Help!

Last Sunday it was raining heavily. In the night my daughter called my attention to an ant which was trapped in silken web. my initial thoughts were that it was a spider’s web which had trapped the ant. I could not see any spider around. It was dark and i was struggling to focus on the head and eyes of the ant in My Canon EOS 5D mark II using Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 USM Macro under the modeling lamp of the Canon MT-24EX macro twin light flash. As I was shooting I noticed a small larva next to the ant. Then I realized that the web was the creating of this larva. You can see the larava at the edge of the picture. The ant must have attacked the larva which in retaliation spewed web all over the ant which had the ant trapped. You can see the web more clearly in this second photograph.

Trapped

As i took these shots it started raining heavily and Next day morning I could not trace either ant nor the larva.

Oriental Honey Buzzard

Oriental Honey Buzzard (Pernis ptilorhyncus) sub adult male. also known as Oriental Honey-buzzard and Crested Honey Buzzard. Despite its name, this species is not related to Buzzards, and is taxonomically closer to the kites.

The head lacks a strong supraciliary ridge giving it a very un-raptor-like facial appearance. It has a long tail and a short head crest. It is brown above, but not as dark as Honey Buzzard, and paler below. There is a dark throat stripe. Unusually for a large bird of prey, the sexes can be distinguished. The male has a blue-grey head, while the female’s head is brown. She is slightly larger and darker than the male. The male has a black tail with a white band, whilst the female resembles female Honey Buzzard. It breeds in Asia from central Siberia east to Japan. It is a summer migrant to Siberia, wintering in tropical south east Asia. Elsewhere it is more-or-less resident. It is a specialist feeder, living mainly on the larvae and nests of wasps, although it will take other small prey.

The Oriental Honey Buzzard breeds in woodland, and is inconspicuous except in the spring, when the mating display includes wing-clapping. The display of roller-coasting in flight and fluttering wings at the peak of the ascent are characteristic of the genus Pernis.

Thanks to Shiva for helping me to identify.

We all supposed to shoot in RAW to get best result, or at least that is what is taught by all except guys like Ken Rockwell. RAW is the digital Negative, and JPEG is frowned upon as a inferior product as far as the purity of Information captured during Photography. But most of my friends don’t listen to my preaching that Raw is great. They shoot either with JPEG only or if I am around RAW + JPEG.

Let us see why JPEG is so favored. The file size is small, the generation of JPEG is fast, It does not need Post processing. It faithfully brings out the settings you dialed under saturation, contrast, color etc in the camera menu. You can fill lot of JPEGs per GB of card. So what is wrong with JPEG.

RAW on the other hand is huge and cumbersome. Needs post processing. It fills up your card fast. needs to be de-noised, sharpened and white balance corrected. So why shoot in RAW?

You will realize the potential of RAW once you shot using RAW. The information which is captured during shooting remains intact in Raw. Raw file is either 12 bit or 14 bit. So it will have more color information than JPEG which is 8it. Compression of JPEG is lossy, so if you start post processing JPEG file you will realize that resulting picture will be far inferior to that from a Raw. So if you want to post process shoot in Raw.

Most of my friends shoot both in RAW + JPEG. The reason they give is that that way they can give the JPEGs without post processing and when the need arises to do the post processing they have the RAW. What they don’t realize that this strategy is waste of space. Remember that there is an embedded JPEG within each raw file.

The ability to browse through raw files “instantly” in applications including BreezeBrowser, Irfanview, GarphicConverter, Adobe Camera Raw, Lightroom and scores of others, is still based, either fully or in part, on the ability to extract the embedded JPEG within each raw file. When we view the raw file in one of these applications, one of 2 things happens. Either we are in fact viewing the embedded JPEG based on the camera settings, or we briefly see the embedded JPEG, until the raw conversion software is able to create a new preview file based on the default (or adjusted) settings from within the specific raw application.

Instant JPEG From RAW Free Utility

IJFR - Running on a RAW file

OK. So I am here to tell you about a free utility that extracts this mighty embedded JPEG file from a RAW file. But how is that going to help you in your 2009workflow ? Well maybe it will and maybe it won’t, but I am hoping that for at least some of you, it will make your day (and that is a tough thing to do on the day after Photoshop CS4 was announced)!

