Sergei Mutovkin’s Rumbling Mumbling

I’m a big fan of Digital SLR photography. One of the advantages over compact P&S is that all SLR let you shoot in RAW. Raw allows you get get better results not only today but in also in the future. This is the case with my photo shooting session of Queen + Paul Rodgers concert back in March 16, 2006. Originally all photos were processed with Canon Digital Photos Professional. DPP converts RAWs into Jpeg but preserves all CMOS noise for high ISOs and can’t recover highlights without manually tweaking the curve. Yesterday I had finally found time to process all the photos again but now with Bibble Pro, which did help to automate quite a few things. The results are much better.

Thanks to Noise Ninja built into Bibble all images are almost noise free even though they are all ISO1600. In the future with advent of better image processing techniques it will be possible to batch re-process all the images again and get even better results. Again all photos are on Flickr and in my Gallery.

“It’s over, it’s over, it’s all over now”… Yesterday we have reached a temperature of 31 degrees Celsius and today we returned back to more normal Octoberish 15C… This is my tenth year in Canada and I don’t remember such hot weather… in fact I’m pretty sure it never happened while I’m in Canada. So the Turkey Day was very hot and I wanted to capture some of the Ontario Fall Colors. The result is in my Gallery and on Flickr.

What’s more I have Geotagged all photos from Barbados and Turkey Day on Flickr…

The photos from the last day in Smiths Detection are in my Gallery. Unfortunately only people who went to my farewell lunch are on those pictures. It was really great to work with all of you guys! Thank you!

Yahoo!, I have finished processing all 451 RAW files from Barbados. Then after a rigorous verification of my dear wife, we have selected 201 “better” images (some of them might still suck big time). The result is again available from both Flickr and my PHP Gallery

The Bajan Experience was great indeed.

Last week after working well for more then four years (since June 2003) my old point-and-shoot camera Canon S400 died (though I will still try to find out why some time later). But it has died only after giving me the last chance to take some great-looking pictures under water. Yesterday, I have posted those pictures simultaneously on Flickr and in my Gallery.

Finally, I got back to finishing London Honeymoon photos that I have taken last year. This time I decided to process pictures from June 2nd, 2006 when we have visited the magnificent Windsor Castle and rode the London Eye. At the end we said goodbye to London late at night by taking night-time pictures.

What’s more I have simultaneously posted pictures on my Flickr gallery. Apparently thanks to being a Rogers Hi-Speed subscriber (at least I can now somewhat justify the price) I get a full Professional membership with Flickr and therefore unlimited space, resolutions and uploads. All this is totally fantastic since Flickr is the best photographer’s community website.

Fortunately or unfortunately I still have two days of worth of UK pictures which total to about 500 files.

It has been a long while since I traveled to Chicago, USA. It took me almost a year to return to the last unprocessed set of RAW images from that trip. Finally, I have spent some time yesterday at night and whole today playing with the images. Most of the time was definitely spent on creating those huge panorama shots at the end of the album.

I’ve heard some critique from my friend that my photos tend to be on a softer side, closer to the original colors and not as vivid as one would want to. I’ve tried to fix this and most of the photos have much more contrast then I usually was creating in the past (I was using this nice little feature of Bibble Pro - Perfectly Clear). So you are the judge - go see the photos and rate those that you like.

Now once Chicago is finally over, I will return to even later set of images - images from my honeymoon in London in May-June 2006. Three days are still untouched and should arrive soon (I hope).

Using my new monitor processed another batch of photos. All of the photos were converted from RAW to Jpeg using Bibble Pro 4.9 trial software. I think this software is defenitely worth buying, but one should understand that it is not perfect at all. Firstly it is slow, even though my PC is old enough (3.5 years) it should be able to process those RAW files faster using two Xeon 2.66Ghz CPUs. Any operation in Bibble requires a few seconds to restore preview to a full preview resolution. Some tools are absolutely inadequate like the White Balance tool which should have “Auto” preset, which is lacking currently. Using White Balance correction is very difficult to get proper skin tones. But otherwise default “Camera” white balance produces good results.

So take a look at newly processed photos from September 18, 2006 - Chicago Day 2:

and photos of the nature from last week Fall In Scarborough:

Finally, I was able to finish processing RAW files from Day 3 & 4 our our honeymoon.

• On the third day we were on the “Evan Evans Tour” around the City of London. As part of the tour we saw Westminster Abbey, Change of the Guards, cruised Thames River and tried to have a glimpse on the Crown Jewels at the Tower of London. Right after we headed to walk on Piccadilly.
  

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• On Tuesday, May 30, 2006, the fourth day of our stay in London early in the morning we decided to check out the Waterloo train station and check availability of Tickets to Paris, as it was getting boring in London and some “fresh” French air was required. Unfortunately the Eurostar tickets were not cheap at all and booking in advance was required. Hence we scrapped the idea of visiting Paris and moved on to see Freddie Mercury’s house at Logan Place. Walking distance away was a Kensington Palace, the ex-residence of the Princess of Wales – Diana. I skipped the pleasure of enjoying Diana’s dresses but enjoyed all the creatures living in the park nearby. Swans, crows, squirrels and pigeons are all there and all very friendly. We ended the day by walking a trail around Notting Hill with all amazing colorful houses.
  

  

  

  

It is late at night. I’ve just finished processing pictures from the last few photo sessions and some are already in the gallery. It terrifies me to realize that I currently have 44.8Gb of photos. What’s more 33.1Gb is from this year alone. Yes, wedding have contributed a lot to this, but still we are only in August. RAW format that my Canon Digital Rebel XT is creating requires approximately 8Mb per picture and in addition to that to make any picture easily viewable Jpeg should be created. Because of all of this some changes will be coming to the Photo Gallery.

First, all the albums where the number of pictures is too large for a person to see without getting bored (more then 100) will be split in two: Best and Rest. Some of the “Rest” albums I will not make even public. Some I will, depending on what’s inside and how good these leftovers are.

Secondly, I will start tracking which albums don’t get any attention at all and will be hiding them from the public eye. Hence, it is very important if you like the picture to rate it via a simple one-click operation. Just click on the number of stars you believe a picture deserves and your vote will be counted-in.

Third, after the transition to WordPress+Gallery integrated website, I will be regenerating all resized images from current 800×600 to 760×760 pixels, you will notice that resized vertical images will become more visible and 800×600 pictures will fit nicely inside WordPress.