U2’s Bono & The Edge made a bunch of commercials for ESPN’s coverage of the 2006 FIFA World Cup.

Sick days (Beautiful Day):

City of Blinding Lights is going to be ESPN’s World Cup song:

Ivory Coast (“Where The Streets Have No Name”):

My favourite: Scotland Didn’t Make the World Cup (“I Will Follow”):

For those of you following it, here’s an Excel spreadsheet you can use to track the World Cup 2006.

It’s in Spanish, but since we’re all “Dora the Explorer” fans, I’m sure we won’t have any trouble with it.

It’s neat, because you can fill in the results, and follow the groups and playoffs.

Download the Excel file.

I’m in Hartley Bay right now. Here are three short video clips I took yesterday.

The first video is our landing in Hartley Bay. We flew out in a small floatplane. It was a scenic flight.

Jit and I are very lucky that we have amazing hosts who just happened to take us fishing yesterday evening. We saw whales and bears:

Which is the better photo?

Praia de Mira, Portugal, in colour. (click for larger version)

Praia de Mira, Portugal, in B&W. (click for larger version)

Unfortunately these are crappy small resolution jpegs. The original full-resolution uncompressed versions are better. But I can’t decide between colour or B&W.

Rick Mercer on Portuguese deportations.

I hope they send me back soon. I could use a vacation.

Stardog Champion commented on my previous colour / black and white post that it would be really cool to just keep a portion of the photo in colour, while making the rest of the photo black and white.

This is a lot easier than it sounds, especially with Photoshop. Take a photo that has a nice bright colour, and use the “select / select colour range” command in Photoshop to select the colour you want to keep. Move the fuzziness slider up and down to grow and shrink the selection. Then copy and paste your selection onto a new layer, and desaturate the original layer. Should only take a few seconds to accomplish.

Here are a couple of examples from last year’s CHSS play “The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940.” These were taken during our first reading of the play:

 
Those are easy enough to do. But the really cool ones are when you have a subject that you want to remove from a cluttery or inappropriate background. Then you have to somehow get your subject on a new layer, then desturate and / or blur the original layer.

 
Some examples taken from the CHSS Photo Album. Hope these kids don’t mind being used as examples:

The original photo:

The photo’s ok, it captures the moment. But I hate the colour of the wall, and the other people in the photo are really taking away focus from the CHSS player.
So I blurred the background a bit, and desaturated it, keeping the CHSS player in colour. The result:

It’s a much better photo now. It’s one of my favourites.
More examples of the same thing:

 


 
Make sure you visit Stardog Champion’s blog!

Some things are better without colour:

 
And some things just look great with colour: