For a decade I suffered this piece of junk -- or a different but essentially identical one.

(Hat tip; Flickr pool; my comparison album)

Sweet video here.  The hangtime on that jello is amazing.

I would download the 720p or 1080p version, rather than playing it in your browser, to avoid skipping and stuff.

I never in my life got poison ivy until last year when we moved here; this place is apparently crawling with the satanic plant.  But never having worried about it before, I’m not very good at identifying it, and now I’m paranoid, so I think that any plant with leaves in triplets is poison.

Some of these look like they’re definitely poison; others I’m not sure.  What do you think?

1:

2:

3:

4:

5:

6:

(show full-size image viewer)

We finally ditched our stone-age TV and got an HDTV.  I thought it’d be fun to take some before and after photos.

Here’s an angle-shot from before (click for after):

Here’s a head-on shot from before (click for after):

Here’s the input/output panel from before (click for after):

(show full-size image viewer)

I’ve never done any film photography, but I’ll bet that even in the darkroom days, producing a great photo had as much to do with your darkroom technique as with your composition and shooting skills.  Certainly it’s the case today that post-processing is a huge part of what makes many great photos great.

David Nightingale’s latest photo provides a striking example of this.  Look at the photo for a minute to let it sink in; then check out the original.

...or, you know, whenever.

As if.

This is my first attempt at HDR/tone-mapping photography.  I started with 3 exposure-bracketed images, fed them into Qtpfsgui using mostly-default settings, and this is what came out.

The smaller version here actually looks better than the full-size, due to noise and other artifacts in the full version.  Partly that’s because my camera is only 4 megapixels and generally produces noisy skies; partly it’s because I haven’t spent much time tweaking the many, many settings in Qtpfsgui to get the best result.  But I thought this was neat enough to put up for now anyway.

Here are the 3 original images for reference:

...

...

(show full-size image viewer)

This is on a small humidifier we have:

Right... so how DO you clean it?

Here’s a nice collection of photos of the former president, plus an interesting personal report (with photos) from Bush’s flight home to Texas, including many familiar names and faces from in & around his administration.

The ice storm a few weeks ago, in our backyard:

A field along Batman Road (no, really) at route 100:

And speaking of photography, here’s some interesting photography notes & advice from Chris Orwig.

(show full-size image viewer)

This is a sign that one passes on the way from State College to Pittsburgh.  Every time I pass it, I have to fight to resist the urge to drive off the highway and run it over, for using the wrong slash and doing it in such a large typeface.

Here are Kim’s Christmas photos and videos.

Kim’s new LX3 can do manual exposures up to 60 seconds long.  My (old) Sony DSC-S85 can only do 8 seconds, and I always wished it could do more, especially for night sky shots.

Here are a couple photos I took the other night with Kim’s new camera:

(show full-size image viewer)

I’ve posted my cat photos from June and July.

A few days ago these new bugs showed up out of nowhere, and now I see a bunch of them every day.  What are they?

(show full-size image viewer)

(More photos)

Spotted in a bathroom at the Jersey shore:

And yes, I took the photo after washing my hands.

Photos of the cats from April & May are now online.

faildogs.com is the site I was talking about at the picnic today.  Here’s an example:

Aunt Nancy and Uncle Bob just sent us some great photos of our whitewater rafting trip in Steamboat Springs.  They stood on the shore and patiently waited the hour or so it took for us to come down the river and pass their spot.

When you land in Philadelphia after flying from Colorado, the first thing you think is, "Where are all the mountains?"  And the second thing is, "Man, there are trees everywhere."

Having been born and raised in Pennsylvania, I have grown accustomed to all the trees, to the point that I don’t even think we have an abnormal amount of trees.  But being in Colorado, with its vast open ranges, mountains, and whitewater rivers, dotted but not smothered in trees, I feel like I’m on another planet.

This trip was only a short 5 days, and it stormed or threatened to storm almost every day, but we managed to get in a couple of hikes, a bike ride, a trip down the Alpine Slide, some whitewater rafting, and a trip to the rodeo.

The bike ride and the rafting were both along the Yampa River, which is slow and tranquil in some spots and fairly frothy in others -- it’s considered a stage 2 whitewater, though probably only because of one or two drops of perhaps 3-5 feet.  Most of its whitewater sections along the ~5 mile, 90-minute trip are pretty tame; we were neither required nor advised to wear helmets for example.  But the scenic beauty of the river, the surrounding landscape, and the charming backyards of Steamboat Springs make it an extremely enjoyable ride even if the rafting isn’t extreme.

