A quick shot from the whole lot I took at St Malo, city of Corsairs...

I've started to go through some of the photos from my Printemps gallery that were post-processed too hastily...

The first image, that I've tried to fix is the one below, with a single flower whose petals are too weakly colored in the original shot.

The image that made its way to my gallery suffers from over-saturation, because I only applied global changes on the white balance and the overall contrast, which was probably not well suited here (or at least not enough).

To get a better result (with Gimp), the easiest way is to use the layers and layer masks. This technique is well explained in the MeetTheGimp[en] podcast (for instance in the  latest episode[en]).

So layers make it possible to work with several images superimposed, and to control the transparency effects  ((ie how much the top image will mask the images underneath)). Here, only two layers were needed: a image of the origianl shot, modified in order to make the greenish background darker and an image of the same shot but where the colors and luminosity have been enhanced. Using a layer mask on this second image, made it possible to keep the modifications only on the white regions of the mask. Thus, I could modify the color of the flower independently from the background. Images below show three examples of such modifications.

The sun took some time to make its mind, but it eventually settled and so did the spring. A good occasion for me to learn about macro photography ("only" 100mm for now). Here is a small sample (the full gallery is accessible by clicking on the image):

There's a strange pattern appearing in the number of visits on my blog, that does not seem to be linked with my posts. It can be seen in the image below -- where I've voluntarily removed the scale for the (pathetic) number of views. Suffices to say that the highest point is a 10x jump in visitors (( which sums up to not that much actually:) )). By checking what are  the pages viewed in such occasions, I've realized that it's mostly all about my LaTeX page ((which, now I think of it, is still not translated to english :S )). So, my nice visitors are very likely to be writing scientific papers, report or visual presentation ((and most probably not doing so in english...)) at those times. But a mystery remains as I'm still unable to explain the full pattern: the jumps seem to be regularly set. The red ones are on tuesday/wednesday (is that a late student I see working on his presentation until wednesday morning when he/she has to defend his/her project ?) and the orange ones are on tuesday/friday (a paper to submit on friday I guess... and f**king late as far as I can tell)... Anyway, for those of you who are struggling to get your papers perfect, don't forget the awesome advices from PhDComics:

Along with New-Zealand and Ireland France has to face the "graduated response" bill project and may well try a black-out action too. Not sure of what the music and film industry will gain by fighting their customers with such rage...

Since Miro2.0 has been released a few weeks ago, I've had some time to use it and I thought I could take this occasion to share some of the podcasts I folow regularly on the internet.

But first of all a great thanx to Miro's developer that did a great job in tackling the two major problems I had with the software: impossibility to navigate the list of feeds, while playing a video (or audio) and performance. The only remaining thing on my whishlist would be that Miro handles image feeds (ala CoolIris for instance).

Now for the list of podcasts I listen to, most of them are in french, so here is a quick selection among the english speaking ones:

• ESOCast some info on the southern observatory in Chile
• Martin Bailey Photography Podcast: nice podcast about Martin's work

• Jeff Curto's Camera Position : about the "creative side" of photography

• TED Theme: Tales of Invention : high-tech fancy conferences

For a more exhaustive list see my OPML subscription file: miro_subscriptions