Well, this evening I was staring out the door into the darkness to see if our sometimes-feral cat Scrappy wanted to be let in for some additional kitty chow, and I found this little guy peering in instead. He’s a good sized frog, probably three or four inches in length (just the body, not the legs), and he stood still as I tried to catch several pictures of him through the glass. I tried to get some motion video of his little chin pulsing, but it didn’t really turn out with the 1/2 second exposure times. Still, he’s kind of cute.

I mean, for a warty, slimy amphibian.

I’ll move him off into the bushes so the cat doesn’t get him when he comes back.

[tags]Frog,My Photos[/tags]

Well, the tulip bulbs that I planted last October are finally blooming, and I grabbed my little Nikon 4500 and shot this photo just to have something colorful in my background. I really need to get a new camera. 🙂

[tags]Flowers,Photo[/tags]

I upgraded my Gallery to version 2.0. It seems really slick, and is supposedly more themable than the older version. Check it out.

While looking for an entirely different CD full of image, I uncovered the original PhotoCD that my friend Jeff Eaton and I made when we went to Australia. It has thirty four images that we took while we were at Grove Greek Observatory. I spent an embarrassing amount of time getting them converted into JPEG form, and now have them on my brainwagon photo gallery. Enjoy.

I took one of the infrared photos that I took on my recent Sonoma trip and tried tweaking it a bit in gimp to make it appear more dramatic. Check out my photo gallery to see both my after and before pictures.

Basically, I took the original and stretched the contrast, then applied some color curve modification to make the darks darker and the lights lighter. I then cloned some of the existing texture to eliminate the vignetting that appears in the corner, and then did some local burn/dodge type modifications. I like the overall result quite a bit.

I didn’t notice this before, but you can see a bird just to the left of the rock in this shot quite learly. I snapped a picture of him later, but didn’t notice him when I took this picture.

Every year Pixar has a small auto show. People who work here bring in some of their classic cars, and a couple of local dealers usually bring out some top of the line dream cars. We have a picnic and lots of people show up. It’s kind of fun. I snapped a bunch of pictures, and put them in my Brainwagon Photo Gallery for you to enjoy.

Apologies for the corner vignetting that most pictures have: I was shooting with a polarizing filter, and at very wide angles you can see the corners of this filter. Stupid Nikon 4500.

Make your own.

Pear Photo

Originally uploaded by brainwagon.

While in front of the Copia center in Napa last weekend, I tried snapping close up photos of a wide variety of plants and fruits they had growing in their gardens. I think this pear image turned out the best. I like the general shape, the out of focus background and the subtle shifts in green coloration. It seems nice to me. Enjoy.

Cell Phone Warning

Originally uploaded by brainwagon.

Sometimes the inspiration to blog something strikes me at odd moments. As I was gassing up my SUV this morning, I noticed that all the pumps at my local Shell station bore the warning stickers that you see at the right. I’d never really noticed them before, so I took a picture. Just to tempt fate, I did it with my cell phone.

What’s really curious about these warning messages is that there is actually no confirmed cases of a cell phone causing a fire in this way. There have been cases of gasoline fires caused by static discharge, but we don’t see warning labels telling us to be careful with polyester shirts (like the one I’m wearing today, thrill seeker that I am) or nylons (which I am not wearing today). It’s just another example about how we never really take appropriate steps to manage risk.

Well, okay, so these bandits were really just stealing Scrappy’s cat food from the patio, but this time I had my new trusty JVC GR-D270 lying around, and decided to try out its night vision mode to try to get them on tape. A few minutes of work with Microsoft’s Movie Maker, and voila!, here they are, ready for an appearance on America’s Most Wanted.

I’ll have to remind everyone not to feed Scrappy outside. These guys are big, and as my wife pointed out, they do carry ticks and the like. Best not to give them a reason to come down the hill to interact with our sometimes feral cat. Still, they are cute on film.

Addendum: Was this valuable to anyone?

Addendum 2: I can’t spell “Raccoon”.

Here is a picture of the crescent moon, captured at 25x zoom on my JVC GR-D270 camcorder. I punched it up just a tiny bit with gimp, but it’s pretty close to what you can expect from this camcorder. Not bad, but not staggeringly exciting either.

I have a lot of fun with digital cameras, just taking pictures of objects in isolation. A bit of work with Gimp, and you have something you can, well, write posts about on your weblog.

Okay, okay, my inspiration was actually here.