Merrie Yuletide!

 
A Yuletide Blessing

Long is the night and the stars are bright;
Cold is the wind, and sighing.
Bare are the trees -- there's snow in the breeze;
Silent, the land... but not dying:
Sleep is the cure when one must endure --
Lord, knight, lady and fool:
Here is the night when back comes the light:
Blessed be all, upon Yule.

ooOOooOOooOOooOOooOOoo

Merrie Yuletide to all!

This is such a bittersweet festival to me, because the Winter Solstice also marks the anniversary of Mom's passing. And this year, it's more significant than ever. I can't believe that it's been seven years since she passed over. Seven years. She was born just short of the Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere, and she passed on the very eve of Yule, in the south. I told her story here, so in this post I'll just say that I miss her, and always will. Wherever you are, Mom, I hope you're happy.

This year, we decided to celebrate the festival properly, with a small tree and some little gifts, and a midwinter feast. Nothing vastly elaborate, but something to break up the winter, which is turning out to be very cold indeed. Most of the continent is in the grip of an acutely chilly snap -- temperatures well below zero in the early morning, as far north as Queensland --

Not my photo!!! Borrowed from ABC News, to make my point, because (duh) I don't live in Qld. 

 --a nd there's really no answer to that, is there? Well, actually, there are several answers, but most of them involve jokes and the practise of banana bending, and there's not especially appropriate. So.

It's been a very long time indeed since I posted regularly to any blog. Life has been a bit rough, but I'll set down enough here to at least patch the gap a little. March and April saw me insanely busy. I did a stupendous amount of work on a new website, and as a consequence neglected others. It still isn't 100% complete, so I'm not (yet) going to link to it. Then in May, Dave and I got Covid a second time ... and everything sort of...ran off the rails. Long Covid is no joke, and there is no other explanation for what's going on with my health. I'm just exhausted, achy and confoozelated, a lot of the time. What can you say? I have eight tonnes of projects waiting to be tackled, and I don't have the energy, inspiration or creative zeal to sink my teeth into anything. No gumption. I hope this will change soon, but right now I'd have to say that the last four months or so have zipped past in a blur. It's not just this blog I've neglected ... I haven't posted a line to Facebook in almost as long!

In fact, Facebook is rather a sore spot for me at the moment. The AI driving it rubbed me the wrong way just once too often. I was getting time bans (which I believe they call Facebook Jail) for NOTHING I had done, including a lifetime ban from something they call the "FB Marketplace," for "contravening their community standards" -- which was a bloody good trick, because I have never in my life even seen this FB Marketplace thing, much less clicked a mouse on/in it. Huh. The last time, FB banned me for a day for something I did "yesterday," when I hadn't even looked at a ruddy computer for a week!!! I saw that cheerful little message when I turned on my phone to get the time at 7:05am, one morning in March ... and I walked away from Facebook. Should I go back? Maybe. Will I? Possibly. If I have a good enough reason.

Actually, the good enough reason is probably sitting under the Yuletree right now, in wrapping paper. A new camera. Canon. Mirrorless, pro-level, with two lenses -- a digital revamp of the old SLR tech of yesteryear. This time, as a new chapter in my patchwork career as a photographer opens up, I intend to go out there as a landscape photographer, because I'll be able to capture wide shots in the equivalent of 4K resolution. The Lumix superzoom bridge cameras I've been using for the last five or six years are dandy for what they are -- I wanted to go birding at the time, and did -- but they have their limitations. I actually quit photographing landscapes, because the 1200mm zoom generally yields wide shots of such low resolution, in poor-light conditions, the work looks more like finger-painting than photography!

So ... if this pans out (and I'll soon know), I shall be able to go back to signing off and watermarking as "Jen Downes Photography," which is a luxury/arrogance I haven't permitted myself in years now. We'll see. But one thing is for sure: this is going to be fun.

So ... Merrie Yuletide to all!

And for myself, I should be making resolutions for the new year that begins as we pass the midwinter solstice. Get past the Covid blues ... be more creative ... write my own stories, as well as "just" editing for Mike (which is also tremendously gratifying, and a lot of fun) ... try and find some genuine optimism for the future ... get out there with the new Canon mirrorless camera, and capture this state in Ultra HD. 

There. Goals to strive for as we go forward.  

Happy New Camera, 2020!

So -- where's the art? Is this a 3D art blog, or what? Yes it is ... or was ... and will be again; but first comes the new computer. And before that comes about $2,500 in "spare cash." It'll happen at the end of the year, and then -- yep, art. Now? No can do. The desktop that handles DAZ, Terragen. Bryce and all the rest is staggering. You can't do 3D art without a powerful computer! We'll get there, but we're not there yet, guys. Patience.

But what I could do was replace the old camera!

