I’m coming up on one year of my foray into “real” photography (that is, putting some effort into my shots rather than just random point-and-shoot), and I wanted to share an experience I had that demonstrated the importance of spending quality time post-processing your photos. One of my pictures that got little attention at first started getting a lot more looks, comments, group invites, and awards once I knew what I was doing in post and spent some time tweaking it.

Until relatively recently, I hadn’t really done much post-processing work — I’d pull the shots off my memory card, maybe do a little tweaking to the exposure if I had under- or over-exposed, maybe crop a little, but that was about it. But as I’ve spent more time trying to learn about photography, both from the pros and from some talented friends, I realized in addition to developing “the eye” in the field, I needed to be developing my skills back at my desk, long after the shot. I have plenty of experience designing user interfaces for web sites, but little with enhancing photographs. Once I started putting some effort into post, some of my shots really started to pop much more than they used to. One great example of this is my mossy ravine photograph.
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WhiteHouse.gov - before and after

Today was a historic day. The nation saw the biggest inaugural crowd ever, the peaceful transition of power (and a massive shift in politics), and — what we web designers really care about — a new WhiteHouse.gov web site.

Yes, at exactly 12:00 noon, just minutes before Chief Justice Roberts and President Obama stumbled over the exact wording of the presidential oath (really, you had just one job today, Roberts — and you screwed it up), the official White House web site switched over from the Bush version (which interestingly just got a redesign a few months ago…not sure why they bothered) to the shiny Obama edition.

All joking about “change” aside, I really do find the new site interesting. For one thing, it obviously exhibits the high level of polish and design sense that all of Obama’s sites have demonstrated over the past couple years. It now includes a blog. It has a clear statement on copyright, creative commons, and the DMCA (very significant for those battling our archaic copyright laws). The whole site is designed to be a platform to support Obama’s pledge for transparent government, and looking at it purely from a web designer’s point of view it’s a great start.

Even looking at the source, it’s clean code. Tags are organized, tend to be properly indented, and CSS classes are named well most of the time. Javascript (in the form of jQuery — my personal fav) is used efficiently and effectively to enhance the experience without weighing down the page. Graphical elements and typography are generally strong and well optimized, with only a few exceptions. It’s encouraging that his digital team takes this much care with the web site — I think it bodes well for all Internet denizens that the new president clearly has a great number of people who “get” the power of the Internet — and the power of good design.

UPDATE: CNN now has a story about the new web site.

On Friday, January 16, the first of the final ten episodes of BattleStar Galactica aired on SciFi. As some of you may know, this is one of my favorite shows of all time. Considering the cliffhanger that the last episode left us on back in June of 2008, and how SciFi feels the need to split these “mid-season breaks” into huge 6-month gaps, the anticipation was high. This is going to just be some quick impressions, not a detailed review.

Overall, I thought the episode was very good. Yes, we find out what’s up with Earth and why it’s so desolate (not a huge mystery), as well as who used to be there (that was more surprising). There were lots of new twists in this episode, good ones I think, that will be explored through the final nine shows I’m sure. Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell are amazing dramatic actors, and they really carry the emotional weight of this show. The Adama/Roslyn scenes were always so powerful. In contrast, the scenes with Lee and Dualla, in which they’re rediscovering their romantic attraction to each other, were less enjoyable. They felt forced and campy. I never liked that matchup.

Although the mix-in of the newly discovered cylon allies with the regular colonial crew — and the members of the crew who were just outed as cylons — provided a different and quirky “elephant in the room” kind of atmosphere, this show did in some ways represent a return to roots for several characters. Baltar was being a scientist again — no more creepy followers and weird religious rants. Laura was being herself — a strong presence around others yet emotional and fragile in private. Even Tigh seemed to have gotten over the fact that he’s a cylon and tried to be his old self again — his old self when he wasn’t drunk, that is. In that respect, one of the most powerful scenes was when Adama was the raging drunk and Tigh had to talk him down. For all the times that Adama was there for Tigh, now the roles became reversed. It was a very interesting reflection.

Among the many new pieces of information and surprising twists and turns, the most shocking was the sudden — and graphic — loss of a major character that has been with the show from the very beginning. We don’t even yet know why this character died.

Most important of all: we now know who the 5th cylon is.

Battlestar remains excellent television and, I think, one of the best stories ever told on the small screen. If you haven’t watched it and you like human drama, give it a shot. Start with the 2003 miniseries, then move to season one and watch it in order. The DVDs can be had from Netflix or any other video rental store.

Plex, the fantastic media center software I’ve written about before, added some icing on the cake recently: out-of-the-box support for Logitech Harmony universal remotes.

Logitech Harmony remotes are great because Logitech maintains a massive database of all the codes for pretty much every consumer electronics device ever made (the Harmony 550 was my pick for the best gadget gift under $100). You (usually) don’t have to sit there “training” the Harmony with your original remotes — you just hook it up to your computer, type in the model numbers of your TV, receiver, game console, etc, and you’re off. It vastly improves (and simplifies) control of your home entertainment center.

However, while Logitech did have remote codes for the Mac Mini (which is what I’m using to run Plex), the six buttons of the Apple remote aren’t enough to control a full-featured software suite like Plex. So I wound up buying a piece of software called Remote Buddy that interprets signals from remote controls and turns them into keystrokes. Basically, I spent 2 hours having my Harmony learn IR codes from 7 “virtual” Apple remotes (7 distinct sets of 6 IR codes) to give me 42 effective buttons, but then I had to create keystrokes for each of those 42 IR codes in Remote Buddy so that the proper commands would be sent to Plex (as keystrokes). It was extremely tedious, and I wound up having to do most of it over again because one of the learned IR commands was corrupted (resulting in double-presses).
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One of the more interesting discussions I had over the holidays was with a couple friends of mine who work at Ford. As usual (to my wife’s good-natured annoyance) the topic eventually turned to cars. What I’ve been really curious about these days is figuring out what our long-term replacement for traditional gasoline engines will be. There seems to be little doubt even among the average citizen that we can’t depend on oil forever, and that some day we’re going to have to get off the teat of the middle east. Of course, no one knows for sure what exactly our savior will be, but there’s plenty of speculation to go around.

Currently the two main candidates are pure electric cars and hydrogen fuel-cell cars. Both of these types of automobiles actually exist and can be bought (sort of) right now; if you’ve got about $100,000 you can grab a blisteringly fast all-electric Tesla Roadster, and for $600 a month and a lot of luck you can get on Honda’s list to lease the family-friendly hydrogen powered FCX Clarity — provided you live in southern California where they’ve installed some hydrogen filling stations, that is. (No, you can’t buy the FCX Clarity — some estimates value the vehicles at $10 million each, given the R&D costs Honda has put into them.) Neither of these vehicles emits anything harmful; the Tesla just gives off a little heat, and the only thing that comes out of the FCX Clarity’s tailpipe is pure water vapor.
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