Rob Masters

This story is one that I thought I had finished. Then one of the characters started poking me, and telling me that there needed to be more. Finder tells me it is done, for now at least. So here is what I think is the complete story of Lorn, Scout Explorer and Finder-of-Unnoticed-Details, Shaman. https://rdmasters.lympago.com/p/scout-and-shaman.html Diligent readers Of A Certain Age may well have suspicions about the larger universe that the story is set in. I will neither confirm nor deny this resemblance. Anyway, I filed the serial numbers off, and gave it a new coat of paint. 

I do not often make gear recommendations to other photographers, but today I will, because it is not some great flash new bit of kit that will revolutionise your workflow. I am recommending it because it will revolutionise how you look at photography, and remind you of the very core of our art. So, if you are an even half-way skilled photographer, go out and get yourself a kiddies thermal printing camera. And a bunch of thermal printer rolls of paper. You'll set yourself back about AUD50 for enough supplies to print thousands of images. Don't bother getting a microSD card for it. That's not the point. The point is the immense freedom and creative challenges that working with a fixed aperture, fixed focus plastic lens that will then print out on a short-lived high-contrast paper will bring. And it is a freedom being so highly restricted. It is also freeing to be able to shoot with abandon, not worrying about any sort of post-processing, and not worrying about the cost of the...

Last night we visited the Gravity Discovery Centre and Observatory in Gingin for one of their Observatory Tour nights. You get a full access ticket to the discovery Centre as a part of the tour ticket, so we made use of that to have a look around at the exhibits. The whole thing is a bit like a very focused SciTech or Powerhouse Museum sort of idea. The GDC at sunset, the Leaning Tower to the right, and the Lecture Dome and Giant Pendulum to the left We also collected the five solargraph cameras that we set up six months ago. Three of these were Solarcan Pucks, and two were home-brew can cameras. One of the Pucks was, alas, full of water, and the film was washed away. One of the can cameras was also heavily water filled, while the other had been partially crushed. The other two Pucks were in perfect condition. Six month solargraph of the giant pendulum, with the Leaning Tower in the background. What was unexpected was that both can cameras had acquired significant populations of tiny...

 Well, I have completed my Rooftop Movies Solargraphy project! You can read all about it on the project's dedicated page - here !  Here is a teaser!

 This evening we visited the wonderful Rooftop Movies. Before the show, though, thanks to the organisers , we set up a dozen or so solargraph cameras around the cinema.  These are a mix of Solarcan Pucks, Solarcan Cans, and some homebrew can cams.  The plan is to recover half of them in a fortnight to check alignments and framing, and the rest on the last day. As a special treat to ourselves and the Rooftop Movies team, we brought one Puck in after just three hours. Here is the result.

Through late 2022 and most of 2023, an author, E.W.Paris , on the writing.exchange Mastodon instance shared a daily AI generated image as a writing prompt for a 500 character story.  I found myself entranced by the often surreal images, and responded to quite a few of them. A handful of them turned into a linked space opera that I am now turning into what will probably be a novella with a working title of The Cerian and Varan War. You can find that here .  Another one prompted a high fantasy, which is also turning into a larger tale, most likely a long short story or novelette. You can read about Gwen and Grey here. And so, without actually intending to, I appear to have become an author of sorts. I hope you enjoy my tales.

 I am a novice when it comes to driving advanced post-processing tools like Siril , which, if you are getting into astrophotography, I highly recommend. It does have a steep learning curve, especially the post-stack processing side. Powerful, but not intuitive. But if you want quick results from your funky new smart telescope, you do have alternatives. So let's have a look at some solar photography and see what happens. Here is a untouched image, and the same image with some in-camera curve adjustment. The only edit is to crop the image. The Sun, unmodified With in-camera curve  adjustment Straight away, you can see more detail - the penumbras are clearer in sun spots, the granulation is more obvious.  Now let's look at what happens when you get heavy handed with Snapseed's structure and sharpening tools, adjusting the shadows and highlights a bit more, adding a touch of HDR and tweaking the colour balance. Heavily post processed in Snapseed First up, the granulation is v...

