A mid-twenties white collar dude’s take on everything
So it’s my birthday next week, and I’ve asked for a bunch of photography gear this year. Yesterday I got a new flash for my camera, and I’m quite excited about it. I know no one else will care, but it’s a big deal to me. I have a ton to learn about how to use it and whatnot, but I played around a bit last night. It’s going to be fun learning how to do this stuff! This is the best shot I came away with:
This past weekend was my wife’s 24th birthday, so I decided to take her to NYC for the weekend to see a show and hang out in the city. We had a great time, helped in large part by her best friend with whom we stayed and who showed us around the city all weekend.
Manhattan is not for everyone, mind you. I know I could never live there, although it is fun to visit. Everything just seems like it would be such a hassle! Going to the grocery store, getting to work, doing your Christmas shopping, doing your laundry…all these things would be pain in the neck if you lived in downtown New York.
In any event, we saw The Lion King, which was fantastic. You may think it a bit juvenile (as I did at first), but I can assure you that it was excellent. As “business person”, the sheer creativity and artistic talent that people like that possess is dumbfounding. Highly recommended.
Anyway, I took a few pictures, but the weather was crappy for a decent part of the weekend, and it was packed just about everywhere we went so I didn’t take a ton. Check out Flickr if you want to see.
I just noticed that Flickr now has KML feeds for each user. Very cool! This should play nice with Google Earth, no? That’s fantastic. I’ll get back to you on that!
Technorati Tags: flickr, feeds, rss, kml, google earth
I just wanted to show people a little bit of what Photoshop can do for you people who have never used it before. Take a look at this picture I took last weekend when Kel and I went to Gettysburg. This view is from on top of Little Round Top looking down on Devil’s Den:
Now take a look at this Photoshopped version from the same picture and try and pick out what I changed:
Now, obviously I cropped the picture and made it kind of a sepia tone, but what else? Check it out:
- You’ll notice a small building on the left side of the untouched version. That is a bathroom the park installed some years ago that they are eventually going to remove. I did it for them.
- Got rid of all the roads the tourists use to get around the park.
- There are a few monuments way in the background. Outta here!
- There are numerous cars in the parking lot, and a tractor over by the bathroom. I got rid of those guys too.
- If you look closely, you’ll see there are a couple of dozen people climbing on the rocks in Devil’s Den. Had to get them out.
- There are various walkers, bike riders, and joggers both on the road in the foreground, and back behind Devil’s Den. Gone, baby!
- There are two different birds that flew through my shot that I nixed. One on the left, and the other on the top right.
This just goes to show you how Photoshop can take a normal, “touristy” photo and help turn it in to something more. Now, I’m not one of those guys that normally likes to Photoshop his stuff to death on every shot. In my opinion, the truly great photographer is one who can capture a shot and not have to doctor it up afterward to make it decent. But Photoshop can be a very useful tool.
Technorati Tags: photoshop, flickr, gettysburg, civil war
Dave Winer has a cool idea for a “social camera“. It’s kind of a neat concept, really. I wonder if anyone has made something like this. One concern I would have is keeping people from passing off pictures I took as their own. What would be really cool is if it could somehow be integrated with Flickr. Your camera would store your Flickr info in the file’s EXIF metadata so that if you transferred a photo to someone else, the file would have your info embedded in it. It would help prevent you from uploading the photo without proper attribution to its true owner/author.
I’d also want an easy way to choose which photos I wanted and which were trash.
Wouldn’t it be nice to go on vacation and get some pictures of yourself without having to ask some stranger to take a picture of you with your camera? Someone smarter than me, invent this, please!
Technorati Tags: winer, social camera
Yesterday I bet on 7 Major League Baseball games. One of the bets I always make is that the favored team will win by greater than 1 run. According to my calculations, over the past 20 seasons a home team will win a game by exactly 1 run roughly 15.46% of the time (i.e., given all the games played by all the teams in a season, exactly 15.46% of those will be a home win by 1 run). Away teams will win by exactly one run about 9.8% of the time.
For me, the one thing you don’t want to have happen is for the home (or favored) team to win by exactly one run. Yesterday, that happened in 3 out of the 7 games I bet (thanks a lot, Diamondbacks, Dodgers, and Indians). That’s bogus, as it means I lose on both sides of my bet (I bet the favored team to win by 2 and the underdog to win straight up, thereby hedging a bit). According to the binomial probability function, the chances of this happening are only about 6.61%. This ended up losing me about 42.5% of my total bet–not a good return on “investment”.
Yesterday was not my lucky day.
No one was chomping on Oreos for me yesterday.
We spent Easter at Kel’s grandparents’ house this year. This is a picture of her 3 year old cousin right after I asked, “Hey, Kate, how much of that cake can you cram in your mouth at once?”
Still unsure of exactly how to use Flickr? Check out Webware’s “Newbie’s Guide to Flickr” for the basics.
There are some incredibly creative people on Flickr (myself not being one of them). Check out the Curry and Paprika monsters from user mashishka…
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