Laen Aggregated

Neither this page, nor my gallery get many hits, so I sometimes let the webserver logs scroll in the background while I work, just to see what people are hitting. Most people get here through a photoblogs.org link, or a Photo Friday” entry. Usually they just look at the picture linked, and sometimes the ones before and after it.

Occasionally, though, someone will spend a great deal of time browsing around. For instance, for the last two nights I’ve been visited by someone coming in on a Kuwait IP address. On both nights they spent over an hour wandering around the albums. Well, tonight I joined them. Whenever they’d go to a new page, I’d follow. It was fascinating, seeing what they saw. What pictures did they like? On the first night they did a search for “sunrise” and “sunset”, then spent a long time in the Lomo album. They liked the rain pictures enough to download the full image, which had to take forever considering the ping times. Who were they? A Kuwaiti curious about a slice of Florida life? A US citizen stationed in Kuwait? Since they came from two different IP addresses on the same subnet, I pictured them in an Internet cafe’. It was 10 in the morning in Kuwait.

It’s a funny feeling when someone spends a lot of time looking at your pictures. I wonder what we have in common.

Okay, obligatory photos. This /is/ a photoblog after all.

This was one of about two hundred pictures I took while feeding the seagulls. If you ever want to see a flock of seagulls like this, all you have to do is take a piece of food– any food– go to the beach and give it to the nearest seagull. Every single seagull on the beach will come flying. It’s like they have a psychic food connection.

I used stale cornchips. They didn’t seem to mind.

Bird Posse:
Them birds got some funny expressions.

This weekend I went to International Plaza with my wife and her parents. I haven’t gotten out in a while, and welcomed the opportunity to go take some pictures. After wandering around for almost an hour and not getting anything great, we went outside to the open-air wing of Internation Plaza. My luck changed when the sky opened up:

I was estatic. I really like pictures of people against the elements.

Of course, once it started raining, the family wanted to head back inside, so I didn’t get as many pictures as I probably could have. We wandered around for a little while longer, ate at a mall restaurant, and went back to the car to drive home.

On the way out of the parking lot, a fox ran acoss our path! I stopped the car right in the middle of the road and lept out to take pictures:

It looked skinny, and it wasn’t at all disturbed by my presence. Some of these pictures were taken from under 10 feet away.

So, not a great weekend for photography, but not bad either.

So, now that I have enough good photos, I can print some out and hang them on the wall. I knew this day would come, so back when I bought my Canon EOS 300D, I also bought a whole bunch of Staples photo paper. 200 sheets of 4×6 Premium Photo Paper, and 100 sheets of 8.5×11 Professional High Gloss Photo Paper. They were having a two-for-one sale, and I was obviously in some kind of weakened condition that left me open to buying massive amounts of photo paper.

I’ve done some prints before , and they’ve come out all hazy and muddy. The saturation was all wrong, and the pictures seemed… flat. I figured I just wasn’t editing the pictures correctly, and that even though they were pretty and bright on the screen, I’d have to make them even brighter and more saturated to get the effect on paper. I was sure this was going to suck.

So I gave up printing for a while. No need to waste ink trying to figure out how I was going to have to edit a picture in order to have it come out good on the printer. After all, it was more important to me that my photos look good online than on paper. Still, Liz would occasionally ask me to print something out to send to a friend, and I’d do it, look at the result, and gag. This was embarassing.

Today I got some pictures of a Mall Fox and Liz wanted a print so she could mail it to a friend. Once again, it came out crappy and embarassing, so I took some time. to experiment and figure it out.

The problem was with the Color Management. What I needed to do in Photoshop CS when printing was:
* File -> Print with Preview
* “Show More Options”
* “Color Management”
* Print Space, Profile: “BJ Color Printer Profile 2000″
* Print Space, Intent: “Perceptual”
* I left “Use Black Point Compensation” checked.

MUCH nicer result. The colors are clear, and the haziness is completely gone. Hooray for color profiles!

On Saturday, I spent three hours walking around Hillsborough River State Park. The tree cover provided some relief from the 93 degree weather, and I never strayed far from the river, which certainly helped keep the temperature bearable. All the same, by the end of the three hours, I had gone through a litre and a half of water and felt near to fainting.

Looking back at the pictures, I think it was worth it. I got a some good pictures, some okay pictures, and enough tree pictures to make me doubt my sanity. (I mean really, what’s with all the tree pictures?)

That was pretty much it for this weekend. It was too hot to go to the zoo. Next weekend: Egmont Key.