Monthly Archives: June 2010

Our wedding and the Whore of Babylon

You may not have known this, but it’s Embarrassing Story Monday today! Aren’t you excited? On the menu today: a classic tale of love, embarrassment, revenge, and a dueling death.  Minus the revenge and dueling death parts.

Overall, our wedding—almost 5 years ago!—went smoothly. It was cheap, which was a plus since we had no money at the time, and a ton of people came together to help out and make it happen—bless your hearts fruit-chopping, church-cleaning members of Eagle Creek!

My husband and I didn’t care enough about the details to really supervise anything— we were just interested in the soon-to-be-had marital freedoms. Of the bedroom persuasion. Just kidding! Or not. Hey, it had been a long courtship, OK? And hormones were raging. Raging, I tell you.

The 70's effect, via many Photoshop maneuvers.

Here we are, looking quite calm—but raging inside.

Anyway, to this day I’m surprised it all actually happened. I don’t remember organizing half the things that went down. I was 22 (21 during most of the planning) and just couldn’t bring myself to care about flowers, or colors, or logistics, or my hairdressing arrangements (hence the “plastered hair” look), or really anything except tying the actual knot. This lack of focus on my part led to an interesting situation during the ceremony.

We had 4 Scripture readings, 1 for each of my current roommates.  For your edification and to set the record straight for posterity, here is the reading from Hosea that was supposed to happen. It’s not your typical wedding reading, but to this day those last couple verses give me the chills (Hosea 2:14-23):

Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the desert and speak tenderly to her. There I will give her back her vineyards, and will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope. There she will sing as in the days of her youth, as in the day she came up out of Egypt.

“In that day,” declares the LORD, “you will call me ‘my husband’; you will no longer call me ‘my master. ‘ I will remove the names of the Baals from her lips; no longer will their names be invoked. In that day I will make a covenant for them with the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and the creatures that move along the ground. Bow and sword and battle I will abolish from the land, so that all may lie down in safety.

I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you in righteousness and justice, in love and compassion. I will betroth you in faithfulness, and you will acknowledge the LORD.

“In that day I will respond,” declares the LORD—”I will respond to the skies, and they will respond to the earth; and the earth will respond to the grain, the new wine and oil, and they will respond to Jezreel.

I will plant her for myself in the land; I will show my love to the one I called ‘Not my loved one. ‘ I will say to those called ‘Not my people,’ ‘You are my people’; and they will say, ‘You are my God.’

We thought it was beautiful because it shows that marriage is a reflection of God’s relationship with his people—God wants to be a “husband” instead of a “master”, and gives them a place of peace and safety where they are reconciled to him perfectly, and where they sing for joy. Aaaaah.

Alackaday, there was a hefty miscommunication about the stopping point in the above passage—and yes, I take full responsibility since my mind was occupied by “other things”. My roommate—bless her heart—sailed right past the end of chapter 2, diving headlong and with no regrets into the following:

The LORD said to me, “Go, show your love to your wife again, though she is loved by another and is an adulteress. Love her as the LORD loves the Israelites, though they turn to other gods and love the sacred raisin cakes.” So I bought her for fifteen shekels of silver and about a homer and a lethek of barley. Then I told her, “You are to live with me many days; you must not be a prostitute or be intimate with any man, and I will live with you.” For the Israelites will live many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or sacred stones, without ephod or idol. Afterward the Israelites will return and seek the LORD their God and David their king. They will come trembling to the LORD and to his blessings in the last days.

My extended family cackled in the pews. My raucous male cousins cackled in the pews.

My brain started overheating. The flush that comes when a woman is called “prostitute” to her face spread across me like the Red Sea. I briefly considered wrenching the microphone from my uncle (our pastor) and sobbing “I swear I’m not a prostitute! I’ve remained pure for my wedding day despite the raging hormones! Anyway, how can I be an adulteress if I’m not even married, guys! Come on, I don’t even like the sacred raisin cakes!” Plus, I wanted to ask if anyone in attendance knew what a homer or lethek of barley was, and where one could obtain such a thing in modern times.

I like to remember the ordeal as the “whore of Babylon incident”. And so does my extended family.

I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can laugh uproariously crack a smile at this memory. Aren’t you glad I’m making progress? I have a special drawer just for my therapy bills.

On a side note, those raisin cakes must have been something all right.

Happy Monday, one and all!

White balance in-camera and post-processing

What is white balance? Well my friends, I’m going to try to explain this in my own words. Professional photographers, you know I love you, but please flee the scene before I horrify you with my amateur and incomplete explanation!

OK, now that those guys are gone we can dive straight in. Let us begin:

Your camera measures the array of colors in an image based on what it thinks is white. For example, if you take a picture of a child sleeping on a white sheet, the camera will produce an accurate array of colors only if it recognizes that the sheet is white.

Imagine that sheet is lit by fluorescent lights (greenish or blueish tints) or incandescent lights (yellowish tints): if you don’t set your white balance, the camera can give you a yellow or green or blue-colored sheet, which means that the child’s skin will look … well, not like a healthy child’s skin should look. And who wants that? Nobody!

Your job is to tell the camera “this sheet is white. Measure the rest of the colors according to this reading of white.” And the child’s skin problems will immediately disappear (phew!).

