A collection of photography and exploration focusing on Upstate South Carolina and beyond.
This morning I began a class on portrait photography. The class, taught by Polly Donahue, is being offered at the Greenville Museum of Art in conjunction with Furman’s Lifelong Learning program. We meet on Saturday mornings at the museum for three weeks. Today’s session was a general overview of the various types of portrait photography. … Read More “The Art of Portrait Photography” »
I’ve been getting a bit more daring with my Photoshopping. After reading about blur overlays on the Digital Photography School, I decided to try a few on some more pictures. Here are a couple more before and after shots. First, the Before. This shot was taken with my Nikon D50 attached to a Celestron C90 … Read More “Full Moon Photoshopped” »
The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion. ~Henry Steele Commager I am a government censor. I am responsible for blocking certain images and ideas that might be deemed harmful to our students. I do this … Read More “Censorship” »
Back last summer I wrote an article on this site complaining about triple tags and the clutter they create on tag clouds. The idea was that a tag cloud is meant to group items with similar characteristics. However, triple tags are meant to identify a specific item. They are often called "machine-readable" because they are … Read More “Flickr’s Machine Tags” »
Sometimes I hate dealing with vendors. Don’t get me wrong. A good relationship with a vendor is crucial to a successful technology program. However, for every good, successful vendor relationship, there are a dozen cold calls and down right annoying sales people. Since this is E-Rate season, the number of such calls has increased. First, … Read More “What part of “no”….?” »
On October 3 Google Earth released a massive imagery update. Until that point, most of South Carolina was in low resolution. The new release provided much higher resolution images for almost all of the state. Almost all, that is. Right after the update there was a very blurry section right where the town of Casey, … Read More “Columbia is Back!” »
Normally, conversation while watching a football game doesn’t involve discussion of chemistry. Laura mentioned her discovery of www.madewithmolecules.com, which prompted him to relay the tale of this e-mail he received while at Harvard… Dear Dr. Goess: My roommate had the chemical structure of her antidepressants tattooed on her ankle. She didn’t have the atoms labeled … Read More “Unusual Quotes during Football” »
Just about the time I delude myself into thinking I’m an OK photographer, I stumble across someone who is doing truly great things. One such person is Flickr photographer Johnny Blood. I am amazed at the quality, clarity, color, and composition he is able to achieve. One of the most incredible things is his abilty … Read More “Recent Flickr Discoveries” »
Friday night we invited Laura’s Techniques students over for pizza. We had about 50 people show up. As many rooms and chairs as we had available, they still wanted to sit on the floor all in one room. Paul pulled out the Magnetix and started making molecular models. Saturday was a gathering of … Read More “Gatherings” »
The Digital Photography School has been a wealth of Photoshop tips this week. First, Elise Hennen has posted four mini-tutorials on using filter overlays. I like these effects, however, they don’t all work for every image. Each introduces some element of distortion into the image. It’s just a matter of where or not that distortion … Read More “Photoshop Roundup” »