pierces

What's worse than going through all your old photos? Going through someone else's. The portrait I assembled in an earlier post ended up being the tip of the iceberg. The memorial slideshow seems to be a thing now and I just finished up-rezzing, blemish removal and tone correcting about a hundred scanned images. The originals were not what I would call "cared for" and many were faded with the cursed orange cast of poor rinsing when processed. Some were somewhat out of focus or stained/scratched/folded (I think one actually had tire tracks on it). Topaz PhotoAI, Photoshop and Adobe Premier Elements allowed me to complete it in a day, which was surprising. Another surprise was how happy I was to do it. As I said before, Uncle John's sister is a wonderful person and doing favors for good people just doesn't seem like work. Fade example with AI recovery and tone correction: Bad Polaroid stored in one of those "Magic Adhesive" photobooks. Nothing to do about the adhesive artifacts, but uprezzing, face recovery and tone correction made it good enough for a 1080p slideshow. I guess I really am The Family Photographer! 🙂 Dave

Dave

Saturday was Mother's Day at our house. Family work schedules make Sundays a bit of a problem for scheduling family gatherings. We were originally going to have our usual brunch, but a few more work-related issues turned that into Breakfast for Dinner. Steak, eggs, waffles, home-baked cinnamon rolls, hash browns. All the usual favorites served with traditional and non-traditional breakfast beverages. Setting up. cooking and chatting with less-seen family members left me precious little time to take pictures. On my way to do some hosting chore or another, I passed by Hailee and Savannah having sister time. Hailee moving in with us to be closer to school hasn’t put a dent in their twin-like relationship. Two pieces in the wonderful puzzle that is our family. Family Dave

Pictures taken between Monday, May 15 and Sunday, May 21. Life can be busy. The days fly by and at the end of the week we sometimes struggle to remember where that chunk of our lives went. Thake a few minutes to photograph something that interested you or made you smile. Rules: See above That's it. This isn't a contest. All photos taken this week are welcome (not just cruising). Prizes will not be awarded. Discovering the joy of photography is the prize. The idea is to get folks out using their cameras for more than vacations and toddler birthdays. Post one. Post many. Up to you. Have fun with your camera and share your fun with others!

More old photo work. This was a sad task as my son-in-law's uncle passed away last week and they wanted a portrait for the service. John always favored the outdoor life and cared for the horses on his property, so his sister wanted to use a picture of him with his cowboy hat. Unfortunately, the photo found on his phone was just not suitable for the size needed. Their family is not photographically inclined, so my daughter asked if I had any pictures of Uncle John from various family events. I was able to find a few, and they decided on the one below from her wedding. ...but with a cowboy hat added. Darling Daughter asked if it could be done, and I put my foot down just like when she was living at home...and said "yes" (with some strong CMA caveats). Here are the steps: I prepared a 16x20 aspect crop in Lightroom and re-sized it with Topaz Photo AI (fantastic program, BTW). His sister wanted it to be his hat and since she is an absolute saint of a woman, I had her bring it over and I took several shots of it at various angles to match to the chosen image. After loading the images into Photoshop, I cut out the hat, pasted it onto the portrait as a layer, resized to fit, made it semi-transparent, aligned it carefully and trimmed it to reveal the covered parts of his head and face. I spent a little time in the adjustment menu to match up the exposure and level of blur so the two layers looked like parts of one photo. After merging the layers, I cut him out of the frame and cleared it before pasting him back in. I found a background that she liked and fiddled around to adjust the color to her taste. I lightly feathered and trimmed the subject layer so it didn't look like I just Scotch-taped it to the background, then added some shadow under the hat and against the background, I finished up with a final exposure adjustment before flattening the image and doing a small endzone dance. I liked it. She liked it. That's good enough for me. Those old photos often seem to have a hidden reason that made you take them. Dave

If you haven't done any deep-dive into the settings, here are a few thinks to check. ALWAYS shoot at max resolution. Images can be reduced to post or email but quality can never be increased by enlarging. Image stabilization is optional, but unless the shot is taken on a tripod, it is usually better left on. This is a setting you may want to get familiar with. Single AF is good for people and static scenes since it allows you to half-press the shutter and lock onto the subject of your choice. Continuous AF is best used for moving objects (sports, wildlife, hyper children and pets) by allowing the camera to continuously adjusrt focus as the subject moves. Single shot for most of the time for walkabout photography. In low light, continuous shooting helps by taking multiple shots with a chance of catching hand shake at a peak. Movement is usually a back-and-forth or up-and-down thing, and a burst of shots may catch the movement when is stops briefly before reversing. For wildlife continuous is a given but for people, continuous shooting can provide insurance against blinks and random silly expressions. Flash off whenever possible. Sometimes you need it, but natural light will generally look better. Here is an article I wrote about low-light shooting: Low-Light Photography – The Family Photographer (pierce324.com) Another on the compositional rule of thirds (sounds fancy but is really basic): Rule of Thirds – The Family Photographer (pierce324.com) Hope this was helpful. Dave

