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Saturday, October 15, 2016

White balance for different color.


Today I went out to take pictures. It is a very good day for taking pictures. I prefer, presently, days with very low humidity. Humidity in the atmosphere tends to light up a little bit and it ends up in your photograph as a kind over lightening of your image. Your eye sees this and your mind accommodates it. Your camera though takes it all in.

My Canon Powershot flashed a little thumbnail sign at me today. It suggested I change my white balance settings. I had set my white balance about 2 weeks ago on a very bright sunny day. The manual setting on the Powershot uses that white balance.

It is important to update your manual white balance at each new location you use. I hadn't done that so I took out a white piece of paper and re-calibrated the white balance. I used the back of a receipt at first, and it turned the color tones in the view finder green.

I tried again, same results.

Then I went back to the mini-van and puled out a sheet of typewriter paper and stuck it on the back windshield under the rear windshield wiper which had the direct sun beaming down on it. I got a great white balance then, the colors looked great in the view finder afterwards. Or so I thought.

I took some more pictures. The Autumn colors are really on right now. But I wasn't seeing the same bright colors in the view finder. I went back to the white balance settings and changed the setting to fluorescent.

Big difference. But I am not sure the colors are any better. I think I prefer using the white balance I calibrated better than changing to the fluorescent mode for outdoors under sunshine.

The difference I am seeing is a kind of slight reddening and maybe a little bit of browning to the captured image.


Friday, October 14, 2016

The Autumn Colors



Over the next 2 weeks the Autumn Colors are going to become brilliant. A friend of mine told me today that the trip out to his farm, about an hour away, was particularly spectacular.

I will post some links to my photo blog at 500px.com for you to take a look at the nice colors the trees are showing us this year.


500px.com


I have been posting my photographs to 500px.com.

I found this site about 2 years ago and enjoy the features it has. I started with it because I rented a camera to shoot video of a concert in 2013 and as part of the rental I got a discount card to 500px.com.

So I opened an account.

500px.com keeps adding features that I enjoy, and I keep discovering more features as I look through the dashboard and other available links.

A couple weeks ago I created a 500px portfolio of my photos. I used the statistics feature to help decide which photographs would become a part of my current portfolio. And I have already taken the first photos down and placed new pictures in my portfolio.

500px.com has an algorithm called Pulse. I have no idea what the parameters are to generate the Pulse figure for one of my photos is but with it and the number of views my photos receive I make decisions on which photos seem to be right for my portfolio.

Here is a link to my current portfolio:  http://photoplane.500px.com/

I have noticed the portfolio seems to soften the focus of my pictures. That bothers me a little because sharp looking photos are important, especially for my landscape images and I hope to sell photographs from this site. I suspect the photos get processed through a Flash system. Flash is falling out of favor as a web display system because of security issues.

The portfolio presentation is extremely good except for that issue.

I would rather you look at my photos right off the photo tiles though, located here:

https://500px.com/photoplane

When you click on any of those tiles you get to see the pictures as clearly as I see them through the camera. Now it is several years later and I stopped using 500px because they really don't pay enough for my pictures given the tiome and effort that went into them, and now we are iin the Ai world and images can be generated by artificial intelligences, with very good composition capabilities.

a cloned account



I had a strange thing happen the other day.

I re-named an online account of mine and a cloned account was created at the same time.

So my old account got a new name, and the clone took the old name and added a numeric 1 to the end of it.


I sit here and ponder this.


My immediate reaction was to email tech support because I thought something malicious happened. I thought perhaps a hacker had somehow managed to be waiting at the right moment and then when I re-named the account, because there was a credit card attached to the old account, and money applied to the old account (which meant the account fell into a higher category of user type, it became more significant in a number of ways (better dashboard controls, statistics and so on)), and this is reaching a bit admittedly, but that extra gave it a little more life, so to speak.

Which made me wonder.

I informed tech support and they deleted the new clone account.

It begs the question... did the data that made up that old account want to come to life and because it was threatened by my wanting to give my account a new name it decided to give birth to itself as a clone?


Think about this. The implications are quite significant. What if this Universe was created in much the same way?

What if, as the Gnostics believe, there was only a single all one-ness and some part of that one-ness wanted its freedom, and the other part decided the new part needed a new name and in so naming the new, a clone of the old was created?

For those of you that know the Gnostic storyline this makes sense. I'll leave this discussion there for now.

It begs another question... Did I inadvertently kill off a new form of life?

What would the clone have done had it continued? Would I have had to keep "feeding it" new content? Would it have eventually expired itself on its own?


The online service this happened with is a photography site. There are literally millions of photographs on this site.

Is it possible by so much human input, so much intense interest in the photos uploaded that those collective thoughts, at the right moment, given the right conditions, when I decided to re-name my account, gave birth to the clone?