[Choc-Ful-A]

Two quick points… The service provider can sell “unlimited” bandwidth to customers, meaning they don’t constrain your bandwidth, but their connectivity to the Internet isn’t unlimited. So they could be overbooking their bandwidth significantly for cost control reasons. If so, they are relying on their assessments of what the average utilization per user will be to predict how much bandwidth the need to purchase to handle it. They might have guessed wrong, or they might be taking risks.

Second, the connectivity between Fark and the hosting provider could be unreliable due to the Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) that route the traffic. So even if both Fark and your hosting service are perfectly healthy, some ISP in the middle could be having problems. That could cause Fark to fail when checking your images and that would trigger to the system to disable your entry. Think of it like road construction at an intersection between two locations. It might prevent you from being able to get from point A to point B even if there are no problems at either end.

[Choc-Ful-A]

I thought I’d already posted something in this thread, but going back I don’t see it. I guess it’s time to look into memory improvement meds, eh?

So, what I thought I’d already said is that I’d be more than happy to have any picture(s) of mine included in the project. And if other people are picking that seems like a cool twist to the process and I’m all for that too. The only caveat I’d add is that if the picture selected has people I know in it (family, friends, co-workers, etc…) then I’d have to make sure they were OK with it first. Other than that, anything goes.

[Choc-Ful-A]

Flip away, it seems OK by the rules to me too.

[Choc-Ful-A]

I really enjoyed this contest, even though I ended up picking from archives due to a lack of time to get out and take more photos. Here are some b-sides if you need “more less”.

Succulent flower spikes on Alcatraz island (scanned from film)

A different wildfire sunset with an odd reflection/distortion

Towering wind turbine in a 99% cloudless sky in So Cal

One of many bird in flight against the sky shots considered this week

Another bird flying, against a wildfire stained sky this time

And a pair of overexposed gulls further distorted by a moody scanner

Sunset obscured by huge rocks on the beach

I think the first bird is a female Northern Harrier. Her mate was much smaller, lighter in color and harder to photograph. I only got blurry images of him.

[Choc-Ful-A]

With regard to avoiding editing your original, this is one of the reasons I shoot raw whenever possible. Since you don’t edit a raw image, it functions as your original, unedited archive image. It takes more space, but the other advantages make it worth the effort. It can slow down the burst rate of your camera, but that’s rarely an issue for me.

I hadn’t thought of that (the raw file as the original I never edit) but in practice that’s exactly what I end up doing. I batch convert all the raw files to PNG and only go back to the raw files if I screw up the PNG somehow.

[Choc-Ful-A]

Here’s a gallery that contains my b-sides for this week.

[Choc-Ful-A]

Also, if you want accuracy (at the expense of time) you can zoom in before editing. It’s much easier to get finer control that way. But the more you zoom, the more time it takes. So you might want to reserve that tedious level of detail for just the edges of the parts you want to separate.

[Choc-Ful-A]

yup yup yup, that’s one tasty photo!

[Choc-Ful-A]

I’m not sure what you mean by “non-descriptively” but here’s what I just tried in GIMP with reasonable results. There may very well be a “Effects -> Holga VIgnette” option in Photoshop of course… But this should work in any image manipulation program.

1. Use the circle/oval selection tool to pick the part of the image you want to be free of vignette distortion

2. Use “select -> invert”

3. Then “select -> feather”
3a. I found using ~10% of the width of the image worked well

4. Use “color -> curves” to darken the fuzzy corners you selected as much as you like.

The more you feather the wider the gradient will be. And the size of the initial circle/oval selection controls how much of the darkness extends from the corners. So you can play with both until you get the effect you want.

Finally, if you shrink the image so that it’s smaller than the window framing it (meaning there’s an empty border around it) it’s easier to get the circle/oval to select what you want, since you can drag the corners outside the image boundaries (so that the sides are clear of vignette distortion).

If that doesn’t make sense let me know and I can try to re-word or post screen captures of the steps.

[Choc-Ful-A]

This one is going to be odd for me… I only got one photo prep’d last night and I won’t be home from work until late in the evening PT. So if I do manage to find and post a 2nd or 3rd photo they will be separated by many hours, possibly well after the contest goes live. Real life keeps getting in the way of pursuing my hobbies. 🙂

[Choc-Ful-A]

That’s definitely a good read and the interviewer was clearly a fan of your photographs, which add a nice sense of honesty to the piece. The “fine art” question was pretty silly but you handled it very well. Congrats on getting some well earned public praise!

[Choc-Ful-A]

Yow, I got home at 8:20pm, shot some photos, edited, uploaded and posted by 9:04. Not what I had in mind for this week!

[Choc-Ful-A]

I’ve had absolutely no time this week and I’m still at work… So it’s a mad dash home to see if I can come up with something for me.

[Choc-Ful-A]

Smoke bomb. It was odd. I had a pack of really crappy smoke bombs. They lasted all of 3 or 4 seconds each. Most of them had wispy smoke. This one had nice smoke – like a cumulus cloud.

My daughter was kinda pissed that her dragon smelled like fireworks.

?peppermints?

There’s a landmark psychedelic 1967 album by The Strawberry Alarm Clock called Incense and Peppermints so I’m guessing that the reference…

[Choc-Ful-A]

I just looked through the set and they are really gorgeous! Including the fish, shrimp and octopus shots in the mix was a nice twist too.

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