the beach. The gap here was wider than the first gap, but Christine was confident that she could jump it, rather than having to walk all the way back along the pontoons to the first pier. I decided to take a photo of her leap...

... which turned out spectacularly well, but unfortunately the jump itself didn't end quite so happily. Christine's left foot slipped on the wet wooden dock, and when her right foot tried to compensate, it got bent in the wrong direction, causing a horrific sprain in her right ankle. However, we didn't know this at first, as the initial pain was in her shin. Thinking she'd just grazed her shin and that she'd be fine after the initial pain died down, we sat around for a while, telling concerned onlookers that we'd be alright in a minute.

However, when Christine tried to stand, the real injury became apparent and its serious nature sunk in. Christine was in immense pain with every little movement of her ankle, and I had to enlist the aid of a nearby burly gentleman to help me carry her back to the car park. We headed back to the campsite and got directions to the nearest hospital, which was in the nearby town of Madras. We set off on our way, with me trying to drive both quickly and smoothly at the same time, as every bump in the road caused Christine excruciating pain. Finally, after what seemed an eternity, we arrived at the little hospital and checked Christine in. After an interminable check-in process ("Do you have a religious preference?" was one of the questions!), Christine was attended to. X-Rays confirmed no break, just a serious sprain and we were soon on our way, with Christine's ankle safely held in an air cast,armed with painkillers and a pair of crutches, which the hospital were very reluctant to give her until they realised she had insurance!

Remarkably, we went back to the campsite (which we had set up earlier in the day) and camped out as intended... although we arrived back at camp after 10:30! On Sunday, we drove down to Bend and had lunch at the excellent Deschutes Brewery and Public House before returning to Portland in the afternoon. Quite the adventure!

Posted in: chaosboy, hiking, oregon, photography, travel on May 20, 2009 at at 10:54:00 PM 0 comments    

For my birthday this year, Christine decided to treat me to a day of snowboarding up at Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood. We hired some gear and headed up yesterday - cheap lift tickets mid-week made the deal more attractive and the slopes were pretty empty, so it was a good day for a beginner like myself. Christine, who hadn't snowboarded for a few years, jumped straight on her board like it was an old bicycle and was carving up the mountain, no problems at all. And, looking at this photo, you might think that I got the hang of things pretty quickly...

Looks pretty impressive, eh? Unfortunately, this was not the normal position for the day. Most of the time, I looked more like this picture...

Seriously, I lost count of the number of times that I fell flat on my face or butt. Snowboarding is really, really hard, and I just couldn't get the hang of certain necessary techniques, especially the all-important turns that move you from the toe edge of the board to the heel edge. As a result, I spent most of the day on my toe edge: in effect, standing on tippy-toes facing up the hill for extended periods of time. My calves got a thorough stretch, that's for sure!

Every time I'd try to transition to the heel edge (resting on your heels, facing down the hill), I'd lose control and fall down again. And again. And again. A couple of falls were real bell-ringers, as well... I slammed the back of my head hard into the snow a few times (not as soft as it might sound), and winded myself a couple of other times when my arm got caught between the snow and my ribs when I fell. Ouch. Still, everyone says that the first two or three times you go snowboarding, falling down constantly is simply part of the job description, so at least I'm not alone!

One thing I can't fault is Christine's instruction. She was a great teacher all day, even when I was having little temper tantrums... she showed far more patience than I ever thought possible. She laid out all the theory and techniques perfectly, but my body just couldn't turn theory into actuality! However, despite feeling like I have the body of a 90-year old with severe arthritis this morning, I actually had a really good, fun time yesterday and will definitely be back for more.

Just as we were leaving, the thick cloud that had been blanketing Mount Hood all day long suddenly blew away, leaving us with this spectacular view of the mountain to remember the day by. Stunning!

Posted in: chaosboy, oregon, photography, sport on February 18, 2009 at at 1:03:00 PM 0 comments    

Recently, Flickr – the fantastic photo-sharing service and community that I've been using for the last few years – announced that it was entering into partnership with Getty Images, one of the world's foremost stock photography sites. Together, they're working on The Flickr Collection, a library of rights-managed and royalty-free images derived entirely from the millions of photos that are on Flickr.

Over the last few weeks, Flickr and Getty have been sending out emails to select Flickr members, asking them to contribute images for the launch of the collection in March. So I was pretty excited to receive my email on the weekend asking for my participation!

