June 2007 Archives

Cool, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.1 is up and available. More information here and Inside Lightroom has info too. Mostly expected, and desired, updates. New cameras supported (don't care) Adobe Camera Raw 4 (whoohooo!), better noise reduction and sharpening controls (double whohooo), and other misc tweaks (yay).

More news:

• Martin Evening (whose excellent book I just finished reading) will release a 1.1 update series online.
  
• Downloadable presets updated.
  
• More info on the update from Sean as well as some details on some of the smaller changes.
  

How do do Grid Lighting on the cheap (with black straws) Part 1 and Part 2. Via Strobist.

Dang nabbit! Just when I thought I could get away with not spending money on lenses, especially "silly" lenses like the 10-17mm fisheye, I found this post showing the fisheye is great for closeup shots. *sigh* See.... now I have no choice but to get one!

Who knew there was a whole genre of photography called trash the dress, which involves (as far as I can tell) pictures that when done are a pretty much assurance that your wedding dress isn't going to be used a second time. Scenes involving water appear to be a favorite. Is this common? Being someone that's getting married in a few short weeks, is this something I need to deal with?

With the cost of a wedding dress being somewhere between a couple of hundred and a few thousand dollars, is dunking it in the water, cutting it, burning it or grinding sand and grime into it really something that's done by people? Most of the images on the trash the dress page are pretty good, but are they really something you'd want to treasure? I do have to admit that this image (at the bottom of the post) by Susan Stripling is particularly striking to me.

Am I the crazy one? :)

I saw a question about stock photography in the forums and, thinking this was another pro-photographer hanger-on looking to get rich selling pictures of his cats (like me) I clicked on the link and went back to work. When I got back to my browser and looked at Damien Lee's site I was absolutely stunned by how amazing the shots were, especially the New Zealand gallery. They reminded me how good landscape photography can be. I guess I've been looking at my own stuff too much lately and thinking that because my landscapes are... "sub-par", all are. Thanks Damien for a bit of inspiration!

Firefly's been gone since last Friday on a course or seminar or something, so I've had to amuse myself the last few days. Somehow in the last 4 days I've ended up for three of them in the municipal pool down the street. Today I managed 11 laps of the 25 meter pool (that'd be 275m for those keeping track) and was quite proud of myself... that's over a quarter kilometer! Well, if there were edges along that km where you could rest every 25-50m anyway :)

Either swimming is way more work than I remember it being or I'm way out of shape. I'm thinking probably a little from column A, a little more from column B...

After the laps I hit the steam room, then the sauna, then the hot tub, then back to the steam room again, just for fun. A very embarrassing thing happened when I went leave though. I had a locker in the change room, but couldn't find it! There aren't that many lockers in there, and for the life of me I could not remember where it was. When I got to the row that was a couple off of my locker number I just had to find the row of lockers that had the next set of numbers. Should be simple right? Of course, these aren't "rows" of lockers, but more of a hextagonal shape.

There were also a bunch of other people there and my eyesight is so bad I have to get my face a few inches from the locker numbers, and I was feeling really conspicuous, some random old guy wandering around staring at locker numbers. So what's a shy, self conscious geek to do? Well, pretend that I just had to go to the bathroom then went out to the pool again, walked around, had a drink from the fountain and waited until the people who were in there left (or at least, the vague body-like shapes who I presume might have been the vague body-like shapes from the locker room left) and then went back in. Much easier this time, no one was there and I found my locker fast... turns out that locker that was just two numbers off mine? Well, it was two numbers in the other direction, I had passed by my locker two or three times. D'oh!

Came home, made dinner and watched The Departed.... great movie, unexpected ending and the whole thing kept me on the edge of my seat. Over the weekend I watched The Illusionist, another great movie with another unexpected ending, the kind I really like. Both highly recommended if you're like m and live in a cave and haven't seen these yet :)

A while back we had been thinking that a trip down the Oregon coast would be nice.... I remember going to the beach on a holiday trip with my parents ages ago and it being great fun. A couple of nice places to visit if I ever do end up going are Silver Falls State Park and also of course Cannon Beach, which also has some amazing pictures. Both of them are about six and a half hours from home (which sucks), but I'm pretty sure that I could easily spend at least a day at each place (assuming I had enough memory cards for the camera of course).

Now to convince my bride-to-be that this would be a good place to go on a honeymoon :)

Found an interesting looking Black and White Conversions courtesy of Matt Greer.

UFies.org is currently down due to co-lo provider issues. Nothing I can do :( When it's up, it's up.

Probably another rogue backhoe.

Update 12:00 - Back up now...

Thanks to a post by Sema regarding the List of updated groups not appearing in Firefox 2.0.0.4 when using Google Reader. The fix is to add an exception rule "@@|http://www.google.com/reader/api/*" into AdBlock Plus (if you have it installed) as one of it's default rules stops the google reader from running it's javascript. I was pulling my hair out wondering what was going on here!