Archive for the ‘Photography’ Category

Photo Restoration in Foreign Languages

Thursday, May 27th, 2010

The guy who runs a photo retouching and photo restoration company came for another stay. We like it when visitors come back…it means we didn’t scare them off the first time, so we will get another chance!

I asked him what was up in the photo restoration business. He said that many baby boomers are discovering drawers full of old, damaged photographs from their childhoods (or earlier). He said this brings a constant stream of new, and returning, customers.

He said that his company has recently created some versions of their website in foreign languages. For example:
Danish
German
Greek
Spanish
Hebrew
Polish
Portuguese
Romanian
Afrikaans
Czech
French
Italian
He figures that there must be people in all those nations who have lots of old, scratched, faded photos that need restoration.

I asked him what he will do when somebody actually sends in an order written in Romanian or Greek. He scratched his head and walked away.

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Carbonite Not Backing Up Videos

Saturday, January 31st, 2009

We had a guest from the MidWest last night, a guy who sells computer hardware. He wondered how we backup our operating data here at the Inn. I told him that our needs are pretty modest…we use an external hard drive, and also use Carbonite online backups.

He asked if we knew that Carbonite does not back up videos. I said I didn’t know that, and wasn’t sure I believed it.

So, he said “Go to your computer and double click the “Carbonite Backup Drive” icon on the desktop. Open the “Backed Up Files” folder and look for one of your videos. I went to a DVD folder that contains an old converted home video. Inside were two folders, VIDEO_RM and VIDEO_TS. The TS folder was very small, less than 1 MB.

He said, “Did you tell Carbonite to backup all your videos?” “Yes,” I replied, “months ago I selected the My Videos folder on my computer and selected the Backup option in Carbonite.”

“Now, look at that same VIDEO_TS folder on your hard drive.” I did, and it was 4 GB! Carbonite had backed up the folder, but very little of what was inside it!

This was a big surprise, a very big surprise! I thought everything was safely stored offsite, but it wasn’t.

He said he thinks it’s possible to get Carbonite to back up videos, but that it takes a lot of manual configuring. Neither quick nor intuitive.

I’m not sure where we go from here, I guess I need to send those DVDs to my aunt in New Jersey for safekeeping.

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The Guy Who Can’t Spell

Monday, October 27th, 2008

We had this fellow in here who says he is an expert on spelling mistakes. He claims to use a computer to determine the most common spelling errors that people type. He said that people often tap a key too lightly for it to register (especially under certain fingers), and they also hit nearby keys by mistake.

He gave a page of misspelled words about photo retouching as an example. Some of them look unbelievable, but he said that they are all likely errors.

He laughed with us when he had to come by the desk to ask his room number…he had forgotten it. He may be an expert at letters, but numbers just aren’t his thing.

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The Geotagging Guy

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008

We’ve been busy preparing for winter, so I haven’t done much blog writing lately.

We did have an unusual character stay with us. We nicknamed him “Mr. GPS” or “Mr. Geotagging.” He kept wandering around with his GPS gadgets and camera, noting exactly where he was. Some thought he was a surveyor in disguise, making a secret survey of the property for some reason.

I decided he was harmless, although it was disconcerting to have a guest who always wanted to know the exact boundaries of the Naugas Inn land. He used a Garmin handheld GPS to create a list of waypoints for all the features of the land. He mentioned geocaching, but I don’t think he buried any secret treasure-chest objects while he was here.

His waypoints were stored in his GPS, and they were listings of latitude and longitude of our front gate, and the front door, and the overlook, and other points of interest.

He used a little GPS gadget called an Evermore GT-800 EverPhoto with his digital camera, and he said it let him geotag all his digital photos so they could be located using Google Maps or Google Earth.

After he paid his bill, the maid said that he never peeled back the covers on his bed. She thinks he slept in a sleeping bag on top of the bed. Strange!

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Two Approaches to Photography

Monday, July 14th, 2008

As I was poking around the Internet last night I came across two interesting sites. One belongs to a photographer, the other is a company that enhances photographs.

The photographer’s site is from an Austin, Texas, professional photographer named Jeff Cicolani, and his company is named PhotoJava,NET. He takes wedding photos, portraits and scenic photographs. Something about the style of his wedding photos really captivated me.

If a wedding is a new beginning, then the other site looks at the other end of the spectrum…the end of a relationship. Specifically, the end of a relationship between a person and their pet. The artist at the site uses Photoshop to create photographic cat, dog, horse pet memorials of a pet a person has. For many people, a pet is like a child, and these pet memorials look like an excellent way to keep alive the memory after the pet is gone.

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Beautiful Model Visits the Naugas

Saturday, July 12th, 2008

The entire Naugas desk staff seemed to take a deep breath when a drop-dead gorgeous woman walked in the door yesterday to check in. She was with a guy driving a fancy sports car. I guess that guys love women with beauty, and women love guys with money.

We learned later that she is a professional model, with her picture appearing on the covers of several national magazines. She said that she works closely with a professional photographer in New York City, and that it really is tiring for a model to “strike a pose” over and over…but a model can’t let your face reveal that you are tired, or the photographs will reveal it.

“Actually,” she revealed, “a good retoucher can hide fatigue in the retouched photos. Using Photoshop, she said, “A great retoucher can eliminate bags under the eyes, skin blemishes, pimples, scars, stray hairs and all kinds of imperfections.” She said that a photo reveals imperfections that are not normally noticed, and that she would never, ever release a picture that was not retouched.

As I looked at some of the other Naugas staff members, I realized that some of them would need some heavy-duty retouching to look good.

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