Exercise is a funny thing: the more you do it, the more you can do. For 18 months or so we've been walking around the tan. Increasingly quickly. As we do so some joggers typically complete three or more circuits, which shows that our walks weren't pushing the limits of human endurance. It probably takes us a bit less than 40 minutes to walk around.
Last Sunday and today we upped the ante. We started running around the tan: a bit. We probably managed to run about half the distance: some running, some walking, broken into about ten stretches of about 200 metres of running.
Last Sunday (the first time we ran) it took 27 minutes. Today (aided, perhaps, by a bit of rain?) it took us 25 minutes and 55 seconds.
For the historical record, here's the GPS record of the run. My Blackberry's GPS seems to have gotten a little confused along Alexandra Avenue: it implies that we entered the Gardens, whilst we actually stuck to the Tan jogging track along the side of the Avenue. If you zoom in a little you can guess where we were running rather than walking: the blue track points are further apart whilst we ran. For example, most of the distance down Anderson Street (and about half of the rest of the circuit). One day I guess we'll be able to run the whole distance.
View Larger Map
Anthony Holmes July 4th, 2009 09:43:44 PM
In this blog posting I commemorate the passing of Kodachrome. Kodak have announced that they are ceasing production of the most venerable films that is also one of the best film types ever produced. (But fiendishly difficult to process.)
One of my books, The Handbook of Color Photograpy, by Ellis Herwig (Amphoto, 1982) described Kodachrome as follows:
"The introduction of Kodachrome in 1936 was a color photography milestone. At last, anyone with a 35mm camera... could use this superior-quality dye-coupler film. At one stroke, all other color processes had been rendered obsolete, and Kodachrome's reputation for excellence has endured from that day to this - never equaled, never surpassed."
Kodachrome also had had another quality: its longevity. Kodachrome slides are expected to keep their colour for 100 years, which far surpassed the 10, 20 or possibly 50 year lifespans of other films being used in the 1980s. Frustratingly, although the many Kodachrome slides I took in the 1980s and 90s still have great quality, I'm holding off on scanning them because unless I'm extremely careful they tend to flare in areas of high contrast with my Nikon Super Coolscan 5000.
The image above is a slide that I took during the most astonishing sunrise of my life. It was so good that I took 18 photos of the sunrise: an extraordinary 'waste' of film back in the days when the cost of a roll of Kodachrome (with processing) was a very expensive $25 or so.
I'm eternally grateful to Mark Attard for waking me up to see this sunrise. The night before as we camped on the foreshore I contemplated getting up to see the sunrise. When morning arrived it was cold and I never like getting up early. Mark put his head out of the tent and told me that I should get up to see the sunrise. "Is it good?" I asked. "It's good" he said. "Very good?" I asked. "Very good. (long pause) I think you should get up." he said, in a tone that left me with no choice. In every direction in the sky there were bright red, orange and yellow clouds. Kodachrome caught them and, unlike most of my negatives from the 1980s, the colour is still perfect today. Follow the link to my web site and choose the largest size that your screen can support to a get a feeling for what it was like. (It looks great on my 27" Dell monitor.)
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Anthony Holmes June 30th, 2009 11:33:07 PM
In my first three blog postings on how I have achieved tight diabetes control I covered these topics:
- Introduction
- Dose Adjustment for Normal Eating principles for balancing insulin and eating
- Modified eating (to avoid high carbohydrate hits mucking up my control)
The final major strategy is "Tons of Testing".
In theory, DAFNE means that I can match my food with my insulin quite happily and rarely need to test. In practice, DAFNE recommends fairly frequent testing: a minimum of four times per day and then additional tests when you think you might be going wrong. According to DAFNE you might find yourself testing anything from 4 to 7 times per day.
If I ate meals that contained very predictable carbohydrate quantities at predictable times and had very stable activity and stress levels and no infections, then I could probably get by with very few tests at all. I notice, for example, that when I eat slices of toast I can generally judge my sugar levels well. A serving of a large casserole containing potatoes, carrots, beans etc., will less easy to predict. The same with many take away meals. There's a fair margin for error. If I mis-judge the amount of carbohydrates by even 10-20% (meaning, for example, I guess 45g carbohydrates when it's really 55g carbohydrates), then I'm likely to go high or low.
I manage this uncertainty by taking large numbers of blood tests: 15 to 20 every day. If I eat a meal and rise to 9mmol/l, (160mg/dl) I take one or two 'top up' units of insulin. If I drop to 3.5mmol/l (60mg/dl) I eat my usual hypo top up: fast acting sweets totalling 6-12g carbohydrates.
It's also important to keep records as I do this. A dose of quick acting insulin will still be taking an effect up to four hours later.
My ability to do this is greatly aided by Australia's National Diabetes Services Scheme, which gives me access to heavily subsidised blood testing strips (with a co-payment by me to make sure I'm not wasteful). At a bare minimum I reckon I've dropped my risk of macrovascular heart illnesses by 15-20% compared with my previous 'good enough' levels of control, and dropped the risk that I will develop all the other complications of diabetes by similar amounts. So there's little doubt that the cost of my strips is a good investment. However: if you're living with a health system that rations the number of strips you get, or if you live with a health insurer who limits expenditure (or, worse, if you have no health insurance), then I appreciate that my approach will be hard or impossible to adopt. In that case, the only suggestion I can make is that you start to control your diet to (healthy) carefully managed standard quantities of carbohydrate.
At the end of the day, Continuous Glucose Monitoring Systems will allow my to perfect my control even further. I'll blog about how I think those systems have the potential to revolutionise diabetes control - but how it is that the manufacturers/diabetes practitioners don't yet fully realise how revolutionary CGMSs can be - in a subsequent blog posting.
A photo I took today looking from Melbourne's Royal Park towards the city, with the cranes of the new Royal Childrens Hospital in the foreground. Comments (0)
Anthony Holmes June 8th, 2009 09:47:28 PM
The slogan that goes with the DAFNE approach to diabetes management is "Eat what you want. Enjoy what you eat". Like many diabetes management regimes it doesn't encourage the routine measurement of blood glucose in the hour or two after a meal. The theory is that you are likely to go high during that time and their isn't much you can do about it, so focus on making sure that you come back down to normal over a slightly longer period (and don't go low).
The only problem with this theory is that if you have three carbohydrate laden meals a day you might be spending 6 or more hours with blood glucose levels higher than normal. At that rate you'll never get a low HbA1c reading and - more importantly - during that large chunk of each day you'll be running the risk of causing damage to your body.
There's a different theory to diabetes management that suggests that carbohydrate consumption should be left as low as possible. The key (but not the only) advocate of this approach is Dr Bernstein. He advocates that you eat only 30 grams of carbohydrates each day. Breakfast 6g, Lunch 12g, Dinner 12g. This compares to a normal western diet of anything from 150 to 250 grams of carbohydrate per day. He makes the very sound point that with small quantities of carbohydrate there is less room for dosing error and it's much easier to keep blood glucose under control. He also argues that this is a more natural and healthy diet and will generally aid health even without diabetes.
I'm not entirely convinced that it's necessary to lower carbohydrate consumption to that level. I find that with the aid of DAFNE principles and with frequent testing, I can get my HbA1c down to normal levels whilst still eating more normal quantities of carbohydrates.
That said, I still find high carbohydrate meals easily lead to large errors in control (with accompanying highs and lows). Unless you are meticulously weighing and counting ingredients it is easy to make a 10% error in estimating how much carbohydrate you are eating, and that can lead to your blood glucose going well out of range. And, try as I might, there are some meals that just have too many quick acting carbohydrates for me to be able to eat them and stay normal. So I'm tending to eat fewer and fewer carbohydrates.
As a result, I've ditched or curtailed a few meal types:
- Pizza
- Too many hot chips
- Normal sized servings of white rice, including sushi platters
The key is to try out meals and to measure how high I go: including a couple of tests taken in during the two hours after after a meal. And I record what sort of meal I have eaten, and then I have the meal a few times over a few weeks to see what my usual reaction to it is. If a meal persistently sends me to high I either stop having it or reduce how much I have. So nowadays when I eat Japanese I avoid sushi platters and only have a few pieces with white rice: and concentrate on sashimi (fish without rice) instead.
The key here is keeping records of what I ate, how much insulin I took and how my blood sugars panned out. Ideally I'd never let myself rise about the highest "normal" reading (which I count as 7.8 mmol/l). (For those people in the US who insist on using a different measure to the rest of the world, that's 140 mg/dl.) In practice I'll often go to 9 mmol/l and sometimes higher.
I currently keep my records in a spreadsheet developed by Kevin on his Parenthetic (Diabetic) web site. His spreadsheet is excellent, and if you drop him an email he'll send you a copy.
Keeping meticulous records (of what you eat as well as blood glucose and insulin doses) might seem like a drag. I can't emphasise enough how liberating it is to be able to see a clear picture of how your body is reacting to insulin and food. Make a mental decision: decide that record keeping will be fun and useful, not boring and depressing. Make sure you even feel happy about recording bad results: you're going to learn a lot from them. If you get into the swing of it you'll learn to love it.
At some stage I'm going to do a statistical analysis to see whether there is a correlation between my low carbohydrate days (and my averages and my variations during those days) and whether they were statistically better than days when I ate more carbohydrates. The spreadsheet records have built up many hundreds of days of data so I should be able to get a clear indication as to whether lowering carbohydrates improves my control as much as I think it does.
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Anthony Holmes June 2nd, 2009 11:22:30 PM
In my last posting about my diabetes I said that my improvements came from three main areas:
- My use of the DAFNE system for managing insulin;
- Modified eating; and
- Tons of Testing
In this posting I'm going to describe DAFNE in more detail.
DAFNE stands for Dose Adjustment for Normal Eating. The slogan that goes with the program is "Like what you eat. Eat what you like."
How DAFNE works
DAFNE is a five day (!) training course for people with type one diabetes teaching a method of managing food and insulin doses.
When I first got diabetes, the goal was to eat exactly the same amount of carbohydrates every day and to give exactly the same insulin every day. Over time I loosened this up a bit: I'd eat a bit more or less at each meal and give a bit more or less insulin. Hypos and high blood readings told me that I didn't always judge this correctly. But two thirds of the times that I visited my specialist he'd tell me that I had an HbA1c reading below 7%, so my control was 'excellent'. And the other third of the time he'd tell me I was over 7%, so I was only 'good'. Despite these rules of thumb, my dosing was actually up the creek and I was fluctuating wildly (and often not realising it). It was only my average that was good. (My specialist once commented that my individual glucose results were 'always' very variable, and we assumed this was just a fact of life (like the weather) that we couldn't change (and shouldn't change if the HbA1c readings were OK.))
The DAFNE approach first sets your long acting insulin to an absolutely steady level. If you don't have a bite to eat all day, your insulin level shouldn't vary at all. (OK: exercise, stress and illness might change things. But all things being equal, you'd stay steady.) During the five day course everybody works out what their background doses should be. Interestingly, most of the people on my course substantially dropped their long acting insulin doses. Mine dropped from 50 units per day to 20 units per day (taken in two doses of 10 units).
Then you work out how much insulin you need for your meals. This is calculated with ratios. 1:1 means that for every carbohydrate portion (10 grams of carbohydrates) you have one unit of insulin. 1.5:1 means that for every carbohydrate portion you need 1.5 units of insulin. Through experimentation everybody determines what ratios they need. But the important thing to remember here is that at different times of the day you are likely to need different ratios. So I need 2 units for every carbohydrate portion in the morning, but only 1.5 at other times. Ratios can vary from 0.5:1 to 3:1.
Once you've worked out your ratios, you can vary your meals much or as little as you want. You can change the size of a meal and when you have it. You can skip a meal entirely. Your insulin goes up and down with your meals. As an ongoing process you'll need to keep tracking to make sure you are using the correct ratios. Things will change from time to time as your state of health or the amount of exercise you do varies. But as a general principle you'll be able to eat and select doses with enormous confidence and flexibility.
DAFNE in the real world
People who have been trained in DAFNE have improved control, reduced hypos and improved quality of life. The 25% of participants with the highest HbA1c readings see the biggest improvements (in Australia an average dropped from 9.9 to 9.1%). The 25% of participants with the best HbA1c readings actually increased their HbA1c readings slightly (from 6.8% to 6.9%). But their frequency of severe hypos dropped significantly, indicating that although their average control remained the same, the amount of variation (which wasn't measured in the Australian study) probably dropped.
What did DAFNE do for me?
I was in the 'good' quarter of people taking DAFNE. On average it shouldn't have changed my HbA1c much. Had I known this at the time, I wouldn't have spent five days attending the course. But it turns out that doing DAFNE was especially important for me.
For six months I was doing nothing except follow DAFNE. My HbA1c dropped a couple of percent. Its biggest benefit was the way it reduced my variations in blood glucose readings.
On its own, doing the DAFNE course:
- Allowed me to fix my old dosing rules which were entirely wrong (too much background, too much yo-yoing with my quick acting doses)
- Has given me confidence that I can avoid 'out of control' hypos: the ones that needed someone to come to my aid. (I haven't had one of these for a couple of years now)
I highly recommend doing DAFNE no matter what your control is currently like. The stability it gives you is well worth the time it takes to do the course.
More information
UK DAFNE Web site
OZ DAFNE web site (for the Australian program)
Training in flexible, intensive insulin management to enable dietary freedom in people with type 1 diabetes: dose adjustment for normal eating (DAFNE) randomised controlled trial British Medical Journal: 2002; 325: 746
Taking the Guess Work out of Type 1 Diabetes; Dianne Harvey; Diabetes Management Journal, Volume 26, March 2009, page 16 (not available online). Editor dmj@goodhealthpublications.com, Suite 207, 2nd floor, 69 Christie Street, St Leonards New South Wales 2065, Australia.
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Anthony Holmes May 25th, 2009 05:30:27 PM
This is the first of a number of postings I'm going to write on the topic of improving the control of diabetes.
I've had type one diabetes for thirty-three years.
I've been lucky: nobody has ever considered chopping off my feet because of poor circulations; my kidneys seem to be working fine; I haven't needed laser treatment to prevent me going blind due to retinopathy... and I haven't had a heart attack. (Although, to be honest, I'm not sure whether the tests my doctors do would necessarily disclose macro-vascular problems before I had a heart attack).
Genetic Luck?
I suspect my good health may well be partly due to good luck: some people may be more likely to develop complications than others based on their genes. So I don't want to sound superior when I describe my state of health.
And Good Control
However: anybody who has diabetes (especially those taking insulin) knows that some days they manage get better results than others.
The degree to which you take control of your life can make astonishing differences to how your outcomes. No matter whether you got a good or a bad set of genes, you can do a lot to improve your control.
