no go

If you make a list of four things to do up town you run a chance of getting two of them done. My Nokia N81 8GB broke again. Something with the navibutton, cursor jumping back and forth like crazy. Still under guarantee so...except that today SFR, the local "service provider" (HA!) had closed its Service Aprés-vente. Usually on has to wait at least 45 minutes to get service and now it ceased totally.

There is a packet in mail since two weeks but it does not exist. I called and a friendly guy explained that they have about 6 weeks of waiting in the customs. If you ever have something to send to France, use DHL, UPS, Fedex or whatever but DO NOT USE FRENCH POST!

None of the mechanic shops were open so I could not have my register plates changed.

On the way home I spent half an hour in traffic jam. The road was blocked for no obvious reason "Travails en cours".

This island is a training course of frustration tolerance.
The worst part of it is that it works. You know that there is no such thing as tomorrow, only "not today for sure". You assume the same style little by little. It has been a month since I wore real shoes. My mail is gathering in piles unanswered. Reminders of different colors. Even uncashed checks. Nobody's taking out garbage and it stinks.

This is scary.
How to fight Island Idiocy?
Or should I just go fishing.

holidays coming to an end

Monday it is workworkwork again. the way of repeating the word three times to emphasize that there is a lot of something there or going on is a local habit. If multiplying verbs and nouns is not enough to cover all the threatening stretches of silence, you can say "bla-bla-bla et comme ça" and "le voilà". People hate silence. The seem to be stuck on oral phase: They have to talk, kiss, smoke, eat or drink incessantly. 

They drive me nuts.

As for my HDR experiment, I have now noticed that there are pictures that are correctly exposed and well within the contrast range and they number increases dramatically as one brackets the exposure with ±1.67 stops. Then there are some shots that "justify" the use of HDR but the end result is not necessarily better than the middle orginal.

And then there are shots that improve. 

I am not talking about making unnatural "creative" shots just for the heck of it. I am after a natural rendition, something that we subjectively experience with the help of our magnificent image processing grayware. We do color correction, 3-D rendition, histogram flattening etc. at a fraction of a second without even appreciating what is going on. Cameras are not like that at all. Yet.

So I took off after 6 to catch some morning light in the nearby marsh. I was not very impressed, it was quite dull with clear skies. But I shot 1GB CF-card full anyway. Bracketing!

Normally one walks 3 hours and takes (old habit) about 35 shots of which 4 turn out OK.

So I got home, uploaded my catch on my Mac and got three pictures that I liked.

I did HDR transformation on one of the shots but I am not going to tell which one.

All I can say that it took quite a while to mix the three shots together and even after all the effort I am pretty sure that no one could tell the manipulated shot apart from the others.

Not better, not worse, not more or less synthetic than the others.

Playplayplay.

GOOD!

going HDR, thanks to Catalunia

Got the idea from fellow blogger.
What you need is Photoshop CS2 or higher on your computer and two photos that are similar except for the exposure.

Obviously, things are easier if you take the pictures with HDR conversion in mind in the first place. Your digital SLR knows how to bracket the exposure automatically if you tell him so. One needs the operating instructions, though.

On my first attempt I can see that instead of just taking two photos with different exposures I should have pretreated the other one's rocks and the other one's clouds to get a result.

My photo is just another picture, no drama.
Which is (sort of) how I want it but not quite as bland as this.

Got to keep on trying.

after Nissan X-trail, the deluge

on rrrroule!
by garbidz

I have to confess, I do not have a bad conscience of driving a 4x4. It is not because I am ignorant; I am not. Our beautiful fragile planet is overheating, drying up, flooding and getting increasingly toxic.

Too many people like me. Too many people commuting, air-conditioning, eating deep frozen delicacies and buying stuff we don't need wrapped in stuff that kills sea mammals. Too many people like me flying jet planes and defecating in water.

I even use diesel-generated electricity. Now is that a no-no or not! I never buy bio stuff because I like to know that what I eat or put on my skin has fulfils ISO norms. I do not mind manipulated genes or stem cell research.

And I like the 4x4. Our bikes and picnic gear goes to the back.
We drive around, park the car, ride a little, eat a little and take a little siesta somewhere on the mountains or the seaside.
Life is beautiful, delicious and good.

Meanwhile elsewhere we have the Chinese starting up 5 coal plants every day. We see the Indians multiplying like drunken rabbits and pretty soon getting a car, each one of the 1.2 billion of them.

We see the americans (5% of the world population) burning about 30% of the world fossile fuel consumption.

Plus, plus, plus.
So we do our little sins here on our little island with not too much soul-searching. While it lasts, it is very nice.
It won't be for long. I would gladly suffer to change it. But I cannot, in this matter I am powerless. 

BTW it is true that women are better drivers, doing about half of the kilometers but causing only one sixth of the accidents.
(I also like her smile)

carnivore!

young fine lion
by garbidz

This is a young lion I met in South Africa about one year ago.

I like his expression, it is as if he was approaching the punch line of a raunchy joke.

What DO lions joke about?

Cocky gnus? Zebra's tempers? Tipsy giraffes?

fears of dying, getting old

Lava rock is not the easiest surface to walk on. Or it depends. If it is level and dry, OK. But at the beach where the molten stone has boiled and bubbled with sea water, it gets very uneven. And very, very slippery when wet. The thing is, one does not see the difference. All of a sudden you just lose grip and off you go. It is the algae.

This morning, decided to capture the (overly magenta) morning light again I headed to le Gouffre, a lava rock formation about 10 minutes walk from here. With my Loewepro on my back and the tripod in hand as a walking stick I negotiated down the slippery rocks. Shot some photos of which I am not very proud artistically. Technically they are so about there. 

