“Hey Mr. Raccoon! Look at this doll! She’s just like a robot!”

A brilliant woman, named Pat, sat with me over coffee one morning and explained what she thought were the underpinnings of anxiety. She said that anxiety was the combination of Ambiguity, Loneliness and Indecision. She felt like it could be treated by understanding those three causes and working to erase them. That, and the choice of the right bottle of Scotch.

More here.

The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.

More here.

This is an excerpt from an e-mail I sent a friend.

Here is my current Lightroom M.O.:

• Set the black point. Modern lenses are very contrasty and may not need this. 5 is the default for Lightroom and it is a good one but I had a lens that needed 8 or 9 every single time. In extreme low light situations you may have to set this to 2 or even 0. Basically you adjust this slider so that the parts of your image that you want to be black, are actually black.
• Set the proper white balance. Once you get perfectly neutral white balance, add a smidge of warmth, it really brings out the skin tones.
• Adjust contrast to taste. With my camera it winds up being 35-50. Rarely over 50 unless I’m looking for an effect.
• Add a slight bit of vignetting (by which I mean, add darkness, I think you need to reduce the number on the slider), depending on the lighting conditions. The eye is drawn to the lightest parts of the image, but I want to have a subtle drawing in effect where I bring the eye to the focal point. This is needed most if the light doesn’t have much contrast across the image. It can look gimmicky if you overdo it. An alternative is to use localized corrections to put in a super strong asymmetrical “vignette” to strongly draw attention.
• Fill light, highlight recovery and clarity can be added as needed.
1. You need fill light if the shadows are too dark; if you add too much, you’ll probably need to add contrast to compensate. Of course that negates the benefit of the fill light; striking the right balance is key here.
2. You need highlight recovery only occasionally. Don’t use it all of the time, it dulls the image and robs it of impact. Far better to blow out those highlights and maintain the emotional intensity of the image, instead of getting a more “technically perfect” image that has no oomph.
3. Clarity is another word for enhancing localized contrast. It increases the illusion of sharpness, and a light hand is usually called for. Too much can cause a sickening effect on faces. Can be okay with a B&W photo of someone with a lot of wrinkles if you want to enhance those. In general, you can use more of this on male faces than female or child faces. It adds just a bit of crunch to the image.

• A lot of added contrast is sometimes needed for luminance adjustment, but it can cause unpleasant effects on the overall color of the image. Take saturation or vibrance down by 3-7 points if the color contrast is too much.
• Don’t adjust sharpening unless you both know what you are doing and are printing something to paper. I don’t know what I’m doing with sharpening and rarely print.
• You can almost always crank up color noise reduction to 100 percent with no problems. I’ve run across 2, maybe 3 images (out of about 100k) where that was not the case. Luminance noise reduction can often lead to a plasticky looking image, and rarely is that good. You can experiment with it if you are only outputting 600 pixel wide web images though.
• If you just can’t get a good edit of a shot because the color keeps coming up goofy, but you know it’s got to be possible, make a virtual copy, start from scratch, convert to greyscale, and make the greyscale image look nice. Then convert back to color. 8 times out of 10 this fixes it.
• Break these rules. People make entire careers out of breaking these rules. Some of my best shots have broken these rules. Here’s a good example of one that broke nearly all of these rules: http://www.crazybutable.com/photolog/index.php?showimage=918

Seriously, these rules are stupid and you should break them as much as you want…. just break them in aesthetically pleasing ways!

A quote from a friend to whom I recently sent some real, printed-on-paper photos:

1) I say this with all love and admiration and foofiness: Right now, somewhere in the world is a schizophrenic serial killer who has just gone off his meds, gotten himself heavily drunk, and at this moment is attempting to write a warning on his bathroom wall about a mind control device implanted in his teeth by CIA-funded aliens. This man has better handwriting than you. :)

2) following from the above, the best I can deduce from the caption of one photo is that you think C. would make an excellent custard.

It’s true. My “absolute best behavior” handwriting is atrocious.

Scott Adams recently moved into a new house, and has a list of house ideas that worked:

Home Theater Location

We put our home theater in the same general area as the kitchen and family room. It seats ten, which makes it cozy enough for general TV viewing. Now that most TV shows are HD, the big screen gets used every night. If the theater were in the basement or the far end of the home, as is often the case, it would feel lonely, and only get used for movies.