First Step: Deciding to take control
The first step is to decide to improve your control. At different times in your life you'll be more or less ready to take the effort. I've always paid a fair bit of attention to my control over the 33 years, but there were long periods of time when I was fairly slack. A little over two years ago I decided I was ready to take my control to a better level.
If you're ready to do that, then please read my postings on this topic.
Second Step: Knowing what to do
I've "known" how to look after my diabetes since I was 12. As I sat in hospital for days whilst I was being stabilised, I was old enough to read and (with sufficient time) understand most of the information that was placed in front of me describing diabetes. I was helped by my mother who carefully cut one crust off each slice of bread in my sandwiches (so they were exactly 'one portion' each) and who made sure I did each and every urine test (two per day!) to measure my control. With that knowledge I managed to get control that was "pretty good": HbA1c readings of about 7% or a little lower. My specialist was happy with this and told me that any person with diabetes who got lower levels (eg normal readings of 6%) only did so by having "heaps of hypos". The implication was that I shouldn't try harder.
Over the last couple of years I've disproved that. My HbA1c readings are now down around 5.3-5.4%. And I feel more in control than I have at any time over the last 33 years.
I'm not the only person with diabetes who can do this: there are other people who have achieved results that surprise most medical professionals/diabetes educators. On average, people with diabetes are getting better at control (and complications less frequent). With the correct approach you can get ahead of the curve. Here's how I did it.
DAMEATT
This is my acronym. It stands for Dose Adjustment With Modified Eating and Tons of Testing. It's a variation I've come up with that partly incorporates one part of my tighter control: DAFNE plus some other stuff.
There are the three components to my changed control:
- I attended a five day course following a program called Dose Adjustment for Normal Eating (DAFNE)
Although I already counted carbohydrates and adjusted my insulin, I did so in a fairly unstructured way. By following this approach (which is taught in Germany, the UK and Australia), I developed a much better approach which revealed serious problems with my previous approach. It was necessary but not sufficient for my tight control. - Modified Eating
The control given to my by the DAFNE principles showed to me that some meals gave me a heavy carbohydrate loadings that sent my blood sugars unacceptably high almost every day of the week. Some people advocate huge reductions in carbohydrates to get good diabetes control. I've only found it necessary to make some minor changes to my eating habits (that I will describe). - Tons of Testing
Even with the DAFNE principles and modified eating, many things can throw your diabetes control out of whack. I've now made measuring my glucose - and keeping scrupulous records - a regular part of my day.
Stay tuned for more information.
Second posting: DAFNE
(By the way: I'm not a doctor. I'm not providing medical advice. I'm describing my own experience. If you are making changes to your diabetes management, do so with care and consult your health professionals if in doubt. I can't take responsibility for any action you might or might not take.) Comments (0)
Anthony Holmes May 24th, 2009 11:46:12 PM
The famous Apple "halo" effect has won another serious follower.
Several years ago I bought an iPod classic. A while later Dennis bought a newer iPod classic (with a colour screen). Then Dennis got an iPhone. (Which is a delightful bit of hardware, but for productivity reasons I'm still sold on my Blackberry.)
And then I bought a Canon 5D Mark II camera. (Not an Apple product, but bear with me...) It's a Single Lens Reflex camera that produces glorious 1080p30 High Definition video. Video that my PC couldn't play, let alone edit. And hence, when it came time to think about getting a new PC and I could have considered a "PC", I was instead drawn to a new environment... and hence I now have a Mac Pro along with a copy of Final Cut Studio for video editing.
On the whole, switching to a Mac has been easy. First up: if you are thinking about switching to a Mac, remember that changing operating systems has its confusing moments.
For example:
- I just went back and fixed a typo in this blog posting and then, without thinking, tried pressing the "end" key to get back to the end of the line - which doesn't do the same thing on a Mac.
- Double clicking on the top of a window doesn't maximise it: it shrinks it.
- The main menus are always at the top of the screen instead of the top of your current window.
- Closing windows doesn't close applications: so if you don't realise this you end up with a lot of applications still running
- Installing programs can be a little bit weird: often simpler, but weird, since sometimes you just drag an application into a folder, sometimes you get a file that thinks it's a disk, sometimes there's an install program, sometimes there isn't. But you rarely seem to end up with an installation that scatters hundreds of DLL files on your drive and does intrusive things to your registry, etc..
If you are prepared to accept that some things work just a little differently and get someone patient to guide you (or read Apple's guidance for Windows users) you find a lovely integrated environment.
A whole bunch of my favourite programs have Mac versions -- it's not like I even have to find an equivalent program: my favourite software providers already support the Mac themselves. It's like they realised that somebody like me would be drawn to the Mac one day.
These include:
- Canon Digital Photo Professional software (for editing my Camera's Raw images)
- Nikon Coolscan software (for my film scanner)
- Bibble (Raw camera editor, which complements Canon's software)
- DIM (for copying and renaming images)
- Lotus Notes (for email, running my blog and wikis etc.)
