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!