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Crabby
I was up way late, slept till 11:30 this morning. Kaan tried to head butt me awake a couple of times. He can be so sweet.
Most of the afternoon I worked on processing the latest scanned slides. These were mostly ones I had developed in Thailand, 1975-77, when air conditioning was working if it got the room down to 90F. When the developer is too warm, the photos are more grainy and the colors are dull. When the fixer is too warm, it doesn't fix the colors and they go purple. I'm talking about Ektachrome, which has a bit of blue sensitivity. On Agfa and Kodachrome they tend to go more red/brown.
I went with the cheap service which doesn't do any corrections, and mostly doesn't bother to clean the slides. And there were about a dozen where they didn't bother to check that the slide was falling out of its holder.
Photoshop does a decent job of color correction with a single keystroke, and sometimes that also corrects the brightness and contrast. Sometimes I need to apply the "lighten shadows" or "midtones brighter" widgets. Some needed saturation boosted, but I didn't figure that out till I was almost done.
At about box 8 I saw the time and wondered why my phone's calendar app had not alerted me. It was time to go to Saratoga for the South Bay Musical Theater annual crab feed. They had fewer ticket sales this year - usually they sell out well before, but there were still tickets available at the door. But as usual, the chairs were packed way too close together, and by about 6:45 all the seats were filled. There was enough crab, but not enough to sell leftovers, which was a big reason I went this year. Boo. Hiss. The entertainment was a gypsy band, sort of. They took American standards and played them super-fast mariachi style, but without brass or accordions. The leader stood out front with his guitar, which he played well and knows it. The rest of the band - a drummer, an electric bass and maybe a keyboard or another guitar - looked bored. It sounded great if you didn't listen to the tunes. When they played "My Way" as a fast tango I almost lost it.
At about 8, the MC got up and tried to do some jokes, and then the raffles and some of the high-price auctions, but the sound system only reached the second row. It was sad. I went to have an other go at the chocolate fountain. This year's was smaller, and the stuff to dip was less diverse. Marshmallows, rice crispies treats, alleged brownie-ettes, and strawberries. Could have used more fruits.
I schmoozed with some friends, managed to avoid the producers from the last show of theirs I was in, and bailed after my ex-wife (who was one of the servers) told me there were not going to be leftovers for sale.
Had two items to buy at Target on the way home: wooden/bamboo chopsticks and a can opener. Found the chopsticks right away, but I was shocked - shocked, I tell you! - that The French Store not only had no electric can openers for sale, but none of the manual openers (there were 6 kinds of those) included a triangular punch for opening can tops for liquids. Two of them had bottle cap openers, so I bought one of those.
Home, back to processing the slides. Got done around 11:30.
Costco names the files with the 9-digit order number followed by -SLD and then the 3-digit box number (I sent them 10 this time) followed by the 4-digit slide number (in the order they scanned them, since I didn't have them in any real order). So I did some magic with Word and Excel and the command line to rename them. So something like
72535003-SLD-001-0001.jpg
becomes
Thai2_01-001.jpg
Much easier on the eyes.
Flickr hides the "permanently delete a batch" button, which caused me some grief when I reamed the previous set and wanted to replace the old set with those. I'll mess with that tomorrow.
Meanwhile the latest set is up:
Click here
It is a hodgepodge. If something sparks a question, feel free to comment.
Plans for tomorrow:
Rename and reload the first set of slides
Make Kourabiethes
Take them to the Brigadoon potluck/read-through. My ex at the crab feed told me about a production of that musical which she was in where everyne got sick, and they nicknamed it Brig-of-Doom.
Most of the afternoon I worked on processing the latest scanned slides. These were mostly ones I had developed in Thailand, 1975-77, when air conditioning was working if it got the room down to 90F. When the developer is too warm, the photos are more grainy and the colors are dull. When the fixer is too warm, it doesn't fix the colors and they go purple. I'm talking about Ektachrome, which has a bit of blue sensitivity. On Agfa and Kodachrome they tend to go more red/brown.
I went with the cheap service which doesn't do any corrections, and mostly doesn't bother to clean the slides. And there were about a dozen where they didn't bother to check that the slide was falling out of its holder.
Photoshop does a decent job of color correction with a single keystroke, and sometimes that also corrects the brightness and contrast. Sometimes I need to apply the "lighten shadows" or "midtones brighter" widgets. Some needed saturation boosted, but I didn't figure that out till I was almost done.
At about box 8 I saw the time and wondered why my phone's calendar app had not alerted me. It was time to go to Saratoga for the South Bay Musical Theater annual crab feed. They had fewer ticket sales this year - usually they sell out well before, but there were still tickets available at the door. But as usual, the chairs were packed way too close together, and by about 6:45 all the seats were filled. There was enough crab, but not enough to sell leftovers, which was a big reason I went this year. Boo. Hiss. The entertainment was a gypsy band, sort of. They took American standards and played them super-fast mariachi style, but without brass or accordions. The leader stood out front with his guitar, which he played well and knows it. The rest of the band - a drummer, an electric bass and maybe a keyboard or another guitar - looked bored. It sounded great if you didn't listen to the tunes. When they played "My Way" as a fast tango I almost lost it.
At about 8, the MC got up and tried to do some jokes, and then the raffles and some of the high-price auctions, but the sound system only reached the second row. It was sad. I went to have an other go at the chocolate fountain. This year's was smaller, and the stuff to dip was less diverse. Marshmallows, rice crispies treats, alleged brownie-ettes, and strawberries. Could have used more fruits.
I schmoozed with some friends, managed to avoid the producers from the last show of theirs I was in, and bailed after my ex-wife (who was one of the servers) told me there were not going to be leftovers for sale.
Had two items to buy at Target on the way home: wooden/bamboo chopsticks and a can opener. Found the chopsticks right away, but I was shocked - shocked, I tell you! - that The French Store not only had no electric can openers for sale, but none of the manual openers (there were 6 kinds of those) included a triangular punch for opening can tops for liquids. Two of them had bottle cap openers, so I bought one of those.
Home, back to processing the slides. Got done around 11:30.
Costco names the files with the 9-digit order number followed by -SLD and then the 3-digit box number (I sent them 10 this time) followed by the 4-digit slide number (in the order they scanned them, since I didn't have them in any real order). So I did some magic with Word and Excel and the command line to rename them. So something like
72535003-SLD-001-0001.jpg
becomes
Thai2_01-001.jpg
Much easier on the eyes.
Flickr hides the "permanently delete a batch" button, which caused me some grief when I reamed the previous set and wanted to replace the old set with those. I'll mess with that tomorrow.
Meanwhile the latest set is up:
Click here
It is a hodgepodge. If something sparks a question, feel free to comment.
Plans for tomorrow:
Rename and reload the first set of slides
Make Kourabiethes
Take them to the Brigadoon potluck/read-through. My ex at the crab feed told me about a production of that musical which she was in where everyne got sick, and they nicknamed it Brig-of-Doom.