Ann and I had an awesome day birding (and walking, and looking at the blooms) at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens today. Such a perfect day to be outside enjoying Alabama’s environment!
Birmingham
Railroad Park in Birmingham
This photo was taken a few months back–before the drought, before the heat and before the deluge of 9 inches of rain we got from Tropical Storm/Hurricane Lee last week. Railroad Park is new park not far from us and even closer to downtown Birmingham. Great park to visit!
Another Sierra Club Newsletter Completed: November 2008
One of the monthly newsletters I work on: The Alabama Sierran. I did the first newsletter for the Alabama Chapter of the Sierra Club in January 2006 and have done one each month since then. This is an 8 page tabloid-size newsletter printed on recycled newsprint. You can download the full newsletter at alabama.sierraclub.org. In addition to working on this newsletter, I just finished an online newsletter for Birmingham, Alabama based CGH Insurance Group (www.cghinsurance.com/newsletter). And, perhaps most fun right now, I’m working on a website on tourism–particularly historical and ecological–in Bibb County, Alabama. I’m developing it almost entirely in Movable Type (using a little Dreamweaver to help me handle the CSS stylesheets). Pretty interesting stuff. Not that far along yet, but I’ve built the shell: www.bibbtourism.com. Other than that, just the usual blog updates at Your Town Alabama and Alabama’s Front Porches.
Alzheimer’s of Central Alabama Newsletter Complete!
This newsletter is one that I do only about 2 times each year. It is a pretty good sized newsletter with lots of input, so it takes a while to complete: very pleased with this issue, both design-wise and content-wise. We managed to add in more reference, teaching-oriented information into this issue than ever before (at least since I’ve been doing the newsletter–and that’s been about 5 years).
July 2008 Postcard for AccuPrint
A postcard for AccuPrint featuring downtown Birmingham. This photo is actually 4 photos I took using my Canon 40D and 17×40 wide angle lens and combined in Adobe Photoshop. it is so much less complicated to merge photos than it was just 5 years ago. Would have taken an hour to merge these photos–now it only takes a couple of minutes and the heavy lifting is done by your computer. There were a couple of errors–mainly with the concrete work around the edge of the pools. Easy enough to correct.
Notice my link to the LinkedIn Network at the top right of the page–if you would like to join this networking site, just click the button. (and don’t forget to add me as a connection!)
Photoshop CS3 And Panoramic Photos
Wow! I’m really impressed with how well photoshop creates panoramas from multiple images. Had I been a bit more careful, I think this would have turned out even better. There is a bit of distortion–mainly from using my 17-40 mm lens at the widest setting. The photo below is a compilation of 8 photos taken last weekend. Even with my relatively wide angle lens, I couldn’t quite get the whole Tutwiler Hotel in the frame. This hasn’t been doctored by me very much at all–there are a couple of rough spots along the roof line, but nothing that a little touchup can’t fix. This took just a few minutes–and most of that was just processing. This would have taken a lot longer before they added the photomerge feature to Photoshop.