After a year or more of bemoaning the fact that my Fuji HS50 has almost completely given up the ghost, well ... it was time to get a new camera. I've been researching them, looking at reviews, trying to figure out where the "sweet spot" lay, between needing something good, not having unlimited dollars to invest, and also needing to buy something that was light to carry about. So --

All things taken into consideration, I wound up with the Lumix TZ90, from Panasonic ... at at $438, it was an absolutely amazing deal. Then, there's its Leica optics, and its bells and whistles --

Ahem! Suffice to say, I'm having a lot of fun. More fun than I've had with photography for well over a year, because I knew that most of the shots I wanted to get, the HS50 would spoil. (Almost everything had stopped working on it: light metering was off by a mile, and I'm sure its focusing system was way off too: you'd pull focus "here," with your chosen object right in the crosshairs, and it would focus about ten degrees of arc away. Not fun. Not fun at all.)

So, in the last year or so I haven't done very much with photography; and I've missed it. The hobby gives you a reason to get out there and hike around, go the extra "nine yards" in order to come back with superb pictures. What's the point, if the camera is only going to spoil them? So --

The biggest step was making the decision to set down a great wad of cash. With that decision out of the way, the next was to work out which camera to buy ... and you really are spoiled for choice these days, no matter your price bracket. I think I spent about ten hours, hunting down individual cameras, reading reviews, comparing features.

And it all came down to a choice between a Canon PowerShot, and the Lumix TZ90. They are comparable; but the Lumix does a great deal more. It has those Leica optics, and a 3" touch screen display, plus a 'finder ... which the PowerShot doesn't have. The decision turned out to be the right one for me...

...I know, I demand a lot of a camera. I've used Fuji for well over ten years now -- had four of them; but the last one was surprisingly fragile, and I was honestly shocked when it started to break down in just a couple of years. I think I noticed the first "hmmm" moments after the second year. This time around, I've made the promise to myself, to be ultra-careful with the new Lumix, and deliberately NOT take liberties with it. Don't knock it. Don't let it hit anything.

Sooo I've just got myself a spare battery plus charger (there's another hundred bucks!), and have also ordered a camera bag, which will fit the Lumix snugly, not let it move about, and damage itself...

With any luck the camera bag will arrive before Dave and I take off for the Limestone Coast at the end of this month. If not, I'll have to MacGyver something to protect the camera on the road. I'm looking forward enormously to the trip. We haven't been to Mount Gambier in eight years. Hoping to get good weather for this one ... the last trip (our second to the Grampians), we had rotten luck with the weather for most of the time. On that trip, the HS50 misbehaved so much, I ended up using the phone for almost everything -- and every image in that blog post I just linked to was done with the phone -- an UmiDigi something or other, with 14MP and a lot of bells and whistles. Okay, I was impressed with it. But I still need a proper, functioning camera...

My other hope is that my health picks up a bit before we leave. I'm basically going one day at a time right now, and while I know I need to see a doctor and find out what's wrong ... I also know what the tests are going to be like. I'm putting them off as long as possible, because I just don't want to go there. Not ready yet. I'll know when I am. So --

There you have it! Happy New Camera, 2020! This is going to be big fun ... in fact, the fun has already begun. Pictures here were taken at Belair NP, Punchbowl Lookout, and in the back garden right here at home. Monday, we went to Onkaparinga Wetlands, and although the sky was far from blue and the sun far from bright, I got lovely pictures, which you can see on another post, on my travel blog, right here!

Reflections on the water. With ducklings.

Well ... fudgesickles, as Dave says. A couple of hours' excursion to the national park turned into a priceless photo op, with the most amazing stuff right in front of the camera ... and it turned out, the light levels were too low for a compact digital to produce more than a handful of good pictures, counterbalanced by a huge amount of dross headed for the bin. So here I am turning some of the shots into art, by messing about in Irfanview...

Yeah, okay, the art is dandy, but I'd rather have had a swag of top-notch photos! There were ducklings, and parrots, and miners, and a darter ... birding is a hobby of ours. On the rare occasion when the camera actually got its tiny little brain around the job, I came up with pictures like this:

That's a darter, in the "above" shot, and the magpie and miners in the "below" shot. You can't imagine the shots that got away. Sigh. Well, as someone wise once said, "You can't get a coconut every time." So ... let's put some of the lesser dross through the process and resurrect them as art:

These were all done in Irfanview, just pushing and pulling color values, over-driving contrast, blurring and sharpening. Some really neat results. But ... oh, the opportunity that just went walkies! Better luck next time. And next time the light levels are low, I'll click the whole thing over to full manual ... cut some of the technology out of the loop and do it the old fashioned way.

The Return of Jade -- back in 2015, starting out early ... with attitude!

