Blogging, Photography

Sunset – Just When I Thought It Couldn’t Get Any Better !

I keep thinking I’ve taken and seen the perfect sunset, and then I go out to shoot another that leaves me in awe. This evening’s was again, stunning – 652 photos in a little over an hour !

I know you guys know that I don’t bullshit, but here have a look at the folder in Windows :

DonCharisma.org-Sunset-Photos

I’ve included the full size jpeg file (big – 3374 x 2103 pixels), so worth a click …

Why post this ? Well I wanted to show how much the sunset changes over the course of an hour. Also hoping Richard Branson will read and send me a new iPhone with 128GB storage, as I keep on running out of space. I’ve added him on Google+ plus but he hasn’t added me back … YET !

How I can keep on topping myself, I have no idea, it’s all in god’s hands really …

I might have a look into fisheye or very wide angle lenses on a compact DSLR, might save me some time in my digital darkroom.

I’ll post one of the finished panoramas later today 🙂

Cheers

Don Charisma

67 thoughts on “Sunset – Just When I Thought It Couldn’t Get Any Better !”

  2. I see we share the love for a sunset. Thanks for the visit. I just can not help myself for taking photo’s of a sunset. I know it is the kitches of things but who cares I say!

    1. 😆 and I think it’s fair to say that a lot of people love sunsets, so you’re in a pretty big club … and as for what other people say, who cares !

  6. I’m at a loss for words. Your panoramas are stunning…can’t wait to see the next one!!!

  7. Holy Moly, that’s a lotta photos Don. Do you ever sleep? Sorta like the 4005 my brother sent me from his Mediterranean trip. I nearly went blind looking at them all.

    1. Hahaha! But that’s what you’re supposed to do, record beautiful things* however with photos, art or in words. 4005?! that’s more than six times the amount he did LOL Not uncommon with photographers, especially if they’re using just SLR’s. They go through rolls of it. Well, did in the past. Heck, now even the memory cards/or flash are really inexpensive. 🙂

      1. I’m still using my original memory card. After downloading it to my flash I erase it and use over and over. Now if I could just get inside Irene’s brain and figure out where she would put my battery charger, I’d be golden. Just can’t find another battery like the original one any more. I know, new cameras aren’t all that expensive, but old angels need old familiar things.

      3. My iphone has built in memory, so I have to copy to my PC when I get home … apple seems to put crap in the memory I can’t figure out how to clear, so it’s a limited number of photos … occasionally I hit the limit …

        I’d suggest maybe ebay, you could buy the whole camera second hand, then you’d have two cameras, a battery and a charger !

      4. I try and get usuable photos for everything I shoot, past experience with blurry distorted and bad angles has said, more, more, more 🙂

    2. I try to, but sometimes I don’t sleep to much when busy … I’m getting faster at working with photos, so what seemed a lot doesn’t now if that makes sense 🙂

  8. That’s a lot of pictures. Even I don’t take that many, and people say I take a lot of pictures.

    Also, where in the world did you get a 3374×2103 monitor? I bet you can’t go back to 1024×768!
    (I tried using 320×240 one time. It was terrible)

    By the way, I have probably mentioned this before, but don’t use JPEG for anything other than photos. It leaves too many artifacts in the image. Use PNG instead.

    1. It’s a screenshot so it probably already was in PNG. In Adobe you can strip/scrub it or even that edit stuff out or change it. Save for web 🙂 Are you referring to like embedded virus or malware stuff or just being able to read about his pc or device/etc.?

      2. Oh no, I’m not referring to any malware-related issues. JPEG destroys image quality because it’s a lossy format, and it’s especially apparent with screenshots and other non-photo images because what should be a single-colour region often ends up having artifacts, that is, pixels with a sightly different colour. If you zoom in a little, you should see what I mean, especially around the filenames. Also, editing artifacts out of JPEGs, or even just editing non-photo JPEGs in general, is a real pain. Give it a try one time, if you’re into that stuff.
        Contrastingly, PNG is a lossless format, which means the image retains its quality.