- Readerware (for book cataloguing)
- Open Office/NeoOffice/Symphony (and if I really wanted it, Microsoft Office)
- VMWare Fusion (which lets me run work based Virtual Machines on my Mac, or run a Bootcamp installation of Windows inside my Mac instead of dual booting, or Linux)
The only program I really feel I'm missing is Photools' iMatch program: and for the time being I will run it via Fusion. Once upon a time I would also have wanted Paintshop Pro, but whilst I used to love it, I've come to hate it since Corel took it over and turned it into a slow and unreliable program, so I'm not stressed that it won't run on a Mac.
I'm teaching myself video editing with Final Cut Studio. High level video editing is a little like brain surgery: it takes a long time to understand what all the options are and how not to make a mess. I've tried this before with Adobe Premiere under Windows. Both times I've done it carefully: done a lot of reading, read stuff on the web, taken notes to help me learn as I try things out. Admittedly the technology has moved a long way since I tried to learn Premiere under Windows 5-6 years ago. But my experience with Final Cut Studio on the Mac has been streets ahead. Whereas the Windows/Premiere combination seemed to go out of its way to fail (or to fail to explain to me what I was doing wrong), FInal Cut Studio seems to be much more likely to simply work. I'm not saying it's easy. It's not. (Going to a class would probably be a very good idea if you weren't already familiar with video editing.) But here are two examples of it being nice:
- I chose a video format for my project. I thought I knew what I was doing. When I imported my first clip, Final Cut told me my clip was slightly different to the format I had chosen and offered to change my project's settings to match my clip. Nice. Premiere would have given me an error.
- I wanted to find a control. With my old release of Premiere this led to fruitless hunts to find a tiny icon that I could see in my books but not on my screen. In Final Cut I went to Help and typed the name of the control and it directly opened up the relevant menu item(s) thus not only telling me the answer to my question, but showing me as well.
Now: I'm being a little unfair on Premiere because I'm familiar with an older release from more primitive times.
But I do like my Mac.
Photo taken on the banks of Merri Creek on 10th May 2009. Comments (0)
Anthony Holmes May 24th, 2009 10:19:28 PM
A while ago I commented on the fact that a movie was being shot about our laneway: http://www.centreplacemovie.com/
It's still in production.
The other day we got a flyer announcing that a television commercial for the Victorian Government was going to be shot in Centre Place tonight. I assumed it was going to be another tourism commercial with dreamy shots and large balls of wool. So I was a little surprised when shouting broke out. What sort of toursim ad has angry shouting in it? Had there been an artistic dispute between members of the film crew?
Ten minutes later it happened again. And again.
I suspect that the commerical which "will focus on Melbourne streets" is going to be about something like drunken and violent behaviour as a social evil to be avoided. And Centre Place is being used as a site for drunken and violent behaviour. Which is a bit mean. We don't have much drunken behaviour in our street. (Dennis suggests we do, but I think that any shouting we hear late at nights is all happening out in Flinders Lane.) In our laneway we get people sitting on milk crates and having cigarettes. And canoodling. I think our neighbours with a view further down the lane suspect there's sometimes some drug dealing.
Anyway: here's a shot of our laneway being nice and peaceful.
Anthony Holmes March 23rd, 2009 09:58:52 PM
Some people power around the Bay in a Day. We're walking small stretches of it on weekends, getting some exercise and taking photos.
Here's a bit of sea wall we saw today whilst walking between Sandringham and Brighton Beach. The exposures were about a second long to make the sea water nice and soft.
You can see a larger copy of this photo here. (Click on "Original" to see it in the largest size.)
I'm now going to post occasional photos into a 2009 Photostream Gallery on my Photo Site. Collections of Photos will continue be grouped into separate galleries, but random photos will just be thrown into the 2009 Photostream Gallery. This is the ATOM/RSS feed for the 2009 Photostream Gallery. Comments (0)
Anthony Holmes March 22nd, 2009 10:29:23 PM
A stinking hot day.
Here's Oscar, lying next to my penguin 31.
The penguin's name (31 1911), so named because he came with a label that read:
Hello, my name is
31 1911
Fluffy Penguin
Since "Fluffy Penguin" is obviously a description and not a name, this means that 31 1911 is his proper name.
Anyway, this photo was actually taken on Friday 5th February, which, whilst warm, wasn't the record breaking 46.4 degrees that we reached today, Saturday 6th February 2009. But the look of lolling about fits the mood of today, especially since Oscar and 31 chose to do it on top of the esky that is still sitting near our kitchen. (The esky was in use after our old fridge broke down, until we bought a brand new fridge last week.)
Of course, Oscar (the cat) might be exercising some cat psychology here:
- Molly (our other cat) regularly lies up close to Dennis. In cat psychology, she's probably asserting her dominance as the apartment's top cat.
- Since Molly clearly wants to be top cat, and clearly prefers to lie next to Dennis, I assume this means she thinks that Dennis is higher up the chain than I am.
- I regularly play with Oscar each night, and often lie down next to him, so he probably thinks I'm trying to dominate him. (He definitely defers to Molly.)
