thedude.com

This is always such a difficult event to shoot. The F-18’s are moving at speeds up to 650 miles per hour, and perform their most breathtaking maneuvers more than a mile away. I have to use my longest lens with the camera set to ISO 1000 so that I can use a shutter speed of 1/2500 of a second. Lots of compromises.

I took more than 500 shots. Even so, I think I achieved better results last year. Oh well, I guess I need to keep practicing. More shots here.

I thought I’d share the thoughtful birthday card I received from my ever-lovin’ wife this year. I think it’s hilarious.

Kelly always finds the best cards. Her secret? The card racks at the car wash. Who knew?

We’ve been spending a lot of time with our neighbors Jack Tres and Olive lately. That’s a good thing. I shot this picture at Flora on Thursday night. The light was provided by a single candle on the table in front of Tres. I used my old manual-focus f1.4 Nikkor wide open, at 1/15th of a second with the Magic Camera set to ISO 3200. This image is to me, nothing short of amazing. It’s as if the camera added light to the scene. I could not see her this well with my naked eye!

Then, I added the neat little border and drop-shadow to the above thumbnail without ever opening any image editor. Instead of PhotoShop, I used ImageMagick on my Linux server to create the effect at the command line! The command I used to do this:

convert image.jpg -resize 605x \
-unsharp 0.5x1.2+0.5+0.1 -matte \
-bordercolor white -border 8 \
-bordercolor grey85 -border 1 \
\( +clone -background grey60 -shadow 80x3+6+6 \) +swap \
-background white -mosaic image-thumb.jpg

Why would I do this? A few reasons.

1. It’s very fast - it takes just 2 seconds to create this nice effect.
2. I can create this effect form anywhere without any special tools.
3. The effect can be applied very quickly to a whole directory of images.
4. I can add a “create pretty thumbnail” option to Wordpress.

I have a lot to learn before I have item 4 working, but the challenge is half the fun of it!

Today is an important day in the life of thedude - System Administrator Appreciation Day.

With love and a prayer for world peace from a beautiful girl named Grace.

All of us - including Orion - love you very much!

Oh my. I guess I should feel guilty about yesterday’s food orgy, but I don’t. I’m too busy drooling over the pictures. Here’s a taste of the menu at MoNO.

After we finished photographing (and eating!) the food, we continued the feast at Chris and Ben’s with champagne and succulent leg of lamb.

I can’t help but say a couple things about the D3 combined with the 14-24 mm lens. Together they allow me to do things I would not even try with my D2X. With the D3, I can shoot in much lower light than previously possible. It’s surprisingly easy to get used to being able to shoot at ISO 1600 with virtually no loss of image fidelity. And the lens is incredible! Look at the images above and see if you can find any color-fringing at all. Even in the horribly overexposed regions there is none. Wow. Same goes for barrel distortion. This zoom lens is better wide open than the Nikkor 14 mm prime it replaces at any aperture. I am so happy to have this lens. Now I really want to own the other Nikkor lens in this class.

It’s that time of year. Seems like there are parties every night. Trust me - I’m not complaining. Although it does seem like I’m spending a lot of time taking pictures and creating photo albums like this one from our friend Lelah’s party last night. I was supposed to be photographing her and her baby Lohtse, but traffic conspired against us. It took us two hours to cover nine miles, so by the time we got to the party, the beautiful baby was sound asleep. At least I got a fun shot of Lelah and her mother. The family resemblance is striking, wouldn’t you say?

Oh yeah, a couple days ago I mentioned that we stayed at the beautiful Clift Hotel in San Francisco. Here are a few shots of my favorite model in and around our suite. Spectacular! The hotel’s not to shabby either…

This entry probably won’t be of interest to most of you, but I went to so much trouble getting the images posted on our blog at work that I figured I’d get a little extra mileage out of them by posting them here too.

Rumor has it that the people in this photo album are coworkers of mine, although I know almost none of them. They seem like a good group though. :)

We decided to get a room in the city last night at the Clift Hotel, which turned out to be pretty darn nice. That’ll be the topic of a future post, but right now we have to go back to San Francisco and make some pictures of a baby and her proud new Mama.

Before and after.

This year’s greeting card began as three images - a classic Christmas painting by Haddon Sundblom, who painted at least one other familiar icon as well as a few stunning pinup girls. The Coca-Cola image came up while Googling “classic Christmas images”. The fact that there was already a little Jimmy in the scene may have influenced my decision. :)

The second image was of a bottle of Jack Daniels, and the third was itself a composite of two goofy-looking shots like this one. The rest of the transformation is pure PhotoShop. If you’re interested in learning more about how this idea developed, download the the PhotoShop file with layers intact here. (10 megabyte .psd file.)

Wonderful friends, perfect Bay Area weather, fantastic food. An awesome day.

Love to all of you from thedude and Kellster!

View the rest of the photos from our fun-drenched day here.

We’re doing something tomorrow that we haven’t done in a long time - we’re taking a vacation by ourselves! Oh sure, it’s a short one - just 5 days - but we’re both totally looking forward to four blissful birdless nights at our favorite destination up the coast. No computers. Ahhhh… (Of course, we’ll continue update Kelly’s cell phone images as they come in. :)