Let’s take this typical fictitious example. I am doing a  shoot for a client. I have to make great pictures, under great pressure, but have to deliver a flash drive with large JPEG proofs immediately after the shoot, as well as email small JPEGs to a web gallery. Time is of the essence. Of course I shoot in raw format as I always do. Although I know that JPEG proofs will be required immediately after the shoot, I do not shoot in RAW+JPEG because it is much too slow and cumbersome and fills my card fast.

The shoot is done, the files are uploaded to my old laptop, and the client is extremely pleased but is impatiently waiting to leave with the proofs. There are many ways that the JPEGs could be created, but why create the JPEGs, when they already exist with the raw files? Here comes our The Instant JPEG from Raw workflow utility. It churns out all the JPEG needed from the whole bunch of Raw file in a very short time. So you have saved space on the Card plus have theJPEGs too. I creat2 2 sets of JPEGs one for the client and other smaller one for my web gallery. Whole creation takes less than a minute on my rickety laptop. Clint is happy so is the viewers of my web gallery.

IJFR - Running on a Folder of Raw files

I believe that IJFR is the fastest and easiest way to go from raw files to high quality proof files, especially on low powered machines and without involving running an application. What is great is that you can get JPEGs in various sizes too thus eliminating the resize work afterwords, so now you can have a JPEG with full 10-12 Mega pixel and one for the web at 800×600 pixel dimension.

The IJFR utility is available for Win or Mac OS, and is fast, simple, has a tiny footprint (uses very little disk space or RAM) and is free, and easy to have on all of your desktop and laptop machines, no matter how slow, or resource challenged. Download for free (but you need to sign in to get download link) from RawWorkflow.com.

It has been raining so much out side, I wanted a drastic change of things around me, mainly the stuff on my computer. I was using Vista for a long time (right from the day it went to become RTM Nov 2006). I was getting more and more disillusioned with the way Windows is going. Vista had all the Bells and Whistles Bill Gates boasted of when he introduced Vista to us. But I was not satisfied.

Let me tell you I am an out and out Windows person. I started with windows 3.1, graduated to Windows 95, then to 98 , ME and finally plunged to Windows XP. Later I found that Windows 2003 server was a better workstation than XP and shifted to it. Finally reached Vista. 6 months with Vista was spent mainly for finding right driver and finding application to work in the right way, but the period was not exactly productive. The final nail in the coffin was when I wanted to upgrade to 4GB RAM. Vista with all its boasting on the cutting edge technology could not see all my 4GB RAM. I found out that 32 bit version cannot see all of the 4GB, to get that I have to move to the 64Bit version.

So I started installing Vista and other softwares all over again on 64bit environment. Then came the problem with the compatibility of several of my programs. Many (99.9 %) were 32 bit versions. No good 3rd party firewall available which can work fluently in 64 Bit. 64 bit was looking more like an afterthought of an operating system. 2 days into installing I started getting PFN List corrupt error blue screen of death faults. It was either the hardware or the drivers which were playing with me.

Then it stuck me that in Windows environment I use very few basic Windows oriented tools. If I want to list them they are just a handful. These are the few which I use everyday & I am unable to find exact replacement in other OSes.

• Adobe Photoshop
• Microsoft Accesss
• Proxomitron
• Ultraiso

Other than these four I could get things done with any other OS. So which one of those OS will it be? Let us just explore the choices.(to be continued tomorrow)

The strength of Windows Vista’s security model is easily the biggest question facing the nascent operating system. While sales will be strong simply on account of the way OEMs have adopted Vista on their midrange and high-end offerings, the place of Vista in the enterprise is not yet clear. Microsoft must demonstrate that its approach to security with Vista is indeed effective; otherwise, IT managers will see little benefit to moving to the new OS anytime soon.

Windows Vista only offers “marginal security advantages over XP” according to tests completed by CRN. “Vista remains riddled with holes, despite its multilayer security architecture and embedded security tools.” The report’s findings are mixed and at times a little unfair, but it does demonstrate the problems that Microsoft has to face—technical and otherwise.

The report faults Vista for “providing no improvement in virus protection vs. XP,” but of course Windows Vista does not ship with antivirus software—something the reviewer fails to mention. Faulting an AV-less Vista for not stopping viruses is a bit like faulting a door without a lock for opening when the handle is twisted. Any business that is deploying Vista (or XP) without an antivirus solution is, of course, out of its mind.

Check this article at ArsTechnica