I moved our Mac home and don't have Photoshop, so I've been playing around with Picnik, a free online photo editor. For what I do, which is basically nothing, this is more than I need.
I took a trip to Taipei on Thursday to visit the 228 Museum. This was my third trip on the HSR, and the first one for which I had my camera. Here's the train pulling into the station at Wuer.
And another shot after arriving at the Taipei main station. The train appears to have encountered a flock, or at least a few members of a flock, of sparrows on the way north.
The Peace Park is a peaceful enough place, plenty of trees for folks to sit under. There's a traditional Chinese concrete pagoda, and a modern sculpture dedicated to the memory of the people killed in the White Terror.
Little boxes on the hillside
And the boys go into business and marry and raise a familyThese are monkeyed highlights from a series of pictures I took facing East from the roof of the Early Bird Diner on Chung Ming South Rd just South of Kungyi Rd across from that little park there. If you're in the neighborhood, check out the breakfast and lunch menus at the Early Bird. The pancakes are award winning.
A friend of mine and I took a scooter ride up Hwy 136 into the mountains and along the ridge down towards Puli. On the way, we stopped a couple times, and here are a couple shots that I picked up along the way. There are more at B@Taiwan.
First is a lotus blossom in a pond at a reconstructed park surrounding a tourist attraction called Bat Hole. 
And, as much as I hate cats, I had a good time communing with this one at a Buddhist monastery.
This is another one of those serendipitous pictures that pop up from time to time. I went up on the roof last night to take pictures of the sunset, but the light was nothing like dusk tonight.
This is my first attempt (that came out halfway decent looking) at High Dynamic Range (HDR) Imaging. Not very exciting, and it looks a little fuzzy. Try and try again. This is a combination of two seperate images.
Below is a combination of this image, and the two that begat it.
I've got my work cut out for me. Cybergrain.com has this introduction, there's this tutorial at Cambridge in Color, andFlickr has stacks and stacks of examples of some really groovy work. Another tutorial at Daily Pete
I haven't been up to much lately, but I've been enjoying putting pictures together in photoshop. This is a combination of some of the shapes that I put together over the last two years or so. I;m intrigued by how different each of the seeds for these mosaic/collage/fractals were, and yet how similar they appear after various filters are visited upon them.
Maybe it's not that remarkable at all. Perhaps it's just my ignorance of basic geometry that makes me think that silly stuff like this is magical.
No, no, I haven't been doing much lately. When I took this shot, it was the first new Jaguar I'd seen in a long time. Like many Jags, this one wasn't going anywhere, but it was parked in front of the Starbucks on the Harbor Rd near the Science Museum. Nice lines.
A little something left over from the graffiti at Tagging Taichung.
Interesting and/or helpful guide to the rights of a photographer in the United States. Not much help for me in Taiwan, but eventuallyI hope to put the PDF file to use.
Bert P. Krages II — Attorney at Law
Here's a cool little game that I found through clicked.msnbc.com. Finally, those three years in the photolab in North Carolina are paying off. I enjoy games like Tetris, and this one is similar, but it tests your understanding of additive colors. Splendid fun.
There was a small kitchen fire in the next building over. By the time I got downstairs to take some pictures, there were no fewer than 12 fire engines parked on our corner.
Ananova - Photographer criticised:
Interesting ethical question here. Some folks are saying that the photographer had the responsibility to warn passing cyclists of the pot-hole. One reader of the Beijing Youth Daily says that the photographer ought to be "condemmed" for taking the picture instead of raising an alarm. I'm hoping that by "condemmed" he means strongly reprimanded.
But, does the photographer bear any more responsibility to warn people of danger than the average Jiu on the street? Certainly this photographer wasn't the first to discover the hole?
Nice photo story. Lots of raw emotion. Hope he's ok.
