This looks promising to a home theater geek like me. HD over Cat5.

Paul Stamatiou’s K2 theme customizations.

I’m messing around with this new theme. Please hold while I unb0rk the header image. Header image seems to be working. On with the tweaks… Hmm, the header image is not rendering correctly in Safari. Looks fine in Firefox and IE…

Appears fixed in Safari and now it doesn’t quite render correctly in Firefox (Mac). Top and bottom sections of green are different values in Safari. Seems fine in other browsers on Mac and Win.

Looking better now I think. I faded the header image, after re-cropping it to get rid of the top green border (salvaged from the old theme, this is the header image Dave made and I still like it).

I find when I’m on holidays and taking those precious holiday snaps, my habits can be divided quite simply: 1) This looks kind of interesting but I’m in a bit of a hurry so I’ll grab a quick snap and pray and 2) Oh my God I’ll be able to sell this as a limited edition print so let me shoot 5 or 10 or 20 different compositions and/or exposures to get this one right. When I get home or back to the hotel and download all of my photos I can usually see what I was trying to accomplish but it never is accomplished.

Enter Photoshop.

For the most part I find a can make something of just about every shot I’ve taken. I kid you not. Sadly I’ve yet to sell any limited edition prints but that’s another thing. This particular shot could easily have been a pass or a throw-away. For you it probably is. But I was there and it’s my holiday and I want to capture the mood and the memory. So yes, I spent a couple of hours on this silly little holiday snap. And I like it. Click the image below to go to a wide (1200 px) combined image of before, after and zoomed results of my efforts.

In a nutshell what I’ve done is used a lens blur filter to draw the eye down the alley to focus on the painting resting on an easel at the end and make you say, “oooooo, I wonder what’s down there”. Next, I grabbed the burn tool and darkened the midtones of the subject (the painting) and a few other areas that looked washed out. Finally I applied an unsharp mask to sharpen the details. The result for me is a throw-away I just may keep.

…Americans don’t know the Constitution!

I’ve just finished the second and longest part of my involvement in “Constitution Challenge,” a PBS program that aims to teach 10th graders about the US Constitution. It’s in a game show format: to introduce a new question, the host throws it to a “man on the street” - that’d be me - who poses questions to random passing strangers. We shot in four cities, in a total of seven locations. Here’s a rundown of where we shot and what it was like… Continue Reading »