Napa Sunflower Cards

5x7 Folded Card

View the entire collection of cards.

My Own QR Code

Christmas Tree - Time Lapse

Camera on tripod.
Laptop using Canon capture software.
First time doing this, so I green boxed it.
~760 shots.
Adobe Premiere, inport as numbered sequence.
www.archive.org for Christmas music.

Merry Christmas!

I recommend seeing it in High Resolution. Go here and click on the "Watch in High Quality"

The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny

Aesop Fable:

A Wolf, meeting with a Lamb astray from the fold, resolved not to lay violent hands on him, but to find some plea, which should justify to the Lamb himself his right to eat him. He then addressed him: "Sirrah, last year you grossly insulted me." "Indeed," bleated the Lamb in a mournful tone of voice, "I was not then born." Then said the Wolf: "You feed in my pasture." "No, good sir," replied the Lamb, "I have not yet tasted grass." Again said the Wolf: "You drink of my well." "No," exclaimed the Lamb, "I never yet drank water, for as yet my mother's milk is both food and drink to me." On which the Wolf seized him, and ate him up, saying:
"Well! I won't remain supperless, even though you refute every one of my imputations."

The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny, and it is useless for the innocent to try by reasoning to get justice, when the oppressor intends to be unjust.

Another New Toy - Chumby

It's an "Internet Player". That means it will display widgets written in Flash-Lite.

They allow you to embed HTML in a web page (such as a blog) that represents what widgets you have on the physical Chumby, creating a virtual Chumby.

www.chumby.com

Untitled

I'm writing a test post in Zoho.  This is an application suite that uses Google Gears for offline web apps.

Back From China

3 weeks
35 pounds of camera gear
in a sling backpack
100 degree weather
100% humidity

resulting in

lost 3 pounds
~3800 photos
24 gigabytes

See Flickr for the shots as they trickle through my workflow.

Color Enhancement & Sharpening - Part 3

Part 3 covers the use of curves and shows a different type of curve fot the color enhancement.

This one is hosted on Google videos since Youtube has a 10 minute length limit. Sorry to those who have subscribed to my Youtube channel. I'll try to figure something out.

Part 3 is Crunching Away

I think I've figured out the keyframe zoom thing on Premiere. I find it easier to use the Effects Control window. I had thought that right clicking on the clips would get me to the right context menu, but that just led me down a rat hole.

Now it's crunching away, 9 more hours to go. The Camtasia editor computes faster, but the results are junk, as evidenced by part 1. Plus the Camtasia editor barfs after you get too many edit points in the project file. Memory leak!

Color Enhancement & Sharpening - Part 2

This was delayed due to issues with the Camtasia video editor. Apparently they don't support the features listed on the box. I did this one with Premiere. Sorry for the jerky zooms and transitions, I'm still learning.

Video Generation Troubles

I have run into some glitches in generating the videos.

It turns out that if you want to use any of the great features of the Camtasia editor, you end up crashing every 10 minutes. Camtasia has all the features you could want for this kind of work, but if you get to many edit commands in the project file, it gets unstable. Pretty nasty.

Their tech support has nicely said, if it hurts, don't do it. Bite me.

Color Enhancement & Sharpening - Part 1

Color Enhancement and Sharpening

I've done a 3 part video tutorial on how to get brighter colors and sharper details in a photo. These methods are variations of what is outlined in the Flickr group Photoshop Support Group. This is the place to go for helpful advice without the flaming of newbies that goes on in other places. A very friendly place.

Part 1:
Enhance the colors by adding a curves adjustment layer and use the layer mask and opacity to control the effect.

Part 2:
Duplicate the background and sharpen the photo. Use a mask to keep parts from getting over sharpened. It is rare that one level of sharpness works across the entire photo.

Part 3:
An alternate approach to the curves shown in part 1.

Photo Tip of the Day...

Or tip of today. Whichever.

After taking pictures on a tripod, (not OF a tripod), turn off mirror lockup right away. This way you won't embarrass yourself the next day when you are trying to take a headshot of your boss for a web site.

3-Layer Orton Lanterns Photo Featured on Photojojo

Photojojo has featured my Lunar New Year Lantern photo when they linked to my 3-Layer Orton tutorial video.


The Photojojo post is seen here.

Camelia Generated using the 3 Layer Orton Effect

Really better if you view it large on a black gackground.

3 Layer Orton Video Tutorial

OK........

The video is uploaded. Enjoy!



The Flickr Orton group is here.

A discussion thread is here.

3 Layer Orton

I've just recorded a video that shows how I am now doing most of my post processing.

-It was captured in one take, a little less than 10 minutes long.

-I installed Adobe Premiere Elements, 15 minutes.

-I learned how to zoom in on the video using camera controls, 30 minutes.

-I edited the titles and the zooms, 60 minutes.

-Rendering the video? Priceless, or about 23 hours and still going.

That will teach me to do this on my main PC (1.7G Pentium-M). Unfortunately, Premiere isn't compiled for the native Itanium instruction set, so I can't run it on my 64 Socket Itanium system. That's 128 cores. I figure it would render in a few minutes on that box.

Oh well.

Gratuitous Post

Must not let Blog die......

Nothing since January?

So web 1.0

Ortonize Photos

OK, so I don't update my blog often. You get what you pay for. Or not.

I got more than I paid for when I was looking at trout photos on Flickr. I stumbled across a woman in Michigan who had a note on using the "Orton Technique". Thinking this was some new fishing trick, I googled and found this:
http://www.naturephotographers.net/articles0106/dw0106-1.html

"Ortonizing" is a way to mess with your photos in a fun way.

Here are a few results (zebra, maple, thistle):
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bobgcampbell/93486912/