Photography.

[willedoo]

That's interesting. I haven't tried any of the menu options on the left side of the page, only the main enhancement feature. As per which photos it works best on, it's just try and see. Really poor quality, low res photos don't do well. Maybe not enough pixels to clone into a good blend. It does a good job on some very average resolution photos. With a good photo, sometimes it improves it a little, and others it can sometimes make them a bit worse. Some photos are improved a lot and still look natural whereas others end up looking a bit too AI like.

[red750]

I got my first camera in 1962, not long after I started my first job out of school, working with the bank. My family lived in Warragul, but my appointment was in Caulfield, and after a few months, I was transferred into head office. My dad was working as a truck driver making deliveries around the metropolitan area, and we were living 5 days a week in a house next door to the factory he worked for. 

One day, Dad introduced me to a chap he knew in Melbourne, and he gave me a small Japanese 35mm camera. So began my experience with photography.

 

I started with monochrome film, shooting stuff around town.  After about a year of being seperated from the rest of the family, Dad got the opportunity to buy a milk bar and greengrocery shop in Pascoe Vale with residence attached. The family relocated to Melbourne. We were right under the approach to runway 27 at Essendon, and had planes coming over day and night. As a person deeply interested in aviation, I was close enough to ride my pushbike to Essendon and take photos. I changed to colour film, taking colour prints and slides. 

 

Recently I found a group on Facebook called Family and Friends of TAA. I applied and was accepted as a member of the group. I have submitted some photos taken in the late 60's and early 70's, and which I had scanned onto the computer. I have had a very pleasing acceptance of these photos with 'likes' into the 50s for each photo, and more coming through all the time. So far I have submitted 2 Electra photos, 1 DC9 and 12 Bell Helicab. I have a couple more to upload.

[Jerry_Atrick]

Pete, I am sure you and I crossed paths at some stage if your family had a milk bar in Pascoe Vale.. I used to go there toget out of Glenroy! 😉

 

I  still have my old Olympus OM2 somewhere. Loved it. Bought it second hand and I could not take adecent photo for love nor money. Took it to a camera shop and to took them a microsecond after looking into the viewfinder to realise the light meter was stuffed. I can't remember how much it was, but I was broke on my part time job salary for a few weeks.

 

I had a Lucky B&W enlarger, the dark bags, a developing canister, the checmicals, trays, tongs; had the lot. We balcked out the laundry when I was developing and printing. Loved it. Used Ilford Chems and paper almost exclusively.

 

Traded up to colour processing - sort of.. The next door neighbour who moved in was right into photogrpahy and build a dark room with all the kit. I shudder to think hoe much it cost, and doing everything in the complete dark was an experinece.

 

[red750]

The milk bar was on Gaffney St, near the border with Coburg (see map below). The camera was a very basic Neoka, no light meter, no through-the-lens viewfinder, no rangefinder, but it took good photos.

 

 

[red750]

My brother and I shared a bungalow in the back yard, and we would lay there at night and listen the the planes coming in, the scream of Friendships and Viscounts, the roar of 727's and DC9's, the rumble of the DC4 and Bristol freighters on the overnight Tassie runs. No curfews in those days. And when pilots were shooting practice instrument approaches, we were under the point where they would hit the throttles and climb out for the next approach. They were low enough to read the rego under the wings.

[red750]

Here's one of the TAA photos. It has so far received 54 Likes (thumb up emogi)

 

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[spacesailor]

👍.

From me .

spacesailor

[onetrack]

You might have photographed Facthunter unwittingly?

[willedoo]

I found another old scanned photo of the same machine posted a few posts back. The other original photo was taken with an instamatic camera; this one was taken with one of those small compact cameras. I forget the type of film they took, was it 35mm?

 

The machine has a distinct list to port in the photo. It didn't like the Macumba River. It seems funny looking at a machine like that now as they look really old, but at the time the photo was taken it was only about three years old and the current model at that time.

 

[onetrack]

Yeah, I've been there and done that, plenty of times. When the mud starts coming over the floorplate and the fan starts to pick up the mud and fling it into the radiator, you're really in trouble!

We used to keep cut lengths of 1/2" steel wire rope on hand, about 3.5-4M long, for de-bogging, using a log tied to the tracks.

 

Once you were down to the makers name, you'd cut a big log from a suitable nearby tree (about 300mm diameter and about 4M long), take it to the rear of the dozer, dig out enough dirt behind each track to enable you to thread the wire rope through the track chain - and then wrap it around the log and tie a reef knot in it (not so easy to do with 1/2" SWR!)

 

You'd then climb on the tractor and gently engage reverse, and spin the tracks until the cable knots tightened fully (it was necessary to have a helper when doing this - they made sure the knots didn't unravel as you pulled them tight!). Once the wire rope was fully tightened, a few more revs would pull the log under the tracks, and the machine would climb out of the bog!

 

Only in the very worst of bogs would you need two logs. In that case, you then had to have an axe or big sledgehammer handy to cut the SWR on the first log, as it re-appeared at the front of the tractor!

[pmccarthy]

That business with tying steel cables happened when using rope scrapers underground. After tying the knot, someone had to hold the loose ends while you carefully pulled it tight on the winch controls. Or you could tie the ends with wire but that often fell off as the knot tightened.

[red750]

After playing around with the video screen capture of Snipping Tool while working on the screenprints for the Brain Teaser thread,  I thought I'd see if I could record the editing procedure I use on photos for the profiles.This clip only shows the most common editing, and doesn't include rotating or cloning, or colour/lighting adjustment. I also haven't added an audio track,

 

 

 

 

[spacesailor]

I see your using ' JPEG '

  when it came out they said it losses a little bit each time it is " saved " .

