Take your camera to work day

No, it is not a replacement for my laptop. I can’t run Photoshop on it, and I don’t want to. I am also not a fan of the app store. So much crap that should be free. I guess I have spent too much time with Linux.

So, wait. My big machine is Win 7, my netbook is Ubuntu and my tablet is iOS.

Okay, onto the picture. Just a crop and some adjustments in ACR.

I set the white balance off the keys on the keyboard, plus a few other adjustments.

Oh, and again with the original.

So, at least in the digital work we can easily clean things up

The first thing I’ve bought? A 1 TB external hard drive. That’s photography? You betcha. For the last year I have been spending too much time burning to dvd’s and deleting files on my main hard drive, freeing up space.

So, why a 1gig drive? The 2TB drives were only about $30.00 more. I serious thought about it, but 2 TB’s? That is over 3 years of RAW photos! That is too many to have in one place. 1 TB is really too much but it is hard to find new full size hard drives under 1 TB.

So, this time next year I’ll be putting this hard drive in the closet and buying a new one. If I ever start doing this professionally I’ll have two backups, one at home and one else where.

Believe it or not, a friend just called while I was writing this telling me her hard drive just crashed! She had not backed up anything and there is over a year of photos on it.  No backups.

So, other then work I did do a shoot for a now defunct band. Oh well, I did learn a few things. Here are some pics

Same for a downtown sunset looking though a maze of power lines. Or the picture below, a blue Lambo on the road surrounded by everyday ho-hum cars and SUVs. Here is what I saw.

And here is what the camera saw

unedited SOOC

So, yeah. Even simple uninspired snap shots get a little editing. I don’t really care to show you what the camera sees, I just want to show you what was in my selective vision.

I made heavy use of Photoshop’s clone brush. The Content Aware Fill did help but it is not perfect. Be sure to feather your selections when using Content Aware Fill. The trees directly above the Lambo look like they have a bit of glare on them, this was shot though a dirty windshield. Maybe I should have done some burning there, or is that dodging ( I always forget which is which).

Chris

The shot was at 200mm from about 30m away. At 100% crop things looked pretty good but when reduced to a thumbnail the leaves were too small and regular. The berries and the cardinal were visible but had no impact.

Here is is what I mean.

I am too far away

So, a crop is in order.

crop and adjustments

So, okay the original did not have a  good composition, the cropping helped but notice that all the green is basically the same value. The foreground  and back pretty much blend into each other. Time to darken the background.

Darkening of the background

This helps but is still not there. The bird is too small and the berries still have only a little impact. So, one more crop.

final crop

This is so near to a 100% crop. I would say it is reduced to 80% of original. Notice there is little to no noise, and I shot this at 1600 ISO. I did over expose it 2/3 of a stop and then darkened it upon importing with ACR. Most of your noise is in the shadows so if your shadows are light, you’ll have little noise even at high ISOs.

BTW, for those who don’t know, ACR is Adobe Camera Raw.

I am coming to believe that 200mm is too short for birding. My lens will go out to 300mm but it looks like crap at 300.

Chris

What I can not deal with are these new food allergies I seem to have developed. One of them is wheat. Okay, it is not an allergy but a food intolerance. Bread causes heartburn, acid reflux. Bread. I love bread. My mother bakes this swiss cheese, bear bread and it is delicious. It is salty and savory, my mouth waters just thinking about it. Not just bread but brownies, cake, pasta, pizza. If it has wheat in it, I get acid reflux.

But that is not all. I may be allergic to dairy too, or  oil. I am thinking it is dairy but right now I have none to test it with. But yeah dairy. You see for a while when I ate out or had some fast food my sinuses would stop up, totally. I thought it was fried food, so much fried food out there. Then I noticed something. I have cheese with everything. I like cheese a lot. Cheese Burgers, alfredo pastas, grilled cheese sandwiches, breakfast cereal, ice cream. Dairy and bread go together.

Bread and cheese. Isn’t that the food of life?

Okay, I do like asian foods and I have had no issues with rice. All proteins seem to be okay and that is good. So no more wheat and no more dairy. I have tried soy cheese and, no, it is not a substitute. I am not much a fan of soy milk either. I have heard that corn can be as bad as wheat so I need to test some corn bread and corn tortillas.

Ah, but F1. That is something I will awake at 2am to watch. Lately I haven’t had to get up early. Fox has been carrying the race. It is tape delayed so they can butcher it and spread out to 2 hours with a crap load of commercials.

