Hi Folks:
I sent this out to a number of people by e-mail yesterday; thought I’d share it here as well…
.
Follow this link and play the video, but listen first, without looking at the video or trying to interpret what you hear:
- “Years”
Author Archives: Mike Nelson Pedde
Red Flags
Hi Folks:
If you were among those who have visited our blog in the past few days, you will have found that it was ‘red flagged’ for distributing ‘malware’. Rather than attempting to rail against the folks at Google for marking our site ‘unsafe’, we should instead be grateful that such action alerted us to the code that had been installed on our blog. There is a saying in the corporate world that there are two kinds of companies – those who know they have been hacked and those who don’t. However, when it comes to a site where one invests as much of one’s self as Marcia and I do here, having someone hack into it is equivalent to having someone break into one’s home. There is a certain senselessness to it. It may be more benign to talk of ‘spamming robots’ as autonomic devices, but the truth is that there is a person behind all such actions. We can’t begin to understand their motivations, but we can imagine that it stems from a search for ‘power’ based on a perceived feeling of inadequacy. Our wish is for that person to come to see and celebrate his/ her own magnificence instead.
So, Dear Reader, if you’ve come by our blog recently and been put off by the ‘red flag’ status, we apologize. It’s not the first time this has happened, and may or may not be the last. We trust you’ve found something of benefit here, and we invite you to return. And to whomever has been adding malicious code to our site, we offer you only love. May you come to see yourself as we do – a truly wonderful Being! We don’t invite or encourage such attacks, but we don’t do much to defend against them either. Doing so only escalates the feelings of negativity, and there is already far too much of that in the world. We wish you peace.
Love,
Marcia and Mike.
P.S. Special thanks to our son Nick for all you do every day to keep our site running so beautifully!
Photo of the Month – January
Hi Folks:
Well, my first photo of the month post for 2012, and also my first image posted here that was processed with Lightroom 4 Beta. Marcia and I were ‘up island’ briefly in Campbell River this past month, and took the opportunity to go for a short walk along the shore at Willow Point. The tide was out and some of the rocks that were revealed were incredible. I liked this one in particular. This is an HDR image, 3 exposures at -1/0/+1, shot hand-held and joined together with Autopano Pro then finished off in Lightroom. I trust you like it!!
Now go out and make some photographs!
Mike.
Lightroom, File Management and Metadata
Hi Folks:
This has been covered before on other sites (and to some extent on ours), but since I recently explained all of this to someone on Twitter I thought I’d take what I wrote then and massage it into some form of post for our blog.
To begin with we need to cover a few terms. One is that, as I mentioned in our Should I Get Lightroom or Photoshop or…? post, a digital image isn’t really an ‘image’ in the traditional sense. It starts as light, gets converted into electrical impulses by the camera’s sensor, and is then translated into binary code – 1s and 0s – as a digital file. Be that as it may, there are two aspects to each digital image. One is the image information itself – the code that is assembled to create the image on your computer screen or as a print, and the other is information about the image. This starts in the camera and can include the camera make/model/serial number, the exposure information, date and time of the image capture, the lens, focal length (for zoom lenses), GPS information and more. When the image is transferred to the computer one can add copyright information, keywords, owner contact information… All of this is collectively called ‘metadata’. This metadata is stored in one of two ways, depending on the type of digital image you’re working with. For .TIF, .PSD, .JPG and .DNG files, the metadata is stored within the image file itself. For raw images, a second file, often called a ‘sidecar’ file is generated. Sidecar files have an .XMP extension. Therefore, for a Canon raw file for example, one would have IMG0001.cr2 for the image data, and IMG0001.xmp for the metadata information.
New Beginnings… and Old Memories…
Hi Folks:
It’s now closing in on the end of January, so if you’re still maintaining your New Year’s resolutions, my congratulations to you! It may be sheer coincidence that Remembrance Day and New Year’s Day fall so closely together on the calendar but our memories of the past and our dreams of the future always seem bound together. It may be true that (as espoused by George Santayana), “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It’s also true that much of how we see ourselves today is based on and built out of who we have believed ourselves to be and that person no longer exists. It’s not just that your body is continuously refreshing itself – building new cells and removing old ones. Our thoughts, ideas, understandings – in some ways the essence of who we are – is also different… unless of course we hang on tight to the past memories of who we used to be. Memories can be pleasant or painful and there are varying degrees of both, but there’s one thing memories rarely are, and that’s an accurate recollection of the past as it happened. My grandmother was a very wise woman with a Grade 5 education, and one of her sayings was, “No matter how thin the paper, there are two sides to every page.” In some cases there are many more than two sides to an issue, more than two sides to a memory, but the point is made. Continue Reading →
You Like Me! You Really Like Me!!
