During my commute drive to work this morning I saw my first Great Blue Heron of the year. It was standing in the shallows of Baldwin Lake in Berea. Spring must be close at hand! I thought it worth mentioning.
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The view from the dining room doesn't include a trace of the driveway that runs past. If my car was in the picture you wouldn't see much of that, either!
A much-heralded winter storm struck in the hours before dawn this morning. Most all schools were closed for the day as was my workplace. The employer of She Who Must Be Obeyed was open for business but She wisely chose to work from home. So I spent the day on the Web Edition of the annual Calendar project whilst She participated in a conference call, did office work via the ‘net, and Tasha supervised. Around midday I shot a few photos of the snow (from the comfort of the dining room) and was happy I didn’t even feel the slightest bit of guilt over not going to work… they were closed, after all! It’s not snowing much now and the winds have died down. At around 4:00 I ventured outside and dug my car out of the drifts. I’d guess we got about 8 to 10 inches of snow but, since it blew around a lot, it was hard to be sure. As I finished excavation the clouds began to part, blue sky showed, and sunshine broke through! Maybe a little self-centered on my part but it wasn’t a bad Friday for me at all. A guilt-free say at home, personal projects done at my own pace, and a bit of pretty weather at the end. It’s a snow day!
Tasha watches the snowy world from the comfort of a place mat on the dining room table. Photo by James Guilford.
Left-hand is post-, right-hand is pre-calibration of monitor.
I’ve never calibrated my computer monitors. With all the photography and publication work I’ve done on computers over the years, it’s never been done. Lately, looking at my photos on various monitors and in print, I’ve begun to feel something needed to be done. So I bought a Spyder3 Elite colorimeter and calibrated my monitor this morning. It was a fairly easy process once the software was installed and updated. The colorimeter and its software ask certain manual adjustments be made –brightness only, in my case– but is largely automatic. The whole thing was done in under an hour, though I didn’t time it.
The Spyder’s software came with a set of photos displayed in a window that, after calibration, allowed fast switching between the monitor’s former color settings and the “corrected” ones. The “before” and “after” displays were both acceptable and pleasing but post-calibration images were noticably warmer in color. In general my monitor also seems a bit brighter and possibly a bit contrastier.
As a non-scientific test, I opened my recent sunset photo from its RAW file and adjusted it in ways similar (as best I can recall) to what I’d previously done. Then I copied half of the previously-pleasing picture and superimposed it on the newly-adjusted image. Whoa! That’s what’s displayed above. In each case the colors may be more brilliant than the original scene but the comparison is still striking.
So I’m hoping for better, more consistent results with my photos and graphics. It wasn’t cheap but I think it will be worth it.
Even in Ohio we sometimes enjoy sunsets worthy of photographs.
A day of changeable weather in Northeastern Ohio ended with a spectacularly colorful sunset illuminating rippled clouds. We used to believe we had to travel to the Arizona desert to enjoy such color when really, all we need to do is stop and look around.
Tasha enjoys laundry in her own way. The rest of us merely do the wash.
It was a day off today so I did minor cleaning of things, some prep work on the Big Publishing Project, a couple hours for lunch out, with a little time for washing my shirts. I usually lay out the shirts in a stack on the bed to collect later for the trip to the basement. If she’s around, Tasha always takes the opportunity to nest amongst the shirts. A photograph of the practice was long overdue.
The way an antenna should be installed: displayed proudly under clear blue skies.
So far the “cut the cable” experiment has gone pretty well. Special thanks go to the digital television conversion — local broadcasters now transmit HD content but have taken advantage of digital technologies (and new regulations) to add channels.
On the “up” side: we don’t pay high cable fees for gobs of content we never watch. And HD content looks better when it comes straight to your antenna rather than through anyone’s cable system.
On the “down” side: we live in a condominium and reception sucks! We’re only a few miles from the primary TV broadcast towers for this region. Since the condo association forbids exterior antennas, our modern signal-catcher is mounted in the attic. The attic wasn’t too awful except that now the roof over it is carrying about a foot of ice and snow which, it turns out, is pretty effective in blocking TV signals. Formerly sufficient reception is now unreliable and signals that once were strong are now only adequate. {sigh}
Now I’m told FCC regulations say condo associations may not forbid installation of TV antennas outdoors. But the FCC doesn’t live here and they don’t have to deal with the formidable (being polite) woman who rules the board. So we’ll wait for the thaw to return our signal strength. (And wish we had our own single-family house.)