Now, let's just say that I have a lot of experience with stock photography, both as a designer (buyer) and as a seller. Most stock photography sites out there (iStockphoto, Shutterstock, etc.) are what are known as "micro-stock" libraries, where photos are sold extremely cheaply and contributing photographers receive a correspondingly tiny amount of money per image sold. Getty is not one of these sites – it's world wide, almost ubiquitous within the design industry, and sells photos for what they're worth.

I've tried to sell photos through these micro-stock sites before and haven't had any luck at all. Finding and submitting an image that they feel they need and meets all their quality guidelines seems to be almost impossible, and I've usually given up in disgust shortly thereafter. I've had much better luck with people simply finding my photos on Flickr and entering into negotiations directly with me. So, hopefully, this new Getty Collection will take that success and multiply it by Getty's ability to promote their photos... if they actually accept my shots!

Because all I've done so far is upload the images that Getty is interested in to their servers for review. So I still don't know whether they'll accept any of them, but I'm hopeful that at least a few of them will make it through. Then, as the service expands, maybe they'll pick up on some other images hat I think are worthwhile.

In case you're interested, here are the seven images that Getty initially selected for review...

Ampelmann! One of my favourite shots, but I declined to nominate this one for a few reasons. Firstly, I don't have a high-resolution version of this shot (I was new to digital photography when I took this shot and only kept the final, Flickr-sized version of it for some reason), and it also contains copyrighted elements – the Ampelmann itself and the Dorling Kindersley map which it is sitting on.

Houses, Burano: I'm kind of surprised that this was selected, truth be told. It's a nice, colourful shot of an interesting location, but I don't think it's particularly wonderful.

In Space, No One Can Hear You Kiss: I'm also not submitting this one, for the simple fact that I didn't take it! This beautiful shot – of us – was taken at our wedding by Linda, Russ' wife... which kind of precludes me from submitting it as mine!

The Perfect Kiss: Christine and me sharing a smooch. Still deciding whether or not to submit this one... it's a very personal shot, plus the model release forms are a bitch to fill in!

Boats, St. Ives Harbour: This has always been a favourite of mine. I love the gentle curve of the boats as they recede into the distance.

Through The Grass: Another good one! Taken in Yellowstone National Park, I only hope that the quality of this pic is good enough – it was taken with my little Panasonic Lumix point-and-shoot, which only takes 5MP pictures and they tend to be a bit JPG compressy...

Venetian Sunset: One of my most absolute most favourite photos ever! The colour really was like this on the day I took it – from the back deck of a vaporetto returning to Venice from the lagoon islands – and the little Nikon film camera I was using at the time (thanks, Dad!) somehow managed to capture it perfectly!

Winding Path: Paths are obviously in demand at Getty Images! I really like the curving composition and subdued colour palette in this image.

That's it so far! Hopefully some of these will make it through, and then maybe more in the future!

Posted in: chaosboy, flickr, photography on February 4, 2009 at at 8:57:00 PM 0 comments    

We have wheels!

Although Portland is a great city for biking around and has great public transport options, there are times when you just need a car. Whether it's for a shopping trip, a party in the far reaches of south-east PDX or – most importantly for me – for getting the heck out of of town on weekends. Up until now, we've got by with using Zip/Flex cars for shorter trips and hiring cars/hitching rides for those longer journeys, but these do require some degree of planning and aren't exactly spontaneous methods of transport.

So we started looking around at options for a car of our own. By the strangest of coincidences (or not), Christine's mom was looking to get herself a new car and was more than willing to cut us a good deal on her old Subaru Forester. We just had to come up with the cash in a lump sum, as she rightly said that monthly payments to her would put an unnecessary strain of family friendships. We had around half of the money already, so set out to obtain a loan for the other half.

To cut a long story short, it was an adventure in itself. We found out that while I am on my "interim" 2-year Green Card, I actually don't exist in terms of a credit rating. My rating is ZERO and will not move until I qualify for my full 10-year Green Card. This meant that Christine had to qualify for and take on the responsibility for the loan all by herself - my income could not be added to hers as proof of ability to repay the loan! In the end, we had to take a secured loan where the car itself stands as equity and the interest rate is somewhat horrific. The good news is that Christine will have an awesome credit rating when we finish paying the loan off!

Once the money was secured, we just had to get ourselves to Idaho Falls to pick up our new car. Plane fares the day after Thanksgiving are possibly the cheapest fares of the holiday season, and the planes themselves amongst the emptiest I have travelled on in the US. We spent a couple of happy, lazy days with Keener and Karen (gotta love having a beer in the hot tub out on the deck!) before taking possession of our new wheels and driving back to Portland.

