Randomrants

For something different, this Missing From the Exif, is more about how a photo can tell a different story to the subject matter, the location or even the composition of the original image. To be fair to the original image this is about a 20% crop, to remove some sun flare and the fact the image was a little top heavy.

Yet, this is the image that I saw through the view finder, that is it is the image I wanted. The only treatment to the image was to crop in Lightroom, with a slight push to the blacks. The image was shot in Auto No Flash Mode into a very clear setting sun, with my Sigma 150-500mm Lens at 500mm.

The reason for the 500mm for portrait photos like this, the subject often doesn’t know you are getting the shot. I am also a big fan of portrait photography where a person tells a story, but that the person isn’t the story at the same time. Makes sense to me, so I’ll stick with that as an explanation.

The truth behind this photo is that, the frozen moment isn’t real. Not with the title that I have given it. Whilst this image does feel like someone pausing for a moment in thought and reflection, they weren’t. There was a young couple fishing off the pier, and he was just checking on some lines. He was in this position for only a few seconds.

Perhaps giving away the title of this image will remove some of the magic. For me, it might help you look at photography in more detail. Wonder what the image was, and what both the subject and the photographer are trying to say.

But yes, sometimes a good story, is just that.

The EXIF Data

and the image on Flickr:

Tags: Missing from the Exif by Wolf
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– Stantard Disclaimer First…

The HTC Incredible S was supplied by HTC and Optus as a review device, the terms and conditions of this review are to do a number of reviews over afew weeks, sharing my experience as I use the device. There are 5 HTC Incredible Reviewers, all whose content will appear first on the HTCAU Facebook Diary Page

Like the Telstra Desire Social Review Program from last year, I do get to keep the device once the review period is complete. ( As an aside, I am still using the HTC Desire that was part of the review program from last year )

————-

My First Post…….

Don’t you hate it when someone gets a toy before you do…. especially when you knew you were getting the same toy. Well that is how I felt when it was with dread that my new HTC Incredible S wasn’t going to arrive till after Easter. Still, I did manage to get lots of chores done instead of playing with my new phone all weekend, which I am sure my much better half wouldn’t have liked.

So finally today it has arrived….. hmmm… shiny… hmmm… fast…hmmm… big screen…. hmmm, no make that huge screen…. hmmm not as banged up as my HTC Desire is looking. (Note, I am hard on phones due in no small part to being clumsy, and whilst the Desire has a few dents, it is still going fine), hmmm… shiny.. oh wait Ialready said that.

First thing, plug in the very swanky power adapter to charge the phone up some more. This thing is tiny, a couple of prongs and a USB port, perfect for the road warrior (sorry not THAT road warrior, no phone reception beyond thunderdome) to chuck in their kit. Although to labour the point, within a few min of comparing the Desire to the Incredible S, it is a case of two phones enter one phone leaves. ( Thanks Desire, you have done me proud )

Admire the big screen, hmmm shiny big screen… sorry… Now, first things first pull the back off, has HTC fixed that annoying placement of the SD Card slot that was on the Desire, whew, yep, tick that. With the Sim card placed under the battery as well, you can just pick up a spare battery to chuck in your kit bag.

Next, log into my Gmail Account, press sync and oh look all my contacts on my phone done and dusted, well that was easy. Now I am bit of a power user, with custom screens, software etc all over the place, so I really haven’t had a proper play with the phone but Foursquare and Seesmic are installed already.

Unlike when I got my first Android phone, this isn’t a huge change for me, there are lots of things I am looking forward to testing, the maps, the camera, battery etc, which are all said to be improved.

I’ve only just had a quick play and whilst the new HTC Sense has moved some things around, most settings are where I expected them to be. For a quick play with this phone, it has ticked a number of boxes I was hoping it would… now to really get stuck in.

(P.S to whomever at HTC said make the soft buttons rotate at the bottom of the screen in Apps, a big thanks, I like it )

Tags: Uncategorized by Wolf
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Thought I would set up a Flickr Set for my fav place to go and get photos. The North Road Foreshore Park, Brighton. Having got a few in the last few days, which when writing the description I thought I should expand upon.

About a 10min drive from home, this is the first place I think of when interesting weather is approaching, it looks like a good sunset, or I need along shot of the city. Parking is easy ( apart from NYE ) and I know the area so well now.

Yes there are a lot of sunset shots, but that is the time I aim to get there, with winter and the end of daylight savings though, sunsets will be alot harder to get due to work etc. But it is a great place for long exposures of the city at night, even the big fireworks shows.

I hope you enjoy this slideshow and take inspiration from the fact that one simple location can provide so much variety.

Tags: Nikon D90, Photos by Wolf
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A huge issue I have with the conservative politics is the ” we want things like they were” argument. An argument, that came to the fore again with Jim Wallace stating his 96 year old father didn’t recognise Modern Australia, and the implication that this was bad.

