However the version I submitted in the May competition at the camera club was the result of a few hours of processing, the most processing I have ever done to an image:

I first took the image out of Lightroom and into GIMP where I “corrected” the perspective. You know, to make the verticals vertical. I also stretched it vertically because it was looking a bit squashed.

Once back in Lightroom I began to liberally apply the spot removal tool to remove the parking signs and one of the chimneys, the goal being to make the image symmetrical. My final changes were to add a gradient to bump up the exposure of the bottom half and an overall change to the levels.

I entered the image as a print, which the judge awarded a highly commended.

I also recieved highly commendeds for two other images, both from the Perth road trip and both entered as EDI. First was this image of the red earth and blue skies near Marvel Loch:

Second was this image of water pooled on some rocks in the desert:

This second image was also modified from when I first posted it to Flickr, it is a different crop, contrast has been increased and a gradient applied to the sky to bring out the clouds.

My final image featured the regrowth on the trees near Marysville, burnt in the Black Saturday bushfires:

As I currently work at the Clayton campus, why would I ride to Caulfield? Because they will be renovating our building (yes again…) and this time they want 100 people to move to space in Caulfield for the six months the renovations will take. Although we were told late last year that they wanted to renovate the building, it was only a few weeks ago that they dropped on us a deadline of construction “starting” in June. After much discussion within our team, we finally decided to say yes to moving.

At Clayton we are not in the main campus, we are out on Blackburn Road which means that on the days I don’t ride my bike, there is free parking on the street a short walk away. At Caulfield the parking is much more limited (there is also a large railway station next to the campus) which changes my transports options to bicycle or public transport.

After extensive review of online maps and aerial imagery, today was a test and this is the path I followed:

The route is what I determined to be the most direct, while still avoiding hills and busy roads where possible. The route back is different, significantly in that I will not return via High Street Road as a big downhill would turn in to a painfull uphill stretch. Just look at the elevation profile:

Breaking the ride down it is:

• Along High Street Road taking advantage of the downhill to maintain speed
• Onto the Gardiners Creek Trail, including crossing under Warrigal Road
• Loop onto the footpath and then follow Argyll Street that parallels the railway line
• At the freeway join the western end of the Scotchmans Creek Trail to get to East Malvern Railway Station
• Through the station carpark and then out and along Waverley Road.
• Leave Waverely Road for the parallel side street of Ardrie Road
• Onto Burke Road for a short distance and cross over Princes Highway at the lights

The route home is the reverse of this until nearing Holmesglen Railway Station where I enter the station carpark and then use the pedestrian bridge over Warrigal Road where I follow the railway line until Mount Waverley Railway Station. The benefit of this change is that instead of climbing the hill up the busy High Street Road, I use a mix of off-road paths and side strees.

Variations include:

• Heading up to Mount Waverley Railway Station and following the railway line on the way in
• Keeping to the Gardiners Creek Trail and getting to East Malvern Railway Station from the other side of the freeway
• Following Gardiners Creek Trail further until Winton Road and then using side streets on the north side of Waverley Road

Of course there is one other variation that I wouldn’t plan on using, but is handy to have: using the train between East Malvern and Mount Waverley Railway Stations.

It is not yet final if we will move to Caulfield during the renovations (keeping the team together is one of our conditions), but now I know that cyling is a realistic option.

The judge did award this a merit, but after seeing it as a square thumbnail, I tried changing the crop to square:

I much prefer this version of the image and I wish I had submitted it this way. As I am planning to enter images into the Warrigal National this year, I will submit it to that (and the Pakenham National) as the square version.

On the other hand I am happy with my other images I submitted for the monthly competition. The two prints were both from a road trip up to the Snowy Mountains and are both photos of the road:

My other EDI entry was from another recent road trip, specifically Wreck Beack on the Great Ocean Road. To shoot the sunset from the beach you do need to climb back up three hunderd and sixty six steps.

By the way, expect to continue to see a number of road trip sourced photos, because that has been where I have actually been taking photos…

The first of these is a version of an image that is currently up on my wall, one taken at the old Spotswood Pumping Station. I tried to bring out the patterns made by the brickwork and also brightened the dial as it was looking washed out.