Climbing back up I was thinking all kinds of things. FLIP-CRASH! there I was, sitting in a pond of seawater, my knee twisted. Feeling like an idiot I took a deep breath, packed up my gear and -as I was sitting down already- took a pause.

These are the kinds of things you get when you do not appreciate your age.

You get carried away in you daydreams for a  split second and you get hit by the forces of gravity.

Some of the pictures turned out OK. But my leg hurts...

Brave shining Jodie

Jodie Foster has been my leading lady since the Taxi Driver. An intelligent beautiful woman who never seems to slip or fall. In the Brave One she pulls a brilliant performance playing a deeply traumatized woman trying to get back the life that used to be hers. Mugged to coma, boyfriend killed and dog stolen. This kind of stuff sort of gets the romance out of your repertoire.

Sideline: A cerebral trauma causing a long loss of consciousness probably leaves traces in the brain -even though psychomotor functions test normal, there are more subtle changes affecting emotion and values which impair social functions. I am pretty sure that Jodie Foster has done her homework here. Erica Bain had lost the connection to her feeling self with the exception of urge to survive.

What we have here is a psychopath. Her hands do not tremble when she shoots somebody. There is no guilt. there is no excitement. On the positive side of the emotional spectrum we can observe her laying her hand on the hand and the shoulder of the cop. Her neighbour's sympathy is bothersome unless useful in stitching her up after the encounter.

What if the heroine was somebody less sympathetic, less cultivated and not quite as beautiful as Jodie Foster? Now the spectator goes on sympathizing with the vigilante who has taken the law in her own hands. We cannot blame him, really, as even the Law falls in the same trap in the form of detective Mercer.

What is this film a picture of?
Are people getting fed up with mindless people committing mindlessly violent acts and getting away with it?
Are we willing to let our instincts rule as fear is lurking behind every corner?
Is law only for us, the Good Guys whereas bad boys can fool around as they wish?
But personally I do not see the film promoting dangerous ideas, it is just depicting them.

But who can be sure...maybe there is somebody somewhere who thinks: "Jody Foster can shoot people and get away with it, why couldn't I".
Chilly film.

sopranos

080307gbdz
Originally uploaded by garbidz

I hate photorealism. Actually, it is something I am going to take advantage of in putting my tummy back behind the belt where it belongs.

I hate my tummy.
The hat is nice, though, got it from Sydney.
This picture was taken near Capetown.
Go south, young bird!

morning light at Pointe du Sel

Learning curve with the wide angle zoom is steep. I just cannot seem to get close enough. Tilt and stop-down and what else. Experience with polafilter not good, the Hoya causes vignetting, colour is dull. Too cheap!

I think I know what I want now and it takes another early morning.

morning light shadow at Pointe du Sel

This one I uploaded from my Mac instead of blogging from Flickr. Playing around to see how these things unwind.

I got up 5 am to take an espresso after which I hoisted my equipment and took off to capture the morning light. It is elusive. It seems there are a few things to watch. One is the color balance. Canon seems to love rose and the pix turn out like strawberry ice cream. Another one is my thumbs. with the wide zoom they seem to be everywhere.
And third, the polafilter evidently has to be an expensive one.

Well, I got my flowers, and a couple of times the "zen" feeling of getting a lot of things right at the same time.

Still work to be done. Perfection is Out There.

Magenta!

too many times I missed the morning light...
admittedly there is too much magenta there and the rocks are slightly our of focus but this is what I got up so early for

troubles with the remote release after it got soaked at the Gouffre the other day

100% seems so far far far away

Garbidz_anse_311205

Garbidz_anse_311205
Originally uploaded by garbidz

discovering the marvels of the walking forest

and the frustrations of the world of Blogging

lazy

I got a somebody to do my work for me so I can be a nobody for a couple of weeks.

Horizontal is my kinda position.

Read up: Ancestors' Tale by Dawkins. Rich! Not to do on a full stomach, no way to keep eyes open. Just wondering, why do people hate Dawkins so much...is it because he is an aristocrat and not the slightest embarrassed about it. Or is it because he says what he thinks is right.

I like his writing, the man I do not know.

Alex Studies, Irene Pepperberg's story of herself and "her damned bird", the beloved Alex who (due to his anatomical restraints) managed to speak with humans without having neither Broca's or Werdnicke's areas of the cerebral cortex. Actually, no cortex at all but a hypothalamus. 

Elkhonon Goldberg's Executive Brain makes one think how a very small difference can make a big difference. Such as being a jew, for instance, in the Soviet Union and managing the big leap out of there. Other than that, I feel he has something very politically incorrect to say and to our delight, he lets us guess what it might be.

Immunologist-Nobelist turned neuroscientist Gerald Edelman gives a very brief presentation about where his study group now is with the machines that simulate human thought processes.

The reading is very heavy. Had I not read his (and Tononi's) A Universe of Consciousness, I would probably not have understood at all what he was about.

Basically, IF we have certain functions hard-wired and soft-wired in a certain fashion, the media becomes irrelevant and the construction can achieve consciousness-like properties.

Which takes a lot of BS out of the consciousness talk of today.

Certainly, no need for philosophers here, as they seem to be focusing on the wrong questions. Our language is not adequate to describe phenomena that are alien to our perception. (makes sense) So any verbal construction will be useless in trying to predict what an unknown entity might behave like. Whereas the Philosophers' Way is to declare things impossible if there are no words to describe them.

As if universe was dependent on our ability to comprehend it.

Anyway, I got very very wet and possibly destroyed my Canon D30 while trying to capture the evening swoosh by the seaside.

Worth it?

What do you think