Small blue flowers, sharply focused through a fence. The Canon EF 50mm F1.4 lens has good focus… you just have to close the aperture up a bit. I used F3.2. It’s hard to see if the image is sharp in the viewfinder. I zoom in afterward on the LCD screen and see if the subject looks sharp. The flowers weren’t extremely sharp because digital SLRs don’t sharpen much, but I sharpened this on the computer.

These flowers are behind a chain-link fence by someone’s sidewalk. If you just walk around with a camera you’ll find photo opportunities like …

... CONTINUE READING

This could be a tribute to the rock band Queen, but I decided the title on the spot without thinking of them. This cat seems regal. A leader with an overbearing sense of entitlement. Instead of running away like the other cats in our neighborhood do, she stood her ground. She stared my camera down as I took many pictures from different angles. It could be a male cat—I didn’t check—but I didn’t get that impression. This is a queen cat.

I darkened her pupils and brightened the whites of her eyes. She has interesting eyes. I made …

... CONTINUE READING

Light blue flowers, like velvet in the sun.

This was framed well. There are a whole bunch more flowers on the left and below, a dark plant on the right, and deep turquoise sky above. It wasn’t quite like that in reality, but I changed the color of the sky and made the flowers lighter in Photoshop, by manipulating curves on the a and b channels in the Lab colorspace.

These flowers are near bldg. 300 at Daytona State College. I had to sit near the ants on the sidewalk while pointing my camera up to get this …

... CONTINUE READING

A yellow leaf, partially eaten by bugs, lit by sunshine, floating on a background of dark green leaves, greatly out of focus.

I was walking around my yard and saw the sunshine hitting the leaf like this. It was quite dramatic because the background was so dark. I set my camera’s focus point to the center of the lens and shot this.

On the computer, I darkened the background and sharpened the leaf.

Enjoy!

Canon Rebel XTi, EF 28-135mm, 1/160, F5.6, 132mm, ISO100, 2008-11-17T13:32:07-04, 20081117-183207rxt

Download a perfected high-res JPEG or download the source image (Canon Rebel XTi RAW file).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Credit me as Richard X. Thripp, and link back to richardxthripp.thripp.com or rxthripp.com. Thanks!

I’m seeing bloggers in two categories:

1. Ones that stick to one subject so as not to alienate their readers. These bloggers always put their readers first, doing anything to make them happy. They keep everything short and pithy, and make five posts a day. If it’s a photography blog, three-quarters the post are about Canon and Nikon’s latest cameras and other industry news. These blogs are often have several writers, who follow rules like “use short paragraphs” and “capture the reader’s attention quickly because otherwise, it will go away.” These are clearly subject-oriented blogs. This category holds many popular and …

... CONTINUE READING

Something that is valuable without strings attached has intrinsic value. I find intrinsic value is far more reliable than extrinsic value, because it’s self-reliant, independent, and free of the influence of others. The opposite of intrinsic value is extrinsic value. I like “extrinsic” as a word, but don’t see it used much. What it means is the value is assigned to the item by external forces. The item is worthless on its own. Or perhaps it has a mix of intrinsic and extrinsic value, so it is simply less valuable.

One thing that’s hard to accept about intrinsic vs. extrinsic value …

... CONTINUE READING

Say I have a plain text file of 500 dates formatted as MM/DD/YY and I need to change them to YYYY-MM-DD. There are a couple of options. I can do it all by hand, wearing out the backspace and arrow keys, and opening myself to the possibilities of typos. Or, I can find an automated way to do it. Say I’m slow, and it takes me three hours of fighting to find a good text editor and figure out how to use regular expressions to make the changes all at once. It would’ve been quicker just to do it all …

... CONTINUE READING