thedude.com

UPDATE! Now 105 images in the album.

I have so many good shots this year! As much as I’d like to, I can’t load them all up on this page. The resulting page would just be too huge. So, I created a photo album of the best shots from Carnaval San Francisco, 2007. The album is a work in progress. I have so many images that I’ll be adding more for at least a couple more days. By the way, if you were at Carnaval this year or know anyone in my photos, please send them a link to thedude.com!

Despite chilly temperatures and overcast skies, this year’s parade was as beautiful as ever. A celebration of music and cultures, Carnaval is one of the most joyful annual events in the bay area. It’s also one of the most colorful. Scantily costumed women are among my favorite subjects, but with smiles as infectious as the Latin rhythms, the children always steal the show.

For photographers who want their shots to look like these, here are a few tips from thedude.

1. Engage your subjects. Peek out from behind the camera. Make eye contact. Smile. Wave. You will be rewarded.
2. Move in close. At an event like this, it’s almost impossible to get wide shots. There is just too much noise in the background. You could use a longer lens, but this is a lot harder to work with. Your chances of producing an in-focus image without motion blur drops significantly with focal lengths over 150 mm.
3. Use a flash! No matter what the weather is like, you will get better results at an event like this one with a flash. Set it to underexpose slightly in flash-fill mode. The flash will do a couple of important things for you. It will soften shadows, which can be very important on sunny days. The flash can help give more consistent color-balance and it will create nice specular highlights on shiny objects like costume jewelry. Best of all, the flash will put a twinkle in your subject’s eyes. See them sparkle? Beautiful.

This is mainly because I can’t write, but also because I can’t remember much of anything about a particular movie just moments after I saw it. I don’t even have a movie Category. However, I definitely remember that this movie made me smile with amazement from start to finish - and not just because one of the stars is another, much more interesting Dude. Five stars.

On a side note, this is the first entry ever published to this blog using Adobe Contribute. I’ll try to make an assessment of this tool in the next 28 days, when the demo self-destructs. My early opinions are mixed. It made subtle changes to this the layout in this entry. That’s not good. (I fixed them - they bugged me too much.) It also seems to have degraded the quality of my JPEG’s quite a bit.

On the other hand, it might be appealing to many because the graphical editing tool previews pages quite accurately.

Note to self:

If you already have a job with a 4 mile commute, excellent pay, a modern, clean environment, flexible hours, tons of vacation time, and really great coworkers, just shut the hell up and stay put!

It was so cold in the city last night that we thought we might not make it to the fireworks, but once they began, we completely forgot about our frozen extremities.

KFOG Kaboom might be the coolest 18 minutes of the year. You really have to see this in person to appreciate the scale of it. Someone in the crowd of 250,000 must have made an HD video of this year’s fireworks display. I’ll try to find one and post it here.

Entertaining guests from out of town is exhausting. Ann and Lynne had made a detailed list of must-see Bay Area “attractions” - some of which I had been successfully avoiding for nearly 25 years. Places like Fisherman’s Wharf, The Haight, Lombard Street, the Painted Ladies, Chinatown, Ghirardelli Square, San Francisco cable cars and Alcatraz are not high on my list of favorite destinations. It turns out though, that it can actually be fun cramming all of this into a one-day visit to San Francisco. Photo-ops abound. I’m reminded just how wonderful it is to live in the Bay Area!

This was my first visit to Alcatraz, and I found it to be well worth the trip. The audio tour paints a vivid and often moving picture of what life (and death) was like on The Rock.

Until today, I thought that I was the only blogger on the entire Internet with a site designed for viewing at 1920 x 1200 pixels. Well, it turns out there’s another dude out there whose photo gallery features pages designed specifically for the well-endowed display. As if this isn’t coincidence enough, this other dude also loves panoramic photography! Coincidence? Hmmm…

I use a PhotoShop Action to prepare images for my blog. My “Blogerize” action scales images for the site in steps while applying a bit of smart sharpening along the way. The action also converts the images to the appropriate color depth and color space. Since I need to do these things for every image I post, there is no better time-saver in PhotoShop than Actions.

Recently, a friend asked me to send him my Blogerize Action, and that made me wonder about other useful PhotoShop Actions, which eventually led me to Adobe’s own PhotoShop Exchange. Despite the site’s annoying Flash design, there are several cool tools here, including the Action I used to create this fun “collage”. Search for “B&Big Picture”, and get more info about Actions here.

Did you know there is an independent animated movie being created in 4th Street Lofts? Neither did I.

We spent last weekend with a couple of long-time friends from Wisconsin. Ann and Lynne were determined to cram as much sightseeing as possible into a short visit. We were lucky enough to have friends with a home in Carmel, so we spent a couple days shopping and eating in trendy Carmel. We visited all of the required tourist hot spots - The Bixby Bridge the Lone Cypress, Pebble Beach, and Hog’s Breath Inn. We were given a private tour and tasted delicious wines at Chateau Julien and celebrated Cinco de Mayo with margarita’s at the spectacular Ventana Inn.

More soon…