Back on December 31, 2021, we attended a grand party that turned out to be a farewell to Citrus Grove Distillery. Sad circumstances forced the owners to close the wonderful little speakeasy that had become our go-to venue for a getaway evening with friends. One of the food trucks in the rotation was Cousin’s Maine Lobster. Their lobster rolls, and especially the lobster tots pictured here, became a reason to schedule a night out. A while ago, we though to look up the truck’s whereabouts and found they were regulars at a nearby brewery. It turns out the brewery has really established itself and the evening was a total success. Monthly lobster tots and excellent craft beers like the “Blonde, James Blonde” blonde ale in the photo have resurrected occasional nights out with friends. Manna Tots Dave

Pictures taken between Monday, May 8 and Sunday, May 14. Middle of May is coming up. If you haven't gotten out and had some fun with your camera yet this year (and proved it by posting), shame on you! Ok, not really shameful, but you may have missed out on some joy. 😞 For those of you that have posted, good work! Rules: See above That's it. This isn't a contest. All photos taken this week are welcome (not just cruising). Prizes will not be awarded. Discovering the joy of photography is the prize. The idea is to get folks out using their cameras for more than vacations and toddler birthdays. Post one. Post many. Up to you. Have fun with your camera and share your fun with others!

The FZ-151 has a rating of 210 shots per charge. This is the factory tested rating and can easily vary up or down by 100% depending on whether you are shooting bursts (+) or spend time reviewing images (-). My last compact was a Sony HX5V and I always carried 2 extra batteries, recharging all of them nightly. Digital camera + dead battery = paperweight. As for memory, a couple of 32GB cards should do well. A 16MP camera produces a 4-5MP JPEG file on average an that will give you room for 5k or more shots per card. If you plan to shoot video, test battery and card consumption before your trip and adjust if needed. Enjoy your trip. Alaska is amazing! Dave P.S. Turn off auto-review. It is a battery hog and can cause you to miss a shot waiting for it to clear.

Type of camera? How many shots a day do you typically shoot? Same goes for the memory cards. There's a wide variation in battery performance and memory card consumption based on resolution. Need a little more information. Dave

I have been on a bit of mission lately. I am revisiting the folder listed below and culling the too-blurries, scrapping the ones that fall into the why-the-heck-did-I-take-that category and trimming the redundant images from burst sequences. I re-started the project after running this little report: Considering that I really don't keep everything and have done culling and reorganization in fits and starts over the years, that's still a metric crap-ton of photos to go through. I have also been keywording them and using Lightroom's facial recognition to tag people known to me. (I will do a separate commentary on the hilarious mistakes the facial recognition makes at a later date.) While going through the Family directory (39,209 Files, 437 Folders), a light bulb went off and I actually did something with the idea rather than filing it under "someday". Since all of the grandkids' images have a high percentage of tags associated with them, I thought that doing a small birth-to-now history would be fun for their parents and the Wonderful Wife. I realize that making use of 0.112% of the photos isn't exactly deserving of an end zone dance, but it was fun and made me feel more optimistic that the organization project won't outlive me. I was also sort of thankful for digital. Doing all of the indexing on 4x6 prints and slides would probably have ended up with a dumpster rental. (I only have about 5,000 of those left to sort and scan...) Grandkid Project (pptphoto.com) if you want to take a look at the results. More to come as I make progress and try to come up with more ideas to justify keeping thousands of old photos... Dave

Pictures taken between Monday, May 1 and Sunday, May 7. I seem to remember there were widespread April Showers. Take your camera out and record the arrival of all those May Flowers! Rules: See above That's it. This isn't a contest. All photos taken this week are welcome (not just cruising). Prizes will not be awarded. Discovering the joy of photography is the prize. The idea is to get folks out using their cameras for more than vacations and toddler birthdays. Post one. Post many. Up to you. Have fun with your camera and share your fun with others!

