Eugene, Oregon
Dylan is a freelance software engineer, world traveler, and aspiring vagabond. . .[more]
About Me
Dylan is a freelance software engineer, world traveler, and aspiring vagabond. . .[more]
Current Location
11/24/2009 - 03:35
Pokhara, Nepal
Yes, I'm still here in Pokhara, and it's getting a bit old at this point. I'm getting close to finishing my pictures from the trek around the Annapurnas. I probably could be further along, but I have to remind myself that, technically, I'm on vacation, and the thought of 8 hours on the computer isn't very appealing. So, I've been spending about 4 hours a day working on photos, then sitting in the sun on the roof of my hotel for a while, then heading down to the local watering hole to check out the house band. The hotel has cable with three movie channels - HBO, and two Cinimax stations, so I've caught quite a few movies as well. I'm almost becoming a local here.
On another note, I went paragliding the other day and it was really cool. I took an hour long flight, but after about 45 minutes, I'd had enough. Still the views of Pokhara were amazing, and it was cool flying around in the clouds with a parachute.
I hope to finish my pictures in a few days, then get a flight to Kathmandu, and then a flight to Ludha and start the trek to Everest Base Camp. Yeah, I suppose I'm cheating a bit by flying to Lukla, but I need to finish the trek before my visa expires.
So, back to the computer and image processing...
11/15/2009 - 21:21
Pokhara, Nepal
Well I've been in Pokhara, Nepal for a long time now - it's going on three weeks! However, I've been pretty busy, and I haven't been too much of a bum. After returning from the trek, I took a 4 day white water kayaking clinic. The clinic was run by Paddle Nepal and was excellent. Day one consisted of paddling across Phewa Lake here in Pokhara, and learning the basics, rescue techniques, and the all important kayak roll. Actually, I don't think anyone actually got a roll until the second or third day. The next three days were spent on the Lower Seti River, outside of Pokhara. The river was pretty tame, consisting of class 1 & 2 rapids, with a class 3 at the end, but these were enough to send everyone swimming pretty often. It was pretty funny to watch the students, me included, get totally worked by a rapid, while the instructors are floating through sideways nonchalantly, one usually smoking a cigarette.
After my kayak school, I decided to take a class in motorcycle riding, a skill that is very useful in this part of the world. I took the class through Hearts And Tears Motorcycle Club, and I was very impressed. The beginners class was a full day of learning the basics. It's for people like me who have never been on a motorcycle before. There were only two of us in the class, so it was very personalized instruction, and the instructor was great. By the end of the day we were able to take a short trip over to a small village on the other side of the lake. I enjoyed the class so much, I took the advanced class as well. This was a class in cornering techniques while we went on a 80 kilometer ride on a winding mountain road. The instructor would stop at certain corners, then we would get off our bikes, walk through the corner, analyze the turn, and determine the correct line through it. It was also interesting to watch random riders take the turn, and watch how they all chose the incorrect line, and exit the turn in a bad location in the road. In all, the two days were well worth it. After that, I rented a motorcycle for two days, and practiced cornering in the mountains - very very fun.
One note, I don't think I'd feel comfortable riding in the US at this point. I think it's far safer here than anywhere back home. First of all, there are hardly any cars here, it's mostly other motorcycles on the road. Also, the average speed in the city is probably around 25 mph. On the mountain roads, there are even less cars. The main vehicles on the roads out there are big buses, and big delivery trucks. They also average about 25 mph on the twisty mountain roads. The main thing I've had to deal with are the potholes, and occasional monkey running out in front of me.
Now I'm waiting around for the weather to clear up so I can take a paragliding flight. I've signed up for a one hour tandem flight through Sunrise Paragliding. The coolest thing, I think anyways, is that they use trained birds, eagles or hawks - not sure which, to find the best thermals. Looking forward to this one. Unfortunately, it's been cloudy and foggy for the past week or so. I plan to hang out in Pokhara until it clears up and I can take the flight. After that, I plan to trek to Everest Base Camp.
11/07/2009 - 03:01
Pokhara, Nepal
I've finally caught up with China pictures - YEE HAW!!! Of course I've got about a million pictures from Nepal to sort through, process, and post.
I suppose this is a good time to procrastinate from my picture processing and give a short run down on how I actually process my photos. First, I have two digital cameras that I use to take the photos - a Canon PowerShot SD950IS 12.1MP, which I use as my everyday carry around point and shoot camera, and a Canon EOS Rebel T1i 15.1MP, which I use for "the good stuff". Actually, I'm still learning how to use the T1i, so I probably don't use it as much as I should. Plus, it's a bit of a pain to carry around a big camera all the time. However, I'm trying to get past it, and use the DSLR more often.
After I take the pictures, I download them to my MacBook using Adobe Lightroom. Even though I love Photoshop, I've pretty much abandoned it for Lightroom. I still use Photoshop for splicing images together, and difficult image editing, but for the most part Lightroom does everything I need.
Anyway, I load the images into Lightroom. Next, I back up all the original images to an external hard drive, as well as to DVD. I then ship the DVDs back to the US (thanks Dad for checking that the DVDs made it back in working order). After I've confirmed that I have all my originals backed up, I begin the process of elimination. First, go through the hundreds of images I've taken, and delete anything that's blurry, duplicates, bad composition (still working on figuring that out), bad lighting, and anything else that I can't fix.
Next it's photo fixing time (feel free to skip this section if you don't care about software photo editing). I go through the images I like and make adjustments in Lightroom. For the most part it's very quick work. I adjust the Fill Light if it's under exposed, Recovery if it's over exposed. I usually bump up the Brightness and Contrast a bit. Then I'll bump up Clarity, Vibrance, and Saturation a tad - too much and it looks super fake. For images with a super washed out sky (the sky blends in with the clouds and you see no blue), I just discovered that you can drop Luminance of the blues and it helps to bring the sky out. However, anything else with blue color in your picture with get darker as well. If there's a little bit of blurriness or motion blur, there's a super basic sharpness editor in Lightroom, but it doesn't do much. That's about it, anything more involved and I have to resort to Photoshop.
Finally I export all images so that the longest edge is 1024 pixels long. Not sure why I went with that, but it seems big enough to give detail in all the pictures, and the full size image tends to be around 300K in size - not too bad for downloading, especially if you live in a country with half way decent internet.
After the processing has been done, the real pain in the butt begins. I have to upload all the images to this site. Actually the uploading isn't too bad, since I switched from a Drupal based uploading system, to using a simple FTP program (FileZilla). The problem is with creating images in Drupal itself. The way (my setup) of Drupal works, for each image I must click "Create Content > Image" Then a page loads where I must fill in a Title, optional Body Text, Location, Tags, Photo Album name, and Image Name. I click Submit, and it creates the image node. This takes FOREVER, especially on a horrible internet connection (Ahem... China, Nepal....) If I had a choice, I'd create my own PHP site from scratch, one where I can set my own auto form field fills, and tweak it to do whatever I want. Drupal was a huge mistake. But perhaps I will find a nice beach in India or Thailand, take a month or two off from traveling, and actually rebuild this site from scratch....
And there you have it. That's how I put all these pictures up. Now I need to learn how to take better pictures in the first place. ;-)
11/06/2009 - 06:09
Pokhara, Nepal
I've added pictures to the Shangrila and Tiger Leaping Gorge - Part 1 albums, and I've created albums for Tiger Leaping Gorge - Part 2, and Lijiang. Tomorrow I'll work on Chengdu, Big Buddha, as well as some pictures from Nepal.
