PDF slide shows, Bremerton

I have spent the afternoon creating a .pdf presentation with music, that includes these 3 photos from our Panama Canal Cruise. The butterflies and waterfall from our Costa Rica excursion and the cliff diver from Acapulco, Mexico. I must make a page on my website to add these PDFs. They're fun to do. The photos can be higher resolution and larger than my regular page photos, plus they have music. When I get them loaded to my page, I can just link friends to their .pdf instead of filling up their email box. How cool is that?

The other photos on the presentation are for the Cyrs. We got back yesterday from Sequim via the Port Angeles ferry. We had been to the Bremerton Swap meet. It poured rain all the time we were there. I found a few blue glass treasures. Hagar (their dog) is so well behaved. Irene is taking him to clicker doggie school too. Wish I had got pictures of him.

We are having heavy rain for the last 3 days. There are rivers flooding their banks all around the island. We need the rain, but not all of it at once! Our little Colquitz river is still within its banks. Considering its just across the road from our house, that is a bit of a relief.

Scanner, Velvia, Star Ttails

I got my 36 exposure slide film back from the lab early this afternoon and spent most of the afternoon learning how to scan my slides with my Epson 4870 and how to tweak them in Photoshop Elements. That film is Fujichrome velvia 50 and is highly saturated film. I am not sure I care for that. Its too far off real.

I shot this with Fujichrome velvia 50 in my Canon EOS Elan 7e, set up on my deck, pointed North, for approximaely 8 hours. At some point the battery died, so my time to leave it out next time is debateable.

My star trails were left out too long, perhaps. A shorter period of time might have given smaller radius to the circles. The batteries died at some point in the 8 hours I had left it out, so I am not sure how long the next time should be. Or perhaps just set the lens to the widest setting possible. Hmmmmmmm, there is much I need to learn yet.

My lens fogged up on the second attempt to shoot, so despite my wiping the lens at hourly intervals, I still only have a blank slide, on my second attempt.

It is fun to try this stuff, anyway. I have learned a lot about my scanner todsy, also. I boot up Adobe Elements and go to Import and my scanner. Do all the settings in Professional mode.. I seem to be able to enlarge them from the small slide size, also do unsharpen mask, do noise removal, then any changes in PS, of course.

Tomorrow we leave on the ferry to go to the Bremerton Swap meet with Dan and Irene on Saturday. Should be another fun weekend. There are tons of old cameras at these swaps. Hmmmmmm, wonder if I should start a collection. Maybe I can find a gizmo to show slides with .. not a projector, but one of those little box things that just lights up the slide -- don't know its name.

panorama

Today I tried doing a panorama with my Canon S3 IS. I just shot my kitchen area from sitting in my comfy chair in my computer/reading/light garden room. I did not use a tripod nor pay any particular attention to lighting settings or cleaning up the kitchen area for a good set up. I stitched 4 exposures together with the Stitch Assist software that came with my camera. It turned out not to bad, I think. What do you think? I had done 5 shots but the last one was too much out of line and light with the rest. That stitch assist program is pretty cool. I can move each individual shot around to line up any horizontal or vertical lines. I did not try that, but its possible. My camera manual says I can take 26 photos in its panorama mode. Man that would make one huge photo. This one is reduced from 7700 pixels wide to only 1000, as it was too wide for blogspot to load. Hope it shows up on VFXY.