Special Ops

A while back I mentioned that my grandson was enlisting in the US Air Force. We found out yesterday he has been selected for Special Operations training when he finishes basic training. He will most likely be deployed to Afghanistan if he makes it through the training; less than 20 percent of the accepted candidates make it through the rigorous year-long ordeal. We are at once proud of him and at the same time we fear for his safety.
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Yesterday was another lovely, warmish day, but was mostly cloudy. I went out and checked the damage our shrubbery incurred from the heavy snowfalls, and it wasn't as bad as it could have been. Our Beckman's Arborvitae at the driveway will probably have to be replaced; it had just grown to mature size in the past couple of years. The huge forsythia that is one of my favorite photography targets is squished down and broken pretty badly. I will give it a chance to bloom this spring before I decide its fate; it has been at the end of the porch for nearly 15 years.
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Carolyn is threatening to cook. All I want is fried taters and onions and homemade biscuits. She is also threatening to give me a haircut. At least one of these two things will probably happen.
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A note concerning RAW shooting: RAW files are huge; the ones coming from my Pentax 10 mega-pixel camera are more than 16.5 mega-bytes, which means they can fill a memory card rather quickly and they can be slow to load to the pc. Another thing is that they have to be converted to JPG or similar format to be used on internet. The good thing about working with RAW images is that you use a good software program to fine adjust the pic before it is converted. I use a program called Raw Therapee to tweak and convert. It has many fine-tuning adjustments and a good vignetting correction tool which comes in handy with the lens I normally use. Another is that it will highlight the over exposed and under exposed areas of the photo, allowing for just enough fine tuning to make your shots the best possible. It is a free program and is not difficult to learn to use. It even has an automatic setting which will do most of the work for you if you like. Here is a Flickr group for Raw Therapee only images. Here is a link to the user's manual. Here is a link to the download page. I recommend using the RT v2.4.1 and then later on when the 3.0v is declared as stable, it should be much better than the 2.x versions.

The following is from the introduction in the user's manual:

What is RawTherapee?

RawTherapee is a free RAW converter and digital photo processing software. It is available for Windows
and for Linux and is actively developed.
RawTherapee is used to adjust some of the most often changed parameters when optimizing digital
images. A normal user often just wants to adjust the white balance or brightness of a photo he took. Instead
of using a big and expensive image editor you could use a small and fast (specialized) tool like
RawTherapee.
More and more cameras also support RAW formats. RAW files usually offer higher color depth than
JPGs (JPG is limited to 8 Bit per color). So the adjustments are done with the high color depth and
then afterwards converted to or saved as JPGs. Thus you loose no picture detail in the JPG as you
would when changing the JPG itself.

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Have a thrilling Thursday!