I installed my slide scanner for the first time on the “new” laptop I moved to at work last summer, and scanned a few of Dad’s slides. I think these are all from 1950 to 1952. I didn’t bother to clean these up or fix anything, I just wanted to scan a few to show Mom. The first picture is my Dad’s family: (back row) Don, Don’s wife Ruth, Dick (my Dad), Lorna, Irv, (front row) Vern, Arley & Mary (Grandpa & Grandma), and Lowell.
When we first met, Megan used to add “in bed” to the end of fortunes on fortune cookies, naughtily transforming innocent lines like “you will find great happiness” or “success will be yours at last” into something altogether different. Consider the possibilities in a typical list of fortunes.
Well, tonight we stopped at a Chinese place, and after dinner I read my fortune:
Then Megan read hers:
The boys have been fascinated by a few dozen friends who dropped in to poke holes in the lawn today.
The new house may be less than ideal for such visitors, if Megan’s latest idea works out. But it would be ideal for the cats!
We attended the Empty Bowls dinner event at Moshier Park Community Art Center in Burien this evening to celebrate Orcmid’s birthday, and there were hundreds of people there to make donations and get ceramic bowls full of good (truly) soup with bread and cookies. Mom and a few of her coffee friends were there too.
Dennis and I were so busy geeking out that I forgot to get a picture of Vicki throwing bowls. (Do I have that jargon right?)
For my sister-in-law’s amusement, here are a few pictures from this evening, including Murg (the cat you always remind me I don’t take enough pictures of), and Megan sharing her facial supplies to give me a headial …
As we head into a recession, it’s a good time to consider How the Iraq war’s $2 trillion cost to U.S. could have been spent.
That’s roughly 400 million high-end digital SLRs with fancy lenses. Wow.
This morning I left for work around 6:30, and all the way to work I regretted not having my camera with me. It was the clearest morning I’ve seen in ages, and the full moon setting in the eastern sky behind the Seattle skyscrapers was spectacular, as was the silhouette of Mount Rainier to the south and the faint glow of sunrise far behind the Cascades to the west, making them visible in the darkness.
It was still pretty clear when I got home, just in time to shoot this photo. Tomorrow I’m going in early again, but this time I’m bringing my camera.
Three hours later, moonlight on Lake Washington …
I purchased the Fisheye-Hemi plugin Friday, and I’ve been having fun with it over the weekend. The basic concept is that it takes fisheye shots and stretches them to remove some of the “bubbled up in the middle” look that you get with a fisheye lens. Orcmid had told me about the rectilinear correction in Nikon’s Capture NX software, and I started looking around at options and decided to play with this one first.
Below are four examples. In each case, I’ve not cropped anything so that you can see the overall effect. You can see that it doesn’t remove 100% of the distortion, but it gets things closer to reality. An even better tool for this, from what I’ve seen, is DxO Optics Pro, but that’s $150 and the Fisheye-Hemi plugin is $29, so I decided to start there.
In the fourth shot (the bedroom of our new house), I used an option for a different type of lens, which results in over-correction. I kind of like the effect, though. The other three shots are riding the bus in San Francisco with Megan and Lynn, the skyline of Sao Paulo, and a building in Munich.
Fisheye photos as originally taken:
Corrected with the Fisheye-Hemi plugin:
