Tuesday Twister - Guess What

I had a feeling that last week's twisted photo might have been hard for some to identify. As it was there was only one fully correct answer so Adrian gets my congratulations and a virtual gold star all to himself for identifying the Union Flag,  often called the Union Jack.  Definitely patriotic Wilma and definitely a flag TWG.

     

If the Scots vote to have an independent nation then I assume Mr. Salmond will pay me to replace my Union Flags as part will have to be removed.

I don't think this week's twisted photo will cause as many headaches.

Guess What:


Please leave any guesses in the comments.
They will be revealed, along with the answer, next Tuesday.
No prizes. Just for fun and a virtual gold star.

Lapse It Pro

I tried Hyperlapse to make a time lapse video of clouds and found that is not what the app is designed for. The way it crops slightly and then tries to stabilize the video plays havoc with stationary sections of the scene. Any still object, building, bushes, etc., wobble around in a small circular motion. Yuk! This has been noted by at least one other user in the reviews on iTunes.

I had a look round for an app designed for 'normal' time lapse and discovered that I had downloaded Lapse It Pro some time in the past when it was on free offer. (Present price £1.49) For some reason I had deleted it so I installed it  on the iPod Touch5 to try out.

To hold the iPod securely on a tripod I bought a Smartphone Tripod Adapter from Smoothshot which clamps mobile phones safely and securely and accepts a tripod screw in the base:



Set up the iPod Touch on a tripod:



Set the app to take a photo once every five seconds and settled down while it strutted its stuff for about an hour.  Of course the foreman (foredog) had to make sure I was doing everything correctly:



Once I had stopped Lapse It a movie was presented. That was transferred to the MacBook to add a title and then uploaded to Flickr. The result being:



Fascinating to watch clouds drift across but also be created out of thin air, twisting and tumbling in upper air turbulence.

One thing to remember - start with a fully charged battery. When I tried it a few days ago it came up with a low battery warning after about 55 minutes. Today I started with it fully charged. After about 55 minutes, there was something like 3/4 battery charge left.

PhotoScissors for Mac

I was browsing through the latest list of apps for iOS or Mac which had gone free or been reduced in price on appshopper.com when I came across PhotoScissors which can be used to cut out objects from photos. Normally I wouldn't have considered it at its usual price of £13.99 but at the time of writing it had been reduced to £1.49 which was more to my liking.

Once downloaded and installed I looked for a subject to try it out on and chose a photo I had taken of an orchid flower which had plenty of clutter around it. Mode of working is simply a matter of marking in red the things which are not wanted and green those which are to be kept. Click on the arrow at the top of the screen to see the result:



It takes a bit of practice to get things just right. Sometimes where subject and background colours match that colour will also be removed from the subject. No problem though, just add more green to those areas on the subject. Likewise colours in the subject can appear in the background so just add a bit of red to the places where that colour is not wanted. The end result can have a transparent background, as show above, and be saved as a .png file.



Or any colour can be chosen for the background and then saved as .png, .jpg, .tiff or .bmp


This has a coloured background with frame added using UltraCollage:



Finally a couple of silly pictures made using the orchid with transparent background while I was learning to use layers to merge photos in Pixelmator:





I did find what appears to be a bug in the save routine of PhotoScissors where it can add a double extension to the filename (name.png.jpg) under certain circumstances. I have reported this to the writers so it will be interesting to see how quickly they respond.

Friday at the Flicks - Flutters + Tiny Planet, the Movie

There is a Buddleia plant just over the fence in next door's garden which is flowering much later than mine. It has been attracting the latest batch of butterflies:



I often use the iOS app 'Living Planet' to make my twisted pictures for Tuesdays but I actually installed it for another feature not available in other similar apps - the ability to make a Tiny Planet video from a standard video file:



Saving the Tiny Planet video is a slow process, especially on my old iPad2. The app appeared to converted 50 seconds of video to 1600 Tiny Planet stills and then made them in to the resulting video. Before the video is saved all the same facilities available to still photos can be used to adjust the final appearance. What surprised me was that it kept the original soundtrack which I wasn't expecting.

The circular line round the 'planet' isn't a kink in the program but a telephone wire which crossed the view.  The original was hand held which accounts for some of the movement in the 'planet'. This is a snapshot from the original video.

 

The movie was cropped to 640x480 before being sent to the iPad for turning in to a Tiny Planet. Finally iMovie was used to add the text.

Harvestman

Almost perfectly camouflaged on the back door to the garage was this Harvestman. At first glance it looks like a spider but unlike spiders it only has one main body section and only one pair of eyes:





With its tiny body and l-o-n-g legs it is sometimes know as 'daddy longlegs' or 'granddaddy longlegs'. They do not produce poison and their diet includes small insects, all kinds of plant life and fungi.

Hibiscus

Hibiscus flowers are so pretty it's a shame that each one lasts such a short time:



Apparently the amount and strength of the red in each bloom depends on the weather, cooler nights can make the red more vibrant.

Tuesday Twister - Guess What

Congratulations and virtual gold stars go to Adrian, Wilma and TexWisGirl who all correctly identified the twisted snail in last week's photo:

   

This week's twisted photo may take a bit longer to puzzle out.
Guess what:


Please leave any guesses in the comments.
They will be revealed, along with the answer, next Tuesday.
No prizes. Just for fun and a virtual gold star.