Too much technology+photo free time

Camouflage in nature

Yves Roumazeilles — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:23:35 +0000

A very nice set of camouflaged animals.

A Grey Cicada hides on pine bark in France

Source: Daily Mail.

Cheetah and cubs

Yves Roumazeilles — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 20:33:30 +0000

A cheetah family (the other photos are on YLoveBigsCats.com).

Cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus, Guépard, Guepardo), Masai Mara, Kenya, September 2008.

Baboons

Yves Roumazeilles — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:16:22 +0000

A few baboons walking down a Kenyan road.

Guinea Baboon - Copyright (C) 2008 Yves Roumazeilles
Male Baboon - Copyright (C) 2008 Yves Roumazeilles	Guinea Baboons - Copyright (C) 2008 Yves Roumazeilles
Click on the thumbnails to enlarge them

Guinea Baboon (Papio papio, Babouin de Guinée, Papión de Guinea), Masai Mara, Kenya, September 2008.

PDF: Rape the protection

Yves Roumazeilles — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 20:22:32 +0000

This secret is almost public: PDF documents protected by a password (to prohibit cut-and-paste or print functions) are badly protected. As a matter of fact, there is even a fereeware utility program available for Windows whose only aim is to run around this protection. Freeware PDF Unlocker, even if it does not do much and is more limited than its commercial equivalents, merely and simply allows you to cut-and-paste the contents of a password-protected PDF file. Simple, efficient, recommended!

Giant Yosemite photo

Yves Roumazeilles — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 11:46:44 +0000

What is clearly one of the largest digital photos ever taken is presented by Gerard Maynard. 17-giga-pixel image where you can zoom in to look at interesting details.

Yosemite park - Click to get 17-Giga-Pixel zoom

Defragment like a God

Yves Roumazeilles — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 18:15:37 +0000

Defragmenting your hard disc drive may not be the latest fad, but it still is useful to improve the performance of a disc drive that’s been used for months or years and now looks more like a mouldy swiss cheese than a nice little techo-gadget. The solution: defragmenter your disc drive(s).

Here are a few ideas of (free) software programs that may be useful here:

Ultimate Defrag (from DiskTrix) is clearly a defragmenter wet dream. The only trouble? So many options that you won’t be able to sleep.
Smart Defrag (from IOBit) will help you defragmente several disc or several partitions at the same time.
Partition Find and Mount will do its best to find again lost data on a damaged hard disc drive.

Collection of tutorials for Photoshop and GIMP

Yves Roumazeilles — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 13:29:56 +0000

I collected a long list of tutorials (mostly in English) on my other photo website: Tutorials for Photoshop and The GIMP.

PHP changes

Yves Roumazeilles — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 12:26:01 +0000

This is what I told myself when uncovering a little PHP code fragment that stopped working on one of my web sites. So, this is a reminder for those of you inattentive programmers like me: $DOCUMENT_ROOT = $HTTP_SERVER_VARS['DOCUMENT_ROOT']; is deprecated and works no longer. You must now use the newest form: $DOCUMENT_ROOT = $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'];.

Be warned.

Hippopotamus

Yves Roumazeilles — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 20:25:43 +0000

Hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius, Hippopotame, hipopótamo común). Masai Mara, Kenya, September 2008.

USA: Both old and new

Yves Roumazeilles — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 05:26:05 +0000

Let’s be precise, I admire that country the United States of America because they can build a major historical event: The voters of America made a new country out of old values.

B.Obama and J.McCain are impersonating exactly that. The new America is a young President holding high the ideals of Democracy, Liberty, Opportunity and Hope but -already so many others told so- it is not only a victory of African Americans but an enormous example of Democracy put in action by the people of a great country. Who would have thought that a black man would walk into the White House while the people who walked with Martin Luther King are still alive?

Old values -and who could embody them best that John Mc Cain?- were at the center of this election. After Presidential Elections in 2004 where values have been continuously promoted and over-promoted, 2008 comes showing millions of people walking to the polls, oblivious of the age of their democracy and decided to make history with the same impetus as those voting for the first time in countries with much shorter history of liberty and votes.

On September 11, 2001, we were all Americans. Today, I am proud that some people from this great country consider me as a friend.

Leopard, food storage in a tree

Yves Roumazeilles — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 19:47:28 +0000

Leopard is a big cat special because it protects its largest preys (those which will make more than a single lunch) by dragging them away and up into a tree. It can take its own weight (or a little more) up to a high branch where no hyena would be able to steal it.

It takes the carcass, usually by the collar.

Then, it will choose the right branch, look and find the right climbing path.

Unfortunately, this one did not succeed in dragging up the Bohor Reedbuck it had caught late in the afternoon. It’s only during the night that (after reducing the weight by eating more of it) that the leopard brought the prey in its tree. Before light out, it just “visited” the tree.

Leopard in a tree - Copyright (C) 2008 Yves Roumazeilles	Leopard in a tree - Copyright (C) 2008 Yves Roumazeilles
Click on the thumbnails to enlarge them

Leopard (Panthera pardus, Léopard, Leopardo), Masai Mara, Kenya, September 2008.

