Yesterday's flash problems irritate me greatly. Time to investigate why I always
have such problems. Found the instruction manual for the mecablitz 15 MS-1—I don't think I ever
got a PDF version—and read the
instructions for the appallingly difficult configuration. The big discovery was that
it is possible to use my with a cable, but then I lose the clever camera
functionality. But why did things go wrong yesterday? It could be the camera settings, but
I would have thought that they would be OK.
Time to write down some details of
what flash equipment I have and how to use it.
It's been 3 days now since my web server load came back to normal. Time to allow legitimate
crawlers? Removed the completely restrictive robots.txt on lax, but not
on fra at 3:00 UTC. We'll
see what happens there.
It's been quite cold lately—yesterday the overnight low was 1.0°, and today it was 0.8°.
How is my Hibiscus
rosa-sinensis “Uncle Max” in the garden doing?
Once again, the biggest issue was focus. Digital cameras have made all sorts of progress
with autofocus since the introduction of “mirrorless” cameras, but it's all directed towards
conventional photos and video. When I have a subject, how can I tell where the start and
end focus points are, let alone how many images I need to cover that range? Today I took
groups of 40 images for each view, though it turned out that my range was only about 15
images. But how do I select the start point? Despite focus stacking (which really needs to
be adjustable), I missed it on a number of images. The fifth was completely out: nothing
was in focus. And the first went way beyond the flower to include the background:
Yes, I could fix it by restacking without the last 10 or so images, but it wasn't the best
image.
Another issue is how difficult it is to set the number of images. I need to dig deep into
the menu system (here the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II) to get the settings, and then set the numbers individually for ones, tens and hundreds.
I spent some time playing with the OM System OM-1 Mark II,
which has a completely different menu system, one which puts “focus stacking” (in-camera) in
a completely different place from what they call “focus bracketing”, where the images have
to be merged in postprocessing.
So: what focus assistance should the camera provide? How about:
Adjustable strength focus peaking. For some reason it seems to get weaker at close
distances.
Automatic detection of focus ranges. That requires knowing what part of the subject is
being stacked. In this example, it's clear, but possibly this would be a case for
selecting the near and the far focus points, for example with the thumb wheels. This
would eliminate the step count settings.
And what about the step size setting? I have no idea. Despite many attempts I haven't
understood what it's good for.
While walking the dogs down Grassy Gully Road, Elena suddenly went crazy and pulled on her leash. Kangaroo? It sounded right, but
she was particularly violent, and I didn't see anything. But yes, about 15 m away there was
a kangaroo stuck in a bush, maybe caught in a fence.
That was the end of the walk. Took the dogs back home and out again to see what was going
on:
Had it been caught in the fence? I don't think so: when we first saw it, it was on this
side of the fence. In the meantime it had certainly made its way through, and it had left
some fur behind in the barbed wire:
OK, call wildlife rescue. Vince from the Wala Animal Sanctuary? That's in Smythes_Creek. Is there nobody
closer?
Yes: Sandra Thompson, phone 0413 624 205. Called her up with great difficulty. She told me
that she was in Ferrers Road, here in Dereel, and had particularly bad phone coverage. But she came along, found—as
expected—that he had a broken leg. He's at peace now, as she put it.
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
a horror of reverse chronological documents, so
all my diary entries are chronological. This page normally contains the last two days,
but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in
the archive. Note that I often update a diary entry
a day or two after I write it.
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