Reader Mail: Your fetish for photos

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Lisa Northcraft, co-author at the Eat Flesh, Drink Blood blog (which has, in the past, posted some of my work), writes in with a comment about a certain photographic feature I run on the blog here.

Well Hello!

It has been a while since we have chatted. I do log on to your blog often :) I appreciate your writing & also your submissions on our eatfleshdrinkblood blog.

I just checked your photo for the day Kenneth. Beautiful. I thought you might like logging on to my daughter’s site. Her website is AutumnRoseArt.com She is 18 & recieved a $36k scholarship from the top art school in the nation. (Proud mom!) She loves & uses Lightroom & Photoshop.

Hover over the pics & you may see a few. Anyway, hope all is good for you & yours.

Regards,
Lisa

Well, Lisa, thank you very much, and be assured that things are indeed well for Grace and myself.

I do recommend the linked site to the reader — the young photographer has a lot of talent, and some of her photos are exceptionally beautiful. As something of a second-rate hack where photography is concerned, I’m rather jealous. ;)

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Pic of the Day #679

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We evidently lost the source graphic for our trade show banner at work, so I had to re-create a high-resolution copy using my and the other day. The result you see here is a panoramic (comprised of 7 source images) that was made square only after spending a good twenty minutes playing with the ‘Warp’ tool.

 

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Pic of the Day #677

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This is another experiment, this time done the “proper” way — e.g. with three exposure-bracketed images, rather than with and only two images (and some cutting and smoothing).

Just for fun, I tried a couple of different presets out on the image. An alternative colour scheme from Lightroom Killer Tips can be seen after the jump.
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Pic of the Day #672

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Pic of the Day #666

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Pic of the Day #663

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For my best man

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Colin, my good friend and best man, graciously agreed to help Grace and myself move some furniture to my uncle’s place north of the city — we are in the midst of re-configuring the apartment to prepare for the arrival of our little one in October.

As payment, we took him out for dinner and a pint or two, but I also agreed to finish a t-shirt idea that he and I have been mulling over for a while. You see, Colin, good-hearted chap that he is, seems to be the one that many members of the Rover Crew turn to when they have need of a ride to or from places.

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So I hauled out the again and came up with a t-shirt logo that matched the rather hilarious slogan he had come up with some months ago.

Now I just need to find a store where I can get this printed in a reasonably expedient manner. I think the one that I had previously known about closed down recently, so I may have to resort to using an online store.

 

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Open bigotry from Rehmat

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ist blogger (and , nuclear power plant worker) Shaukat Khawja — also known as Rehmat, owner/operator of the Rehmatpedia blog — has had some very…interesting things to say in the past, but I’ve a feeling that this latest offering of his (put not on his blog but in the IslamUnity.net forums) might just take the cake. If nothing else, it at least confirms a suspicion that I’ve had about the guy for a while: underneath any pretense he might have established about being committed to peace and mercy (the name “Rehmat”, if memory serves, means “mercy” or “kind”), he’s just your typical anti-Jewish bigot.

Choice samples from his latest include:

Jew elites always played a major part in great wars and reactionary movements. They’re known for tricking the both parties in a conflict. For example, Jews funded most of Crusades against Muslims and ; Jew sided on both sides of ; they were behind and Communist Revolution in – and they declared war on Nazi , while 150,000 German Jews were serving Army and some Zionist terrorist groups were having honeymoon with Hitler and Mussolini regimes.

Jew elites, eh? You mean, like this?

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Okay, pery aside, Shaukat is here saying more or less the same thing that got into trouble a couple years back: “Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world”. Now, to be fair, I’m sure that Jews probably did fight in e.g. the American Civil War, and then on both sides. But that is because such conflicts transcend religious considerations — neither the Civil War, nor the French or Russian revolutions or World War II were about religion, and did not have any real religious significance. Even the Crusades were more about politics and territory than they were about religion. And in such conflicts, people of the same religious stripe might well end up on opposite sides of the field of battle.

Case in point: there currently Muslims serving with e.g. forces in , and who do battle with the Muslims in the .

Shaukat claims that he doesn’t need to prove this — or any other — statement made in the list of his that I have linked to, and yet the claim made above is hardly sufficiently self-evident to be able to stand on its own. Where is the evidence of Jewish funding of e.g. the Crusades against their own people?

Nazis never killed six million Jews. It’s 20th century’s biggest hoax – which has only flourished under government protection in several western countries.

Nazis are known for killing several million of Gypsies, Christians and Jews under their rule – but the largest victims were Gypsies. Even museum in now have reduced the figure of Jewish killed by Nazis as 2.5 million.

Ah, denial — pretty much a staple of Islamic discourse, unfortunately.

