Lost soles

Posted on 29 January 2013 by SkepticaLee

Before and after. Boot on the right after 3400 km.

Ah, boots! Can’t do anything without ’em, can’t do anything with ’em.

A long time ago I had an old pair of hiking boots that were well past their prime and I seemed to have gained a couple of blisters from them and lost a couple of toenails in return on their last journey. A mate of mine, Chris Thompson, on hearing of my mishap, had bought a pair of boots that were too small for him, but he reckoned they might be OK for me, so in the style of we’re all one big family, he made me a present of them, when it turned out that they were a good fit. Continue reading →

Kiwi III, 2010

Posted on 25 January 2013 by SkepticaLee

Sunset at Sunset Beach, 2010 (bracket of 47 exposures)

On the success of Kiwi II, I decided that a trip in early spring (August – October) might be the next goal, at least to explore the North Island more fully. I wanted to go to White Island, Cape Reinga, and do the remaining NI Great Walks. Auckland never seems to be cold, and while it was a little wet… It also very much brought back the Augusts and Septembers of fallen-in-love. Continue reading →

GPS

Posted on 22 January 2013 by SkepticaLee

Getting from A to B on your own two feet may be becoming a lost art. Not just being able to follow a track and persevere when you think you are lost, but also crunching the kms, one after the other, to reach a distant goal. At the end, you’ll want to know where you’ve been, how far you’ve walked and what time you did it in. Continue reading →

Purple Picture Processor

Posted on 18 January 2013 by SkepticaLee

Dersch’s A and B vs. Zoom

It seems like we’ll be waiting some time for the camera that takes the view you saw and makes it into a picture on its own. On the way to this goal a number of problems turned up that were solved on the computer. Low dynamic range (high contrast) was improved by bracketing and enfusing; barrelling (radial distortion) by determining the Dersch coefficients (left) and applying a counter-distortion; and chromatic aberration by measuring sets of aberrations (below right) and remapping the colour channels so that they now matched each other. What we might also like to do is process RAW images, save copies of the originals, both as JPG and in a sturdier format such as PNG. And while we’re moving the formats around, taking care that the EXIF data gets transferred too, perhaps a little extra data could be included. Then some postprocessing like Advanced Tone Mapping. And finally, thumbnailing and sharpening so that the images can be experimented with. Oh dear, it seems like Christmas is rather early this year. Continue reading →

Ticketing 2

Posted on 15 January 2013 by SkepticaLee

Hen’s teeth. Screenshot from Jan 17, showing three (!) free places on the Milford. Ready, set, go!

Well, it turned out opodo had its disadvantages after all. As I suspected, there was no Rail&Fly for the return leg; half an hour of telephone queue was necessary to order one, with a special “late fee” added. All in all, R&F might have advantages for the traveller and the environment, but in practice it sucks massively, and a discounted train ticket for the journey to Frankfurt and an ordinary ticket for the return are not much more expensive. As some research on opodo’s booking system shows, R&F can be automatically booked for a “simple” return flight, but as soon as there is a leg outside Germany (as in a Y-flight), R&F is no longer available for subsequent legs, even if they do end here. Hey, no worries, the internet was only invented yesterday, right? Continue reading →

What CHDK has done for me

Posted on 11 January 2013 by SkepticaLee

After the serendipity of finding CHDK, I set to work on my projects. This is how they turned out.

Grid overlay. Easy, almost trivial to implement, but it’s a great help just having a couple of lines on the screen to check that your horizontal is what you think it is. Continue reading →

Camera Extras

Posted on 8 January 2013 by SkepticaLee

Back: two solar filters, one lens cap. Front: UV/pol filter

Youtube Video

With the camera now functioning like it cost ten times the price thanks to the possibilities of CHDK, it was time to look at a couple of hardware issues.

Filters. A polarisation filter is a major game-changer, as anyone wearing polarised sunglasses can tell, because it cuts down reflection from water and glassy surfaces and thus also the haze in the air that washes out detail at large distances. With a pol filter the sky is bluer, the grass is greener, and the hills are closer. Continue reading →

Hacking the Canons: CHDK

Posted on 4 January 2013 by SkepticaLee

CHDK logo by cosmograph

CHDK is a set of tools allowing the user full control over the operation of a large number of the cheaper Canon point&shoot cameras. After all, a camera nowadays is more that a box with a hole in it; everything is, of course, controlled by a microprocessor. With suitable access to the processor, the camera becomes like any other universal machine and can be programmed to do what you like with it. I can vividly remember my disappointment when I thought that I could use the time delay function for a sort of limited time lapse, and all the camera did was wait for the set time and take the ten shots in quick succession. If the camera can count to 30 once, why not continue the process. Continue reading →

Searching for a Bracketing Camera

Posted on 1 January 2013 by SkepticaLee

Fox Glacier. Bracket of 7 images from +1 to -1 EV in 1/3 steps.

Before it got all complicated, let’s just go back to the beginning: I wanted a camera that would automatically take exposure series (brackets) so that I could paste them together and achieve a result as good as or better than the eye can see. Without an automatic mechanism, I’d be stuck with taking one shot after another and having to wait for the camera to settle down between each shot. Continue reading →

Kiwi IV 2013

Voyage to Te Wai Pounamu

Monthly Archives: January 2013