In the mean time we’ve a new favorite program in the wonderful 1960s series Mr. Ed being shown on one of those “secondary” channels. We also enjoy a number of new shows on the big commercial networks and are rediscovering the joys of PBS. Fortunately or not “Downton Abbey” on Masterpiece Classic has us watching every week. Yeah, it’s a high-class soap opera but engrosses us with its characters, acting, story, and amazing sets all shown in glorious HD.
We haven’t yet felt the need to attach a computer to the TV to view content from the Web. She Who Must Be Obeyed does regularly watch some of her favorite shows on her big notebook especially when the TV signal is too weak.
A recent ice storm-related power outage made for an interesting experience. The electricity went out for about two hours one evening. We lit candles, used flashlights, and when the house began to cool we pressed the wood-burning stove into its ultimately practical use. So in our cozy living room by candlelight, She and I fired up our respective notebook computers –She with on online TV show, me with my Web and Twitter activities– and spent an enjoyable evening. Er, computers and Internet when the power’s out? Easy… the notebooks ran on their own high-capacity internal batteries and our wireless Internet router was running on its big external “UPS” battery.
What an odd thing… sitting there in our living room in a darkened neighborhood using technologies colonial settlers would recognize and use –candles for light and wood stove for heat– alongside our 21st century wireless Internet with its movies, email, and global instant messages! Yeah, they’d have burned us at the stake!
Well, well, well… the new release of the WordPress App for Apple iOS is good! I’ve used it several times now to manage comments and post replies. I’m even composing this entire brief post on my iPod Touch! The app doesn’t “hang” now and I’ve not had to reset my Touch; that’s the way it ought to be and should have been from the beginning. Thanks, WordPress, for fixing it!
Apple iBook G4. Credit: Apple Inc.
Someone donated a cool little Apple iBook G4 (ca. 2006) to our Friends group. At first the recipients thought it was dead. Turning it over to me resulted in a functioning computer ready for sale to benefit the group.
A cautionary tale is, however, in order:
Once I got the notebook booted I started looking around on its hard drive and checking the machine’s applications. Nice: Mac OS-X ver. 10.5.8. All of the Apple basics. Very good. Wi-Fi access — hmmmm…… what’s this in the Safari browser? The former owner’s Gmail account… OPEN! And her Amazon.com account login! Gad!! Between those two things, plus the identity information she failed to remove from the Mac, I could have purchased no end of items and produced no limit of trouble for the goodhearted Ms. K. Yikes! Thank goodness the Mac wasn’t sold to some bad guy!
I instantly logged out of Gmail, erased the browser history, cleared her identity information. Ideally the hard drive should have been formatted but, with no OS installation discs, that would have reduced the used computer’s sale value to near zero. Clearly, however, the former owner’s level of risk has been vastly reduced through the little bit of work I did in her stead.
And if the Friends can’t sell the little Mac, I hope to buy it!
I’ve paid good money at a “photo-sharing” site for a place to display, market, and protect my images. Their stock page templates suck. So I’m still lookin’.
I actually like the free photo blogging theme offered here, at WordPress. Though it will only display one photo per post, it does offer protection against “click and grab” abduction of my pictures. It does not offer protected galleries and some of the features of the pay site.
As usual, if you take the best features of two or more sites you’ll get something that’s really good. {sigh}
Here’s the URL of my WordPress experiment: http://guilfordphoto.wordpress.com
W00066279.jpg was taken on January 11, 2011 and received on Earth January 12, 2011. The camera was pointing toward RHEA at approximately 59,938 kilometers away, and the image was taken using the CL1 and CL2 filters. Sister moons are seen above and to the left of Rhea; the bright line is an edge-on view of Saturn's ring system. This image has not been validated or calibrated. Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute. Levels, contrast, and brightness adjusted by James Guilford.
It seamed like it might be fun to toy around with brand-new raw images just received from the Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn. I must say I didn’t do much with the image. Still, it was fun to see details emerging from a formerly soft, gray picture as I made adjustments to the image. I’m away from my home office so I used GIMP instead of Photoshop but I’m sure to play with pictures like this more often in future!
PhotonStopper 