White balance

I shot a slew of pictures at a wedding on Saturday. The reception was held inside a ballroom after dark, so it was definitely a low light situation. I was very glad for my f/1.8 lens, which allowed me to shoot in program mode without the flash and get fairly decent raw images—not the greatest, but good enough.

I wasn't totally satisfied with the photos, though; they all had a slight yellow cast. The yellow gave it a nice soft look, but it was also somewhat unnatural. I wanted to correct this, and I knew I probably could since I shot everything in RAW mode, which leaves the photos unprocessed (as opposed to shooting in jpg, which compresses the images as it writes them to the camera's memory card). But I didn't really know how to do it, or even if I could do it at all with iPhoto, which is the only photo management application I have.

So I sent a quick message to my Internet friend Greg Kendall-Ball, who is a professional photographer and has been gracious in the past about giving me pointers. (Seriously, check out his work—it's excellent. Order some prints. Tell him I sent you.) I asked him how to get rid of the yellow tint in my photos, and he replied and advised me that iPhoto does in fact do white balance correction. And it's pretty easy; here's what he said: "On the 'Adjust' panel, next to 'Tint' is an eyedropper. Click that on a spot that should be white." Here's the relevant portion of the Adjust panel in iPhoto. The eyedropper is all the way to the left.



And it's a simple one-click process. There were a lot of white shirts and tablecloths (and a certain white dress, of course) in the photos I took, so it was easy enough to find a "true" white for the software to rely on for its adjustments. Clicking on something that should be white had an instant dramatic effect. Here is one before/after example, a shot of my friend Anna and her son Troy. (I clicked on Troy's shirt to make the adjustment.)



In some ways I like the softness of the poorly balanced image better. I can't decide if this is just bad judgment on my part, or if there's some additional manipulation I should apply to the photo to give it back some of its warm glow. It could also be that the automated correction overdid it and fine-tuning it is the key.

I welcome your comments and advice, especially if you have more of a clue about this kind of thing than I do. Thanks, Greg, for the tip! (And the rest of you: remember to visit his site and check out his work.)

Hail to the Redskins

Today the Redskins beat heavily favored Dallas on the road, handing the Cowboys their first loss of the season. On a day when the Yankees are getting their big plasma screens ready so they can watch the Red Sox in the playoffs from the comfort of their living rooms, it's nice to see the hated Cowboys taken down a notch.

Can we possibly stop it in time?

I say no, but here's Ron Paul's advice:

"Although the present bailout package is almost certainly not the end of the political atrocities we'll witness in connection with the crisis, time is short. Congress may vote as soon as tomorrow. With a Rasmussen poll finding support for the bailout at an anemic seven percent, some members of Congress are afraid to vote for it. Call them! Let them hear from you! Tell them you will never vote for anyone who supports this atrocity."

Find your senators and representative here. It can't hurt to call.

Enough already

Can allergy season please end now?



Yes, I actually buy tissues in bulk. And not the cheap kind that rips your nose apart.

Design our tattoo, win fifty bucks

When Tracey and I ran a marathon last year, we decided to get matching tattoos to commemorate the event. Off and on over the past year, I've sat down to try and work up a design that I'd be comfortable having on my body when I die, and I just can't seem to get it quite right. It's time to give up and turn the job over to someone more qualified. Are you that person? If so, we'll give you $50. Hey, I know it's not much for the type of design work you're capable of, but come on: you get the satisfaction of knowing it's stuck on our arms (or ankles, or backs, or whatever) forever and ever!

Here are some criteria.

Size: Fairly small. It should be able to fit on, say, a large red delicious apple.

Color: Black is okay, but some color is nice too. Nothing too crazy that makes it really expensive or requires several sessions.

Content: Up to you. I've been working with pure text, just the mileage (26.2) and the date (9-16-2007); I'd also be okay with a graphic if it's well-designed. See the running blog I linked above for inspiration.

Rules: We reserve the right to reject any and all submitted designs. There is no guaranteed winner.

Questions? Post a comment or send me an email!

Not all dialog boxes are good

For every great dialog box, there's a crappy one:



"Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Cancel or OK?" Ick.

