We’ve a big Holly bush near our back yard. After the snow, every robin in the area was in our block to feed on that tree! I took some nice pictures of the event:
Also shot a short video so you can get an idea of the air traffic on Friday. It wasn’t nearly as nice a day, so please forgive the quality of the footage.
On our trip out here, we had a long layover in Frankfurt. It seems every flight east that doesn’t go through London goes through Frankfurt. It’s a big airport, but gets a lot of volume, so it is almost always busy and crowded.
This time, we decided to take advantage of our layover and sightsee a little. Once we landed, we checked in to ensure that our connecting flight was still on schedule, rearranged our carryon so we could check most of it in the left-luggage stand at the airport, and then jumped on a train that went up the Rhein to Mainz.
Mainz is a long-established city (thousands of years old) and the part we saw is a charming collection of platz’ surrounded by pretty buildings, connected by small streets. The city is most noted for is honored son, Gutenberg, of printing press fame. One of the churches in the city has a set of stained-glass windows designed by Marc Chagalle; they were the last windows he did before he died, and they honestly look like watercolor paintings captured in glass. The subtle variations and softness in the colors is amazing!
In the main platz near the cathedral the Christmas market (Fasnachtmarkt (I think!)) was set up and full of people out socializing. The booths selling Gleuwien and roast chestnuts were the most popular, however you could find every kind of food, sweet, or craft you wanted if you just looked enough. There were lots of tourists, yes, but there were a lot of Meentzers too.
After walking around for a couple hours, it felt good to sit and enjoyed a cup of Gleuwien, before winding our way back to the train station to catch our flight out to Ekaterinburg.
I’ve posted pictures from Pretoria, Sun City and Pilanesberg to my account on Flickr.
So I’ve been playing around with the camera a lot this spring. I’ve been able to do some basic color and contrast correction on my pictures for a while, but I don’t know much in the way of advanced tricks.
Yesterday I ran across this site: “Eric Jeschke Photography: GIMP Image Editing Tutorials (Eric Jeschke Photography: GIMP Image Editing Tutorials)”:http://cs.uhh.hawaii.edu/~jeschke/photography/articles/gimp/. It is full of tricks and techniques to enhance digital images.
I used one of the basic techniques he discusses, called a contrast mask, on one of the pictures I posted earlier. Look at how much more of the background is pulled out in the processed shot. Most notable for me was the red of the cherry trees in the upper right that was almost completely gone in the original.
h3. After
!http://thekagys.com/ckagy/weblog/archives/IMG_0548_contrast_web.jpg!
h3. Before
!http://thekagys.com/ckagy/weblog/archives/IMG_0548_corrected_web.jpg!
