Wrath Of God

Click image to view larger size. Or even better, see a larger version on a black background.

This is my second pass at this image. I was able to clean up the chromatic aberration that was distracting in the original image as well as the HDR version. I have also (I believe) brought out more of the "menace" in the clouds. I was also FAR less aggressive in correcting the angle than I was in the first version allowing the building to have the appearance of bowing or bending in the wind that comes from shooting at a slightly up-angle with a an ultra wide angle lens like the 11-18mm

Ride The Wild Surf

The Allen Oldies Band celebrated the release of their new album “Ride The Wild Surf” last night at the Continental Club. Needless to say, a good time was had by all.

Especially entertaining was Tomas Escalante (Suspects/Clouseaux/El Orbits) and his son singing backup on “Sweets for My Sweet”, a song written by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman and originally recorded by The Drifters in 1961.

Chromatic Aberration

From Wikipedia:

In optics, chromatic aberration is caused by a lens having a different refractive index for different wavelengths of light (the dispersion of the lens).

In real ife what it means is that in some lighting situations my ultra-wide angle lens shows some abnormalities in the form of colored fringing on objects to the far left and the far right of my images as evidenced in my recent photo of the lightning strike over 610 in Uptown.

This is taken from the left side of the original image:

As you can see, the building has a red border along the right edge that is also noticeable along the top of the tree line. If you look at the HDR image I rendered from the original RAW file you will see that the cromatic aberration is much more pronounced.

This is pushing me to learn more about post processing software tools. I have been experimenting the Adobe Camera Raw plugin for Photoshop and the initial results are promising:

Vote For The New White Racial Slur!

Gawker.com asked for and received over 350 suggestions after requesting a new racial slur to describe white people. They’ve narrowed the selection down to 10 choices.

  • Rambins
  • Ivories
  • Osmonds
  • Cyclons
  • Altoids
  • Brunchers
  • Mayflowers
  • Elmers
  • Frecklers
  • The Casians

    • *EDIT* Aparently the choice is now down to “‘Nillas” or “Altoids”
    You can cast your vote here.

    I’ve also been reading Stuff White People Like, not only for the obvious humor, but the insightful self examination as well.

    Flickr Explore

    Flickr uses a software algorithm/program that ranks the thousands and thousand of images uploaded each day based on something they call “interestingness” and then places the top 500 on their Explore page each day.

    Nobody can say with any certainty what makes a picture “interesting” or how the algorithm works, exactly, but for sure Explore is a GREAT way to check out some of the better pictures uploaded to Flickr on any given day.

    Even better is finding that some of your own pictures have made it to the Explore page.

    1. Fake Miniature Car Show, 2. The Astrodome, 3. Minding The Store, 4. Vanishing Point

    If you use Flickr to host your own images and would like to see if any of your pictures are now or ever have been on the Explore page you can use this tool at Big Huge Labs to find out.

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