Author Archives: Mike Nelson Pedde

Being Green – Sustainable Prisons

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Hi Folks:

I usually start these with, “Friday once again and time for this week’s ‘Being Green‘ post.”

This post started out the same way… I had one idea for a topic, then completely changed my mind and went off in a different direction, started doing research on that, wrote two other blog posts, celebrated (with Marcia) our 195th Monthaversary of being a couple, followed by our 18th Anniversary (216th Monthaversary) of the day we met, and it’s now Monday and I’m back to my original topic!  This coming Saturday is our 100th Monthaversary of being married, but I should have this week’s ‘Being Green’ post done before then!  😉

Before I get to that, however, last week’s post was on solar power and I wanted to take a second to add in this link: Concentrated Solar Power Tower In Seville, Spain: The Future Of Electricity? I also wanted to point you toward a brilliant TED talk by Michael Pawlyn on biomimicry, titled “Using nature’s genius in architecture“.  Well worth your time.

Okay, this week’s post is on ‘Sustainable Prisons’.  I have friend who has a Master’s degree in Criminology and as such she’s entitled to use fancy words like ‘recividism‘, and qualified to talk about the penal system in Canada and the US vs. the penal system in Sweden for example.  I also had a friend (now deceased) who was a psychologist at a prison for the criminally insane.  I have no such qualifications, but I have read Edward O. Wilson’s book called ‘Biophilia‘, and was touched by the movies ‘Greenfingers‘ and ‘The Bird Man of Alcatraz‘.  Essentially ‘biophilia’ translates as ‘love of the earth’, and that’s something that affects all of us.  There’s an interesting article called, ‘Biophilia, Selling the Love of Nature‘ that speaks to this, and I did a previous ‘Being Green‘ post on a similar same topic. Continue Reading →

Help! I Deleted My Lightroom Images!!

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Hi Folks:

I received the following question this morning and provided some information that helped, but I thought I’d take the time to write a longer response as well. First, the problem:

Hi there Mike, Thanks for offering to help me! I just did a real stupid thing! Processed images in Lightroom (2.7). By accident I deleted the images in the orig. folder – AND emptied the bin (do not ask) but I am still seeing the images in my Lightroom Library tray! However it does not let me export them obviously – as it cannot find the original files. So I was wondering if I can retrieve the images from Lightroom? I hope you can help me!

Now then…  If this happens to you, all is not (necessarily) lost but there are a few things to understand about Lightroom and about your computer’s hard drive.  I’ll begin by saying that I work in Windows and my knowledge of Macs is somewhat limited, but they work in essentially the same way. Continue Reading →

Choices…

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Hi folks:

I was reading through my book of notes to my self this morning and stumbled over the following entry from January 25.  Thought I’d share it with all y’all:

Let’s say you’ve been wandering around lost, over hill and dale, through forests and swamps, and all of a sudden you come across a community in the middle of nowhere.  The place is beautiful; the people are warm, friendly and inviting… in short, a veritable Garden of Eden.  You’re taken in, given food, clean clothing and rest, and after you’ve had a chance to refresh yourself the village elder comes to see you and tells you that you need to make a decision.  There are two options:  For option 1, you remain there and become an integral part of their community.  You adopt their manner of dress, food, customs and beliefs.  For option 2, you choose to retain control of your own destiny.

Given these two options, which one would you choose?

I related this to Marcia, and her initial response was very similar to mine.  She said there were too many factors to consider and not enough information.  It would depend on the people’s beliefs, ideas, attitudes, etc.

But here’s the kicker.  Nowhere in option 2 is it expressed or implied that you would have to leave.

There’s no ‘correct’ answer to this question…

Love,
Mike.

P.S.  Eleven years ago I wrote a story called, “The Way“.  You can find more of our stories under the ‘Our Stories’ link at the top of this page.

Being Green – Bottling Sunshine

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Hi Folks:

Friday once again, and time for this week’s ‘Being Green‘ post.  Of all of the world’s current ills, one of the largest and most well known is global warming – sometimes called the ‘greenhouse effect’.  There are essentially two strands to this problem: one is that plants like trees and even algae (which sequester CO2) are being killed off faster than they are being replenished through activities like logging and through poisoning the world’s oceans, and the other is that in our demands for energy we are burning fossil fuels to produce electricity and to power our vehicles (from cars to airplanes), thus releasing more CO2 into the atmosphere.  All in all, not a very pretty picture, and one that presents clear long-term consequences.

Many people talk of electricity as ‘clean energy’, but at the moment that’s more advertising hype than it is truth for the simple reason that most of our ‘clean’ electricity’ comes from dirty sources: generating plants that burn coal or even natural gas.  Nuclear reactors present their own very-long-term challenges as well as the potential for environmental disasters… such as what happened in Chernobyl. Continue Reading →

A Quick Tip: Lightroom Colour Picker

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Hi Folks:

The following isn’t my idea, but something I picked up from watching a video by Matt Kloskowski over at Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips.  The only difference is that he was working in Photoshop, and I thought it must be transferable to Lightroom; so it is.

