Link of the day

Old-Picture.com - very cool.

From yesterday's photo shoot

At the zoo

I'll be doing a more formal gallery soon, but here are some samples of my visit to the zoo with Mike and Erin.

Links to the sound of impacting bugs

For some reasons bumblebees have been smacking into my office window for the past hour. Here's some links for your reading while I'm uploading...

• Night Photography Tutorial
• Linq tutorial videos
• AskTheBuilder.com is a handy site
• I should probably be more outraged about this, but Planned Parenthood took a donation (later revealed to be a politically motivated prank) specifically for abortions for black women. All a part of the grand evolution I suppose
• The last doughboy - an era is ending and we're not seeing it.
• Free bricks to anyone in Atlanta
  

Rockspoloitation on Saint Patrick's Day

They needed some photos for their site, and I took quite a few. I finally got a chance to shoot in daylight which made quite a difference.

Tuesday link roundup

• A guide to night photography
• JumpUp.com
• Samantha Powers resigns...
• Southern Baptists Fight Climate Change - if only we can get Nascar and Fox News on the bandwagon the Left will declare Global Warming a hoax
• 
  Anonymous Philanthropist Donates 200 Human Kidneys To Hospital
  
• 
  In The Know: How Can We Make The War In Iraq More Eco-Friendly?
• 
  Mysterious Traveler Entrances Town With Utopian Vision Of The Future

Saturday links

• Deputy dumps man out of wheelchair - man then gets ahold of courthouse videotape, it reaches the media, and now that deputy is charged.
• Danish media reprints controversial cartoons, and show far more courage than American media outlets.
• Drunken Orgies Tainted System says Florida prison boss.
• Police Chief accused of improper chats retires - this is interesting. The police department in question was famous for find people trying to entice minors. Relevant quote

  Lindsey said Murray used his city-owned computer to chat online with women during an ongoing investigation into local massage parlors used as fronts for prostitution.
  All the department's computers, except for one used for the continuing Internet child sexual predator sting operation, are monitored by a keystroke program.

  
  Why would the only machine in the department that produces intentional evidence NOT have the keylogger installed?
  

• Tax me more fund raises little revenue
• The law and economics of pirates
• An aerial photo of San Francisco in the age of Earthquakes
• Fake cops rob family - this will be a growing problem I fear.

Most of these factor info my coming law enforcement meldown/feedback mismatch post I'm going to write one of these days...

Self Portrait at the Dawn of Man

Two random shots from my little Canon

Random Photo

From my visit to the Commuter Art Gallery

Friday morning rapid fire

• The rules on using the names Mohamed and Jesus
• How to hold a digital camera
• This collection of anti-drug commercials. It certainly makes me never want to cook.
• Film Noir Lighting
• The marines and laser guns, it has the memorable line - "Photoshop can quickly solve all engineering challenges."

DC photos finally uploaded

I finally got around to posting them, they're all from my small Canon.

The rest of the Chicago photos

I've finished processing the pictures from my small Canon camera from the Chicago trip. I wasn't able to bring the big Nikon into the event, so this gallery consists of the road photos and the non-closeups of the Crossroads Guitar Festival.

As you might guess from the quantity of photos, there was a long wait outside Buddy Guy's nightclub.

Check out the gallery.

And the best photo site is...

Lost America - Night photography of the abandoned West. Absolutely brilliant. This makes it to the BlogRoll.

We arrive in Chicago without incident

Driving exclusively at night resembles time travel. The vulgarity in the car reached new heights and several new terms were coined, none of which can be shared on this family blog.

Quick link round up

• Long range acoustic devices
• The Agitator has a list of questions that should be asked of all presidential candidates, well worth reading
• Ward Churchill has been fired.
• Black straw lighting from the Strobist and Lighting Mods.
  

Great minds think alike

I do some Googleing, and find out that someone else has taken cool pictures of the old Pullman railroad yards as well. It's good stuff.

