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 [↩]

“… 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.

There a problem in today’s world. It’s widespread and is very crippling, in some cases. The problem, of course, is that of the “jaggies” (so maybe not the technical term). Many computers with LCDs and many laptops suffer from this. This is when the fancier, (usually) more interesting fonts on a webpage or elsewhere looks very jagged on LCD monitors. On the CRT monitors, the text will display fine. Take a look at the example of bwong.net below:

On the left, we have the jagged letters. As you can see, the letters look very crude and just plain ugly. On the right, however, we have text that is rendered using what is called “ClearType.” See the difference? The font is much smoother and much easier on the eyes than the one on the right. There’s an interesting reason behind it, but I won’t bother explaining since the Wikipedia article can do it far better.
Instead, I’ll show you guys step-by-step (there’s only three) how to alleviate this problem on Windows (as far as I know, Macs don’t have this problem)

Step 1:

Right click your desktop and click on “Properties”:

Step 2:

Click on the “Appearance” tab, and then the “Effects” button:

Step 3:

Click the checkbox “Use the following method…” and then choose “ClearType” from the pull-down menu:

And voila! Smooooove letters.