Tag:fun in lockdown
Continued from Part One
Tom’s Amazing Adventures continued the next day. After walking all morning, Tom had picked up a ride to Dubbo with a lovely old lady in a Vauxhall. She regaled him with stories of her childhood during the Great Depression of the ’30s and the hardship of the ’40s with WW2. It particularly offended her that people were protesting their current “hardship” with the lockdown. “pfft”, she said. “They have no idea what hardship is. Have any of them ever had bread and dripping sandwiches or eaten Tripe?”
Dubbo
More than a bit shamefaced with her words, Tom remained silent. After being dropped off in Dubbo, Tom decided to take a couple of days rest from the road and picked up some casual work repairing burst pipes. So it seems with all the excess eating of desserts. The cream was building up and causing the old pipes to crack.
Tom had been in Dubbo for three days. With work on the pipes done, he spent a day relaxing. He had been sleeping rough under the bridge alongside the Macquarie River in Biddybungie Reserve. Wandering alongside the river, and through the town’s parks, he indulged his hobby of birdwatching.
This was also a good cover for keeping an eye out for checkpoints and police roadblocks. Next, Tom stopped off at the local Salvation Army Op shop. Taking a leaf out of his hero Jack Reacher’s life on the road, he purchased a change of clothes. He then discarded his old clothes in a bin. He would simply wear them until he needed to replace them. He then sneaked into the NRMA Dubbo holiday park for a shower. He planned to head up the Newell Highway the next day, hoping to get a lift as far as Walgett.
On the road to Walgett
Tom set out as the sun was coming up and started walking along the edge of the highway, thumb out. After about half an hour, he was picked up by a cattle truck heading north. Grateful that the wind was blowing south, Tom accepted the ride. He chatted with Bluey, the driver, all the way to Walgett. Walking into town, Tom found a café and ordered a coffee.
Chatting to a local, he found out that Walgett had artesian bore baths, naturally heated to a temperature of 41.5°. Even better, the baths were free. Having been on the road now for almost two weeks, a good soak sounded perfect.
Tom’s goal of getting to Walgett was based on it being a quiet little town but a stop on the Great Inland Way. This was a tourist route that travelled 2,956 kilometres from Sydney to Cairns, through inland NSW. He surmised that he would have no trouble picking up a lift from travelling tourists. And camping in the national parks along the way would be easy. The border to Qld was also only an hour and a half away by car, though he planned to cross by foot. Again under the cover of darkness in a day or so. In the meantime, he would camp at the free campsite in Walgett to rest up and be ready for the night crossing.
The giant Cos tree
After a comfortable night, Tom made himself a billy tea – and decided to go for a hike through Cos Valley. He had heard other campers talking about the valley in glowing terms. It had plenty of birdlife and the tallest Cos tree in Australia. So after a breakfast of sausages in bread, cooked on his campfire (god, he missed Bunnings), he packed his backpack with a few supplies and set off.
He hiked through Cos Valley and ate his lunch under the shade of the Cos tree. Tom enjoyed the solitude before he headed back to Walgett via an ancient Celery Forest, Where much to his surprise, he encountered Bill and the scout troop Bill, behaving as he didn’t know Tom, gave him a brief nod and said ‘afternoon sir, enjoying your walk?” and kept going.
Rendevous
Back at camp, Tom put the billy on and sat down. Then, realising it was Bill who had been watching his last night, he sat and waited. It wasn’t long before Bill ambled over. They greeted each other warmly, and Bill said to Tom, “you made good time then” “Yes, said Tom, I had some luck on the trip with picking up rides, But I didn’t expect to see you till I got to Lightning Ridge”.
“My dear old mum always said you were lucky bloke,” said Bill, “she said you would always land on your feet. But, mind you, I don’t see how that’s good. If I landed on my feet, I’d snap both ankles” They hung by the campfire and talked quietly. Bill explained with the good weather; he thought he had time to get an overnight trip in with the scouts before Tom arrived.
“Everything on your list is ready at the house,” Bill said. “Beryl was a bit annoyed at the start, but she’s come around and is looking forward to seeing you,” They said their goodbyes for now, and Bill headed back to the scouts’ Tom settled down for the night as he had an early start in the morning.
Lightning Ridge
The camp was still quiet. With most still sleeping in their tents, Tom packed up and left in the morning. He wandered through the sleeping town and hit the Castlereagh Highway just after 7 am. Walking along with his thumb out, he got his first lift from a truck as it pulled out of the Walgett Wheat Siding. He rode with the driver as far as the Gwydir Highway junction. From there, he was on foot again until he was picked up by a fossicker who took him all the way to Lightning Ridge.
Beryl had been thinking about Tom. Was he having a fantastic Adventure? However, she had to work that afternoon, so no time to think about Tom Beryl was a caddy at the Lightning Ridge Golf Club Tom and Bill decided to go with her and have a drink at the clubhouse while she worked then they would all stay for dinner “Not looking or smelling like that”, said Beryl “You,” she said, pointing at Tom, “are going to take a long, hot shower, WITH soap AND shampoo, and throw those clothes out the door into the hall You will find clean clothes and shoes in your room, because Bill, you are going to burn what’s he’s wearing They aren’t going in my washing machine, and aren’t fit for the oppy”.
