Two hours of tv left, had to open the Chilean red mix. Nose of Champagne, legs like an olympic gymnist. Tasty but wife no likey.
Author Archive for Daniel Lucas
15
Dec
08
Twitter update
15
Dec
08
Twitter update
Opened a red from Argentina this evening for dinner. Strange nose, bold taste, excellent finish. Nice to get out of California.
15
Dec
08
Twitter update
My wife and I, an empty theater, and a beer in-hand. Not a bad Monday so far.
15
Dec
08
Twitter update
Wife just found a burst mustard pack in her back pocket!?! I’m dieing over here.
15
Dec
08
Twitter update
Feel bad ordering only soup, salad, and breadsticks @ Olive Garden. But the look I get from the waitress never fails to free me.
15
Dec
08
Twitter update
Busch Gardens is fun only so many times in one year. Don’t think we will be renewing our passes.
15
Dec
08
Twitter update
Stuck in car while wife shops. Getting bored. Nothing to read.
14
Dec
08
Twitter update
Finished Blood Canticle. Now back to the witches series (skipped over them in my youth). Beyond that I’ll need recommendations.
14
Dec
08
Twitter update
There’s nothing worse than smut masquerading as op-ed (Rush et al). Oh wait, yes there is: Op-ed masquerading as journalism (CNN et al).
13
Dec
08
soccer season has begun
Soccer season has begun again and we are enjoying the grass and the sun and the fries. These are from last Saturday, her first game. I cut off heads and cropped a little awkwardly out of boredom. After all, I have hundreds of soccer photographs from these games. There are a few on the roll I shot today that look interesting. Later for those.
12
Dec
08
Twitter update
"…there’s technically, in my world, no such thing as a digression! All roads lead to me." -Lestat (Blood Canticle) such modesty ; )
11
Dec
08
Twitter update
Mac fanboys are annoying but Windows bigots are worse: God said "Let there be right-click." And it was so. *sheesh*
11
Dec
08
resistance is futile
1/40 f/3.5 ISO 450 handheld (D300, 50mm f/1.8)
I wonder if she will be annoyed later in life at the sheer number of photographs of her as a child. I’m not sure that I would want such a close look at myself at every stage. Her mother thinks she will enjoy them. If there were an answer to this question it would have no affect on my behavior. I can resist capturing her beauty in images as well as I can resist kissing her before bed each night.
11
Dec
08
Twitter update
Funny that when there are two TVs blaring, musak from above, and phones ringing, it is actually easier to concentrate on my book.
11
Dec
08
Twitter update
MCHammer just started following me on twitter. That guy was my hero. Or was that LLCoolJ? Oh well who cares!
09
Dec
08
Twitter update
Late start this morning. Craving a croissandwich. [stupid english spellcheck]
08
Dec
08
Twitter update
Traffic light this Monday morning. Are the Christians having a day that I forgot about?
07
Dec
08
Twitter update
Missed the breakfast cutoff at Wendys, headed to Sonic.
06
Dec
08
lightroom 2 – tip #7
As I said in the beginning, these tips were created using a combination of my own experimentation with LR2 and Scott Kelby’s The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book for Digital Photographers. I highly recommend this book for anyone learning LR2.
Setting overall exposure is very easy. Just drag the Exposure slider left or right until the desired look is achieved. Be careful not to blow out your highlights. This occurs when areas of the image become so bright that they contain essentially no data. It becomes very noticeable when doing other pixel edits later. Also consider what happens to these areas when printed. The way most inkjets print white is by not laying down any toner at all. You can imagine how this might be a problem.
So, how do you avoid blowing highlights? I use Scott Kelby’s suggestion of using the clipping warning feature. Just click on the arrow in the upper right hand corner of the Histogram. All blown highlights are shown in red. If there are large areas of red you may want to back off with the exposure slider. If you can’t back off far enough without darkening the main subject, try the recovery slider. Increasing it will add detail back to your highlights, but be careful. Too much recovery can make skin tones look gray and people look like the living dead. You don’t want that.
Here is a tip from Kelby: Try using the recovery slider with landscapes and be amazed at what it can do for skies.
