I hope you and your family have a great weekend. Enjoy!
Archive for May, 2008
Over the weekend my wife and our two kiddos attended The Long Walk in Melbourne. The Long Walk celebrated the positive achievements of our Indigenous communities. It was a time of sharing and celebrating.
Like many modern Australian’s we are a ‘mixed’ race family. The Long Walk was a wonderful event to role model to our children public activism and the need to end racism.
I was compelled to add this photo to my gallery after reading Helen Bascom’s Journal titled “I Have Given Up“. I and my family do understand Helen’s and her family’s pain. I would hope that she continues to move the world through her images and thoughts.
Keep going Helen, it’s people like you, through your words and actions, that will make a difference. Don’t give up!
On the weekend I wandered around Melbourne with my family. While crossing the street I snapped this photo of the church opposite Federation Square. The background is a Hubble Space Telescope shot of the NGC 3603 star forming region.
(from Wikipedia)
NGC 3603 is a giant H II region[1] in the Carina spiral arm of the Milky Way around 20,000 light-years away from our solar system. It was discovered by John Frederick William Herschel in 1834. It is home to an open cluster (centre of the image) containing about 2000 bright stars, each of which is much brighter and more massive than our Sun, and the only giant H II region in our galaxy that is visible at optical wavelengths.
NGC 3603 is visible in the telescope as a small rather insignificant nebulosity with a yellowish tinge due to the effects of interstellar absorption. In the mid-1960s optical studies coincided with radio astronomical observations which showed it to be an extremely strong thermal radio source. Later observations in other galaxies introduced the concept of ’starburst’ regions, in some cases whole galaxies, of extremely rapid star formation and NGC 3603 is now considered to be such a region. In 1987 a supernova (known as SN 1987A) occurred in the Large Magellanic Cloud. This was the first supernova to be close enough for detailed observation with satellite based telescopes. One result was the discovery that prior to the main explosion it had thrown off a relatively small amount of material in a very distinctive pattern, a bit like an hourglass perpendicular to a detached glowing ring. One star in NGC 3603 (Sher 25, the number comes from the 1960s optical observations) was found to have thrown off matter in a pattern similar to that found for the supernova 1987A. This coincidence has aroused intense interest.
This was a little project inspired once again by Chica’s Photo Projectz site. The challenge was to
“Take a photo you like… and play around with it in your favorite editing program to come up with a heavily filtered look that you feel adds to the image and leaves you with an entirely different (when compared to the original), but enjoyable, result.”
I chose an image I took a while back. It’s an emotive portrait. I started fiddling with my filters and sliders in the GIMP. I ended up using a very heavy dose of the oil painting filter followed by some extreme unsharp masking. I liked the warm rich color and the heavy shadow effect. Hopefully this edit has enhanced my emotive effect.
On Saturday we went down to Federation Square in Melbourne to participate in the Long Walk. This year The Long Walk celebrated the positive achievements of Indigenous communities by starting the walk with a celebration including stalls, kids’ activities and performances at Federation Square. I will write a post later to detail the event and cause - with photos of course!
While there, we strolled down the banks of the Yarra River in Birrarung Marr. We found this interesting riverside sculpture. I’m not sure what it is or what it means but it certainly got the family talking and hypothesising. The plaque indicated that the two-headed, five-legged Angel, was created by Deborah Halpern when she set out to make a sculpture that was “wild, whimsical and colourful”. After standing in front of the National Gallery of Victoria for 18 years, and some restoration of her covering of 4000 tiles, Angel was rel