I had made sure to get an Instructional Driving Permit from the DMV before we left, meaning that I can drive so long as a licensed driver is sitting next to me. It's kind of embarrassing to be treated like an "L" driver when I've driven for over 10 years in Australia without a single accident, but them's the rules! This meant we could share the driving on the way home, some 760 miles (1,200km) away. We took two days to drive home, taking the (slightly longer) scenic route rather than racing home along the (very dull) Interstate. Along the way, we stopped off at two of the most amazing places I have ever seen – Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho and the Painted Hills in Central Oregon.

Craters of the Moon is a giant lava field spreading across the Snake River plain, a huge black scar that suddenly appears as you drive along the highway. Within the park, giant cinder cones rise up above the twisted black lava, while underneath your feet lie huge lava tubes – caves left behind as rivers of lava cooled over, forming long tubes. We spent a long time exploring the park, going down into one of the lava tubes, Indian Tunnel. This tube is the only one you can explore without a helmet and a light source, as regular roof collapses have left many "skylights" along the tunnel's 800 foot length. The tube is over 50 feet wide and 30 feet high and is an amazing sight. One day, we will return properly equipped and explore the other tubes, some of which have permanent ice on the cave floor!

The Painted Hills – which we saw on the second day – are part of the John Day Fossil Beds, one of the most important sources of prehistoric mammalian fossils (and their entire ecosystem) in the world. The hills themselves are an ancient riverbed, with layer upon layer of different coloured alluvial soils – and their attendant fossils – now compressed into beautiful folded hills. Much like Uluru in Australia, the hills can change colour completely depending on the light and the forms created by light and shadow are nothing short of amazing.

We were treated with more spectacular sights as we reached the home stretch – the Cascades mountain range spread out before us, high volcanic peaks dotting the horizon from north to south, with Mount Jefferson (below) and Mount Hood being particularly view-worthy as sunset approached.
Finally, we reached home and began our new life with our own transport. Now we just have to get enough cash together to register the car in Oregon, and I have to get around to getting a real driver's license!

Posted in: chaosboy, idaho falls, oregon, photography, travel on December 15, 2008 at at 8:57:00 AM 0 comments    

Flickr is awesome. Not only does it enable me to share my photos with family, friends and like-minded photographers from around the world, but it also acts as my agent. Companies of all sorts need photography, and it seems to me that they are increasingly turning to sites like Flickr instead of traditional (and highly expensive) photo libraries like Getty Images.

The image above is an initial cover concept for a novel that is being produced by a Dutch publishing house - and that's my photo on the cover! They found it on Flickr and asked me whether they could use it for a fee. After some negotiation, we came to an agreement and the result is above: I think it looks great!

This is the third image I've sold through Flickr in the last year, the other two being this and this. I've also donated this image to the Bath Abbey Trust, and a whole heap of images to the Crater Lake Trust – I'm always open to helping non-profits out with my photos, especially ones where I feel a connection.

Posted in: chaosboy, photography on October 11, 2008 at at 5:52:00 PM 2 comments    

Tired of being stuck here in Portland all the dang time (one of the few disadvantages of not owning our own car!), Christine and I resolved to take advantage of a small gap in my work schedule and get the heck out of town for a few days.

So we rented a car and drove on down to Crater Lake, an enormous clear blue lake that is entirely within the enormous (6 miles by 4 miles) caldera of a volcano that blew itself apart a mere 7,700 years ago - a mere blip in time geologically speaking. In a few weeks' time, the area around the lake will be covered in snow that will last until June next year, so this was probably our last chance to see it for a while. The drive down was fairly uneventful and quick - the I-5 corridor may be dull, but it does get you places quickly!

We entered the National Park from the north and soon achieved our first view of the lake. It certainly didn't disappoint!

No photograph can possibly do justice to the scale and majestic grandeur of this remarkable place (although that didn't stop me taking almost 200 shots over the next couple of days!), with sheer, soaring cliffs over 700 feet tall surrounding the bluest of blue waters that you have ever seen.

After soaking in the view from this initial view point, we quickly headed down to the campground, 7 miles south of the rim and set up our tent for the night. We were warned that bears frequented the campground and took all necessary precautions to secure our food in the provided bear-proof lockers before heading back to the Rim Village to view a beautiful clear sunset over the lake.

The small island is known as Wizard's Island, supposedly because of it's resemblance to a wizard's hat. It is a small volcanic cinder cone that rises from the lake's floor, and has a small crater of its own on top - a crater within a crater!

