Chaos is Come

"Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul,
But I do love thee! and when I love thee not,
Chaos is come again."

- Othello, in William Shakespeare's Othello

I almost did a mawkish blip of all our iProducts, in view of Steve Jobs' death from pancreatic cancer (kind of the Dark Lord Sauron of cancers). That would have consisted of two iPads (on one of which I am now typing this), two iPhones (a 4 and a 3GS, having just given away my old 3G), 4 iPods (a classic, a nano, a shuffle, and a touch), an iMac, a MacBook, and an old iBook with a dead battery which the kids love. Does that make me iTsuken?

The only reason I started making videos and posting them on YouTube was really because my (then) new iMac had a camera, GarageBand, and iMovie. It was just all so easy to do, and that's one of the things that Apple under Steve Jobs has done so well: make it easy to create things - whatever those things might be.

When I started taking photos (even pre-blip) I imported them into iPhoto. After a time I started using some of the adjustments in iPhoto to enhance my photos a bit, and despite knowing sod-all about photography, was pleased - and encouraged - by the results. I made some photo books of the kids and got them printed - easy as pie. I've started doing the same with a selection of photos from my first 500 daily photos (from Flickr and then Blipfoto).

And now, as I once again type out my blip journal entry using an app on my iPad, and prepare to use another iApp to upload a photo which a few minutes after taking, I transferred to my iPad, using the Apple Camera Connection Kit, and edited on the iPad ... I reflect on just how much of an impact Jobs' vision and leadership has had, on ordinary everyday people and life. The ways we do things have really changed, and I think Apple and Jobs have contributed to making some of those changes really great.

Anyway, the galahs....

I took a little walk around the hospital grounds this morning. No lorikeets (the little baskets), but these galahs whizzed overhead - pursued, I think, by a couple of masked lapwings. I watched them circle about, and then land down by one of the car parks, so trudged off after them. They were sitting there, along with a couple of long-billed corellas (which according to my birds book, shouldn't be found around here, but there they were), but after a couple of shots they got spooked by a passing car and started hopping and fluttering about. This was my favourite shot, despite not being terribly crisp, because of how much is going on in it: the one coming in to land over to the right; the one in front of the corella taking off, with the corella cawing and spreading its wings behind; the one in the very front having face-planted, with the other behind it ...

In Filterstorm I cropped it to 3:2, sharpened all the galahs, pulled down the luminance curve on everything but the birds, and added a tiny tiny S to the RGB curve for the whole image.

edit:
Oh, and one more thing ...

Jobs' clear vision did not, apparently, extend to his own health. In the early stages of his cancer he followed the advice of his naturopath, when if he had gone for real treatment, there is a possibility he could have made a significant difference to his prognosis.

If you're sick, go see your doctor.

Thus endeth the lecture.

Lumix DMC-G10 : f/5.60 : 1/499" : 124mm : ISO 100

Large version here.

Uploaded with Blipfoto iPhone app.