Archives for category: Photography

Saturday Night Pizza

December 3, 2006 //

Broccoli/Bell Pepper/Onion/Garlic Pizza

More pictures in the kitchen. This is the best of a series I took while cooking pizza for dinner last night. Actually, Mary is the cook, I just roll out the dough and manage the pizza’s transition from counter to oven and back again. Mary is such a wonderful cook. A true foodie.

Technically there are problems with this image. Mostly, it has too narrow of a depth of field (area of sharp focus) and the position of this depth of field is on the wrong part of the pizza (it should include the front of the pizza to about half way through it). To improve the next time I’ll close down the f-stop on the camera to get a greater depth of field which will probably require the use of the flash.

Mary and I just finished discussing Christmas dinner and she suggested pizza (Spinach and Sun-dried tomato). So I’ll get another chance to make a great pizza picture. Maybe I should practice some before then? Won’t that be fun!! By the way the pizza was delicious.

Categories Photography

Kitchen Photography

November 23, 2006 //

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.

Categories Gimp, Linux, Photography

Walking Rain Sesshin

November 12, 2006 //

Indianola, Washington

First picture from my new camera. A Canon SD800. It is a great camera. I followed the advice of Ken Rockwell and picked the SD800 over the SD700. Thanks Ken.

Also my first sesshin. It was a time. The people were great, the food was great, the weather was great (really stormy) and the facilities was so-so. Best of all the quiet time put me in a centered place. When we were done, I was ask by several people if I had any problems sitting for so long. “No. No more than usual.” Is a sesshin hard? “No. If you can sit for 25 minutes, you can sit for a whole sesshin.” (A sesshin is made of a lot of 25 minute sits all strung together with a 5 minute walking meditation interspersed (108 – 25 minute sits in 7 days). Now I’m preparing for a little shorter retreat in Spokane. This one will only be five day and will have longer rest periods and longer work periods. Yahoo!!

Categories Photography, Zen

Connect the dots

October 29, 2006 //

“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.

Categories GTD, Personal, Photography, Writing, Zen

Imagemagick

October 21, 2006 //

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

Categories Linux, Photography, Tutorials

Boykan has TPLO Surgery

September 24, 2006 //

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.

Categories Evertything Else, Personal, Photography

Merry Cellars

July 23, 2006 //

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.

Categories Gimp, Linux, Photography

Advanced Panorama Using Ubuntu/Autopano-sift/Hugin/Enblend/GIMP

July 4, 2006 //

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!

Categories Gimp, Linux, Photography, Tutorials

A Couple Photography References

June 17, 2006 //

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!

Categories Photography

“Beginning Gimp” by Akkana Peck

May 31, 2006 //

I just got this book to review. I’ve been a Gimp user for over 5 years and all the images on my other site “Palouse Photography” were all post-processed using Gimp. Gimp is a very versiatle tool so I jumped at the opportunity to look at and review this book. (The above scan was done using Ubuntu Dapper, Gimp 2.2.11 and my old Epson 1660 scanner.)

I've only started the book but I really excited to learn more about one of my most favorite programs. Gimp is one of the first program I install on a new system, Windows or Linux. More to follow.

Categories Gimp, Linux, Photography