Tim’s Ramblings

I can’t watch the Bills vs. Browns game. It hurts me… For godsakes… 4 turn overs by the Bills. Browns THANKFULLY can’t do anything wtih it. Oh look…Buffalo just got an interception! Let’s see if our offence can do anything with it. Doubt it. Our (btw, I live in Cleveland but the Bills will always be my team) defence is good but…man…our offence HURTS. Oh wait…no. It’s not an interception. Goddammit…

So in between time outs and half time and such I’ve been reading up and learning about Adobe Lightroom 2.

It’s a program specifically designed for photographers and it is impressive. It basically gives me the toosl that Photoshop gives me but without all the extra. Basically I can do in Lightroom, as long as I know what I’m doing, what would take me an hour in Photoshop in about 15 minutes. Knowing what I’m doing is the key though.

Also, it is a very poweful photo cataloging tool. Creates a great library of all the photos that I really want to work with and has great keyword support as well as all the metadata info and so on. Quite impressive. Need to make sure I don’t catalog all of the tiny little photos I take though since the catalog can get to be a few gigs in size. However, once in the catalog, I can, in theory, create flash presentations, web photo albums, and so on.

But the most powerful part of Lightroom is the Develop Module for photo editing. And the most powerful part of the Develop Module is the Adjustment Brush. It’s basically a virtual paint brush but rather than color you can “paint in” everything from exposure to contrast, saturation, clarity, brightness, etc… This combined with a full range of adjustments from gradient filters to fine tuning each individual color channels and you get an amazing set of tools…and a ridiculous amount of new tools to learn how to use…

Anyway, here’s like my 5th or 6th attempt at playing with photos in Lightroom. The great part is, everything I do is non-destructive. In another words, it remembers everything I do and I can go back and forth in history to not just go back and undo stuff but then adjust my settings. In another words, I can set the brightness for one location, keep working, then go back to that brightness setting and reset it and then go back to the top and keep working from where I was before. Great stuff.

(HOLY CRAP we’re in the LEAD by a point with 2:25 to go!!!)

Right. So here is my before and after of a photo of the Lone Cypress in Pebble Beach, California. I still really didn’t know how to use my DSLR then so it came out pretty crappy with a smaller filie size and not that good of a resolution. But I did what I could do. Worked on the colors a bit and then used the Adjustment Brush to bring out some highlights and color in select places and TRIED to make it look far less utterly gloomy than it really was. As usual you can click to get a bigger version (1024×768).

It really is a cool program. That’s probably why it costs so damn much… Oh well…

Don’t know why it took me this long to actually get around to playing with Photoshop for real as opposed to just sorta using it now and again for nothing more than the occasional tweak. Probably because only this summer did I finally get a good enough PC that can handle usnig Photoshop on my 10 megapixel photos while if I tried it with my old one it would probably scream in agony and die…

So until now I was always using Paint Shop Pro 8. And don’t get me wrong. It is a GREAT program and has some very nice easy to use features. But in the end, to manipulate RAW images and such, Photoshop and (once I get aroudn to learning it) LightRoom 2 seems to be the best for standard use.

I only have Photoshop CS2 but it does the job and while I’ve been messing around with it along with GIMP, I finally got out and picked up a few books and have been playing around with it more and more. Especially since I have a ridiculous amount of photos (something like 45 Gigs on my portable HD…I really need to get another one to back up the back up…) that I can use to experiment. And yes…this is yet another reason why I’m not playing World of Warcraft…

So, I decided to post a recent before and after. Why? Because I have that big of an ego… Ha! No. Just because. And also to show that while many of my shots do come out pretty good…I also DO do a bit of touch up…some more than others.

This time I was experimenting and trying out Adjustment Layers! Ooooh. And for all of you who are photoshop gods…shut up dammit…this is new to me. For this test I picked a nice shot I took in the Rockies by Bear Lake. Here is the original unaltered pic straight from my camera (and as usual, these are linked to bigger pics).

Not too bad. Got some nice greens there along with a nice reflection and the sky has good detail without it being totally washed out. Buuuut it just didn’t look as good as I remembered it.

With most of my time spent working on masking, here is the new shot.

Brightened it up a bit. Brought out the sky and also the trees and other greenery a bit. And unlike my HDR shots, this is a bit closer to “reality” I think.

Fun times. Anyway, that’s it.

Got 12 days of vacation left and the year is flying by fast… Need to do something… Starting to think maybe a trip to Okinawa, Japan… It’s warm there. Tropical. And since it looks like I won’t be going to Japan in November (the new office in Tokyo is really making my traveling easier…though I guess this means I’ll have to buy even more stuff when I go out there now…) maybe I can instead go in December and stay an extra week. Heard there’s some good photo ops and such out there too :) Since I bought a new expensive lens and a new camera, I gotta get SOME use out of them!!

