Gaps in the rain radar

I’m very pleased with my ability to find the gaps in the rain in which to walk the dog.

The arrow on the rain radar map below shows the direction the clouds are moving in. The gap marked out is when I walked Maggie.

And this is what happened exactly two minutes after we got home!

Animated GIF showing of a wild and windy downpour in a residential back garden.

Lessons from dog

The best way to deal with the clammy, rainy, miserable afternoon we’re having in Melbourne today…

Photo of a red/brown dog sprawled out in front of a gas heater, with her front paws stretched out towards the fire. The dog is lying half off of the mat that’s been placed on the floor for it. The dog has her chin pressed up against the tiled area that’s in front of the heater.

A smidge of sunshine

A smidge of sunshine…

Selfie of a man walking a red/brown dog on a residential street. The man is wearing a bright blue cap and a light grey rain shell. There’s a bit of pale sunlight on the bottom half of the man’s face.

On an otherwise overcast and drizzly day.

Selfie of a man walking a red/brown dog on a residential street. The man is wearing a bright blue cap and a light grey rain shell, with the shell’s hood covering the cap. There are splotches of rain on the rain shell.

Not. Happy.

Melbourne’s recent, super-humid heatwave finally broke when several bands of thunderstorms rumbled through the city.

Maggie Does Not like thunderstorms. She ran to Nadia when the thunder started.

I responded to Nadia’s tweet with my own freaked-out-Maggie photo a short time later.

Close-up photo of a stressed looking red/brown dog underneath a desk. The dog’s ears are pulled back and its mouth is open, with tongue hanging out.

Fortunately, playing Midnight Oil’s ‘Diesel and Dust’ album rather loudly helped – with the music easily masking the ongoing thunder as the storm system rumbled along. [x]

Selfie of a man sitting on a chair in a carpeted room. Sitting on the carpet behind him – alert, but not scared – is a red/brown dog.

Three steps back

A couple of months after I stopped needing to wear it, I had to pull out my puffer jacket to walk the dog this morning. With this current cold snap we’ve taken two steps forward, three steps back on our way to summer in Melbourne. *sigh*

Selfie of a man walking along a residential street. He is wearing a black t-shirt, black puffer jacket, and black cap (with a red trim).

Thunderstorm fringe

The thunderstorm itself might have missed our suburb, but at least we got to see the gorgeous cloud formations on the fringes of that weather system.

(Of course even this distant thunder managed to freak poor Maggie out. She was a trembly dog all afternoon. *sigh*)

Photo of a completely overcast sky above the roofs of some houses. The sky is full of puffy, swirling clouds and looks quite dramatic.

Battered, but not too bruised

We had heavy rain and seriously wild winds across Melbourne overnight and well into this morning.

Screenshot of a smartphone weather app showing a large band of heavy rain moving towards Melbourne from the west.

Luckily just three weeks ago our local council and the power companies that supply our side of the city had come through and cut down all the tree branches that were close to powerlines in our neighbourhood. They’d asked us to do the same with the trees in our front yard too.

Photo of a letter titled ‘Vegetation clearance responsibilities’ with diagrams showing how residents need to trim trees around power lines in front of their houses.

Not that this stopped whole trees and massive tree branches from falling across roads in and around Melbourne’s west, of course.

Screenshot of a smartphone app showing a continuing list of ‘Tree Down’ incidents across several suburbs in Melbourne’s west (including the suburbs of Brooklyn, Ascot Vale, and Maidstone).

Which inevitably led to a bunch of power outages.

Screenshot of an ‘Electricity Outages’ webpage from electricity supplier Jemena. The map on the screenshot shows several pockets of power outages across Jemena’s area of supply, which is mainly to the inner west and inner north of Melbourne. There are no outages at the bottom of the map – between Altona North and Williamstown – which is where the suburb of Newport is situated.

But we lucked out in our neighbourhood: we did have a couple of brownouts during the worst of the wind, but we never actually lost power.

This was the biggest branch that fell on our street.

Photo of a large branch that has fallen off a massive tree on the side of a residential street. The branch that has fallen off is as long as the house behind it is wide.

Fortunately most of the branches that did fall were thinner and leafier, like this one. (Medium sized dog for scale.)

Photo of a relatively thin tree branch that has fallen and is lying on the nature strip next to a residential street. A red dog on a leash is standing next to the branch on the grass.

So chalk one up for proactive maintenance from the Hobson’s Bay City Council, Jemena, and Zinfra!

My hands are numb

Walking Maggie on a rainy nine degree morning that feels like 5 degrees. Fun times.

Selfie of a man walking his dog on a residential street. The man is wearing glasses, a face mask, and a light grey rain jacket with visible wet patches on it. The dog is sniffing around in the dirt by the side of the road.

At least this was followed by much deserved post-walk heater time.

Photo of a dog asleep on its side in front of a heater in a carpeted lounge room.

Photo editing show-and-tell #1

On weekends I batch upload to this blog all the photos I’ve posted to Twitter over the course of that week (or, occasionally, several weeks!).

In the meantime, through the magic of technology and cloud computing working together in the background, those photos have been automatically copied from my smartphone to my computer. And, while I originally post those photos to Twitter from my phone, I usually post them to this blog from my computer.

It’s only when I’m looking at these photos on my large screen monitor that I get to fully appreciate the editing and post-processing I’ve done on them. (For which I use the Snapseed app, btw.) So I thought I’d do a bit of a show-and-tell on two of my recent photos to document what I did to them and why.

A bright, sunny day washes out colours

Here’s the original photo I took of a tree in autumn whose leaves had all turned shades of red. This was taken with my Google Pixel 3XL (released November 2018).

There’s a bunch of things I don’t like about this photo:

  • The colours are washed out. The sky is pale blue, when in real life it was a deeper blue, and the leaves of the tree had more vibrant shades of red than what you see here.

  • The brightness of the sun has oversaturated parts of the photo. Here you can’t make out any definition in the clouds, though when I saw them through my sunglasses they had much more depth. Also things like the pavement have almost no texture.

So what I did was reduce the highlights, added some colour saturation, and (mainly for the clouds) added a bit of the ‘HDR-scape’ filter. I also selectively increased the colour saturation on the tree. All that resulted in this image which has much more depth, colour vibrancy, and textural definition.

Here a side-by-side before and after that makes those edits much clearer. Yes, the ‘after’ photo looks darker overall, but that’s because I’ve turned down the highlights that made the ‘before’ photo too bright. Note the restored blue of the sky and the red of the tree leaves, the depth and definition of the clouds, and the texture you can see in things like the pavement.

A gloomy overcast day also washes out colour

Here’s another photo that, for opposite reasons, essentially had the same issues as the one above. This time it was the gloominess of the light that washed out the colours and led to the lack of contrast and texture.

The fix for this was basically the same: reduce highlights, add ambience (which tweaks the brightness and increases saturation), and add a touch of HDR-scape for the clouds.

Here’s the side-by-side that shows the differences more clearly. We now have more vibrant colours (look at the colourful building and the grass), more definition in the clouds, and more depth overall. And I think the darker ‘after’ photo does a better job of capturing the gloomy, overcast mood of the day.

I don’t have too many other examples to show you, to be honest. That’s mainly because, with decent lighting, the Pixel 3XL camera does a remarkably good job of creating a balanced, well exposed, nicely coloured photos. Those I just have to crop and they’re ready to go.

I will talk about what else I do to improve my photos before I share them, but that’s for another blog post.

What kind of post-processing do you do on your photos before you post them or share them anywhere? And what camera and editing software do you use? I’d love to know.