The problem with it is: the Nazis themselves were reasonably good book-keepers; we know from their own documentation that approximately 6 million Jews were murdered in various ways in the 1930s and 1940s. The figure of 2.5 million Jews that Shaukat gives is reflective of the number of Jews killed in Poland alone. And again, many of these deaths were documented and/or witnessed; the figures are not baseless.

Holocaust denial is ostensibly a punishable offence in Canada (not something I agree with, but that’s another matter). Strangely, however, I very much doubt that Shaukat is going to be charged with anything over this utterance.

September 11, 2001 attack on WTC and Pentagon was an inside terrorist job – conceived by i , and pro-Israel politicians and government officials.

Ah, the conspiracy. Another canard, and again a common staple of Islamic discourse.

There’s other stuff, some of it laugh-out-loud wrong, but these are some of the highlights. I think there’s room for one more, and that’s good…because of all the things Shaukat has asserted about Jews in his latest post, here’s my personal favourite:

Jews have the most powerful Jewish Lobby (AIPAC, ADL, AJC, etc.) in the US - which works for the interests of Zionist Israel instead of the US.

Here I had thought that the Hindu Jewish lobby was the most powerful. It appears, O Reader, that I have been grossly misinformed about the size thereof.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

 

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Pic of the Day #647

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and her friend Michelle sit and talk at Michelle’s birthday party. I added a bit of lens flare to this shot in , because I quite frankly prefer the look of Photoshop’s rendered over the somewhat uglier flare that my 17-85 mm lens displays.

 

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Pic of the Day #645

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This is a composite shot, done in , of Grace showing off her baby bump — she’s about five months along in this picture.

 

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Pic of the Day #633

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Pic of the Day #625

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Pic of the Day #614

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This is my wife’s handiwork.

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These snacks are pretty tasty, and are comprised of boccocini, basil leaves, and cherry tomatos on toothpicks. Simple, yet very enjoyable (and if you pureed the lot, you’d have a heck of a tomato sauce). spent all morning preparing and arranging them on the plate just so…and the results were pretty good; full marks for presentaton too!

And how could I not take a picure of my wife’s hard work?

I think the Reader can guess that I boosted the red and green s fairly heavily in this shot, in addition to doing some major (this platter was next to the window through which the sunlight was entering the boat). Given more time, I might have had a go at using to delete the surrounding food items, but decided against that for the time being.

 

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A modern Mother’s Day

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The People’s Cube put up this graphic as a commentary on the “art”work of student , whose project supposedly involved “repeatedly inseminat[ing] herself with sperm freshly collected from campus masturbators, then induc[ing] miscarriages and stor[ing] the resulting blood with fertilized eggs in order to smear it over the surface of a large suspended cube at a student art show.”

Now, to be fair, that’s a disgusting art project, although one can hardly call it new:

Indeed, Ms. Shvarts’ pursuit of unusual purposes for body parts is not new. In 1943, another uninhibited woman named tried to deconstruct the “normative understanding of the relationship between art and the human body” by having a lampshade made from tattooed skins of prisoners.

In their usual fashion of odd humour, the people at The People’s Cube have come up with a graphic that I think rather nicely captures the reality of the situation. I think, though, that the message of the graphic (with a touch of pery) applies much more broadly than just in that circumstance.

Hence:

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For that is the sad reality, is it not? As previously discussed, abortion exists in opposition to motherhood, and the reality is that when a woman procures an abortion, a human being — who would otherwise have gone on to grow up into a child that produces just this sort of art project for his or her mother in grade school — ceases to be.

 

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Pic of the Day #592

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The stretch of forest located immediately behind my grandparents’ house was evidently supposed to be turned, at one point, into another housing development. Quite a number of people in rallied to save the place, and it has since been turned into a forest preserve, with only a handful of walking trails winding their way through it. It’s really quite a tranquil place, and Grace and I made a point of exploring it fairly thoroughly on our second day on .

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This is just one of several spectacular views one could happen upon whilst walking through the forest. There is a small creek that winds through the area, which one can catch glimpses of from the walking paths at various high points. Views like this really, I think, lend an air of mystery and magic to the area, and in walking through places like this it is not hard to imagine Tolkein or Lewis walking through similar stretches of forest in , emerging with their minds brimming with ideas concerning or .

Edit-wise, I applied the standard battery of presets to this image, but then re-thought the Clarity setting (+50) that usually accompanies the Punch preset, and instead set it to -50. The slight diffusion effect adds to the aforementioned mystery, I think. I also adjusted the green and yellow s quite a bit, and also the hues of each colour. Initially, the greenery had a very strong yellow tint, but gives me the option to make my yellows more “greenish.”

It’s a little less effective than ’s colour replacement tool, but it’s also a little more predictable.

 

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