The Gimp: basic photo editing

There are probably a few steps you need to go through when returning home from a day of picture taking.

The real no-hopers can be deleted straight away, but the rest should be downloaded and at least given a second chance.

So this post suggests a few basic techniques that may be applied to any potential "keepers".

The Gimp: replace that boring sky

Getting the exposure right for landscape photography can be challenging.

You may end up with your subject just right but the sky burnt out, or an interesting sky but a foreground that is too dark.

Or you could just cheat by combining 2 images using a photo editor.

Millers Wood: a great place for bird photography

Although bird photography can be a very rewarding activity, it can also be frustrating.

Your attempts to get a perfect shot can often be spoilt by visual obstructions like branches, or distracting backgrounds like buildings or litter, or just the long distance between you and your target bird.

Then there may be noisy dogs or unruly children to contend with (...or vice versa).

Finding the IP on a Pi using hostname

I was looking for a really easy method of finding the IP address on a Raspberry Pi.

I wanted a method I could use in a program to tell which bird box was returning data asynchronously.

And I was hoping to avoid having to hunt for the IP address string, buried somewhere in a block of text created by a command like ifconfig.

BirdBox2017: double Zero deployed!

I attached the new bird box & external camera to our pergola late yesterday afternoon, and by 8:30 this morning we had our first visitors.

Blue tits are very inquisitive, and certainly do not require a couple of months to get used to a new box (as some tv experts would have you believe).

So the 2017 season appears to have got off to a good start!