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After the clarity gained earlier this week, the rest of my time working with the device specialist proved enjoyable.  I learned a lot about device operations and found out he liked photography.  So after lunch on the last day of his visit, I showed him my office where I have some 15 large prints up on the wall.

Him: Did you take these yourself?
Me: Yeah.
Him: And it looks like you don’t much like 8 x 10s.
Me: Nope.  8x10s are nice for something to put on a desk, but 11×14 is where you start showing you give a damn.
Him: Larger than 8×10, I guess I had never thought of getting anything bigger than could be done at Walgreens.
Me: I mostly do super B 13 x 19s.
Him: I have pictures that I could print.  Then I could put them on the wall of my office. *pause* Terry, you have inspired me.
Me:  Thank you.
*handshake*

The Texas accent is what sold his last line.

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Deer!

The above is an unremarkable shot of a deer.  I took it while at camp with my 70-200mm lens and was glad the deer came out clearly.  So, just a picture?

Prior to it being taken, the deer had stood in the puddle for about 20 minutes alternatively jumping up and down then squatting and peeing.  Periodically it’d glance at me and the others on our walk but it mostly just jumped and tinkled.

Deer Butt!

So, this is probably a better representation of our interactions with the deer.

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I’ve run out of reasonably usable space in my office to post pictures so I’ve started putting them on the wall outside my work area.  One of them is probably my new favorite building shot:
Reflections Explained

No one said anything but I received a heck of compliment when someone opened the door to my area and ran into someone who’d be staring at it for a minute.  A picture so good it hurts.

</ego boost>

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Next week, 15 folks from my Team Fortress 2 team will be at the Radisson-Warwick in Philadelphia and I really have no intimate knowledge of where the heck we’re going, so my camera and I made our way into Market East Station to figure out how long it’d take to get everywhere and I took pictures along the way.

After exiting Market East station, I had a person ask me for 35 cents to get a breakfast sandwich.  Normally I’m willing to engage panhandlers up to about $5.00 if there’s a bit of showmanship but 35 cents proved to be an amount so small and also the exact amount of change I had on me that the asker was more rendering a service than an inconvenience.  I hate having change in my pockets.

Near Broad and Samsom

Near Broad and Samsom

Philadelphia is a polite city in that I think it is kind to the new arrival as it has a reasonable scope.  The buildings on Market at Liberty Place are the only buildings near 60 stories and they rise gently from the surrounding terrain.  One can see both the base and top of the building at the same time at a reasonable distance and the towers have breathing space.  There are unoccupied spaces and broad sidewalks in most places.  Compare this to midtown Manhattan where one is perpetually in an urban canyon where one feels not like the buildings rise around them but that the pedestrian is somehow buried beneath the actual cityscape.

Grass in Philadelphia

Holy crap, unoccupied space.

20110716-1402-HDRPhilly

Gentle Scale

The combination of reasonable sized buildings and open spaces along with most of the building boom occurring during the heyday of glass facades results in some neat light effects.  Buildings reflect off of buildings off of buildings making the streets around City Hall the only ones where I’ve ever felt the term “sun-dappled” applied  like some thousand foot tall semi-invisible banyan tree towered over the skyline.

Reflection Explosion #2

Sun-Dappled #1

Reflections Explained

Sun-Dappled #2

Normally, a hall of mirrors shows you nothing as meaningless reflection bounces off of meaningless reflection, I don’t believe that applies to the second photo above.  The light moves back and forth enough that the repeated iterations of scattering and diffusion create a painterly effect (rendering it to a tone-mapped HDR didn’t hurt either).

I feel I’ve been remiss in not spending more time at ground-level in Philadelphia, a place where I can get a day of photography, lunch, and train fare for under $30.00.  I hope to fix this.

William Penn Tower

Obligatory Shot of William Penn Statue

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On export, Lightroom has been performing a consistent color shift which makes all people photographed appear to have rosacea.  Tonight I set about figuring out why and emerged triumphant:

Lightroom takes in RAW images and runs its rendering to present to you a picture in Develop Mode.  AWESOME!  BUT, in Library mode it uses AdobeRGB for previews as well as Develop thumbnails.  In Web and Slideshow it uses sRGB as that’s the most common on the web and on print it uses whatever you specify.  I understand the logic of this and now know that I need to set my export options to compensate but at least give me the option to change this.  IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and probably Opera and Konqueror all accept color profiles so I don’t see why the sRGB default.  Or at least I didn’t until I uploaded something to Facebook which strips away profiles on upload.  It appears the pull of the Zuckerbeast is more powerful than all modern browsers simultaneously entering the 21st century.

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I was photographically out of shape for my brother’s wedding and today was an attempt to rise at dawn to train.  Sam Lodise, Joe Naylor, and I went to Washington’s Crossing Historical Park and had in our head the idea that we were going to collect volleys of photons projected through high quality glass and polycarbonate plastic in such a way that our memory cards would explode with awesomeness.  We made a critical mis-calculation in that there isn’t really anything to see at Washington’s Crossing.  Below is the best picture I took on site:

20110220-6094-WashingtonsCrossingAnd2more

Yep, it's a door. But a tonemapped HDR door.

I say with confidence, that this picture is one of the top five door pictures I’ve ever taken. Next we went to Bowman’s Hill Tower, which was closed, and then I got a picture of a 1/4 mile length of the Delaware Canal that was frozen over.  The frozen picture is un-remarkable, but I’m happy with a shot of Joe I got.

