Déjà vu - LOTR Parade

What prompt me to re post "LOTR Parade in Wellington"... a short chat with our daughter this morning...

11:11 Ming-N: hey ya...just wondering, did you do a blog post on the lord of the rings premiere?

11:13 me: I did in the old blog that was attached to Jeff Ooi's ScreenShot, that site was hacked and completely gone! Why?

Ming-N: ahh... shame...Ashley (new guy) is a huge LOTR fan

was going to show him the picsare they online anywhere?

me: May be I should do a deja vu piece :)

11:14 I am sure it will be highly popular :)

11:15 Ming-N: definitely! especially with The Hobbit starting filming next Feb11:16 me: That is a good idea! I will, soon...

So to Ashley who recently moved log stock and barrel from England and all the LOTR fans, here it is again!

Most of the photos below were NOT in the original post, so please enjoy ;)

WELLY Thru My Eyes!

WELLY, just in case you don't know; is a nickname for the city of Wellington, New Zealand which has been named the "Coolest Little Capital In The World" by traveler's bible Lonely Planet!

Some of my friends in Malaysia has requested that I post more photos of this cool city and area around it, here they are!

A luxurious cruise ship from Princess Cruises leaving Wellington Harbour after a short visit.

Wellington, the COOLEST LITTLE CAPITAL!

Wellington, New Zealand; has been named the "Coolest Little Capital" in the world by traveler's bible Lonely Planet!

This is the first time a New Zealand city has made it into the annual Best in Travel, a publication on world's best trends, destinations, journeys and experiences according to Lonely Planet.

Lonely Planet has named where we are, (yes, we set up home here!) the 4th Best City in which to travel, behind New York, Tangier and Tel Aviv.

Eat yer heart out, London and Singapore ;)

According to Positively Wellington Tourism chief executive David Perks...

"To have Lonely Planet – a global brand respected for frank opinions and having its finger on the pulse – come out and refer to Wellington as the `coolest little capital in the world' and among the top 10 cities you must visit for 2011 is quite simply incredible."

Wellington sunset from Mt Victoria lookout.

Halloween @ Karori

Every year at this time, in Karori; our house are invaded by little "monsters"!

To appease them we have little bags of sweets and goodies ready, they are happy; so are we ;)

Halloween is big business in America! Just Google the word return a whopping "About 807,000,000 results"! Horror ;)

According to Reuters, the 10 BEST places to celebrate Halloween are:

1. Salem, Massachusetts
2. Bran, Romania
3. London, England
4. New Orleans, Louisiana
5. New York, New York
6. Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
7. Tombstone, Arizona
8. Forks, Washington
9. Orlando, Florida
10.Long Beach, California

New Zealand not even in the radar! Ha ha ha...

Every year the little monsters understood that they get their sweets and I get to take their pictures! Not a bad deal? :)

Happy mums with happy little "monsters" in 2008.

BRIAN me, that BRAKE was GOOD!

I remember in the mid 60s, my classmates and I were quite rapped on this Kiwi photographer, Brian Brake. I was a Illustrative Photography student at R.M.I.T., Melbourne; Australia then.

There were much to admire about Brian...

"Brian left New Zealand for London in 1953, meeting Ernst Haas, John Morris and Henri Cartier-Bresson, who invited him to become a member of Magnum Photos, of which he remained a member until 1967. He worked as freelance photographer in Europe, Africa and Asia until joining Life in 1958, contributing work to Paris Match."

"He is best known for his coverage of China(where he was allowed an unusual level of access), his photographs of Pablo Picasso at a bullfight,and his series "Monsoon" of photographs taken in India during a sabbatical from Life during 1960." - Wikipedia -

The photography work of Brake that are most remembered are those from "Monsoon".

JPEG Noise & Artifact

In my previous article "JPEG Hell!" I show you how high JPEG compression in Paint Shop Pro can really damage your image file.

One of my young reader argued that he cannot see much damage when his image is being compressed in Photoshop, even at a very high compression / low quality setting.

He wonder if I can "show" him that JPEG in Photoshop really damage his original file!

Your wish is my command ;)

To do this demonstration I selected this "grab shot" I captured in K.L., 1998.

I was shooting a street market scene in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia, this kind Malay family let me used their veranda for an overhead view.

While I was shooting, at the corner of my eyes I saw her with the baby... quick shot with my EOS1n and 80-200 at about 200mm.

What can I say? Just pure innocent.

I was surprise how well the ISO 400 Kodak Ektapress negative film rendered her flawless complexion so well!

The colour negative was scanned with my Nikon Coolscan 4000 ED.

Now, back to our JPEG noise demo...

JPEG Hell !!

After my THIRD story on the revolutionary compression technology call HIPIX from Human Monitoring, I thought that is the end; or at least the end for a while!

Was I wrong ;)

I received another response from Ira of HM!

Dear C.Y.

I really am sorry for not letting this go by, but I hate thinking that there is even one PSP user thinking we treated PSP wrong.

I have been using PSP at home for many years and it is beautiful. JPEG however has limitations.

Photoshop does not necessarily do a better job, but a more clever one - by putting a limit to the compression.

With PSP you can compress images of 12MP to 200KB getting these topographic maps, which Photoshop will prevent you from getting, but you'll end up with 350KB instead.

So here's a screen capture sequence of my coding session using JASC PSP7 (that's what I have at home).

You can see for yourself, single shot, no editing, resolution, size and all, how we got what we got.

Sorry JASC, COREL, Adobe, it's not you, it's the 8x8 DCT and Huffman with no spatial prediction and many other tools.

Yours truly, Ira.

Hmmm... Ira also gave me a link to download an AVI clip showing the two photos being JPEG-ed by his Paint Shop Pro (PSP).