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Luggage cart at Prince Rupert airport. Yeah, it’s got a HEMI.

I have a whole bunch of photos that I need to go through and upload. You can check them out in my gallery — look under 2006.

Did anybody else enter the “door prize” contest at Seafest? If so, you’ll probably be getting a phone call soon where they tell you that you’ve won a trip, no wait, make it two trips, or three!

You’ll have to pay your own way to Miami or Tampa, though, and then you’ll have to pay a bunch of fees for the “prize.” What they don’t tell you is that you haven’t won anything at all — the “fees” are actually more than the cost of a decent cruise from Tampa or Miami.

I can’t believe the Seafest people actually allowed these guys to set up this obvious scam.

Here’s a link that discusses these kinds of scams: http://www.cruisecritic.com/cruiseplanning/articles.cfm?ID=88

Also, follow the conversation on HTMF.

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:

Pam put up a Hummingbird feeder filled with red stuff (Kool-aid? Freshie?).

This is the result:

More photos in my photo gallery, including this photo of three hummingbirds fighting over landing rights.