Mount Cook, Hooker Valley. George Moodie’s account and photographs from his February 1893 trip to Mount Cook. Text sourced from the NZ Alpine Journal Vol I, No. 4, November 1893. Photographs from the Te Papa Digital Archive. I have attempted to find, locate, and place the photographs that Moodie describes into the relevant areas of his account. I think these are mostly correct, however there may be inaccuracies. –| isthisit.nz
My fourth autumn in Melbourne. My favourite season here due to the colourful trees, cooler temperatures, and the way the light hits on the landscape on accord of the sun sitting lower in the sky. From April through July I shot a couple of rolls of Portra 160 film with the Voigtlander 40mm and 58mm prime lenses. Selected here are photographs from a few day trips. On reflection, no grand landscapes. Instead, wide open apertures, shallow depth of field, and colourful scenes. A combination of fac...| isthisit.nz
Analog Photography Assistant Analog Photography Assistant (APA) is a free, ad-free, privacy-first android app for film photographers. APA v1.1.0 is the first post-launch release and focuses on UX improvements and bug fixes. I got a lot of feedback from the folks in the 35mmc community ranging from requests to add additional f-stops and ISO values to the light meter, through to reports that in the northern hemisphere the compass displayed bearings that were inaccurate by 180 degrees. Whoops.| isthisit.nz
I’ve just published Pine Smoke, an album of fifty-seven landscape photographs from the west of Tasmania. Pine Smoke This was my third trip to Tasmania, a place I like to visit because the climate and terrain remind me a lot of the South Island of New Zealand (home). On this trip I set out to photograph landscapes of industry – forestry, hydro electricity, farming, and mining. The more I learned about the history and present day of the region, the more parallels emerged with Otago and the ...| isthisit.nz
Over the last 6 months I created Analog Photography Assistant, an Android app to help photographers shoot old film cameras. The app provides a bunch of utilities such as measuring the amount of light in a scene, and a calculator to factor in the reciprocity failure characteristic of film. Before this, I’d never written an Android application and the extent of my Kotlin experience was using the ungodly Kotlin DSL for Teamcity CI/CD pipelines. I’m now at the first major release of the app a...| isthisit.nz
Analog Photography Assistant Analog Photography Assistant is a free, ad-free, privacy-first app for film photographers. I wrote it for my own personal use, and have now released it on the Play Store. It has the following features: Light Meter – meter scenes with your phone. Set the ISO of the film you’re using and get aperture and shutter speed combinations. Reciprocity Calculator – select the film you’re shooting on, enter the metered exposure for a scene, and this calculator factors...| isthisit.nz
Over the last six months I have been developing an Android app to aid in my film photography. I now use it every time I go out shooting and am making it free for everyone to use. Analog Photography Assistant Analog Photography Assistant is a free, ad-free, privacy-first app with the following features. Light Meter – meter scenes with your phone. Set the ISO of the film you’re using and get aperture and shutter speed combinations. Reciprocity Calculator – select the film you’re shootin...| isthisit.nz
Belgrave Forest I get my film developed at a local film lab and scan the negatives myself at home. The scanning setup is simple. I suspend the film negative flat over a lightbox, mount my sony digital camera to a copy stand so that it’s facing down, and shoot the negative using a macro lens. I get much better results than the local film labs can give me – more fine detail in the image, more megapixels which allows me to crop, and a RAW file output that allows me to adjust relative exposures.| isthisit.nz
Terminal. There’s an urban wasteland walking distance from the Melbourne central business district. No, not Elizabeth Street, but an in-between area of the city – you’ve left the city going north west but haven’t yet reached the suburbs. You drive over it on viaducts, or travel through it on metro train lines. It’s an area of the city that borders the port – full of oil silos, containers, and warehouses.| isthisit.nz
The Maniototo The Maniototo is a region made of plains and mountains in the South Island of New Zealand. As names go, through to the early 1900s the Maniototo used to be known as Central Otago, during which modern day Central Otago (Cromwell, Queenstown, Wanaka, …) was known as The Interior. A rough map was made in 1852, with a more formal map published a few years later. This tale from Down the Years in the Maniototo (1948) by Janet C.| isthisit.nz
Foot of the St Bathans Range. It’s the middle of summer and the golden tussock has overtaken its shorter agricultural cousin. Back down the Manuherikia Valley, bands of green grass run up the sides of the Dunstan Range. Productive Land they call it. Indeed it is, but visually that splash of green is at odds with the golden tussock or grand blue skies. That’s all south of the Home Hills, along with the letterboxes, farming equipment, and power lines. North of the Home Hills one gets taken ...| isthisit.nz
Old Dunstan Road. Hawkduns. Early evening in Ida Valley. Sunset in the Ida Valley. Kokonga Hut, at the foot of Mt Buster. Foot of Mt Buster. Below, above Falls Dam. On Raggedy Range. Sutton at dawn. Cambrian Common Forest. Up the Manuherikia Valley.| isthisit.nz
Once upon a time in Giza. The Pyramids are difficult to photograph. You’re close enough to touch them and yet they’re so fucking big. Standing at the base and looking up the how did they make that? factor comes into play. The individual blocks themselves, made out of limestone, are the height of a tiktok influencer – make sure it’s my best angle. Up the road from the Great Pyramid is a spot dubbed Panorama Point which is nearby the spot where that photo of the three pyramids lined up ...| isthisit.nz
In this blog I share my experience in building a Python REPL augmented with ChatGPT. I explore how the application is built, and speculate on software engineering patterns and paradigms that might emerge in systems built on Large Language Models (LLMs). GEPL - Generate, Evaluate, Print, Loop Link to this section Introduction The Lisp programming language made REPLs (Read, Evaluate, Print, Loop) famous. REPLs are interactive programming environments where the programmer gets immediate feedback...| isthisit.nz