Ichimusai's Place

Release-4

Golden opportunity for city shots

The last time was quite some time ago now and the pictures I took then was done with a really really crappy HP camera that I gave to a friend later on. This camera is not really doing it justice but the pictures here shows the type of potential pictures you may get from this point of view.

The tax office building is no longer the tax office. It has moved out to the suburbs and instead the house has become living quarters for students. The full set is here.

Digital Workflow for developing pictures

Things have been rather slow on this site for quite some time now. Five weeks of holiday and then the recent merger at work is less inspiring of actually doing something. But there are a few things that are going on. I have for example completely changed my digital workflow when it comes to working with the pictures I take. Working with digital negatives or RAW files when shooting is more time consuming but the result is much more interesting than before and now I can also work in automatic geotagging of the pictures and this is the way it works.

The equipment I use is mainly my trusty old Nikon D70s camera which I carry pretty much everywhere. I also use a GPS-receiver from Magellan, specialized for hiking and outdoor activity, this is very different from your ordinary car satellite navigation system, this unit has a high resolution outdoor map plotter and you can buy very detailed maps for it. In fact they are so detailed that you can zoom down to each building, they have topographic information and all the local names.

When I go out I start the GPS receiver. It will keep tracking my movements as long as it is turned on. When done for the day I can save this to a track log. When connected to my computer this tracklog will be loaded into a software called Magellan MapSend Lite which is a freeware software that can be downloaded from Magellan web site. This software allows me to make any adjustments necessary to the trail from the log file and then I can save it in GPX format which will be necessary later on. Note that depending on the settings the GPX file will contain time stamps in UTC (Zulu time) rather than your local time. In the summer Sweden is +2 hours from UTC and we will have to use this later on.

The next step is to download the pictures from the camera memory cards and import them. I use Adobe Lightroom for this. The images are then imported to the image bank, they are named, tagged, the good ones are selected for further processing and then they are developed. When finished they are saved as developed JPEG pictures complete with the meta information provided from tagging in Lightroom.

Afther this the step is to add geographical location information to the images, a process also known as "geotagging". Geotagging inserts a new EXIF header in the picture containing the longitude and latitude where the photo was taken. Because the time when each shot was taken is recorded in the photos by the camera we can now match this with our trail from the GPS receiver! To do this manually requires a bit of labour but fortunately there is a great software that allows us to do this automatically.

This software is called GPicSync and will synchronize the location data from the GPS trail into your geocoded pictures. It will interpolate and it can also add certain other meta information to your pictures such as local names where it was taken and so on. GPicSync can also make a Google Earth trail showing exactly where your pictures where taken. This is so awesome...

The last step is to upload the geotagged, marked, selected and developed pictures to Flickr using Flickr Uploadr, a freeware program downloadable from the Flickr site. The result can be shown as here. Don't forget to check out my map on Flickr it will show you the geolocation of my shots also...

New Pictures

During the summer I have had some time to take some new pictures. So therefore my Flickr account has been updated with some of them and more are to come.

Getting a bike

I am getting myself a new bike this week, I have not had one in many years so I am just gonna go down to the bike store and get some professional help. I hope it will be not too costly, most bikes that I fancy seems to be in the range of EUR 200-400 anyway which is affordable after this years tax-return.

But then again I suspect that there are other things that will also have to buy, like it probably comes without gear shifter, tyres and saddle so they are likely that you will have to fork out extra for, that's how things goes this day, isn't it?

Then I will have to get a GPSr holder for my handheld navigator so I can go looking for those Geocaches using my new bike.

CoLinux, peaceful coexistence on your desktop

I tried out CoLinux today, which is a very interesting distribution. It consists of some windows drivers and daemons necessary to boostrap a virtual machine running a vmlinux kernel inside the windows operating system, very cool for those who wish to take advantage of Linux but don't want to mess with dual-booting their system.

CoLinux can run pretty much any distribution, just point it to the ISO of a live file system, CD or DVD style and then boot it up. It will kickstard the kernel and then go on to boot up as any Linux.

It was much faster than I believed it could be and although I only tested it on an old Gentoo live cd I will definitely test it on more interesting systems later on. I believe my next distro will be Scientific Linux, it looks really good by now.

US harden its stand with greenhouse gas emissions

Unfortunately it hardly comes as a surprise that the US government is not accepting the new proposals put forth by the G8 members on greenhouse gas emissions. The proposal would be quite costly for the US who does not seem prepared in any way to back down on the fossil fuel they use.

Hardly surprising in the light that it was also one of the few industrialized nations that definitely rejected the Kyoto protocol that many European nations are now working hard to ratify.