The next day, we drove a complete loop around the crater rim, stopping often for photographs. Our main goal was to walk to the top of Mount Scott, the highest point within the National Park at 8,929 feet (2,721 metres). The trail itself rises 1,200 feet over its 2.5 mile length, making it a pretty strenuous climb, especially for those unaccustomed to exercising at higher altitudes (i.e., me!). However, we made it to the top in just over an hour and were rewarded with absolutely spectacular 360 degree views, including the whole enormous lake laid out before us. Totally worth the effort!

(Our car is parked on the road at the absolute bottom right of the picture, just to give you some idea of where the trail has come from!)

In the evening, we climbed to the top of Watchman Peak on the exact opposite side of the lake (it's just to the right of my hat) to view another sunset - this one completely different to the previous night. Forest fires were raging to the south and the north of the park and had covered large parts of the sky with a thick pall of smoke. So where there had been crystal clear blue skies, there was haze and smoke, which was spectacular in its own (slightly eerie) way.


After the sun sank under the horizon in a blood-red blaze, we descended the mountain ( much easier path than Mount Scott) and retired to our campsite for a very well-earned beverage and meal. We left pretty early the next morning, as we were unable to secure seats for the boat cruises around the lake itself (curse you, large tour groups, for booking out all the early cruises!).

Posted in: chaosboy, oregon, photography, travel on September 9, 2008 at at 9:52:00 PM 0 comments    

Adobe has just released version 2 of Lightroom, their photography management/development application, and all I can say is that it is amazing. There are so many enhancements and upgrades that it's hard to know where to start. It's probably best to say that unless I actually want to do a whole heap of tricky retouching, I'm hardly going to fire up Photoshop at all anymore.

It's not perfect, however: a rather nasty bug in v2.0 stops all your old keywords from v1.4 from exporting with your photos, although a very simple SQL command (so simple, even I could do it!) fixes that problem. There have also been reports of Lightroom being everything from somewhat sluggish to completely glacial in performance, although my Mac Pro makes light work of just about anything, so I can't really comment on this!

Of all the tools, the selective adjustment brush was the most touted. With it, you can now mask areas and apply exposure, sharpness, colour, clariry (and more!) edits to specific areas of your photos without having to hand the image over to Photoshop. All your edits are non-destructive - just as in the previous version of Lightroom, all your edits are simply saved as instructions that are applied in real time to your image. The interface takes a little getting used to, especially for us Photoshop mavens, but once you've got the hang of it, it really is intuitive and extremely powerful.

However, my favourite tool is the adjustment brush's poorer, less glitzy cousin, the graduated filter. As its name suggests, this tool emulates the coloured or neutral density filters that you can physically place in front of your camera lens to achieve certain effects. My use for this tool so far is extremely prosaic - I use it to fix overexposed areas of sky.

We've all taken photos like this. While the foreground is fairly well exposed and detailed, the sky is completely blown out. If I had shot this picture in JPG, that would be pretty much the end of things - an 8-bit image simply wouldn't contain enough information for me to be able to regain all that lost detail in the sky. White is white, and would always remain so.

But when you shoot RAW, there is a ridiculous amount of information contained in the file (4,096 levels as opposed to JPG's 256 levels). And the important thing to realise is that most of this information is in the lighter areas of any image. As explained in this excellent article at Luminous Landscape, exactly half of the 4,096 levels of information are contained in the brightest fifth of the image, while there's a mere 128 levels of information in the darkest areas, the shadows.

What this means is that it's very possible to restore missing detail from overexposed areas when you shoot RAW. However, this was kind of a painful process before the new tools in Lightroom. To retain the properly exposed foreground but also get the corrected sky, I would have to export two versions of the file to Photoshop (one exposed for the foreground, the other for the backgroun) and then use layer masks to blend the two versions together. It's not something I'd do except for a photo I really thought was worth it.

With the new graduated filter tool, all I have to do is specify my exposure adjustment for the sky (around -2.0 to -3.0 stops, depending on how blown out things are) and drag out my gradient from top to bottom. The gradient is fully adjustable to taste after it's been applied, both in location and intensity. The results are nearly instantaneous and it's ridiculously easy to apply. Here's a before and after of the shot above, just so you can see how much detail can be regained using this technique.

This is an extreme example, requiring a full -3.0 stops to regain the detail in the clouds - probably about the absolute limit of this technique. But just think - there is that amount of information and detail just hiding in that brightest part of your image, and you have to shoot RAW if you want to be able to release it.

Posted in: adobe lightroom, chaosboy, photography on August 8, 2008 at at 9:42:00 AM 0 comments    

Last weekend, Portland played host to one of the craziest days of entertainment that I have ever witnessed - the Red Bull Flugtag. Flugtag means "flight day" in German (Red Bull being an Austrian company), and it certainly lived up to its name.