During our first hike, at Mad Creek, I got into the creek up to my waist; and at the end of our bike ride I got into the Yampa completely.  The water was freezing both times, but it was at least a hot sunny day for the bike ride.  When I got into Mad Creek, it was the middle of a downpour.  But I generally can’t resist getting into rivers and lakes given the opportunity.

I’d never ridden an Alpine Slide before, but I gather that it’s something icy, fast, and fun in the winter.  And in the summer they let you ride down it on these little carts that are about twice the size of a skateboard, with 2 wheels on one end and just friction on the other end, to prevent you from going too fast down the long concrete slide.  There’s a single joystick-like control that you push forward to go and pull back on to stop.  The track itself is probably a quarter-mile long, just winding back and forth down the mountain.

As we rode the chairlift up to the top, a girl went down the slide below us, going full speed, and wiped out pretty badly right in front of us on the first curve.  Some of her arms and legs went over the side of the track, and she ended up with a big gash in her hand and probably some nasty scrapes all over.  If I hadn’t seen that, I might have just floored it when it was my turn, falsely assuming that the arched sides of the track would keep me safe all the way down.

The rodeo was pretty interesting and not exactly the redneck-infested event that you might expect, though we weren’t in the south so maybe you wouldn’t expect that.  The best part was the "calf scramble," where they invite all the 6-12 year old kids into the arena and then let loose a calf which has a ribbon on its tail; the kid who gets the ribbon wins.  There must have been 200 kids and it was a hilarious sight to see the mob of them chasing this calf, which was running for its life.  They then repeated this event with kids 5 and under and using a sheep instead of a calf; this had the added bonus of the sheep bounding right on top of the mob of kids as it tried to escape.

On Saturday we had to drive from Steamboat to Denver to catch our flight home.  It’s a 4-hour trip, but the country out there is just beautiful, and since our rental F-150 had a line-in jack through which we could play the music on our iPhones, it was a nice drive.  We passed through Winter Park, which has a restaurant called Fontenot’s, and I got a dish called Orzo Pasta Salad.  It’s a base of cold orzo -- which I’d never had nor heard of before -- with field greens on top, then hot sauteed mushrooms in a "roasted red pepper balsamic dressing," and finally Pecorino cheese on top of that.  I ordered it without the actual red peppers, and would have also omitted the onions had I known they would be hiding in it; but regardless it was an amazing meal.

Another great thing about Colorado is the climate: whereas in PA, during the summer, the temperature may go from a high of sweltering 90 degrees to a low of sweltering 70 degrees, in Steamboat Springs it goes from the 80s to the 40s.  So you get the nice hot summer days and still have nice cool nights.  The pool at the condo was even heated, so while not great for daytime swimming, it was a giant hot tub at night.

It’s difficult to describe just how different and amazing Colorado, and Steamboat in particular, is.  It’s huge, it’s wide open, the sky is far more blue, the rivers are clean, and the views, pretty much no matter where you look, are breathtaking: there are mountains everywhere, many of them snow-capped all year ’round.  Not to mention the skiing and snowboarding in the winter...

I’ve been to Steamboat 3 times now, and it’s hard to leave.  I feel like I belong there.  We would move to Steamboat in a heartbeat if it weren’t for the fact that we’d miss all of our family in PA too much.  But Kim’s mom would follow us there.  So I know I won’t be able to convince all of my family to come, but I figure at least one or two of you would be down for it.  Rolly and Margie?  Maria?  ...Sinjin?

Kim was on photo duty for this trip; here are her albums:

Drive to Colorado

Mad Creek Hike

Steamboat Lake Hike / Aunt Nancy & Uncle Robert Visit

Biking and the Alpine Slide

Whitewater Rafting

Rodeo and 4th of July Fireworks

Drive to Denver

(show full-size image viewer)

A photojournalism blog called The Big Picture on boston.com has a dozen amazing photos of the eruption of the Chaiten Volcano in Chile, including this one:

(Photo credit: REUTERS/Carlos Gutierrez)

Am I the only one who, upon hearing about this story and seeing the photos, can’t think of anything but the Geico cavemen?

The Geico cavemen, and "that’s totally photoshopped" are my primary reactions to this.

I just posted my cat photos from February and March.