Here is an example of food photography in which my blue cheese looked a little yellow. I was like “No, man–it’s white.” The picture above looks a bit unappetizing to me … the one below is somewhat better thanks to a more accurate white balance. Can you see the difference?

Yellowish hue

More accurate white balance

Getting a good white balance is especially important in food photography. This example illustrates it perfectly:

It's a nasty pile of whatsit!

No, thank you.

I'll take a bowlful. Make that two.

 

Some people prefer a “warm” hue to their photos (the whites are yellowish), and a “cold” hue can be appealing for other photos (the whites are bluish). Here are two examples in which I purposefully altered the white balance to produce a more interesting shot:

Celtic Fest, with bluish hue

Celtic Fest, with yellowish hue

Out of curiosity, do you like one in particular over the other? (I will perform a 5-step psychological analysis of you based on your answer)

However great it is to play around with color balance to express your creativity, it’s good to know how to get a well-balanced and accurate color in your picture straight out of the camera, so that you don’t have to make corrections later.

If you have a DSLR (digital single-lens reflex camera), I encourage you to grab it at this point and play with it as I go through these steps. They will be slightly different depending on what you’re shooting with, but it won’t be that hard–really! I tried to make it super easy to follow by photographing my Nikon’s LCD screen with my point-and-shoot . . . but the pictures were just a bright blur. So track with me through some instructions. With my camera (Nikon D5000), this is how I set my white balance:

  • Press “Menu” button
  • Select “Shooting Menu” (the little camera icon)
  • Select “White Balance” (6th option down).

At this point, I can select the kind of light I’m shooting in: fluorescent, direct sunlight, shade, cloudy day, incandescent, etc. This option is fine and dandy–but I prefer another way. Let’s continue . . .

  • The final option under “White Balance” is called “Preset Manual”. Pick this; it will allow us to set the white balance manually. The word “manually” might send off little alarm bells in your head, but it’s only going to take about 5 seconds (literally), and it carries a distinct advantage: imagine that you’re taking a picture of your family on a couch. Since you’re inside, there are probably many different light sources going on at once. There’s a little natural light coming in from the windows, there are a couple incandescent bulbs, there’s some fluorescent light spillover coming from the kitchen, and there’s a weird-tinted energy-saving bulb (hideous). No matter how fancy your camera is, I guarantee it doesn’t have a “combo” option for this particular mixture of lights. So the solution is to simply tell the camera “This is white” by using the “Preset Manual” option. You’ll never go back, and the family-on-the-couch picture will turn out great. A word to the wise: sometimes when shooting inside, you have to alter your white balance as you move from the kitchen (usually fluorescent lighting) to the terrace (natural light) to the living room (incandescent light)–unless you’re using your fancy-schmancy external flash. But that’s another story.
  • You will see 2 choices: “Measure” or “Use photo”. Pick “Measure”.
  • You will get a prompt: “Overwrite existing data?” Select “Yes”.
  • The next prompt says “Take photo of white or grey object filling viewfinder under lighting for shooting”. In other words, find something white (like a wall, or the back of a sheet of paper) and take a picture. The screen should now say “Data acquired” at the top of the info screen.

Ta-daa! This is the best way to get your white balance set correctly.

Now–what if you need to correct it after the fact? There’s an easy solution: use the color balance slider in your photo editing program (would anyone join me in 3 boisterous cheers for technology?). If you own a Mac, iphoto has color balance sliders called “temperature” and “tint”. They’re in the bottom right-hand corner:

iphoto color balance slider

Just drag them back and forth until you find a balance that you like.

Of course, my preferred option is Photoshop, because it allows you to play with a little more than these other programs I’ve mentioned, isolating the shadows, midtones and highlights of the picture and allowing you to adjust them independently.

Let’s take this picture of my Mom as it came out of the camera. It has potential, but it’s way too orange/red for my taste. Her skin is practically a neon flame. My husband happens to like how that looks, but track with me for the sake of the example. Here is the original:

For some reason, uploaded to this post it looked a little better–but in the screenprint below you can see how orange it looked when I opened it in Photoshop. It was time to fix it. You can bring up your color balance slider by going to “Image”, “Adjustments” and “Color Balance”, or by hitting Command B on a Mac. You can play around with the highlights, midtones, or shadows, and you can alter each one with the 3 sliders. Options, options, options! I love options. I am sometimes paralyzed by options, but I love them.

Let’s play with the sliders to get that fluorescent orange hue off my mom’s face. A little to the right … and little to the left … adding a little cyan and blue to make up for the bright orange …

And there you go. The screenprint above shows where I left the sliders at the end. She needed a LOT and I’m saying a LOT of cyan before I was happy. I like how it looks. When uploading it to this post, unfortunately it looked a lot darker and a lot browner:

. . . but if works for the sake of the example.

Aim to get good color balance SOOC (straight out of camera), but have fun playing as well. A fun adventure: purposefully pick a preset white balance such as “incandescent light” when you’re outside. Or pick “fluorescent”–see what it does to your pictures. Who knows, you may like the effect!

Now go into the world, and set your white balance manually! It will make your momma proud.