400 km and 0 photographs

Snail dish, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Today I drove the car for well over 400 km, to visit relatives. And I didn't feel like taking photographs at all. The photograph shown here is from yesterday, which was a sunny but cool enough day.

Update: There is an excellent posting on intimate landscapes written by Bob Johnson at Earthbound Light. This is a type of photography I would like to explore more, but often the 60 mm tele end of the LX3 is not enough for this.

Update 2: I don't know whether the term "intimate landscapes" applies here, but a photograph of the droppings of a European hare on spring snow is #2 most viewed of my Flickr photographs. I posted the image here in March, as an experiment in post-processing, but never would have thought that it would be popular.

Update 3: Olympus finally announced the E-P1, a new micro 4/3 system camera. It looks great, and compact. There is already a detailed preview at Dpr. This might just be the camera I have been waiting for. Features include in-body image stabilization, which makes this a great camera to have with legacy lenses (with a suitable adapter). I'm thinking of my old Minolta SLR lenses, for example 50 mm f/1.7.

SoFoBoMo hint for Mac and Pages users: reduce PDF filesize from 161 MB to 8 MB

Eaten, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Although I finished my SoFoBoMo project some time ago, yesterday I generated a new version of the PDF file (7.7 MB).

I produced the new PDF file using GhostScript to compress the original "best" quality PDF output from Pages (file size 160.7 MB). Compression by GhostScript decreased the file size by 1/20. The resulting file is much better quality than using the worst quality setting in exporting the PDF file from Pages, which generated a 4 MB file. In fact, the result seems to be better than the 20 MB PDF file generated by the medium quality setting in Pages.

It seems that when using the "best" PDF output setting, Pages includes the image files as they are. The Pages document size is 160.8 MB and the PDF file is 160.7 MB. Using the lesser quality output settings cuts down the document size significantly, but Pages is doing a worse job than GhostScript in terms of image quality vs. file size.

Have a look at a hint on reducing the file size of a PDF. The needed GhostScript command is this:

gs -q -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=BK_low.pdf -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook BK.pdf

On a Mac, you need to use Terminal for this; GhostScript is pre-installed. The command can take several minutes to run.

The image here is from Thursday. It was a nice day. I got 3.5 hours of exercise in all, which was a bit too much, but it was needed anyway.

Update: I found another good GhostScript hint, on how to convert a PDF document into individual jpeg image files. (But I used 300 dpi instead of 150 as the output resolution.) I'm testing whether this is the best way to make a Blurb book out of the PDF document.

Summer sunshine

Dandelion leaves, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Green field, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Brown wire and other stuff, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Ref leaf, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Last Sunday I made a posting titled "Grayness". These photographs are different, about sunshine, taken today. Weather changed, for the better. And it was warmer, almost 20 °C, during the late afternoon.

Update: I used the new version of the LX3 firmware for these images, and didn't find any difference in tones etc. Also skin color seemed to be ok, no "magenta skin" issues, but then I have never had those.