Between times

Well here we are; in that period between Christmas and New Year and finally Adobe has made it possible for me to acquire Photoshop with a clear conscience. Rather than shelling out NZ$1,300 for a CS6 license which was quite ridiculous (on various levels), Adobe's Photography Program allows photographers to have the use of both Lightroom and Photoshop for a little under NZ$12 per month - now that's what I call reasonable, so I will be starting out the New Year with the tool I wanted but couldn't previously justify buying. To celebrate, here is "Akaroa by night" from last month's trip to New Zealand's 'French Riviera':

Happy New Year to everyone.

Oxford Arts Fair

Last Saturday was the opening of the inaugural Oxford Arts Fair. It runs until 22 December with various artists doing demonstrations each weekend. Fantastic turnout on the Saturday for the opening with a good time seemingly had by all. This short video gives a flavour of the event:

Lost Past

Continuing my explorations with Proshow Producer, I reprocessed some pictures of the Provincial Council buildings that I took back in 2009 for the Christchurch City Council's web project. It was interesting revisiting processing from four years ago - my tastes, techniques and tools have all changed in that time and I made much better use of the Nikon D80 RAW files than I did originally. The resulting video is a sort of requiem to some beautiful buildings that are sadly now badly damaged or destroyed.

An updated HD video from that included in the original post.

A selection of pictures from a weekend in Akaroa including a visit to the Giant's House (6min video).

Akaroa rays

Just back from a long weekend in stunning Akaroa with my beautiful wife. Or was that a beautiful weekend with my stunning wife? Darned if I know. Anyway the weather was great and as we sat in our room on Sunday night I saw the setting sun just appearing under the clouds.

The rays only lingered for a few minutes but fortunately we were only about 100m from the quay so a quick sprint to the foreshore got me there for a few quickly composed frames. A nice ending to a nice weekend.

Fractals?

 So, you can tell I love fractal art. Well, this post is for those who want to know what fractal art is about and especially for my friends at the Holy Disorder of Dancing Monks!

Love fractals

Fractal art is mathematical art. Art formed by the interaction of multiple mathematical formula to plot points in three dimensional (3D) space. A fractal artist manipulates the formula and their properties to produce various abstract models. These 3D models are then rendered by a computer to form a two dimensional picture which can be viewed on a computer screen or printed on paper.

If that sounds complicated, it is. Fractal art could not exist in its present form without a computer to do the heavy lifting. My computer has just rendered a fractal I designed; it made 5,942,263 calculations per second and took 4 hours and 42 mins to complete. That's over 100 billion calculations for a single fractal image - a feat hardly possible without a computer.

Though fractals are mathematical, fractal artists today do not need to be mathematicians (I certainly am not!) As well as the mind-bending volume of calculations, computers help the artist by providing a visual environment in which mathematical formula can be represented by graphical objects. The artist positions and sizes the objects in relation to one another and modifies their properties, while the approximate results are displayed on the computer screen.

Despite such technical help, the journey to a finished fractal image is anything but straightforward. Fractal pictures can rarely be previsualised, except in the broadest of terms; the artist launches into the fractal void on a voyage of discovery. It can be a frustrating voyage - for some time nothing usable is revealed then, when finally something interesting does form in front of the artist, the task is to coax that embryonic image towards something worthy of being called a fractal image. Often it never makes it and the artist must start over.

In the beginning

Even with these difficulties, there is something about fractal images which draws the artist onward. A good fractal can be breathtakingly beautiful and the combination of creativity, discovery, and craft involved in producing fractals, quite addictive. But fractals also seem to have another quality - the ability to connect with something that lies just outside our normal comprehension - visual analogies that communicate at a metaphysical level.

If you want to get started in fractal art a good place to begin is with a free program (Windows only) called Apophysis and tutorials which can be found at Deviant Art.

Audio-visual

In a few weeks this view will be obscured by spring's new growth and an abundance of leaves. It caught my eye yesterday for the bold simplicity of the shapes set against a stormy sky. It was the work of a moment with the camera, but processing it to capture the feeling of that moment took several hours and a few aborted attempts. Why are the simple pictures the hardest?

On a related note, I have just read through "Eyes of the Heart - Photography as a Christian contemplative Practice" by Christine Valters Paintner. Her book deserves more than a quick read through (and I will give it much more than that) but she encourages a deeper 'seeing' than a photographer (me) often gives the subject; more of a 'slow gazing' designed to see beyond the mere physical form and expose something deeper. That's a huge challenge - using a device (a camera) designed to capture light to reveal something more than an image. Hmm ... work to do there me thinks.

Android storm

Just before the storm struck last night, ripping off our gates and hot water expansion pipe, we experienced a technology storm of a different sort. It started when my two week old Android tablet seemed to be connected to WiFi but was not connecting to the Internet. A fifteen hour power outage interrupted diagnosis but, when power returned today, both my phone and Annette's Android phone were both showing the same symptoms - connected to WiFi but no Internet access. All other devices (PCs, iPads, Kindle seemed unaffected).

Google searches uncovered an Android bug where IP addresses allocated via DHCP were not being properly recorded in the Android device. Each affected Android device shows it's IP as "Unknown" (Settings/About device/Status).

Although repeated connecting and disconnecting from the network can restore a device to working order, this is hit and miss at best, and frustratingly annoying at worst. The actual answer is to reserve IP addresses on the DHCP server for use by Android devices and to set each Android device using one of these "static" IPs rather than DHCP. Everything else in the network can continue using DHCP but the Android devices each get their own dedicated IP. It's a bit of a pain to set up but once it is done everything works more smoothly and devices connect more quickly.

Hope that helps someone out there with a misbehaving Android.

Back in The Square again

After nearly three years, it's good to be able to walk through our city centre again. Sure it's damaged and it's disorientating not having all the familiar buildings in their place, but I like what I am seeing - Christchurch people are reclaiming their broken city. People are creating things, wonderful things, that could not have found a place in the more regulated pre-quake Christchurch. Would anyone have been allowed to erect a whare in the square prior to 2010?

Would impromptu art spaces, like this photo exhibition, have found a place on the more crowded city streets?

There is something really cool going on in Christchurch post quake, and I'm not sure that I want to see the rebuild snuff it out once the developers and bureaucrats get their act together. We need an ongoing supply of empty space where creative people can make cool things for Cantabrians to delight in and smile at.

Window pain

Three years on from the start of the earthquakes, and this damaged yet unrepaired building seems to reflect our city: