The Author – Bart Busschots
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Sep
9
My Butterfly Collection
Filed Under Photography | Leave a Comment
As the butterfly season comes to an end here in Ireland for another year I’ve taken some time over the past few days to sort and process my best Irish butterfly pictures and compile them into a Flickr Set. In the long term I’m planning on getting photographs of all 28 species of butterfly that exist in Ireland, but that will take quite some time and quite a bit of travelling. This collection represents my best shots from this year and last, though the vast majority are from this year. My aim is to have at least two shots of each species, a top view of the open wings, and a side view of the closed wings. The differences between these two views can be very dramatic.
[tags]photography, Ireland, butterfly[/tags]
Sep
8
Photo of the Week 29 – St. Mary’s By Night
Filed Under Photography | 4 Comments
St. Mary’s Square is the second quadrangle on the St. Patrick’s College campus. It’s smaller and less well known than St. Joseph’s square. The square was rather controversially re-designed with a very modern water garden a decade or two ago. Personally I love it. I think it’s a great melding of the old with the new. This shot was taken on the central island within the water garden with the largest stone fountain in the left foreground.
In many ways this shot is one of the most extreme I’ve ever taken. The only source of light in the scene is the windows around the square. this lead to a gigantic dynamic range with the interior of the windows needing an exposure of a fraction of a second and the interior of the square requiring an exposure of a few minutes. Bridging this range required combining ten exposures over a range of 9 f stops (1 EV steps from -4 to +5) totalling about 8 minutes into a single HDR image.
[tags]Maynooth, Kildare, Ireland, SPCM, HDR, night, photography[/tags]
Aug
31
Each year in May Irish hedgerows get painted white by Hawthorn blossoms. Each flower is tiny, but a few million of them soon add up! This is a close-up shot of a small bunch of blossoms near the start of the season.
For those of you interested in such things here are some of the technical details of this shot:
- Camera: Nikon D40
- Lens: Nikon DX AFS 55-200mm
- Exposure: 1/1250 sec
- Focal Length: 200mm
- Focal Ratio: F8
- ISO: 400
- Camera Mode: Aperture Priority
- Exposure Compensation: -0.33
[tags]Maynooth, Kildare, Ireland, Hawthorn, flower, blossom, white, photography[/tags]
Aug
31
Indiana Jones and Kingdom of the God-Awful Film
Filed Under 42 (Life the Universe & Everything) | Leave a Comment
I finally got around to watching the last (it better be the last) Indiana Jones film. It started well. The silhouette of Indie putting his hat on was fantastic, it felt like we were in for a true Indie film, another classic. Sure, Ford is old, but he’s clearly still got it! If only, the opening few minutes were the high point of the film, it was down hill from there. At first we were heading slowly down hill, but the speed soon picked up.
[tags]Indiana Jones, The Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls[/tags]
Aug
30
My Perl Image Processing Scripts
Filed Under Photography, My Projects, Software Development, Computers & Tech | 6 Comments
Update (18 June 2012) – A more up-to-date version of these scripts can now be found here.
My Myers Briggs personality profile insists that I “prefer economy of effort”, you can probably translate that to “is a lazy sod”. Because of this I like automating repetitive tasks. It all started when I wanted a quick and easy way to prepare my images for posting to my website. I wanted them resized with my URL and the Creative Commons icon added in, and I wanted to be able to process a whole directory of images in one go. I started by playing around with the GD libs in PHP, but soon realised it would be quicker and easier to use Perl to shell out to the command line tools from Image Magick. At the time I wrote a post on my choice to do this which also contained the initial code. That code has been expanded and evolved since, and now includes functions for rendering nice (in my opinion) borders and titles on my better images. If you want to see examples checkout the Photo of the Week category on this blog..
[tags]Perl, Image Magick, script, programming, image processing[/tags]
Aug
29
I was never very good at Chemistry. I cherry picked my way around it for the Junior Cert and didn’t take it for the Leaving Cert or as part of my science degree. I never really got beyond the three types of bond and the fact that electrons are in shells and that the amount of them on the outer shell is very important. I don’t think I ever considered Chemistry fun. However, I was really impressed by the work of the Chemistry department in the University of Nottingham when I stumbled across it last month. They have created a YouTube video about every single element in the periodic table! I’ve watched them all over the space of a few weeks (a few a day) and I learned a lot as well as being entertained. You get to see real chemists talking about the elements, as well as doing experiments with some (often involving explosions), and you get to see samples of most of them. Although I always knew what Gold and Silver looked like, I had no idea what Bismuth looked like! What’s also cook is that these videos are still being updated and expanded so you can watch the project grow.