Is the American economy really that fragile that any environmental work is too expensive? The biggest user of fossil fuel in the world needs to take some responsibility for that use. The way forward is to find alternative, not securing the oil wells in the middle east countries.

BBC reports in this article that Tony Blai failed to persuade the US officials to alter their stance. "The treatment of climate change runs counter to our overall position and crosses 'multiple red lines' in terms of what we simply cannot agree to" says the American response.

Germany declares hacking tools illegal

Germany has recently updated their laws and made hacking illegal (that is cracking for those who still has a version of the old Jargon File). This law also includes making "hacking tools" also illegal which puts any decent system administrator in a dubious position with the law. It does not seem like they recognize that the white hats are using the exact same tools as the black hats are to test the security of their own network. In no way can trying to test your own network security be considered illegal?

Or can it? If the possession of these tools is enough to call the blue on you, then it would be definitely interesting. What about the Linux distributions, some of them are put together in Germany, will they also be at peril now because they come normally with the "hacking tools" pre-installed?

And what is a hacking tool? Anything more advanced than what the Windows XP user interface offers? Maybe Ping and ARP and other similar commands that always was a part of handling the TCP/IP settings and network on a computer will be rendered illegal tools in the future.

My hope is that everyone can see the folly of such law and that this law will never really be used and then removed from the books. Breaking into someone elses network can with good rights be illegal under current laws, but to call network analyzers and other similar tools for "hacking tools" is just outright stupid. They can not have asked even a simple network technician about this before it made the books.

Read more here in the Register's article.

Relic

It was a very long time since I read something that was so difficult to put down. This book is a gripping suspense from the first to the last page, the story is extraordinarily well told and there are few other books that I would wish to become films more than this book.

Several nights now I have had to force myself to let go before I go to sleep 2 in the morning because I just want to finish another chapter. My pocket has 474 pages but the way it is written you just plow through it. There is not a single moment when it loses the tempo or becomes a passage before the next event grips in, there is always some little twist the drives the story forward.

Now I have to get going on the follow-up, "Reliquary", and see if it is as suspending as this book was. Highly recommended. A 5/5 on the scale for reading as a holiday book.

In the worlds largest museum of natural history there is a lot of things that goes on. But then strange things start to happen and when two boys get lost in the basement and are found murdered people realise that there is no ordinary thing that goes on. Some of the most brilliant scientists discover that the murderer is no ordinary human killer, but something far, far worse than you could possibly imagine.

Add to this the grand opening of the most costly and well directed exhibition ever mounted in a natural museum and many hundred of people on the opening night coming in to get a peek of the "Superstition" exhibition before it opens for the general public and you may have a diaster on your hands.

A power outage and then something nocturnal stirs in the shadows and a mad race begins for survival - but also to understand what IS this thing, where does it come from and how can we survive it?

Set in the scariest building possibly imaginable in New York this riveting detective-suspense-horror story just more and more firmly grips you as you turn to yet another page where the pace just increase one more notch. Just when you think you can not take more comes an unexpected twist of the story that sure makes the bed for a follow-up...

A few pictures from Kallhäll

The beach is still empty and there are people there waiting for the true summer to arrive. Within a few weeks this place will be full of people bathing and having a barbecue and lots of other things.

But still the water is a little cold and only the toughest are actually taking a swim.

Still it was a nice walk down the beach that we did one day me and Jeanette in the weekend. If you want to see where this spot is, make sure you check out the Yaho Image maps in this area where you can find more shots because all my images in the future should be geotagged with the location they were shot in.

The Capture of Light

Click on the images for a larger version.

Basically you can say that photography is about one thing and one thing only, the capture of light. No matter if you do photographic film or use a digital camera with a memory card there is one thing that the camera needs and this is light.

When I first started taking pictures I had the idea that light was light was light. But soon after I started using a real camera instead of the cheapest point and shoots I realized that light comes in may different qualities and they are all different and good for different subjects and different situations.

Natural light is almost always to be preferred but in some cases light created in a studio can be equally good but there is something magical about when the natural light just hits the subject right. The picture here is from Öland, it is the northern most part of the island and it was taken just after a shower of rain around 6.40pm. The light was fanstastic at the time and although some parts of this shot is blown out in the high lights it is one of my favourites from this trip.

Catching a landscape like this can be very difficult, there is always a risk that it comes out flad, grey and dull, and it definitely did in some of the pictures that really show off the grey sky, grey sea and grey stone. But immediately when this light filtered down through the sky it was the photo moment I had waited for.

