January 2009 – woowoowoo

hot, ain’t it?

All of south eastern Australia is bracing for another day of 40°+, it’s not uncommon to have one or two days in a row, but four!?! I always remember the hot weather never started until school went back, but this is a bit over the top!

Thankfully, just two years back we installed air conditioning – we went for the evaporative style, partly because they allow you to keep the house open with a breeze, but mostly because they consume relatively little power. Still, we feel guilt. The evaporative units do use another precious resource: water. Not a great deal, but I think it’s enough to make Target 155 a little difficult.

Along with the traditional heatwave comes the record power consumption, which is yet another worry – I certainly hope we don’t end up with a blackout. It’s apparently due to load, not lack of capacity, but it always makes me wonder… these days that place the greatest load on the power grid would also be just brilliant for generating solar power. You’d think there would be some synergy there.

I have a better idea though – I think I should go back on holiday at Wilsons Prom where it climbed to just 20° at 5pm today. Take me back!

Women’s Semi Final, Australian Open 1992

Every January when the Australian Open Tennis is on, I fondly remember back to 1992 when, working for XPress Group, I was lucky enough to be handed a Press Pass and a Nikon F2 camera fitted with a new Kodak DCS-1 back. The camera, in turn, was connected to a ‘luggable’ hard disk with (B+W CRT!) preview function that stored, from memory, about 120 images at 2048px along the longest edge. The hard disk could also accept a keyboard and voiceband modem that allowed images to be sent to news photo repositories and syndicated worldwide within … well, within an hour or so! It was amazing technology for the time – bear in mind that the Mosaic browser wasn’t released for another 15 months!

If you look at this photo, you’ll see some pretty massive compression artefacts as well as a wild colour balance issue (that purple is supposed to be royal blue!), but the product was aimed at the fast turnaround press environment (believe me, you couldn’t afford this kit at home!), and given the low resolutions involved and the fact that no newspapers were printed in colour, these technical issues were not big obstacles.

My task was to get the ‘real’ press photographers interested in it and teach them how to use it if they were interested. It was a great tool, probably the biggest issue was the shutter delay. You really had to fire in anticipation – about half a second ahead, otherwise you missed your moment.

In the end, a photo I took of Jim Courier holding aloft the cup was posted on the ‘wire’ and was picked up by the Canberra Times, appearing on the back page the next day – the first digital photograph to appear in any Australian Newspaper.

My highilight, though, was Monica Seles – one of the most fiercely determined women I’ve ever seen. Great fun.

meet dora

Cats at our house have a good time of it. This little scrap – about 8 weeks old – came home from the Lort Smith animal hospital last Monday to join our little family. They say cats always land on their feet… she definitely has.

Viv, the incumbent, has been like a saint. He doesn’t pretend to like her yet, but he’s very patient and hasn’t torn her to bits for playing with his tail 😉