Readers

Out for a run this morning a little after six. Before I went out the gate I saw four planets.

Five if you count the earth. ;-)

Mars was looking balefully red in front of me, and I had seen Venus out the back window - obvious as she always is. I checked on the "Planets" app on my phone to see if I was right about Mars (I was) and noticed that between him and the moon was Saturn, and between Venus and the other horizon was Mercury. A little look and I spotted them. Good beginning to the day.

Later we headed up to Leura. Kids got books from Megalong Books, and when mrs tsuken was shopping in a shop, the kids sat down together reading the young lad's Angry Birds Star Wars book. I rather liked how they looked.

Largerer.

A woman whose photography - and processing - I very much admire mentioned that until she started shooting RAW, she had been using the cross-processing preset on her K-30; that started me reading about digital methods to get those sort of looks, and thus to more fiddling with individual colour curves. I'm having a bit of fun already:

Carrington window.

Leura windows.

Reading girl.

On the topic of processing, it is perhaps worth reinforcing that "straight out of camera" actually isn't (unless you're shooting in RAW); the jpgs from the camera look bright and sparkly because the camera has processed the raw data - usually increasing saturation, contrast, and sharpness. So doing one's own processing is conceptually no different; it's just taking control of what is being done, and tailoring it to the image, rather than some camera default. <end rant>