20110220-6154-WashingtonsCrossing

I used the sun as a hot light and the atmosphere as a bit of a soft box. Â That's planning.

We stopped chasing the dream of finding something interesting along the canal and first went to an incredibly crowded IHOP and then a not at all crowded Red Robin.  We agreed to go to Longwood Gardens sometime in the spring and Sam and I stopped to take pictures of ducks after dropping off Joe.

20110220-6195-WashingtonsCrossing

Ducks

There are mornings where joggers don’t want to get out and jog because the weather sucks, one didn’t sleep well, or one just doesn’t want to jog, but one goes out anyway.  Today was the photographic equivalent of that.

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My mother came by to do some task to fill time in the day and we began with a back-and-forth regarding a set of full size bedding she’d given me which I asked her to take back.  This ended with “but one day, you’ll need them” and I replied “and on that day, I’ll buy them”.  The difference between a hoard and stockpile seems only to be creativity and I’m a bit too inventive for my own good sometimes.  Later, she asked to see the pictures I had taken during Christmas at her house and we had a bit of a back and forth.  She seemed to be under the impression that the camera out of the box was the biggest determiner of photo quality.

Me: *changing white balance*
Mom: Why are the colors different now?
Me: I adjusted the white balance, lights have different colors and what we see as white rarely is.
Mom: Is that why indoor pictures all look yellow?
Me: Yes.  Now I’m adjusting the clarity on the picture of your sister.
Mom: Why would you do that?
Me: Negative clarity tends to clear up the skin a bit.  Otherwise everyone looks like they’re 80.
Mom: That seems like you’re changing the picture, that’s not what it really looked like.
Me: I can use a similar process to reduce the wrinkles around your eyes.
Mom: Ooh, that is nice.

For Valentine’s Day give your lady the greatest gift of all: A photo with selective softening in areas where a line-detection algorithm notes high contrast surrounded by an area of low contrast.

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I participated in a secret santa this year for my Team Fortress 2 team and my sender asked me what I wanted.  I replied “something that promotes human connection or something unique to the sender”,  the response was “ooh”.  Today I received in the mail I received this:

Portable Stove

It’s a portable stove that plugs into the 12V outlet of a car and can heat up a can of soup in about 20 minutes.  I thought it was neat.

For my aunt and uncle I wanted to provide a family photo of my father, mother, brother and I.  Since we have no family photos taken within the last… 14 years, I faked it by doing a 4-up print with one pane per person.  This was the only photo of my mother I had so I needed something else and I contacted her travel partner for a trip she took last year and grabbed copies of the photos they took.  The best I could find was:

I had no interest in the woman on the right appearing in the family collage so I used a bit of context-aware fill to create the following:

I think I did an almost Stalin-esque job of zarching her from the picture.  There’s a bit of deformation in the wall and around the ice, but no one’s noticed so far.

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For the past three years I’ve done a promotional video for Ockanickon, initially to fill a gap when an offer to film one by some third party fell through and I volunteered to do one on condition that someone else provide the raw material.  This year I received 3800 pictures from the photography crew at camp, more than I received in any other year  and coupled with my new SSD I was looking to make short work of the promo.  I quickly encountered difficulties:

  • 1200 shots were simply out of focus.
  • 800 were improperly illuminated.  My favorite being those of night activities where the flash caught only a single white object like a shoe or volleyball in the dead stillness of night.
  • 700 depict a single child staring at something, completely bored, or with an indeterminate activity involving a book or pencil.
  • 600 involved volleyball, the volleyball tournament, or sitting around Totem lodge.
  • Golf, horseback riding, rafting, law, dining hall program, the health lodge, mountain biking, CPR and all other leader training had no pictures taken of them at all.
  • Ecology only had pictures of people washing their hands.
  • Eagle only had pictures of kids staring into the distance or doing a dog pile.
  • Handicraft had 4 pictures, but they were quite nice.

I faked a picture of mountain biking by doing a ridiculous crop + rotation on a guy passing by Neshaminy camp site.  Also, I found a wonderful picture of adults engaged in a whipped cream eating contest where if you rotate it and crop out the kids it looks like a group of village elders climbing a glacier with their beards.

I reduced the pool to about 140 usable images that met my requirements and made a video.

Next year I’m either going to provide a shot list or stage everything after the fact at my house.

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Method development is usually a dull exercise is formulating rigorous text excised of cliche, figure of speech, or even simple terms as “paper towel” is replaced with “highly bibulous sopping paper”.  Recently, methods have been adding pictures to instruct the operator who may or may not speak English and I’ve jumped on the opportunity to do shoots, having been victim to ambiguous photos myself, and as a way to practice.

Two days ago, someone notified me that he would like pictures taken the next day so I packed my camera and shooting equipment into work and set up a tiny studio consisting of a backdrop, camera, tripod,  c-stand, flash, umbrella, flash adapter, and a jig to avoid keystoning.  Yesterday I took pictures and today a coworker approached me:

Coworker: Where did you stow the camera equipment, I need to use it?
Me: At home.
Coworker: What did you take it home for?
Me: So I could use it.
Coworker: Why did you do that?
Me: Because it’s mine.
Coworker: Oh.  Well, do you think we could get a setup like that for under a few hundred dollars?

He didn’t like my laughter, but I think it answered his question.