One ring to rule them all

Mostly just playing with my macro lens.

The life

Someone's home or cottage at Mahone Bay. The original was pretty hazy (it was taken with a 300mm lens across a hazy bay) and the colours weren't great, so it took some pretty significant messing around with levels and contrast and masks and all that stuff to get it this clear. I think I'm happy with the final result.

Portrait of a cutie

I think this is the best portrait I've been able to get so far of Andrea... Still not thrilled with it.

Pretty in pink!

There are some absolutely beautiful trees outside my office building full of these lovely pink flowers. I should have gone out yesterday to get pictures, but since I didn't have my camera, I had to wait til today. The flowers are still nice, but you can see that they're already starting to die. Still beautiful.

Fun with Photoshop

The photography course I just finished included a few weeks of playing in Photoshop, learning how to make our images really come alive. There are a few tricks I've enjoyed playing with, and I decided to turn my attention to an old picture of my parents' cat. He's a lovely creature, but the source image never really did him justice:


After a little playing, I've ended up with a picture that I think is much closer to what the cat actually looks like in real life.

Yes, it really is a photo

I was back out at Hog's Back last weekend and got a bunch of pictures. Unfortunately, between dirt on the lens and foolish shutter speed selection, very few turned out. This one suffered from dirt on the lens, but a few minutes in Photoshop sorted that out. In this particular shot, the slow shutter speed was deliberate, because I wanted to catch the motion of the water. Between that and a slight shake of my hand, it almost makes the whole thing look like a painting rather than a photo.

New software, same sock

So decided to have a little fun... I took the same picture I used last time and used my new version of Photoshop to adjust the white balance properly. That's the left-hand side of the picture. On the right, you'll see the same picture I posted last time -- which was colour balanced already, just with a less-capable program.

I gotta say, Photoshop CS2 is teh awesome.

Knitting! -- and also, comments requested

First, a fun pair of felted mittens that Andrea just finished. I don't think I managed to really do them justice -- they're really quite funky, but because of that cuff they're a little chunky at the bottom and that made them lie strangely. I'm not entirely thrilled with the results, but oh well.


Next, a funky sock that Andrea knit! She's making the matching one right now, I believe. I posted up two versions, one with a black background and one with a white background, so everyone could compare the two.

What I'd like from you folks is a comment telling me which of the two versions you like better, and why (if you know why). I have my own thoughts, but I'd prefer to hear other people's ideas.

More beer!

I took a red and a black version of the beer photo from earlier. The red turned out really weird and almost painful -- which I find cool in a really ugly way -- but the black one was boring and crappy. So I didn't bother posting it.

Beer = happy

So I finally got my light tent built and set up on the weekend and took a few test shots. For lack of other suitable subjects, I decided to use a bottle of one of my favourite types of beer, Sleeman Fine Porter. (Very tasty. If you like dark beers, I highly recommend sampling it.)

Overall, the tent worked, but not to my satisfaction. The lighting was too dark and a little too spotty, but by shooting in raw mode I was able to adjust the white balance fairly easily. I also had a little fun with the background colour... I'm not sure, but I think I like the blue better.



So, now I have to experiment with alternative lighting. I have a few ideas, I'll try them out and see what comes out of it.

DIY photo studio

Interesting... A case of beer, a few sheets of paper towel, and a few sheets of printer paper combine to form a photo studio. A pretty decent one, actually, at least for the purpose this guy's putting it to -- taking decent photos for eBay.

DIY eBay Photo Studio, from a person named Jesse, apparently.

I think I'll create my own version of this... I have some larger items that I need to take pictures of, so a case of beer probably won't be big enough. Still, I should be able to produce something relatively cheap. :-)

Cookies!

Andrea and her mother made delicious, life-giving cookies. Being a nerd, I took pictures of them rather than eating them.

This particular shot was taken with about a half-second exposure time, on a tripod. Lighting was provided by a single incandescent bulb over the stove. The full shot has another row of cookies at the front, but they were so out of focus it really screwed up the image, so I cropped them out. I'd have retried the image with the camera looking further up (bringing the in-focus cookie to the bottom third instead of the top third, where it originally was) but the way the table and everything was set up, I would have been looking past the cookies and into other stuff, and it would have looked kinda dumb. So there you go.

Distracted by shiny objects

Shiny gold fake plant thingie that was on top of a box of chocolates my boss gave me. I used a flash but also a long exposure, and since I didn't have a tripod the camera shook a bit, making the object look just a bit ethereal.

My new home!

I take a lot of non-baby photos and don't want to fill up Thomas's blog with them, so I might as well set up a new blog to host them. Yay new blog!