- So, when Oscar saw the chance, with humble 31 lying on top of the esky, he decided to take his opportunity and lie next to 31 to make sure 31 knows his place at the bottom of the pecking order.
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Anthony Holmes February 7th, 2009 11:23:48 PM
Sort of by accident I've ended up with a new camera: a Canon 5D Mark II. You see, it happened like this. We were in Myer buying a coffee grinder. Whilst Dennis researched the features of competing models and spoke with the sales staff, I wandered off a few metres to look at Myer's camera department: such a small camera department that I'd never think of buying something there. But I had been thinking about this camera particular type of camera for a while, and, as of last week, the Canon 5d Mark II was still sufficiently new and in short supply that you couldn't just see it sitting on camera store shelves: you got one when the store reached your number on their waiting list as stock slowly dribbled in.
But none of the people who had put their names down at places like Michaels, Teds, Camera Action, JB, Elizabeth Street Photography... had thought that Myer might get one of Canon's semi-pro cameras. But there it was. Just sitting there looking out of place amongst the point and shoots and Myer's smallish selection of SLRs.
I would have resisted buying it except for the fact that I ended up speaking to a salesperson to ask the price. And that led to a discount that seemed big in absolute terms, and then it came with this, and that, and after a while it seemed positively churlish not to buy it. Still, it was probably just a case of bringing the purchase date forward a little. I think I would have found it very hard to have gone up to Mount Buffalo at Easter without having purchased this new camera.
Oh, and the coffee grinder we got was a Sunbeam.
(Photo from the Botanic Gardens, turned to Monochrome with a green filter and toning effect in Canon Digital Photo Professional and curves/contrast edited in Paintshop Pro.) Comments (2)
Anthony Holmes January 9th, 2009 10:17:32 PM
Many years ago, somebody told me about a movie that a friend of his was working on. It sounded like a disaster waiting to happen. There was no way it would amount to anything, so I didn't tell anybody about it before it was released. I expected never to hear about it, or, if I did, I knew that it would soon sink into obscurity.
Here was the story line:
- The movie was about a bunch of drag queens/transexuals (so naturally the movie would never be mainstream)
- Who had to travel into the outback for an obscure reason (contrived plot)
- They met all sorts of odd characters along the way (ditto)
- And they travelled in a bus
- Which they painted
- And they climbed up on top of it
- And (naturally?) they found themselves singing from a giant shoe placed on top of the bus, complete with streamers (just plain weird)
- Oh, and the bus was called Priscilla
Given how successful it was, I'm never going to be relucant to mention a future movie ever again, just in case it's a runaway success that garners Academy Awards.
This afternoon I left the apartment in my daggiest shorts and a non-matching shirt carrying two 'green' bags to pop down to pick up some stuff from the supermarket. Only to find Flinders Lane at the corner of Centre Place filled with a film crew. The security people instructed a few of us random pedestrians to simply "walk through, but don't look at the camera". Which I did, only to discover a 'crowd' of extras walking through just after me as part of a background scene for a movie. I'll be eternally embarrassed if they decide to leave me in a shot.
We got a flyer for this movie, so I'll give you a description:
The film is called Centre Place. It's a 'character based Australian film with a high calibre case including Alison Whyte, John Waters and introducing Julia Markowski as "Lizzie"'.
'The film takes its name from the street in which it is filmed. Centre Place is the story of Lizzie a young woman and her journey to rebuild her life and recapture her dreams when they are dashed away, with the help of her family, friends and community.
'Much thought has been given to the way we film in the street. It is a beautiful lane... we want to see it the way it is, i.e. its signs, the shops and the atmosphere in the street, in the most romantic way possible.'
Here's a photo of the film crew taken from above (there's a camera on rails on the left, a light on the top right and the pot plants on the bottom right are from some of the balconies).
And here's a photo taken as a screenshot from the security camera at our front door. The person sitting across the laneway with a white top and black pants seems to be an extra. I think the two people walking down the lane are crew rather than cast.
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Anthony Holmes January 5th, 2009 09:11:47 PM
I've posted photos taken following a walk we did around Albert Park Lake last weekend in a gallery here.
There are lots of bird shots because... ummm... there were a lot of birds on the lake. Including baby duckies.
The photo at the top of this blog posting is a small crop taken from a more panoramic shot that can be seen as the first photograph in the gallery. It was actually a nice sunny day, but hey, I can turn my photographs into dark loury photographs if I feel like it, can't I? In the gallery I describe the steps I took to manipulate it look gritty.
PS: If you'd like to see exactly where each photo was taken, click on the "Map This" button towards the top of the screen and you'll see a Google map of Albert Park lake with the exact location of each photo, as synched with the GPS readings obtained by my Blackberry that I was carrying during the walk. Comments (0)
Anthony Holmes December 8th, 2008 06:53:28 PM
One of my photos has been published in that fine journal, the Mordialloc Chelsea Leader.
It was a photo taken at the Pink Ribbon fundrasing breakfast hosted at the house of Maria Wilton (one of the Mt Buffalo crowd).
