Seen in Times Square, this NYPD surveillance tower is called Sky Watch, and contains digital cameras, a spotlight, unspecified “sensors,” and a police officer to run it all. From 25 feet in the air, it provides the ability to watch (and record) everything in the area from on high.
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Mississippi has passed a law banning red light cameras. No new cameras will go up, and all existing ones must come down by October. Bravo. Meanwhile, New Jersey, where I live, is adding towns to the list for new red light cameras. Other places are adding them as well. That's not so good. Laws were meant to be enforced by people, not computers. And they certainly weren't meant to be a source of revenue at the expense of safety, which is what these things are – even more so than the rest of traffic enforcement. Do you think they make...
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I have no idea why, but Chinatown restaurants love to hang animal carcasses in their windows. Birds, in particular. What is the deal with this?
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So, the ABC series Life On Mars is being canceled. I love this show. It was easily the best new show of the season. But, the folks at ABC decided that they hate having good shows, and they would rather be known for ridiculous nonsense like Dancing With The Stars. Yet another good show isn't given a chance past the first season, but idiotic crap like The Bachelor will, no doubt, live on. Now NBC is nuking their entire 10pm weekday lineup and sticking Jay Leno in there. They think I'm going to sit down at 10pm every night to...
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When you're driving through South Dakota, eventually you start noticing these signs. It's not immediately clear what they mean, but they're all over the place. “X Marks The Spot,” they say. “Think! Drive Safely.” On the other side, the same design, but instead of “Think!” it's “Why Die?”
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Wall Drug is, ostensibly, a drug store; at least, that's how it started. It has evolved into the wonderful tourist trap it is today, occupying a large part of Wall's main street.
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I am pleased to announce that my long-awaited (by me, at any rate) iPhone app, ThisDay. This application will tell you everything you want to know about today: holidays, today in history, famous birthdays, moon phases, etc. Read all about it and, you know, buy a copy!
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Something that works well along with the Kodachrome-like color profile I posted previously is warming up the shadows a bit, a simple trick to get those rich shadows you yearn for. In Lightroom, you can warm up your shadows without affecting the rest of the image using the Split Toning tool. Set the Balance to 85, Hue to 40 (a warm yellow), and Saturation to around 23; adjust to taste. That's all there is to it, but it's surprisingly useful. To make it even easier, I've packaged this as a Lightroom Preset for you, which you can download here.
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On Interstate 40, west of Winslow, Arizona, you will find Twin Arrows, an old Route 66 trading post. Situated where the Route 66 alignment meets up with the Interstate, the trading post has a highway exit, but has been abandoned for some years, the price of a gallon of gasoline forever frozen at $1.36.
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If you were a film photographer who has switched to digital, one thing you miss is Kodachrome. Digital cameras have given us images that are superior to film by most objective technical measures, but they haven't yet made a digital sensor that looks as good as Kodachrome did 60 years ago. Kodachrome is as good a reason as any to pick up the old film camera, but sometimes you want to get closer to that look with digital. I did, too, and Adobe's free DNG Profile Editor can help. With the Profile Editor, you can create camera profiles to be...
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