This is so Windows 95 it's pathetic that a major Internet property would use it in the year 2008. [Update: Elliot notes that this is not Google/Blogger's fault, that it is a limitation of Javascript. Fair enough: whoever is at fault ought to fix it.] The buttons should say "Stay here" and "Leave without saving," or something similar. As it stands now, I'm forced to read all the text, interpret which nondescript button corresponds to my desired course of action, and click—hoping I got it right.

(I first encountered this idea several years back on the site "X vs. XP," which played a major role in my decision to switch to the Mac.)

Sync For Cider!

A few posts back, I lamented my frustration with my calendar workflow, mainly because I wanted a good sync solution. The impetus for this whine happened a few weeks earlier, when my family's lack of synchronization with calendaring resulted in a double booking that meant I would miss Artisan Cider Days. Cider Days is perhaps the best event of the year at Artisan Church: apple picking, pie-eating, turkey frying, cider pressing—oh, the tangy, unpasteurized goodness of freshly pressed apple cider! Big fun next month guys; seriously, don't miss it. For me, big fun 13 months from now. Ouch. Bad.

But it wasn't just that I had no good way to sync calendars with Tracey. If that was all I wanted, I could set her up with a Google Calendar, subscribe to it, pull it into iCal, and go from there. Google Calendar is a brilliant way to keep track of your calendars, for the obvious reason that it's available on any Internet-capable computer in the world. (Well, except when you can't—more in a minute.)

The only problem is that I don't like using it.

I don't like the way it looks; I don't like the way it responds to clicking anywhere in the interface; I don't like that I can't choose black as a calendar color. (Black. Come on guys, basic black!) I don't like much of anything about it, except the part that I love: the always available access.

Apple's iCal, on the other hand, is an calendar app I'm both used to and fond of. I can use it anywhere I have my laptop—regardless of whether the Internet is available, and regardless of whether Google Calendar decides to wet its pants about showing me one of my calendars, which it did for about 36 hours a couple weeks back. As an added bonus, I find its user interface to be better than Google Calendar's in almost every way. I realize that this may be purely a matter of personal taste and familiarity—I'm not a UI expert. But that's the way I feel about it.

An ideal solution would be one that allows me to take advantage of all the best parts of Google Calendar AND all the best parts of iCal. A solution that would allow me to add and edit events in iCal and view them in Google Calendar. A solution that would bring Tracey's calendar to me and send my calendar to her. This last one, the bidirectional syncing, is the key. Without some way to get my iCal events up to my Google Calendar, Tracey would have no way to see my calendar, and sending hers to me would be a pointless exercise.

Enter BusySync, an OS X preference pane application that syncs local calendars on your home network as well as syncing Google Calendar with iCal. I don't know how or why it works. All I know is that it does. I don't care about the local syncing, but I rely on the Google/iCal syncing, and it works flawlessly. So here's a crude diagram of how my calendar flow goes now:

iCal <--> Google Calendar (all of them: mine, Tracey's, the church's—every single one)
iCal <--> iPhone (crucial for viewing and editing on the go)
iCal --> iCal Events (a dashboard widget that shows me the next 7 days at a glance)

That's pretty simple, and believe me, it makes life a lot less complicated. Well worth the $25 a BusySync license costs! It's hard to explain how much of a relief it is to have this problem solved. So come on friends, lets sync our calendars—do it for the cider! Sync For Cider! Sync For Cider!

(Hey, it's as least as good a slogan as "Drill, Baby, Drill!")

Happy Anniversary to us

It was nine years ago that Tracey and I said our vows under a small oak tree in Letchworth State Park. I am struck simultaneously with the sense that the whole thing happened just yesterday and a feeling that we've always been together. I certainly would prefer not to imagine what my life would have been like without her!

I think I may have said this last year, but it's the clearest way I can express my love for my wife: I don't care where we end up or what we're doing. As long as we're together, I will be happy.

Birthday lens

My mom and dad got me a terrific new lens for my birthday. I already love the results I'm getting, even though I'm experiencing the usual sense of "I don't know what I'm doing with this quite yet" that comes with a powerful new tool. But check this out (now, granted, the raw material here is pretty hard to screw up). This glass captures nice light:


Abel makes Tracey smile

Thanks Mom and Dad!