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Join us as we sail around the world - share our joy, experiences, trials and tribulations as we proceed.
It's lonely out here! So please comment as we love to hear from you.

MAY
10
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Sights from Salvador to Recife

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2614 Hits
APR
09
1

Salvador Sights & Scenes

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Love the photos! Thanks so much for sharing.
Friday, 10 April 2015 22:37
2030 Hits
NOV
22
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GoPro Hero 4

We received a call from ORMS, a Cape Town photographic dealer that our GoPro 4 camera finally arrived and is ready for collection. We also bought a couple of other items when we went to collect the camera. One of these is a handy GoPro remote with a range of 180 meters (600 feet). This will come in very handy when taking pictures from kite flying far up in the sky.

GoProHero4

  2893 Hits
2893 Hits
NOV
14
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Cold and Cloudy

We did not leave the yacht today and spend most of the time indoors catching up on todo lists, paperwork, phoning suppliers and a couple of other minor stuff. Cape Town is the place where you will experience all four seasons within one single day and today was no exception. This afternoon is cold, overcast with woolly clouds covering the upper mountain peaks. No matter my eternal fight with the "Fucked Up Half Dead's" and other frustrations, this remains a beautiful place. I cheated a bit (OK, quite a lot) with the photo below - I did some HDR image editing adding some drama to the picture.

ColdCloudy

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3339 Hits
MAY
10
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Tilt shift photography

You may have heard about it before. Perhaps you’ve seen a tilt-shift lens or an old-fashioned camera with a bellows. Cameras and lenses like these can be used to shift the most focused part of your image, resulting in some interesting effects. One of them is the “fake miniature” image below. So, if you haven’t heard about tilt-shift photography yet, then consider this your introduction.

Tilt-shift photography has to do with the ability to tilt or raise the lens in relation to the back of the camera where the image is focused. When you tilt the lens, you’re pointing it at a slightly different angle from the normal straight approach, and when you shift the lens, you’re moving it upwards or downwards to achieve the desired effect. When photography was first invented, all cameras were tilt-shift cameras. The view camera allowed you to manipulate the end with the lens, either by tilting it upward/downward, moving it side to side, or moving it up or down. This design was common in the view cameras of the late 1800s, and it persisted until the advent of the compact camera. At that point, adding a tilt/shift mechanism to existing lenses was simply too costly for the average consumer who was unlikely to use it.

To do tilt-shift photography these days, you need to get a special tilt-shift lens. This lens attaches to your digital SLR and allows you to change the view angle or shift the lens upward and downward to achieve the desired effect. Architectural photographers benefit the most from tilt-shift photography. It comes in handy whenever they’re trying to take a picture of a building from ground level. If you don’t angle the camera upwards from this perspective, you won’t get the entire building in the frame. However, if you do tilt the entire camera upwards, the top of the building bends backwards and its straight lines no longer appear straight.

To remedy this problem, architectural photographers use a tilt-shift lens. By controlling the angle of the lens, they can fit the entire building into the scene while keeping the building’s straight lines straight. Tilt-shift photography is also associated with miniature faking, a technique used to make ordinary scenes appear as though they have been captured with a macro lens. To get this effect, you use a tilt-shift lens in conjunction with a wide aperture to create an unusually small depth of field. Subjects closer to, and further away from the small focus point range will be blurry. It appears as though you’re looking down at a miniature model, whereas you are really looking at the real thing. The extremely shallow depth of field creates this effect, making you think the image was taken with a macro lens. Today you can create most of these effects (including building straightening) in Corel PhotoPaint and Photoshop.

The photographs below is of Houtbay and the first photograph shows the miniature tilt shift effect done in Corel PhotoPaint. The second photograph is the original image without any effects.

HoutBayTiltShift2

HoutBayTiltShift1

  2281 Hits
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2281 Hits
MAY
08
0

PhotoMosiac

So here is a poster size photo mosaic I made of Sue. Using more than 3200 different images, I painstakingly created this photo mosaic. Each photo was reduced to a small size (image tile) and I then took one image tile at a time, color matched it to the original image of Sue and created this photo mosaic in the same way one would build a jigsaw puzzle. This was months of fine detailed work to build this single photomosaic. Jeez, this was a lot of hard work - time for a break! Time for a margarita!

Really? No! Just bullshitting you ... ha ha.
I used Artensoft Photo Mosaic Wizard to create this photo mosaic. So, no hard work by me and it was all done within a couple of minutes. Yes, there are more than 3200 image tiles used to create the photomosaic. Artensoft Photo Mosaic Wizard Photo mosaic maker builds true photo mosaics by carefully choosing, matching, and fitting each individual tile to form the master image. The photomosaic software does that without resorting to tricks such as blending cell images into a master image with color overlays. Instead, it solves a complex mathematical equation of fitting cell images the best possible way to produce stunning and very realistic mosaics.

Here is the ORIGINAL PHOTO the mosaic is based upon.

SueMosiac

  2361 Hits
2361 Hits