You might get the feeling I do not a fan of Fox. I am not. They bought Speedvision a number of years ago and basically turned it into NASCAR Tv. No more rallies, no more road racing and F1 got very hard to find. No more reruns of F1.

This year they have decided to place 4 races on Fox. I guess this is good. More exposure to the American populous. Maybe more American fans. Maybe that F1 track in Texas will happen. We only have two races on this side of the world, Canada and Brazil.

F1 is the pinnacle of auto racing. It is a shame we do not have a track, team or driver. I would love to see Ford step up. I can always dream.

Why? Well, you can see the whole image at a glance. Any of my 360deg views are about 5 times wider then they are tall. Viewing one at full height means I am going to have to scroll sideways quite a bit. After all the years of scrolling up and down on websites, it is just plain weird to scroll horizontally.

So here are some samples, and a quick tutorial.

Okay, to start you need a panoramic. Really you don need a true panoramic, just an image that can be tiled side to side. A 360 degree pano is the easiest way to do this.

360 pano

Now resize the image so it is equally wide as it is tall.

pano squashed

Now, take your squashed image and flip it vertically.

pano flipped

Now it is time for the plugin Polar Coordinates. Make sure you have “Rectangular to Polar” selected.

Polar Coordinates

Now all you have to do is clean things up. You will have a seam that needs to be smoothed out. Also the very center of the image will be pinched, a bit of cloning brush can help with that.

Backyard

Backyard inverse

Power Lines

cowan park

Clinton Tn

I love Spaghetti, I eat it at least once a month. Really, it is good stuff. I would say my spaghetti is not like yours. I am not trying to be elitist or anything, but long ago I gave up on bottled spaghetti sauce and spice packets. I also gave up on ground beef too. It is too bland. I use Italian Sausage.  If I was crazy I would use fresh tomatoes too, but I never have that much time. You see, time is always a factor and that is where the Spaghetti Sandwich came from. It takes at least 20 minutes to cook pasta, 2 minutes to make toast.  First, lets start with the sauce.

The Sauce

Ingredients:

12oz Italian Sausage, skinned and broken into small bits
1 med Onion, sliced into thin half rings
3 cloves Garlic, diced or smashed
1 14.5oz can Diced Tomatoes
1 14.5oz can Stewed Tomatoes
Salt, Black Pepper, Dry Oregano, Dry Basil, Chili Flakes, Sugar

Over Medium High Heat brown your Sausage. Add onions. When the onions turn translucent add the garlic. Cook the garlic a bit then add the tomatoes. Bring to a simmer then add the spices and sugar. I add very little sugar but the amount depends on the chili flake. The more Chili, the more sugar but never more then a tablespoon. Allow to reduce over a simmer while the pasta cooks, about 20 minutes.

That is a good plate of spaghetti. Don’t forget the parmigiana cheese. Another thing, add some mushrooms or black olives with the tomatoes. If you have some bell peppers, add them with the onions. You can experiment with Sweet, Mild or Hot sausage, I generally go for mild so I can control the heat.

But what about leftovers? I love freshly cooked pasta so I only cook as much as I am going to eat, about 3oz per serving. (package says 2oz but I eat more) So, that leave sauce left over in the fridge. Guess what? It makes a great Sloppy Joe. You just need some good bread, mayo and swiss cheese.

Toast

Microwaved Sauce on Toast

Thinly spread Mayo

Melted Swiss over the Sauce

Completed Sandwich

Now, for a few words of advice. Use a hearty sandwich bread, something like Pepperidge Farm or Sarah Lee breads. If you do not like swiss cheese, you need to add some type of cheese. The melted cheese holds every thing together. It also helps to let things cool off a bit. Even with the cheese this sandwich needs to be wrapped to be cleanly eaten.

As for Calories and what not. The sauce has about 800 calories all told and makes about 6 servings. So that is about 135 calories, maybe less on a sandwich. I need to measure to be sure. The bread, cheese and mayo adds up to 407 calories with the bread being 220 cal total, 140cal for the cheese and only 45cal for the mayo. So, totaled up we are looking at somewhere around 542 calories.

BTW, did you know that the bread and pasta are almost an even trade? 200 calories for 2oz of pasta, but like I said, I generally eat around 3oz or 300 calories. I use less cheese and no mayo on spaghetti so everything evens out in the end.

I generally try and aim for three meals a day at or around 600 calories each, leaving a few hundred for a snack in the day. That takes me close to 2000. So no, this is not diet food, it is a bit high on fat but is good on protein too.

Chris