A milestone

I just found out today that someone wants to pay for some of my art photos! I've been a "professional" (been paid for it) photographer for awhile, now I'll be a real artist! I think I'll shop for a beret and a narcissistic attitude on Amazon.

Saturday link roundup

• A nice how-to on HDR photography
• Survivorman is blogging again!
• The greatest living American you've never heard of.
• The world's stupidest Fatwas, my favorite -

  Many Muslims believe that unmarried men and women should not work alone together—a stricture that can pose problems in today’s global economy. So one Islamic scholar came up with a novel solution: If a woman were to breast-feed her male colleague five times, the two could safely be alone together.

  The injuction against the Polio vaccine is scary though.
• It seems that tires will outlive us all
• More on the Kathryn Johnson case
• A Slate article on the ethanol haters, of which I am one. He leaves out the fact that creating ethanol takes more energy than it produces.
  

Thursday morning link rapid fire

• Fast Failure's and Google
• HDR in Photoshop CS III - I still haven't gotten that to work right, more at this site.
• Andrew Sullivan largely echoes me in what to do with Iraq.
  

Free Photoshop Actions for my loyal readers

As my Nikon D80 makes it quite easy to take several hundred photos per session, and converting from the RAW format to psd takes forever (per photo) I recently created a couple of new photoshop actions to speed conversion and color correction.

They are both part of an action set I call "Mass Photo Actions"; you can download it here.

There are two actions in there that serve different purposes. The first action "RawToPSDNoTweaks" just takes a RAW file from a particular directory, converts it using the default settings, saves it as a psd file, and then closes it. It does no color correction, use this one if you intend to make a lot of manual color corrections later.

The second one "RawToPSDWithTweaks" opens and converts the file like the one above, and then does a safe amount of color correction and image sharpening to the image, saves it as a psd and then closes the file. Use this one if you took a bunch of well-exposed photos and just want to do some small automated tweaks.

None of these functions are that notable in and of themselves, but when run in a batch on hundreds of files they save hours of time.

To use it, first download the action, put it somewhere on your hard drive, bring it into PhotoShop using the "Load Actions" option on your Actions toolbar. Now it's ready to be used on an individual file.

To run it in a batch, just go to File > Automate > Batch - and then choose the proper photoshop action and the source and destination directories.

No warranty is expressed or implied, you do this at your own risk. I've only tested this on PhotoShop CS Two on Windows Vista. Use at your own risk.

I just felt like sharing. These two actions save me hours of time after every photo adventure.

Happy Birthday!

231 years old, and you don't look a day over 190. 143 years without a civil war too!

One the whole I think we're doing much better than can be expected.

I celebrated by driving around West Atlanta and attempting some HDR photography which didn't turn out too well.

New Photo Gallery is up!

At long last, after much color correcting and tweaking in Photoshop, my last round of photography is online. I've put some samples on this page, just click any of them and it will take you to the gallery. Or you can just click here.

The lovely Michelle Overstreet was my model for the occasion. Her brother Scott (the only other person in any of the photos) was there as well taking pictures.

As you might notice the choice to go for color over black and white depends greatly on the total light available as well as the amount of concrete in the shot.

On the whole I think they turned out quite well. I was able to do some tricks with lighting I haven't tried before, and the fiddler against the city skyline remains a solid idea. I particularly like the use of the Flash (on the later shots) and the cool golden glow the lighter provided. In post processing I created several utility Photoshop Actions (I'll post those later) which sped up the color corrections and image resizing a great deal.

All of these were taken last Saturday on either Bishop Street in Midtown (near Atlantic Station, or at the North Highland bridge downtown. For my non-local readers, these locations are about five miles apart from each other in Atlanta. We started about 7:00 PM and went to 9:45. With the exception of the black and white conversion, cropping and color corrections, almost nothing was done in Photoshop.

Thoughts?

Another round of the fiddler series

A full gallery to come, when I have time to go through them all.

The view from my window

I think the metering was a bit off, but it's hard to get it right when you shoot into the sun. Anyway, the coloring turned out well. The shot below is PhotoShopped very little. I have no idea why the blimp was there.

