Day 52

Title: Jess

Today was a much needed unwinding day.

I just chilled in my parent's backyard with the G-units, cubing, reading, photographing, talking, and generally doing nothing. Nothing felt nice today.

The only thing that sucked was that Miss Day 7 stood me up. Sorry I just made that public, Miss Day 7.

Then I played tennis with Jessica, who is featured in today's portrait. She's a fantastic person with one hell of a life. I doubt she's ever had a shortage of stories to tell.

Anyway, back to tennis. AJ got me into racquetball this last year, and even bought me a racket for christmas. I'd love to keep playing, but it's no longer free since I graduated and can't use the CU gym anymore (I guess it was never free...my parent's were probably paying out the ass in student fees for me to be able to go there). Being the cheap-ass I am, I've decided that I need to find a free alternative, and I think that tennis is going to be it. I've always been slightly put off by the concept of tennis, though. You see, in racquetball you're surrounded on six sides by solid surfaces, so no matter where or how hard you hit the ball, it can't go very far. Sure there's still a lot of technique associated with getting a good shot out of hitting the ball hard, but even if it's just your last ditch effort to keep the volley going then there are never consequences like - oh I don't know - smashing the ball into low earth orbit. I see tennis as a more controlled precision game with bigger rackets and heavier balls.

I had a lot of fun with Jessica, though, so I think I might just give it a chance.

I had an interesting day photographically. I was shooting the monolithically monochromatic blue sky, trying to capture the barely visible waxing crescent moon at the edge of the frame. When I pulled the picture up on my computer, I was surprised when I noticed significant vignetting around the corners in the original, unaltered photo. I don't think that I've taken a bright, uniformly colored photo quite like these yet, so I never noticed its effects before. Frankly, I just thought it was a false effect that you could put in during post-processing that Mark and Scott both use much more effectively than I do (examples of their works behind the links). Then when I was trying to bring out the whites in the photo to get the moon to pop with a little more contrast with the background sky (I guess the sky is actually in the foreground since the blue is an atmospheric effect which is much closer to us than the moon is), and I hit AUTO in curves, and it did...well, what you see below. I thought that was bizarre how harshly Photoshop handled the mostly monochromatic photo, but it really brings out the vignetting. It also brings out several large black dots that are hardly visible in the original. I'm not sure if those came from something really out of focus in the photograph, crap on one of my lenses, or crap on my sensor. I really hope those don't keep manifesting themselves in my pictures. Just because I think it's interesting, below is the totally untouched original photograph compared to the Photoshop auto curves version.




Oh, and one more thing. I've noticed that I spend a lot of time in Photoshop trying to get colors to look just right, only to have Flickr totally mute the colors. I've opened an identical copy of the same photograph in Flickr, Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, and Adobe Bridge at the same time, and all three look different. Then I look at my blog on other computers with completely different calibrations, and my colors get further fucked. I always thought in the past that people that talked about the importance of calibrating your monitors and printers were just being pretentious and nitpicky, kind of like people that argue about the differences in sound guitars with maple necks have versus those with mahogany. I now understand their reasoning since I have started loosing the battle of trying to make my photos look semi-okay universally.