My friend Gary was in town for Christmas or the holiday or whatever folks call it these days. I got to take a couple of days off work and chat with him about the work he's doing in Traverse City, Michigan. If you're getting married in Michigan, he's your man. Not to marry, but...anyway.
Our conversations kept coming back to "the photo story." Gary was polite enough not to tell me that I was wasting time with abstraction, but it's pretty clear that people would rather look at pictures of people. Skinny Sean used to bug me about this quite a bit when he still lived in Taiwan. I guess I'm just a misanthrope.
Yeah, so my New Year's Resolution is to take more pictures of people and to look for photo stories. And to drum up business for my friend Gary. Now, wouldn't you love to get married in Michigan?
After finishing the CELTA course, I gave myself a break from traffic and study and people on the street asking me "Sir, where you go, you want 'Boom Boom?'"
One hour east of Bang Rong Pier on the east of Phuket Island, just off the coast of the province of Krabi rests a chunk of landscape called Koh Yao Noi. And on the east coast of this island 20 minutes by taxi through several small villages, past goast, sheep, & water buffalo, onto a gooey dirt road that winds its way between rubber plantations and rice paddies lay a cluster of eight bungalows spread out beneath dozens of coconut trees called Lomlae resort.
I cannot remember the last time I was in a place that was so absolutely still. It had been quiet snorkeling on reefs off a speck called Dok Mai where the only sounds were fish munching on what fish munch on, the staticky sound of life on the coral, and the occasional hum of boat engines. But the peace at Lomlae was entirely different.
The patter of a light rain on the grass roof of my hut, two or three birds, a fishing boat way far off in the distance, a falling coconut. The structure's frame creaking against the sway of the overloaded hammock in which this paragraph was written. And ... what's that? Ah, yes, a table saw in the resort next door cutting boards for the floors of a new set of huts. Such is the cost of progress.
If you want things to do, there is plenty to do there. The folks at the resort are careful to not be 
intrusive, yet are ready to fill any need moments after it announces itself in your frontal lobe. Wanna scuba? No sweat. Charter boats are available to take you to any of the islands of the seas between Phuket and Phang-Nga. Like every western hang out in Thailand, there's a book exchange if you just want to remain motionless on dry land. One afternoon I took a rather small sea kayak out to the nearest island approximately 30 minutes away. The visibility on the reef was poor, but I had the island to myself.
Coming back from this island was a chore. The wind was in my face and the tide was strong. One of the guys from the resort gave me a hand dragging the kayak up the beach and I went in and booked an hour long Thai massage for 300 baht. The masseuse was a 60 year old woman who lived in the village nearby. Imagine what a half-century practitioner of massage knows. With waves crashing on the beach yards away from my head this may have been the most relaxing hour I've spent since a Sunday afternoon back in 1993 that I recall with fondness.
Four of us went out for a trip one Friday afternoon and half of us wiped out. One guy jumped a ditch and a girl got cut off by a dude pulling out of a blind driveway. Or a blind guy pulling out of a driveway. One of those. Phuket is Thailand's number one province for motorcycle fatalities. Keep that in mind and drive safely. These bikes are surely colorful enough to be noticed.
This is a slightly different take on the de rigueur holiday travel guide photo of beach umbrellas. Here we see them stacked up besides some white plastic chairs. Kind of.
The only thing about this picture is that I am shocked to have gotten picture with a level horizon while in a madly leaping speedboat. Honest. Ok, maybe I cropped it a little bit.
There was rain all the way from Phuket Town over the mountains and down to the beach, and it didn't let up just because we'd arrived. It was a pleasure to dive into the warm waters of the Indian Ocean and escape the cold drops of rain.
One of my traveling companions/cl
assmates took advantage of waiting for another one driving back to retrieve a forgotten bag and took another stab at the heavy surf.
There'd have been plenty to do there if the weather had been more cooperative. The clouds rolled away in time for a sunset memorable only because I took it home in my camera, but maybe the guy under the parasail has a different story to tell.