I used to use GIF , Graphic Image Files .

 But others had problems with that .

spacesailor

[red750]

I haven't dug deeply, so I don't know if it can be changed, but PhotoScape only recognises JPEG. Even saved files off the internet in PNG are not recognised, I have to save as JPEG. Most photos automatically download as JPEG.

 

While typing this reply, I did a quick test and found that PhotoScape actually does edit GIF files. I use that photo editor a) because it is a free download, and b) it does everything I need.

[onetrack]

I was a little surprised to see that PhotoScape is designed for all the earlier, and now essentially obsolete, MS Operating Systems - such as Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista/7/8. They have a version for Windows 10, called PhotoScape X, but no mention of Windows 11. As MS essentially now only supports W11, I'm surprised that the PhotoScape programme only caters to obsolete MS Operating Systems.

[red750]

Preparing a new set of photos to create a new profile, an opportunity arose to show another feature of PhotoScape. Sometimes, you take a photo with the camera a little off level. In this photo, the horizon is sloping, and looks out of place. The photo is rotated to line up with the gridlines, the photo is cropped to the standard image aspect ratio (16:9), and the size adjusted to the standard 750 pixels wide, which results in 422 pixels high. On some photos, the original cannot be trimmed to 750x422 without chopping part of the aircraft off. The solution is to set width at 750 pixels, and adjust the height.

 

 

 

[willedoo]

Found some old work photos, from around 2011 if the memory is correct. Taken on one of those small Panasonic cameras, a DMC-LZ1 according to the image data. The name Lumix rings a bell.

 

Off to the Simpson for a bit of adventure in these photos:

 

[willedoo]

In the Simpson. It had been a good season, the dune corridors were all covered in grasses and herbage. I can remember coming across a bloke doing a trip on an off road bike. He was on a north/south track that ran up from the French Line and eventually exits the desert on the western side.

 

[facthunter]

IF you want to learn about red dust.  Nev

[onetrack]

What, no photos of being bogged to the eyeballs in red mud? 😄  Classic Red Centre photos there, Willie.

 

It's interesting how you get people who love the place and other people who can't cope with the isolation and silence, the dust and the temperature extremes.

50° in the middle of the day and 0° at night. I can remember a story a bloke told me about how they were camped out in the Red Centre and it was a bitterly cold night with an icy South-Easterly wind blowing, typical of mid-July.

 

The mechanic/boilermaker/welder with them took off in a ute and came back half an hour later. He'd recently found an old rubbish tip and he'd scrounged a big old, woven wire-mesh bed frame from it - you know the ones with the wooden perimeter frame and the woven wire mesh tightened between the wooden outer beams.

 

He stood the bed frame up at about a 60° angle, dragged over the long welding leads from the engine-driven welder, hooked the earth lead and electrode holder to it at diagonally opposite corners, then went back to the welder, cranked it up, and adjusted the output so the wire frame just started to glow in the dark!

 

The bloke told me it was the best outdoor heater he'd ever come across! He said it was like standing in front of a giant toaster! It certainly kept the cold at bay!

[facthunter]

The stars shine brightly though. Nev

[willedoo]

That wasn't the best camp site being soft and sandy but there were no better options. From memory we had to tow the trucks on site and tow them back out to the track when we left. The track was fairly hard as it had served as a rig road a couple of years before and still had the clay surface mostly intact. There was the old rig site with a capped well not far south of our camp site but it was out of bounds for camping. Same with claypans due to environmental restrictions and there aren't many claypans in that area anyway.

 

It was on the first day at work on that trip that I came across Reg Sprigg's original base camp #1 from the 1960's when he did that west/east crossing with his family. It was when he had his Geosurveys company pre Beach Petroleum. I think the claim was they were the first white people to cross the Simpson from west to east. I'd have to re-read the book on him (Rock Star-the story of Reg Sprigg) to be sure but I think they were doing a magnetic survey grid. One of his partners was doing the north south lines. I came over a sand dune and spotted a star picket which survey companies use as permanent markers on lines. When I checked the stamped aluminium tag attached it had the Geosurveys detail on it. There was a bit of debris scattered around and a few old baked beans cans. The beans had long dried up and you could hear them rattle if you shook the can. It had probably been buried and dug up and scattered by dingos over the years.

[willedoo]

This is that same camp site after a lot of human foot traffic. It looks like a mob of cattle has been through it. The person in the white chef's tunic was a bloke who was pretending to be the cook. Chefs are ok at chefing but they rarely make good camp cooks. He kept us alive though and that's the main thing.

 

That job was the one and only time I've worked in the Simpson. I'd flown over it a couple of times previously. First time in 1982 in a Cherokee Six in a drought year when it was all sand and hardly any vegetation. That was flying from Windorah to Alice Springs. The second time was in 1985 when it was much greener on a trip from Halls Creek to somewhere west of Gidgealpa. That was a nice uneventful flight compared to the issues we had with the Cherokee on the first flight. On that one it took us a couple of goes to get across. Eventually we got across with no radio or instruments and had to land at Ringwood Station and use their phone to alert Alice Springs airport to clear some airspace for us to come in without comms. At Alice we got a new alternator and finished the trip to Halls Creek with no further problems.

 

[willedoo]

With a site like that the restoration is basically using a dozer or grader to push the removed spinifex back over the site. The main object is to scatter the seed stock back over the cleared site. There would be a certain amount of root stock still in the ground as well.

[pmccarthy]

Griselda also wrote a book - Dune is a four letter word.

Edited November 23 by pmccarthy