The headstone is in

I got back yesterday from the headstone commemoration ceremony. It was good to see everyone, and the headstone is very nice. The stone from the military (featured below) was a pleasant surprise.

Sad reminders of things gone.

Random photo

From the recent trip.

Monday link roundup

• An in-depth examination on how to build an energy efficient house
• Robot snipers in Israel
• Strobist begins Lighting 102
• No one thinks seriously about alternative energy. Check out this post from TreeHugger "New Battery Pushed Prius to 125 MPG". It's a great idea and invention, but it's a plug-in hybrid. The motion is coming from the power grid. Granted electricity is usually more efficient than gasoline, but that's like saying that a diesel engine gets infinite mileage because it doesn't burn any gasoline at all.
  

A nifty photoshop video tutorial

It has some great stuff on color correction and sharpening. Check it out at Digital Photography School.

Photography Note

For good portrait shots with an SLR camera, make sure the focal length (zoom) is around 72mm (or 50mm if you're using Nikon DX lenses, which most Nikons are). This minimizes lens distortion and ensures that the photographs actually look their subjects.

My magic portrait lens is set at this by default, and it's a wonderful thing.

Thursday link roundup

• Hitchens has a sharp pen - Jimmy Carter is his particular target today.
  
• The economics of The Wire - I suppose I need to write one about the economics of the Shield to fully flesh out the crime show econ world.
• Top 100 website run by one guy - hopefully someone will be writing that about me.
• How to photography silhouettes
  

First HDR attempt

The image is nothing spectacular, but the HDR process really brings out the grain and contrasts from the source files (HDR stands for high Dynamic Range).

Wednesday round up

• 5 Techniques for Enhancing Contrast in Digital Photos
• "Breeding dysentery in the ranks" - the best misuses of the English language in the Sopranos
• What journalists need to know about economics - quite good
  

Tuesday rapid fire

• A BBC documentary about Private Military Companies
• Geoengineering
  
• Amazon.com buys DPReview.com - I've bought my last two camera based on DP Review's recommendations
• High Dynamic Range photography - I'm surprised I haven't heard of this before. A flickr group is here, and the photoshop tutorial is here. I'll probably have some examples soon.
• Photoshop madness - unmentioned is American free time
  

New photo gallery

Sunday night in Alpharetta

Sunday photography

I wound up taking some shots for a friend of mine's site and wound up with a lot of good shots. My brother took the one of me (the first one) and I took the one of Steve Coffey (of the band the Rockin' Pontoons) (the second one). Galleries on the way soon.

Taken at my brother's house

Taken off of North Highland

How to be a better photographer

In video no less, on Digital Photography School.

Thursday rapid fire

• In camera photo tricks that get you around Photoshop
• Business 2.0 magazine fails to back things up with disastrous consequeces
• Getting fat can mean that men are committed to a relationship, among many other things
  

Loner into the waste did go...

On Friday I happened to be driving through Kirkwood and happened by the old, abandoned Pullman Company Yards. I happened to have my camera with me, so I did some exploring.

The Atlanta Preservation Center describes it as

The Pratt Engineering Company purchased this property adjacent to the rail line in 1900 in what was once the City of Kirkwood. In the 1920's, the Pullman Company bought and expanded the industrial complex for its southeast repair facility. Many of the industrial buildings, characterized by brick clad and riveted iron skeleton construction built by Pratt Engineering and the brick clad reinforced concrete buildings built by the Pullman Company remain on the site.

Anyway, check out the photo gallery.

I go exploring

I went here. More photos to come, here's a preliminary favorite though

The old round up

• Digital Camera crop factors
• 20 things not to do when starting a business - I stayed away from most of them
• More solar power
• via Marginal Revolution -

  The public's opinion of past wars improves as a new war approaches. Thus, after Vietnam most people thought the war was a mistake and this held true for decades until the beginning of the Iraq war when the opinion of war in Vietnam suddenly improved! Even more dramatically, a majority of people thought that World War I was a mistake until World War II approached when the percentage thinking it was a good war doubled.
  

