Archive for October, 2008

The Southern Eland is the largest savanah antelope (bulls may weigh 700-800kg). Very shy, it runs away at first sight of a human being or a car. Difficult snapshot, guaranteed.

Southern Eland

Southern Eland (Taurotragus oryx, Elan du Cap, antĂ­lope eland comĂșn). Masai Mara, Kenya, September 2008.

Presented by  Dutch architects NL in the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 arrives and this is important. As a matter of fact, the free desktop suite (as interesting as the MS-Office suite) shift in high gear.

OpenOffice.org v3.0

The new features are quite noticeable:

• Support of MS-Office 2007 format for documents
• OOo 3.0 is now compatible with Mac OS X
• New multi-page mode in Writer
• Several users can now simultaneously edit and share a single spreadsheet
• Capacity to use MS Access databases from Writer

To freely download your MS-Word 2007, your MS-Excel 2007, you just have to run to the OpenOffice.org web site. This is free, this is legal!

If you have the heart of an adventurer, you may be interested to know that Ijust put in beta-test some new websites that I am working on.

• YLovePhoto.com (site specializing in digital photography)
• YLoveBigCats.com (about felines and other big cats)
• YLoveIllusions.com (optical illusions)
• YWantVisits.com (SEO, traffic optimisation and web site revenue maximization)

Your opinion will be welcome, but -remember- this is beta-test. So, it is full of bugs, problems, issues and don’t come back and complain if your significant other dumps you because of it.

Note: Most (if not all) of the photo-related news here will be applied to YLovePhoto.com as soon as I feel free with this new web site.

I published a few shots of lions. Portraits taken in the Masai Mara park (Kenya). My prefered is the following one:

Lionness - Copyright 2008, Yves Roumazeilles

If you click on the thumbnail image, you will enlarge it. And you may notice that the photographer (and its car) are appearing in the eye of the lion.

But there are several other images taken nearly at the same time on the original Big Cats web site. Yes! This is another of my web sites. Actually, YLoveBigCats.com is a separate location to publish information specifically about the big felines of the world (and some of the my photos of them).

You should think that most cattle birds never heard about this injunction. They use African Buffalos as landing strips and these big cows as as source of food while they remove the parasites from their skin.

African Buffalos (nearly) without birds

African Buffalo - Copyright 2008 Y.Roumazeilles

African Buffalo - Copyright 2008 Y.Roumazeilles

Buffalos and birds

Here, we see a fast airplane in final approach, or is it in attack phase?

African Buffal and birds: Tora! Tora! Tora! - Copyright 2008 Y.Roumazeilles

Finally, here the one I prefer (”the airport is not happy“) :

African Buffalo and birds - Copyright 2008 Y.Roumazeilles

African Buffalo (Syncerus caffer, Buffle d’Afrique, BĂșfalo negro). Kenya, Masai Mara, September 2008.

I found a few funny, interesting, or surprising glasses or vases that I wanted to share with you.

The first ones are coming with a request to drink responsibly:

A Cognac glass (Rikke Hagen)

(more…)

Splendid representant of the guineafowl bird family, Numididae, a brightly colored bird with a bare head, can be found all around the Masai Mara National Park. Unfortunately, it is always running out of the path of the photographer.

Helmeted Guineafowl (Copyright 2008 Yves Roumazeilles)

Helmeted Guineafowl (Numida meleagris, Pintade de Numidie). Kenya, September 2008.

Photoshop CS4

Newsrooms are full of weird coincidences. For example, we just learned that  two products often presented as direct competition were launched this Fall. To my right, here is Adobe with its boxing champion, Photoshop, loaded up to version CS4. To my left, Linux and its community of free developpers pushing the challenger on the ring, version 2.6 of The Gimp.

I am still convinced that this is not an even fight (and Photoshop is favored by bookmakers, for those still doubting it) but both announces are interesting and should be reviewed shortly.

Photoshop CS4 is a new step forward based on the award-winning user interface that made it a best seller and on top-level performance. To this market reference product, Adobe adds the following image-edition-oriented features:

• Accelerated computation using the modern graphic cards coprocessor and the Windows 64 features (when available, of course), and many tools needed to support a 3rd dimension in graphics design (painting on top of 3Dmodels, 3D compositing, etc.)
• Several new tools
• Adobe Camera Raw v5 is improved again to include complementary tools applicabel to RAW photo files (local editing, gradual correction filters, etc.)
• Bridge CS4 is notably accelerated

The Gimp 2.6

On the other side, The Gimp is now available as version 2.6. Here again, improvements are notable, even if a little smaller:

• A number of improvements to the user interface (but I still thing that this is the weak point of this software program; Recommendation: Look into GimpShop which is a hack to The Gimp in order to make it appear similar to Photoshop)
• Improvements to the selection tool
• Improvements to the drawing brush
• 32-bit GEGL data management (perfectly adapted to keep maximum quality in 12- and 14-bit RAW files)

All this will probably start again comment wars supporting one or the other solution. But remember that The Gimp is simply free. On the contrary, Photoshop CS4 (even if getting the upgrade license and despite the many available options) will still be very expensive (Master Collection at $2,499).

