I’ve recently (tried to) pick up photography¹ again. One thing that has always been a big deal to a lot of people is that I photoshop my photos. It seems like people find it disingenuous that I do, but I think it’s a necessary part of photography. Why? Because:

1. No matter what you do, the camera will not produce what you perceive in real life.
2. As with any form of art, I believe it is created to evoke emotion

Take, for example, a photo that a few people have particularly liked².

Now, what did the original, straight-out-of-the-camera image look like?

World of difference right? What I guess many people don’t quite know is that no matter how good you are and how much time you spend changing the settings on your camera, there’s no way to create the first photo straight from the camera. It’s just a simple limitation on the technology. Even with film, there are a lot of things you can’t do unless you do some post-processing in the darkroom.

And even if it could come close, personally I think a photo should convey something. Capturing the moment isn’t merely capturing the image of it, but the emotion and the power of the image. In the above example, bringing out the contrast in the sky emphasizes the gloominess of the photo and of the scene.

Now, when photoshopping someone/something into or out of a photo, that’s where I feel it starts to break down and becomes disigenuous. Even then, it depends on the extent and purpose of it.

Anywho, if you want to see how I got from the second photo to the first, I’ve created a screencast here: http://www.vimeo.com/2130347

I’ve also embedded the video below. (There’s no audio, in case you’re wondering!)

How I Photoshop from benny on Vimeo.

1. Photo site [↩]
2. A Day in Dirty Jerz [↩]

1. You don’t crash (yet). Thank you. That makes me happy.
2. When I move you onto my second, smaller screen, you know this. You readjust, and I appreciate that.
3. You finally understand me. When I zoom, the pictures should zoom too, not just the text. You really know my soul .

PS: Laura, this does not change the way I feel about you.

So I was reading this article the other day

But maybe people simply like what they do and aren’t, as some management would have you believe, asking for too much — just the elimination of a small but disproportionately powerful amount of office inanity.

That doesn’t sound quite right to me.

The article has the same tone and message throughout. Maybe it’s me, but I feel like I demand a lot from my job. While I think you don’t necessarily need a job that you would marry given the chance, but I feel like elimination of “office inanity” isn’t enough?

I’d to hear your thoughts on this. Maybe the author is right, but from my own experience and the people around me, the message of the article just doesn’t quite fit?

So how do you like your job and what would make it the “perfect job”?

My buddy Jon has been prisoner to iMovie since we got back a week+ ago and has made two video, one from our trip to Taiwan and one from our stint in Hong Kong.

Trip to Taiwan: Healing Island

Trip to Taiwan from Jonathan W on Vimeo.

Hong Kong: Homage to Benny

24 Hours in Hong Kong from Jonathan W on Vimeo.

“… now wiggle with it.”

I’m not entirely sure why, but I’ve recently been hit with a fear of loss of data. This should have hit me earlier as I’ve lost three hard drives in the past two or so years. And I know it’ll happen again. Mostly it was because I was a college student and anything but ‘free’ was too expensive.

And it’ll, more likely than not, happen to you to. Of course, hard drives have gotten better through the years, but the failure might not be hardware related. Other things could happen: fire, theft, dog ate my hard drive, leprechauns, etc.

So because of my fear of leprechauns stealing my hard drive, I decided to look into the alternatives (read: read a lot of blogs) and found Amazon S3. It’s not free, but now that I’m making money, I figure it’s ok to spend a couple bucks to save my important data (pictures!). It’s basically Amazon offering their own storage space to us common folk. I looked at a few other options, such as Mozy, that looked very similar to Amazon’s service. Ultimately, I figured that Amazon has created and maintained many, many Data centers throughout the years, so your data is probably safe with them.

