NewSc2

Series of photos depicting China. Most are pretty depressing (child labor, overcrowded living, poverty), but give good perspective on life. This one isn’t depressing:

Street side tailor making an instant repair on a skirt.

Page 1 (Survival), Page 2 (Relationships), Page 3 (Desires)

POST-PROCESSING (IN PHOTOSHOP) OF VEGAS PHOTOS

Learned some really basic post-processing photography techniques and wanted to post examples to track my progress. I took a few shots from the selection in my gallery of Vegas below, and touched them up in Photoshop. Just did some basic levels and curve adjustments, and unmask sharpened a little bit. Didn’t take more than about a minute for each one.

For the first example, a pretty underexposed picture of the Venetian Canal Square:

The image was processed straight to JPG in the camera, so I didn’t think I could grab this much more detail using the lossy file format. Lo and behold, a few tweaks and the shot looks arguably a bit better, and definitely has more detail. I know it has more distractions (people’s faces, etc.) but I was pretty impressed with the change:

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The next series of pics are going to be from Red Rock Canyon. The canyon was very scenic, so it was pretty hard to take a truly bad shot. But we went in the middle of the day, with the super-harsh sun, and there was a bit of dust and haze in the distance that came up on my pictures. Photoshop helped put back in some of that lost color.

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This was a picture that stood out to me. It has nice composition, but the colors just seem so washed out. This may have been a part of Red Rock that wasn’t so red, but the sky itself seems more gray than what I have in other pics. I might revisit this picture in the future… instead of going for the colored look, trying to tone down the image and work with its boundaries in that way. But for now, I don’t know how to do that, so here goes.

The difference isn’t huge, but the sky is more blue, and the rocks more red. The background mountain is also more clear.

And few more examples for your viewing pleasure:

And:

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This pair is actually one of my favorites I took. The depth of field in the image didn’t turn out the way I exactly intended to, but post-processing gives the log a better contrast and looks more lively:

So that’s it! Someday you can be a beginning post-processor too. Pardon my enthusiasm but I’m pretty pleased with the way things turned out and I’m very bored at work.

This past weekend Robert, Goldsheft, David, and I went to Vegas, and stayed at the Sahara (which is in BFE compared to the rest of the Strip):

Surprisingly, it didn’t matter much. It’s nice to walk out of the hotel and be in the middle of the Strip, but walking out of the hotel and driving for 5 minutes isn’t that bad. The only thing is that the Sahara buffet sucks. Don’t go there.

Buncha pics of Vegas from first two days, from our arrival to me walking around taking pictures (and avoiding leaving Vegas in the red for gambling — I left winning $22 — yay!). Caption is contained in the file name (hover mouse to see):

Continuing on, the four of us went to the Moon Club and Playboy Lounge at the Palms on Saturday night (pics were taken with a small point-and-shoot camera, hence the shittier quality. I do wish I brought my big camera, but club + expensive camera don’t mix):

And Luxor illuminating the moon:

Have I ever mentioned that I don’t like hip-hop clubs? People cheer for songs they’ve heard before, not for a truly good song or a good mix. I’d rather go to a house or techno club, and I might even go to a trance club for that matter, to get away from the hip-hop/pop crowd. Crass commercialism > musical genius for the loss :(. (I’ll save that rant for another day). As you can see, the club at least looked really nice, especially the illuminated bar, and illuminated floor tiles everywhere, and it was really fucking crowded.

Day 3, Sunday, saw a nice segue to an outdoor excursion, away from all the hustle and bustle of Vegas. Sadly, it wasn’t away from the heat. We got to Red Rock around 2 in the afternoon, and it wasn’t really that far away from Las Vegas. 30 min.?

(I wish Wordpress had a bulk thumbnail upload. That just took me about 10 minutes to upload those images individually)

On the way back from Vegas we hit a traffic jam — big rig flipped over the side of the 15 fwy. Sorry, no pics of that…

To pass the 6/7-odd hours the return trip lasted, we played the movie/actor game, where someone starts off with the name of the movie, the next person has to say an actor/actress that was in the movie, then the next person says another movie that actor/actress was in, and so on and so forth. No name can be said twice, so after, about, 4 hours the game got a little difficult. Especially considering I rarely watch movies anyway — my music takes up about 300 gigs on my hard drive, and movies maybe 20. Whoever says a movie or actor has to back up that name with one step more (so I can’t blindly say a movie without knowing a legit answer for the next person). The penalty for missing is a punch.

The game ended on a high note with me unofficially winning as we pulled up to Robert’s house. It somehow got from Val Kilmer to Batman Forever to Jim Carrey to Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, and it was my turn. I’ve watched Ace Ventura several times, but I’m not really a names-of-actors person. I racked my head really quickly and came up with — yep, you guessed it — Dan Marino! And I knew another movie he was in! David couldn’t get it after a couple minutes, so he challenged me, and… yep you guessed it again — Dan Marino was in Bad Boys 2. He got his car stolen before the ridiculous car chase. Whoo hoo! That $8 I spent to see the movie back in high school (and the 2 hours I wasted) actually came to fruition.

Great weekend, fun memories, Vegas, hiking, and good company. What more could you ask for?