The theater has a double door with a large glass oval in the center. It doesn’t let much light in, and you always feel visually connected to people in the kitchen when you’re in the theater.

Being near the kitchen gives you convenient access to the microwave and refrigerator. The theater is soundproofed with acoustic wall panels, so you can be blasting a movie without interrupting conversation in the kitchen. It works in reverse too. If you want to escape the noise in the rest of the house you can leave the theater sound off and be in complete silence.

TV for Parties

The living room has its own largish standard TV. That allows us to entertain around special broadcasts such as the Super Bowl or the Academy Awards. The hardcore viewers use the theater while the chit-chatters mingle in the living room, near enough to each other that there’s a flow back and forth to make you feel connected. And both rooms open to the kitchen where people inevitably congregate, so the three spaces act as one for entertaining. (There’s a small TV in the kitchen too.)

Far be it for me to disagree with my lovely wife, but I would like to offer up a slight clarification.

I don’t think I’m “right”, I think I made the right decision for me. She didn’t tell me that she was intentionally not eating salad; I’ve been feeling guilty for the past two months for eating it all up before she got a chance.

I don’t think her choice was “wrong”, it was more of a decision on my part to try to get as many different salad recipes under my belt so I could bang one out when I needed to. And yes, it was difficult to get used to eating so many greens.

I had a theory. My theory was that before, during previous attempts at eating our way through the CSA “greens” marathon, we would only buy salad dressing one bottle at a time. So by the third day of peppercorn ranch, my stomach revolted at the thought.

But what if we had lots of different kinds of salad dressings? And salad dressing toppings? How many different kinds of recipes could I make? Hey, that sounds less like “work” and more like “fun”!

The experiment worked for me! Now I’m a little cranky if I don’t get my breakfast salad. It helps that this first salad mix from our new CSA was AMAZING. It had all kinds of crazy-weird plants, and, strangely enough, didn’t taste like lawn clippings.

Update: From the newsletter, this is what was in the salad mix:

One Bag of Salad Mix: Mizuna, Mustard Greens, Tatsoi, Red Russian Kale, Red Amaranth, Baby Lettuces, Bulls Blood Beets, and Pea Shoots.

Original:

Lens vignetting (-100):

Convert to greyscale:

Brightness (+14):

Black clipping (+18):

Contrast (+21):

Clarity (+13) (subtle, probably only visible at larger sizes):

All edits using Lightroom 1.4. Picture taken with a 20D using a 35-80 f/4-5.6 I, f/5.0, 1/30th of a second, ISO 1600.

[Extremely brief SoFoBoMo update: It's too much work to do a film based SoFoBoMo book with my current set up. Currently I'm re-thinking my SoFoBoMo book and trying to figure out a good theme.]

Molly Lewis wants to get an iPad. But iPads are expensive. So she took the cost of an iPad and made some infographics:

I’ve been itching to get an iPad for weeks, and so to put that amount of money into perspective I went through my ThinkGeek / Amazon / Del.icio.us wishlists, and made these infographics to show myself how much an iPad is worth in terms of all the other stuff on the internet that I consider too expensive to impulse-buy.

Each picture in this series adds up to roughly the same total, $1167 (an iPad+Apple Care+a case+1 year of data).

I love this! I should do this with some of the things I want.

Hey, it’s time for me to bore you with SoFoBoMo photos again! (At least it means semi-regular updates).

I like constraints with my SoFoBoMo books. My first book was taken using only my old digital point and shoot. My second was a book based on photos taken with a homemade macro lens. I’ve long wanted to do a film based SoFoBoMo book, so this year the constraint is that all photos have to be taken with my Olympus XA.

It’s proving to be an expensive constraint, sadly. I’m economizing by not getting the film scanned, and scanning the prints at home with my scanner. I’ve been getting wildly divergent film scans vs. prints from Costco recently anyway. Alas, scanning takes a tremendous amount of time, especially since I had to re-install the HP drivers, only to find that the old ones were far better. Now it takes me much, much longer to get a good scan.

One advantage: Costco gives these free index prints, so I don’t have to make contact sheets by hand. Here’s roll 1 and 2: (click to embiggen):

Rolls 3 and 4 are being developed and roll 5 is awaiting being sent over to Costco. Please note that the pictures of the kids playing in the mud in Roll 1 is actually from Memorial Day and does not count towards SoFoBoMo. Those won’t be in the book, so I posted one to the photolog instead.