Adventures in Fooding - Taipei

Anita and I are proud of the fact that we can stomach (literally and figuratively) a much broader range of 'food' than our North American peers, and so we take photos of some of the more exotic or interesting fooling adventures we've been on. Here's a quick set from our adventures in Taiwan. Every once in a while, even we find something so unappetizing or appallingly unsanitary that we won't eat them. The first photo in this series is one of those cases. Really, who DOESN'T want to eat a yummy pork snout hanging a foot off the ground, unrefrigerated on a table in the street exposed to the splashing of puddles from passing vehicles. Did I mention this was literally on the street? There were no sidewalks. Yum.

Hiking Old Goat Glacier

Third weekend in a row that we drove that crater filled gravel road beyond the Canmore Nordic Centre to get to the Smith-Dorrien for a hike. We chose a shorter trek this weekend, opting for a small 650m elevation gain hike in to see the Old Goat Glacier. As you approach, the glacier looks pretty pathetic from afar, but when you get right up to it, you realize it's far more impressive than you first thought (it extends much further than you can see, as much of it is currently buried under the loose rock).



Obviously, this photo has been heavily edited. I like how it looks like Anita and I were here in 1973, and not just yesterday.

Scrambling Ha Ling Peak

Two scrambles in two weekends. Now that's more like it. Although Ha Ling can hardly be called a scramble, as it's really just a steep-ish hike. But that's not to take anything away from Anita. I'm proud of her for pulling this one out, considering she has the hiking skills of an 87 year old. I mean that in the nicest, most endearing way of course. As nice as calling your wife an 87 yr old can be, that is. Despite her relative lack of mountain prowess (more like NONE AT ALL), we managed to summit in under 2 hrs. And surprisingly, there were many other groups on the trail that turned around before the summit because of the perceived scary factor. So yay Anita! And yay to the taster's selection on the menu at the Grizzly Paw Brew Pub! Perfect way to finish a perfect day.

Lifestyles of the Hip and the Famous

So a couple buddies of mine have re-emerged from a multi-year creative hiatus, and launched a new webcomic celebrating Hipsters (a label which I don't even truly understand given its contrary natures of "valuing independent thinking and rejecting mainstream culture" blended with what essentially boils down to a fashion sense that requires you to "dress like an urban outfitters posterboy (or girl... or androgynous looking boy/girl... with an ironic mullet)."

Anyways, philosophical debate on the scope of the term 'hipsters' aside, I did want to point you to their new comic, Inglorious Hipsters. The strip is only a couple weeks into what I hope will be a long run, so the best is still yet to come. But the art style, writing, and creative direction are distinctly Jeremy and Gregg - who I guess you could very well call hipsters themselves (except they lack ironic haircuts because, frankly, they're both of the receding hairline variety). Maybe they can get ironic brush cuts?

So of course, what better way to promote their hipster work, than to say Go read their strip and their bios! And since I recently read that 'shooting with analog cameras' can be a distinguishing feature of hipsters, I wanted to join in the fun with a series of photos of these two artists I shot with a Nikon FG film SLR (oooh hip!).

Gregg




Jeremy

B+W Shadow Play

These are a few photos I shot and then gave the black and white treatment to. I Like the interplay of light and shadows in them. Click to view the large versions.

Test Drive: Alien Skin Exposure 3 for Lightroom

I took a brief test drive of Alien Skin's Exposure 3 Lightroom plug-in, and thought I'd give a quick review for anyone interested in using it. Exposure is Alien Skin's software suite that simulates the look of various film stocks to give your banal digital photos a retro analog look and feel. I'd used a previous version of this in Photoshop, and it was okay, if a bit on the slow side. The plugin for Lightroom does seem to run a bit faster than in Photoshop, but that could also just be a fault of my poor underpowered iMac.

Having only played with a few sliders and presets quickly, I would say my initial impression of the software is good. There are easily over a hundred different settings you can choose as starting points, each one simulating a specific colour or b&w film look. All the major chrome and colour negative film stocks are there, in regular and cross processed form. Prefer b&w? Well you can simulate pretty much every major variety of those stocks as well, with or without grain. Purists will obviously frown on this - if you want a true film look, just shoot film. But there are settings for film types that no longer exist (kodachrome!!), which render that argument moot. Then you can tweak colour, tone, focus, grain, and what they term 'age' (this is where you add dust and scratches for a truly authentic vintage analog look). The tone curve in Exposure feels more versatile than the one in Lightroom, which limits the number of points you can plot and move on the curve. The Exposure tone curve is actually much more like the one in Photoshop, with individual channels, as well as your overall curve. The grain function is fairly useful as well, especially when using older versions of Lightroom, which don't have grain controls for you to add it if you so desire. The closest you could get in those was to use the 'add noise' function, which was rather useless.

Now having espoused some of the good, I do have a few beefs with the software. I don't like that the Exposure plug-in isn't directly integrated into Lightroom's develop module. Instead, you access it by selecting the photos you want to edit, then choosing 'photo>edit in>Exposure 3'. This then brings up it's own interface for you to do your edits, and you have to close it before the edited version shows up in your Lightroom library. I dislike this for a couple reasons. Mainly, it's that this prevents you from coupling Lightroom presets with the effects in Exposure in any easy way. You have to make all your adjustments in one, then the other. I feel like I'd want to make changes using Lightroom presets WHILE simultaneously working with the Exposure settings. Another big beef I have with Exposure itself is that you can only choose one analog film process per photo in its interface, so you can't compare the differences between the various processes as easily as you could if you were working directly in the Lightroom library and develop modules. It's a minor annoyance, but still... Similarly, you can't switch between b&w effects and colour effects on the fly. You must choose one or the other when you launch the Exposure plug-in, which again is a hassle.

Having said all that, these are more petty inconveniences than actual debilitating hurdles for the software, so take all that I've said with a grain of salt.

Overall, I would say that without going into a full blown point by point explanation of each of the features in Exposure 3, I would say that they are mostly useful, and if you aren't interested in hours and hours of retouching and editing in photoshop to get a certain vintage analog look, then Exposure certainly is a good alternative.

Disclaimer: I'm not a power user by any means, and I don't think I've ever done a software review before. So this crappy review will probably only be useful for similar folks who have about as limited knowledge of computers as I do. I hope you found something useful here. If not, go read a real review. ;P