It's Bitchy when it's Itchy

Broken Wrist Update

One of my first D800 images. Shot in a 3-part mirror, flipped, LR distortion (angled mirrors),
framed with Perfect Effects 8, further processing in Topaz Simplify for your enjoyment!

My right arm is in a cast (they made me choose a colour. I picked raspberry!). My fingers are still quite swollen, I can't close my hand yet. But the good news is that the cast comes off February 18th.

Anyone who's worn a cast will tell you it's bitchy when it's itchy. I figured I'm tough, I can stand it. Oh yeah? It better get better soon. I woke up at 6am and was tempted to gnaw the damned arm off!

Last time I wrote about the terrific service at the Minden ER. The fracture clinic is at the Ross Memorial Hospital in Lindsay and it too was a far cry from the big city body factories. They were competent and relatively responsive, but some big city stuff crept in. For instance $2.50/½ hour for parking. Walking a maze of endless corridors.

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This is NOT a photo. Well, except for the girl. I created the entire image in Photoshop using the new pattern fill tool, then added a texture with Paper Textures. Yes, I drew the trees, the water, the sunlit trail, the birds... More to come, this is fun. Especially when it's hard to hold a camera!

Camera Club

It's astounding. We have 45 paid-up members already and we're talking about capping the number of members! Apparently about a dozen people showed up to shoot the first weekend of the Pond Hockey in -25°C temperatures (I wasn't there. I wanted to be but the wrist injury was compounded by an ugly head cold). I'm starting to see some images from some very talented people, this is going to be great. We're still working on the logo, website, etc. Stay tuned!

D800 image and metadata

When I saw this Latte come out of the Tassimo machine, I had to grab a shot. Ugly ambient lighting didn't help. I did do some editing:  a towel on the counter in front was cloned out, I tweaked the colour balance, sharpened it with a hipass layer and I cropped a little, primarily off the left side. It's surprisingly sharp given that it was a 1/13" exposure handheld in portrait mode with a broken wrist, no less! Oh, and a touch of Noise Reduction: it was at ISO 6400!

I inadvertently deleted the NEF file while working on my workflow: I will be deleting a lot of unused RAW files to save storage space. But I wanted to verify the shutter actuation count on the new camera, so I loaded up my metadata editor to have a look. 608 clicks, just where Nikon said it would be.

You would be AMAZED at the copious amount of metadata your camera collects. I've addressed this topic before, but if you missed it, or you want to have a peek at this fascinating info, wander on over to my tech blog where I posted it. There's also a link there to where you can download the free metadata editor I use.

More to Come

I'm still quite limited in what I can do with one wing, but I'm going to try my damnedest to get out to the Pond Hockey tournament on the weekend. That D800 needs some exercise!

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