So much of our lives revolve around mealtimes. When heads of state gather, there is almost always a banquet of some sort. For weddings, there is a rehearsal dinner prior to the event and as lavish a reception dinner as the family can afford after the ceremony. Favorite foods are a hallmark of birthday celebrations, with a bonus of cake. Thanksgiving has its turkey and Easter has any number of regional traditional meals. Christmas too. I even remember fish-sticks on Friday at school way back when. Why is food so important? Most of us have never known when it was scarce and hard to get. We celebrate with food because it gives life, happiness and security. Food unto itself can be a celebration like this perfectly smoked Tri-tip we prepared for, well...Tuesday evening. Special Occasion Dave

Note that WordPress doesn't have to be a "blog" per se. A daily/weekly blog is just a series of short articles. "Blogging" your trips would just be really big, infrequent entries in your travel "blog". In a WordPress layout, you can have any number of static pages you need for intro, about or link pages. You can then create "blog" pages of any length to accommodate a trip review with illustrations. That way a review with a moderate number of notable illustrative photos could be posted to a "blog" page, automatically added to the blog list menu and have a link to a separate photo album in the review for the bulk of the photos from the trip. Wordpress gets very laggy with large albums which is why I chose to use WordPress as base pages for articles and intro pages and jAlbum for the galleries. When setting up a jAlbum gallery (you can make a separate gallery for each trip), you can make the "Home" button point back to the review page that sent you there. As for choosing a host site, the super-duper three-year intro prices are featured by many hosts. Once you own the domain name, you can move it as often as you want. You can move the physical site files by backing up your WordPress site, downloading it and loading it to another three-year deal and reloading your jAlbum directories to the new site. Dave

Large rubber hood, no polarizer (plexiglass windows or UV-blocker films interract badly), and a light weight black hooded sweatshirt or windbreaker to minimize reflections from behind the camera. 1/1000s minimum. My recipe. Dave

Take a look at my sites at PPTPhoto.com and The Family Photographer. They are hosted by BlueHost which supports WordPress well. The galleries are done with jAlbum, which is very easy to maintain once set up. If the components look like they would work, I'd be happy to give you more info. Dave

I have zero experience with gimbals since I do such limited video, but I have a couple of friends that do and they recommend the DJI OSMO line. Reasonable to expensive price range, by the lower end is still quite effective. Amazon.com : iphone gimbal Dave

Last week found us still aboard the Celebrity Solstice. Our trip took us to Cabo, Mazatlan and San Diego before returning to Los Angeles on Saturday. It was a relaxing trip with no shore excursions or other schedules to adhere to. We splurged on a specialty dining package and spent three of the nights being pampered by people who threat food as art. I took the new camera along but wasn’t really inspired to take a ton of pictures (only 400 or so) since we have simply seen the scenes so many times and already have photos galore. This one was chosen because of the fortuitous framing of the Discovery Princess photo-bombing the iconic Land’s End rock formation as we pulled into the harbor. All in all, a good week spent relaxing with our friends on a beautiful ship. Cabo Again Dave

Pictures taken between Monday, April 24 and Sunday, April 30. Do the right thing. On this forum, and in particular on this series, the right thing is to post pictures taken this week. Rules: See above That's it. This isn't a contest. All photos taken this week are welcome (not just cruising). Prizes will not be awarded. Discovering the joy of photography is the prize. The idea is to get folks out using their cameras for more than vacations and toddler birthdays. Post one. Post many. Up to you. Have fun with your camera and share your fun with others!

A good way to end a week! This was our Sunday morning courtesy of the nice folks at Celebrity Cruises who gave us another “free” cruise as a reward for using the pretty machines in the casino. The cruise was honestly a surprise since Kim went through less that a couple hundred dollars over the seven days of the previous cruise. She did win a lot, lose it then win it back again etc., so I guess the overall flow was what qualified us for the trip. Ron and Peri joined us because they were gifted a trip as well. The ship was full, so I don’t think it was emergency passenger packing on Celebrity’s part that got us invited. Whatever the reason, it was a relaxing voyage to nowhere with good food, good friends, a bunch of breakfast Bellinis and some much-needed rest on one of our favorite ships. Clink! Dave

Just the four of us day-drinking on the Solstice. 😁 Dave

Vote for Op-tech. Cheap, effective and compact. Used them for years. Dave

Pictures taken between Monday, April 17 and Sunday, April 23. Going somewhere this week? If it's interesting, bring back some photos. If it isn't, bring back some photos that make it look interesting. Rules: See above That's it. This isn't a contest. All photos taken this week are welcome (not just cruising). Prizes will not be awarded. Discovering the joy of photography is the prize. The idea is to get folks out using their cameras for more than vacations and toddler birthdays. Post one. Post many. Up to you. Have fun with your camera and share your fun with others!

It was the Millennium. Second sailing after Alaska reopened in July, 2021. Alaska has fairly sporadic weather. We've never been there before June and never later than the first week in September. We have seen sunny and 84° in September and 34° with sleet in June. We have never (in 6 trips) been shut out of the glacier day by weather. It truly is luck of the draw. I will say that even when rainy, Alaska is pretty awesome. This was Tracy Arm at 5:30 AM 8:30 AM Dave