Hi Folks:
So far as I know, Facebook was the first to introduce the concept of the ‘Like’ button to user posts and comments, and it’s such a good idea that it’s been adopted by others as well. Google+ uses the ‘+1’ button instead, but it’s the same idea. The folks at TED.com used to give users the ability to up vote or down vote another user’s comments, but they changed that policy so that only up votes are possible. The people at 50opx.com have both ‘Like’ and ‘Dislike’ buttons on the images displayed there; I suggested to them that they remove the ‘Dislike’ button but the choice is of course theirs.
Why is this so important? Well, in a pre-internet world (yes, I’m old enough to remember such a time), personal interactions were less frequent and more intimate. People waited days, weeks, even months sometimes to hear from a friend or loved one, and as such contacts were treasured. People exchanged long notes, thank you cards and more. Today we live in a much different world. Long letters are hardly ever written, thank you cards are almost forgotten, and even e-mail has become passé, especially among the younger generation. We’re swamped with ever more information, almost all of it short and almost all of it impersonal. The internet is largely considered anonymous and while on one hand that gives people the freedom to express their ‘true’ feelings behind that mask of anonymity it also distances the connections we have with those who are close to us in different ways. Internet friendships can be as strong as any ‘personal’ relationship, but without being face to face we lack inflection, touch and more. Apparently studies have shown that people are more likely to ‘trust’ links that their friends have ‘liked’, but I think it’s much more than that.
Happy Holidays!
Happy Holidays, Everyone! There are a lot of different celebrations this time of year, but they all share the same general ideas… so whether you prefer Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Saturnalia, Solstice or something more personal (the Muslim celebration of Eid al-Fitr is on a different, lunar calendar), we wanted to wish you a safe and happy Holiday Season and a New Year filled with as much love, joy, peace, adventure, contentment, prosperity and excitement as you can handle!
As a gift, we’d love to share this with you: TEDxSF – Louie Schwartzberg – Gratitude
Thanks so much for dropping by our little corner of the ‘net!
Hugs,
M&M
(P.S. Thanks to John for the idea for the image at the top!)
2012 Photo Calendars
Hi Folks:
 Update: If you’re looking for 2014 calendars, please click here.
Fixed the link – December 4, 2012 – my apologies!
While there are usually several templates made every year to make photo calendars in Lightroom, (with many thanks to their respective providers, you can find one here, one here, one here, one here, a Photoshop script here, and while not a template, Matt Kloskowski has a video on using downloaded calendar images in Lightroom here (corrected the link, December 20). NB: He begins in Photoshop, but you can do most of what he does straight in Lightroom. I’ll add more links as I come across them) last year I created a template in MS Word that allowed people who don’t have Photoshop, Lightroom or the equivalent to make their own photo calendars. Thought I’d do the same again this year. I used MS Word 2007 to make the template, but saved it as both a Word 2007 file and a Word 97-2003 compatible file. Basically it’s a series of tables, one for each month, that look something like this: Continue Reading →
Understanding Criticism
Hi Folks:
This is going to be a very short (for me) post, and is really just a pointer to some excellent articles written by someone else. Photographer Alain Briot recently wrote a series of three articles for the Luminous Landscape, and while they’re primarily written for the understanding of photographers, I think the points Alain makes have a broader reference to the criticisms we all deal with in our daily life.
You can find them here:
Understanding Criticism, Part 1: The Many Faces of Criticism
Understanding Criticism, Part 2: Responding to Criticism
Understanding Criticism, Part 3: A few words on perseverance
Okay, that’s it for now!
Hugs,
Mike.
(See, I told you it was going to be short… 😉 )
Eating Our Way Through Victoria… Celebrations!
Hi Folks:
Well, last Saturday was Marcia’s birthday and since she was off on both Friday and Saturday we (I) expanded her birthday celebration into a two-day event. Fortunately Marcia was willing to go along with my schemes! Before I continue, I should add a little backstory…
Back in 1995 we shared our first two-bedroom apartment together. For Marcia’s birthday I invited a ‘few’ friends for a pot-luck surprise party and we managed to pack 37 people into our little apartment! Everyone had a great time, including Marcia, but she also casually mentioned that she’d kill me if I ever did it again. Well, since we no longer live there, and keeping to the ‘letter of the law’ so to speak, here’s a quick summary of some of the things we undertook over our weekend. It also highlights some of the reasons we love living here in Victoria! Continue Reading →