      4. For the Web, always export to PNG unless it’s a photo or an animation. For photos, use JPEG, and for animated images, use GIF. The problem with GIF is that it only supports 256 colours and 1-bit transparency (either fully opaque or fully transparent), and because of that, there’s a trend towards using the non-standard APNG (“animated PNG”) instead. If you do any image editing, make sure you also save the source file in the program’s native format (e.g. PSD for Photoshop, XCF for GIMP). TIFF is apparently good if you want to get it printed. Use SVG for scalable graphics.
        (Aside: There is JPEG2000 and it’s highly superior to the original JPEG. It boggles me why nobody uses it)

        For read-only documents, I recommend PDF, otherwise your program’s native format (DOCX for Microsoft Word, ODT for OpenOffice/LibreOffice Writer, etc.).

        For audio, FLAC is best for your source file because it’s a compressed lossless format, which means that you won’t lose any quality and it won’t be as large as WAV. For exporting, MP3 will get you wide support, but I prefer to use Ogg Vorbis (OGG) because it’s a free format; technically, you’re supposed to be paying royalties whenever you use MP3, but Microsoft and Apple pay those for you.

        I’m not too familiar with video, but I’ve found MP4 to have the best mix of quality, support, and file size. The free video format is Ogg Theora (OGV), which is also good. They’re both lossy formats.

      5. Thanks dude, very useful info … and with you on all of it, jpeg2000 I had vaguely heard of but presumably that betamax vs vhs all over again !

        Mp4 concur, although the MKV container is much more flexible … most things I wanted to do can be done in m4v which includes subtitling … and damn dolby, I’ve pretty much vowed to avoid them if at all possible after their fight with Apple cost me the use of my video playing app … DTS is much better anyway in my opinion, so who needs dolby anyway …

      6. There’s a new (2010) open format that’s being by Google that everyone’s getting hyped up about, including me, called WebP. It supports both lossy and lossless compression, with animation, and it’s purportedly about 20% to 65% smaller depending on the format you compare it with.
        Support is slowly coming… . Google Chrome, and by extension Opera, obviously supports it, but the rest are still in the works to support it.

      11. As a post script … what format do you use for saving “master” images, I’ve been using JPG on highest quality setting … I’m think mostly about photo editing rather than graphic design BTW …

      12. If I had a DSLR, I would save my photos as RAW, but I don’t, so I just save mine as high-quality JPEGs. For retouching, unless I haven’t added any new layers, I’ll save them in The GIMP’s native XCF format. After that, export to JPEG.

      13. Thanks dude … I experimented with RAW in the past with my old Canons, the drawback I found was that one couldn’t get a preview in Windows … and like you I don’t have DSLR either ! …

      14. It was a png when I captured it off the screen … I added my logo, then went to save the file … the png was huge, both original and the edited one from photoshop, so I went with png … I think like anything, it’s good to know the guidelines with picture formats, but then the rules can be broken sometimes when there’s a good reason … I’ll leave the malware embedding to the morons !

      16. I think PS doesn’t have a compression setting … the ones that the MS Paint saves are usually pretty compact, but I think because it had photo images in it, that made it large … The PNG original was 3.16MB and the optimized jpg was 1.87MB … so I went with the jpg … will check out pngcrush, as I’m often working with images !

    2. 😆 not always, but yes when there’s a photo op, I jump on it, I’ve had too many blurry/unusable shots in the past, and know that getting multiple shots means I’m likely to capture what I want in the best way …

      It’s a quad setup with a pny pcie x16 quad display card … a “hangover” from my trading days … it was a print screen of the window after I’d resized it to fit all the thumbnails, the contact sheet in PS broke after about 100 photos, completely filled my SSD !