My second image was from a day trip down to the Mornington Peninsula on ANZAC day last year, a day where heavy fog covered Melbourne and the surrounding area all the way to Hastings. This foggy image was almost monochrome to start with.

My third image was from my recent trip along the Great Ocean Road over the Australia Day weekend where I captured the silhouette of a bicycle rider. It is the perspective that makes them seem out by themselves, and I hoped to enhance the textures in the clouds in monochrome.

My final image (which recieved a merit) was taken of an old shack in Jamieson (near Lake Eildon) and much of the processing was done while experimenting with Snapseed on another club members iPad.

Of my ten entries, these are my favourites:

On the last legs of the Perth road trip we arrived at the Ceduna jetty at exactly the right time for this long exposure image that was awarded a merit.

The Easter break included a day trip down the Mornington Peninsula on a day that fog covered all of Melbourne, even down to Hastings where it began to lift.

While keeping an eye out for timber structures in interesting shapes I looked at the scenic railway during a club outing to Luna Park, this was awarded highly commended.

The final topic of the year was “sports action” where I returned to stereotype by setting up a scene involving lego (to get a highly commended).

My first image was taken during the second half of the interrupted road trip along the south coast of New South Wales, from up the Green Cape lighthouse. This print was awarded a merit.

My other print was also awarded a merit, and was also the subject of discussion as a number of people asked how I got the shot. The image was taken at Cat Bay on Phillip Island where there are the remains of an old jetty. The other people I was with were taking photos of the main structure out in the water, but I grew tired of that and focused on one part, lighting it up with a flash from directly above during the long exposure .

Neither of my digital entries received an award. One may have been seen before as it is from the big Perth road trip last year

while the other is from a camera club weekend away to Mansfield at the end of September.

My monochrome entries are already in for the next competition, so shall see how they go.

While the stock stereo in my car does feature a six CD changer, once radio reception fades away (or there is nothing good on) there is only so much music that six discs can contain. So I started investigating MP3 options, where I first looked at options that replaced the stock stereo with an aftermarket unit, ideally one that could play MP3 files, ideally from USB.

I started my reasearch online and concluded it by visiting a number of stores with both a USB stick and an iPod to experience the interfaces first hand. I found that:

• A front USB port is very common, but irrelevant to me as I do not was a USB drive or cable hanging out the front of the head unit all of the time.
• A rear USB port is much less common, but what I wanted as it would allow the cabling to be routed into the glovebox to keep it all neat.
• On current units the USB port can be used for an iPod with a simple USB to dock connector cable
• Some units only have front USB, but may include a rear connection for an iPod
• Support for USB drives appears to be universally sucky. In my price range I didn’t find a single unit that could scan the USB drive and read the ID3 tags. Instead you might be able to browse directories, but otherwise you accessed the music from track number 1 and on. Their implementations are so minimal that the files are not even sorted by name, they are listed by the order they appear in the file allocation table.
• Support for iPods is much better, you can browse by artist, album, song, genre, etc. Offloading the processing to the iPod which already does all that does seem to make some sense.
• Display of the current time (because my car doesn’t have a standalone clock) was generally pretty poor and the buttons are harder to use, but my stock unit does have nice large buttons.

I did decide on a unit and went so far as ordering one, a fascia kit (because the stock unit is double din) and almost booking in a time for installation. That is, before I was reminded by a co-worker about the no-name kits that connect via the CD changer port on the rear of the stock unit. Further investigation along this path did indicate it should work in my car (even though intended for newer Mazdas) and there was actually an official Mazda version that gave me more confidence that it might work.

These cheaper units are much more limited. You can use any player you want with an AUX input, but that doesn’t give you control via the stereo or power to the player. Otherwise you have to use an iPod that does have basic track control, but still no information displayed as the stock stereo cannot display text.

After verifying that my stereo has the port for the external CD changer, I decided that it would be a worthwhile experiment to get the cheapest kit I could find on eBay. This was shortly before Christmas and I also bought an iPod, one that played music fine, but had a broken backlight for the screen. Cost of this was less than $100, while aftermarket unit and fascia was over $300.

