My colleague Adam posted a link to a neat little video on his Pligg yesterday, and I have to say, I found it outstanding.

The creator of Eclectic 3.0 pieced together 15,000 still photos taken with a tilt-shift perspective control lens to create a fake miniature effect that looks like a stop-motion video.

We found some other great examples of tilt-shift photography, like Bathtub IV and this list of images at Smashing Magazine’s blog.

Tilt-shift photography is nothing new – the lenses have been available for almost 40 years or so – but I don’t think I remember seeing it until Adam showed me those links.

It is something that I’d like to try out for myself at some point – although I can’t find a tilt-shift lens that fits the Sony Alphas (although there may be an adaptor out there). Still, I’ve discovered that there are methods of replicating this technique in Photoshop. Although, I’ll need to get Photoshop or try it in Gimpshop (which I’ve just downloaded).

The photos are here.

I aim to write a little travelog over the weekend – but just in case that gets delayed, I figured I should get the images up first.

While my friends in the UK have expressed jealousy over these temperatures, especially as they are facing more snow and ice this last week, I would have to say, reluctantly, that they don’t really know what they’re on about.

I’ve been cold – I’ve been so cold my toes have gone black. But cold is easy to deal with – your body is a heat generator, and all you have to do is insulate yourself from the cold, and you are quite happy.

There’s not much you can do when it is hot – there are only so many layers you can take off.

Perhaps the worse thing about it all isn’t the fact that it is hot – it is the night-time minimums. There is no chance for anything to cool down again overnight – the brick walls of houses can’t radiate the heat that they have stored through the day, there’s no cooling breeze to drift through open windows as you sleep, and when you grab your shirt for work and it is still baking warm from the previous day, you know something isn’t quite right.

Buckled Rails near Adelaide - Taken from Adelaide Now (click for larger image)

All this is making for some incredible difficult times for transport and utilities providers – tracks are buckling as the steel expands, and transformers, which are already overloaded by the fact that everyone is running air-conditioning and fans, are struggling to dissipate the heat that is an unfortunate by-product of dropping voltages.

It looks like we’ve got about another week of this, according to the weather agency, but we’re starting to get more breezes through, which are helping.

Hopefully, I can stick it out a bit longer – the portable air-conditioner I bought the other night is helping a lot.

One thing that might be a plus – I should be sweating the fat out of myself in this weather.

The Rivers Murray and Darling are the major sources of water for most of the population west of the Great Dividing Range in New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia – even southern Queensland. In fact, for South Australia, the River Murray is pretty much it – there are other minor rivers, but without the Murray, there is no way that we could support our current population or, more importantly, our agriculture.

Unfortunately, for South Australia, management of the Murray-Darling system has been fragmented between the states that rely on it – which has meant that New South Wales and Victoria have been able to take as much water as they wanted before the Murray crosses over into South Australia and then empties into the sea. Thankfully, the Federal government has finally stepped in, and is starting to ensure supply into South Australia.

The country has also been in a severe drought for many years now – one which could go on for a long while more.

All this means that the river is starting to dry up – I’ve been hearing stories on the radio, and seen pictures on the TV and in the paper – but I hadn’t really been able to see it for myself (it’s about 100 km out to the river from Adelaide). It also took me a while to find the same place that I had taken the images above so that I would get a good comparison of the situation.

The Murray, and its surrounding wetlands, are really suffering from this drought, and local wildlife is starting to really struggle.

And yet, we still have a whole bunch of people in Adelaide who insist on growing an “English country garden” with water-thirsty plants all over the place, and maintaining a luscious green lawn. And in order to do this, they quite happily and blatantly break water regulations by heading out with their hosepipes at any time of the week (restrictions are down to a few hours on either a Saturday or Sunday, as well as another few hours in the mid-week, depending on the side of the road).

And then there are the “bore-hole” waterers – who are tapping into the underground aquifers and sucking them dry. Most worrying here is the distribution of bore-hole permits – almost all of the private permits are in the most well-off parts of the city.

