Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler OT: Home owner bliss

being an amateur photographer, i would say she has to dally with them a little. especially that photo of the prairie on the opening page.. the sky is almost neon.

but, retouched or not, she has a great eye for what she does. really fantastic shots. that is the level of ability i wish to reach.

bigjohn

Filters, my man... filters!

One of my favorite shots that I've taken was the perfect sunset shot with a person in the foreground - perfect except the sunset, due to smoke from a fire or something wasn't as orange as I would have liked. So, on goes an orange filter over the lens. But wait, I hear you say... wouldn't that make the person look like an oompa-loompa? Normally, but if you pop off a flash with a gel the opposite colour of the lens filter (in this case, blue), the flash neutralizes the colour added for anything close enough for it to affect - your subject, and leaves it untouched for anything outside its range (the sunset)... add a polarizing filter for a bit of contrast enhancement and voila!

I love playing with colour shooting film - the new 4 layer Fuji films with supersaturated colours are great for landscapes, Kodak's got a line of infrared films that do well for getting shots through things like water spray (waterfalls, etc), I've even played with orthochromatic film (truly black & white - very few greys - it's used to photoreplicate texts and the like) and tungsten-balanced film (good for concerts and other stage-lit performances). I hate to sound regressive, but digital photography with auto-seeking white balance really takes the art out of the photo.

It's painful to have to go back to lighting documentary-style after that... 1/2 CTBs and if the DOP is really wild, maybe even a straw on the backlight/hairlight... makes you feel like Michelangelo working as a house painter.

Bren R.

I'm sure she uses some filters on some shots. She hasn't a clue how to work Photoshop. I had to show her about 10 times just how to re-size a file. So there's certainly no digital manipulation to them!

Craig - Mom is a treasure and the pics are incredible. You need to suggest that 1 picture is nice, but another 25-30 would really fill in the empty space around Spiff Manor!!!

A bit of general input from an older guy. Based on years of tinkering, fixing and painting, I have neither the time or the appetite to continue doing those things. I have evolved to answering the incessant requests from my wife to continue doing these types of things by introducing her to "Ray's Homeowner's Repair Kit". The RHRK consists of only 2 components - the Yellow Pages and a checkbook. My muscles don't hurt, my knuckles aren't beat up anymore and time is available for golf. Life is good.

Well today turned out to be complete shite. I guess it's Karma for the great day we had yesterday with the new carpeting.

The plumbers arrived today and commenced to thrash our downstairs living room wall and ceiling in search of our gas line. After six large holes in the wall, and another six even larger holes in the ceiling they found the line. Then announced that getting gas into our kitchen would be impossible without tearing apart the entire kitchen and upstair floor.

Now we have no gas, and 12 big holes to patch. Yippee! To make this story even more painful, we had another plumber stop by previously to give us an estimate. He told us everything these guys did without making a single hole. We just didn't trust/believe him. We'd had three other people say it could be done. Clearly they were all wrong. Grrrrr....

So it's electric stove time for us. Bleck. I if you look really hard for a silver lining the electrician I spoke with gave us some good news. Rather than needing an entirely new breaker box, he should be able to simply add another 40amp breaker to our existing one. So far he seems to be the only decent/honest contractor we've dealt with. Are most contractors slow/lazy/dishonest people? Geesh!

You can address the last few sentences yourself. You have chosen to take on the role of General Contractor.

Wow - my heart goes out to you. The mayhem you described is unacceptable. In the future, once the contractor has made 3 holes call a halt and apply full flaps. They clearly should have known better.

The trouble is I don't know a thing about plumbing and they came highly recommended. I was pretty much at their mercy.

Are these ppl going to repair the holes in the walls before they leave and never come back or did they stick you with that job?

They left the holes for us. As he left he let us know that he wouldn't charge us for his time. Wasn't that nice of him?

$!$%&*