The service itself doesn’t provide an easy way to drag and drop your data, but there’s a piece of software called JungleDisk that makes your Amazon storage space look like another drive so that you can drag and drop! It works on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Now how much does it cost? No, it’s not free, but it’s pretty affordable. Most of the charges come from how much data is sitting on their servers, as well as how much traffic goes to and from their servers (uploading/downloading). Here’s a breakdown of my costs so far:

• Initial Cost: Amazon: $0, JungleDisk: $20
• Initial Upload: Amazon: $12
• Storage Cost: Amazon: $6 (40gb of photos)

So far, it’s cost me $38. So not “cheap” per se. But that’s only the initial startup cost. It now costs me around ~$6 a month to maintain what I have now, and I imagine it’ll only go up by a couple of bucks every half year or so.

I won’t go into the details, but eventually it’ll be cheaper to have an extra external hard drive (and even a RAID system, you still won’t have the reliability and replication that you’ll have with Amazon. And those leprechauns, don’t forget the leprechauns.

I just got into Taipei last night (late!). I’m here on vacation with two friends (one of whom speaks no chinese!) until the 31st. The trip should prove to be … interesting I have a lot to blog about, but as you can see, none of them have made it on here yet. I’ll probably have a lot of downtime traveling around the island so maybe I can sneak a few posts here and there and post them when I’m back online.

It was raining all afternoon here so what better way to spend it than making a website? …okay, so maybe a lot of ways but I settled on remaking the seedless website.

Not much of a makeover since theres not much content, but it sure beats the hell out of the nothing we had before. love it.

from my tumblr:

As you may have heard, there’ve been disasters in Myanmar and China. If you follow those two links, they list ways that you can help out. I encourage you to help out in any way you can.

For anyone who has known me for more than, I don’t know 10 minutes, would know that I am really lazy. I very much believe in the converse of the physics law “things in motion tend to stay in motion.” ie. if I’m sitting my ass in a chair, pretty be damn good to get me out of it.

However, recently, I’ve been oddly productive. I don’t mean at work either, but like in real life. What I’m referring to is some of the side projects I’ve been working on (exhibit a and exhibit b). Now, here’s a revelation I’ve come upon: It feels good to do stuff.

How does this relate to missed opportunities?

Muxtape.com has been getting some buzz around the net. It’s a pretty cool concept, upload a few songs, and be able to play the songs as well as link it with your friend. Simple problem, simple solution. Not trying too hard at all. It’s one of those ‘Web 2.0 startups’ that are bound to be bought out by a Google or Yahoo-types.

A few years ago, I had started develop this site called “hearphone”. Simple idea: upload a few songs, be able to play it, share the link with friends. Sound familiar?

I think part of the reason why I’m, you know, doing things is that it sucks that you miss an opportunity like this because you’re lazy. If you have a good idea, why not go with it? It sucks to regret not putting in the extra little bit to keep going.

Updated (05/08/2008 @ 9:37 AM): my thoughts about other “Mixtape” websites here.

For the two (rss) readers of this blog (according to my feedburner), exciting z0mg 1337 soop3r h4z0r n3wZ!! THERES A NEW BWONG.NET.

Yeah, I know, I don’t care either.

But I’m going to talk about it anyway. So the other day I thought “instead of sitting on my lazy ass, maybe I’ll do something productive,” which lead to the new bwong.net. Over the years, I’ve had grandiose ideas of what bwong.net would be. I could have a lot of things like projects I’m working on, books I’ve read, pictures, videos, A WINDOW INTO MY SOUL, peanuts, music, tiny kitten, and the like. Then, I realized that was all ridiculous. Why would I need a whole complicated website for myself? I have at most 3 things that are interesting about me, and those could be summed up in 1.734 sentences.

So I opted for a simple, straight to point design (if you can even call it a design). It has all I really care to share about me on the internet, and points you to places where you can browse if you’re intruiged. The only thing that is a bit interesting about the page is the “I currently dig” thing. It has nothing to do with digg, but is kind of a weird love child between digg, twitter and my tumblr.

So I wrote a quick little script in PHP do keep these little snippets of things I’m interested in, links I’ve found, categorized with little tags. The script only took an hour or two to write and couldn’t help thinking of DHH’s post about the Immediacy of PHP. Anyway, if anyone is interested in how I did it, it might be fun to write up, but only if anyone cares.

Anyway, that’s all. Enjoy, and I don’t care what you think, I think its pretty.