My Personal Mickey

This past week my youngest son was home after graduating college (yes that does sink in!) and Evelyn was showing him my baby book. How and why that got started I do not know but he had never seen it.

The were plenty of wow dad, you where... The he came upon one photo of me that form the previous year looked like I had gone through a complete transformation. It was not good! His comment was “how do you go from that to this in one year?” I my defense I could only shrug my shoulders and admit that I was full fledge into my nerd years.

We were picking through the many articles and clippings my mother had kept over the years and we stumbled onto one that was rather significant.

My dad had some relative somewhat removed that was involved with the Disney organizations legal department and all I knew ids that we went to Disneyland in Anaheim CA more than a couple of times.

I was just a little squirt but remember riding and getting sick on the tea cup ride, doing the Matterhorn and many of the other rides and attractions. Unfortunately I do not remember when this happened but it was obviously on the complex. Roy Disney if you are old enough to remember was the nephew to Walt Disney and took over the Disney Sunday night show and the Disney organization after Walt’s death. The following image is a scan of a piece of paper that was hand drawn by Roy for me.

At this time I can only thank my mother for keeping this object of personal importance and historical relevance.

After scanning the sheet of paper I added Mickey and mat to match his colors. Then it was off to onOne’s Photo Frame and a hue saturation adjustment layer to get a different color than the default tan.

So that is my personal Mickey story.


Take care and I’ll Cya... Doug

Work Around

I have been wanting to get an image form last Sunday night up here all week. The problem I was having was the RAW files form the canon 5D Mk II can not be interpreted by Adobe Camera Raw below version 5.2. I have blogged about this before as I have the current version of Lightroom which will process the 5D2 RAW's but the CRW in CS3 does not. Let alone 4.6 that runs under Elements which I run on my PowerBook G4. So basically I have been hosed this week on processing the files. 

I had a strategy that put a bunch of files on a thumb drive and I was going to hang out at the Apple store and process a few of the files in CS4 which runs CRW 5.2. The problem has been that the days have been long and I have not been able to get down to the Apple store. So right now I am not at all happy with Adobe.

 

Apple to the rescue. I loaded the files onto the laptop and when finder opened I was pleased that OS version 10.5.6 had the thumbnails on the window. Hmmm? I wondered if iPhoto would read the files. So I selected the above image and pulled it into iPhoto. There it was in all its glory. I tried to make some adjustments to the image but kept on deleting the adjustments. It just looks so good right from the camera. So there it is. It was very dark at the venue so I had to push the ISO up to 6400. I was looking through an EF 28-135 f4 IS lens and the rest of the specs are an aperture of f/4 and a shutter speed of 1/200th second. This is a great lens but the f/4 is a bit slow. This image just would not have been possible on the 40D with this little of noise.

Finally I wanted to have a little fun with the image so I dropped a Posterize filter to make the lighting a little edgy. That filter uses gradations of light to define its edges so the silhouetted drum set maintained its original tonality.

I still have class in the morning and then a drive up to GR so it's off to La La Land.

Injoy your weekend and I'll be back Monday... Doug

Way Too Funny!

I have been sitting here in my hotel room in Dallas today wondering what I was going to blog on. Often is the case where I rely on spontaneity to generate a point of interest to blog about. Be it a training item, an image I have captured, a thought I felt like sharing, or like today, something so funny I have to bring it up.

Working on our website, I had the TV on and the program TZM was on. It is one of those low life Hollywood "news" programs that try and find any tid-bit of information on celebrity life that for some reason this country craves. No I did not turn to it either. 

Anyhow, this picture of P Diddy came up and I just had to laugh out loud. The look of surprise, shock, or even disdane about finding a single dollar bill in the wad of hundreds in his hand. The look on his face says it all. DUDE, WHAT IS THIS DOING IN MY WAD!

Then I got to thinking about the current vilifying of excess by individuals in our government over the past couple of weeks. How dare we travel on corporate jets, own two homes, four cars, horses, or more than two children. I say if Sean Combs can walk around with over 2K worth of bills, good for him. The economy is stimulated when the people start spending money, not when the government takes money form the very people they are trying to stimulate.

Hey if I keep on going I will get depressed so you all have a great weekend and I'll be back on Monday.

Cya... Doug

24 Junky

This one is strictly for you 24 Junkies like me. It has probably been on there site for some time but on the FOX website was this image that shows the January 09 of Season 7 is on it's way. Last year there was to be a two hour special that was a stand alone movie and not an episode of the show. Kind of a teaser for the up coming series. Never saw it, don't know if it ever got out of the can. Oh well, only five more months.

Cya.. Doug

Hulk

Well... We took a chance and went and saw the Incredible Hulk. Remembering the TV Hulk, then the disaster of a movie they came out with a few years back, I really had some reservations to the quality of movie this was going to be. We had seen Iron Man a few times and it was fantastic, so we thought we would give Hulk III a try.

We were not disappointed. Ed Norton did a fabulous job as David Banner and the Hulkster... Well, he was no ordinary run of the mill big guy. He was a HULK! Of course there is the bad guy, then good vs evil, and in any of these movies, good wins (as it should).

I would give it four out of five shutters.