      And yes it’d be hard to go back to VGA or lesser, perhaps for maintenance on a server or command line stuff …

      You did mention before and it’s been very helpful and useful information, I can now for instance do a transparency on png-24 … however in this particular case the file size was much much smaller jpeg vs png, so I went with jpeg …

      And as my resident picture file format guy, perhaps you can answer this – Google pagespeed recommends progressive jpeg rather than standard … personally I think it’s pedentic … but I’ve been told one of the metrics google uses to decide whether to show one’s result or not is page loading speed, so could actually be an important factor … what’s your take ?

      Cheers

      Don Charisma

      1. Before I answer your question, let’s go over what the difference between standard and progressive JPEG. A standard JPEG image will load one line at a time, starting at the top. Progressive JPEGs will show a low-quality image and pass through the image multiple times, each time improving the quality of the displayed image. With that in mind, progressive JPEGs will allow readers with a slow connection to have a low-quality preview while downloading the image instead of just the top half. Additionally, progressive JPEGs tend to be slightly smaller in file size.
        According to Wikipedia, if an application that doesn’t support progressive JPEGs encounters one (like IE8 and earlier), it’ll display the image after it has completely downloaded.
        I usually don’t think about it and just accept The GIMP’s defaults, which includes progressive mode.

      2. Well question has come up more than once because of google pagespeed recommend progressive jpegs … personally I could care less, but if they are that much more likely to show my snippet because I’m a fraction of second quicker then so be it ..

  10. Holy doodle! O_O With digital SLR or Old-Skool going through tons of film for that one perfect shot? Nevertheless, beautiful! Very COOL! 😀

  12. 😮 stunning! 🙂
    I look forward to seeing your panorama, dear Don 🙂 Thank you for sharing your photo art

      1. Hi Don, that’s very kind of you. 🙂 Thanks God, my being 43 years old isn’t that bad. I wish you a nice day, man and thank you again

    1. LOL, I’m sure I will top it, and yes you’re right what I’m doing changes, it’s congruent with my imagination 🙂 Thanks for watching, stay tuned for the next episode of DonCharismaTV 😆

      2. 😆 well afraid I have to make a living too, so there will be commercials … my youtube channel is DonCharismaTV but haven’t had time to put anything on it yet !

      4. We’re building a web dev/design/seo firm, so I will need to promote and market this, it was one of the reasons for starting the blog … the current advertising brings in a little “pocket money” but it’s not enough to live on, not by a long way !
        Viral wise, hasn’t happened yet for me, although a few articles of mine are well favoured by google and get quite a lot of traffic 🙂
        In my opinion it’s hard work that pays off, a few get lucky with viral posts and massive outstanding popularity, but mere mortal like you and I just have to keep at it 😆

      5. I knew your blog was tied with your SEO business… I never thought of blog articles going viral, and getting paid for it. And yes it sounds like you are on to something. I would like to see that happen for you. ^_^

        For myself I don’t have the drive or goal to post except for when i am inspired. I missed the window for pet videos going viral, as my pets are now gone…. this is something I probably would have gotten into if timing was different. Such is life!

      6. There’s always the next opportunity around the corner 🙂 … I just keep at what I’m doing and see what happens … and yes inspiration plays a big part for me too 🙂

  16. I just went to Instagram assuming you’d have a spectacular feed full of pictures. Surprised you’re not using it. You’ll have some sunset photography completion from me in about 4 weeks or so when we start having some visible sunsets where I am.

    1. 😆 technically I am using it, sure I have an Instgram account … however you’re right I don’t use Instagram, at the moment … reason, I’ve been concentrating all my efforts on the wordpress blog, because I feel this is the best platform for me, gives me the most control and flexibility … I don’t generally see it as competition Phil, more collaborations, or if you still prefer competition, then constructive-competition … probably just semantics … so I’ll look forward to seeing what the sunsets look like where you are – give me a heads up when you post 🙂

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