Screaming Monkey Research Laboratories

Went with an Upper Sioux Agency photo of absolutely nothing.

The beta just ate the photo of the week. Might be time to order the real thing.

Was stitching an image from Savanna Portage. Looks nice enough except the focus is hosed on the right image. (Two images stitched into a square image.) Think I need to buy gaffers tape to hold things like focus when doing panos. Particularly since I want to do some multi row panoramas.

Anywho, CS3 app errored on the potw so it will be up sometime after I get the gumption to recreate it.

At a photo seminar I went to last year John Shaw repeated the mantra “Merges will kill you.” What he means is that having elements of an image just touch a border or blend into another part of an image will kill the image. He’s right.

Here is an example. I’ve played a lot with this photo. I’ve tried a lot of crops. (This is about the left third of the original image.) What kills the image every time is that the plant just barely touches the left border. Makes the image feel very cutoff and crowded. Color (can’t tell here), focus, DOF, etc are all done just as I wanted. (The blurred background goes from green to red on the right. Otherwise the full frame would work.) That left border kills it. That left edge is so sudden.

This picture makes me mad every time I look at it. I took one exposure. If I’d taken 2 maybe I’d have an image. Give me a petals width of border on the left and it would be framed.

Merges kill you.

This is the first time I’ve tried this one in black and white. I like the conversion but the original green and yellow version makes for a better photo.

The great thing about Exif data is that you can see when you took a photo. If you fill in keywords and whatnot you can tell where you took it. This was taken on April 24th 2 or 3 years ago at Nerstrand. Time to go looking for some more of these things. I really wish I’d taken a wider photo for context. I’ve no idea what kind of plant to look for.

Should have cropped more on the right for this try.

Snap Dragons (I think. Not an expert.) at Upper Sioux Agency. Was actually looking for another photo but I can’t get the conversion I want out of CS3. Once again I mourn the death of Raw Shooter Premium. Truly a superior product.

Anywho, the B+W conversion was done with the new B+W tool in photoshop. A couple oddities that if I go back I’ll fix.

Maybe should have cropped a little tighter. If you sit back it works. If you sit close the “star” flower is kind of lost. Something to look for, I guess, should I be there at the right time again. (Which, BTW, is what keywording and exif is for. I can find this and see when I should show up again.)

Turns out if you go the other way there is a pond and all kinds of things. About 40,000 robins (not the batman kind) nesting in the area, too. Oddly, I saw nothing using any of the birdhouses.

Been playing with HDR again. I’ve determined two things.

1. The photo still has to be interesting. Particularly if you are going to shoot 5 identical pictures of it.

2. Photoshop’s HDR sucks.

I like this photo. Course I like my cat so that isn’t a huge surprise. (I wonder what CM Burns is doing back there.)

Some technical commentary. This was taken at ISO 1600 with my Canon EOS Xti. Unlike ISO 1600 photos taken with my 20D this required noise reduction. That might be a side effect of using a new raw convertet. Time to hunt down some Xti profiles and get Neat Image working under CS3.

As an aside, the 17-85IS has wonderful bokeh.

I had no idea this was a problem these days. Or, well, ever.

From the TaxCut Minnesota State edition…

Cattle Tuberculosis Testing Credit

If you own cattle and you incurred expenses during the year to test your cattle for tuberculosis, you may qualify for a credit of 50 percent of your total expenses.

I need to redo this one. I grabbed the wrong image for the leftmost bit. It didn’t merge right so I had to crop it off. With that one in place you get a nice feel for superior. Not so much with this one. The B+W conversion worked nicely.

Click on the image to see a much bigger version.