Photo Friday: The Good Life

I’m usually to busy living the good life to photograph it, but I have a picture here of a tent full of happy, wet, drunk SCAdians from about 12 years ago that will always be remembered as one of the best weeks of my life. Sorry the pic is so small and low-quality.

Photo Friday: Art

It’s not just art, it’s art you can wear! Or at least, stand inside of. Here’s a pic of me with my head inside of some monkey/cat/thing sculpture, in Heidelberg Germany.

He was, if I recall correctly, the guardian of the altbruecke (old bridge). I met some online friends of mine in Heidelberg, who were stationed at Ramstein AFB in Germany at the time. It was a very cool experience, and I enjoyed spending the day with them. I suppose that makes this their picture and not mine, since I’m on the wrong end of the camera. The second picture is of the plaque that explains this sculpture. Auf Deutsch, of course. And judging by the spelling of Heidelberg, it’s not even modern Deutsch.

Photo Friday: What Is That?

In line with this week’s theme, I won’t discuss the picture. If you need a small hint as to what it is, you can peek at the one tag I’ve given it on Flickr.

Photo Friday: Time Machine

For this week’s Photo Friday, I have selected a picture I took for the Human Clock, in “motivational poster” format.

Photo Friday: Disastrous

For this week’s Photo Friday, something a bit personal. The topic is “disastrous”, and this was nearly so for me. If you look at the crumpled rear door in this picture… I was sitting right there at the point of impact. It’s rather amazing I got away with just a couple (extremely painful) cracked ribs.

Photo Friday: Mountain

I used to participate in Photo Friday fairly often, but I have been ignoring it a long time. When I got this morning’s topic, however, I immediately thought of this picture, which I used as the title graphic for my 1 Fjorda Road blog. I’m rather impressed with this photo for some reason, so here it is again. Maybe I’ll start doing Photo Friday on a regular basis again…

edit: forgot to insert a link to Photo Friday, fixed that.

Digikam needs a screensaver

I’ve been using Digikam as my photo manager for quite some time now, but I haven’t really been utilizing it fully. I’ve starting playing around with some new features (tags, advanced slideshow, the right-hand side-bar that I somehow never noticed existed before), and it’s led me to one big gripe: Why is the advanced slide show not implemented as a KDE screen saver? Tags are all well and good, but Digikam tags aren’t applicable to anything outside Digikam. Sure would be nice if I could set a screen saver to show all images with a certain tag without having to go through the huge effort to move (or copy, and waste disk space) those files to a particular folder. If you’re into KDE, please go register with the KDE Bug Tracking System (pain-free registration just needs an e-mail address and a name) and vote for this wish-list bug. You can apply up to 20 votes to it (out of 100 alloted per account). Let’s make this feature a reality for the next version of Digikam.

Seam carving again

I got a comment on my last post pointing me to a flash-based site that allows you to alter your images with (it sounds like) greater control than the Gimp plugin. I say “it sounds like”, because I can’t seem to upload a picture to this app at all. I left a comment to that effect, and told him which flash and browser versions I was running, and he said it’s never been tested against Linux, so I’d appreciate any other Linux folks to give it a shot and give feedback. And if you get it to work (Linux or otherwise), let me know how cool it is.

Seam Carving

I wrote about a month ago about an incredibly cool new image editing technique that will allow you to creatively resize without distorting important elements, or allow you to selectively remove elements. Now from the same source, I learn that there’s a Gimp plug-in for this, as well as a stand-alone application (Windows, Linux, whatever). Check it out.

Update: The Gimp plug-in seems fairly worthless. I’ll give the stand-alone a try sometime in the next week…

The next big thing in “photoshopping”

I found a Youtube video via an Ubuntu developer’s blog that demonstrates “image retargeting” technology. Basically a hybrid between crop and scale that allows you to resize an image without distorting the main points, and without wholesale removal of columns/rows of pixels. It can also be used in some very impressive ways to remove items from a picture, or to bring things far apart closer together (or vice versa). I would love for this to be in the next version of Gimp, but I’m not holding my breath. I didn’t hear or see any mention of a product for this tech yet, unfortunately.

Powered by ScribeFire.