Nikon D700

After the launch events of this Summer and this Fall (before and during the Köln Photokina), there are two brands leaving important questions open. This is Sony and Nikon. While the two near-friends had us used to seeing them working together around the Sony digital photo sensors, we discovered two very divergent/different announces about 35mm Full Frame dSLR cameras: A Sony Alpha 900 pushing the resolution to record levels (24.6MP) and a Nikon D700 limiting its resolution in favor of maximum sensitivity (12MP).

Sony Alpha 900 - publicité

Some would have us thinking that Nikon would have rejected the sensor offered by Sony (used on the Alpha 900) for reasons of insufficient image quality. It does not seem so obvious when looking at the results actually obtained by Sony, but why not? After all, Nikon did obtain a special edition of the Alpha 700 sensor in order to build its Nikon D300…

So what?

It is not very difficult to forecast. Nikon is preparing a Full Frame SLR photo camera with very high resolution (the Nikon D800 of the rumour mill or the D4 promised around Christmas?) and Sony will derive a low resolution version of the Alpha 900 (most certainly named Alpha 800). Their moves will be opposite but very complementary (and predictable).

In both cases, you can say that Canon will not be forced into running with the pack. With their EOS 5D Mk II (and the last EOS 5D, sold at bargain prices), there is enough to sustain the pressure, but Canon will need to react in 2009, before Summer.

Here is an interesting case (I think) of how I work on the photos I shot. Usually, I think of it as development of the digital image. Like for its argentic/analog counter-part, I have to work a little on the image to make it printable, but I also have to prepare a correct framing of the image and possibly more.

This is the photo of an elephant on the Musiara plains of the Masai Mara National Park in Kenya. Initially, I shot the horizontal photo below, in order to get a fairly good portrait of an elephant within a tight frame:

Elephant, portrait (Copyright 2008 Yves Roumazeilles)

It is a fairly correct image: A touch of colour in the background, enough information in both highlights and shadows, good focus plane, nice structure on the skin of the elephant, both eyes are visible and both tusks are inside the frame.

But after preparing/developping the trivial image (just minor levels correction, minimal unsharp mask), I thougt that it could be possible to try something else by re-framing the image:

Elephant, portrait (Copyright 2008 Yves Roumazeilles)

But while I was at it (and because of the nice work of light on the mud-covered skin of the animal), I also decided to try a black and white presentation (with desaturation by Photoshop and a little coloring of the image):

Elephant, portrait (Copyright 2008 Yves Roumazeilles)

What do you think about it? Which one is the best image?

Random encounter, a baby elephant, probably only two- or three-week old.

Bébé éléphant (Copyright 2008 Yves Roumazeilles)

This is merely the beginning of the publication of photos I shot in the Masai Mara National Reserve (Kenya) during a photo safari leaded by Alain Pons, French wildlife photographer. You can expect a long string of images since I found quite a number of nice occasions to snap a few animal shots.

Awesomely superb, “The Orchidaceae of Mexico and Guatemala” is an illustrated book (download in PDF) by James Bateman that you can find in Botanicus.org wbe site of the Missouri Botanical Gardens.

Did you think that you needed to drop a few bucks to get Norton Ghost? No, it can be free. And legal, too. If you go and get one of the software programs that can do the same service for nothing, zip, silch, naught.

I would recommend the following:

• DriveImage XML is probably the most famous of these programs. It’s free for personal use, quite old, but still kicking and able to do not only images, but also scheduled backups. However, the interface is among the simplest ones. My own personal recommendation.

However, some people would also think about other similar tools:

• For a straight-up, drive-to-drive clone, you can use Runtime’s Shadow Copy (completely free)
• XXClone runs in Windows, is free for personal use and -while being very simple- does copies of your disk (even makes it bootable, if needed).

Once again, there is no need to buy expensive software or to go to Pirate Bay to get a hacked/pirated copy. Just use the right tool for the right price. Norton Ghost is good enough, DriveImage XML is much better.

After about 10 days out of France, I am back from the Masai Mara National Reserve (in Kenya). I brought back about 30 GB of wildlife photos (around 1700-1800 images) to be sorted out in the coming days. You can expect series of published images here on a regular basis.