Water is a vital resource – it is needed by everyone for everyday life, and also by agriculture to provide food and export income, and also to support our wildlife. And, thanks in part to the selfish actions of a great many gardeners, water is becoming scarcer by the day.

This week has seen the Tour Down Under around South Australia. It is the only competition outside of Europe on the UCI ProTour – which isn’t too bad, since it is only a little over a decade old.

This year got even more attention than ever before, thanks to Lance Armstrong’s return to competitive racing – and as of this morning, he was one of the cyclists who were still in the running to win the 2009 Tour. I guess the 7-time Tour de France winner has still got that edge.

Unfortunately for me, most of the stages for the race have been on weekdays, and so I’ve missed most of the action (including a major incident where several cyclists were seriously injured following a crash). However, I was able to get to the Cancer Council Classic last Sunday evening, and also down to Willunga and Aldinga for Stage 5 earlier today.

And, of course, I took my Sony – so there’s plenty of photo’s of each of the two day’s races.

I’ve also put together a quick map of Stage 5, and with some markers for where I grabbed some shots of the race:

View Larger Map

And, in all honesty, these aren’t really new year’s resolutions again – that’s mostly just a coincidence. The timing is more down to the fact that I’ve had most of a month for some reflection.

So, I have some new goals in life:

Lose weight

My more recent attempts to lose weight have been somewhat less enthusiastic than half-hearted, meaning that I’ve been settled at 120-125kg for a while now.

My aim is to make it all the way down to 90kg as soon as possible. Thankfully, my family are all joining in on losing weight (although, they don’t have as far to go). We’re actually putting into a kitty, and the person who loses the most in a month gets the kitty.

Part of losing weight is diet – which I’ve got planned and sorted. And part of it is activity – so rejoining the gym, and getting up and using it is another goal.

Take more photos and publish them more often

There is something going on somewhere all the time – and my aim is to get my camera out to these events and take pictures as much as possible – and then publish them here on the website.

See more of the country

Obviously, this will help me take more photos, and give me more to write about.

I already have a trip to Melbourne being planned for the end February – I’m going to take the train down there, and fly back. Eventually, I’d like to take the train from Adelaide out in all directions (Melbourne, Perth, Darwin, Sydney) – just to say I’ve done it.

Get a car

And this will help me see more of South Australia – I have no idea what I want, and I keep swinging between a VW Camper (mobile kitchen and bedroom), a station wagon (better roadhandling – plus enough room to sleep in it), or a Mini Cooper (just as a style thing).

I’ll probably end up getting some ten-year old station.

So, that’s what I’ve set myself as goals for the next few months – I’m looking forward to it.

I-Nex on the Temptation

It’s the last week before Christmas, and Mark (my boss) very kindly setup a trip for the company and friends out on the Temptation. This catamaran sails out of Glenelg, and runs up the coast and back for a distance offering chances to see dolphins and other sealife that you might not normally see from being on the beach.

As it was – we saw only the one dolphin as it was feeding at the harbour-mouth, but it was nice to be out of the office and with friends on a calm and sunny day.

Of course, the camera went with me, and you can see the pictures here.

Taken from Arthouse at Flickr. Attribute: Kevin O’Mara. Licence

There’s a lot more at Unusual Architecture:

Device to Root out Evil by Dennis Oppenheimer

Okay, so those two are actually artworks rather than functioning buildings, but there are some even more incredible designs which are actually used:

The Crooked House in Sopat, Poland

More incredible is the design for a new building proposed in Dubai – a region of some exceptional designs:

I made a small boast that I had a better one.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite true, because when I came to review the shots that I had taken when my family and I took a 45 minute flight over the area, I realised that I had no pictures of the pound itself from anywhere near as close as the photographer who took the National Geographic’s image had managed.

Still, it prompted me to sort out the better pictures that me and my father took from the air and upload them to the site:

Flight over Flinders Album