Posts Tagged “geeking out”

I was excited to hear that Google maps had finally added Boston’s public transit system.  Now you can get directions around Boston for driving, walking, and public transit.  Of course, the MBTA website has been providing a trip planning service for some time.  So I figured I would compare the two services recommendations.  Too lazy to do anything particularly scientific, I asked both to tell me how to get from limeduck world headquarters (a secure undisclosed location in Central Square) to Modern Pastry in the North End at 8:30pm tomorrow.  The variance is shocking.

The defending champ, the MBTA Trip planner coughed up two suggestions:

• Red line to Orange line to Haymarket in 23 minutes
• Red line to Green line to Haymarket in 28 minutes

This pretty conclusively reinforced my preference for the Orange line to the Green, even if it means an extra stop on the Red.

The contender, Google Maps, brought four different routes, although two of them are essentially identical.

• Red line to Green line to Haymarket in 19 minutes
• Red line to Downtown Crossing, then walk the rest of the way in 22 minutes (duplicated with different Red line departures)
• Red line to Green E line (at Symphony) to Haymarket in 37 minutes

Both sets of times include the walking time on each end.  I don’t know which of these plans is more accurate.  I have to believe that the MBTA should know the schedule better, but I also believe that Google might be reporting more realistic data.  Both systems agree that the Red line departing Central at 8:33 will arrive at Park Street at 8:39, but it all goes haywire after that, with a whopping nine minute difference in estimating the same trip, with Google saying it’s quicker to hoof it than to take either of MBTA’s Green or Orange legs.

I checked, the Orange line does show up in some Google routes at different times, but it looks like it doesn’t arrive very often, which might skew things.  Google’s last suggestion is so off the wall that it makes me doubt the whole system – take the #1 bus down Mass ave past the B C & D Green line station at Hynes and the Orange line station at Mass Ave to get on the E branch of the Green line at Symphony??  Feh.

Poor Google, has Boston’s beany maze bested your mapping mojo?

The last three posts were all about choosing the right digital camera for photographing food.  Despite that, we all know that what you do with the equipment is the important part.  Here, I present a pretty simple set of steps for making decent blogworthy photos from whatever camera you have.  Some steps refer specifically to features of Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 for Windows (currently in version 7 for Windows and some other version for Mac), which I recommend highly.  It’s not nearly as full-featured as the CS version, but it’s more than sufficient for our purposes, and it even has some convenient “auto” features not found in the professional product.  I have both, but use Elements almost exclusively for my blog photos.

Here’s a sample photo of a succulent duck leg from J’s kitchen with turnip puree, potato threads, onion strings, wild rice crispies, broccoli rabe and a veal sauce.  It’s fresh from the camera, unchanged except for resizing.

(A quick note on reszing: know how big in pixels you want your picture to be ahead of time, it’ll save you some hassle and grief.)

First thing I do is crop the photo.  Sometimes it was perfectly composed in the camera, but not often.  I’m a stickler for keeping the original aspect ratio, but that’s up to you.  Here it is cropped in just a bit.  This is also a good time to resize to your final desired dimensions.

Next, basic color and contrast correction.  If you really want to, you can adjust a lot of different things separately, but in Photoshop Elements, I usually just use “auto smart fix” which is sufficient in the majority of cases.  I’ll talk another time about advanced color repair for those candle-lit shots.

The change is subtle in this case, but you can see some change in the white of the plate and the green of the broccoli.  The next step is a little vague, but here is where I touch up anything that still looks off.  Sometimes this means using the clone stamp tool to eradicate a stray grain of rice.  In this case, I used the burn tool to darken some of the distracting elements in the upper background, notably that lemon.

Almost there.  The final step (and its important that this be the last step in most cases) is to use the Auto Sharpen function.  Just to be clear, photoshop cannot actually sharpen a blurry photo, it’s just an approximation.  But I use this even if the image is already sharp (which is rare with low-light hand-held pics) because it brings up the highlights in wet and juicy textures common in food.  See for yourself.

Got it?  Don’t worry, I’ll review some of the tools at the end.  Here are slices of the above photos for some side-by-side comparison.  The final result isn’t far from the original, but you shouldn’t have to do a lot of post work just to get servicable blog photos.

1. Original photo
2. Crop and resize
3. Auto smart fix
4. Touch ups
5. Auto sharpen

That doesn’t look to hard, does it?  Here’s a screenshot showing the Enhance menu where most of the functions I refer to are located.

Good luck, and have fun with it!

I’m a big believer in the primacy of content, but sometimes I have to share some technical details on what kind of typewriters the infinite monkeys in here are using, and I know there are a few techies out there who dig this stuff.

Feeling the need for more mobility in my computing and blogging, I recently bought an Acer Aspire One, a very small notebook computer, what’s often called a “netbook” these days.  It weighs 2.2 pounds and it’s (mostly) brown.  It also runs Linux and has a solid state memory thingy instead of a hard drive, so it boots up and shuts down very very quickly.  Here it is with a Thinkpad T61.  You can compare the Thnkpad’s 14″ not so wide screen (1400×1050) with the Aspire’s 8.9″ wide screen (1024×600) and refer to my earlier rant on wideness.

You can also get a sense of the keyboard and key size compared the Thinkpad’s, which is often considered the gold standard of laptop keyboards.  It takes some getting used to, but I managed to compose and edit today’s post on Social Media Breakfast on it.  It would have been liveblogging if a wireless connection were available at Ryles.  I had to use another computer to wrangle the photos, but only because I haven’t yet installed image editing software on it.

