Blizzard 2005
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Any travel is strongly discouraged. If you leave the safety of being indoors… you are putting your life at risk.
Above is our front yard picnic table and our back yard picnic table as of this morning—they might be totally gone by the end of the day. Good thing it’s no weather for a picnic.
Incidentally, if anyone has any ideas about how to take good quality digital photos of snow, or how to use the GIMP to get better whites, please let me know. I did a little fiddling with these shots, but it’s really much brighter out there than these images would have you believe.
Being both sick and snowed in inspires me to file bugs and ask mailing list questions. For example, this bug with mplayer that prevents me from playing AAC files that I’ve tagged with mp4tags has been bugging me for a couple of months. And I just learned that sending a USR2 signal to openbox forces ‘reconfigure’, which is quite useful if you script changes to the rc.xml file.
Now if someone could help me with this strange, intractable Apache bug my day would be complete.
Ari Pollak Jan 28
My camera happens to have a Snow Scene setting, but I also adjusted the Levels in gimp so the contrast wasn’t all screwy. http://lj.ebnj.net/05snow2.jpg
Go to Layer->Colors->Levels. You want to adjust the Input Levels sliders so that the black triangle is approximately where the graph starts, the white triangle to where the graph ends, and the grey triangle to somewhere in the middle. It takes some practice, but it’s easy to see your changes before applying them as long as you have the Preview button checked. The first picture also looks like it could use some de-hazing. I think there’s a good tutorial on gimpguru.org somewhere.
peter Jan 28
— same picnic different year! –greetings, from the previous owners of adams new house
Ben Jan 28
You need to make sure that your white balance setting is set for the snow scene. Because of all the white in the scene, the auto-metering system is fooled and the white snow comes out too dark.
Ben
Ben Jan 28
If you just have “preset” white balance settings on your camera, try “cloudy” or “shade” settings. Essentially, you need to compensate for the increased reflected light in the scene.