Photography
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.