This photo is very fun.  You almost don’t even notice that it’s a night shot.  The photographer used a 583 second exposure -- yes, that’s nearly ten minutes.  One of the very few things I dislike about my DSC-S85 is that its longest possible exposure is merely 8 seconds.  I have a few somewhat similar night shots, but they aren’t nearly so cool.

Also very fun is the fact that I’m the fifth hit on Google for this:

Quoting some poor soul:

what does it mean when you have the same dream about the same person for over a week?

Yes, what does it mean?  Pray tell, oh Magic Google Ball!  : )

I finally got my Niagara photos online.  There were so many to sort through, and I ended up only putting about 1/4 of them online.  I think a lot of them are really good though, and Kim has a bunch of good ones too.

I don’t often see red-eye when I take pictures of people, because I generally keep the camera flash disabled and instead adjust the aperture & shutter speed to make the subject bright enough.  And because I rarely have to deal with red-eye, when I do encounter it I always just manually remove it (using Gimp of course).

But if you have to fix the redeye in multiple photos, doing it manually is a big pain.  So tonight I googled and found a sweet Gimp script that automates the redeye removal process, making it quick and easy.  (That page first describes the long, manual way to do it, then at the bottom provides the script to automate the whole process.  The script at the bottom is what you want -- just follow the instructions that say to download it to your ~/.gimp/scripts/ directory, and then it’ll appear in Gimp on the Script-Fu menu under Selection -> Red Eye.)

Kim has a few really cute photos from this weekend; here’s one that I removed the redeye from.  This is the super laser-beam death-ray eyes version:

And here’s the fixed version:

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On Monday I had 172 visitors, stomping the previous (year-to-date) record of 148.  Then on Tuesday I had 186.  I’d been wanting to re-add my daily visitors bar graph to the site, and having a surge in visitors helped convince me to do it last night.  You can see it at the bottom of the navigation section on the lefthand side of the page.

One reason for the increase in the visitor count is that previously, I didn’t have my visitor-logger on my photos pages.  I added it last week, and discovered that I was getting a few dozen hits per day from people searching for things like beefalo pictures, pistachio insect, and nice scenery, and those search-terms lead them directly to the photo-sets bypassing the main page and the visitor logger.  So it’s not actually a few dozen new visitors, it’s just that they weren’t being logged before.

In other news...

Google Maps is awesome.  It’s awesome because you can click and drag anywhere on the map itself to navigate -- the page never has to reload.  I think that mapquest and yahoo!maps will be switching to this format soon, as it’s just leaps and bounds better than their way of doing it (click, wait for page to load, find what you want, click again, wait again...).  It’s also awesome because it’s implemented entirely in JavaScript, which means it doesn’t require any yucky plugins like Java or Flash.  Finally, it’s awesome because it works in Moz/FF, and it doesn’t spike my computer’s CPU at 100% like many yucky-plugin-based webapps tend to do.

Update: AND, the size of the map-image on the screen isn’t fixed (and tiny) like Mapquest’s is.  If you put your browser into fullscreen mode (press the F11 key), the map is HUGE.  These are the best map features of all time, and yet they seem so obvious... I almost can’t believe no one has done this before.

And last but not least, why does "not at all" mean "not even a little"?

The other night, Kim noticed that the moon was huge and orange on the horizon.  I wanted to take some photos, but by the time I was able to get to a location with a low enough view of the horizon, the hugeness and orangeness were gone.  I snapped a few photos anyway, and I don’t think they’re great, but here are 3 of the best ones.

These are all unedited except for lossless cropping, and all were taken with my Sony DSC-S85 set to 3x optical zoom, and with my Kenko Tele Converter KUT-500 5x zoom lens attached.

The moon appears to be orange when it’s right on the horizon because the light is travelling through more air than when the moon is high in the sky.  When the light collides with molecules in the air, the molecules steal some of the light’s energy, and this happens most readily at the blue/violet end of the spectrum because of an obscure inverse-quad law.  Anyway, when the moon is overhead, its light isn’t passing through enough air to strip out all of the blue energy, so the light that makes its way to us still appears white.  But when the moon is on the horizon, its light has to travel through a lot more air to get to us, so many more collisions take place causing much more blue energy to be stripped out, leaving mainly the orange/red hues to reach our eyes.  This phenomenon also explains why you can get sunburn during the day but not around dusk or after: ultra-violet light, being at the short-wavelength end of the spectrum, is the first to be stripped out.

(And it also explains why sunset skies are red and orange.  It is a myth that pollution causes pretty sunsets -- in fact, pollution diminishes the vibrancy of such colorful skies.)

But all that to say this: why isn’t the moon huge and orange on the horizon every night?  Or is it so, and I just don’t see it?  I definitely don’t see the moon every night, nor indeed that often at all, but I can only recall a handful of times that I’ve seen it huge and orange.

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Family++  •  Love++  •  Mom has photos  •  ( :

Where is the image at the top of your page taken?  I’m guessing French Creek but I have the distinct feeling that I’m incredibly wrong.