The kit arrived today and it took less than half an hour to install, where most of this time was deciding where to route the cable and to experiment with the interface. It isn’t the best, but I expect that on my next big drive (out to Ballarat for Linux conf later in the month) it should prove useful.

The co-worker who reminded me about these kits also bought one, but a “better” one that he also got with a bluetooth kit for his phone. His also arrived this week, but he hasn’t installed it yet (the install in an RX-8 is more involved than in the 323) so I might borrow it to see if there is any benefits.

The equipment involved included:

• my 40″ Samsung 200Hz television
• Hamish’s 40″ Sony 100Hz television
• my Sony Bluray player
• Hamish’s Playstation 3

This resulted in three test setups:

• Sony television and Playstation 3
• Samsung television and Playstation 3
• Samsung television and Sony Blu-ray player.

For each setup we compared:

• a car racing game in 3D
• a scene from an animated 3D movie

The car racing game was observed to be less jerky on my television than it was on Hamish’s. The output from the Playstation was 720 at 60Hz. In this situation the higher refresh rate of my television is what gave the better result. We don’t know exactly how fast the 3D runs, does a 60Hz signal result in a 120Hz output once it alternates between eyes? If so then it is clear why 100Hz was not as smooth.

Watching the animated movie was different as we didn’t notice any real difference between the televisions. In this case the output was 1080 at 24Hz. If it was really outputting 48Hz, that is well within the 100Hz of the Sony.

What was quite surprising to us was that we noticed an improvement when the same scene was played through the Sony Blu-ray player instead of the Playstation 3. Is the Blu-ray player handling the playback better in hardware than the Playstation was handling in software?

Of course none of this really matters as I have not yet and I don’t have any plan to actually watch a movie in 3D. It has also been a long time since I have played games, but even then that would be on the computer, not on a console.

The completed things (mostly in order of east to west through the property) include:

• new television
• mounting said television on the wall
• new shelves to fit in the alcoves on either side of the television
• additional antenna socket in the study
• network cabling between the television and the study
• a two seater couch and two armchairs
• a number of my photos mounted on the walls in 16×20″ frames
• all sorts of kitchen utensils, cutlery, crockey and appliances
• swing out rubbish bin under the kitchen sink
• two stools for the kitchen bench
• new deadlocks and entrance sets, including the garage
• remote opener for the garage door
• additional towel rail in the bathroom
• shelves within the cupboard in the study
• cutting down trees and removing stumps from the front garden
• digging over front garden beds
• removing bamboo along driveway
• taking down unused curtain rail hooks

The larger items currently on the todo list include:

• put up venetian blind (currently on order) in kitchen
• get quotes for new screen doors
• finalise new line for edge of the garden beds and put in concrete mower strip
• rug in the lounge and a new coffee table

Here’s to another year…

View SE NSW 2011 Tuesday – Cooma to Merimbula in a larger map

We had a plan for today, head inland from Merimbula to lookouts, waterfalls and rainforest walks before looping back to Eden. We got to Wolumna Peak and started to head west to Myrtle Mountain via fire roads, but this happened:

You see the dissipating smoke surrounding the car? That is the remains of the clutch…

The more dramatic action shot is:

After this our priority was to get back to the main road, which we almost did until being stopped by a creek about 200 metres short. A 2km walk later we had enough phone reception to call RACV/NRMA. It took two hours for them to arrive, but they pulled us out and got the car to a mechanic in Bega. As it would take more than three days to fix (you do have to remove the whole engine and gearbox from the car) it will be towed back to Melbourne instead of being repaired.

But what about us? A taxi got us back to Merimbula to a motel (everything was booked in Bega) and we shall pick up a rental car tomorrow morning. All thanks to RACV Total Care.

Unfortunately we will only have the rental car for two days, and they are only paying for 200km per day. As the direct route from Merimbula to Melbourne is 560km, we will have to pay that difference plus that of any detours we make. It also means we will return to Melbourne a day earlier than planned. We are updating our itinerary now…