Konnichiwa !

Welcome to another edition of the Sunday Surprise from a relatively sunny and gorgeous Melbourne!

Just yesterday we passed the 50% funded mark on the Kickstarter project. The next half will be much harder to get through so if you're sitting on the fence, don't delay! Pledge for your own Sixty Degrees South 1000 piece jigsaw now.

Also, this is a new newsletter and if you've enjoyed it or found any of it useful, please let your friends know so they can subscribe to it! And also, thank YOU for reading along too!

Anyway, on to this weeks surprises...

Watch

A Monkey controls a robot

https://www.ted.com/talks/miguel_nicolelis_a_monkey_that_controls_a_robot_with_its_thoughts_no_really?language=en

After last weeks Neuralink update, I remembered one of the videos I saw years ago about the where we were on EEG signal processing about 10 years ago.

While Elon Musk is working on a commercial venture, just have a look at where the bleeding edge of research was nearly 10 years ago. This is a 15 min video that absolutely blew my mind and STILL makes me think that it's science fiction.

Listen

Jakatta - Visisons

https://open.spotify.com/album/5ZQ1LsdZXCf56L2KnP5ysU?si=l0d44BylSM6DZa2i6eJNZw

With the weather warming up, this old album reminded me of lazy afternoons of my youth spent on the Gold Coast. It has a certain Ibiza beach club vibe that I absolutely love!

I think I'll be putting this album back in heavy rotation this year as it gets hotter and (hopefully) as the lock downs ease.

Enjoy!

Gadget (well, software)

LuminarAI

https://skylum.evyy.net/c/1311216/880106/3255 

The next tip is all about photo editing on the phone and while that's most common, I do like to sit down and do some creative edits on the PC from time to time. Enter Skylum software and their new app Luminar AI. There's a few people on this newsletter that I have recommended the previous version to who have loved it and from the preview I have seen, this new version should be MUCH better.

Unlike other software like Photoshop or Lightoom, Luminar allows you to catalogue AND edit your images in one app. Most editing apps have a "basic" edit panel, an "advanced" edit area and then finer tuning effects. LuminarAI takes the routine tweaks and applies AI to essentially do the basic edits using just a few sliders. In essence, what you'll see in the video below would take me about half the time using LuminarAI.

For those who really don't have the time to spend hours editing, Luminar is a great starting point and it also has all the advanced tools too if you like. Best of all, it's not a subscription unlike most other editing apps these days. So if you pre-order now for about $80, that's it! No subscription ever! Compare that to $75/month for the full Adobe collection and you can see why they're becoming popular.

I pre-ordered my copy yesterday.

PxR photo tip

How I edit August 2020: Night Cityscapes

https://youtu.be/5UVAJGuwHmc

This is one of the "How I edit" videos that I make every so often for my patrons over at my Patreon page. I've decided that I'll add these videos every so often to my Sunday Surprise emails long before they become available on my Youtube channel.

The photos I take and post on instagram are almost always shot on my phone (currently the Samsung Note20 Ultra) and are mostly edited in Snapseed which is a free Android or iOS app, so you can follow along the edits pretty much to the end. The final image I post on social media probably has a tiny bit of refining done in Lightroom mobile or Lens Distortion which both have free tiers.

As I mentioned in previous videos, taking the photos is only half the task. The rest is editing and the easiest way to learn to just watch someone else. This is what I did with Trey Ratcliff's editing course and I thought I'd make a simpler version for you all!

Would love to know what you think of this and whether you want more?

Kickstarter update

PxR Kickstarter campaign is past half way!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/photosbyraffy/sixty-degrees-south-antarctic-image-jigsaw-puzzle?ref=6nwuqk

Officially we have passed the the half way mark! Currently the project is sitting at 53% with about another 3 weeks to go! This part will be hard since all my friends who are interested have already pledged and I'm hoping YOU can help by spreading the word on your social media.

It'd be awesome to be able to tick this small thing off my bucket list and also to treat the staff that I work with to something nice as well. If you're sitting on the fence please consider pledging now. The beauty of Kickstarter is that if it really falls through on funding, you wont be charged at all.

Quote I'm pondering

“If your body wandered as much as your mind, you would have traveled the entire world by now."

―Melandwords

This is something I saw on an Instagram story and I have to say it rang quite true. I've been focusing on meditating more regularly and just like it's meant to, it's made me much more aware of just how much my mind races around like a monkey jumping from tree to tree.

I'm currently using Calm as my meditation app of choice and the built in breathing exercise on my Galaxy Watch.

Truly random

This is a new section I wanted to try out, which is a mix between random updates and truly unrelated things that I found interesting. Would love feedback if you liked this.

Planter update

You remember a while ago I posted the link up to some geometric triangular planters? Well, they arrived and I've got them up on the wall! Here's how they're looking at the moment

I re-potted a spider plant that I received as a gift for my birthday, I pinched a devil's icy cutting from the cafe downstairs (with permission!) and then ordered some Gasteria Royal Wolfgang from Plants in a box for the third planter. What do you think of my "hanging garden?"

Air purifier

All this Covid-19 stuff and also the fires from earlier in the year have made me consider an air purifier. At the moment there's this one on Kickstarter, the SmartMi. Have you used one? Have you noticed a difference? I'm still undecided on whether to get one or not so would love to hear your opinion on them.

More Neuralink on Wait, but why?

Has all the news on Neural interfaces make you want to learn a bit more? This article from Wait but why written a while ago is a pretty good primer on the different aspects of this technology. Like a lot of his writing, it's well worth a read.

Thanks again for joining me on yet another week of randomness!

Hope you're staying safe!

- Raffy

PS - I want to know what part of the newsletter you like the most! Please take a literal 30 second survey?

Sunday Surprise uses affiliate/referral links in the newsletter. While this does not influence the product recommendations or verdict, if there are any that are likely to lead to Photos by Raffy receiving any sort of compensation from, they will be marked in orange. Non affiliate links will appear as blue.