It’s July 2020, and Covid has created havoc across the world. I live in Victoria. The leper colony of Australia. We are now in stage four lockdown with the harshest restrictions in the world. A Nighttime curfew only allowed 5km from home during the day, shops closed, masks mandatory, businesses closing, and public transport halted. The only option for a holiday is in my imagination.
Photoshop and Luminar
My passport is Adobe Photoshop, and my mode of transport is Luminar 4. This time, luggage wasn’t a problem, nor was choosing what to wear. I made the entire trip in my pyjamas during lockdown 2020.
I gathered together images from previous holidays, fired up Photoshop and Luminar, settled into my desk chair with a coffee, and took off!
Arctic Circle
First stop was the Arctic circle – I had signed on to repatriate three lost polar bears. The boatswain took one look at my pyjamas and handed me a puffy jacket. Then, while he steered, I took photos for posterity.
Leaving the bears safely on a genetically modified ice floe (guaranteed not to melt), we jumped on a plane and headed for Cairns. Queensland. The sunshine state. No lockdown 2020 in Qld. Currently locked tighter than a chastity belt against anyone from Victoria or NSW.
Sunny Cairns
The sun was rising as we arrived and settled in. waving goodbye to Biggles as he flew away from our cuckoo nest. We spent a pleasant and warm few hours in Cairns – then hopped a hot air balloon and headed to New Zealand.
Drifting across the Tasman, we hovered over Melbourne briefly (who would want to land there!?) and watched the space shuttle take off from Princes Pier.
Stonehenge, UK
Our hot air balloon then dropped us at Stonehenge in the UK. We had heard a confluence of druids coming in on Samhain night to attempt a ritual, to drive out the virus. Unfortunately, it was unsuccessful, so the druids headed back to Avalon to report to the lady of the lake.
We bid adieu to our balloon pilot and boarded a flight for Norway. The northern lights were illuminating the skies as we flew over the fjords.
We landed briefly to stretch our legs and had a short visit with Rudolf. He was on holiday from the North Pole – he figures Christmas is cancelled this year, so he was backpacking around Europe.
To be Continued.……..
Creating surreal little planets is something you can do at home, from the comfort of your chair. Using landscape images or panorama’s that you had taken pre-lockdown – you can create unique surreal images simply in Photoshop in just a few steps.
The right image
Choosing the image that will create a surreal little planet is about half the equation. It would help if you had a landscape or pano with a sky of 30% or more. It also helps if the horizon on both sides of the image is reasonably level. This forms the area around our circular planet. Panorama’s do work best for surreal little planets, but with one extra step, landscape work. If you have a panorama to start with, you can skip ahead.
Using a landscape Image
If you don’t have a panorama suitable, you can still create an incredible little planet. We’ll make our image wider. This is the image we’re using.
With your image open in photoshop, select the crop tool. As soon as you do this, you will see white ‘handles’ appear around the edges of your image. Grab the right-hand middle handle and drag it to the right.
Drag it to the right until the new area is about one third wider than your image. It doesn’t have to be exact. It will go white once you let go of the left click. Next, we want to copy what’s on the left and put it on the right. To do this, select the Rectangular marquee tool. It’s the second one from the top, and drag a box around your left-hand image. The ‘marching ants’ will mean it’s active.
On your keyboard choose Ctrl + C (Command + C on Mac) to copy and Ctrl + V (Command + V on Mac) to paste. It will look like nothing has happened as it’s directly over the top of your image. But don’t stress.
On the top menu bar beside File, click Edit – scroll down to Transform and Flip Horizontal. Now you still have one image, but it’s reversed. Don’t stress we are going to move it to the white area.
Select your move tool (it’s the four-sided arrow at the top). Next, left click on your image and drag it to the right over the white area. Move it till you are happy with its position. I kept mine reasonably close together, but that’s a personal choice.
You will find you have a line where they join. To fix this, click the layers panel, then click the icon at the bottom (it looks like the Japanese flag). That will create a layer mask on your image. Next, take the brush tool, select black as your foreground colour, set the opacity to about 40%, and brush over the join to blend them in. If you take too much off, brush with white to put it back. Don’t stress getting a perfect match; we can refine that at the end stage after it’s warped.
I didn’t use all the new area I created, so that I will crop that off.
That’s it. We now have our panorama and can make our little planet. If you already have a panorama – then this is where you start.
Using a Panorama Image
You can skip this step if you want – but it will make the result a bit better.