Neighbours dig deep
This isn't the first time a photograph of mine has been published - many of my photographs appeared in Silvertongue, the journal of the Monash Association of Debaters. But I think that the Mordialloc Chelsea Leader will have exceeded Silvertongue's circulation by an order of magnitude or two.
Anthony Holmes December 1st, 2008 04:44:11 PM
Last Sunday we walked to the MacRobertson bridge, a pretty long 15km round trip. At 2:35pm on Sunday I was next to the St Catherine's Boathouse and took the photo above. Right next door is the Wesley Boathouse (below).
It was a little disconcerting to hear on the news tonight that somebody had been shot just next to this electricity tower (and just on the other side of Wesley Boathouse from the shot below) at 2am last night.
See the story (and the electricity tower) in The Age's video story about the shooting here.
I hasten to stress that, 1 day, 11 hours and 34 minutes before the incident, I didn't see anything suspicious, and I didn't capture anybody in a photograph.
So I can't help the police with their enquiries, and drug dealers don't need to worry about me.
Back in May during our first attempt at this round trip walk, Dennis got tired before I did. This time around the months he has spent on his exercise program meant that he was powering ahead of me at the end of the walk. I had a bit of an excuse for falling behind: I took more photographs. But that's a rationalisation. To make things worse, he has now lifted his exercise program even further: today, in addition to his daily walks to or from work and his regular exercise sessions, he added a lunch time walk. If this keeps happening, I might need to raise the stakes by attempting to jog around the Tan rather than power walking. (Dennis seems to be gaining more stamina, but I think I can still run further than he can.) Although, come to think of it, jogging might end as an embarrassing failure. Comments (0)
Anthony Holmes November 11th, 2008 08:06:33 PM
You could have knocked me over with a feather when I picked up the phone yesterday to be get a phone call from a nice young man at Gallup to ask my opinions on the upcoming 2008 Melbourne City Council election.
Opinion Polls are expensive things to run.
To get statistical accuracy, you need to question a reasonable number of people:
A poll of 400 people gives you a 95% chance that you've got the result within 5%. A poll of 1000 people gives you a 95% chance that you've got the result within 3%. So for practical purposes, you usually need to go for 1000 people. Those numbers apply regardless of whether you're surveying the entire country, a single state or a single seat.
Because of that, the polls of Australia are done about once a fortnight with the full 1000 people, often combined with questions on other topics to justify the expense. Polls of States are rarer: and sometimes done with the smaller sample of 400. And polls of single seats (like John Howard's seat in the 2007 election) are very rare.
Gallup asked for my top two choices. And they were prepared to ask my specific opinion on all the candidates, which took a while. The questions weren't lumped in with my opinions on other topics (like Credit Cards or Television programs), like many other polls.
Gallup isn't The Age's polling company.
It isn't the Herald Sun's polling company.
So who is prepared to spend quite a bit of money on a Council election?
Surely no candidate could afford it?
The Victorian Electoral Commission lists the Candidates for 2008 here. There are eleven teams running. The last one on their list is MORGAN CLARKE - OUR CITY - YOUR COUNCIL (Gary Morgan for Mayor, Michele Anderson for Deputy Mayor)
Ah hah! I can't be completely certain that they were funding the poll. But:
"The Morgan Poll is conducted by the ONLY Australian and New Zealand member of the Gallup International Association."
http://www.roymorgan.com/news/polls/2006/4032/
So I think it's likely that they were funding it. To be clear: it looks like Gary Morgan might be using Roy Morgan Research under the name of Gallup to get a feel for voting intentions in the Mayoral election.
The shame was, I hadn't yet done my usual close analysis of the candidates. This meant that I was only able to give rough feedback on my opinions of candidates, rather than the precise evaluation of policies that I'll manage by the time of the election. So I might change my mind and upset their figures.
Anthony Holmes October 30th, 2008 09:37:38 PM
I've been playing with creating High Dynamic Range photographs with Photomatix.
The idea is that a normal photograph doesn't capture the range of light and darkness in many scenes. In many (most) scenes, something is too light or too dark to be displayed on the screen or on a print. So you take a series of photographs of the same scene with a range of exposures (from over exposed to underexposed) and then produce a single composite version of the scene that displays detail at all levels from light through dark.
In this case, I've played around with the settings to produce somewhat surreal versions of the scene we saw as we walked from Port Melbourne to St Kilda last Sunday. In reality it was a lovely warm day, but these images make it look a little cold and eery. A more subtly processed set of High Dynamic Range photos can look much more realistic than this. I'll have to come back and look at these photos again in a year or two's time to decide whether I've overdone the effect, or if I still think they make an interesting variation on more standard looking photos.
Both of these photos were taken near St Kilda Pier. If you look closely at the top photo, you'll see that the people on the pier look like ghosts. That's because they moved between each of the five photos that were combined to make this single picture, so they are faint shadows.
Anthony Holmes October 13th, 2008 10:09:10 PM
I found (and bought) a book called The Lyre-Birds of Mount Buffalo.
