If one is not enough

Everybody who travels knowns this dilemma: Should I take a big SLR with me or just the small digicam? I always go for the digicam solution which is a Powershot A590 IS. Sounds fancy but it's only about 100 EUR on amazon. Why? There are several reasons but the most important reason is that I already broke two of those cameras and it would be a shame to say that I broke my Canon 1D Mark IV just because I left it standing in the rain.

So I deal with my good old Powershot and make the best out of it. And there are three things which are helping me with this task:

• First of all the Canon Hack Development Kit or CHDK. This is a small software you can load onto your SD card which tweaks your Powershot a little bit. Longer exposures, RAW-Pictures, higher apertures, bracketing and a lot of more stuff. You will find two 50s exposures in the picasa-album >> check the stars on the brighter picture.
  
  
• Another great help is Igor. This is my Oregon 300 GPSr which is quite handy if you try to geotag your pictures. Just record where you are going, sync the clock with your camera and later on you assign geolocations to the taken pictures by software - GPicSync. No more "Hmmm ... where have I taken this one?"
  (If you ask yourself why I call it Igor there is a good read at hand: The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet. The little T.S. calls his GPSr "Igor")
  
  
• Now it get's tricky. There are these amazing views which just don't want to be taken on a single picture. Either you are praying for a fish-eye lens to materialise in front of you or - even worse - the lighting is so dynamic that your camera can't deal with it.
  The solutions to these two are quite simple if you think a little bit ahead. Take some more pictures and later on software does the trick.
  Panorama stitching is quite common but don't go for the Canon Stitch which comes along with your PowerShot. You should use Hugin instead which gives you way better results as you can see on the "Melbourne Central" picture (It's made out of 30 pictures) and it's for free!
  The second software is called Qtpfsgui and composes a high dynamic range picture out of a series of exposure bracketing (also freeware). For this one you do need a tripod to take the pictures otherwise it doesn't work. Make sure you have nothing moving in your picture like clouds otherwise you will get a lot of noise in it. The "Remarkable Rocks" HDR was one of those. The software has a noise reduction filter but you just loose contrast along with it.
  

So this is it. This is how I do the magic just with an ordinary digicam which is already the third in my possession (The first got stolen, the second died after 11.000 pics and this one did indeed survive a night in the open rain).

... and now I gotta go outside: Bright Beaches, Waves, Sunshine, 30°C, Ice-Cream, Palm-Trees and A Wonderful Girl :o)

HDR and Panorama

Road music

We carry about 20 GB music data with us, 2 iPods and an iTunes Library and our brand-new Suzuki Vitara, called "Victoria" luckily features an AUX-IN.

So this is the song of the day today:

Already drove 500kms today, hoping to arrive in Armindale, NSW, by 9pm. That was a long day on the road through horse country and Hunter Valley.

And by the way: Seems like we have x-mas sorted out. We will meet a bunch of Couchsurfers in Auckland and have a cooking-brunch with local traditional dishes. So much looking forward to it!

Safety first!

We are in the Blue Mountains for 2 days already - stunning mountains, very green forest and steep canyons/stairs, not so much blue though. More green, brown and yellow. We are staying at the Flying Fox Hostel in a "room with a view" ;-). Very nice and fun place with a lot of people to meet and share stories with.

We learned today that the New South Wales Police offers free-of-charge PLBs to hikers in NSW, especially in the the Blue Mountain area. Guess who was thrilled to take along another gadget ;-) But although the Federal Pass along Katoomba does not really require special security gadgets it still is a great service, I think. Especially if you pass by so many FlipFlop-Tourists along the way trying to hold on to the handrails while "sliding" down 50m steep stairs. Luckily we didn't meet any of them while hiking down the Dry Canyon - incl. gravel road driving, 2 hours hike through bushland and quite some rock climbing through the canyon.

Sometimes safety is as much as hopping into your car, considering that a Red-bellied black Snake just passes by your car. Or putting on sunscreen 50 which actually works too well as the "Natural Tan" updates prove.

We came across this ad yesterday - can anyone eyplain what this means? Thank you!

Tomorrow saftey for us means making sure we don't fall asleep or kill a kangaroo/wallabie/wombat/human being while heading quite a few hundred kilometers further north. Brisbane, here we come!