Posted my Photos in Video: On YouTube

February 5th, 2012 Thomasso

I spent some time editing a little video of some of the photos, and a short clip, that I took today from my Sony A33. The video a sort of the spur of the moment project, very amateurish, and I put it together in less than an hour.

Basically what you about to see is the short video clip of the bridge going over the Fraser River, then some of the photos I took of that hike along Brae Island outside of Fort Langley, BC. The music is mine – done on the LMMS, and the video production and editing was done suing the OpenShot on my LINUX PC, with Ubuntu 11.10.

Enjoy.

Posted in Around Town, Art, Astronomy, Audio, Photographs, Software, Video | No Comments »

Going for True Colour: Master of the White Balance

January 28th, 2012 Thomasso

I took some time today working on my camera skills, doing some indoor shots of my plant, trying to master the whole colour issue I have. The weather was very unpleasant today, so staying inside was how I was going to spend it–shooting under compact florescent lights, or CFLs.  I really needed to master how I was using the White Balance with this camera becuase working indoors, I am shooting in artificial light, coming from many different types and sources.

With my brand of camera, a Sony A33, it has its own set of peculiar settings, and ways, than shooting with my old Nikon and Cannon SLRs did. I had a Nikon DLSR for while that a friend of mine let me use for a weekend, and it was a totally different animal than this Sony A33. I should point out that the Nikon DSLR was a few years old, and my Sony is very new, but the two are worlds apart in how they handle and function. White Balance is one of them.

I started tweaking the White Balance on my camera today by actually setting the camera into “M” mode, or manual mode, and using the “plus” and “minus” values in the White Balance menu option, as I did a series of shots under some CFLs. To my amazement, I started getting, what I see as true colours, from certain objects in my photos for the very first time. My window blinds, in this photo, seem to be very close to what I see with my naked eyes in terms of colour, tint and brightness.

I also found out that once I set the White Balance, then switch my camera to “Auto,” the values stay the same until I hit the “default” settings in the camera’s menu option. This is cool if I do a lot of shooting in the same room, and I shut the camera off all the time between sessions.

Posted in General, Photographs, Software | No Comments »

Mind Maps: The Lost Thought

January 7th, 2012 Thomasso

Mind maps are an interesting tool becuase you either like to use them, or you do not, and when you do, you can do a lot with them when you are doing large writing, research or development projects. Or they just look pretty. This last week I was having coffee with a neighbour who brought up the topic of mind maps and her writing. This got me thinking about mind maps and there relationship to me in my little corner of the universe.

Back in the day, just over a year ago now, I used mind maps for my last research paper that involved a lot of statistical work. The paper in its finished product was only three quarters writing, and the rest was graphs and tables from the research data that I had collected. I employed the use of mind maps for mapping out my work so that I could follow the format of a academic research paper. So mind mapping really benefited me when I had all of my subject matter, ideas and thoughts and layout ready for the final edit. I should also add that mind mapping really does not help when typing out a blog post, or any short writing task for me.

Up until my days taking computer science, all of my essay planning took the form of either brain storming/free writing, cloud or mind mapping, or just winging a paper and editing it on the fly with the word processor. Most of my everyday writing is just me and the word processor, just simply becuase of ease and flexibility that a computer and word processing software bring. But I do have an attachment with mind mapping.

One of the best “free” mind mapping software out in the cyber universe is FreeMind. As far as I know it still works with Macs, possibly on Window$, but works perfect with Linux! If you have a super big writing project, and you hate hundreds of scrap pages piled all over the place, yet value fast and flexible means of spewing your thoughts down in text, then give this program a try.

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Another Inspiring Moment in Art, Done in Five Minutes

December 27th, 2011 Thomasso

Yes, another inspiring moment in art, all done within fine minutes using my 9 by 12 inch USB drawing tablet. As per usual, I was board out of my tree, and needed some mental stimulation last night to get me through. I was tired from my marathon of reading, and had a few hours to kill before I needed to get to bed to sleep to start my work week on the right foot. My sleep cycles got all mixed up from the long weekend, so setting myself up for sleep was a priority. I plunged in my graphic tablet and away I went.

I know, it is not much to look at, but what do you expect for five minutes of drawing time?

I used a program called My Paint, which is an open source and it is free to use. It has some amazing brushes and brush effects in it, and it is very easy to use. It is nothing like the thousand dollar proprietary software you see on the market, but for its cost, this program rocks!

