Archive for the 'Photography' Category

I have made a few changes to the way individual entries are handled in my photo album. The URL for a specific image no longer uses the image filename, which should help the Google bot better index my photos. I noticed recently that none of my images were being found by Google’s indexer, and I’m pretty sure that the filename in the URL was the culprit. If you spot anything that’s broken, please let me know.

It’s taken me many weeks, but I have finally posted a new photo album of a family trip to Hanging Rock State Park, an outing we took at the beginning of the month for my birthday. I hope you enjoy the photos.

Note that there are two panorama shots in this album, both of which turned out fairly decent. I need to work on my panorama skills, and I’d like my album software to be able to dynamically link to high-res variants of a specific photo (a feature it currently does not support). For now, the links to the larger image are presented in the caption.

I have posted a new photo album from this year’s Old Fashioned Farmer’s Day event in Silk Hope, NC. This year’s album includes two short movies, showing a hit-and-miss engine in action, as well as the giant steam engine. Had I known more about the video feature of my camera, the results would probably have been better.

I was touching up some of my photographs recently when I noticed that one shot in particular had substantial vignetting. Wishing to use this photograph as a desktop wallpaper, I set out to try and remove this effect from the photograph. All of the standard Photoshop tools failed to do the trick. Both the clone tool and healing tool produced poor results. Disappointed, I searched the web for help. Thankfully, I found the answer I was looking for: a new filter introduced in Photoshop CS2.

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My family and I took a trip to the North Carolina Zoo earlier this week. As I normally do these days, I took my camera along and got lots of great photos. So many of my photographs turned out so well, that I think this may be my best photo album yet. A trusty monopod (which I got for Christmas last year) helped out tremendously in the darker exhibits.

Our trip this time primarily focused on the African exhibits (we spent the majority of our time on our previous trip in the American exhibits). The great thing about the NC Zoo is that there are so many things to see. In fact, it’s hard to see it all in one day!

I have fixed a bug in the navigation links in MonkeyAlbum here at the site. Some of the links used to navigate photo albums with multiple pages were pointing to the wrong location. If you happen to spot any other problems, please let me know.

A new photo album (possibly my best one yet) will be posted within the next day or two, so stay tuned.

Yesterday, my sister Hannah graduated from UNC, with a bachelor’s degree in Psychology (though she essentially crafted her own neuro-science major, a topic she is most interested in). She was only 1 of 3 people in her (very large) department that graduated with highest honors, which is a real accomplishment. It’s hard to believe that my little sister has grown up so much.

My main focus with this post, however, is one of great mystery. After the Psychology department ceremony (the last one we attended during the day), my grandmother, mother, sister, and I waited around the Old Well while my dad went to get our car. In a grassy area nearby, a group of people were putting on some sort of show for everyone. There were four “characters” in this show:

The Drummers

The first “character” was actually a group of three people sitting atop some African-style conga drums, each playing a consistent, though seemingly random, beat. Each one did this without stopping, at least for the entire time we were there (which was about 10 or 15 minutes).

The Purple Monster

This character was apparently controlled by two or three people, and stood 12 to 15 feet high. It was a purple being, with a large masked head and two large hands. It never moved from its spot, but swayed and danced along to the music from The Drummers.

The Thought Police

This character wore a giant green mask and hat, while carrying a blue baton. They also wore a trench coat, and spent most of their time chasing the next player around the grassy area.

Blue-Haired Person

This player wore a blue wig, a Carolina-blue gown (from graduation, apparently), and red pants. When they weren’t being chased by the “Thought Police,” they sat atop a “Corporate Ladder.”

No one spoke the entire time, which made this strange thing even stranger. The chain of events I could see where this: the Thought Police chased the Blue-Haired Person around for awhile, at least until the Blue-Haired Person climbed the Corporate Ladder. Once the person climbed the Corporate Ladder, the Thought Police left them alone, running around the Purple Monster instead. I took a few pictures of the characters:

• The Thought Police and the Purple Monster
• The Blue-Haired Person and the Drummers

Does anyone have any clues as to what this means? Seeing that this was in Chapel Hill, there was undoubtedly an implied political message, but I fail to grasp what it is. Irregardless of the message, the whole thing was pretty bizarre.