little red planet » trees

When Taking A Walk …

dale — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 05:28:50 +0000

“When taking a walk you need to sit down” Willow

Storytelling With Images, An Experiment

dale — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 11:19:34 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I took a little bush walk in Sherbrooke Forest near my home. I came back with a number of fantastic photos however, viewed individually or one after the other, they lost some of their appeal and magic. Last week I experimented with uploading an image a day with a one sentence caption that told a simple story. The photos and captions helped to tie the images together and allowed me to highlight aspects of the photo. This worked out really well so I’ve placed them together into a little movie complete with a Ry Cooder audio track. I’ll continue to explore and experiment with this as another media. Let me know what you think. Cheers.

A Little Walk … from dale rogers on Vimeo.

Photographs taken in Sherbrooke Forest, Dandenong Ranges, Australia. All images were taken on a little walk about a half mile from my house. Hope you enjoy the serenity and majesty of this great mountain forest.

GIMP Plugins

dale — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 11:26:52 +0000

I’ve had a computer melt down. My main computer’s power supply turned off the lights and now no one’s home. The laptop had a failing HDD. I replaced the HDD in the laptop but had to leave the big computer with someone else to repair the power supply. After replacing the laptop HDD I’ve had to reinstall all software. I upgraded to the latest Ubuntu 9.10 and installed all my favorite apps. However, I couldn’t remember the name of the suite of scripts/plugins I use on GIMP. I googled furiously to find the plugins I have on the main computer. Eventually I found them – FX-Foundry . If you’ve never used this collection before I’d highly recommend it. Like I said, I was frantic to find them to install on the laptop.

In the process I happened across another collection of plugins from gimphelp.org I experimented tonight with an image I took earlier in the day of an old dead tree.

Here’s the originial image:

Cutout script

Infrared Simulation

and my favorite for this image – Make Wonderful

Do We Stay or Do We Go?

dale — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 11:23:57 +0000

We were called back home because of a serious bushfire threat. All the way home on the drive from the city, a large smoke plume was visible. Luckily the plume indicated the fire was headed south, the opposite direction from our home.

At last, we made it home and sat on the ridge watching the fire burn the tranquil valley below. As we watched in horror, news swept through the small crowd gathered with us on the ridge. A change was rapidly approaching and the wind would soon change direction.

We waited and watched. Suddenly, it happened. The wind swung around from the south bringing swift cool Antarctic gusts. We watched as the fire changed direction and began heading towards us. It surrounded a home on the other side of the valley. Water bombing helicopters swooped in. The Southerly wind change swung the massive smoke plume around and into our faces. What was once clearly visible became obscure.

We could hear a number of massive helicopters overhead and in the valley below but could not see their efforts or targets. Sirens wailed in the distance.

A light fall of soot and ash started to descend like a snowstorm from hell. We dispersed and patrolled our properties, looking for sign of ember attack, hoses at the ready.

Under a soot and ash choked sky we wait. A eerie silence has fallen. No longer able to see the approaching firestorm front. We must decide now, do we stay and fight or do we leave our properties in the hands of fate and the sheer determination and effort of volunteer fire fighters? Stay or go?

Pondering In My Backyard

dale — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 12:47:26 +0000

“Logic moves in one direction, the direction of clarity, coherence and structure. Ambiguity moves in the other direction, that of fluidity, openness, and release. Mathematics moves back and forth between these two poles. [...] It is the interaction between these different aspects that gives mathematics its power.”
William Byers (How Mathematicians Think, Princeton University Press, 2007)

“Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.” Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

“One cannot understand… the universality of laws of nature, the relationship of things, without an understanding of mathematics. There is no other way to do it.”
Richard P. Feynman

“Philosophy is written in this grand book–I mean the universe–which stands continually open to our glaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.”
Galileo Galilei (Il Saggiatore, 1623)

“Math is the only place where truth and beauty mean the same thing.”
Danica McKellar

Nebula Neighbor

dale — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 07:58:59 +0000

When I step out onto my balcony and look East, I always have magnificent views. I look towards the ridge opposite my house in the Dandenong Ranges. There are frequent colorful sunrises that materialise behind the dead branches of a large tree jutting through the forest canopy. You’ll find a number of photos from my balcony with the tree top as subject (just see yesterday’s post).

I took this image some time ago and was struck by the contrast between the red rising sun and the black early morning sky. I then wondered, what would this view be like if we were much closer to other star systems. What if a nebula was a nearby neighbor? Here’s my minds eye of what that would look like. I’ve combined an image of nebula NGC 1333 with my tree view.

This image of NGC 1333 was taken using the Mosaic-1 imager and the National Science Foundation’s Mayall 4-meter telescope at Kitt Peak. This star-forming region, located roughly 1,000 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Perseus, harbors hundreds of newly formed stars less than one million years old. Many of these proto-stars exhibit energetic activity such as jets and strong stellar winds. NGC 1333 credit T.A. Rector/University of Alaska Anchorage, H. Schweiker/WIYN and NOAO/AURA/NSF

The Bodhi Tree

dale — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 20:40:12 +0000

“Those who really seek the path to Enlightenment dictate terms to their mind. Then they proceed with strong determination.” Buddha

The Harbinger

dale — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 22:18:33 +0000

Here’s my Wordless Wednesday (well almost wordless and it’s actually Friday now). Although it doesn’t feel like it, spring is on its way to Oz. This is a shot I took yesterday of an ornamental cherry tree that hangs across the drive way. I was on my way to the shops in the rain, when I noticed that the tree had blossomed. I quickly pulled out the tripod and camera and took a couple of snaps before me and the gear got soaked.

Is This How Trees Look Down Under?

dale — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 22:01:20 +0000

Chica posts a Photo Project each week on her Photo Projectz blog. They are always challenging and often inspiring. At any given time I have a couple of her projects in the works (like the day in the life one). This week she suggested:

“shoot a photograph with something that upside down in it, or you can flip a photograph and make it upside down. How easy is that! The world look so different upside down, showcase it the best way you know how.”

Here’s my take on her project. I stood directly under this tree fern, leaned my head back and snapped the picture. It certainly gives a very different perspective. Thanks for the idea Chica.

There's A Rainbow Outside My Kitchen Window

dale — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 12:50:49 +0000

Not only was there a rainbow outside the kitchen window, there was even the end of a rainbow! This image has no photo editing tricks. That’s the bonafide end of a rainbow. However, I can now pretty much rule out the whole ‘Pot of Gold’ myth