The other day I came across a suggestion in a beginning photographers' forum on flickr that to make your photos appear more dazzling, you can use post-processing software to turn up the color saturation. I don't know how I feel about that. It just seems like cheating. But to test it out I re-processed one of my early successes. Here are the results.


Before...





and after...




I also re-cropped the image, and played with the exposure settings a little. The differences are subtle I guess. I could have made it garishly bright, but that would have been grotesque, like lipstick on a baby.


Anyway, better?


Speaking of color...I almost hate to put this here since it's an advertisement and the S--- corporation isn't paying me anything...but there is this fascinating clip on You-tube that I've been watching over and over lately. I just look at it as a guy made a really neat film, but really neat films don't happen for free, so someone has to pay for it. If you want, just watch it and block out the logo at the beginning and end. Anyway, here it is...

Labels: Photos

I'm on the 10th installment of Moby Dick and Ishmael has just barely managed to get himself into bed at an inn called The Spouter. I think a gay bath house now occupies the space where the Spouter used to reside, which is fortunate since they wouldn't have had to change the signs.

But seriously folks. We've only just barely seen the character who I think is Captain Ahab and we, or rather Ishmael, hasn't even seen his face yet. The guy who is maybe Ahab has been out selling head...I mean, selling a head, specifically the head of a New Zealander. Everyone's reaction to this fact is disturbingly casual. Maybe Ahab proceeds to undress and is about to climb in bed with Ishamel, who has been forced to share quarters with the whaler due to a lack of space at the inn. (If I had a dollar for every head-peddling whalers I've shared a bed with...) In any case, it seems an inauspicious way to begin an adventure. But then I already know we're going to end up chasing a white whale before we're done, so what did I honestly expect?


Anyway, I don't know if I want to do this whole, blogging Moby Dick thing. There is already a guy who is blogging The Bible. But I don't want to seem like a copy cat. Plus, there are probably a lot of people way more qualified to do this. What to y'all think? I'll do it if I get some positive feedback that says people are interested in reading this, otherwise, I'll just keep reading and give updates about what is happening in the book every once in a while.

Also, I went out to take pictures today, so hopefully I'll have some to post soon.

Labels: Meta-blogging, Reading

Every once in a while I like to take a break from talking about my self-indulgent life, and write about something cool I found whilst trolling the series of tubes.

The other day I learned about a website called Daily Lit. How it works is you choose a book you want to read, and they will send a snippet of it by e-mail each day until you've read the whole thing. I signed up to read Moby Dick, which, maybe I should have started with something less ambitious, but this is one of those books I've always "meant" to read, and so this is probably the least painful way to do it. Even so, if I only read one chunk each day it will take 252 days before Ahab finishes chasing that damn whale. Fortunately there is an option to force immediate delivery of the next chunk, so I will read more on weekends, and it will "only" take me six months to finish. Think I'll stick with it that long? Yeah, me neither. But it'll be fun to try.

After this, maybe I'll tackle War and Peace, at a whopping 675 parts. Yikes

Labels: browsing