Adelaide heatwave, Victorian bushfires and ... summer can go away now. Soon, please.

Many thanks to the folks who swung by to check out the book launch (If you're looking for it, just scroll down to yesterday's post), and in particular many thanks to the readers who invested in a copy, be it electronic or paper. Your support is greatly appreciated.

Today, work continues on the LEGENDS project, and I hope to have it ready, and up, in the late afternoon. If all goes according to schedule, look out for a newsletter later today, or tomorrow.

In the meantime ... this is going to be a little brief. The cool change did "come through" and made a big difference to the temperature; it also dumped a tonne and a half of tropical humidity on us. Add this to about 10 drops of rain and some crash-bang-boom thunder and lightning before dawn, and then the sun came out, and -- where's my scuba diving tank?! Breathing ain't easy.

If you've been following the news from downunder, you'll know we've been having a torrid time of it. I have a couple of links for you -- slideshows: the Victorian bushfires, and the baby koala in the tub of water, which has been appearing in newspapers around the world.

Click here to see the whole slideshow on ABC News.

The other story that has been making people just shake their heads is the tale of the little koala (a baby) who was apparently abandoned and came in out of the bush seeking shelter and water. Now, it's common knowledge that koalas don't drink. Ever. All the moisture they get -- or, at any other time than this, need -- is derived from the eucalypt vegetation they eat ... and they eat ONLY the foliage of bluegums and river redgums. So you can imagine how hot and dry it would have to be to make a koala actually drink:

Click here to see the whole slideshow on Channel 9 News
(starts with the koala in Hahndorf with his head in a garden sprinkler!)

As hot as it's been in Adelaide (45.5C at our hottest; 115F), your heart goes out to the people of Victoria, where Melbourne suffered 46.3C yesterday. SA suffered the bushfires a few years ago -- get me to tell you that story; we had a view that was way too close for comfort -- but this time is Victoria's turn, and they have my sympathies.

And, the weather outlook for the next week? Four days of respite, of which this is one; and then 37 by Saturday. Sunday? They're not saying ... all bets are off, but I know what I'm hoping for!

Have you seen Jade's post on Digital Kosmos? Check this out: Waiting For Rain. Yep, this is what we're hoping for!

Cheers,
MK

Digital photography ... a kind of magic

When you're thinking about buying a serious digital camera, it's a good idea to do some research first -- not just into which camera to choose (which comes down to price, features and availability), but into digital photography itself. It's an art form which is similar to optical, but by no means the same!

It's very true that a good digital camera makes it much easier to get good shots (put another way, you'll get fewer real stinkers!) ... but to get very, very good shots with a digital, you do need to know a bit about photography itself. A little theory goes a long way.

It's also very true that a good photographer will get better images from a poor camera than a poor photographer will get out of a good camera. And when you're thinking about laying down maybe $250 to $750 for a digital which is not even an SLR (they're a lot more expensive), you owe it to yourself to do your "due diligence" beforehand.

Yesterday I talked about a couple of cameras which I would recommend ahead of the rest for folks who don't want to go the whole hog and drop thousands on full-professional gear. After years as a professional photographer, I took the switch to digital as a mixed blessing. It's cheaper to take pictures, because you save to flashcards, not film ... but the cameras are much more expensive. And when you're used to having 100% control over every little thing in the camera (I'd used a couple of Pentax K-1000s, plus an Olympus OM-10 and a wide selection of lenses that fit all three bodies, for a loooooong time), well, digital cameras can be infuriating. You'll be paging through menus and beeping your way through lists of lists, to change settings, for godsakes -- by the time you get the bloody thing set, the kangaroo has hopped off, the fullback is at the other end of the field, the goalie has not only headed the ball out, but he's dropkicked it into the other end penalty box, the Ferarri is two states away ... the flying saucers are back on Mars. Right?

Okay, that's the ultimate downside of ANY digital, and as someone recently said, "Deal with it." It's a fact of digital life, and ain't gonna change any time soon. So, get your head around clicking and beeping your way through pages and menus, and ...

Take a closer look at the theory of photography, as it applies to digital cameras.

I'm uploading a number of photos here, each (hopefully) illustrating some point, as well as being a damned nice, and/or interesting photo. Click on each to get a larger view. All these images were captured with the Fuji FinePix S6500fd, at six megapixel resolution. Wish I could show you images by the Panasonic Lumix, but alas -- no can do at this point. Maybe later.

The first thing you want to look at is "normal conditions" ...

Bright, sunny day and no zoom to speak of. Auto exposure and manual focus. Around noon, so there's no wide shadow areas to contend with. This is the raw image, no enhancement. (Summer, 2008; the South Australian Museum of Natural History).



Same day, but much more difficult lighting conditions. Auto focus and auto exposure here, with the photographer standing in deep, deep shade at the tram stop, shooting out into sunlight that was extremely bright. Notice that the camera's auto exposure mechanism is able to capture good detail in both bright and darker areas. (North Terrace tram stop, end of the line, opposite the casino.)



The war memorial in Angaston, in the Barossa ... in eye-destroyingly bright conditions. Sun is on the shoulder, so you get a good blue sky, though not quite the rich, dark blue you'd get with a polarizing filter on an optical camera. Don't fret about not being able to polarize efficiently with a digital: you can get the same effects with software, when you get home. Auto exposure, manual focus. (Summer of 2007.)




A bright sunny noon in mid-spring. Good sunlight but not too bright, with the camera position in patchy shade and very difficult lighting conditions right ahead -- patches of light and dark. The camera made a good job of averaging the whole thing. Manual focus keeps a tight, sharp image. (Belair National Park, South Australia).



The next thing you're thinking about is the quality of the zoom...

Top of the optical zoom -- no digital zoom here. Koala asleep in a tree, in extremely bright light. The tree was actually moving quite a lot in a decent breeze, but the virtual shutter and aperture were small enough to stop it completely. Auto exposure on this one -- manual focus. On auto focus, the camera repeatedly focused on the bough slightly in front of the koala, and the bear was fuzzy, out of focus. (Belair National Park, spring/summer.)



Again, top of the optical zoom, no digital zoom. The Australian coat of arms, crest, national insignia, whatever you want to term it ... very good lighting conditions, bright sunlight, but shooting close to the sun. Notice the whited-out sky. The sun is close to overhead in this picture, and I'm impressed with the detail and color the camera captured. A government building on North Terrancem Adelaide, S.A.


Top of the optical zoom. A close shot of a pair of million dollar legs. (High wow factor there...) Lighting conditions were not so brilliant; late afternoon shadows in the lee of a massive building. The camera kept great focus and color -- everything on auto in this picture. (The Tour Downunder, at Glenelg, 2008.)


The next thing on your minds is, "Okay, what about the digital zoom?"

Top of the digital zoom ... a butterfly in the brambles, quite a long way off -- and this is the whole frame, not a crop from the middle of it. Very good lighting conditions -- good and bright, but not too bright (which can be a problem in Australia). Good color and not too much noise in the image ... but this is a photo captured in good light. As a rule of thumb, the lower the light, the worse your digital zoom shots will become. (Morialta Falls, South Australia.)


Camera doing duty as telescope! Maximum digital zoom -- and manual exposure as well as manual focus. Without manual control, your chances of getting a digital camera to give you a great moon photo are not so good. You can see quite a lot of noise (grain) in this shot, but it's not too bad at all, when you think about what the camera was asked to do! (Shot from the backyard.)


Close to the top of the digital zoom, but in perfect lighting conditions. The picture shows a little noise, but nothing you'd complain bitterly about. This little guy was waaaaay off; the sun is on the shoulder -- the bear is actually in a tiny patch of shade cast by the canopy of the next tree ... and the trees were swaying about massively in a very lively wind. Such shots are pot luck -- but I did manually focus him. Auto exposure. (Belair, 2008.)



Having looked at telephoto, you're thinking, "what about closeup shots?"


This one is a telephoto closeup -- stand way back and zoom on your subject, and tweak the focus manually. Auto exposure -- and somewhat difficult light. It's been raining ... it's about to rain again. (Handorf, South Australia, 2008.)






If you can actually get close to your subject, the camera does quite well. The minimum lens-to-subject distance is about 8", so you can just get in close, before you even start to look at macro work. However, focus is a bitch when you get in close. If you didn't have the option of manual focus, you'd be sunk. (Wellington, Murray River, S.A.)



To get closer yet, go to the macro setting ... again, you'll want to use manual focus, though the auto exposure is very reliable on macro shots. If you need to get still closer...


The 6500 has a super-macro setting, too. You can virtually sit the lens right on top of your subject. It's inclined to pop the flash when you're this close, so be sure to deliberately turn OFF the flash. Also, in super-macro, manual focus is prerequisite ... I don't think I ever got an auto focus on this setting. Fortunately, manual focus is just too easy.


So, you're thinking, what about poor lighting conditions...?

It was almost dark in here -- a Barossa winery open for tastings. The same rules apply here as with optical: you'll have to hold the camera VERY still, or mount/sit it on something, to avoid shake and blur. Also, the camera is inclined to set the virtual film speed sky-high, if you leave it on automatic. The higher the ISO ratings, the more noise (grain) you'll get. Take control: set your film speed (which sounds Irish, I know), and practise your "nitro fingers."



