So K’s possums got a big brother recently:
The whole family. Note the little sores on the small one? That’s where their whiskers are coming in.
Here’s the biggest one by himself. He needs a bit more enrichment, so he gets to hang out with us on occassion.
I didn’t quite capture the possum tongue, but he was licking me. Very cute 🙂
K is taking care of some baby possums for the next week. They are about 16 grams (1/2 oz) each. Obligatory pictures included…
  
  
   
Okay, I’ve made some updates to my Yellowstone pictures
Changelog:
To do:
When we came back from Yellowstone this year, I had about 1,800 pictures to go through. I’ve finally selected the best 200 or so. Some of them need a bit of cleanup in terms of brightness and in a few cases, getting rid of a mark that was on the back of a lens which shows up when the camera is stopped down. Using the open source principle of release early and often, I’ve put these images online in their current form. I’ve also got a few more that I put in my “best†category that I haven’t done yet, but will tonight.
Last year, I mentioned High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography, where you combine multiple pictures taken at different exposures to create a single picture where all of image is properly exposed. I didn’t do much with it at the time because, a) it’s not really possible when you shoot slide film, and b) there didn’t seem to be a good hdr program for linux.
a) was resolved when I went digital in November
as to b), I just wasn’t paying attention. I was looking for something in the Gimp or a Gimp plugin. I should have looked for PFSTools, PFSTmo and Qtpfsgui. PFSTools is a command line tool for creating and manipulating HDR images in their high bit count format. PFSTmo is a package of command line tone-mapping algorithms that will take the HDR images and map them back to 8 bit per channel images. Finally, Qtpfsgui is a GUI front end for all of this.
I’ve only just started playing with the tools, but take a look at the following 3 images, each with a different exposure (exposure compensation of -2, 0 and 2 EV):
From these images, I created an HDR image which was then tonemapped using different algorithms to produce the following images (going from most to least realistic):
Personally, I like the middle one, although I do wonder why the trees directly behind the house look odd in all of the images. <shrug> I’ll keep playing around and see I can get a better sense of the options.
Sorry I’ve been absent for a bit. I got sick the Sunday before we left on vacation and didn’t even start feeling better until Thursday morning. The we headed out to Yellowstone for two weeks on Saturday.
The vacation was great, although yesterday’s trip home was a nightmare. We got diverted from our connecting airport to Rochester, MN. That meant that we didn’t get to Minneapolis until an hour after our connection was supposed to leave. Fortunately, the connection itself had been diverted to Deluth, so we still beat it by an hour. We did make it home, but rather than the plane landing in NC at 10pm, it didn’t get in until 12:30am. We didn’t get home until after 2am. With getting the dogs from boarding and doing some shopping so that we would be able to eat, I haven’t had a chance to write up much about the vacation.
Fortunately, on the advice of a number of people, I took a digital SLR on the trip this year, so pictures shouldn’t be too long in coming. I just need to get rid of the bad shots and post the good. In the mean time, here’s a nice shot to hold folks over. It’s a pine marten, a relative of the weasel, but darn adorable. We were with a friend who photographs martens (and other wildlife) professionally, and his comment was that this, and a shot he took years ago, are the best marten shots he’s ever seen. 😀
(oh, and for the record, I do want to be Dan Hartman when I grow up 🙂 )
K and I are going through the preparations for our trip out to Yellowstone and I was looking into the photography setup. I headed over to B&H, found the circular polarizer for the lens of my new digital camera, then went over to the film section. For a number of reasons, I still think that landscape shots should be taken using slide film, preferably slow slide film, ideally Velvia 50. It does things with greens and browns that make my heart all fluttery (yes, I know this makes me a big photography nerd). But when I got to the slide film section, I couldn’t find Velvia 50. Velvia 100, yes, but no Velvia 50 – it has been discontinued. Now, Velvia 100 is a nice film, but it’s really just not the same as Velvia 50. For landscapes, it’s too fast – I would rather have the slower speed. After all, my digital can imitate 100 speed film, I want something slower. I bought the 100 speed anyway – I still think that slide film is better than digital for landscapes.
There is a happy ending to this. Looking around, it seems that there were a number of other people complaining when Fuji discontinued Velvia 50. So they are planning to restart production. Unfortunately, they are not shipping until July. I guess the lesson for Fuji is that when you are catering to a niche market, you have to accommodate that niche’s strange preferences. 🙂
I was taking the dogs out last night and saw a periodical cicada emerging from it’s nymph stage. Kind of cool – definitely an interesting picture:
Now I wonder if I have to worry about my fruit trees :-/
Not a whole lot going on this weekend. A little shopping, a little work around the house, etc. Saturday, Bryn’s husband, Adam, came by and took a look at some trees that were worrying me. Having a master arborist tell you that, while they are dying, they won’t come down immediately was reassuring. I had this fear that they were going to come down any minute. We’ll probably still want to take them down this fall, but at least we get to pick the times 🙂
After that, I went out to the Lowe’s and picked up the makings for a few new projects, including toilet replacement. Our toilets came with the house and are as old. So I’m guessing we’re talking somewhere between 5 and 6 gallons a flush, as opposed to modern toilets that only require 1.6 gallons. Since we’re on a well, I dislike wasting that much extra water, salt, etc. So, I picked up two new toilets and installed one last night. I’ll put the other one in tonight. Hopefully, we’ll save a good 50 gallons a day.
Here is the installed, new toilet. I’ll spare you the old removed toilet.
Oh, we also saw our friend the red-phase southern hog nosed snake in the yard. A few pictures of her while I’m at it:
Update: 9:15pm finished the second toilet. The second install took only about 45 minutes – I’m getting faster 🙂 . I’m now the proud owner of two old-style, wasteful toilets. Before I haul them off to the Habitat for Humanity Home Store, does anyone want/need one? You’ll have to install it yourself.
er, sorry just a minor Red Dawn reference – it’s not my fault, I grew up in the 80s.
Now that I’ve got that out of my system, a note on a new toy. As I mentioned before, I’m going to go (mostly) digital on my trip to Yellowstone. I bought 8 GB of memory cards which is only 800 or so pictures in raw format. For the past several years, I’ve shot around 800 pictures in film. On the one hand, I suspect I’ll take more pictures in digital since the marginal cost is basically zero. On the other hand, I’ll have the ability to prune out any bad shots. Still, I suspect that I’ll wind up wanting more memory cards.
Rather than trying to guess how many, I decided to buy the “Wolverine FlashPac 7060†(hey – I was getting there). The Wolverine is a pretty neat device. When I first started looking for a hard drive on which to temporarily store pictures, everything I found was a basic USB hard drive that required a computer to control. The FlashPac doesn’t. It’s a multi-type card reader and hard drive that has enough smarts in the firmware to know how to mount a memory card and copy all of the pictures from a card onto the internal drive. It preserves the contents of the card and you can manually erase the card in your camera. It comes in a variety of sizes, I bought the 60 GB version – enough for 6,000 pictures.
I got the device in today from B&H (they seemed to have the best prices). Unfortunately, it had outdated firmware installed on it which wouldn’t read my SDHC cards. Fortunately, I was expecting that and I had downloaded the next release of the firmware which does support SDHC (although at the fairly slow, standard SD speeds). Of course, getting the firmware on a device while using a linux computer is always challenging. After screwing around with it for an hour or so, I punted and used the old Windows 2000 partition I have on the desktop. I felt dirty afterward, but at least the device works with my memory cards now :).
Overall, it’s a very cool piece of hardware. It does what it says it does and seems to do it well. It’s not for archiving – that’s a whole different problem to tackle, but for short term storage, it’ll work.
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