So, this is not really a post about Japan or anything really informative or important. Just…something stupid…

I posted about the fact that I got this cool new Sony Walkman a while back. You can get it in the US too but in Japan, this thing can record TV via their “1-Seg” network, an HDTV signal taking up one out of the 13 segments that they specifically set aside for use by mobile devices. Really cool. So while I’m in Japan I can set this thing up like a VCR, plug it in, pop up the antenna, and record away.

I usually then watch these shows on the plane on the way back and what I can’t watch, I’ll watch on the way back to Japan. It can record up to 100 hours of TV! Though it depends on how much music you have in it too. With video, it lasts juuust about 6 hours as long as you keep the display brightness down but I also picked up an Eneloop power pack that I can then use to recharge this thing for about 3 more hours of viewing. I also couldn’t watch it at home (or didn’t want to) because there was no speaker just like most MP3 players so you needed headsets or portable speakers.

Recently though, as seen below, I picked up a cute little Sony speaker that attaches to the data/power port so now I can watch it anywhere :)

It’s only about 3.5″ across so it’s pretty small but the screen is nice (despite how the screen looks in this photo…for some reason digital cameras do a crappy job with these types of LCD screens…) and crisp and you really have no problems at all watching recorded or live TV.

Of course this means that now I can watch this in bed! Wooo. So that’s what I’ve been doing off and on when I wasn’t reading all the comic books I picked up the last time I was in Japan. BUT, this is a cautionary tale…

I was lying in bed watching this little thing and at one point, I rolled over onto my back and was holding up this thing over my head watching the show. But it was pretty late at night and I was getting a bit sleepy… You can probably guess what happened…

Yeah. Whlie watching the walkman held over my face, I fell asleep for just an instant. But that was just the instant my body needed to relax my grip… And the damn walkman fell a good 15. to 2′ onto my face. More accuratly my forhead, bridge of my nose, and a tip of my eye.

OW

Hard plastic falling on you is NOT nice. Especially when it’s immediately followed by the sound of the audience laughing in whatever show I was watching at the time.

So…yeah… If you are ever watching your iPod or any other media player in bed…don’t hold it over your head whlie lying on your back. It is only asking for pain and humiliation. Yes. I felt embarrassed even though I was the only person in the house at the time…

But now I’m telling the whole world so…I guess it makes it ok? Or something?

:)

Not the best shot in the world but it was a test shot with my new camera to give its bracketing capabilities a try.

Worked pretty good. Only +/-1 but still managed to get some good detail.

As always the image is a link to a bigger one. And yes, I will post more stuff from Japan and such…maybe on the weekend…

Yes yes. There is a very very very pronounced halo on the sky/land border and the trees look weird because I didn’t spend hours filling in all the holes between the branches…but I kinda like the effect. Besides, I’ve seen worse ones being sold for hundreds of dollars to tourists…*hrmph*!

Heh heh heh.

J gave me an awesome birthday gift!

Scarlet Johansen’s autograph!!! She got it when she got to meet her while canvassing for Obama on Saturday! It’s on the back of a Obama/Biden bumper sticker!

…she’s so hot…and she touched this paper!! TOUCHED IT!!!

…my…my…my precious…

Heh heh heh.

Ok ok. She’s hot but I’m not that crazy (yet). But it’s a cool little gift!

Thanks J!! Oh, and thanks for going to see Eddie Izzard interview Dennis Kucinich!! Eddie Izzard is awesome…I love that man…

Another post! It’s like I’m making up for all the days and weeks that I was too lazy to post anything…

Anyhoo, here is another little something that I picked up on my last trip to Japan.

Behold! The Gorone Makura!

What is this you ask? Let me explain. Makura is Japanese for “pillow” and Gorone means something along the lines of “lazily lying down” from the onomatopoeia in Japanese for being lazy and laying around, “goro goro” (it’s also the way we describe the sound of something rolling around…sooo basically you’re lazy lying on your side rolling around…). Combined, you get the “Lazy Pillow”.

I can imagine you are still confused. See…the holes in the pillow is just perfect for your ear. The pillow is juuust about 6.5″ cubed so if you’re lying down on your side and using this as a pillow, it’s firm enough to support your head, just the right height so make it comfy for your neck, and your ear fits in the hole so you can hear the TV or the radio perfectly. Yes. It’s designed so you can hear the TV through both ears even while lying on your side Awesome. I suppose you can also sleep on it face down and your nose can fit in the hole so you can breathe….but it might crush your eyes…

Is it really comfy? Eh… But it’s a funny novelty and I do find myself on occasion using it to prop my head up with the pillow on the couch’s arm rest.

I think it’s cool dammit! Here’s a few other shots from different angles :)