The shutter time was 1/250 s and the aperture set to f/8 which is my normal setting for this lens, focal lenght 18mm using the Nikkor AF-S VR 18-200mm f/3,5-5,6G ED which I carry around a lot these days. Love to be able to go from wide angle 18mm to 200mm telezoom in one go.

I also used a circular polarized filter to minimize the unwanted reflections from the waves and this worked so well that you can actually see through the water close to the shore even though it was taken in an angle of close to 30 degrees which normally reflects the sky more than it allows you to see through.

The second picture here was shot in the same location but aimed in a different direction. This is aimed towards the east showing more of the shore but the light is quite different. Even though you may not notice when you are standing there later on you realize that the light is changing by the minute here and that when you are in the place your eyes may be fooled by this.

The second picture is taken pretty much with the same setup but slightly different, 1/180s and f/6,7 18mm to the first one just a couple of minutes after the first shot.

The pink hue is from the setting sun on the horizon and it was filtered through the clouds here it contrasts against the green algae and the murky looking waters as well as the stony beach and I really like this picture also.

If you like it you are more than welcome to register on Flickr and comment this picture.

28 new planets found

Being the astronomy-interested nerd that I am this article caught my eye today. A team from the University of California has discovered no less than 28 different new planets outside our solar system, something of a record in itself.

Quoting from the article they say that "The sun and Earth is not a rarity" estimating that there may be at least 20-30 million solar system within our galaxy, The Milky Way, alone. It seems that a family of planet sized bodies orbiting a star is quite a common occurance indeed.

If that is true then this greatly increase the likelihood for Earth-like planets (class M planets, you StarTrek buffs) that may support life as we know it.

The newly found planets were reported at the semiannual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Honolulu (nice place for meetings) that increase the number of known planets outside our solar system called "exoplanets" to 236.

Several of the known exoplanets are members of multi-planet systems. Several planets that reminds about the planets in our solar system has also been found. However most of the systems found so far does not have the circular types of orbits that we habe but rather elongated elliptical orbits that makes the climate on these planets vary a lot with the orbit.

Our instruments are not good enough to directly observe the planets, but the careful observation of wobbling and dimming of stars as the planet passes in front of them is enough to provide the scientists with enough clues to even determine if there is a rocky core and water on the planetary body.

Bible thumpin creationists

When it comes to the creationists tries to appeal to peoples feelings, ignorance, fears and so on my contempt knows no limit really there are few things that gets me so upset as listening to what creationists say about science and other "ungodly" things.

One of their pet arguments for example is that the Theory of Evolution is just that - a theory and therefore they say it is not proven and we can assume other theories, such as God Did It and so on on the same merit. This just appeals to people without the faintest clue of science of course and to illustrate this fact someone created this fabulous picture.

The truth of the matter of course is that the Theory of Evoloution, or more properly the curent body of theories encompassed in the Evolutionary sciences today is both facts and a theory.

Think of it as gravity. Gravity is a fact (the earth sucks) and objects do fall down when dropped. It is also the name for the theory to explain what is happening. In fact there are several theories describing what goes on when we talk about gravity although none are perfect they do have some things in common:

• They make testable predictions
• They can be disproved

This is the whole thing about science. You do not prove things in science except in the most theoretical disciplines such as math and logic, what you do is you construct hypothesies, test them with experiments and those who still stands when you are done may form a theory.

A theory which is fundamental to some physical principle is sometimes referred to as a law. Evolution is too complex to be easily referred to as a law, but it follows several well known laws such as the laws of thermodynamics which is some of the most fundamental principles we know about this universe.

We have three main laws and then a "zeroth" law which has been added also for reference:

• Law 0: If two thermodynamic systems are in thermal equilibrium with a third, they are also in thermal equilibrium with each other.
• Law I: In any process, the total energy of the universe remains constant.
• Law II: There is no process that, operating in a cycle, produces no other effect than the subtraction of a positive amount of heat from a reservoir and the production of an equal amount of work.
• Law III: As temperature approaches absolute zero, the entropy of a system approaches a constant.

Tamron 90mm f/2,8 macro

2007-05-24 in the late evening

I have now had this lens for some time and it is a lovely piece of glass. Not only is it excellent for macro shots with shallow depth of fields but it is also a favourite portrait lens because you can distance yourself a little and still get those gorgeous shots filling the whole frame. Portrait shots seems to always benefit from the subject NOT having the camera straight in their face.

I have therefore created this group on Flickr for everyone that is shooting with this lens regardless of the camera house model. We welcome all photographs taken by this lens and if you are just interested in seeing some really nice macros then you are of course welcome too.

Check it out here.