Which part is bad, is the point of conjecture. A point that is never applied evenly or fairly, with examples always singled out around policy areasthat fit the agenda of the person making the statement. From Immigration Policy, Sexual Equality, Gay Rights and even Employment, everything was always better back in the day. Sometimes that day precedes before the people making these statements were even born.

Post WWI in Australia was a place that women had only recently got the vote, couldn’t run for Parliament and were a minority in most work places. ABC radio was not to come around until 1923. Two thirds of thecountries income came from wheat and wool only. And Kingsford Smith would not finished his first flying circuit of Australia till 1927. Modern medical treatments still hadn’t been invented yet, and the great depression still hadn’t come. Is this the time that people are harking for?

Perhaps the post WWII Australia is what people would like a country thatbecame founded on “Populate or Perish” (*Well if you are white that is o.k). ABC Radio was a major force, but it would 11 years afterthe war before we got ABC TV, so perhaps just radio and newspapers was allthe information that we needed. Aboriginals didn’t become citizens of Australia until 1949, and didn’t get the right to vote inQLD and WA until 1962. And finally the world now had Penicillin, which hadjust kicked off in 1944 to mass manufacturing, so at least a simple infection wouldn’t kill you. Is this the time people want back.

Rushing forward into the post Vietnam era, we have TV ( and colour is coming soon), modern suburbs and pretty decent health care. Of course, we didn’t have medicare, equal pay for women is still (and still is) a long way off, but at least now universities were free for most. So perhaps this is the period that people are harking back for.

Now of course, we have the internet, instant global communications, cheap and reliable interstate and international airtravel, health care that even 20 years ago would have been considered miraculous with PET/MRI scans finding diseases that were untreatable not that long ago. Of course we can’t treat lung cancer or asbestosis to 100% but society has taken stepsto cut these and simailar issues out.

Our biggest export is now our dirt, but we do have a large number of Nobel Prizes to our name for many things and we do as a country lead the worldin a number of aspects when it comes to technology. Our biggest trade partners are also countries that were excluded by the White Australia Policy, China, Japan, South Korea.

So which do we give up. To get where we are today is a journey made of all of these parts. Modern birth control and education has liberated women to the highest roles in the land and yet we need to go back because people don’t recognise the country.

I don’t like some parts of modern Australia, but I do like health care, science, technology and all the benefits that they have brought. Perhaps those harking back for “simpler” times could list all the things they are willing to give up, I think the list would be pretty short.

Tags: Annoyances by Wolf
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Tags: Annoyances by Wolf
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Now, to be honest, this is a device I have been waiting for, for quite some time,and a device Mrs Wolfcat has been waiting for even longer. So am coming into this review with high expectations of what I want out of this Tablet/Slate. Previous to this Asus Slate, I still have my Asus R2H which whilst very long in the tooth, still runs as a good car computer these days.

So, I’ll lay out what my expectations of the device were, so that the rest of the review has a framework. 1) I wanted a full computer in slate format, running full windows (not just an app. store environment), 2) it had to be light, easy to use, have connection options ( SD card and USB ), 3) be able to run lightroom, photoshop etc out on the road, and 4) for Mrs Wolfcat it had to be a Wacom tablet for her to draw on.

First impressions after a few hours of playing with the device are wow, this isn’t a toy. When it takes <15 min to install the full Photoshop CS5 Design suite and when I launch PS CS5 and it does so in under 4 seconds, the Eee Slate feels like a half decent computer already. Running a Win7 setup at home, it was a breeze to set up networking, to enable transfer of some of the install files etc which I needed.

The touch screen is very responsive,

(even if I do feel that Windows isn’t registering the clicks where I think I have pressed). This may be a bit of me ” training vs device ” training, nothing too worrisome just a touch annoying ( pun intended). The onscreen mini keyboard that pops up via Windows on input dialogues works well, and can be dragged around the screen – unlike the “full” keyboard that appears when you press the dedicated keyboard button. The mini keyboard can also switch to handwriting mode, which is pure voodoo. My handwriting is not unlike a drunk chicken taking too much LSD whilst eating magic mushrooms and yet Win 7 still translates it perfectly without any training.

The Wacom Digitiser however is a precision instrument. There are some issues with CS5 64bit Photoshop and the pen, a driver issue from what I have found on the net, and whilst Mrs Wolfcat hasn’t done a full drawing test on the Slate yet, her first impressions were that it is responsive enough with fine enough control. The internal pen holder locks securely and should lessen the chances of losing the pen (if and only if you are the sort of tidy person who puts it away).

The supplied Art Rage Studio 3 program is a great tool for artists with very impressive blend modes and supplied brushes. This means that the Slateis out of the box installed with one of the killer apps that it is designed for. The device is amazingly bloatware free, with a trial version of Office 2010 the only other software installed. No extraneous antivirus/browsers/adware etc software at all.