It's undated. The National Library is unsure, but thinks it might have been published in the 1930s. The photographs are pasted onto the pages. (But they are still dot screen printings, not original continuous silver prints.) To me this suggests an earlyish 20th century printing, when printers were still finding it difficult (or expensive) to merge photos with text in a book.
It contains photographs taken by the legendary Guide Alice, pictured below.
(I think our friend Janet who goes camping on Buffalo each Easter ought to get out her clothes making equipment and come up with an authentic "Guide Alice" costume to wear when we go camping. It would be stunning. Since the photograph is in black and white, she could choose her own colours: the only guidelines being to be consistent with early 20th Century colours, and remember that Guide Alice was probably adventurous in choosing colours.)
In the book her clothes are described as follows:
Guide Alice in the costume she wears when mountaineering. She was the pioneer of fashion in walking-dresses on Mount Buffalo. Tourists know that this dress is ideal for comfort in climbing where the snow lies deep in winter-time.
According to the Parks Victoria description of Guide Alice, this was the first pictorial book ever published on lyre birds.
Compare the excellent photo of a male lyre bird on the cover of the book (above) with my best photograph of a lyre bird (below). Guide Alice (Manfield) would most likely have been using plates of glass as negatives for her pictures, or sheets of celluloid. After each exposure she would have had to pull the square of film out of position and push the next square of film into place and remove a dark slide before she could take the next picture. If she was really modern and not too worried about picture quality, she might have been using roll film. The speed of her film might have been somewhere around 6 to 12 ISO. Most photography these days is done at around 400 ISO, and my camera can go up to 3200 ISO. This means that Alice's shutter speeds would have been around 1/30th to 1/4 of a second, whilst my shutter speeds are typically somewhere around 1/400th to 1/4000th (making it easy to capture moving birds).
I also have auto exposure and auto-focussing. With all those tools at my disposal, this is as good as I've managed so far. It's truly embarrassing.
Alice's approach is described in the book:
Guide Alice, before the chick appeared, won the parent birds' friendship by patience and quietness - and the Mopoke call. She had failed to secure photographs by hiding near the nest, so, morning and evening on several successive days, she sat on a rock, in full view, and accustomed the wary birds to her presence; and always she mimicked the mournful notes of the Boobook Owl, "Mo-poke". This plan at last succeeded: a photograph of the hen bird was secured.
I think that's my problem: I haven't sat, morning and evening, on a rock making the "Mo-poke" noise. Fortunately, I can practice by listening to the recording here. Once I've got the noise right, all I'll need is a nice rock and a whole lot of extra patience.
Comments (3)
Anthony Holmes October 10th, 2008 09:07:21 PM
A week or so ago, Dennis told an unlikely story of one of our cats, Oscar being excited to discover a Cockatoo on our balcony. I didn't see it, so I dismissed it as a figment of both their imaginations. Bear in mind that the only birds we see with any regularity in the city block bounded by Swanston, Collins, Elizabeth & Flinders Streets are pigeons. Our friends who live in slightly posher Spring Street tell of seeing kookaburras and rosellas and all sorts of other natives lured in by the vast expanse of the Gordon Reserve but we don't see natives like that down our way. (If they start boasting about lyre birds and swans, I'll get suspicious).
But this morning I woke to a loud "caw, caw" noise. And, on getting up I discovered not one, but two cockatoos wreaking havoc with the bushes on the balcony belonging to our neighbours, D and E.
In fact, they were really ripping away at the pot plants. As well as nibbling, they stripped off branches and blithely dropped them over the edge: to fall seven storeys onto somebody in Centre Lane: (See plummetting branch, below.)
Then, one of the cheeky cockies flew across to the balcony I was standing on, and landed right next to me, as if to say "So, what do you think you're doing?" and "Do you have a few more of those branches for me to nibble on?"
After a bit more cheekiness they both flew off into the distance. I've no idea why they came here, but this is the first sign that native plants (on our neighbour's balcony and along the seventh floor hall garden) might be attracting native birds. I'm going to have to ask D & E what sort of plants they've got so I can go and buy some similar ones. These guys were much more interesting than pigeons.
Bye bye cockie....
Anthony Holmes September 25th, 2008 10:49:42 PM
I'm in Sydney at the moment and staying in a hotel room. I can tell because my (king size) bed is wider than it is long:-- that's a sign that I'm not at home. Somebody also came and made my bed today, and straightened the things I left on the desk. On the door of the room there's a notice that shows evidence of having wording that evolved since the 19th century.
It says:
Notice
Loss or damage to guests' property
Under the Innkeepers Act, 1968 an innkeeper may be liable...
for loss and damage to a guest's property...
limited to one hundred dollars [woo hoo!]...
[however, liability does not cover] motor-vehicles or other vehicles of any kind,...
or horses or other live animals.
So if I should ride into town on my trusty steed, I guess the message is that I shouldn't entrust it to the care of The Intercontinental.
Anthony Holmes September 15th, 2008 09:34:29 PM