Cya... Doug

Go Speed Racer

This may be an ocational post for Peek Digital Photography. Once in a while I might put up a movie review that I think might be especially significant. Yes I do see a number of movies and I draw the line at gratuitously foul language, nudity, and horror or slasher flicks. I generally use a service called screenit.com to evaluate wether or not it fits my acceptable viewing criteria.

Some movies are a no brainer on attendance. Speed Racer was one of those until reviews said it bombed. So here I am in Columbus OH working with a training committee and one of the guys wanted to go see it. Whatever... I agreed and we were two of four people in the theater at an 8:00 PM movie. Well, that kind of says it all. The story held fairly close to the cartoon, sappiness and all. If you did not know the story, I will save you the ticket price. Boy has serious ADD in school (thinks about racing all the time), older brother (Rex) gets killed in car race under suspicious circumstances, boy grows up racing cars and has a moderately hot girl friend (Trixy). Boy gets propositioned by megabuck race team owner and manufacturer who is crooked and has seen all the Grand Prix races are fixed. Speed Racer turns him down and proceeds to defend the honor of his brother in various races. Racer X is an ally of Speed and during some of the races. Speed finally wins the big one and gets the girl. Speed suspects that Racer X is actually his supposed to be dead brother but Racer X denies it. The audience later finds out that Racer X is in fact Rex but the family never knows.

Yeah! You guessed it... Very predictable.

At the other end of the spectrum is Iron Man. YES! YES! and triple YES! No need to review it, just go see it. Robert Downey Jr. does a very believable job (for a comic book character). What more can I say, I have seen it twice and it was just as entertaining the second time as the first.

Remember, friends don't let friends see stupid movies.

Doug

If You Are In Columbus OH...

The plane has been broken for the last couple of days so we have been sitting around not doing much of anything. I cane report on two entertainment items though. First Leatherheads was Ok... It was funny and all in a goofy kind of way but I am not sure how the facts actually played out. But yes it was entertaining and clean. Not a bad way to blow off a couple of hours. Second is the HBO mini-series on John Adams. I just got done watching the five hour series and was just drawn into the whole period of our unique experiment we call the United States of America. It was really done well and while I will hold out on the historic truth (my wife is the historian), it all played out well. I was planning on doing some work on the peekfoto.com site but could not take myself away from the series.

Before we went to see Leatherheads we stopped by a photography store in Columbus that I had not been to in the years I have been coming here. That is Midwest Photo Exchange. They have a descent presents on the web but I have just not had the occasion to visit the store.

I must tell you it is no a swanked out retail photography store. In fact it was reminiscent of a hobby shop. Don't get me wrong, I thought it was really great there, but after being out at B&H and the organization that they present, Midwest does not come close. They appeared to have very competitive pricing on many of their products, the 5D was going for $2,195 and the 40D was at $1,295, both with L lenses which I can not bring myself to call a kit lens.

Anyhow, If you are anywhere near downtown Columbus it is worth a ride up High Street through the Short North, Past the OSU Campus to there store. The address is 3313 N. High St. Columbus, OH. (616) 261-1264. If you want to jump over to their website click here.

That's about all for this week. Have great weekend and I'll be back on Monday.

Doug

Phantom Sunday

My wife gave me this Playbill from last weekend and I just had to scan it and post it. Last weekend in New York if you kept up on last weeks posts we hooked up with my Daughter Sandy and Son-in-law Chris fro a weekend in NYC. One of the events we had planned as a surprise for our spouses was going to see Phantom of the Opera at the Majestic Theater.

I must tell you, seeing a play on or off Broadway is something to behold. The sets and costumes are spectacular, the actors are spot on, and the music... Oh the music! Phenomenal is a word that comes to mind. For a bunch of musicians buried beneath the stage it was absolutely better than CD quality. The opening Overture when the chandelier was raised off the stage and traversed the audience was just WOW! It must be seen to understand and experience.

As far as the How2 part of this post. The scan was done at 600 dpi and clarified in CS3. As usual print media when scanned has a lot of ink pixels on the surface. To correct that I copied the layer, did a 1.9 gaussian blur then on the mask exposed the background edges of the type edging to give it a sharpened look. As far as the Phantom mask I isolated it so I could re-blackened the playbill cover. Thats it!

Enjoy... Doug

Special Sunday Blog

Figaro... Figaro... Figaro...

As we were out of town on Valentines day I wanted to do something special for my wife other than just dinner out. We did do dinner in Grand Rapids (The Chop House rocks) and during dinner I suggested that we walk down to the boat show and see what was there. So after dinner we are walking to the convention center which is just past the performing arts center. We ducted into the performing arts center with a questioning look on my wife's face. To which I pulled out two tickets to the Opera Figaro.

This was the first Opera either of us had been two and it was a full blown out Opera. Singing in Italian and all. Hidden in the document above was a short summary of the Wedding of Figaro which we did not discover until after the Opera. Thankfully there were short but broken sentences being displayed above the stage to help tell the story. There were five acts to the Opera and we really did not expect the whole process to take three and a half hours. The Grand Rapids Symphony was outstanding, singing was top notch even though we couldn't understand a single word of it, and the acting was very entertaining.

It was truly one of those experiences that I glad they we did but am not holding my breath until I can go to my next Opera. That may change though if it were in english. 

Enjoy the rest of your weekend... Doug