A crowd that has been estimated at being in the vicinity of 80,000 people crammed into Tom McCall Riverside Park, the Hawthorne Bridge's entire southern sidewalk and one east-bound lane, and even the Eastbank Esplanade on the other side of the Willamette River (which was jam-packed with boats both big and small) for this event, which is interesting in itself.

You see, ol' PDX generally prides itself on being staunchly anti-corporation, looking somewhat down its nose at coffee and fast food chains because we're better than that here in Portland, don't you know? Except when afore-said corporation is promising a day chock full of idiots throwing themselves and their home-made magnificent flying machines off a 30-foot high runway into the drink. Then we'll drop everything and turn out in droves.

And we did. I've never seen the riverfront so full, not for the Blues Festival, the Brew Fest, Barack Obama or anything. I arrived a little late and tried to force my way through the seething masses to take some pictures from down the front - it was impossible. I eventually found a few good locations on the periphery of the park, but things were hectic the whole time.

As for the flugtag itself, it was all about showmanship and spectacular crashes and the crowd loved it. We had a giant plane made out of "Lego", complete with "Lego Men" pilots, the Winnebago from Spaceballs (crowd favourite), pots of gold, sporting mascots, hot dogs and more. Some of the "planes" didn't even have wings! The winner flew some 60-odd feet, but no one really cared. Distance was irrelevant; the crowd only cheered for suicidal death plunges into the murky water below and everyone went home happy.

Posted in: chaosboy, photography, portland, sport, weirdness on August 6, 2008 at at 8:49:00 PM 0 comments    

I really wanted Cam to do this post. But since I am the one home today and HE is at WORK, well I guess we know who's in who's place!

Last weekend we went to the Ditch! which should always be spelled with an exclamation point on the end. A friend through Kim whose family owns a large plot of land in Idaho, has a tradition of throwing a party on their property every year which is dubbed "Water in the Ditch" due to the ditch in the back of the house which has water in it. This tradition has been celebrated for 25 years and the generations that have attended keep coming back and bring their next generation with them. I would love to go into great depth of the great times we had but first.. here are some pictures so you can get the main idea :)

First of all, Kevin shaved his beard off which no one, including Kim, had ever witnessed before. He sported instead a giant walrus mustache.
Some people arrived days ahead of us to set up and when we arrived Friday night after midnight, lawn real estate was hard to come by. It was a very cozy community with plenty of utilities and easy to meet your neighbors.

Yay for sunshine! We had a lot of it!
Overlooking the fire pit to the stage.
Among just camping, we tried many new fun things... like acupuncture! Beth Hazzard, a girl I met through Kim, has been studying Chinese medicine for the last 5 years or so. She is skilled in the philosophy of Chinese medicine as well as the science of the practices in the Western world. She had brought on the trip a few needles which she then proceeded to poke into me in stragic places in my legs, wrists and my head! I had told her that I had told her I had specific pains in my back and my dreams had been been very vivid lately. This was enough for her to find the exact spots on me to plant her pins. I can't say I'm completely sold on the idea of acupuncture although I'm sure it can be helpful in certain circumstances. Being pinned down in a chair listening to loud rock right next to me from the stage certainly had a certain calming effect on me.
Looking a bit ramshackle, Kim and I both get visions of grandeur of owning something just like it someday.

The band list for the evening. I regret not being able to get a picture of its creation. Damon created the type with nothing but a magnifying glass in which he burned the titles in.. even in cursive!!
Cam succumbing to the joys of the pool. I had sadly forgotten my suit.
The main house and everyone clear of the area in order not to get too sunburned!

Saturday afternoon brought hot clear blue skies and then suddenly with his Aussie sixth sense, Cam sensed a storm coming in and in an hour and half the sky was gone. Dust rose over the horizon and wind pumped up to a near 40mph. Everyone ran to rescue their poor tents which the wind picking up fron the ground. The bands continued to rock out on the stage and everyone was in a frenzied chaotic state. Cam took a cute picture of me protecting my eyes with my bonnet from the flying dust. I for the most part went and laid in the tent and watched the tent violently shake and shift. It was so soothing to me I was able to take a sound nap.
The storm evaporated as quickly as it had formed about 2 hours later and everything was back to normal.






Nothing like a weekend of crazy people, crazy rock, crazy wind out in the middle of nowhere to regain your senses!!

Posted in: chaosgurl, party time, photography on June 25, 2008 at at 2:13:00 PM 0 comments