Heads up in the clouds

Many years ago (at least 30), as an engineer in the civil service, I was once asked on a project management course to draw a simple chart of my senior management structure.  This I did.  Showing the structure of the ‘Division’ in which I worked leading to a large amorphous cloud.

“What’s that?” the tutor asked.

“Well”, I replied; “I know how decisions are made up to a point, beyond that any decision-making is cloud based and I have absolutely no idea what rationale leads to the decisions that are made and passed down from the cloud”!

Continue reading “Heads up in the clouds”

Pesky Pixels made simple

For Janus when he’s feeling better!

If you want a comprehensive explanation of the relationship between pixels and resolution then you will find it here.

This however is a very simple piece without any technical jargon.

If you imagine pixels are just dots of colour which when viewed all go to making your photo a reasonably accurate representation of the image you intended to photograph, it may help.

The general rule is the more pixels your photos contain, the more detailed and pleasing the image. My camera is set to take photos of roughly 2000 pixels in width, which is the maximum allowed. Yes, it is a bit old now and modern cameras will allow you to take bigger pictures. These are big files!

Now on this site, the maximum width for photos is only 700 pixels in width in posts and 600 in comments. So by reducing the number of pixels you are effectively throwing them away. The pictures still display pretty well on your screen at home, so you don’t need the additional pixels, and they take up room in the Media Library.

But once you have thrown away these pixels, you can’t put them back. Your photo-editing software will allow you to try, but it doesn’t work. You can, however, go back to your original large image to crop it and focus on a different part of your image without losing the crispness and turning it to mush!

If you are reducing or cropping photos, it’s a good idea to practise on a copy, so your original image is still intact, and you don’t have to worry.

Photo cropping – 11th photo comp.

Ara’s requirements for the latest photo comp are I think not a simple close up cropped from an existing picture but perhaps something cropped from the picture which has nothing to do with the subject and changes the whole context of the photo (and in my case is actually quite funny!)

I could of course be wrong 😉

E.G.

Have you read the signage?

This bakkie wasn’t supposed to be in my shot at all, here’s what I was trying to get Continue reading “Photo cropping – 11th photo comp.”

11th Photo Competition.

Crop It, or Move Closer!

It’s always difficult to set the theme for this competition. Does one aim to inspire greater efforts of photographic brilliance or keep it fairly open?

Since most of my better efforts are achieved more by luck than judgement – I usually know what I’m trying to photograph, but don’t always think about the composition – I’m a great believer in Cropping! It can change the composition and the focus of the picture wonderfully and usually for the better. You have to start with a reasonable number of pixels in the first place, or the results can be disappointing. It’s sort of the reverse of the Devil is in the detail.

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Cursing the Devil

This Wednesday, 22 June, marks the seventieth anniversary of the start of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of Russia.  It was to be the biggest, and the bloodiest, military campaign in history, concluding in the ruins of the Reichstag in May, 1945.

In retrospect Hitler’s precipitate decision, which was to mark the beginning of the end of the Third Reich, looks disastrous, was disastrous, because there were all sorts of reasons why Germany could not defeat the Soviets in a major war.  Russia not only had the space to absorb the shock of Blitzkrieg, a tactic pursued hitherto with such dramatic results, but it also had the capacity to survive defeats in battle that would have finished any other nation on earth.

But this is looking at history retrospectively, a God’s eye view, so to speak.  There is one question, looking from the ground up, that is still legitimate to ask: namely, how close did the German invasion of Russia come to success?
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What I’m Going to Read on My Holidays

I take up my pen in this Year of Grace Two Thousand and Eleven to apprise you that I imminently purpose to embark, at some considerable risk to my person, on an hazardous and lengthy voyage to a little known former province of the great British Empire; an Empire which, at its zenith, bestrode ‘the narrow world like a Colossus’ as the Bard has it. My sole and faithful companion will be the trusty Mrs M, often styled ‘The Passepartout of Embra’. I will be furnishing you with a full chronicle of my journey to the island of Terra Australis Incognita.

I have, as my inspiration, the ‘great travellers’ described by the immortal Jules Verne (1828-1905) in his masterpiece, ‘Celebrated Travels and Travellers’. To borrow from the great man in his ‘Preface’ thereto, I trust that my readers will render to Mrs M the credit due to her for her ‘share in a work which will demonstrate what manner of men the great travellers have been from the time of Hanno and Herodotus down to Livingstone and Stanley’ (and me, in my opinion, if Jules had lived long enough to learn of my many and manifest talents). Continue reading “What I’m Going to Read on My Holidays”