drupal 7

Well, while I figure out what the heck I'm doing with the new Drupal release (which is only in Alpha so it's little more than a playground for the time being), I'll be back here. I lost a good 15 posts from my previous version of airanwright.com that I'll try to repost here. Who knows...maybe I'll just keep this feed and port it over to my site as an aggregate.

Thanks for your patience, my handful of readers. :)

correction attempts

Here goes my attempts at color correction. It is a little disorienting because I never really saw all this "corrected" while I was diving. It was all very blue to me. I mean, our eyes and the camera lens basically see the same thing, right? So "correcting" it isn't technically accurate. More like "enhancing" in the same way astronomers enhance telescope images in order to bring color back into them.

Anyway:

Original Image

Enhanced Image
(achieved by pushing the red spectrum up and the blue down, adding "vibrance" and desaturating a tiny bit - that's for all you photoshop junkies...you know who you are)

dressel

By the way, I would be remiss if I didn't thank Ema, Rebeca, Martin, Anton, and everyone else at Dressel Divers in Cozumel for my wonderful experience. They are awesome. Go to the Iberostar down there if you want first class diving instruction.
http://www.dresseldivers.com/en/cozumel.htm

diving

As promised, more pics from diving. No reds. They go away pretty quick. I'll post again with an attempt at correction to see what my options are for bringing that back into photos. For now though, enjoy!










I had a blast. I'm not done diving, for sure. But for now I have to save my pennies before I can sufficiently afford to brave the Chicago underwater scene. Brrrrr.

we're back!

Okay. More on this in a bit but it turns out Ikelite, leader in underwater camera enclosures, knows what it is doing. Even at 30 feet depth, there is more than enough light to take a picture without a flash. See below.

I still lost all the red in the photo...but that's the physics of light for you.

last minute

As usual, flight leaves in 6 hours and I'm still up trying to finish everything before we head out. Pluses = I have my clothes and camera gear packed. Minuses = still loading movies onto the phone to bribe the kiddos and still finishing work.

I toy with the idea of just staying up the whole night. It is such a bad idea...and yet...

underwater

Well, lesson learned. Point and shoot cameras like the Canon Elph might have a lot of options, but underwater they might have one serious issue. The flash is seated just above and to the right of the lens. In an underwater enclosure such as the one we purchased for our trip to Mexico in 2 days, that puts the flash slightly obscured by the portion of plastic in front of the lens. So for any shot with a flash, you get a big semi-circle of nothingness on the lower left of the photo.

I'm not giving up hope...we'll try to do this sans flash and see how bad the lack of a tripod underwater makes it. But if a flash is necessary and I can't attached one to the camera, I'll be writing a seriously negative review on amazon of this enclosure.

The next vacation I'm pushing for this instead: Ikelite Canon 20D Enclosure
Santa, are you listening???