Basking

Project 365

Project 365 = one photo a day.

Why do it? Because if you want to get better at something, a really good way to do that is to practice every day. That's it.

So far I haven't missed a day of shooting, although I am a couple of days behind in converting the RAW files and many days behind in posting the final photos to Flickr. [Still having motherboard issues with the Mac, which is not always ready when I am. Really frustrating.]

The photo above (Day 12 - Frozen) is my favorite so far. Several of them have surprised me, where I've been able to make something out of very little. A few didn't pan out that well. But that's how the individual days go. Some turn out better than you expect and other days are utterly forgettable.

Trio

Happy Friday, everyone.

Color Me Confused

I've had to give myself a crash course in color management for digital photography. Since I got the fancy new camera, I decided to take advantage of shooting in RAW format. I won't bore you with the technical details of why the RAW format is better. You can google it if you are curious. Anyway, the RAW images are "processed", the digital version of developing film, and then the results are saved into other formats. Things were going pretty well at first. Got some good images, prettied them up in the camera software, then finished them in Photoshop Elements. Everything looked great at the time. However, all of this was done on the desktop Mac, and Macs have had built-in color management for a long time. So imagine my horror when I looked at my Flickr photostream on a PC - and the images that looked so wonderful on the Mac were garishly oversaturated on the Windows browsers. And looked like they were taken with a magenta filter. Crap!

After several days of painful research and experimentation, I finally have a workflow that keeps the images looking roughly the same on all platforms. I now know way more than I wanted to know about ICC profiles, monitor calibration, color spaces, gamut, embedded color profiles, LCD monitor characteristics, gamma, color temperature, and so on. I also learned that all of my discoveries on this matter are just the tip of the iceberg. It would take years to get good at this. A lot of years. So hopefully I know just enough. No more pink and orange cats. Unless they were born that way.

The Moxy photo below is one of the photos I had to correct. Mac users will see no difference, but PC users should now see a photo with far more realistic colors.

Super Extra Bonus Holiday Catblogging

Just because.

CatBlogging 2.0 for 2010

Getting a late start. Got a new DSLR camera for Christmas, but having lots of hardware trouble with the Mac, which is what I use to "process" digital photos. But enough is enough. Bare bones version here. Friday CatBlogging is back, baby. And Zima deserves to headline this sucker. She's the oldest and puts up with the most crap.

Seasonal Vegetables?

It is January. Deep in the dead of winter last I checked. But did my local grocery store have any butternut squash - a winter vegetable?

No. No, they did not.

But they had watermelon. Wha?

I had to drive to Tucker to get the winter squash. And took two of the last sad three. Not really in the mood for watermelon... doesn't make good soup.