tony_dummett

Gary died last week, from a terrible liver disease acquired through his work - about 20 years ago - with poisonous fibreglass resin.

I went to his wake today. He and Diane stayed married. She was there, upset but brave. I met a lot of his other friends, the different spheres of his life coming together....  too late.

Gary was a great mate. We laughed at the stories we all had to share. We cried, me included, at the sadness of his death and the shortness of his life.

Vale Gary. I'll miss you.

Amazing to read the comments of some here who have trouble believing this photograph is natural, as the

photographer found it.

 

Even more amazing to see the suggestions for altering it to make it "perfect".

 

It's fine as it is, a natural scene with a natural relaxed look about it. Who cares if an arm is wrong? That's

life, guys. Marco did agreat job in seeing this scene, something most of us would hurry past, on our way to

getting it exactly right.

That's because it WAS spontaneous. No posing. No staging. I just clicked the shutter when I thought the moment was right.

Which is the wave? The tiddly ones at the front or the huge tsunami in the background?

 

Imagining the latter, this is one scary photo.

A photograph from another planet, one where the camera is always ready and the eye is always watchful.

 

Ian does this so effortlessly, without the stylization that's taken over so much modern still photography, especially on these pages.

 

More than a good eye and good technique, you need a great heart to make a photo like this. Paradoxically, you also need to free yourself from sentiment and from the temptation to indulge in obvious message-making.

 

Ian's photographs reveal a true human being who - I can't think of any other way - was probably born with an empathy for human nature and the talent to present it in a compelling way. Look at his portfolio and you might (if you're lucky) see it conclusively proved that a picture is not a window into the soul of the subject, but a light shone on the soul of the photographer.

 

There's a lightness of composition and an optimism about Ian's work that, even in his starkest images, gives you hope for the human condition.

 

That is the true mark of a great photographer: you're taken along for the ride, you see what he saw... in the way that he saw it. The conclusions you draw are irresistable. The plainer the presentation, the less artifice is employed, the more powerful the image. It is the photographer's impression; an impression worth seeing.

 

I don't know why "Ian McEachern" is not a world famous name. One thing I do know: it's the world's loss. It's not the photography, it's the person behind the camera we all should know better. The photographs, unaltered, unprocessed, straight from the heart, are simply the physical evidence that, out there somewhere, a truly good person lives his life and does us the favour, from time to time, of letting us in on the love he has for his fellow Man.

 

A wonderful image from a portfolio - a life - of wonderful images.

Hugh, no travel likely in the near future due to lack of ready funds. Still can't figure out why they were looking at me (I'm a much more sober-looking citizen nowadays... even shaved off the beard and cut the hair right back to a No.3 clipper).

I didn't notice that about the four males, but you're absolutely correct.

 

Everyone was so happy... although the drop-out rate, post graduation, is high, this was - for all of them - the first day of the rest of their lives.

 

Good luck to them all, and God bless them. They have a fight ahead that we lucky ones have no idea about.

Drunk again Peter?

 

(How are ya, ya Greek Bastard?)

It's everyone's favourite picture of him. Sums him up perfectly. A funny kid, spoilt, cheeky, smart, artistic talent just beginning to show, but completely under the usually benevolent (sometimes not so) thumb of his Big Brother, who is the only one immune to his tantrums.

Recently the Big Brother told us that Kye would get sick of riding his scooter on a long walk the three of us were on with the dogs. He outlined the sequence.

First he would complain.

Then he would cry.

The he would throw a full-blown tantrum.

As the predicted tantrum began the Big Brother turned around to me and with a weary look, begotten of many past tantrums said, "Phase #3... begins."

Glad you spotted wierdo, Hugh. Good catch.

Later on he "revealed all", as only the Germans can do, stripping naked in full view, getting into his swimming trunks preparatory to a swim out to the reef.

As my grandson, Kye, would say, "That's bisgusting!"

(And it truly was)

That's a sweet comment Hugh. Thanks.

 

The amazing thing was that five minutes after the rain the gardeners were out watering... the same gardens that had had an inch of rain just before!

 

I suppose they're paid to work, not to think. And hey, a job at the Marriot is a job, right?

Soap opera? Nah... it's just the way I write it up. We had a wonderful time, good food, good beer, lots of laughs.

Ah yes, it IS a koala crossing. The bar was the "Sailors Bar (Aussie Owned)".

 

I asked, with typical Down Under garishness, "So where's the Aussie?". She said, "In Australia, of course. Why aren't you?"

 

To which, of course, there is no reply.

 

Ancient, gray types like me are regarded as either harmless irritants or potential husbands along the Patong Strip, I'm told (there's another picture here of the latter, called "Retired In Paradise").

 

There was one at this bar too, but the Thai girl looked so bored, and the Aussie expat man too, that I left them alone and snapped the barmaid serving a beer to my companion, who was (and is) the American husband of my ex-girlfriend with whom my wife and I were shacked up at the 5-star "Marriot Beach Resort" further up the coast (separate bedrooms and bathrooms). The girls were next door shopping for pearls (fake, but cheap).

 

So, although it may seem complicated, what with the old Aussie deliberately NOT being photographed by the OTHER old Aussie, in company of the EVEN OLDER Californian, husband to the OLD GIRLFRIEND and companion to the PRESENT WIFE, while the FOXY THAI BABE with (I suspect) yet ANOTHER OLD AUSSIE for a "husband" (even if he was in Australia at the time)... there's a PERFECTLY REASONABLE explanation for the whole sordid thing.

 

Doug, you'll just have to take my word for that. Have I ever lied to you?

 

(Parenthetically: and yes, she was a foxy Thai babe, wasn't she?)

Hi Doug. Yeah, still alive.

 

The blue umbrella? It made for a nice composition and also so that someone would ask "What's with the blue umbrella?"

Nice to hear from you too, Axel.

All I needed was beer. That gives me enough courage to do anything.

The shot was made in 1974, well before digital cameras.

 

The frame was exposed by rating Tri-X at ISO800, and then double-developing it. Hence the extra grain.

 

You could also say the photo as presented is oversharpened, so that aspect could be called "digital grain".

Amazing!

 

Lurkers on a thread this old!

 

Good-on you all.

 

Thanks for visiting (and arguing). I love it.

Tom, I re-read your critique from so long ago.

 

Please don't apologize for your earlier remarks. They're as valid and useful as any others. No offence taken at all. My skin's thicker than that.

 

What I thought set this one out from a purely "adolescent" shot (although I was hardly out of adolescence at the time, and, yes, pretty plastered) is that you can only see one face. That's what makes the guy stand out. The rest of the men there are doing what men do in latrines full of strangers: trying to avoid each others' eyes.

 

Having said all that, I can fully understand why the chap with the umbrella became angry. It's just that I couldn't understand it at the time.

 

Cheers,

 

Tony.

Glad to be of help Axel.

You have to use a proper panoramic head. I use a Manfrotto "Big Heavy Head" - can't remember the model number.

 

It has X,Y sliders to position the camera/lens combination. For each camera/lens combination you have to find the "nodal point" of the lens and position it above the axis of rotation of the head. The nodal point is that point where parallax error through the lens (i.e. as observed in the viewfinder) is minimized, no matter how much you rotate the camera on the head. You judge parallax error by eye, observing the spatial relationship between a "near" and a "far" object. The aim is for the two objects to have the same spatial relationship (no parallax error) no matter how far to the left or right the camera is rotated. When you achieve the nodal state position, you can take multiple frames in the sure knowledge that for each frame any two objects will maintain the same visual relationship to each other as you rotate the camera. This makes stitching straightforward.

 

If you do not find the nodal point then your two reference objects will have more or less air gap between them as you rotate and the stitching software will be presented with a situation where the two objects appear to have moved... not a good thing for stitching.

 

The nodal point is set up BEFORE you go out to shoot, under controlled conditions.

 

To set my nodal point I first visually set the left/right positioning of the camera lens to be in line with the axis of rotation of the head. This is easy: you just align the centre of the lens with the centre of the head.

 

Next, I position the camera so that, when viewed through the center of the viewfinder, a "near" vertical object and a "far" vertical object have a tiny air gap - a backlit slit really - between them. I then rotate the head and camera to the left and right and observe the air gap (remember: it's best to have this backlit so you can see it clearly). If the gap grows or diminishes as you rotate from left to right (it's a tiny gap, so any change is easy to observe) then the lens is not positioned nodally. So I shift the camera forwards or backwards (with the slider) and try again until the air/light gap is the same at left, middle and right, that is, there is no parallax error whichever way I rotate the camera. I then mark this point on my sliders for future reference.

