Erik's Blog

A couple days ago the weather was nice, so I decided to walk across the iron bridge into the neighboring town of Treto. Partly because I don’t think I’ve ever crossed the bridge on foot and partly because I was curious about the nearest train station. The bridge is a well-known landmark, designed by some French guy named Eiffel. It was a very pleasant walk.
(more…)

After my recent splash back into the tilt-shifting pool, my Photoshop muse has been working on ways to focus a photograph viewer’s attention to a particular part of the photograph using, well, focus. While what follows are technically fake tilt-shift effects, the aim in choosing the photographs and choosing the focal depth of each image was not only to make the subjects look miniature, but to draw your attention. All the photographs are mine, plucked from my photo library. I highly recommend viewing them all larger than they appear here, as they are much more impressive large.
(more…)

My little town has two photographer shops and two framing shops. In both, the shop windows are filled with examples of their work that has recently been finished and is waiting to be picked up. The main frame (computer joke) shop is right downtown and I walk by there every day. Usually they have certificates, caricatures, cross-stitched scenes, puzzles, and occasionally a painting or two. Yesterday, as I was glancing at what my fellow townspeople were having framed that day, my brain registered that there was something very wrong about one particular certificate. The text reads, “Second prize, shop window competition, 2009″. See if you can spot what’s wrong.
(more…)

I’ve always been fond of photographs of the space shuttle. There’s something truly magnificent about a space-bound rocket sitting on the launch pad. It saddens me that the shuttle era will come to and end this year. I just hope its successor doesn’t take too long to get off the ground, so to speak. When I saw some photos of the roll-out of STS-130 yesterday, I selected a couple as good tilt-shifting candidates. Below I present to you the results.
(more…)

While I’m certainly not the first to think of this particular play-on-words, I do think that my book cover is better than the other parodies I’ve seen already floating around. The font, in case you’re wondering, is called Didot.

For those of you that don’t know who David Pogue is, he’s a technology columnist for the New York Times, and general internet geek celebrity who gets to test new gadgets before they are released.
(more…)

My sister-in-law has been begging me to make this photoshop construction for a long time. Finally on Saturday I took the pictures, and today I spent a disturbingly small amount of time (< 5 minutes) photoshopping two photos together.

One interesting thing that I discovered in this endeavor was that it’s really hard to move a 7 kg weight from one side of your body to the other without drastically changing your posture. On the photos with Nora on her right, her hips were exaggeratedly to her left, and vice versa.
(more…)

While in Burgos this past weekend, I watched this old man make his way across this open square. Normally, in my experience, canes for the visually impaired make little clicking sounds on the ground as they are swung back and forth feeling the landscape. But this one had a big rubber stopper on the end. Initially it make me think that it was really a cane for support, but he never put any weight on it, and swung it around in front of him. When he got closer, I took his photograph.
(more…)

A little while ago, I had an idea for a cool photography project to visualize Nora’s growth, one that hopefully won’t involve peeing on electronics. My idea is to take a photo of Nora at six months old on one side of our sofa, and then take another picture of her at one year with her slightly to the right of her previous position. Ditto for 18 months and 2 years. Then, I can photoshop them all together to have four versions of Nora sitting together on the sofa! Cool, huh?
(more…)

The point of high dynamic range (HDR) imaging is to, via post-processing, more accurately capture the wide range of colors and tones that the human eye sees as it saccades around the scene. Current camera photon sensing technology is just not as good as the human eye at capturing a wide range of light levels. The typical procedure involves taking three or more photographs of the same subject, with minimal camera movement, at various exposure levels, e.g. one where the shadows are underexposed, one where the highlights are overexposed, and another middle range. Then, using a computer program, the images are aligned and the detail from the shadows in one exposure is combined with the details of the highlights of another exposure, thus giving you detail across a wide range of light levels.
(more…)

I dedicate this post to my high school World Literature teacher, Glenda Stephens, who crammed way too much Greek mythology into my head. As with many good teachers, I hated it at the time and have been grateful ever since.

My favorite lolcats are the ones that are way over the heads of most lolcat viewers.

The photo was found on the internet by my friend, Seth. The caption is mine.