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.

“Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

Commencement address by Steve Jobs,
CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios,
delivered on June 12, 2005 at Stanford University.

How will these dots be connected? I really don’t know.

Lewiston, Idaho & Clarkston, Washington
Confluence of the Snake and Clearwater Rivers

This is my first post to Planet #photogeeks. I’ve come across some pretty interesting little imagemagick commands that I’ve applied to the above photo. Dr Drang at “And now it’s all this” got me started with all this.

I’ve always wanted to be able to add a 1px black border to my images. On the web I’ve been able to do that with the “border=1″ html tag. Sometimes that was a little messy for whatever reason so adding the border to the image is neater. Here is the simple command to add a 1 px border to an image.

convert -bordercolor black -border 1x1 input.jpg output.jpg

I also added the little watermark and I’m going to work on something a little more elagent. Here is how I did it.

convert -size 100x25 xc:none -gravity center -stroke black -strokewidth 2 -annotate 0 'willsimpson.org' -channel RGBA -blur 0x3 -stroke none -fill white -annotate 0 'willsimpson.org' +size input.jpg +swap -gravity south -geometry +0-2 -composite output.jpg

Before and after xrays.

Boykan’s poodle cut!

Green eyed Boykan in recovery mode.

Tibial Plateau Leveling Osteotomy (TPLO) is a surgery developed to repair stifle (knee) injury in dogs. It is particularly good for cruciate ligament tears. Boykan is home recovering now. He really doesn’t like the physical therapy but he tolerates it OK. He has a funny shave job on his left hind quarters that I’ll have to get a picture of soon.

For further information on TPLO, here is a link to Vet Surgery Central.

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!

Kathleen Connally

Kathleen Connally… what can I say? Fantastic! The colors are a little contrasty and the colors are a little over saturated but the combination really works. Katheen really has an eye for capturing her environs. She says in her bio… “Just about all of my photos (except vacation shots) are taken within a ten-mile radius of my home, and feature local residents, visitors, plants, animals, architecture, landscapes and farm life.” Seems a little corny until you see the images. Every image strives for a unique perspective on the subject. If you only check out one thing on the web today, see Kathleen’s “Best Pictures”. This is a cool presentation of her work.

Ken Rockwell has a huge “how-to” section that is a great reference for beginners and veterens alike. Ken has a real passion for photography and sharing his knowledge. His photography and the reference materal he has produced is a labor of love. Kudos Ken!

These shoots are of a short snowshoe trip we took with Bill and Dianne last weekend. We went over to the old Tamarack ski hill and toured around the back side of Moscow Mountain and summitted the old ski hill. The snow was great and a good time was had by all.

It hard to get good exposures in a snowy environment, even harder when you are also in clouds. These shoots were saved by post-processing. Better would have been to have the correct exposure compensation dialed in. +1.5 or +2 exposure compensation would have been appropriate. The first image was lomolized to no great effect. I also sort of mucked around with the borders am I’m more happy with the latter shots as apposed to the former ones. The last picture has horizon issues because all the trees in the scene where leaning and inorder to straighten them I had to skew the horizon just a little.

Hope you enjoy these.