 

Remember: there is a different nodal point for every camera body and lens combination. So mark these points on the sliders when you find them.

 

With Panavue you have to have a reasonably large overlap between frames. I use 24 degrees between frames. This leaves an overlap of about 25%. Panavue will start to hesitate if the overlap is much smaller than this.

 

Digital cameras are good for stitched panoramics as there are no registration errors due to scanner film carrier irregularities between frames. If you get your nodal point correct then you should achieve a high quality stitch. But there are a couple of precautions to take.

 

First, ALWAYS do a Lens Wizard for each panoramic you take. Every panoramic is slightly different in tilt to the last one. Tilt differences can screw up a Panavue panoramic, unless you account for them with a Lens Wizard project.

 

For ther uninitiated, a Lens Wizard is a method in Panavue where you take two or three frames and manually declare several sets of points in adjoining frames to be equivalents. For example, if a flagpole is in the overlap area between two frames then the tip of that flagpole might be an "equivalent" point and could be marked as such. You mark the tip of the flagpole in each frame with a visual "flag" provided by Panavue. From then on Panavue will regard these flag points as the same point in the panoramic image you are photographing, and will try to overlap them in the final stitched image. Any set of equivalent points will do as long as they're evenly spaced throughout the overlap area.

 

Once the sets of equivalencies are declared by the user, Panavue then tries to overlap these points into a stitched image. To do this it applies a spherical warp ("projects" the frame onto the inside of an imaginary sphere) to each frame and then sees if each of the equivalent points can be made to exactly overlap at the warp factor. Panavue iterates this process until they all fit and the stich is seamless. The user then saves these "lens" parameters. The next step is to perform the actual stitch.

 

For this you need all your frames, not just the three samples you used to figure out the warp required. If your "lens" has been calculated accurately then the images should stitch together easily. For this shot I took 15 images and used about 12 of them (it's not quite 360 degrees). Most of the work I did in stitching these 15 images was done in the Lens wizard part of the software, with just three adjacent images that were detail rich acting as references for the whole 15. Once the "lens" was calculated it could be applied to ALL the images.

 

But sometimes - as in this image - there are large areas of blank sky and rippling water, or other either bland or moving artefacts. Panavue on "automatic" stitch can't find equivalent points in blank sky or rippling wavelets and so it will guess, usually wrongly.

 

The program, however, does have a "Flag" stitch. You can position visual flags over points of equivalence, just like in the Lens Wizard. This will force Panavue to put these points together, and only then apply the warp to the individual images to make them fit. The flags represent anchor points.

 

If there is insufficient detail even for manual placement of flags, then with digital (i.e. accurate registered) images you can just use the preset flag positions provided by Panavue. They will all be at the same pixel locations in each frame to start with. Leave them alone and you have automatic perfect placement of your flags as these are digital images without any registration errors. You should then get a perfect stitch, even if your scene has distracting artefacts like moving water and bland clouds or sky.

 

So, in summary, if you use Panavue with a digital camera:

 

1. Get your nodal point correct before you shoot.

 

2. Perform a Lens Wizard for each panoramic image.

 

3. Use "Stitch with 2 flags", but don't set the flags yourself. Just use the default positions.

 

Sorry for the software-specific post, but Axel did mention he was having trouble with Panavue.

 

A couple of other points, now that I think of them, for general use:

 

1. Remember you're photographing a wide scene, so get your exposure right with that portion of the scene which has the greatest variation in light conditions.

 

2. Then use your camera on MANUAL exposure, not automatic.

No, Axel there's nothing to it. I'm so used to shooting JPEG that when I show RAW on this shot (you guessed right) I preset the WB to tungsten out of habit.

 

About half way through the shot I remembered that with RAW it didn't matter, except that in the viewfinder you can get a better idea of the color of the shot.

 

The first time I shot this scene (somewhere else here on PN) I used JPEG files as I only had a 256mb chip. Since then I got myself a 1 gig chip (about 126 RAWs per chip) and it does make a lot of difference to the way I shoot.

 

Just can't get used to unlimited memory.

shhhh!...

... He's having a word with his wife.

Mr. Peter! You de A-Man! Were you in Sydney and DIDN'T look us up? Shame on you!

 

And the OTHER Peter: you're right about Clifford. That was the best ever.

...while whistling Gershwin's unforgettable classic, "Embraceable Ewe".