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Zakim at Night|ppp|fff
On Tuesday night I attended a lecture at the [Museum of Science](http://www.mos.org/). The lecture itself is a topic for another post, but before the lecture started, I went up to the top of the MoS parking garage and took some night-time photos of Boston. Some of them came out really well, others not so good. You can check them all out [here](http://prwdot.org/gallery2/v/travels/2005/boston_at_night/).
Becky used a plastic bag clip to do up my hair, then I had her take [a photo](http://prwdot.org/gallery2/v/etcetera/grab_bag/P1060003.JPG.html). This is all practice for the inevitable hair-play that will come with having children. Apart from being extremely attractive, the hair clip also serves to keep my forehead clear of my rather oily mane.
There was also this one crazy night a while ago, when we were making grape juice, that I decided to try a few new hair styles. Thankfully, none of them really worked for me. The album is appropriately named [Grape Juice and Hair Styling](http://prwdot.org/gallery2/v/craftiness/grape_juice_and_hair_styling/).
Enjoy!
fff|ggg|post_processing/stbasils2|Saint Basil’s|ggg|fff
One of the digital photography techniques I have been slow to adopt is post-processing. Put simply, post-processing is a set of techniques with which a photographer can manipulate photos after they come out of the camera. Dull photos become vibrant, dark photos become bright, blurry photos become sharp, crooked photos become straight. Rarely does a photo come out of a camera look like those amazing ones that you see in magazines or in the web’s best photo galleries.
I take so many photos that I don’t have the time or energy to go through post-processing with all of them. But I have recently been trying to learn some techniques to give photos a bit of extra “pop”. ***Mauricio|http://www.broadbandreports.com/profile/530139*** of the ***BBR|http://www.broadbandreports.com/*** digital imaging forum recently posted a ***tutorial|http://www.broadbandreports.com/speak/print/default;14125972*** on some techniques he used to get a really terrific looking photo. I’ve followed a few of his techniques and have put together a ***sample gallery|http://gallery.prwdot.org/post_processing*** showing photos before and after they have been post-processed. Most of the improvement comes from simply bumping up the saturation a bit, though I do also twiddle with color balance, curves, and sharpness. (Maybe I should bump up the saturation level on my camera? I know that I have a setting for that, and right now it’s set at “standard”…) Anyway, take a look at the ***samples|http://gallery.prwdot.org/post_processing*** and let me know what you think!
Also, this raises a question. What would you folks, the readers of our blog (and, hopefully, also the viewers of our ***gallery|http://gallery.prwdot.org/***), rather see when we upload photos: The full selection of photos with little or no post-processing? Or a smaller selection of ‘choice’ photos, with post-processing? In a way, I guess it comes down to quantity versus quality. Or perhaps both? Maybe I could revive the showcase gallery and take some of the best of the best, post-process them, and put them up for even more jaw-dropping effect?
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After importing the photos from our hike on Sunday, I realized that we had crossed a pretty significant threshhold with our iPhoto library. 10,000+ photos, 10.0+ gigabytes of data, within four years. That’s a lot of images. And a few movies, since we upgraded to iPhoto 5.
Here’s to 10,000 more!
As I’ve ***previously mentioned|http://prwdot.org/archives/002299.html***, I’ve found it difficult to find a use for ***flickr|http://prwdot.org/archives/002299.html*** the social, taggable photo sharing site. We already have a well-established ***photo gallery|http://gallery.prwdot.org/***, running on the web hosting space that we’re already paying for. flickr’s free service wouldn’t allow me to upload the amount I currently do to our regular gallery, so I’d have to pay. Also, I don’t want to migrate over all of our photos, nor do I want to publish them to both places. But I have found one thing that flickr is especially good at, and I’ve decided that it fills a nice niche in my digital photo sharing needs: annotated photos. By this, I mean a photo that has a number of features I would like to describe, like people at a party, locations on a map, or peripherals in a computer workstation. flickr lets you add ‘notes’ to a photo, so that when others are viewing the photo, they will see boxes in certain places on the photo indicating notes, and if they hover over the boxes, the note text will pop up.
The best way to understand it is probably to just *** check out the annotated photos|http://flickr.com/photos/peterwood/tags/annotated/*** over on flickr. I’ll post some other blog entries here about some specific photos in the collection.
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Yesterday I ended up doing a ‘numbers’ theme in Boston. You can see all of the photos ***here|http://gallery.prwdot.org/boston_numbers***!
Hello readers! I am going to be going into Boston (and Cambridge, maybe) for a few hours tomorrow and doing some photography. I’d like to do a sort of theme, and I have a number of ideas floating around in my head. Here they are in no particular order. Leave a comment and let me know which one(s) you’d like to see the most!
I’ll be leaving no later than noon on Sunday, so be sure to get in your votes by then!
While Becky was at Yoga class tonight, I took the opportunity to do ***a bit of photography around Beverly’s marine district|http://gallery.prwdot.org/beverly_browsing***.
Alas, I’ve been duped. There is, in fact, no Cape Cod Canal Tunnel. I drove down to visit Jeremy in Hyannis today, and on the way I thought I might as well stop and look for this tunnel I’d heard so much about. Well, there isn’t one. Shucks.* Anyway, I did manage to get some nice photos of the ***Sagamore Bridge|http://gallery.prwdot.org/sagamore_bridge*** area, and I also drove down and took some photos at ***Scusett Beach|http://gallery.prwdot.org/scusset_beach***. I was lucky enough to get there just in time to see a huge tanker entering the Cape Cod Canal:
ggg|scusset_beach/P1000414|Tanker in the Cape Cod Canal|ggg
Pretty sweet!
* Yes, I’m well aware that the Cape Cod Canal Tunnel bumper stickers are a joke.
I drove Becky to work in Boston today, and after parking at the ***Otis House|http://www.historicnewengland.org/visit/homes/otis.htm***, I headed out to trek around the city, putting my new camera through its paces. I covered a pretty wide swath of the city, from the North End all the way over to Symphony Hall in the Back Bay. I must say, I’m quite pleased with the results. I shot today at my camera’s lowest resolution and lowest quality level, because my larger memory card hasn’t arrived yet… nonetheless, the camera still produced excellent photos. The 12x zoom came in mighty handy, and the optical image stabilizer worked just as advertised. Here is one of the best examples of the zoom capability. These photos were both shot from the same spot in Boston Common; the first with no zoom, and the second with full 12x zoom (zoomed in to focus on a spot on top of the John Hancock Tower, from the center of the first shot):
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ggg|boston_20050313/P1000170|12x Zoom|ggg
Amazing! The rest of the photos (138 in all) can be found ***here|http://gallery.prwdot.org/boston_20050313?page=1***.