Something from the Oven

Took a recent set of pictures of the Henry Clay iron furnace at Coopers Rock State Park.  This isn't quite an HDR shot.  Rather, it was created with an Adobe Lightroom plugin called LR/Enfuse.

LR/Enfuse does a nice little trick with a number of bracketed shots, creating a well-balanced lighting effect without the intensity of a high dynamic range picture.

While shooting there, I met a photographer from Pittsburgh, who was also shooting the furnace.  We swapped lenses, so I got to try his Tamron 28-80 mm lens.

I learned that this opening has a special name -- it's called a tuyere. That's the name for an entry through which the blast of air enters a furnace.  If you're interested, here's where I got my old iron furnace anatomy lesson:  http://www.oldindustry.org/OH_HTML/OH_Buckeye.html#Description.

Revisiting Illustrator Revisited

Previously, I shared an Adobe Illustrator drawing that I was thinking of using as a subject in the framing/matting course that I'm taking.

I showed it to one of my Ukrainian friends, and her daughter made lots of useful suggestions.  As a result of the suggestions, I completely overhauled the color work of the original, collapsing a variety of disparate colors into a very limited palette of art history colors.  The results are not unpleasing.

First of all, the daughter thought that the white background of the original was too glaring.  Rather than fussing with mat color schemes and conspiracies, the suggestion was to just use a harmonious background color and frame directly to that.  After experimenting with the creamy-yellow color that's in the flower petals, I tried the green that's in the leaves.  That received several thumbs-up.

I just ordered an 8"x10" print through Superior Photo.  I can't wait to make this one of my first framing projects.  Prior to this, all of my classwork has been with cutting mats.  That experience has been frustrating, to say the least.  It was almost an epiphany for me to realize that I didn't have to mat this particular work.

Bang, bang!  Maslow's hammer came down upon my head.

Illustrator Revisited

I'm taking a ten-week adult learning class on picture framing and matting.  Most of my effort is with my photographs, but I thought that I might resurrect one of my Adobe Illustrator drawings from a few years back.

I took one of my favorite pysanky designs, the "piven," which is a stylized rooster.  This is it, in the front-right.

Going the extra mile, I touched up some of the rougher areas around the cock's comb and tail feathers.  The nicest effect that I tweaked was making the flower stems on the bottom look like they were passing through the scroll work of the "feet."  Previous attempts had the stems breaking at the junctures.  This left tiny gaps that you could see in the blown up image. This time, I copied portions of the scrolling and placed them in a layer over the flower stem.

When I mat this, I'm thinking of a couple of concentric rectangles.  Even the $2,000 mat cutters in class can't do oval cutting.  The inner quarter-inch mat would use the light green color from the picture, and the larger outer mat would use the reddish brick color.  Something about the way that this browser is rendering the artwork is making the brick color look like cherry-red.  I sure hope the final printed copy remains brick!

On the Bandwagon

A while back, there was a twitter meme that struck my fancy:  https://twitter.com/hashtag/trumpyourcat.

I have a cat that fits the profile well, so I had to contribute:

"Show me someone without an ego, and I'll show you a loser" --

  Donald "Cooter" Trump

Fleur du Jour

Meet the Asiatic dayflower (Commelina communis), which gets its name because the blooms last only one day. It is classified as a noxious weed in North America, but it is used as a medicinal herb in China, its native habitat. 

According to Chinese folk medicine, it has febrifugal, antipyretic, anti-inflammatory, and diuretic effects. It is also used for treating sore throats and tonsillitis.

In Japan the flowers were used to produce a pigment in many world-renowned woodcuts from the 18th and early 19th centuries.

Chinese Measels

An Ars Technica article. NSA report shows China hacked 600+ US targets over 5 years, features a map, which shows the more than 600 sites around the continental U.S. that have been hit by Chinese hackers.

Can you spot WVU on this map?  I knew you could.

It looks like North Dakota is the only "safe" place in this country if you want to live off the grid.

My Pictures Stink

Earlier this year, I bought the book Your Photos Stink!: David Busch's Lessons in Elevating Your Photography from Awful to Awesome.  Sorry to say that I haven't gone all the way through this book, but I learned enough to be dangerous.

Here's a lesson that I applied:

This picture is of a Fuller's Teasel (Dipsacus fullonum) that I shot near Wally World.  Granted, it's nothing special, but to me it has a certain je ne sais quoi.  I even tried to go artsy-fartsy with it and render it in black & white.  It was then that I noted the "stink" factor:  the ant on the top-right of teasel is distracting.  I mean, it's a nice ant and all, but she wasn't meant to be the subject of my picture.  She had to go.

Here is the artsy-fartsy black & white teasel but without the ant:

You probably think I'm talking about putting lipstick on a pig, if you want to call my teasel a pig. Truth be told, I'm thinking that the color shot is more aesthetically pleasing.  But you have to admit that the shot is much better without the little photo bomber.