You’ll find the periodic table of videos at www.periodicvideos.com. They also have a channel on YouTube where you can see all the videos and subscribe to their feed so you never miss an update!
Aug
27
Mobile Me – A Polished Turd?
Filed Under Computers & Tech | 5 Comments
The problem with .Mac (the previous name for Mobile Me) was never the concept, nor was it what was promised, the problem was always the implementation. I expressed my views on .Mac back in January 2007 in a post entitled “.Mac – The Devil is in the Implementation”, and nothing has really changed since. I had high hopes that Mobile Me would finally give us the .Mac we’d always wanted. If all Mobile Me had been was a working version of .Mac without any new functionality it would have been great! However, since it’s launch Mobile Me has just been one disappointment after another. Things started badly when it took them days to get the system even remotely stable, got worse when they permanently lost thousands of people’s email, and didn’t improve at all when we found out Apple had lied to us about push.
[tags]Apple, Mobile Me, .Mac, iDisk, security[/tags]
Aug
26
This is just a quick guide to getting BibTeX to work in a LaTeX document. This is not meant to be an introduction to BibTeX for someone who’s never heard of it, but rather a cheat-sheet for those of us who don’t use it quite often enough to remember the details without a little help.
First you need to create and manage your bibliography database (.bib file). You could do this by hand, but if you’re on OS X I’d highly recommend BibDesk. Much simpler.
Secondly, you insert citations in the document using the \cite{} command. Each entry in your bibliography database has a separate citation key, you use this key to insert a reference. For example, if my bibliography database contained a reference with a citation key ‘Busschots2008’ I’d insert a citation to that reference with the command:
\cite{Busschots2008}
Thirdly, you need to include your bibliography in your document. To do this you need to set a style for it, and then include it. If you’re not sure what style to use start with plain. Assuming your bibliography database is in a file called Sample.bib, you’d include it with the following code (notice that you don’t add .bib to the end of the file name):
\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliography{Sample}
Finally, to render the document you now need to run your document through both BibTex and LaTeX in the following order:
latexbibtexlatexlatex
Aug
24
This shot shows the tower at the back of St. Mary’s protestant church in Maynooth as seen from the St. Patrick’s College/NUI Maynooth South Campus. In some ways this almost a cliché in Maynooth. Very few photographers pass through the arch outside Callan Hall without thinking “wow, this arch frames that church tower perfectly”. For that reason I can take no credit what-so-ever for the concept of this shot, just for the implementation. It’s amazing how many different shots you can get from the identical spot by changing your height above the ground and your focal length. I must have taken about 50 shots before choosing this one as my favourite.
For those of you interested in such things here are some of the technical details of this shot:
- Camera: Nikon D40
- Lens: Nikon DX AFS 18-55mm (D40 kit lens)
- Exposure: 1/160 sec
- Focal Length: 55mm
- Focal Ratio: F11
- ISO: 200
- Camera Mode: Aperture Priority
- Exposure Compensation: 0.0
[tags]Maynooth, Kildare, Ireland, NUIM, SPCM, church, tower, arch, photography[/tags]
Aug
17
Just because something is common, doesn’t mean it isn’t beautiful. After the Cabbage White the Small Tortoiseshell (Aglais urticae) is probably our most common butterfly, but I also think it’s one of our most beautiful. You can’t miss the lovely reds, but look closer and you’ll also see wonderful bright blue spots along the edges of the wings. These guys are strongly attracted to a lot of garden flowers so keep an eye out for them in your back yards! I snapped this one while it was feeding on some Thyme that was flowering.
For those of you interested in such things here are some of the technical details of this shot:
- Camera: Nikon D40
- Lens: Nikon DX AFS 18-55mm (D40 kit lens)
- Exposure: 1/160 sec
- Focal Length: 55mm
- Focal Ratio: F8
- ISO: 200
- Camera Mode: Auto
- Exposure Compensation: 0.0
[tags]butterfly, Small Tortoiseshell, Aglais urticae, Cavan, Ireland, photography[/tags]