Rocket Science

I looked out on my deck this morning to find this…

And here’s another one…

These photos were taken with my iPhone 4 (through the plastic covering that came with the phone).

This is one of my favorite photos.

I took the photo on a country road in New Zealand (ok, most roads are country roads). I was traveling about on holiday with my friend Joanne in 2000 when we found this sign by the side of the road.

Hrm, I’ve never seen an exclamation point sign. I’m guessing it means “warning” or “be alert”. As we continued past the sign, we couldn’t ever see what they were warning us about. Oh well. (I recently saw a similar sign in the UK, though it was a bit more obvious they were warning us about a roadside construction project.)

I’ve been displaying selected photos in a one-at-a-time or slideshow format in the sidebar of my site for awhile now. I’ve been rotating the album every 3-6 months. As I get more albums uploaded, I’ll switch out the albums more often.

This is an update to my Holiday Cards 2003-2008 post.

So, I just finished uploading the photos I plan on using on my Holiday Cards to Shutterfly.

And it’s probably just life coming around and smacking me upside the head, but for the images I’ve uploaded, I’ve added metadata (title and description) four times now.

The first two times were my fault — in adding the metadata, I accidentally reduced their image quality. The first set, I uploaded here because I only intended to display them at a 1024 x 768 resolution.

But for Shutterfly, I wanted the higher quality images since I planned to print them out. So, I did the reasonable thing and recreated the metadata.

But…

Shutterfly doesn’t import the EXIF/IPTC standard metadata from images. What??? Why not?

Sheesh.

So I entered the title/description a third time.

The fourth time was for the photo books I’ve been creating that include all of the images I use on the cards in one place.

*sigh*

I’m kinda tired of entering metadata now.

I found another cool photo tool, for “colour popping”.

tintii is a smart selective colour photo filter, highlighting the striking colours of a photo while desaturating the rest to greyscale. Also known as colour popping…

If you know what you’re doing, you can do this all in Photoshop without tintii. Depending how talented you are this may take very little time, or you may not do it because it takes too long. Enter tintii.

Using either the stand alone software (free; it proved to have some stability problems for me), or a Photoshop plugin ($16; I didn’t buy it), you can make the colors pop.

Of course you have to have the right photo…

Here are the before and after images.

Hrm, I’m using WordPress’ built in gallery feature to display them. That’s not exactly what I had in mind, but it works pretty well. (I’d like to focus on the center part of the image, with the flower.)