Happy Pi Day!!

Hi Folks:

It’s Pi Day! (3.14), so in honour of that most famous of all mathematical constants we thought we’d do something completely irrational and post a couple of recipes. Pi(e) recipes, of course. And a story or two.

There weren’t a lot of male cooks around in the circles where I grew up (BBQ aside), but from the time I started Boy Scouts when I was 10 I’ve learned how to cook. Okay, not always well, and a fire doesn’t have a dial for temperature control, but like everything else, it takes some time to learn. By the time I started college I could cook and bake fairly well, despite the fact that my mother lovingly weighed me down with packages of freezerable food every time I went for a visit. When Marcia and I first moved in together I told her the kitchen was mine and she told me I was welcome to it (Marcia’s actually a very good cook herself, and one of our many shared activities is cooking together). Anyway, I digress. Continue Reading →

Lightroom’s Crop Tool: Aspect Ratio and Image Size

Hi Folks:

I recently answered a question for someone on Twitter about using the Crop Tool in Lightroom so I thought I’d embellish that a little bit and post it here as well…

There are two related issues here, so let’s forget about computers for a moment and deal with paper. If you have a sheet of paper that 1″x1″, that’s a specific size. A sheet of paper that’s 4″x4″ is also a specific size, but they both have the same aspect ratio (1:1). Similarly, a sheet that’s 4″x5″ and a sheet that’s 8″x10″ have the same aspect ratio but obviously one is four times the size of the other. Now, if you have a print that’s 8″x12″ and you cut two inches off the long edge to create an 8×10 you’ve both created a specific size and cropped it to a specific aspect ratio. Continue Reading →