Here’s the view from a short hike from Aro Ha here in Glenorchy. I know it’s a meditation and yoga retreat and I shouldn’t be out taking photos… but, for me, photography is a meditation of its own.
Hey if you’re one of our awesome Passport members then today you’ll see a new video that shows how you can 4x the number of pixels in your photos. Fun!
Here’s a cool video I made and here are some details from Adobe:
Raw Details, previously called Enhance Details produces crisp detail and more accurate renditions of edges, improves color rendering, and also reduces artifacts. The resolution of the enhanced image stays the same as the original image. This feature is especially useful for large displays and prints, where fine details are visible. The supported file types are raw mosaic files from cameras with Bayer sensors (Canon, Nikon, Sony, and others) and Fujifilm X-Trans sensors.
Super Resolution, introduced in Camera Raw 13.2, helps create an enhanced image with similar results as Raw Details but with 2x the linear resolution. This means that the enhanced image will have 2x the width and 2x the height of the original image, or 4x the total pixel count. This feature supports the same file types as Raw Details, plus additional file types such as JPEG and TIFF. Super Resolution is especially useful to increase the resolution of a cropped image.
Ready for a fun, nerdy geology fact? Sure you are! That pyramidal structure in the middle is called a nunatak. I used to have a double-major in comp sci and geophysics, but quit the latter after a fight with a moronic tenured professor. It wasn’t a fist-fight… an intellectual one, a fight with which I contend I won. I just studied geophysics it because I love the Earth and I think rocks and landscapes are super-interesting, not because I wanted a job drilling for oil or anything (the career path for many geophysicists… reminds me of a great Alan Watts lecture that it’s frowned upon for people to study things in universities unless they are looking to fit a cog in a machine) – anyway, this nunatak was formed when the two glaciers from the Dart and Rees from the left and right side came together to carve out that perfect triangle. Technically, it’s not a triangle or pyramid, but a sloping triangular prism… okay nerd talk done. Who cares? It’s pretty. Okay, a little more nerd talk… nunatak is one of the only Greenladish words in our lexicon if you’re into etymology. I got this pic on a fun helicopter ride a few weeks ago with Joann and some friends from Over The Top Helicopters.
As usual, every Sunday we release a new video for Passport Members. Today, you’ll see some videos from my fun day flying in a helicopter over the Southern Alps of the South Island of New Zealand. You’ll also see 700+ terrible photos and how I made the selections of my favorites. Enjoy!
Today’s video shows the 700+ photos I took and how I chose my favorites. I don’t do a lot of processing in here (though you do see some results), so this one is more about how I separate the wheat from the chaff.
We landed at this awesome location just north of Milford Sound to jump out and take some photos. As you can see, the weather was amazing and the light was perfect. It was quite lucky, as there is often a ton of rain pouring in after it crosses the Tasman Sea (the ocean between Australia and New Zealand), so we took the opportunity to take a ton of photos!
If you make it down to Glenorchy in the southern island of New Zealand, be sure to find this amazing walking path through the wetlands. It’s particularly beautiful in the morning just as the sun comes over the mountain to light everything with a yellow light. Another great reason to come in the morning is that it’s much more likely that the water will be smooth and reflective.
If you are a Passport Member then today you’ll get an advanced look at one of my newest creations. It’s just halfway done, but you’ll get a sense of it nonetheless a find out more about the creation process.
So here is my latest one that is still being created. I’ve decided to make this one pretty much 100% symmetrical. It’s actually a bit more difficult than it looks. The music is not final, but I do quite like it. I build these in 10-second intervals – that is – since its 30 frames per second, I choose what the scene looks like every 300 frames and it extrapolates in between. Whenever I see a 10-second span that doesn’t quite look right, I go back in and make some adjustments to the math for that particular keyframe.
Also, if you missed the Passport newsletter last week keep an eye on the eBooks download section of your account for my latest book being added in the coming days. 🙂
I’m headed off for a fun festival on an island over there called Ancient Future. Since don’t have any active cases of Covid19 here in New Zealand, everyone is out and ready to enjoy the summer solstice (the longest day of the year) in just a few days. I didn’t get to go to Burning Man for year 11 in a row, so the chance to get to a big festival where no one is wearing facemasks sounds pretty radical. Why not? The whole event is sold out, so I’ll be one of the 300 hippies out there. Even better, I’ll be taking my son Ethan. I took him to the burn about 7 years ago, so this will be another fun experience for him. I’ll be out doing everything from taking photos doing yoga, hiking, listening to music, dancing, reading, attending workshops, and seeing friends. It’ll be epic.
How many people have to be in the same room for the odds of you having the exact same birthday as someone else? Since there are 365 days in a year, you might think 183, right? Wrong… way off… watch this! I just shared this with my daughter who had her birthday… she’s a math nerd like me, but this will blow your mind!
I’ve taken like 700 photos of this road, and each one is incredibly unique. I got this one from the air with a quadcopter and it was created out of a 3×3 grid of 9 different photos. This spot is only about 40 minutes down the road, so it makes me feel lazy I don’t get out there almost every day!
As soon as I moved to New Zealand, I got about 250,000 bees. I’ve always wanted to be a beekeeper, so I thought it was a great opportunity to give back to the planet a little bit. It’d be kinda awesome if everyone did that, eh? We have a little farm with that’s about 10 acres big and it’s had all sorts of ups and downs. We’ve had sheep born and die (even buried one but not deep enough so its legs sticking out of the ground…) We’ve had chickens that have been killed by dogs and birds of prey… but the only thing that keeps on going without fail is the beehives. It’s not that I’m a great beekeeper; I’m actually terrible! But I’m learning all the time.
The reason that I got into bees is because I’ve always been fascinated by superorganisms. I first got interested in ants then got into bees. From the early days of the internet, I kind of got the idea that humans were going to someday form a superorganism and we would use the internet the same way ants use scent trails or bees perform the waggle dance. I’ve learned so much from my bees about nature and the fundamental inter-workings of the world… I’ve also learned that I’m a pretty crappy beekeeper and I still have a lot to learn!
Here’s the Dart River that flows down from the Southern Alps then fills up Lake Wakatipu. I took this from a helicopter with Choppy and Over the Top while we were on the way to one of our first glacier landings. You can get a quadcopter up over this as well, but you can’t get nearly this high to get this perspective… to me, the more braided rivers, the better!
On the middle day of the hike, the fog rolled in for the entire day so it was extra moody. I didn’t mind at all because it just makes for a different kind of photo. I felt like I was in the Scottish highlands, even though I’ve never actually been to the Scottish highlands! That’s going to be one of my first stops after travel ramps up again!
Here’s a new photo from the lake that I live near – Lake Wakatipu. This is a 9-photo panorama, stitched together in Lightroom. It was shot with a drone, and the final image is even higher rez than my best Sony camera. This exact spot is about halfway between Glenorchy and Queenstown. Pretty soon, we’re gonna get some snow… so I’ll head back out here with all the mountains are icy white.
