Magic Mint Tea

There were a couple of ideas that came my way this week that lead to this image. I’ve been following The Strobist (David) who is sharing his knowledge and skills with small flash devices. The above was cross lit - flash on the left and window on the right. Should have tried this with hard light rather then diffuser on the flash.

-Canon Speedlite 430ex set to -1 stop (with white Omni-Bounce attached)
-Attached with Canon off-shoe cord
-Flash handheld left of subject…maybe 1 ft away.

The other part of the inspiration for this image came from a photographer I found on Flickr. Nigel (at least I think that is his name, fun how the internet is) is from England and is a great photographer. I plan on doing more of this kitchen photography, it is real fun.

A couple of my open source images are being used by Merry Cellars on the labels of their 2004 Merlot and 2004 Cabernet.

Here is a link to a nice articale by Abby Anderson of the University of Idaho’s Argonaut titled Cellar handles wine with care. Here is a link to the original images used by the winery.

Lewiston Levy - Clearwater River
Select the image to load a larger view. (436K)

This is my first attempt at a panorama on Linux. It is made of 6 original images and the final size was 10233×1344 and a whooping 81meg. I couldn’t have done this without the great tutorial found at http://exolucere.ca These are the highly developed tools I used:

• Ubuntu - current distro 6.06
• Autopano-sift - for orienting images
• Hugin - to do the actual panorama converging
• Enblend - blend the whole thing up in the end
• GIMP - usual post processing (crop, curves and unsharpen)

Enjoy!

“The Tango Desktop Project exists to create a consistent user experience for free and Open Source software with graphical user interfaces.”

This creative group of artists and designers have great a project that has a great “Style Guideline“, a growing catolog of “Base Icons” and something called a “Icon Nameing Sec“.

It is becoming clearer what I’m using this blog for. Today it is an ‘outboard brain’. By that I mean a place to store information and links that I need to refer to in the future. I hope this blog evolves into other uses but I’m satisfied so far.

Today ‘outboard brain’ entry is from Eric Jeschke over at gimpguru.org. If you are a gimp user, gimpguru.org is full of tutorials on digital photography processing. The tutorial that caught my attention this morning is on creating a neutral density filter mask in order to hold back highlights.

Poor Color Correction. . . . . . . . . . . .Better Color Correction

Setting your monitor to display images with the correct color, brightness, contrast and gamma is important. You want others to see the images as you see them. I have been having problems setting my monitor to the correct color bit depth and today finally updated my video driver. What a difference! Several of the images I’ve digitally ‘processed’ have color balance problems. Updating the video drivers won’t magically fix everything. I have discovered some valuable resources on the network that I’d like to share.

Somehow, yesterday I got pointed to an article on Linux.com’s website that explains just how easy it is to calibrate your monitor in a Linux environment. Exploring that process lead me to Norman Koren’s highly technical but very useful site. Norman is a fantastic photographer and freely shares his knowledge and experience with digital photography. He comes from a film/scanning background and obviously has a deep understanding of digital color correction. Norman is one of the few photographers that seems to be operating system agnostic. He provides information on PC, PPC and Linux. This is useful no matter which computing paltform you use. He pointed me to a great little Linux utility for calibrating monitor gamma called Monica. There is a lot to explore on Noman’s site.

The LinuxChix GIMP course is conducted on the courses mailing list, and the lessons are archived via the list archive. The course consisted of 11 weekly lessons, starting with Lesson 0 on Jan 25, 2005...