  Back in the day, and I mean starting around the turn of last century, you'd hunt for planets by taking photos through your telescope days or weeks apart, and then comparing the two plates.  Today I proved to myself that I have photographed Neptune from my front garden. This evening, I took this shot with my DwarfII - 10x15s exposures, stacked, and filtered to make everything cyan. In theory, somewhere in this image is Neptune. Good luck working out where. Cyan tinted star scape. Somewhere, Neptune is lurking. Last week, I did the same thing, but I tinted this one yellow. Yellow star scape. Neptune still hiding. Next, I composited them in Snapseed, and played with the opacity slider. Can you see Neptune now? Here are the two locations highlighted Neptune in two locations, circled Two very cool things about this. One, I did this with a telescope the size of a 1L UHT carton from my garden in the middle of suburbia! Two, it clearly shows how planets got their name - from the Gre...

  I do not often plug things. One, I suck at it, two, most things are perfectly good at plugging themselves. For this site, I am making an exception. We all know that there is a lot of horrible stuff going on in the world. And we do need to be informed about it so we can do something about it. But what about the stuff that has had things done about it? We hardly ever hear about that. A few years ago, David Byrne - ex-frontman of Talking Heads, and all-round nice guy, noticed this problem, and started a news site that focuses on solutions from around the world. https:// reasonstobecheerful.world/ Well researched and excellently written articles about the good things in the world - giving us all a reminder of why we should keep going.

  A six-month solargraph taken at the Gingin Gravity Discovery Centre, looking North at the Leaning Tower. Many thanks to the GDC and AIGO for letting me set the cameras up back in December! Scanned using Google Photoscan, and post-processed in Snapseed.

 Folks may have noticed that very little of my photography these days is "normal".  I do still take conventional photos with a fairly ordinary digital camera, but that is mostly my nature photography, and I do not often talk about that.  Great Egret - Herdsman Lake, June 2023. Nikon P900 I also do some astrophotography, up until recently using my mobile phone,  Milky Way, Pixel 6a, Guilderton, June 2022. but more recently with a Dwarf II 'smart telescope'.  Cat's Paw Nebula, Doubleview, June 2023, 98 x 15s frames, stacked in camera. These are not so much telescopes as dedicated astrophotography rigs controlled via a mobile app, and the results speak for themselves. They can align and stack multiple frames all by themselves, and compensate for significant levels of light pollution.  At the other extreme, I also experiment with in-camera cyanotype photography, using an 1830s era chemistry that is best known for making blueprints!  Mandurah Canal House, D...

Astrophotography is arguably the most technically demanding discipline in the art of photography, with high demands in both equipment and post-processing. In recent years advances in mobile phone technology have given everyone access to easy wide-field astrophotography, leaving three areas that still require high end equipment: Stellar, Planetary, and Deep-sky.  Is there still a place for high end equipment in wide-field? Absolutely! Just like the Instagram folks are discovering that a real camera takes better photos than a mobile phone, so too will a dedicated astro rig take better photos than a mobile phone.  But the mobile is accessible, cheap, and easy to use - so it will get folks in.  If you can get shots like this in a Bortle 5 area, it will get you excited, and some folks will be inspired enough to go further.  But what about deep sky? Enter the "Smart Telescope".  These are not so much telescopes as dedicated astrophotography rigs. These have many advan...

  https://writing.exchange/@ewdocparris/109877287387918829 and https://writing.exchange/@ewdocparris/109882779820415999 Tannis was not quite sure how she ended up embedded in the middle of a Varan combined tactics formation, but none of them appeared to have noticed her Cerian fighter. "Oh, well, I may as well go with it for now. It is not like they can do much with me in the middle of them, even if they do notice. Who knows? I might even be able to do some good", she mused to herself. A quick glance showed the CVR was running. Not bad last words. With that, she started checking her weapon loads.