The light is almost nonexistent ... the shot was an experiment, to see what the camera could make of a Tiffany lampshade in a gift store in Handorf, SA ... the results are great. Auto exposure ... I think I used manual focus, though I couldn't swear to it.


Here's the ultimate headache: get the camera to stop adjusting the exposure, and "correcting" your sunset shots back into normal daylight! Take it OFF the auto exposure setting, and but it onto the "N" (for normal) setting. Then, the camera records exactly what it sees, without getting smart. Also, set your ISO rate in 100 or 200, and do the "nitro fingers" thing again. Shot from the backyard.



Very nasty lighting conditions. It's actually quite dark in the Adelaide Railway Station ... as witness, the blur on the folks going by. The camera is on auto, and captures the color extremely well; focus is very sharp, but you're susceptible to shake and blur, so hang onto it.



The camera is sitting on the top rail of the balcony, or this shot would not have been possible. Very late twilight ... manual focus on the crescent moon, manual exposure control too. Shot from the backyard.


So, just how far can you go with this manual focus thing?

You can pretty much get back to the kind of shots you enjoyed with your optical SLR! This shot is an exercise in digital manual focus ... pick the wild flower out of a chaotic background ... and do it in a breeze, with the flower bouncing around. Auto exposure -- the lighting conditions were fair. (Morialta Falls, S.A.)



Same story: getting tack-sharp focus is difficult for even the best digital cameras. So don't leave it up to the mechanism: take control. Check out these feathers. (Juvenile Australian magpie; Belair National Park.)



The absolute other side to the coin on focus is depth of field. That is, how much of the subject is in focus, as it slants away from the camera? The rule is, the smaller the aperture, the greater the depth of field. Take control: manual exposure. Small aperture gives depth of field -- with a loooong virtual shutter speed as the tradeoff. Hold the camera very steady ... the same rules apply as for optical cameras, you just find yourself clicking, paging and beeping through menus to get what you want! (Retired steam loco in a playground in Nuriutpa, Barossa, S.A.)



Cheers,
MK

Muddling through as usual

Back to work today. For the rest of the country it's Saturday, and a lot of people get to take one off; and in the States it's July 4th, and millions of people will be standing beside the BBQ, watching fireworks and parades.

I was in Anchorage for July 4th, 1998, and saw the parade ... another year (don't ask me which), I was in Seward, which is the deep-water port on the Kenai. Independence Day is quite the event in Seward; the inbound motor homes outnumber the local residents about 10:1, and they all park, side by side, nose-in to the shore, down Resurrection Bay. It's quite a sight -- I guess I need to upload the pictures.

It was 32 degrees F that day; I took a hike around the town while the rest of the company (having more brains) were below decks on the yacht, drinking something warming and laced with stimulants. The clouds were heavy on the mountains which guard the bay like fortress walls, there wasn't a patch of blue the size of your thumb, and the wind that was cranking was strong enough to hold you up if you leaned on it ... and cold enough (right off the hanging glaciers that never go away) to slice you to the bone. The wind chill must have been down around zero F. The pictures (optical; digital was a couple of years away, still) are 'soft,' because the lighting conditions were so dark.

Okay, let me dig out the prints and scan them -- I'll upload them in a day or two. (Gives me a reason to try out the scanner in conjunction with this new PC, too.)

Meanwhile ... as I began, it's back to work for me. I'll be dividing my writing time between the edit of AQUAMARINE and the in-depth, middle-section plotting of the haunted house tale. I'm just getting some very early, very tentative 'purple flags,' which I need to assess seriously. I think (mind you, think), I might have plotted myself into a deep, dark hole. This is, in itself, no bad thing, because (as any serious writer will tell you) by the time you've dug yourself back out again, the book has gotten much better, stronger (I won't say faster ... I'll wind up sounding waaaay too much like the Six Million Dollar Man. And I don't type that fast). The downside to having to dig oneself out of the bottom of a pit filled with mud and raptors is that it can take some fair time to escape --

Don't let this get you down: I have a fantasy novel, finished and ready to go, which DreamCraft can have in the meantime. A big, sprawling gay fantasy? How can you go wrong? So there will be a new title following on after the reissue of AQUAMARINE, even if the haunted house piece is giving me a hernia. And it looks like it might. Blast. (And that was a euphemism.)