• The worst school murders actually happened in 1927, though it did not involve shootings. It's a horrifying story.
  

Scenic views wanted

Does anyone know of any great views of the city? I'll soon be doing another installment of the fiddler photo series and I'm looking for some good places to shoot. All suggestions welcome.

Silver King

Tommy Womack at Decatur CD

Yesterday I went to see the immensely talented Tommy Womack at both Decatur CD and later Eddie's Attic. One of the best shows I've seen in years. The photos are from the in-store appearance at Decatur CD.

Quick tab clearing round up

• Meanest quote: they "breed like flies but die in the same way.”
• Joaquin Murietta
• The funniest thing I read on Sunday "A small group of the SOF participated in mass nudity and arson as means of protesting against materialism". Mass nudity and arson! Probably not at the same time though.
• Why the camera adds 10 pounds.
• Bikes must ride single file on Columns Drive
  

The elephant is almost eaten

And my crushing workload is almost abated. In the meantime, this guy was on my roof a few days ago.

Swamped

Work comes at me from all sides, but as the saying goes "I'll sleep when they drive a stake through my heart". Here are some recent photos. The Safe Place one is kind of creepy.

Christmas 2006

This is a bit late, but here are the photos I took on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day of 2006. Some of them turned out very well. The heat lamps allowed the shadows and the colors to do very nice things. Most of the photos were taken with the lovely new prime lens Mike and Erin got me for Christmas.

I overdid the flash, which made many of them fit for conversion to black and white.

Moon shadow

Taken quite late at night, under a nearly full moon.

Day after Christmas rapid fire

As my hard drive is changing itself over, I thought I would share some stuff

• Jetpacks!
• Sin City Photoshop
• Digital Monochrome, absolutely beautiful photos
• Digital Monochrome forums

Hearth, home, etc.

More photos

No gallery yet, but here are two more

More photos taken

A gallery is on the way.

Three good links

• A planned economy fails again
• Cooking with Sartre
• A good photography site
  

As seen on Buford Highway

I got the lights

And they're pretty impressive. The kit is over four feet tall in the case, and 55 pounds or so.

RAM wickedness

I want the 16 hours of my life back. I've been chasing my tail on what I believe are memory problems. The photo is apropos of nothing, but I thought it turned out nicely. It's from my little Canon.

Surreal

It's four in the morning, I've spent all day fighting with asp.net configuration problems and all night been fighting with a cpu that seems to be DOA. I still don't have my new lens.

Then I smell smoke. The neighborhood behind me is filled with smoke and there is a large fire burning behind them.



The photo is apropos of nothing. The fire is out now. There were two fire trucks and several police cars.

Rambling on an Autumn night

I just posted the pictures I took on Thursday night, I dubbed it Rambling on an Autumn Night. The first few are from the Lenox Borders parking lot, and the others are from a bridge overlooking the 75-85 connector. There is a slight shake to all of them due to the slow shutter speed needed and motion of the bridge as cars passed (albeit not many at midnight on a Thursday. For some reason slightly blurry photos look better in my harsh black and white scheme.

Click on the above link or any of the photos below to see more.

Does anyone want to buy my camera

It's a lovely Olympus C8080, I bought it about 16 months ago and took very good care of it. A detailed review of it is here http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/olympusc8080wz/

It's got a five time optical zoom, and comes with

• a tripod
• a charger
• wireless remote
• two and a half gigs of memory (two 1-gig cards and one half gig card)
  
• camera bag
• lens polarizer
• instructions/manual (I still have the original packaging)
• Conversion lens adapter (CLA-8)
• 1.4x Tele Conversion Lens (TCon-14D)
  

All that can be yours for the reasonable price of $450. I thought I would offer it here before I put it on Ebay. FYI - the reason it's for sale is because I got a digital SLR. The Olympus still works wonderfully.

Let me know.

The petrified forest

My latest photo excursion is The Petrified Forest