It could actually be a deWalt ad, since she is playing with the new 18V flashlight that came with the kit...



-Bob

Both pictures below were ones I took on a trip up the Coastal Highway in 2005.
Neither picture caught my eye until recently - something I find happens often enough
that I will periodically go back and review my older photos.

A new sharpening tool that I've found very helpful is Focus Magic.
It is especially good for photos that are a bit out of focus, and it doesn't seem to have many problem creating artifacts.





Enjoy!

-Bob

Another from my "Farmer's Market" series...




...using what is becoming my favorite lens for this kind of shooting - the Canon 85 1.8. Now if only
it had a better short focus distance! I took this picture right at the minimum focus distance.

-Bob

Not everything is completely working as yet, but first a note as to why...

After my database outage turned out to be a hacking incident. I've plugged the security holes.
I've also redone the way my backups work (a word to the wise here) - my new backup scripts now shut down MySQL during the backup just to be sure the dump is as consistent as possible. This gives me about 60 seconds of downtime per evening... well worth the effort as my DB backup was not usable and I had to roll back further than I wanted to.

The galleries are back, but the blog entries need some repair to show the images correctly.

Also, in the course of this restoration effort, I decided I've hit the limit of what can reasonably be backed up by tar. I've switched to dar. It has much better single-file recovery capability. It also compresses files on a per-file basis inside the archive. It is a bit clunky about how it handles "out of space" errors, so you have to plan ahead. It's incremental backup facility works much better than with tar, including file removal recording.

I also decided that swapping 500gb drives in an out via USB is too much manual work - and manual work tends to mean that backups don't get done. So, I'm building a new server with a huge RAID 5 array just for running backups. I also plan to run a WinXP virtualized client so I can keep using Retrospect for windows backups.

In the course of THAT project I sadly figured out that the dual core 2140 cpu I ordered (because it was very cheap and a great value) does not support hardware virtualization.

The Conroe 4500 seems like the value-ticket for running a virtualized WinXP system.

Although I love Newegg, I've started recently ordering from ClubIT. They have ood service, good pricing, and for CPUs they sell by stepping - which is critical if you are working on an overclocking project. I've seen various favorable posts from them on various tech forums as well.

Stay tuned for more on the gallery reorg.

-Bob

Both of these taken on one of her favorite things to do... a walk in the stroller. Light was getting very dim (around evening), so I had to take the shots at high ISO. I find with high-iso shots that a B&W treatment works well. I've also started using the Imagenomic Noiseware pro product for noise removal. I've been using Noise Ninja, but find it creates too many artifacts. I like Noiseware as it has a portrait mode which is aggressive about noise removal and has the effect at the same time of smoothing skin.

Taken in one of the old train cars you can ride from Snoqualmie to North Bend and to Snoqualmie falls.
It's a nice little trip, especially if you like trains. I highly recommend it for families. Check this out for more info.

This is an HDR photo taken with my usual post-processing technique (Photomatix + B&W Convert Pro + Focalblade).
I didn't have the tripod with me, so after everyone left the train I put the camera on the floor and took three shots -2/-/+2.



-Bob