Now, to answer a question which has nothing to do with writing. I quite understand that folks in the north will find it difficult to imagine how a tree can possibly hang onto its leaves year-round and yet shed its bark. It sounds bizarre. It sounds, in fact, like Keegan made it up. Not true. Would I do that to you? So here's a couple of images I shot just yesterday:

These are gums, two different kinds; and here they are in all their bark-shedding glory. The second of the two is a blue gum, which is a fast-growing, long-lived, flowering tree ... and just to make sure everything gets done backwards they (!) flower in winter. The trick is, they shed their bark as it's scorched by the summer sun, and the tree inside is protected. Blue gums are the right kind of trees to have in your yard if you want to attract koalas (the critters don't come into the inner suburbs, but in the hills, sure, you often see them, and hear them, especially at night. Incidentally, they have no road sense. They're delighted to step right out in front of the car and go waddling across the road while you scream your tires, come to a halt with the front fender dug two inches into the bitumen, and your heart jumping out of your chest). The last interesting thing about blue gums is that, like many gums, their limbs can and do get hollow as they get very old and big. They CREAK ... it's weird and spooky, walking through the woods on a still day, summer or winter, not a breeze moving, and there's just this CREAKING. And yep, the old, hollow boughs break off. They can weigh tons, and smash the roof in, on a house. A couple of years ago, one dropped a branch at a golf course, and there happened to be a woman standing underneath. She never knew what hit her.

So, there you have it: Shedding Bark 101!

Parting shot: the new website was spidered overnight ... Google has visited, and the engine seems to know what we're all about. I searched on 'gay science fiction,' and without any further work we're ranking page 37 on Google. Of course, there's also a hell of a lot more work to do, so we're hoping to rank in the top ten for gay SF reasonably soon.

Here's the kicker: it's the NARC page that's top of the gay SF rankings for pages on the Mel Keegan OnLine site. And that's great. There's a trick to this. You don't 'optimize' for search engines. You accomodate the buggers. They want you to roll over and wink, you roll over and wink. I do believe they call it search engine compliance ... and it seems to work.

Speaking of which, I have to get some done.

Attack Koalas from Mars

I'm sure we've been invaded by aliens. They're using some kind of cloaking device, because you don't see them, but you know they're there. To begin with, someTHING disabled the doorbell. That kind of thing doesn't just happen by itself, so you KNOW there was alien involvement. Then ... the weather has been even stranger than usual. The skies are low and brooding, but it won't rain. Can't rain. Like something out of a Stephen King novel.

And how else do you explain the gradual disappearance of all your ballpoints, and your pencil sharpener? I swear, I can't find a pen that works, and as for my pencils, you could feel confident about poking yourself in both eyes with them.

Further evidence of alien invasion: the telescope is missing. I mean, it's GONE. Now, what little nieghborhood ratbag would come creeping into a person's backyard and take the telescope? So you KNOW it's nothing to do with nasty little neighborhood thieves, because rotten little local brats wouldn't have a use for a precision scientific instrument, and the only possible culprits are --

ALIENS!

I mean, nothing else makes sense. It has to be aliens, and I've got a sneaking suspicion I know who they are, and where they come from.

Several years ago, a subterranean race from our neighboring planet, Mars, became disenchanted with living in caves, and salivating over the earth. They began to suck our space probes out of the sky before we could get data from them; they reverse engineered them, and developed both the technology to invade the planet Earth, and to build television receivers, via which they have been monitoring us. And kids, we're in deep doodoo.

They've seen ALIEN V. PREDATOR, and HOGAN'S HEROES, and SKIPPY THE BUSH KANGAROO, and the American Presidential Election broadcasts. They know us. Intimately. And we are wading in it ... they figure we deserve everything we get, and they have been among us, dishing it out, for a while now.

They purloined the telesocope because they're having mechanical problems (the Earth's atmosphere is denser and wetter than they imagined); the same proess of atrophy has taken out their automatic writing devices, so they crept in here under cover of their cloaking gadgets, and every pen and sharp pencil, not to mention the pencil sharpener, followed the telescope. (Damnit, I'm PO'd about that telescope).

Worst of all, they've stopped the rain, to prevent any more of their delicate mechanisms from going bung...

But they've been sussed. I've seen them. They were lurking in the trees the other night, and they look like KOALAS. Now I don't imagine subterranean creatures from Mars really look like koalas, but it doesn't take much brainpower or savvy to work this one out.






Having steeped themselves in multiple seasons of SKIPPY, they figure they'll use their cloking devices to make themselves look like koalas, to lull the humans into a false sense of security while we get robbed blind and invaded. It makes perfect sense ... and their plan is progressing with marrow-chilling ease.

NORAD knows nothing about this! The armed forces are not even on coffee-break standby, let alone a full alert. The leaders of nations are blithely going about their idiotic business, while the aliens are among us, the invasion is happening, and the evidence is concrete and terrible!

Tonight, we arm ourselves and WE will be on alert, even if the armed forces are asleep. Cricket bats to the fore, we will stand guard upon the premises.

Further reports in due course.