I did have a hard time sleeping. My sleep through the night was difficult becuase I was not that tired; in fact I was a little cranky this morning from the lousy quality of my sleep last night. My five minute art therapy was a bust in that regards, but it was fun.

My hand and eye coordination is off becuase I am drawing on a tablet, and the results, or what you are seeing, are up on the monitor, so I found my arm wanting to do weird positions while I was drawing; I was having to really think out what I was doing. A very weird feeling to get used to if you are only used to drawing on a piece of paper instead of looking up at a monitor while drawing on the table.

Posted in Art, Diatribe, General, Humour, Software, Story Telling | 1 Comment »

Just Did a Firmware Update on My Camera

December 23rd, 2011 Thomasso

This morning I did the firmware update on my Sony a33 camera which added some very cool effects on top of the cool scene choices I had with it before. Of the eleven new “picture effect” options that the firmware update added, the colour partial effects are so far my favourites.

What you get with these partial colour effects are a black and white image with only the primary colour you choose as the only colour in the image. In the above image, I chose Red. My website’s logo is not part of the original photo, by the way. In this case, you are looking at a red SADA cable on top of a brown wooden table. Only the red colour is produced. The red also shows up in the view finder too!

The firmware for the Sony A33 now brings me up to version 2.0 from 1.2. There are some other changes that the firmware has done to the camera such as, eleven new effect to the Mode Dial “SCN,” Added some customisation to the “D-Range button,”  Sets display in the finder, and changed the menu selection to last menu selected, or the top menu selection. Sony’s E Support Page.

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Unexpected Saturday Stuff to Do

December 10th, 2011 Thomasso

I guess with being sick for so long with the flu, I put off more than I should have over the last two weeks. I completely forgot things like paying some bills, meeting some friends for some potential business arrangements, and my commitments with some volunteer organisations I spend time with. My head is still a little light from the flu, but I am on the mend. Now I just need to catch up from all the time off.

I wish I could find more time to play with my new camera too. With such short days and the weather not being to terribly co-operative, finding good shooting conditions has been a pain. Those small moments of available time where I can get out and shoot, are few and far between. Of course, I have been focusing on night time photography, doing things such as shooting the night sky, so finding that perfect clear night to shoot has been, well, a rare event over the last three weeks. Fall and winter time in Vancouver is less than ideal for finding clear nights, and being cold out, and having the flue, is just pure torture.

Last night we had the full moon for December, which featured a Lunar Eclipse for Saturday morning. Friday night was perfect shooting conditions, as the sky was clear and it was not too cold out. The moon looked brilliant. My only regret was not having a good telephoto lens with me. Life as a poor photographer; making due with the tools I have.

And to end the post off with, my act of weirdness in art. This was me doodling with my drawing tablet using a drawing/painting program called “MyPaint.”

Have a great weekend!

Posted in Art, General, Linux, Photographs, Software | Comments Off

Online Dependency at Work

November 23rd, 2011 Thomasso

A small tragedy occurred at my work today. Just a small glitch, but it was system wide, and I had a few hours to stop and ponder just where do me and you stand as far as our interconnectedness on the web goes?

Our dependency on email and the web is huge at my work. I mean, I spend more time looking into a monitor screen at hundreds of lines of texts everyday than talking to real live people. I also spend almost an equal amount of time typing replies while uploading and downloading data from our servers and websites and the odd time, talking on the phone. We have a joke where I work, the keyboards are louder than the chatter of human voices.

When our system went down, as part of a regular maintenance upgrade goes, a crash occurred at bootup and it lasted far beyond the one hour scheduled for the outage.  We had to invent things to do while our workstations sat idle.

So, when the server went back up, we all went back to work. I was laughing at myself becuase I actually felt guilty that we lost so much productivity, and I missed an appointment in the mess too. But from outside work, no one seems to care.

Is it possible that we have gone too far with the net in the workplace?

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A Blend of Rendering and Camera Work

November 17th, 2011 Thomasso

It has been cold out, so I have been staying indoors, both at home and at work. With all this time hiding from the cold, I am spending it with my camera, and using it with the instruction handbook that I never read since I bought it. Also, I have been seriously working with some of the these 3D graphic programs that I had downloaded last month. It has been so nice to get better acquainted with the computer and camera.

