crappyjones123

Dinner for the lady tonight. Bourbon and peppercorn salmon and cajun marinated catfish, with steamed green beans and fresh spinach.

Yes. They said to wait till Wednesday and that they would contact Adorama themselves to see if the matter could be sped up.

Ken, I pay off my cards daily to make sure I live within my means but also to maintain my credit history. So it's not like have something to hold over the credit card company. Rather the credit card company is paid and so is Adorama. It is I who doesn't have the product I paid for. Adorama refuses to release the funds to my credit card company until their internal investigation and UPS' internal investigations are done. Seems reasonable but the amount of time they are taking to do it is absurd.

Brent said he liked this one the most on Facebook. Edited it on my laptop instead of the monitor at my apartment so colors might be a bit off. Don't have photoshop so can't play with layers or blend images in Lightroom but recently found out about the Enfuse plugin which allows you to blend images. Still not sure how different sliders work and what kind of effect they have on the images but here is a poor attempt at blending images. I took one image underexposed and another overexposed thinking blending them will give me better dynamic range but I seem to get better results from single frames with the D800. That or I don't know what I am doing with Enfuse. Will play with it some more later. Edit - yay for intact EXIF data.

Gene, EXIF data can be seen here - http://500px.com/photo/64555441 http://500px.com/photo/64566503 I had a fairly dark ND filter (I think 64x) in front of the sigma 35/1.4. It's quite annoying that imgur strips exif data from images uploaded to it. Are there any free image hosts that are allowed here that don't do that? The first one is actually quite close to what I saw. Just more saturated due to the longer exposure. But the water really looked that green color close to the beach. Farther out it was nice and clear blue. The second one is a bit more cooked. I boosted vibrance quite a bit and pulled back saturation. Sharpened and boosted contrast on the pier a wee bit - can't really tell the difference. Took it into Color Efex 4 and stacked a vignette filter for the darker corners and a warmth filter to tone down the grey and blues as they were rather distracting in the clouds. Took it back in lightroom and reduced overall clarity and reduced saturation even more.

Slightly different processing.

Thanks Nate. Spring break started yesterday at 5 so I thought I would go to the beach early morning. Got up and looked at the weather - 77 and clear. Got to the beach an hour later and it was pouring. Snuck this one when the rain let up for a few minutes.

Sigma 35/1.4

Hokay. Will call Zeiss USA tomorrow.

What would Zeiss do here? Adorama is one of their biggest sellers. They aren't going to yell at them.

Nope. Never going back to Adorama again - Helen was rather flippant in her response to the first email. I didn't even get a response to the second email. I am basically out $2200 right now for an untold amount of time which is quite annoying.

Todd, I was too frustrated to stay so I drove off like a petulant child. The last few days we had no clouds and those pictures end up being somewhat Corning. This morning we had just the right amount so I saw it when I got home. I shall try again next weekend maybe.

Get up at 5 and drove an hour to meet up with some people to shoot a sunrise (they were there to surf) and forgot my fucking sd card at home. Yelled at the ocean in frustration and random people came to find out if I was ok. Baaah.

http://anuragkatyal.blogspot.com/2014/03/shadow-dancer.html

I made the mistake of picking up Thomas Hardy instead of Thomas Harris by accident when I was first looking for the Hannibal series. WORST. MISTAKE. EVER. He was the most depressing author I have ever read. Can't remember even getting through that book.

I've read all of his work multiple times over. Excellent author.

Last one for tonight.

I tried to clone the bright spots to something in the neighborhood but it ended up looking much worse so I left them be. Lightroom doesn't have many options for dealing with super bright highlights. I'll try fixing the spots once I finish working on the other images.

Thank you Gene. One of my all time favorite movies, Red Dragon, was the inspiration for the past few images. Had my philosophy advisor agreed, my thesis would have been on cannibalism and how it affects the cannibals psyche in terms of emotional and sexual gratification. I find the topic fascinating. Towards the end of the movie, Anthony Hopkins, looks up and says, "Do you dream much, Will? I think of you often..." I get chills every time I see/hear it. In the scene you see Hannibal look up in quite a similar way as the pictures in the last post. Rehan, one of my classmates, agreed to help me play around with some cheap studio lights I recently acquired. We took some usual portraits but I wanted to try to catch her doing something different since she is always smiling and happy. She was sitting and all of a sudden looked up and I remembered the scene from Red Dragon and then spent half an hour trying to light the scene just right. Only post processing done was crop/straighten and sharpening of the eyes. Everything else is SOOC. Here's a less scary one. All taken with a D800, Zeiss 135/2. Lighting varied throughout the images but for my self portrait, I had a light bouncing off an umbrella at a 45 degree angle behind me. Similar set up for her photo but the angle was 10-20 degrees only as her hair were blocking the light. I know there are those two bright spots on her nose from the light but I am still learning. =/

Linux distros.

Nope. It's a server in a spehshul place.

I think I win for now MD