The colour picker tool in Lightroom’s Develop module is used mostly with Split-toning, although it’s also available with the Gradient tool and the Brush tool.  As can be seen in the image below, one can either use the sliders to set the hue and saturation levels for the Highlights and Shadows, or, by clicking on the colour box, one can bring out the colour picker tool. Continue Reading →

Being Green – Fair Trade

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Hi Folks:

Friday once again, and time for this week’s ‘Being Green‘ post.  Imagine getting up every morning and going to work, but discovering on payday that you have to pay your boss for being there…  Sounds silly, right?  Consider then that of the roughly 8 million tonnes of coffee consumed every year, some 80% is sold for less than what it costs to grow it.  That’s just one example, albeit a common one; where would we be without our caffeine jolt in the morning?  While people are generally happy to discover low prices on foods and other products in the store, how many stop to consider what the ‘cost’ of those low prices really is?

The term ‘Fair Trade‘ has been given several definitions, but the one agreed upon by the four member organizations of ‘FINE’ (from Wikipedia) is:

In 2001, FINE members agreed the following definition of fair trade, on which to base their work:

“Fair trade is a trading partnership, based on dialogue, transparency and respect, that seeks greater equity in international trade. It contributes to sustainable development by offering better trading conditions to, and securing the rights of, marginalized producers and workers – especially in the South. Fair trade organisations, backed by consumers, are engaged actively in supporting producers, awareness raising and in campaigning for changes in the rules and practice of conventional international trade”.

FINE members further agreed to define fair trade‘s strategic intent as:

  • deliberately to work with marginalised producers and workers in order to help them move from a position of vulnerability to security and economic self-sufficiency,
  • to empower producers and workers as stakeholders in their own organisations,
  • actively to play a wider role in the global arena to achieve greater equity in international trade.

Continue Reading →

Photo of the Month – Spring Flowers

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Hi Folks:

At the end of every month I create a post with my favourite image of those I’ve taken in the past month. However, since this site belongs to both Marcia and me, this month I’m going to break with tradition and post one of Marcia’s images instead.   For some strange reason she doesn’t have the same fascination with shutter speeds, f/stops and depth of field tables that I do, but she has a good eye.  This image was made yesterday, using Marcia’s new cell phone camera, while we were walking around the Rockland district of Victoria. I admit I did push it around in Lightroom a little bit, but she nailed the lighting and composition to start with and all I did was accent it. It’s an image of a group of hellebores, or ‘winter roses’ as they’re sometimes called. These were growing in one of the gardens on the Lieutenant Governor’s grounds.Winter RosesSpring flowers. January. I’ll get used to it eventually…

Now go out and make some photographs!

Mike.

Photographing Moving Water – Revisited

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Hi Folks:

Last month I did a blog post on a technique I’ve been playing with for ‘Photographing Moving Water‘. I’m not going to reiterate that technique here so if you’d like to read that other post first, I’ll wait…

…welcome back!

Now, I’ve used this idea on several photos and it generally works pretty well, but I’d only used it on wave action down at the shore of the ocean. I’d been wondering how well it would work on a stream, waterfall or other moving water, so I went out yesterday to make some more images. This is my second ‘winter’ here on the island and I’m still not quite used to the idea of using ‘January’ and ‘spring’ in the same sentence, but the skunk cabbage leaves were already starting to unfurl when I was out… Anyway, I digress. Continue Reading →

Being Green: Green Consumers

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Hi Folks:

Friday once again, and time for this week’s ‘Being Green‘ post.  The title for this post was inspired by a couple of articles I read this week.  The first was, “It’s not easy being a green consumer“, and it begins with:

Green consumerism has the ring of being an oxymoron, but we all need to consume to live. One could go crazy trying to be totally consistent (even Gandhi realized that). Buying less and local are good starts. Combining that with some research and exercising common sense could go a long way, it seems, towards making us all more responsible consumers. (GW)

Continue Reading →

Making Rounded Corners in Lightroom

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Hi Folks:

This has been covered on other photography sites, but since it popped up on Twitter again yesterday I thought I’d do a short post on it.  The question is, “Can I add rounded corners to an image in Lightroom?  The answer is yes, and it’s pretty easy to do, using the Post-Crop Vignetting Tool in the Develop module.  That tool is in the right panel near the bottom and is mostly used to add a vignette for creative effect or to remove the vignetting sometimes caused by wide-angle lenses.  To create an image with rounded corners, use the following settings:

Amount: +/-100 – depending on whether you want a white border or a black border.
Midpoint: Start at around 25 and adjust from there.
Roundness: -100
Feather: 0

Rounded Corners

That’s it!  You can play with the numbers a bit, but once you’ve set them you can also create a Develop preset using the ‘Uncheck All’ then selecting only the ‘Post-Crop Vignetting’ checkbox.  Here, you can even use this one: Rounded Corners preset.

Now go out and make some photographs!

Mike.

P.S. You can find more of our posts on photography and Lightroom tutorials here, and you can find links to over 200 other sites that have Lightroom tips, tutorials and videos here.