James Stephens

Please take a look at my new nature photography website, www.natureimages.info.

I have always had a fascination with nature as well as a passion for photography; the images in these galleries are the result of the union of those interests. My goal is to create simple and artistically successful images documenting living things in their natural setting, and as much as possible behaving in interesting ways.
Continue reading →

The river flowed inexorably,
Toward a distant indigo sea,
First over rocks the waters gushed,
Cascading down, the torrent rushed.
Continue reading →

SPRING

Warmed by the sun of early Spring,
A tender gift a bud did bring,
As bit by bit a leaf unfurled,
And revealed itself to the world
Continue reading →

For a little more than a year now I’ve been taking photographs of the Institute For Advanced Study campus as part of a website redesign for the School of Natural Sciences which was launched recently.
Continue reading →

Recently I’ve been experimenting with HDRsoft‘s tone mapping plugin v1.0.1 for Adobe Photoshop CS2 . The plugin is designed to increase detail in shadows and highlights and from what I can see it does a very good job …
Continue reading →

Recently I’ve been taking a look at DxO Optics Pro. I was attracted by the fact that this software is the only product on the market that offers automated correction for optical vignetting, chromatic aberration (both lateral as well as purple fringing), pincushion and barrel distortion. It also reduces noise, corrects for lens softness and acts as a RAW converter too.
Continue reading →

I took some high ISO indoor shots at the weekend inside Walnford Grist Mill, near Allentown New Jersey. Light levels inside the mill were very low and although I did have my tripod to hand I made a decision to jack the speed right up to ISO 3200 and take some photographs handheld. You might be wondering why …..

Walnford Grist Mill, New Jersey
Canon 5D with 24-105 f/4L IS lens @ ISO 3200
(noise reduction using Neat Image)
(click image to enlarge)

Continue reading →

Following on from the announcement of a renewed commitment to Linux by Linksys-Cisco and the release of the Linux-compatible WRT54GL Wireless-G series broadband router (discussed here), this post details how to run Iptables on a Linksys-Cisco WRT54GL router via firmware from DD-WRT. A fully functional example Iptables script is provided to get you started.
Continue reading →

I was forwarded this illuminating article on the legal aspects of where and what you can photograph. The author, having review a number of information sources, offers up something close to the following:
Continue reading →

In a recent post some advantages were discussed in using Partimage over g4u and Symantec Ghost. Following on from that, example scripts and a simple methodology are provided below to backup and restore Linux partitions using partimage run from a client system, to a remote server running partimaged.
Continue reading →

This post talks about some of the problems and solutions myself and other staff have discovered in trying to Ghost/image/clone Linux systems using Symantec Ghost , g4u, and Partimage.
Continue reading →

I’d like to recommend the book Real World Color Management by Bruce Fraser, Chris Murphy and Fred Bunting.
Continue reading →

This post details a way to script partition creation under Linux using fdisk. I was originally trying to use sfdisk to perform this task as it is designed to be scriptable, reading lines of the form

where each line fills one partition descripton. The problem for me was that sfdisk only appears to accept partition sizes defined in cylinders; for partitioning similar sized disks with different geometries this is inconvenient.
Continue reading →

I haven’t taken any pictures since getting back from a trip to England a week ago, and so yesterday evening I found myself clicking through my images in Adobe Bridge looking for inspiration. It dawned on me that I’d taken three pictures of a particular building from essentially the same angle. More than that though, they were all quite pleasing shots. Roll on spring so I can get the next one in the series ……

Continue reading →

Thomas Niemann has released a new version of PTLens. It operates at least x1.5 faster. It is available for download here. Don’t forget to tip the author if you find it useful.
Continue reading →