A while ago, a set of misty wallpapers proved to be quite appreciated. Fast forward a year and some more, after another misty morning, here's a new set of free pictures ready to be used as walllpapers.
Step 1: with bad design decisions one after another (Australis is a shining example of that) slide yourself into irrelevance;
Step 2: when market share goes below some threshold, the main sponsor diminishes (or suspend?) payments;
Step 3: in retaliation, hurt the users by forcing om them a sub-par alternative as a default;
Step 4: profit bleed even more angry users and go even faster into irrelevance.
Brilliant strategy Mozilla!
Myself, I am still using Firefox for the time being, but that's exclusively due to Gecko.
Organizing Wiki Loves Monuments in Romania this year was the hardest so far. Why so? We had a bigger budget, which allowed us to be more ambitious, so on top of the free photography contest for Wikipedia we had to manage a photo exhibition, a 2 day field trip, an additional contest for juniors, a team of volunteering interns and more. But it was rewarding, the results are notable: over 8200 pictures from 216 contributors.
I will tease with the top 3 photos from the contest, you can see all of them on our website.
1st place: Bogdan Croitoru with Monumentul triumfal Tropaeum Traiani
You can also see the winning pictures, along with highlights from the previous editions and winners of the section dedicated to younger contributors in a photo exhibition opened for 3 weeks at the National Library in Bucharest. After that, the expo will move for a couple more weeks at Universitatea de Vest in Timișoara.
Usually pictures including people does not make for good desktop wallpaper, one exception is images of your beloved one, which do not make sense to share, and another exception is images of scantily clad celebrities, which is some circles may be popular but in others are highly controversial. But as a photographer I prefer to take photos with people, those pictures have more soul. Still, how such pictures can be turned in generally usable wallpapers? Make sure people are not recognizable, turn them in silhouettes, is a perfectly cromulent way.
I was away for the week-end, so I continue clearing the summer wallpapers queue after a small gap (initially planned the climax for the Sunday). Hope you will enjoy them, no matter the timing.
As anticipated, today my free wallpaper series is completed with yet another part from this summer backlog (good new for those uninterested: two more parts and I will stop for a good while). Now is about birds flying above the sea and in front of a rising sun. Quite a lot of empty space to host desktop icons.
I'm not sure why I liked to call those images "post-industrial" when the cranes in the background are from a large and very active naval yard, still I think they are a worthy addition to the series (and free, of course, as in CC-BY-SA).
As hinted the other day, there are more posts in the queue for my free wallpaper series. Today we are going to the beach! ...and if I wouldn't be so used with the one I keep using for a few years, I could see myself going with the first.
Now, when the summer is over, I look back and notice quite a lot of summer-ish pictures which people may want to use as desktop wallpapers. Damn! my last post in the free wallpaper series was in the winter! My backlog of picture is considerable, so there may be 3-4 more similar posts to follow if I feel there is interest.
I am a bit late writing about this here, but on September 1st a new edition of the Wiki Loves Monuments photography contest started globally, with 34 countries registered to participate.
It is happening in Romania too, for the 4th time (I am again part of the team) and for us the start is promising so far: in the mid of the 3rd day we are well past the 1k images mark, something which happened much later (7 to 13 days) in the previous editions. Let's see if the contributors (and this includes you, my readers!) will be able to keep up. BTW, this year our prizes improved too.
I was invited to be a member in the jury for the Wiki Loves Earth 2014 photography contest in Brasil and I joined gladly: it was both a honor and an opportunity to see some places which otherwise I don't expect to see any time soon. Also it was an opportunity to share from my experience with 3 editions already of the similar Wiki Loves Monuments in Romania. Now, as the Brasilian contest has published its winners, I want to share a few conclusions. First, it was a success from any point of view, from the impressive number of images (around 7000), to the exposure the team managed to receive, with presences on the most important technology and photography magazines and portals in the country. Then, a lot of impressive places I wish I could see in person, a good selection of winners and a first place image I really like and envy the photographer who took it.
Recently I took a very colorful and quite abstract picture, which I thought would make for an interesting 'pop art' effect. The process is really basic and obvious, but I decided to share it for anyone who want to learn a quickie.
So, I opened the image with GIMP. Since I want the final collage as a 4x4 composition, increase the Canvas Size to 200% on both directions.
Then Duplicate the image layer.
Repeat the duplication until there are enough pieces to cover the image. I need 3 duplicates, for a total of 4 pieces.
Select each piece and with the Alignment Tool move them to cover the image (one right, one bottom, one right and bottom).
Now the aligned pieces should fill the entire image.
Leave one layer as is (if you really want, you can edit it too) and for the second open the Hue-Saturation dialog.
Move the Hue slider left or right until you are happy with the new color set.
Repeat for the other layers until you have something like this:
Export and you are done:
Here's a different use case for a similar effect: I had a single background for the water drop photos, but adjusting the Hue made it appear the pictures are more different than in reality.
PS: as someone told me, I should print this at some big size and try to sell my 'pop art' creation for a ginormous amount of money.
Usually I don't edit much my landscape photos, not because I don't know how but I prefer them this way. Still, recently I felt the need for some more advanced processing for a picture, it enjoyed some success so I decided to share the process. The tools used were UFRaw (in the form of the GIMP plugin), Luminance HDR and, of course, GIMP.
I passed by this scene in the nearby park at the "golden hour" and it looked photogenic, but I wanted to make it more dramatic. One can increase the drama in a landscape photo by using a HDR treatment, but not having the tripod with me (for a proper HDR image you need at least 3 images with exactly the same scene but different exposures) I decided to go for pseudo-HDR. For this, I set the camera recording mode to RAW.
The RAW image was imported in GIMP via the UFRaw plugin 3 times: with normal, -1 and +1 exposure. If you really want, you can try doing the same starting from a single JPEG an simulate the exposure bracketing with color levels/curves, but I wouldn't advise: if from a RAW you can recover some lost image details, in JPEG they are gone forever.
The result is 3 JPEG images, one under-exposed, one exposed properly and the other over-exposed, which are to be combined in a HDR. For more drama, you can bracket with more than one step.
I imported the JPEGs to Luminance HDR and set their exposures manually to -1, 0 and +1 (or whatever values you used for RAW development). Then just press "Next" a few times, there is no need to adjust parameters, nor align the images (they were obtained from the same source).
Now we have a High Dynamic Range image, which can't be used or viewed as-is on a normal computer display, it has to be converted back to Low Dynamic Range, but optimized for what do we want from it (details in shadows and/or highlights, drama, whatever).
Time to pick one of the presets in the right column, one you think is the best for your case.
Then I adjusted the color levels a bit (if you prefer, the levels can be adjusted later with GIMP or any other image editing app).
Now the image can be exported as a JPEG benefiting from the HDR/pseudo-HDR treatment. You can leave it as-is if you like.
However, I opened it again with GIMP for more refinement: sharpening and color curves adjustment, to make the colors warmer. This is my end result.
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