I’m really impressed with the completeness of this product.  The solid state module is only 8GB and the OS and preloaded applications take up more than half of that, but that already includes the OpenOffice suite, Firefox, and a bunch of other apps.  There’s a webcam and mic, three USB ports, external monitor port plus mic and headphones, and a hardware switch for turning off the wifi for in-flight use.  Once I figure out how to add Skype and GIMP, I’ll be able to do almost all my usual computing tasks on the go.

It’s not a MacBook Air in so many ways (the MacBook weighs 3 pounds, for one) but the Aspire One comes in five colors, and you can buy one of each for less than the price of an Air.  For a second or third computer, I was much more willing to take a chance on it.

You can read up on all the technical details elsewhere, but I want to leave you with my favorite part of the user manual, advice on how not to hold the unit in such a way as to crush your own fingers.  Thanks for the warning, guys.

Have you noticed that just about every computer or TV screen has gone widescreen?  I’m not sure what portion of TV programming or movies comes in what aspect ratio, but I’m definitely seeing computer monitors expanding horizontally.

There are some good reasons for wider screens – such as looking at two full pages of a document or watching a widescreen movie – but I have to suspect part of this fad is actually fed by the monitor manufacturers giving us less and marketing it as more.  Why?  Because we measure monitors by their diagonals, and you can deliver less total screen on the same diagonal if you go wider.

For example, the popular MacBook has a 13.3″ diagonal screen with a resolution of 1280×800, from which we can calculate an aspect ratio of 1.6:1.   This means the screen is 11.28 x 7.05inches for a total screen area of 79.50 square inches.  An old style 4:3 (1.33:1) screen with a 13.3″ diagonal would be about 10.64 x 7.98, or 84.91 square inches.  This means that Apple and other laptop makers who go wide are delivering 6.4% less screen and positioning it as the same or better.

Sinister plot or giving the consumers what they desire?  I’m not sure.  The most screen you could get on a given diagonal would be square, and that doesn’t seem attractive or practical for a laptop.  As a reader and occasional creator of web pages, I feel like we’re too willing to go wide at the expense of the height or length of a page.  Scrolling down is one of the enemies of good web usability, and more and more sites seem to float in wide margins to the right and left.

If you have an eye for this sort of thing, you may have noticed that many of the photographs featured here on limeduck are square, having a width to height ratio of 1:1. Not all of them, but lots of them, and more recently, nearly all of them. We all know that I either take digital photos or scan them, so the aspect ratio is definitely under my control.

I’ve owned and used a variety of cameras over the years, most of them 35mm or digital, with occasional use of other film formats and polaroids. I’ve never used a Lomo or a Hassleblad. Each format has its own particular aspect ratio: 35mm is approximately 3:2 (1.5:1) and most digital cameras (including cellphone cams) are around 4:3 (1.33:1) like televisions and computer monitors used to be before the current craze for various forms of widescreen, mostly around 16:9 (1.78:1), closer to the 2:1 and more seen in some classic movies via cinemascope and related processes.

I’m not quite sure when I started cropping both digital photos and scans to square, but the first one on this blog looks to be from February 24, 2007 with a rectangular pic just a few days earlier on the 19th . Both are scans from 35mm film (Tri-X) shot with my trusty Ricoh GR-1.

When I used to make actual photographic prints in the darkroom from negatives, I was very particular about using the full frame. It’s a photo-geek thing, all about authenticity, since you’re printing everything you shot. There are several reasons why this logic is crap and all photographs are lies, but I won’t go into that here. I will say here that cropping to square from a rectangular shot is sometimes tough, since when you compose through the viewfinder (or screen) you’re seeing what you’re seeing, and leaving out what you’re leaving out.

I got to like the square thing, and it became a bit of distinguishing mark for the blog. Eventually, I was happy to discover a flickr group called squareFormat – with over 10,000 members and 180,000 photos as of this writing. The group rules are wonderful:

Alain Astruc (a group admin) says:
09 Apr 08 - THE THREE LEVELS OF SQUARENESS: ONLY SQUARE PHOTOS!

1/ SQUARE
Square photos taken with a square format camera.
• 6×6 square format rolleiflex, hasselblad etc.

2/ SQUARISH
Almost square photos or square photos taken with a non-square format camera
• 600 type polaroids, cropped 35mm or digital, etc.

3/ META SQUARE
Scans or compositions containing square photos.
• Polaroids scanned with the frame, dyptichs, mosaics of square photos etc…

On one of this group’s message boards, after lots of posts about $15k digital cameras and the merits of using different kinds of tape to mask a camera’s viewfinder, I read about a digital camera that had a square format shooting mode. Even better, the camera was the new digital version the Ricoh GR-1, appropriately named the Ricoh GR Digital II. This means I could compose square photos in the viewfinder and “print” them later without cropping and graduate from Squarish to Square in Alain’s hierarchy. I had to have one.

And a couple of months ago, I got one. It’s really really great, and not only because it shoots square. Sharp fast lens, good color, takes standard AAA batteries in a pinch, standard tripod mount, lots of manual control plus full auto, convenient size, RAW shooting, good no-nonsense mini-USB cable connection, interval shooting mode, level(!), unobtrusive size and color. I miss the lack of viewfinder and wish the lens were a little wider, but that’s about it. There’s no food mode or whiteboard mode, but I can work around that. At 10 megapixels, I find there’s plenty of information to work with when I do choose to crop or print. Of course, if you choose square shooting mode, you get only about 7 of those 10 megapixels. I can live with that.

If you want to own a piece of limeduck history, bid on my soon to be former digital camera, a Kodak V570 dual-lens. This is also a fantastic pocket digital camera, but a little dated with only 5 megapixels. It has two lenses, a very wide prime and a 5x zoom. Mention this blog and I’ll upgrade that 1GB SD card to 2. I don’t use it as much, but I’m not ready to give up my film Ricoh.