In the immortal words of Samwise Gamjee, "I'm back." It's been seventeen months since I posted here ... and sure, time has flown by, and life has been "interesting" in the worst sense of the word; but it's time to get back to doing what I do (or did), pick up the pieces and start again. So, with a brand new year and some attitude, here we go.

LuxRender ... a study in light and shadows...

...and the detail from the full render. Lux Render is amazing.

In the last year and a half I've done a truckload of art -- I just haven't had the opportunity (or energy, or health, or spirit ... but we won't go there) to post any of it. Instead, I'll be posting the images a couple at a time as we chug through 2015; and to give you half an idea of what's ahead, check out these montages, below. (You can pull these up at much larger size, incidentally.)

I don't do much in good ol' DAZ Studio anymore, for the simple reason that the render engine (a too-lite, "free" version of 3DLite) is inadequate to the task of producing really top-notch stuff. I only use Studio 3 for composing the scene; then it's shipped out to LuxRender for a render taking between six hours and two days. The results in LuxRender are more than worth the time. On very, very rare occasions the DAZ Studio raytrace will do the job, so you will still see a few raytraces in these posts; but they're few.

Along the way, I've just about managed to tame Bryce 7 Pro. It's doing pretty much as it's told these days, and I use it to render images involving landscapes and objects on a huge scale:

Bryce has its limitations, though -- for instance, 99% of Bryce trees absolutely suck. End of statement. There's stuff you just can't/won't get to look realistic in Bryce, which is sooo easy in Vue ... and yes, as soon as I've had brain surgery performed upon my desktop, Vue will be installed. Golly, a whole new interface to learn. This is where I'm headed in the coming year. But Bryce also has its positive quirks; you can produce abstract and surreal, fantasy and SF stuff in it quite easily -- see above. I'll always use it for certain renders, I think, even when I'm able to produce the photo-realistic landscapes of my dreams, in Vue.

I had a (very) brief flirtation with digital brush painting in Photoshop, but the truth it it takes waaaay too long to make a really fulfilling hobby, much less any kind of career:

And the major challenge was getting LuxRender to do what I wanted. I'm juuust about there. Seldom does LuxRender defy or surprise me these days, and in fact many of the projects I completed in 2014 were re-renders of some quite old stuff which was done in DAZ Studio 3. The fact is, many of my best ideas were explored in Studio 3 which has, alas, an ATC (almost total crap) render engine. So, onward and upward into LuxRender:

It'll be a pleasure to share these at large size in coming weeks and months.

2015 got off to an excellent start, image-wise -- which is no doubt one of the major inspirations for getting back into blogging pictures! What happened?

HAPPY New Camera!

For Christmas, Dave got me the Fuji FinePix HS-50, which is an amazing piece of hardware. Think about this: the optical zoom equivalent of 26mm - 1,000mm ... 16MP ... fast, fast processing, the ability to do manual everything, including focus, shutter, aperture ... telephoto function while in super-macro mode, superior color and light handling, monster battery capacity -- the works. And you never have to change a lens. For a person who crippled her neck schlepping two big Pentax steel-body SLR cameras around the world about 20 years ago, this is less a bonus than a joy. I've looked at the Canon Eos system ... I also looked at the weight of all those bloody lenses ... and listened to the creaks and groans coming out of my neck. Chiropractic, here we come again! No, thanks. I'm sticking with the "compact" cameras these days; the technology is now very, very comparable to the DSLR tech; the next few years will close the gap between compact and DSLR even more.

Through January, I put the camera through its paces. There's a line where art and photography blur, one into the other, and this is it. With a click, you can view these images at 1000 pixels wide if you like ... or not, if these thumbnails are just fine:

From the surreal world of the very small...

...to the tiny and astonishingly quick...

...to the huge and very, very distant...

...to the ordinary and close at hand...

...and the not so distant, and glaringly bright...

...and from the strongly sunlit...

...to the dim and stormy...

...and into almost total darkness...

...then, on to sudden-impulse shots...

...and well pre-planned ones...

...and difficult backlight conditions...

...and back to simple beauty shots...

...and surreal shots, where the tiny becomes alien...

...and reflex shots for their sheer cuteness...

...and everything in between!

So there you have it: Happy New Camera! Thank you, Dave. 

In 2013 I began a travel blog, Meander to the Max: Adventures of The Millennium Possum, and yes, I'm far, far behind on posting to that, too. Life was the essential Queen Bitch in 2014. Everything went down the tubes for me, personally -- health especially. Everything else followed. We hit the bottom in July, with the loss of the cat who'd been our baby for almost fourteen years. Bagheera has been gone for six months as I type this (am still tearing up; where did the time go?), and the feline you see in the above images is Zolie, who is still not quite a year old, and just as photogenic. 

But 2015 is a new year, and it's time to pick up the pieces. So...

I'm back. With attitude. More soon. 

Jade, January, 2015