Okay, remember the sad kangaroo I mentioned in the San Diego Zoo post? Who we postulated was old or arthritic or somesuch? Well, according to my current National Geographic (June 2011), this is actually just how kangaroos walk! They put their weight on their arms and tail, then scooch their legs up behind them. See? Man, I love this magazine.
I submitted a picture from our trip to the San Diego Zoo to the Intermediate Pictorial category of our camera club this week. This year there have been a lot of good photographers in the intermediate group. Some months I disagree with the judge and the pictures that place. However, as we were going through the images this week I was thinking there were many very good pictures and that I wouldn't feel grumpy about them being placed over mine. When my picture was shown the judge didn't have any critiques about it, but also moved along fairly quickly without much comment. So I was actually quite surprised, and very flattered, when it was awarded first place.
I do rather like the photo. But I don't claim to be able to find and take shots like this with any regularity. Of the 328 pictures I took at the zoo this is the only one that I still really liked after I worked with it. So I'd like to show a few of the steps this image took before the finished product.
Top-left: The original image as it came off the camera.
Top-right: The first step was to take out the extra blue. Your eye is very good at making you think the color balance is OK, but when you see the image with the blue removed it looks much better. The only thing done between the original and this image is the removal of the extra blue.
Bottom: Then I cropped in on the face and bumped up the contrast a little, the saturation a little, and removed some distracting blobs in the background.
The final step was to add some selective darkening to tone down overly bright areas and help the eye stay focused on the face. Here is the final image:
There's this fondue place here in town called Simply Fondue, and I recently got it into my head that I really wanted to go have dinner there sometime, having never done a fondue dinner before. Then I realized that the logistics of this would be far easier to work out before the baby comes, so I asked Kyle if we could go sometime before October. Of course he agreed, so then I got on their website and saw that they had a deal running through the end of April, so I made us a reservation for last Friday night!
It was awesome, starting out with the best caesar salad of my life. Then we got a sharp Wisconsin cheddar fondue with bread and veggies to dip. Next was the main course, a selection of meats that we grilled (this part got a li'l bit greasy and smoky). I think that I liked the cheese ravioli even better than the meats, though, and I didn't even think to dip those in the sauce! For dessert, we ordered a swirl of white and milk chocolate, and there was pound cake and brownies and fruits and other tastiness to dip in it. So good. We have decided that we shall be returning for dessert. We want to try their other choices!
We were there for 2.5 hours and it was just really fun. (Though we did come home and shower because our clothes and hair smelled like grease from the meats!) We were also very full!