Mobius Meadows Farmstead photos

I spent a few days in the scalding heat at my friend's farm in Vermont. One day we had an hour of rain which was a relief and produced some really cool clouds. I also got to finally try and photograph the hummingbirds and got some OK images.  

photography: Provincetown 2023

 I wasn't sure if I would be able to take my end of year trip to provincetown Massachusetts this year. The hotel I usually stay in doubled it rates and going to the states has become more of chore for me lately. However, a friend who has a condo there rents it out and gave me a really kind offer and I was able to stay 5 night for what would have costs me for 2 so I took advantage of that and was able to wander around and take a photos in at least one place I have never been to before.  I only spoke to one person I knew while there the entire trip which was very nice for me because I go there for solitude. Provincetown is super active in season but the opposite off season. I was also recovering from my first case of Covid and had (and still have weeks later) a terrible cough. So while being sick while away isn't ideal, it's better to be sick in a place you can do things by yourself and come back to your place and just sleep or do nothing.

(click images to see larger versions)

There are three lighthouses in provincetown, one I photographed in detail last year, one I have never seen and one I kept seeing but could never get to on Race Point. It took three days of walking for hours and a quick cab ride to finally get there. It's not a road and there are no signs telling where it is. I was deposited on a fire road that became dunes and a sort of broken pathway that led to the lighthouse and it's accompanying buildings. Great! Well, mostly great. The one day i could get there was the same day as a snow storm the the photos I took were not exactly what I was looking for but managed a few good ones I hope. 

Other excursions took me all over Race Point and while I have taken nice images there before I was able to spend more time wandering all over. There are several structures there I find interesting and the dunes are always beautiful.

Lastly, I spent some time taking photos on and around commercial street, the main drag through the town in the daytime and also at night to sort of button up the images I have wanted ot take over the years and never got to. 

Photo: Heron - Parc La Fontaine

 

A nice surprise at Parc La Fontaine this morning on an early walk with the dog. It was a little leary but not really scared so I was able to get quite close. 

Photos: Mobius meadows farmstead

 After not being to the farm for  2 ½ years, I was finally able to go back and see my friends and walk around in the great outdoors. The alpacas still let me pet them which was nice and I was able to take some photos at the farmstead and at the river across the street. 

Review: Topaz Labs Gigelpixel, Sharpen, Denoise AI and Jpeg to Raw

 Topaz Studios has enjoyed an expanding reputation for well done innovative plugins over the years, often being ahead of the game particularly when it comes to the new Artificial Intelligence plugins. 

Photoshop has just added the ability enlarge photos with little to no quality loss, but Topaz has been there for a while. Their Gigapixel AI enlarges up to 6 times the size of the original and, while there are simple and sparse controls, they do allow some options over the final result. You can do photos one by one or drag a bunch into the window and  run a batch of them. From what I have seen, the Photoshop version of this is super fast but with no control. Gigapixel is VERY resource intensive and it's hard to run anything else if it's processing a group of images. The end results are worth it. If you have a client sending you small images that need to somehow be used for print, this will help or if you have smaller files from earlier digital cameras (like I do) you can bring those files into a size that is actually useful in todays world. Most of interpretation done enhances the photo, though now and then you might get a weird interpretation and I found that light colours chest hair on a light skin and get a little chunky looking and needs some finessing to keep it looking natural. 

Denoising is now standard is many image editors but Denoiser AI is a step up from most of them, while suffering from the same setbacks that I don't think you can really get around. Some images are just too much for any software, AI or not, to just make up large areas of ambiguous pixels. Overall the images can be greatly improved and if the problem is just grain from lower light but otherwise detailed images it does an amazing job. One thing I found was if you have already demised the image somewhere else, this plugin can't do much more with it. This makes sense as the image has been "smoothed out" so the grain has already been removed so there is little left to read. DXO Photolab has the best denoiser I have seen but it only works on RAW files while Topaz plugins work on any number of formats.

Sharpening is another tool every program has. Usually there are many methods to enhance sharpness. Denoiser AI take the subject into consideration and has setting that allow special attention spent to faces. Of all the plugins this one worked less impressively than the first 2 and getting a good result wasn't as easy or natural looking especially on older black & white photos where eyes can merge into black blobs. It did bring some focus back to out of focus images (within reason) that other techniques can't begin to do. I don't know why but I tried the same images one day and it was really terrible and tried it another day and worked fine... it's supposed to be AI so maybe it learned something? 

Jpeg to RAW was included in the package I bought and I can't say much about it. It refused to open. What it is designed to do is take a jpeg and bring back some of the colour range and information that gets strips away when compressing to jpeg so you can edit in a RAW processor with much better success. I did contact Topaz and they got right back t me, acknowledged the problem and said a fix was in the works and would send me a message when it was ready. Disappointing but also the customer service was awesome. 

Another issue was integration with Affinity Photo. It can do it... but not if you bought the app from the Apple App Store. This is a problem with other plugins as well and the reason when Affinity goes to Version 2.0 and charges for updates I'll buy directly from them. I find the Apple Store updates lag behind the ones directly from Affinity by up to a couple days as well. Luckily,  the Topaz Plugins also work as independent applications 

4x enlargement with original for scale.

Processing photos using only the iPad

I will be in Barcelona soon to take photos and travelling always has certain problems when you take photos.

Problems:
Carrying all that equipment on planes, getting through customs, where to store all those photos and the best way to process at some of them while travelling.

My hopeful solution:
Use only the iPad and not a laptop to store and process photos.

Of course using only an iPad has problems. The most obvious when you take 1000s of photos while away is storage. The easiest thing to do would buy a iPad pro with 1 terabyte of storage and use Affinity Photo to edit them. Getting them into that device is fairly simple, a cheap adaptor is all you would need. Of course I don't have 2-3000$ in pocket to just buy one of those so that option is out.

How to get around paying a small fortune:
I was happy to discover, by accident, that there are several devices tha tlet you connect a portable drive to any iPad through a wireless connection. The device I chose is the Ravpower Hub which also has a card reader so I can transfer the camera RAW files directly to the hard drive to open with Affinity Photo later. The hub and external drive are under 200$. Problem solved? Nope!

Drawbacks and workarounds:
So it does work, but with a caveat. For some reason I can't fathom, RAW files can not be transferred across the wifi to the iPad. All you get is a tiny PNG preview file. Some say just upload to a cloud service ike Dropbox and then open it from there, but if you could do that anywhere, anytime - you wouldn't need the device! I rarely have super fast Internet while away. So the workaround I have for now is to transfer all the RAW file to the disk as a backup and then take out the card and import just the files I want to work on right now to Affinity. After I'm done, it's not difficult (but a little slow) to export a PSD file to the hard drive, delete the Affinity files and repeat as I go along.

Not perfect by a long shot, but I think it's workable. At least until I win the lottery and get a tricked out iPad pro.