Fun with Photoshop

About a year and a half ago, we took this cute picture of Elise sitting on our bed. When she got excited she would wave her arms about wildly and yell.


Although it was a pretty cute picture to begin with, I thought it could use a little something.

Pictures of the Kids

Last year, after having mixed results taking Elise to the portrait studio, we decided to buy a better camera and do photos ourselves. After using Kara & Ben's Nikon, we bought a Nikon D40 from B&H. We also got the Nikon SB-400 flash, both of which are absolutely wonderful. We've gotten a ton of great candid photos of the kids, but we also wanted to get some posed shots too.

So last week Katie & I went outside to take some pictures of the girls. It was a nice sunny day, and I had the flash one the camera to provide some fill light. We started out with Elise in the sun, until a helpful neighbor (who happened to be a professional photographer) suggested we put her in the shade. This turned out to be very good advice. Below is one of the pictures of Elise.

That's the original image as captured by the camera without any processing. Nice, but a little flat and washed out. Below is the same picture with the default processing by the camera. Better, but still leavs a little to be desired.

I shot the photos in RAW mode, which means the file is a .NEF instead of a .JPG. It's sort of like shooting on film and having access to the the negative - it has more detail than a print.
I opened the RAW file in Adobe Camera Raw, part of Photoshop. This gave me all kinds of tools for correcting exposure & white balance, boosting saturation, and adjusting individual colors. This let me do things like fix the blue ribbons on her dress that had previously been washed out. Anyway, below is the finished picture. Isn't she cute?

And here's a split of all three pictures:

Biking to Work - Day 13

Here are some notes from biking to work for 13 days. I'm writing this partly for me to look back on and partly for any other bikers that might stumble onto this and be interested it someone else's experience.

• It feels like a lot longer than 13 days. (12½ days actually, I still have to bike home tonight.) I feel like I've been doing this for a long time
• It's a lot easier than when I started. Still a lot of work, but more manageable.
• I'm taking Memorial Parkway home instead of Waterworks. I like it much better.
  
• I still drive to work on Tuesdays & Thursdays, but every time I get in my car it feels like it's been about a couple of weeks since I drove.
• Even on a fairly mild morning, a water bottle full of ice cubes will melt in under 30 minutes.
• Most cars are pretty tolerant and courteous of bikes, but every once in a while there's some guy who thinks 6 inches is plenty of space to leave between us, even though there's an empty lane right next to him.
• Sometimes it's safer to take up a whole lane than to stay all the way to the right.
• For the first two weeks, my leg muscles weren't sore, stiff or anything. My lungs and heart couldn't keep enough to give them a real workout. The past two weeks, my heart & lungs have caught up enough allow my legs to start getting workout.
• I've lost about 10 pounds.
• I'm still making some progress on my times, but it has definitely started to slow. Here's a graph:

Go Get Some Friends

Katie is working at Grace's VBS this week, so the girls will be spending the week in the nursery. Last night at dinner we were telling Elise about it, mentioning the fact that she would be spending a lot of time this week playing with other little boys & girls, which she refers to as: "Go get some friends."

Knowing that it would be a big day, we put her to bed early. Katie got stuff ready for the next morning and I did some work, and three hours later she still wasn't asleep - we could hear her in her room talking and singing and making noise. Katie got a sippie-cup of milk, hoping that would help her go to sleep. The moment I opened the door to go in and give it to her, out of the dark I hear her tiny, excited and very awake little voice: "Go get some friends?" Like a kid on Christmas morning, at 10pm she was hoping it was time to get up and play with friends.

7 Days of Commuting

I guess it's time for an update on the commuting thing. For starters, at the suggestion of my biking friend I decided that rather than going from no exercise at all to biking 15 miles per day in traffic, I would start out doing it every other day - so that I wouldn't die. So I and am doing Monday Wednesday & Friday.

Because I'm a geek, I keep track of how long it takes me and calculate my average overall speed. And I make graphs. Pastor Steve would be proud. What the graph doesn't show is the fact that my times have decreased every day with one exception (the obvious dip in the blue line). The slight dips in the red line is were I took a shortcut which decreased my overall time, but also decreased my average speed.

I's also getting easier. Not easy, but easier. Here's a few things I've noticed:

• The first few days all I could think about was "What have I gotten myself into?" Then when I would arrive I would collapse on the floor for 15 minutes to recover and wonder if I could return the bike. Now I don't even have to collapse on the floor at all.
• On my first commute it took 43 minutes to get in. This morning it took just under 29.
• The first ride I stopped about 5 times on the way in to rest, this morning I didn't stop at all. (the rests alone probably account for the time difference)

I say all this not to brag, because I realize that a 7½ mile bike trip is not a huge deal. I thank God for giving me the discipline to do this, because it doesn't come naturally to me - I'm not an extremely physically disciplined person by nature. I know a lot of people who are, and I think you're all weird :) Anyway, I'll keep you posted.

Open Office

This post of the first of many that probably won't be entertaining, but hopefully useful.

Microsoft Office is a great tool, but fairly expensive. It's goes right now for just under $400. That pretty steep for a lot of people. If you're one of those people, you might want to check out OpenOffice.org, or OOo as it's commonly referred to. OOo is free, open source (that's generally a good thing), can read and write MS Office files, and contains most of the functionality of Microsoft Office. In some cases, OOo has a step up on Microsoft. For example: Excel hasn't yet figured out that time began before Jan 1st, 1900. Yup, so if you're making a list of historical events or birthdates of ancestors and want to sort them, Excel won't help much. Calc (the spreadsheet tool in OOo) handles that just fine. Enjoy!

Tagging Spots

A couple of weeks ago I did a post about a TV spot I do for the Cincinnati Zoo. Lest you think my job is always that exciting, I thought I'd tell you about what I did last week: I tagged spots for Fazoli's. What is "tagging" you ask? Well, someone else edited a commercial, and at the end they left some empty space on the screen. It looked like this:


My job is to "tag" that commercial with special text for about 40 different markets that are running the commercial. So if you live in Lexington, KY you'll see this:


I know it's exciting, but please try to contain yourselves, folks. After that, we send them out and the TV stations air them, and people all around the country say "Hey, it's 10:30 and I'm hungry, but Fazoli's is still open so let's go find one of their 15 area locations locations and get some food!"