photography

Today's "Flickr Group Roulette" project was "I Might Be A Cylon". Here's the top 10 reasons I might be...

10: That drumming in my head
9: I have perfect eyesight, I just wear glasses as a fashion statement
8: I'm a sexy beast
7: I clink when I walk
6: I use words like "resurrection" and "One True God" as often as possible
5: Red is my favorite color
4: I have cooler tech toys than my friends
3: I sometimes hear voices in my head
2: The constant video conferences with Baltar.
1: Oh yeah... that other guy looks a lot like me.

Wow, hard to believe I have a senior now! Rather than pay $500+ to have senior portraits taken, I applied my new skillz:

Can't believe I've made it to day 6 of a daily self-portrait without giving up. I challenged my friend Vermyndax to the project as well in the hopes that it will keep me going. Average time per photo? About 2 hours counting set up through post processing. That's GOT to improve soon or I won't be able to do it every day, or else I'll have to do what a lot of people do which is snap something and post it as is. I'm not much for snapping.

Not so much photography specific, but I just stumbled on a great little site with a ton of tutorials for Gimp.

http://www.gimp-tutorials.com/

I decided to configure a new Linux machine just for photography. I just bought LightZone for Linux, and plan to move all my images over to this new machine and set it up just for photo editing.

I did a fresh install of 64-bit desktop Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), followed by an install of the nVidia restricted drivers. Everything went flawlessly.

Attempting to run LightZone resulted in:

$ ./LightZone
Preparing JRE ...
./LightZone: 148: bin/unpack200: not found
Error unpacking jar files. Aborting.
You might need administrative priviledges for this operation.

Turns out if you're running the 64 bit version of Linux, you also need one additional package which can be installed with Synaptic, the default package manager:

ia32-libs

Those are the 32 bit compatibility libraries for the 64 bit Linux. After installing them, everything went swimmingly.

Today the Kyle Petty Charity Ride came through town along with hundreds of fans on motorcycles as well. All total I'd say around 600+ motorcycles were in our little town of 2,300. There were almost as many people from out of town here today as live here.

Here's a photo gallery I made.

I've always wondered how to use the curves adjustment in Gimp, but had never seen a tutorial. John Watson over at photododo.com made a great screencast explaining how to do sky adjustments. I think John is my newest hero, because he has quite a repertoire of Gimp screencast tutorials.

Here's the video:

My Olympus 11-22 wide angle lens just arrived. Here's my first three pictures taken with it, all in one shot:

That's a DigiSlave 3000 with a blue gel behind the monitors triggered by a povertywizard.

Desktop: Ubuntu 8.04 with dual 20" widescreen monitors, RawTherapee and Gimp.

I returned home to a special surprise today. Sitting on my desk was a sample pack of Rosco Color Filters that I'd requested months ago.

I'd given up on ever seeing them. These beauties will fit perfectly over the head of my flash, so I just got a couple of hundred filters for my flash for free. Can't beat that!

When we arrived at work this morning, this little baby was blocking the entrance to the building. Here it's sitting on a piece of 8 1/2 x 11" paper, so you can get an idea of how huge it is. I believe this is a "Cecropia silkmoth" which interestingly enough doesn't eat once they are adult. They consume all the food they need to get this size while a caterpillar. Wow!

Photo taken using a snooted DigiSlave 3000 triggered by a povertywizard propped on the table to the right.