Screaming Monkey Research Laboratories

If you need to debug web layouts and style sheets firebug is the way to go. It is a free add on for firefox that lets you do all kinds of nifty things. Helped me fix the header on this site under IE7.

Recommended.

National Wildlife Refuge from just bellow flying cloud airport. They do not have the overlooks open there anymore which is really too bad.

I’ve posted versions of this image before. This one is done with Adobe Photomerge. 4 or 5 images combined into one. Lens correction used to try to straigten it out. Then noise reduction. (This was a very noisy image.) And the exposure was very tough. So after all the work to get the exposure reasonable the colors were, um, odd. Fixing that was an adventure and resulted in colors not seen in nature. But they’re closer than they were. So what you see in this photo may be a complete fantasy, but I like the feel of it.

Click the picture to see a larger version of it.

Some more off camera strobe experiments. These didn’t work. I didn’t really expect them too. I like this box. It isn’t as colorful as this picture but it has great detail. (Not that you can tell in this picture.)

Playing with off camera strobes. (Well, strobe.) I had a flash off the right side and above. The flash was uncovered and set to about 50 mm to make pretty harsh shadows. I was holding a reflector trying to light up the front of the display.

A few problems. The reflector was only a 12″ portable one so it didn’t provide as much fill as I would like. I would have used the on camera but it was putting out too much flash. Something between the two would be great. The bigger issue is the old blanket I was using as a backdrop. It was fine at some of the wider f stops but this one was stopped down to f8. All the pilling and all that really show up. I hoped to deal with it in post but I think I need to come up with a better technique than the one I was using.

I don’t have the details of this image anymore. It is Teddy Roosevelt with the Rough Riders somewhere. (Well, it says where but I’m not sure if that is the US or where.) But I don’t know who took the photo or any of those particulars. I downloaded it from the Library of Congress.

I dust spotted this. (I can see a spot I screwed up by his glove.) All in all it prints wonderfully. Far better than I thought it was going to. It took a fair amount of work to get enough defintion on his glasses to make them show up. I might try another version with the writing cloned out.

I purchased Qimage to make printing easier and wanted to give it a try with a new image. Found this one on my desktop first. Pleased with both the software and the print.