Click on the gradient tool – if you can’t see it, it’s behind the paint bucket. Just left-click and hold over the bucket, and the submenu will pop up. Next, click on your foreground colour palette at the bottom of the left taskbar. Then move towards your image, your cursor will turn into an eyedropper. Hover over the sky on your image. Click about the middle of the sky, and you will see the foreground colour on your colour palette is now blue. Next, click on the gradient tool (13th tool down, again left-click and hold if you don’t see it as it’s behind the paint bucket). You will see the gradient editor in the top menu – make sure you are on the first one to the right of the colour window.
Left-click and hold just above the image in the centre, and drag down into the sky, and stay within the sky as much as you can. You don’t want to colour your trees or whatever you have. When you let go, the blue will be even from one side to the other.
We’re on the home stretch now. Click the image, then Image Size – we need to make the image square. You will see the little chain link is active – this keeps the image in proportion. For the sake of what we are doing, we don’t want that. Click on it to turn it off, and the lines linking both sizes will go. (don’t forget to turn it back on once you are finished with your planets)
I tend to keep the smallest side pretty much the same in the actual size. Mine is 8821 x 5196, so I will go 5000 x 5000. Now that it’s looking odd, we need to flip it 180°. Go to image – then Image Rotation – then 180°
Last Step!
Except for some tidying up, we are almost done. Click Filter > Distort > Polar Coordinates. The little window will pop up – make sure its set to Rectangular to Polar
Final Housekeeping
Our little planet is done but needs a little bit of cleaning up. Also, I’m not too fond of that distinct blue ring around it on the right-hand side. I would rather it blended a bit more.
To do that, I clicked the foreground colour again to activate the eyedropper and click on the deeper blue just inside the edge of the outer circle. Then I swapped to the brush tool (9th tool down). I set the opacity to 30% on the top menu, then brushed over the outer paler areas till it blended (staying within the lighter areas). To select the size of the brush, use the bracket keys on your keyboard [ to make the brush/spot smaller or ] to make it bigger.
Lastly, I used the spot healing brush (it’s behind the bandaid 8th tool down; hold and click again if you don’t see it) to clean up those spotty bits of branches hanging down. As well as the bad join at the top of the branches.
And we are done. I hope you found this helpful. Have fun with your surreal little planets! For more inspiration check out Paul Reiffers gallery
In this time of worldwide lockdowns and #stayathome – amusing oneself is not easy. Read a book, clean the house, edit some images. Ok, what do we do in Week 2? Enter Multiplicity.
My original plan this week was to take a leaf out of Thomas Heaton’s book and try some macro at home. But after watching Chris Sale’s vlog on multiplicity (or as he called it, multiple exposure selfie), I decided to try that first. Apart from I would l have less mess to clean up – I could do it with minimal effort and no extra supplies.
Taking the Shots
You will need a camera, though a phone will work if you can put it on a tripod, but this post is cameracentric.
To take the images, I placed the camera on my tripod set to a waist-high height. Looking through the lens at 24mm, I couldn’t get everything in, so I swapped it out for the wide-angle and shot at 16mm. The entire image was taken in manual mode with autofocus. Because I didn’t want to use a flash, I also bumped the ISO to 800 with an F-stop of 9 to make sure everything was (reasonably) sharp. This gave me a shutter speed of 1/6 sec. Light isn’t great in the back room on an overcast day. It’s also important that you don’t move it between shots when you set the tripod up. Pick a location that will get all your planned shots in without repositioning the tripod.
I could have used the ten-sec timer – but chose to use my phone connected to the camera via wifi. The advantage of this is I could ‘see’ myself on the phone and set the shot up, then using the phone as a remote, take the image.
Overall, I took 5 images but ended up only using four as one of the shots almost completely obscured another one. I also changed my tops between shots to give a bit more interest. Be sure when you shoot yours, you allow space between yourself; as I mentioned, I lost a shot because one of me was standing in front of the other.
Editing Your Multiplicity
Once I had my shots, I downloaded them to the computer. From there are soooo many ways, you do it. I could be called lazy, but I prefer the term efficient. 😉 This is what works for me. I also worked solely in Photoshop, as I don’t use Lightroom. However, if you are a lightroom user, you can import them into Photoshop from Lightroom as layers.
- Once you have all the images open in photoshop, choose one that will be your base image. It doesn’t really matter which one is.
- go to the second image and hit Cntrl/cmd A then Cntrl/cmd C (this will select and copy the entire image)
- now go to your base layer and hit Cntrl/cmd V, and it should be pasted over the top of the base layer.
- On the adjustments panel, hit the little icon that looks like a Japanese flag
- this creates a mask over your image (it should be white) so choose a black soft brush to brush away the part of the image where you were in the bottom layer to reveal yourself. You should now have two of you
- repeat steps 2-5 with each of the remaining images
- when ‘all’ of you are there, flatten the image and edit as you would normally.
I enjoyed doing it – to the extent, I created another one the next day outside. Being in stage three restrictions with Corona Virus my front yard was as far as I dared go. It also required me to interrupt the dogs morning nap as I roped her in. Give it a go – and would love to see your results – just add a link in the comments section.