The first image came from my new camera. I was taking photos of the Moon, using my 18-55mm lens, that came with it, when a seagull flew by in front of my shot. After looking at it on the monitor, the photo jumped out at me as being a very good image, so I processed it and posted it on Twitter, and now here on the blog. I do not own a telephoto, yet, but when I do get one, I want to do more shooting of far away objects with the camera. I am still drooling over that DSLR, the rang of options are incredible compared to my point and shoots cameras.

The next two images are from the same program I talked about earlier this week, called Wings3D, that renders using Povray. I am just starting to see the cool stuff that I can do with this program. I hate that this software has next to no help files, compressive guides or user manuals with it. There are some YouTube videos, and a very basic PDF files to download, but that is it. You are running it strictly by trial and error; which is sad when I am finding that it is a wonderful program to use, but it is complex and has unusual mouse and menu options.

The end results of working with Wings3D are very cool. I can now see why this is a heavy-duty modeller program. You can take a primitive object, like a sphere, and turn it into a 3D face by stretching and manipulating the mesh. I am still finding some options difficult to figure out, but I am making progress.

So this is what I have been up to when sitting idling by at my computer, or outside, going to and from work while it is still daylight.

I am waiting for the sky (weather) to clear up so that I do some night time photography. One of my primary goals with the DSLR is to take shots of the stars using long exposures and apertures adjustments. I have a 25.5cm reflector telescope, and for it I have purchased a mount to use with my DSLR, so I want to start using it for taking photos of celestial objects.

I cannot wait!

Posted in Around Town, Art, Astronomy, General, Photographs, Software, Twitter | 2 Comments »

Passing Some Time Away – On Art

November 11th, 2011 Thomasso

I could not sleep this morning. I laid in bed for most of the night becuase I was restless, but I think I could be coming down with something?

Oh, I hope it is not something like a flu?

Anyway, I fired up the PC and tinkered with this 3D PovRay program again (Wings3D) and tried to see if I could make heads or tails out of it. I think I made some progress with it?

Check this out:

I managed to figure out how the light settings work. I am still working on how to create different surfaces and textures on various objects. I can see that there is still a lot of work trying to figure out all of the functions on this program still. It is a small, but bery versitile peice of software.

6:18am – I should start to get ready for the day. I think I down becuase it is raining out like crazy?

Posted in Art, General, Linux, Software | Comments Off

No Such Thing as Simple: Printer Hell

November 10th, 2011 Thomasso

Where I work, we have a label machine that is used lots by everyone. It does everything from creating our shipping labels to making as assortment of address labels for just about any correspondences our office pumps out. And best of all, our super label machine holds several sizes of stickers and rolls of labels at once.

One day, (today), the computer that runs the printer died – just stopped working altogether. The office personal were in a state of chaos. The shipping department stopped shipping; the accounting department held off on their billing and invoicing, and administration tried phoning the manufacture to see if they could find a solution to the mess becuase they amongst the chaos of sending their stuff out too. To no avail, the machine had died, and no one knew what to do.

Through some hard work, and a couple of hours of tinkering, one of the techs got it working, but it was a long ways from being the super easy, super simple machine that it once was. Just to get it operational now meant having to go through a whole long series of carrot-stick menu options, and wasting sheet upon sheet of labels, just to get the quality and precision that you needed.  Now printing a single label was a hassle and chore – not a fun task.

After a whole morning, and several upset people, we got a call back from the manufacture of the printer. Our hardware was outdated and is no longer supported. The manufacture said that we must upgrade – for a small fee – if we were to have a super easy and fast functioning labeller printer again.

We knew the printer worked, but we could not figure out why the software would no longer give us all the settings we once had before. The mystery was compounded with the technicians from the I.T. department performing upgrades on all the workstations. It was not until one of the I.T. guys noticed that the tiny computer that operated the printer was attached to the server, and it had been upgraded too. He explained because we were now on a (useless propitiatory O.S., which I will not mention their name here) updated system, and this new system no longer gives us backward compatibility. So, a $10.000.00 upgrade actually caused more damage than giving use the best performance that was claimed to offer?

Nice.

The fellow that got the printer semi-working, (just finished just moments ago), however, it came at a price. The printer is hooked up to a MAC. I am MAC illiterate, along with 99 percent of the office staff here. The MAC has a mouse with one button–I am not kidding. But if you follow the menu, and click the single mouse button, the printer works, albeit through a long menu that adds a couple minutes to your task.

The one button days are gone.

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