Photo Friday: Wide and Wild
After the break: A list of forums, teeny tiny computers, and PIMP MASTER VANDY
Happy Friday, folks! I am excited to be heading down to Baton Rouge today for the Ole Miss at LSU game this weekend. I’m hoping to get some fun pictures of campus and the tailgating to share sometime next week, but for now, you’ll just have to put up with more images from Grand Teton.
The theme this week is Wide and Wild. They’re all cropped to be a wider image than just the normal 3:2 that I shoot in. They may be harder to find a frame for, but I think landscapes—and mountain images specifically—are extremely well-suited to this type of crop.
Let’s dive in.
Photos
1.
What a freakin’ view, right? We took a gondola up to the top of one of the mountains at the resort in Jackson, WY where we were staying and I was lucky enough to get this image at the top.
One of the things I regret about all of the images from this trip is that I didn’t bring a polarizer, so anything off in the distance suffers from quite a bit of that atmospheric haze. That’s what gives off that blue color for the mountains in the distance. You really can’t do anything about that after the fact. That said, it is what it actually looked like while we were there.
I loved how the shadows gave depth to the mountain, and Grand Teton poking up at the top was just an incredible sight. The sky is a bit of a strange color, but that’s mostly due to the haze. If I tried to adjust the sky alone, it would look pretty strange in totality.
Original:
2.
There is one way to get rid of some of that haze: just pull the color temperature way over to warm. This isn’t going to necessarily create an accurate image, but if it’s an image that generally shares the same level of light and the same general colors, you can do things like this. You can see that there’s still some haze in the image, but it lacks that blue color we saw in the first image.
The way the river meandered caught my eye and I love the way this turned out. It’s a very stylized edit, but it feels warm and and cozy to me.
Looking at the original image below, you’ll see that the most insane part of the finished image is what a small fraction of the original it is. That’s what 45 megapixels will get you! You can crop down so far! Folks will tell you that you don’t need a ton of megapixels and that plenty of other factors are more important. And this is true most of the time. But lots of pixels affords you the ability to blow photos up really big or crop a small part of it into a normal-sized image.
I’m not sure how large this one could be blown up, but I love how it looks and I do think I’m going to print it out and hang it somewhere at home.
Original:
3.
I took this photo as I was leaving that hike I wrote about a few weeks ago. We were both wiped out and ready to get home, but we also saw this incredible light coming through the rainclouds we were trying to get away from.
I was focused on making sure that I was going to get the light exposed correctly. You’ll see in the original that the entire image is extremely underexposed except for the sunlight. Because of that choice, there’s quite a bit of noise from bringing up those shadows.
I ended up doing some masking so that I could deal with the trees and the mountains+sky separately. I brought up the exposure on the trees and grass and gave them a little bump toward the yellow and the green tones. I warmed up the sky+mountains and changed the hue and saturation of the blue tones in the sky.
Overall, I’m not sure if I would print this one out, but it’s a really pretty picture of a moment I want to remember from our trip to Grand Teton.
Original:
Links
1. Forums Are Still Alive, Active, And A Treasure Trove Of Information by Chris Person
When I want information, like the real stuff, I go to forums. Over the years, forums did not really get smaller, so much as the rest of the internet just got bigger. Reddit, Discord and Facebook groups have filled a lot of that space, but there is just certain information that requires the dedication of adults who have specifically signed up to be in one kind of community. This blog is a salute to those forums that are either worth participating in or at least looking at in bewilderment.
I loved this article when I saw it. I remember the old days when forums were all over the place instead of subreddits or Discord servers and the information generated within them were easily searchable.
I have to admit that I did make a couple of contributions to this list: MacRumors, which I still use to this day, and LetsRun, which is—as was written in this article—a terribly toxic place with great training information. I don’t go there anymore, but it was helpful when I was just learning about running training.
Forums are dead. Long live forums.
2. Report: First wave of M4 Macs, including smaller Mac mini, coming November 1 by Andrew Cunningham
The refreshed Mac mini is the most interesting of the new models—it's said to come with a fully revamped design for the first time since the aluminum unibody version was released in 2010. The new Mac mini is said to be closer in size to an Apple TV box, but it will retain an internal power supply that doesn't require a bulky external brick. The Mac mini lineup should still be split between two slightly different machines: one entry-level model with a basic M4 chip, and a higher-end M4 Pro version that bridges the gap between the Mac mini and the Mac Studio.
I am so interested in these new form factor Mac Minis. I own an M2 Mac Mini and I own Apple TVs and I am surprised to find out that it’s possible to fit the former into the shell of the latter, but apparently it’s happening!
I’ve wanted to use a Mac to run a home server for a while now (yes I know Linux is better suited for this please don’t @ me) and it would be pretty cool to either run it on a box this small or replace my current Mac Mini with one of these and then use the M2 to run the server!
(This is a justification to buy a new Mac Mini. Please don’t tell my husband. I need a laptop with more RAM first.)
3. Vandy Beats #1 Alabama by SEC Shorts
I spent all day Sunday dreaming about the video we would be getting from SEC Shorts after perpetual basement-dweller Vanderbilt University beat Alabama in a football game. It was an excellent game and it begat an excellent video.
If you know any of the words that I wrote in that previous paragraph, please feel free to spend a few minutes watching that video, and if you do, watch until the very end. Even through the Kirk Herbstreit part.