Having shown the Eee Pc Slate to a few designers, their reaction was, wow, a portable Cintiq Tablet, without the need for a notebook, the tablet, the big power supply etc. This is the primary reason we brought the Slate, and for that, on first impressions it works a treat.

Video playback looks fantastic on the screen. To test video playback I ripped a Bluray disk (yes one I own) as a mp4 file (size 5.5gb), placed it on a share drive and pulled it over a Wifi-G connection. There were only minor issues with playback or stuttering during fast moving scenes. Seeking, pausing etc on fullscreen were all seamless. I’ve yet to do a full battery run down to see if the device will last the “2.4 hours” (compared to the 4 hours battery life for standard use) it is rated to for 1080p playback, but at least I know it can certainly handle the video.

I’ve quickly tested the HDMI output which worked perfectly. It is a pity that the device doesn’t ship with a mini to full HDMI converter. However it is not a core function for me, because you still need a HDMI cable with you and access HDMI screens to run presentations on larger screens, and I don’t do a lot of this kind of work.

The supplied bluetooth MS keyboard is very nice, but not without a few issues. Why did Asus think it was a good idea to put a portable keyboard with a swanky device that is 3cm bigger than the slate itself? It means thatyou have to buy a bag for the keyboard’s length, not the Slates. Possibly this was a rush to market thing, but this really irks me. The Slate comes with a professional looking folio, which folds back to support the Slate in a vertical or horizontal arrangement. Yet has no accommodation for holding the keyboard. The basic keyboard is missing some of those nice notebook function keys for screen brightness etc, which would have made it a lot more functional when using the Slate at a desktop computer – which it is very capable of doing.

There are a few other issues with the Slate itself. The screen rotate feature is basically useless – taking around 5 seconds for the screen to switch orientation. Lock the switch now and leave it that way until a driver update comes out. It does not have a GPS, hey I like that kind of thing and would use it. It only has USB2.0 ports, where as USB3.0 ports, with portable drives now on the market, would make more sense. But at least the SD card slot is SDXC complaint and having 2xUSB means I can run all of the accessories I have at the moment. It would have also been great if the Slate had a SIM slot, as the slate really is a mobile office device and having to plug in a USB stick or tether a phone is annoying. Also missing fromthe side is an Ethernet port. And if Asus are targeting this device to the corporate environment, including a USB to Ethernet adaptor would be a really smart move.

I purchased this at Harvey Norman, as they have an exclusive on the device for 4 weeks from what I can tell, pity really.

The staff at Harvey Norman had no idea really what it was I was buying, and could offer nothing in the “sales pitch” beyond reading off the box. Both HN and Asus need to learn how to do their sales better by training their staff in the products that they carry. What’s more, with the device now in Australia, why haven’t Asus updated their local website with this product?

Having run the Slate on power for a good number of hours, it will sit on your lap just fine because the Slate doesn’t seem to get too warm. Likewise the supplied power transformer remains relatively cool, is not a heavy brick, and is a very svelte device with the added bonus of a USB charger built in. This means you can charge your phone etc faster directly from the transformer than from the USB port on the computer. A very nice finishing touch that reduces the amount of power devices you have to carry.

Win Experience Index ( 1.0-7.9 Scale )

Specifications ( as from Asus – with additional comments from me )

When coming to this device I wanted a lot from it, and perhaps I don’t have all that I want, but the one thing I don’t have is buyers regret. This is the first cab of the rank for me in slate format full computing and once a few little issues are bedded down the future does look great.

If you want a lightweight full slate computer which boots from sleep in under 2 seconds with enough grunt to run Photoshop, full Office, Flash and all your web plug-ins with nearly any bit of Win7 software for less that $1500 AUD you really can’t go wrong.

(P.S it only comes in white and looks quite nice as well )

(P.P.S undoubtedly I’ll have more to say about the EP121 in the next few weeks…. but for now I must had it over to Mrs Wolfcat… sob sob sob )

Tags: Uncategorized by Wolf
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Yeah, one of the last things I was asked to do for the ABC before I left was to supply images for an ABC Environment ad. Finally it has begun airing.

( Video has been removed :- ( )

Do follow the kind people at @ABCEnvironment they are really nice ( and I mean that and not just ’cause they got my photos for free….., I just wish I had got the tree frog photo, that last image is great, but it isn’t mine )

Here are the shots that are on RedBubble ( In order )

I didn’t say which images were in or out, just that they could choose from my Flickr collection… and they managed to choose a few that are also on Redbubble as well…. So if you like the shots go and buy them….

For more info on the commercial visit the ABC Environment Blog

Tags: Uncategorized by Wolf
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