Multicolor image search

Yves Roumazeilles — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 18:49:02 +0000

I am quite found of any tool that allow to search inside the contents of images on the web. One such tool is Multicolr Search Lab Flickr set. I really like it because it is able to look for images based on their colors. But not only that. Today they include a lot more images since they collected 10 millions Creative Commons images from Flickr.com.

Multicolr Search Labs

It was an impressive tool, it’s now a useful tool.

Lion’s lunch

Yves Roumazeilles — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 19:41:33 +0000

This lion is also eating a gnu.

You will easily notice that flies are a very common insect around big cats. No, these are not black defects on the image.

Click on the thumbnails to enlarge them

Lion (Panthera leo, Lion, León), Masai Mara, Kenya, September 2008.

Surprise! You can find color in B&W photos

Yves Roumazeilles — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 14:22:51 +0000

This is easy to reduce a color photo to a B&W image (any photo software or any B&W photocopier can do it). But the reverse operation seems difficult at best, impossible in most cases. However, a team of French scientists from the French INRIA (Guillaume Charpiat, Matthias Hofmann et Bernhard Schölkopf) presented recently an algorithm that succeeds to rebuild the color information from a B&W photo. And with some success.

On the image on the left, Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa has been converted to black and white (A), using color data and textures from a similar image (B), the algorithm built a color image again (C) not too far from the original (D).

Analyzing this work, I’d say that part of the differences between the result (C) and the original (D) come from the quality of the conversion to Black & White which led to an image quite hard (a bit more contrast than needed).

Impressive result on photos, you can expect to see it applied to moving images (and movies).

Source: Futura-Science.

The lionness lunch

Yves Roumazeilles — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 19:15:56 +0000

Found in the morning, this lionness had just kill a gnu (wildebeest). After eating most of it, she actually tried to hide the carcass in order to avoid seeing it stolen by others (hyenas or vultures, for example).

Lionness - Copyright 2008 Yves Roumazeilles
Lionness - Copyright 2008 Yves Roumazeilles	Lionness - Copyright 2008 Yves Roumazeilles
Click on the thumbnails to enlarge them

Lion (Panthera leo, Lion, León), Masai Mara, Kenya, September 2008.

Can you buy a giraffe?

Yves Roumazeilles — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 12:32:31 +0000

When I look into the logs of my web site, I sometimes discover bizarre little gems. For example, I recently noticed that somebody reached my web site through a search engine looking for : “buy a giraffe“. I still wonder whether he or she was looking for the real animal or a poster or photo of the animal. I probably will never know (except if the guilty conscience of the poor guy leads to informing me).

It made me look on Google for the very same thing. And I was surprised to find that there is advice to buy a giraffe (a real one). The first tip is: Do you have enough room? For sure, I would not recommend the giraffe as pet if you live in a flat at the fifth floor…

Internet will always bring me surprises.

Hyena after lunch

Yves Roumazeilles — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 19:15:55 +0000

In the coming days, I will post a number of images taken in Masai Mara National Park, Kenya, of various carnivore animals after or during lunch. Beware, it may be a little more disturbing than most subjects, for sensitive or young people. However, this is routine observation in the wild: Big cats are nice but they eat animals. Raw.

First, this is not a feline. A spotted hyena found in the morning, in a small water pool, after an early lunch.

It is easily forgotten in savanah folklore as recorded in our Northern countries, hyenas are not only carrion eaters stealing their prey from less powerful animals (like cheetahs), but also successful hunters who compensate for their slow running speed with a rather considerable endurance. They kill about half of their food.

Spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta, Hyène tachetée). Masai Mara, Kenya, September 2008.

CDBurnerXP goes Portable

Yves Roumazeilles — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:10:53 +0000

I always recommended the excellent CDBurnerXP for burning your CD and DVD discs. It’s free and does all the commercial programs do.

Now, the editor publishes CDBurnerXP Portable (download it for free). It goes on a USB stick and can follow you everywhere.

Free shipping on prints, posters!

Yves Roumazeilles — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 12:45:06 +0000

Some of my best images are available are posters, cards, prints, laminated prints, etc. on RedBubble.com. I like the quality of their service, their prices and the broad support (including good discussion forums about photo).

What you’ll like even more is that they reduced the shipping costs to NOTHING for a week. They are celebrating their shipment of 100,000 photo/art masterpieces around the world. At this moment, they decided to offer one week of free shipping. You just have to use the following coupon code when checking out: ‘100000masterpieces’

PS: The promotion will expire at 2359 on 30 October (GMT). Just in time to prepare your gifts for Christmas or for your 2009 new year’s cards.

Buy my photos at RedBubble

Cards,
Matted Prints,
Laminated Prints (between shiny plastic sheets),
Prints mounted on hard support,
Canvas Prints,
Framed Prints

Big cats images on my new web site

Yves Roumazeilles — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 17:59:08 +0000

If you are interested, you can find some of my images about big cats (lions, leopards, cheetahs) on my new web site YLoveBigCats.com. As you certainly have noticed, some of these images come from my recent trip to Kenya (Masai Mara).