Memorial Day 2010

Haven't had time to properly blog recently. I'm going to work on improving that. This is from my grab bag of leftovers.

Day 173 of 365

Bridge Not Far Enough

Day 172 of 365

Zig or Not

Day 171 of 365

Scratch

Day 170 of 365

Cal Stirs

The glass wall of the CalSTRS building in West Sacramento . . .

. . . a polar coordinated deep space telescope . . .

. . . and then a zigged and zagged oscilloscope . . .

. . . the randomness of content-aware chaos . . .

. . . with dabs of oil paint . . . but not really. Never really.

Day 169 of 365

Parking lot flowers

I've been doing a lot of driving, which means a lot of parking lots.




Day 168 of 365

Road kill on the deck

Basking in the sun . . .

I was experimenting with the flash I bought for the camera.

There's just no magic here. (See this)

And finally, a slightly painted photo that makes it jump alive.

Day 167 of 365

Indistinguishable from magic

Arthur C. Clarke formulated three "laws" of prediction. Law No. 3:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Meet the magic of Adobe Photoshop CS5's "Content-Aware" automatic fill.

A pair of ducks spent the afternoon by our pool. The Wife and I believe this is the same pair who spent several days by the pool last year. Maybe. Maybe not.

Anyway, I recently received my copy of Adobe Creative Suite CS5. On the Photoshop side, the big talking point has been the ability of the software to examine the content surrounding an area of the image and imagine what that area would look like if you deleted the existing content and replaced it with content-aware fill. I have watched several videos of this, but it is just something you have to see to believe.

I created a rough outline of the duck in the foreground. That's what would be the marching ants if this were a moving picture. And then I hit shift-delete, which brought up this dialogue box. This says the fill contents will use "Content-Aware." That's the default for this. All I did was click on OK.

And after my computer thought about all of this for maybe 30 seconds, I was left with this. Honest. All I did was loosely mark the boundary of what I wanted to remove, pressed shift-enter and then clicked OK.

If you look at the picture at full size you will see a little blurring in the grass that lets on that something happened. Also, the cement that replaces the duck is a straight copy of the image to the right, including the plant that extends into the concrete.

Now, no disrespect meant to the dog and his trick tongue (here), but this is real magic.

Day 166 of 356

The Dog

We take a detour from The Cats to meet The Dog.

Our dog's name is Blainee. The Kid named her. At the time, he was really excited about magician David Blain.
There is something magical about being able to lick the top of your nose.

Day 165 of 356

In the Shadow

One shadow; three views.



Day 164 of 365

Zipper

A study of our lady cat, who was very zippy as a kitten but who has grown into a stout matron.



This last photo I tried out Photoshop CS5's new extraction tool. Very neat!

Day 163 of 365

11:55 p.m.

OK. Time to pull one out of the bag of leftovers. Got distracted first installing a new printer and then attempting to output something that looked on paper even close to what it looked like on the computer. No luck.

So you get this . . .
The Cottage Park bridge over the creek behind the pool. . .


. . . and mystery art.

Day 162 of 365

Parking Lot Flowers

These were taken near sundown in a parking lot at Howe About Arden. The backlit translucence of the flowers caught my eye when I pulled into a parking space. It pays to keep the camera with me at all times.



Day 161 of 365

Eating fresh cherries

Just because I can't eat the cherries . . .

. . . doesn't mean they go to waste . . .

The robin made several stabs at flying off with the prize . . .

. . . but just couldn't fly with the cherry.

Day 160 of 365

Cherries

It's really too bad that I can't eat cherries. A neighbor has a tree that's ready to harvest.

I love the lighting on these last two. This is the product of my experimenting with manually adjusting the exposure.

Day 159 of 365

10K test

Started the year with a couple of running goals: 5k Komen and 10k Thanksgiving Run to Feed the Hungry. Having completed the Komen race, I decided today on the spur of the moment to see if I could complete 10k.

Back when I made my New Year's resolution I mapped out my 10k practice run. The one criteria I had was that it had to have as little overlap as possible. Here's the route:

Managed to finish the route, walk the dog and then go back to a bottle brush bush I'd passed twice and take a picture for today.

And, of course, since I'm supposed to be working right now, I instead played with Photoshop and came up with these:

Day 158 of 365