Life and stuff

I’m only late to the Castle Green posting party by a month, but here it is anyway:

Paparazzi shot:

and the rest of the album: 20061203_castle_green

Something possessed me to start going through my photo archives to see how some old shots could be improved in Photoshop.  Up until say a month or two ago Photoshop wasn’t part of my workflow at all until my ‘vision’ of the shot started conflicting with how a camera actually captures a scene.  So here I am now, bitten this bug to ‘correct’ shots from before.  For the moment I limit myself to some quick shadows / highlights, exposure, and color corrections, but its potentially a slippery slope before I begin polishing turds to a golden brown sheen.

Now for an example: Royce Hall in the afternoon, straight from the C5050:

Same shot with some shadow / highlight processing in Photoshop

I would hope that this 5 minutes of my life wasn’t wasted, but thats pretty subjective.  (And monitor dependent as well.  My 2405fp renders colors to be slightly brighter than my 2001fp almost to the point where the processed image  doesn’t look so good.  Meh.)

Here’s one of those things thats cool but relatively unknown (to me at least). LA County is putting on a free Holiday Celebration with music and dance at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Christmas Eve. The length is a bit on the long side — 6 hours of performances! — but people are supposed to be able to come and go as they please. The list of performances also seems pretty sweet for a free performance: Mariachi, Jazz Tap, Chinese Classical (which is supposed to feature a GuZheng), and some dance troupes as well.

Too bad my Christmas Eve is already booked, or I’d be all over this :\

Here’s a pic from the the parking lot near my work site in the boonies:

The rounded cone-shaped thing on the lower left is the Rotary Rocket. I’m also quite fond of the black cloud thats hanging out in the lower-right of the picture. Its a bit out of place and small enough that I wonder if its somebody’s “doom cloud”.

Fellow Bruins, it looks like its time to start scrutinizing our credit reports. According to the LA Times, some hackers have hit the identify theft jackpot: a database with about 800,000 names, social security numbers, and birthdates of former and current students and faculty. 800,000!!! Say some bastard opens new credit cards for just 100 people with an average of a $2500 spending limit for a nice $250,000 in spending power — thats a scary amount of defrauding that can start very soon.