Knuckledragger

...and now for something complete different. I'm a big fan of the early 80s hardcore band Minor Threat. The cover of their earliest 7" single (and several collections on tape and CD) features this image of singer Ian MacKaye: It's impossible to know Minor Threat without thinking of this picture. It's so iconic that Nike did made an "homage" to it for their own nefarious purposes: This is the original cover to Minor Threat's last official release, "Salad Days." I've always had mixed feelings about it, there are some decent songs (like Cashing In) but Minor Threat don't kick nearly as much ass when they slow down. I've been looking at that image for about two decades now, and I only recently noticed that it was taken with a fisheye lens. Some creative snooping dug up this uncropped original: I love the skateboard and the rotary push mower. This is another image from the same era, taken with a conventional rectilinear lens: Looks like Ian got mad at that front step. Thus ends this evening's mini-lesson on the Photography of Minor Threat.

okayfine....

The BA K-47.

Seource.

Illogical sauce.

It's a scene from Hot Rod. Shane MacGowan finally got new teef.

The new project by The Knife, finally in my hands. So far I love it. In related news, water found to be wet, prone to rolling downhill.

Now that's just odd. I was blissfully unaware of keyboard cat until about 5 minutes ago, when I got him by that AIM worm that connects to unsuspecting users. I was connected to a Yahoo user and the message I got was "Play him off, keyboard cat." The Y! user got something about me being suicidal and needing help.

There was no one behind her. The wall of the nightclub is only about two feet back, and I use fairly tight framing. The dancefloor is to the right of her.

I took this photo at the club where I sometimes work. I'm rather pleased with it.

I've had "Drive/Driven" stuck in my head for days.

I used to read that magazine when I was in highschool. I think there might be a box full of old issues in my mother's basement. There was another publication that was much shorter lived called Audio-Video Interiors. The gear featured in it was always as Serious (I distinctly remember a beautiful NYC apartment that had a surround system featuring five Bose cube speakers) but the photography was drool-inducing.

Thanks. All of those were taken with the EF 17-40mm F/4L.

Photomatix has been making me angry, so I've been checking out some of the competition. This is the first image I've done with Dynamic Photo HDR. The app itself is arm-gnawingly ugly, and reeks of its Windows/CrossOver origins. Furthermore, its controls are alien and difficult to use. All of that said, it made a decent end product from the source images I fed it, where Photomatix 3.1.3 only produced crap. I don't think Dynamic Photo HDR is going to replace Photomatix in my HDR workflow, but it looks like it has some potential to work with troublesome source files. I do wish that it was slightly (massively) better coded, and at least passed EXIF info. This image was made with three exposures and not post-processed at all. Twilight over Moody Bridge Road in Hadley. Made from one raw exposure in Dynamic Photo HDR, and cleaned up in Photoshop. I've processed this shot previously in Photomatix and Photoshop. This time I ran it through DynamicPhoto HDR, on the "Ultra-Contrast" setting and futzed with the controls a little bit. The image looks a bit like what the tone compressor function in Photomatix produces. I still find DPHDR to be seriously counter-intuitive and juniorized, especially compared to Photomatix. That said, it isn't nearly as frustrating as Photomatix has been since version 2.5. The color saturation is a little lurid in this one, but the hue is pretty good. Another of the "I forgot my tripod" series. I set my camera down on the railing of the upper level of the Edgartown wharf and fired off three bracketed exposures. I was unhappy with the results I got with them in Photomatix, so I ran them through DynamicPhoto HDR. I then worked over the HDR composite in Phototshop at length. I'm pretty happy with the end results.