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Brought Skittles home yesterday

IMG_3921.mov

My sister had a great cat named Skittles. Enjoy yours!

Looking Ahead by Ken McIntyre (1960) https://album.link/fdwvwcdwftnxp Example: New issue, originally RVG recording. Some of the hard left/right panning is hard for headphones, but works okay for speakers. And just overall lovely tunes.

I bought a party pack of Feather blades years ago that will likely see me into the ground...ridiculous number of blades. Love my Feather safety razor...a lot. The quality and general weight of it is satisfying and suits me...my fine motor skills are questionable...LOL. HS

Hey, y'all. Remember this thread? So, funny thing... Since moving to MV, I ran out of blades. The stack of Astras I bought in 2013 are long gone. I went through the small stash of Sharks I had earlier this year. Sharks are good for like 2 shaves and miserable thereafter. I will never buy them again. The box of Feathers I had (sharp AF blades, but very unforgiving) is emptied. The Personna blades, which are nearly as sharp as Feathers but much easier to control are doneski. It's more or less impossible to find blades locally. I called around to half a dozen shops on MV that might carry safety razor blades and got either a firm "no" or similar answer, or no answer at all (it is high summer here and the population is 10x that of the winter.) I'm going to have to put in an order this week. Problem is, I have several events where I need to appear reasonably presentable, including one this afternoon. Also, as I mentioned, it's summer and I find stubble to be insufferable in the humidity. I had an impulse to rummage through my travel bag and I found an unopened 5 pack of Lord brand blades. A Lord safety razor was the first one I bought. I (re)learned how to shave with it back in 2013, but I haven't used it since. The handle is too narrow for me to grasp comfortably. It must have come with a couple packs of blades and I forgot about them for a dozen years. So I did my first shave with a Lord blade today. Lord is not exactly a premium brand. TBH, the shave was great. Far better than a shark (damning with the faintest of praise), not as high risk/reward as a Feather. Maybe a step below a Personna. They'll do until I can order some "real" blades.

In an earlier era, I was a regularl reader of The Online Photographer. I haven't kept up with it in years, for a host of reasons ranging from lack of interest to not really gleaning much worthwhile info to entirely too many Amazon affiliate links. One of the entries on TOP from 15+ years ago was "No one cares how hard you worked." I took that one to heart. I've spent ages editing a photo only to earn a collective shrug. Conversely, I've had SOOC jpegs from years ago that get attention to this day. With that in mind... OnnnnOn two occasions recently I've had the hood on my 17-40mm misaligned and not realized it. It's not super noticeable in the viewfinder and I don't chimp (stare at the LCD like a monkey) much. The misaligned hood only shows up in super wide angle shots, say 17-20mm. On Saturday, I had that problem for the entire shoot and didn't noticed until I was done. I have had quite a job with the Healing Brush and Spot Healing Brush tools in Photoshop, painting out the upper left corner of dozens of photos. When that doesn't work, I have to crop. Sometimes, both are necessary. Also, as was the case last year, the lighting conditions were harsh and difficult. I'd already edited 30 or so photos in Photoshop before I decided I was unhappy with the results and ran them through Luminar 4. Let's talk about Luminar for a moment. I pirated it 5 or so years ago. I liked it enough that I bought it. It does a lot with pseudo HDR math, similarly to what smartphone cameras do. The advantage Luminar offers is that it has sufficiently deep granularity in its controls that it's possible to reel in the more cartoonish aspects of HDR. With careful tweaking, Luminar allows for improvement of the dynamic range of images without looking like Photomatix vomit ca. 2006 or Facebook family vacation photos. L4 is no longer updated and in its final state is a quirky and buggy app. I have to make a copy of every photo I feed it because if I use the original, L4 will delete it. I learned this hard way and had to do serious work to replace all the originals Luminar deleted when I discovered this "feature." The app dev Skylum is now pushing the successor, Luminar Neo. They want it to be rentware like an Adobe product, but they don't have ADBE's clout. There is a lifetime license. I bought it on sale months ago for like $120. I am ...underwhelmed. Some of the UI is better than L4, but Neo is enough different that my workflow is much slower in it. Also, said UI is basically a new coat of paint on the same old engine. I find this displeasing. So far I have edited 102 photos (ya rly) including in a number of cases several edits of the same image. If you're really impatient, they're on my Flickr page. It has been been uncharacteristically hot and humid here on the Vineyard, and I swear I can feel my brain swelling. I went over my work earlier and found I had uploaded dupes of at least four different photos. Then there's the issue of figuring out which photos to post here and arranging them. It's exactly like a DJ set in that regard. Anyway, here's a nice bright rear end to tide y'all over while I finish editing The truck. I'm talking about the TRUCK. Stop looking at me like that.

Few more....

Was going to put these in the Slow Forum thread but figured we could use some kitty posts