Photoshoppping

I've been spending a lot of time looking at the photo blogs at www.photoblogs.org. There's a lot of really great images out there. Some of the photographers write about the post-processing work that they do in Photoshop, so we are picking up quite a few tips. One person has a method that she applies to almost all of her shots to create a lot of saturation and drama. I tried it out on some of mine, here's what I got:

The original image:


The modified image:
I'm not entirely certain if I like the effect or not. It's very juicy and certainly dramatic, but it also seems a little too strong, like artificial flavors. Here's one that started with a really unsatisfactory original.




The original, which is grainy
in the shadows, overexposed
in the highlights, and almost
seems foggy.

















The edit, which has more
contrast and is more
colorful. I think this is a
great improvement on the
original.











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Halloween was tons of fun this year. We decorated our front porch with lights and scary music, made a jack'o'lantern, and had enough trick-or-treaters to use up almost all of our candy. It was kind of just like how I remember it growing up. The little kids in their costumes, so sincere with their candy bags and painted faces. The parents standing back on the sidewalk, waiting with flashlights. I wonder if it's still like that in Rocky River. It's totally different from our old neighborhoods in Sacramento, where there's either no children to be seen, or there's unsupervised kids just lolling around in the streets, accosting you rudely as you walk by.

I wonder how those Sacramento kids get so hardened, at such a young age. Is it drugs, or crime, or poverty, or broken homes? I don't think so. We have plenty of those things here, but the kids here are, as a whole, so much more innocent. It's not the isolation that protects them. We may be in a backwater, but most of us have satellite TV here, complete with talk shows and rap videos and movies. If I had to guess, I'd say it's the lack of negative role models.

There have been drug dealers, murderers, thieves, and thugs who have moved into Monument. But it doesn't seem like they last long here. We've heard a few stories of people getting run out of town- people who have set up crank labs here, and people who were in biker gangs. Running someone out of town sounds like frontier justice. But the stories I've heard are mostly just about people being kicked out of rental housing, and noone else being willing to rent to them. It's hard to stay in a town if nobody will rent to you. Simple, effective, done.

That's why we bought a house instead of renting. They can't get rid of us now! Mwahahahahaaaa...