I've more or less put my attempts to find good denoising photo processing software on hold.
None of them did close to what I wanted.
But there are still issues that I can address. One is a free set of “presets” from
ON1 that I haven't got round to looking at yet.
More and more it seems that presets are the way through the maze of settings, but it's also
a matter of searching, something that I don't like to do.
Another is what I already have: DxO
PhotoLab. I'm sticking to release 5 because there don't seem to be any improvements
in newer versions significant enough to pay the full price to upgrade. And release 5 also
has good denoising, which I use for higher ISO sensitivities.
But is that the only use? Nearly 12 years ago I took a sequence of photos of a kangaroo rescue. They didn't
come out well: flash in the open at night. Here one with particularly large background:
DxO improved the background at the cost of lots of spots which must have been on the lens.
It also produced noise where there was none before, not its fault: the noise was there, just
not visible. Can their “DeepPrime” noise reduction help? Yes. Here without and then with
noise reduction (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its
neighbour):
It seems that the whole world has changed in the ten years since we moved into Stones Road.
Once things were relatively stable, but then came the Russian invasion of Ukraine. What a horror! I've been
following events since it started, and also taken note of the opinions expressed that the Russsians
would play for time.
But it's difficult to concentrate on Ukraine. Israel has escaleted violence far beyond
anything that anybody could have expected, and almost nobody—certainly not the USA—has lifted a finger to stop their
atrocities. And then came Donald
Trump and turned the established world order upside-down, probably out of stupidity.
Try to win a Nobel Peace
Prize by attacking other countries indeed! And again almost nobody lifted a finger to
stop him. How unimportant Ukraine suddenly seems, though it's really more important than
ever.
All this looks surprisingly like what happened in Europe nearly 100 years ago. Clearly
Trump is different from Adolf
Hitler—he's much more stupid, for one thing—but it's worth investigating in more
detail. The last couple of days I have been watching a ZDF series „Countdown zur Diktatur“ (“Countdown to dictatorship”). While I think it might be overemphasizing some details,
it shows things that I hadn't understood, in particular that Hitler became Reichskanzler because his party had made the Reichstag unable to
pass any legislation—not very different from the situation I see in US Congress now. It's interesting to
note that the Weimar
Republic had 18 Reichskanzler in a little over 14 years.
Last night Yvonne found Bruno sitting in the toilet (room). He stayed
there all night!
Just before midnight I woke up to hear loud scratching. What was he doing? Observing. So
was Mona. The scratching came from
inside the wall! It must have been some rodent, but what? And what do we do about it? We
can't access it.
The scratching stopped after about 20 minutes, but Bruno didn't give up. In the morning I
found:
OK, it's probably legitimate, but I woke up in the middle of the night with the horrible
thought that it might change my network configuration, including the routing of
my /24 (192.109.197.0/24), probably something that people wouldn't think
about for residential customers. After all, the presumed reason for the change was
to remove old hardware, not only in the residence, but also on the wireless tower.
And that could involve upstream changes.
Called up Aussie Broadband and was
connected to Hayden after only 12 minutes' waiting. He knew nothing of the matter. He
raised a fault number for me, but said that any NBN changes would be transparent to them.
Hopefully he was right.
Call from Josh in the early afternoon. He told me that he was from the National Broadband Network, come to install new
NTD and ODU. Can he identify
himself? He was surprised, but he dragged out a couple of IDs on lanyards, one with the
UGL emblem. OK, that's enough. He
expected me to be off the net for round 30 minutes, which proved to be overly pessimistic.
First we were off the air for 7 minutes:
Feb 3 14:07:43 eureka kernel: xl0: link state changed to DOWN
Feb 3 14:07:54 eureka dhclient[1446]: send_packet: No route to host
...
Feb 3 14:14:17 eureka dhclient: New IP Address (xl0): 121.200.11.253
Feb 3 14:14:17 eureka dhclient: New Subnet Mask (xl0): 255.255.252.0
Feb 3 14:14:17 eureka dhclient: New Broadcast Address (xl0): 121.200.11.255
Feb 3 14:14:17 eureka dhclient: New Routers (xl0): 121.200.8.1
Feb 3 14:14:18 eureka dhclient: New Routers (xl0): 121.200.8.1
Feb 3 14:14:43 eureka kernel: xl0: link state changed to UP
It's interesting that dhclient sets its parameters nearly 30 seconds before the
interface comes up. But that wasn't the only time off the net: he had to do some tests,
resulting in:
Feb 3 14:26:30 eureka kernel: xl0: link state changed to DOWN
Feb 3 14:26:34 eureka kernel: xl0: link state changed to UP
Feb 3 14:26:47 eureka kernel: xl0: link state changed to DOWN
Feb 3 14:26:50 eureka kernel: xl0: link state changed to UP
Feb 3 14:27:08 eureka kernel: xl0: link state changed to DOWN
Feb 3 14:27:10 eureka kernel: xl0: link state changed to UP
Feb 3 14:27:17 eureka kernel: xl0: link state changed to DOWN
Feb 3 14:27:18 eureka kernel: xl0: link state changed to UP
Feb 3 14:27:19 eureka kernel: xl0: link state changed to DOWN
Feb 3 14:28:42 eureka kernel: xl0: link state changed to UP
The new hardware looks somewhat different from the old. Here the NTDs, first old, then new:
Clearly I can do that that with the new one too. How hard can it be?
I gave up. First is the position close to the ground behind my office desk. I wanted good
definition, so I set the sensitivity to ISO 200°/24. And that gave me an exposure of 1/10 s
at f/4, the maximum for the lens, too slow for good hand-held. Yes, I could have used a
wider aperture lens, but I was already in trouble with focus. So I needed a tripod.
Oh. Where do I fit a tripod there? I have a toy tripod that doesn't quite fall over with
the camera on top, but the height isn't adjustable. How about propping it up on something,
like a toolbox?
Still too low, but I can lift it a little with my finger. At 1/5 s (and f/5.6) it shouldn't
be an issue. But I couldn't focus it. Presumably I had some setting that I have forgotten
about. In the end, the best I could get was this:
And the white balance is out: too blue on the left, too yellow on the right.
OK, think the unthinkable: what would my mobile phone do? Once again it was difficult to
get a straight photo, especially as I needed to come much closer with the 24 mm equivalent
lens:
I think that the slices are too big. Cut each in two the next time.
Flash success!
So how do I get the photo of the NTD
(NBN) that I failed to get yesterday? An obvious possibility is with ring flash or
some similar arrangement.
I haven't done any serious flash work for some time, and I found my four attachements mixed
up, with the adapter rings all over the place. In particular, the rings don't adapt all
flashes to all potential lenses. Finally I found an adapter for the M.Zuiko 12-100 mm f/4 IS Pro (72 mm) to the mecablitz 15 MS-1. Given my continuous
problems with flash over the last 60 years, what chance would I have?
Surprise: one image! And it worked, even showing the fingerprints that the NTD surface was
designed to collect. Here the photos from abo (my mobile phone), yesterday's
attempts and today (run the cursor over an image to compare it with
its neighbour):
I don't think that I have used it in the intervening 9 years. It's certainly in the same
configuration.
Tricking Mona
I don't know what it is, but Mona loves
sitting in front of the TV, obscuring the bottom of the display. I've chased her away up to
15 times in an hour, and she keeps coming back. Pene Kirk had recommended putting aluminium
foil there, but we found out last month that doesn't help:
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