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halloween treats and tricks

October 31st, 2008
by Michael
2 Comments

We had beautiful weather for Halloween this year, which is rather unusual for us. Aidan donned his penguin suit (and a new persona–he made us call him Mac, short for macaroni penguin, or Tux after the Linux mascot). Aidan was a little more adventurous this year, wanting to walk a little farther down the block than we ever have in the past. While a little nervous about the very real possibility that any given house might have a dog living there, he ventured anyway on a quest for tasty treats. It was a nice day.

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experimenting in the lightzone

October 25th, 2008
by Michael
1 Comment

I’ve been experimenting with some image post processing, specifically with a program called LightZone by Light Crafts. It’s really easy to use and yet powerful. The program is built for photographers, and the best thing is that Light Crafts is committed to supporting LightZone on Linux (as well as Windows and Mac, if that’s your thing). Check out this quick before and after.

I thought the original shot (while taken a cloudy day) was decent until I dropped into LightZone and made a few clicks of the mouse to create the tweaked version.

The LightZone “Relight” tool made an immediate improvement with just a single click. I went a little further though, and isolated the handful of leaves in the photo as a region to add some color saturation. Then, finally, I sharpened the photo just a little to bring out some more local contrast in the details. Total editing time was about 5 minutes.

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transparencies, generations, photographic experiments

October 4th, 2008
by Michael
6 Comments

We were over at my parents’ house yesterday for a visit. I was playing with the camera and took this triple exposure. I thought it was interesting (although not perfectly composed). It reminds me a little of Lori Novak’s work (not that I’m comparing myself to her, as her work is amazing; I was just messing around). Still, maybe I’ll experiment a little more with this in the future. In the image, you can see my father to the left, me in the center, and Aidan just right of center.

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