On the other side is clipped shadows. This happens when there are large areas of an image with no detail, just black pixels. These are much less of a problem than blown highlights but can be a problem in certain situations. If you have clipped shadows, increase the exposure slider. To see a warning similar to the blown highlight one click the arrow in the upper left-hand corner of the histogram.
The other basic tone sliders:
- Kelby mentions the Brightness slider as an afterthought. This is used to adjust midtones but I have not found it to be very useful myself.
- It seems that everyone agrees that the Contrast slider is pretty useless. I agree with that assessment and would recommend doing contrast adjustments elsewhere, such as the Tone Curve.
- Use the Blacks slider to get rid of haziness or washed out colors. I use this on almost every photograph to deepen the colors even when there is no haziness. Kelby does not seem to use this the same way and I will probably remove it from my edit workflow and see what happens.
Relevant keyboard shortcuts:
- Backslash key will show you the before and pressing it again will take you back to the current setting.
- Y and Shift-Y will bring up the side-by-side and split screen before and after tools.
- To toggle both clipping warnings simply press the J key.
05
Dec
08
Twitter update
Listening to diggnation and upgrading domain controllers. Just another Friday night for a geek.
05
Dec
08
Twitter update
OMG I just heard this scratchy female voice out of nowhere. Turns out someone accidentally called the fax machine near my desk.
05
Dec
08
Twitter update
Just raced a jet plane. It was fun but I lost :(
04
Dec
08
Twitter update
I just spent 20 minutes watching a gigantic spider die from the chemicals I put on it.
04
Dec
08
Twitter update
I wish intelligent and otherwise well-spoken people would stop using "nuther" in conversation.
03
Dec
08
Twitter update
Ok, spent the entire day creating my SL avatar. Now what?
03
Dec
08
Twitter update
Walked out of the office last night to the sting of winter air. Turned back to grab my jacket but had already set the alarm. Oh well.
01
Dec
08
Twitter update
I use late work nights as an excuse to eat absolute garbage for dinner. Entitlement is yummy.
01
Dec
08
Twitter update
We should keep beer in the I.T. fridge for long nights like the one I’m about to have.
30
Nov
08
family photo album
When we had a compact camera, my wife and I would look through and keep a couple hundred images of each shoot. Blurry images, under-exposed images, images of the back of a lens cap, it didn’t matter. Now, I take a couple hundred exposures and only end up showing between three and ten of them. Another difference is that I no longer choose photographs based on their value as documentation. I now choose them based on whether they are artistically valuable.
Needless to say, my wife does not appreciate this change. Being a mother, she naturally cares more about documenting the life and times of our family, and less about my attempt to make art. So here I am posting my favorites of our Thanksgiving trip to my brother’s house. The rest of them can be accessed by family and friends by clicking this link.
WHAT I LEARNED DURING SHOOT:
Most of these images were shot using the new 16-85mm f/3.5-5.6 VR which is not the best indoor lens. I just love its wide angle capabilities and could not resist. Unfortunately, I was using aperture priority and the shutter speed dipped way below where I would have liked it. Next time I will use shutter priority and just up the ISO if I have to. Many of these are blurry on account of my carelessness.
WHAT I LEARNED DURING DEVELOPMENT:
The high ISO required much noise reduction. I use a great Photoshop plug-in called Noiseware by Imagenomic for this work. I do all of my edits in LR 2 and then export to Photoshop for noise reduction. This is a very slow process when editing a large set of photographs that were shot at high ISO. One thing I learned is that I should only do noise reduction at the end of editing the entire shoot. Here is why: After editing all of the photographs from a single shoot, I look back at all of them to get a sense of their uniformity. Many times I find that they’re exposures or white balance are too different to be put side-by-side in a slideshow or an album. So, I will go back and edit them. Because I want to make edits only to the RAW files, I have to redo the noise reduction and delete the first noise-reduced PSD. I can avoid this extra step by simply waiting to do noise-reduction until just before final export.
30
Nov
08
Twitter update
Editing photographs from turkey day visit to my brother’s place near Ft. Myers.
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