Update: So, I found $500 in the trash yesterday

On Friday when I called my bank they said that all would be settled and my deposit would be available within a few hours. I checked today around lunch and still no deposit, wtf. So I called customer support and they said they see the request but it's "in a weird state". The lady then said that she'd just make another request and the deposit will be moved over right away. I just checked at 10pm and still no deposit; so I guess I get to call back tomorrow and make a fuss. What a pain! It's a good thing for them that I am not dependent on that money to pay bills.

Let the canning begin.

Today we picked about 9 pounds of green and wax beans from our garden. We turned them into 15 pints of canned, pickled dilly beans, our favorite!

Why I shoot in RAW!

This is a shot of a bridge that I shot on assignment in Chemung, NY. This post will illustrate the dynamic range that a RAW file has. All three photos are from the same shot/file. The top left is the jpeg straight from the camera. The top right is a jpeg from the RAW file after under exposing it by 4 stops in Photoshop Bridge. I did this to try to get some blue/cloud detail in the sky. Blown out skies look terrible. The third shot is a merge of the top left, and top right, which maintains most of the -4 exposure sky, and has the great detail of the ground from the regular jpeg. I used this method again to merge the two. When painting in the sky I used about a 32% opacity so the light in the sky wasn't totally (4 stops) different from the ground. That day was a total overcast day, so I'm excited that I found any blue in the sky :)

So, I found $500 in the trash yesterday

Last week I made a $500 deposit, and, as usual, threw out the deposit receipt. I checked the account yesterday and noticed that that deposit hadn't posted yet. I called the customer support for our bank and they sounded pretty doubtful that anything could be done without the receipt, wtf, don't banks keep good records of stuff like this? They recommended going to the physical location that I made the deposit and try my luck there.

After I got off the phone I started rummaging through the trash hoping to find the crumbled up receipt. I eventually found it in the 3rd trash bin and it just about made my day. I called support back and they righted to wrong. Apparently, the teller had put a 6 in where there should have been a 9 in my account number.

Moral of the story, be sure to file your deposit receipts someplace other than the trash can.

Why chicks (should) dig geeks

Our bookstore uses a generic point of sale software (Quickbooks POS) which has some serious shortcomings. One of which is that you can't search your purchase orders for a particular book/item. This is rather annoying because there are times when we want to figure out when we ordered a certain book, who we ordered it from, how much we paid for it, etc. before the book actually comes in. Currently, we have to go to each open purchase order and see if the book is on it. When we started this wasn't much of a problem because we didn't order much, now we are ordering twice a week and therefore we tend to have a lot of unfilled purchase orders.

Last night I figured I'd help my wife out and extend the pos-addon that I wrote previously. It took me about an hour to add a button and a dialog to search the existing purchase orders for some entered text using the same QBPOS-SDK that I used previously. I guess if you are going to have lacking software (QB-POS) then the least you can do is release an SDK so we can prod the internal db; and, if you are going to marry, it might as well be a geek!

Merge the top 2 pictures to get the bottom picture...

So I got a little job to shoot this section of Main Street today. This was the exact location that I was assigned to shoot (They sent me a Google Street View of where they wanted me to shoot). I submitted two shots from this angle, one with the bus and one without. I used the 2 shots above with this technique to merge out the bus and the cars. This worked great! The final shot is the merge, plus some lens corrections (angles of the buildings) and a bit of warming.

Here are two shots that were in the running for one of my spring photos. I chose the one on the right because the one on the left is too centered. I did like the sharpness on the one on the left better, but the framing won out.

This is one of my summer pictures for my GCC artist's exhibit. The left (or top) is the unedited jpeg, the right is the cropped/color corrected version. The Rebel XT tends to shoot very cold by default, so I always end up warming the temperature. This goes against the rule of thirds, but I couldn't think of a better way to frame it with all the distractions on the left and right.

I found out last week that my proposal for the GCC artist exhibit got accepted! This is one of the shots that I will get enlarged to poster size (16"x24") for display at the show. I'm getting it printed at Lumeire Photo in Rochester for about $30. The total to get this printed, matted, and framed will probably be around $60; I guess that explains why art is so expensive to buy at art shows.

The shot on the right is the original jpeg from my camera, the one on the left I color corrected in PS. This is one of my pet peeves and it happens to me all the time. I tend to forget to set my camera to +2 over exposure in the snow and I end up with gray snow. I think in this one I actually over exposed +1, but that clearly wasn't enough. I also straightened out the horizon.

Last weekend I planted the last of the corn and radishes. Now the garden is complete except for the growing and eating (and weeding). We have golf ball size tomatoes already on our vertical tomatoes, and no fruit yet on our one non-vertical tomato plant; so, it looks like the vertical method will produce faster!