Tovah drew her first self portrait today! Isn’t it nice?!
Category Archives: Photo
Outing to Hägnan
Today we went on a picknick with the children’s playgroup at Hägnan. It was about 10-15 children in all ages and we had a very good time. We grilled chicken, sausages and ate it together with breadsticks and melon. It was very delightful. It is the kind of place where you can just let the children run around on their own. No strange places where they can fall down, no cars, no high speed bicycles and just tons of fun things to do. In the beginning I was a bid of a protective dad and followed Tovah around but I got over that after lunch but that unfortunately proved not to be to good as Tovah for the first time in her life got lost. She was on her own about one house away but it was still very scary for her.
They also had straw barn where the children (and adults đ could jump into the dried straw. Tovah was a bit scared, but she jumped nicely when she held my hand. Later there was an unfortunate accident đ Tovah and another girl were supposed to jump together. They held hands and Tovah started counting to three and the other girl jumped immediately, pulling Tovah with here. Tovah landed on top of the other girl. It must have hurt quite a bit as they both cried for some time and I couldn’t get Tovah to jump again.
When we got home I was really tired, and found myself just sitting in front of the computer for a while. Some the and chickpeas helped my mood back to happiness. Played with my photos for the rest of the day and learned tons of new things about Photoshop and the most misnamed filter, Unsharp mask which is actually a tool for making the image look sharper.
During the evening I also made IP-telephony experiment. I used Marratech Pro as a SIP client towards DigiSip and called my mother using it as a phone replacement. After a while Tovah wanted to speak with her as well so I called the Pingtel phone as well and included that into the conversation using Pro as a mixer and gateway. It worked very well and the only real problem was sound levels as my speech came out much louder in the Pingtel than my mother.
It is my mother’s birthday today! Happy Birthday, mom!!
Today was also Dick’s funeral. Tina was there. I couldn’t go as I was giving an exam today and honestly I didn’t feel like going.
Now I am just waiting for Tovah to fall asleep so I can get into bed with my lovely wife.
Scanning Experiences
I have now been playing with scanning my photos for a while and I have come to some conclusions. For the record, the scanner is a Canon Canoscan 9900F and I have connected it using USB2.0. My target is publishing them online but also saving them is original PSD (I use Photoshop) for later editing. The source is all negative film.
As you can imagine, the settings you use when scanning a photo affects the result and I have currently found that the following produces the best result.
* Resolution 1600: This produces files of about 2288×1464 pixels and each raw file is 9.56MB in PSD format which in turn can be compressed non-lossy to 7.2MB using Winzip with maximum compression. The resulting JPEG as created with Adobe ImageReady using JPEG quality 90 is 1.35MB. For comparison the PSD file becomes 34MB if the resolution is increased to 3200.
* Remove Dust and Scratches (FARE) Hard: FARE is a technique that uses infrared light to detect dust and scratches on the source and does a VERY good job in removing them. This features as I understand it is unique for Canon scanners. Most of my old negatives have been stored badly and are a bit damaged.
* Fading correction Normal: This makes the colors a bit more saturated.
* Grain correction: Normal This was actually the hardest one to decide on. If I set it on soft you can see the grains on e.g. white walls but if I set it to hard then the image gets to blurry. I decided to use normal.
* Quality High Quality: This just means that it scans in higher quality than normal.
* Not using Unsharp Mask: The unsharp mask is very important but Photoshop makes a much better job than the scanner software. More about this later.
Using these settings scanning on negative takes 5 minutes 20 seconds.
The scanner can scan 24 negatives at one time but that requires that the negatives are cut in sheets of 6 which most Swedish negatives aren’t (they are cut in sheets of 4).
That was the scanning part and I will post more details about handling tomorrow.
[Written while listening to: Chris de Burgh – Carry Me 03 – and talking with my mother using SIP.]
Update: changed the text about Fading correction.
Scan 002
Scan 002 is now finished. It contains among other things photos from when we got Timbo.
[Written while listening to: 02 – My Hometown – Bruce Springsteen – Best Ballads]
Scan 1 – 1994
My first photo scan is now online, 35 photos from 1994. It is mostly of my dog Timbo but you can also see me, Johanna, Johan ‘K’ Karlsson and Jalle.
[Written while listening to: 11 – I Wish I Were Blind – Bruce Springsteen – Best Ballads]
Guests!
We had a nice afternoon with Jalle and Ida. We ate 8.5 rolls of sushi and then we played EBay and Chee’z Dork. EBay was really fun but Chee’z Dork was so so. I am disappointed in you, Steve Jackson!
Tovah found a new game, throwing sand around and of course most of it ended up in her hair. Check out the cloud and pebbles.
We threw them out around 19.30, Tovah took a bath (because of all the sand) and she ended up washing her hair twice in a day. She hates washing her hair.
After she fell asleep J and I dove into our analog photo collection and starting matching up missing negatives and sorting the rest a bit. I have started putting captions on the first set.
Good night everybody!
“Ja, det låter spännande” and Tovah “fuckar”
Welcome oh wonderful world.
It is now Sunday afternoon I have have managed to not work this weekend. That is something new for me and something I will try to maintain. We woke up around 08.30 and I started the day by reading “Pablo, the penguin that always froze” with Tovah. Continued the day with some photo handling. The first roll is now scanned and I will caption it later. The second roll is currently being scanned. Some great photos from 1993.
I feel good for two reasons,
1) Johanna said yesterday that she I going to give notice on her other apartment.
2) I today realized that I have found the hobby I have been missing for so long. Handling my photos. I enjoy this very much and I feel it being an investment for the future. It will be great to be able to view the old photos when I am getting old as well as Tovah will enjoy it when she gets older.
Jalle and Ida are back in town. They came during the night and I of course immediately invited them for dinner today. They will arrive in 50 minutes and they will get sushi – the Parnes way. I enjoy their company very much and I have to admit that I have missed them both during the last weeks. Actually I haven’t met Ida since midsummer.
By the way. I have to explain the subject. Tovah cannot pronounce “s” inside words and this becomes rather funny when she is trying to say “fuskar” (Swedish for cheating) and it becomes “fuckar” which loosely means fucks đ She says “Ja, det låter spännande!” as response to almost everything we are going to do (Swedish for Yes, that sounds exciting).
Catch you all later and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.
[Written while listening to: Smakar Paa Ett Regn – Per Gessle – Mazarin]
Misc Photos December 2002
More captions on old photos again. Misc December 2002 are done.
It is a tad bit quicker to handle digital photos that to scan old analog ones.
Misc photos from January 2003
Some more captions done, Misc January 2003.
Friday
Today we went to the children health care centre for measurement and three year checkup. Tovah was healthy as a whatever and passed all the tests with honors. She got a tattoo for her efforts.
We continued down town where I bought a Lava Lamp. Finally, I have wanted one for the last 20 years. We bought at Cervera that is going out of business so it was on half price. Lunch on Waldorf. The rest of the day I spent working and during the evening we went on can hunt and passed by work. We met Ghyslain. It must have been at least 1 year since I saw him last. Also got the scanner today and I have just had time to install it during the evening and test scan one item, a cd.
Oh, I almost forgot, down town we went by Tradition and they had a sale on games. We bought Chez Dork and the EBay card game. We haven’t played any of the but they look “interesting”.