Leading Lines in Photography

Halloween 2010

Actions in Photoshop

Slowly....very slowly, I am learning or rather teaching myself photoshop. I have PS CS3 which is pretty old at this point so I figure once I have it down pat it will be obsolete and I'll have to upgrade. Hopefully learning the new version won't be as difficult as learning PS from scratch. We will see. 

I recently had a conversation with my brother about cameras and photo processing now that we are in the digital age. Yeah, I know, we've been in the digital age for at least a decade now but it has taken this long for me to find the value (and desire) in tweeking pictures in photoshop. I am the kind of person who feels that photos are meant to be seen as they are taken but then again, I am finding myself attracted to some of these clearly PS processed pictures I am seeing on blogs these days. So we'll see what camp I ultimately fall in after I play around for a bit.

I discovered "actions" as I scoured Kevin & Amanda's blog for photo, blog, and photoshop advice. I downloaded some free actions from the Pioneer Woman which is a nice entrée into adding flavor to your photographs in PS and figuring out whether you want to be a tweeking sort of photographer. I suspect I will enjoy playing with my pictures to get that extra special shot.

Here is a picture of our sweet boy at the beach this summer in the south of France. I added all sorts of actions to it. I like it. I also like the original. Perhaps I should post both. Okay, I'll do that.

Here is the one I produced in Photoshop...

 

and here is the original.

The Big Picture!

I am finally figuring out how to make my photos larger on my blog. I am also not happy with the redesign so I am redesigning the redesign. I figured since I haven't felt inclined to blog but am feeling like I want to redecorate, I might as well do that now!

The other things I would like to figure out:
1. how to center my post title
2. how to insert a line or a divider under it
3. how to insert a post divider object
4. I have figured out how to add extra blog pages but I'd like a better font on that tool bar under my banner. HUM. how to do that?

Playing with Photoshop

I've decided that I want to learn more about how to tweek pictures in Photoshop. I am using PS CS3 and am going to toss pictures up here as I experiment. Feel free to comment. Constructively please.

The picture on the left, in color is the original. My daughter in a cute cotton nighty on our balcony waiting for her dad to get home from work during our stay in Paris.  In the middle is a simple photoshop conversion to b/w. On the right is a combo of the two. I extracted the nighty and placed it over for a hint of color.

duh.

Don’t you hate it when you catch yourself being insanely dense? As you know I love to chronicle our lives and especially our travels on this blog. You may have noticed a lack of material appearing here over this summer which might have surprised you since we are in France for a couple of months. Lots to write about and photographs to share. The problem was that with the slow French DSL uploading pictures turned into a small nightmare. Each time I sat down to write a post, it would take hours to upload the photos. I am using the new blogger editor and in the old editor you could select pictures in batches of 5 , hit upload, and walk away. It was very easy to be doing a few other things like getting the kids ready for the day or make dinner while uploading pictures. With this new editor it seemed that I could only upload one picture at a time which in essence tethered me to the computer. I found that I was spending too much time in the apartment on the computer to chronicle the previous day’s adventure and we were starting to spend less and less time adventuring. So I abandoned it altogether.

Here is where me being the moron comes in. Now on vacation I decided that I was really annoyed that I could not upload batches of photos. So in one swift search in the help box here on blogger I discovered that I could just keep adding photos and not have to wait for the first picture to completely upload. AHHH. So as I write this I am uploading 14 pictures to share from our day in Barcelona yesterday!!!

If all goes well, I will get this post done and scheduled to post before the coffee maker finishes brewing that much needed pot of joe.

If I had been blogging regularly, you’d know that I am in the south of France on a family vacation. We arrived on Friday the 30^th and we are renting a crazy house in the old section of a very old hilltown. I’ll do another post about that. Monday of this week it was scheduled to rain so we decided to hop in the car and head down to Barcelona – just a short 3 hour drive away. We had a nice big lunch of tapas, paella, and sangria and walked around the town for about 6 hours. The kids got to get a jist of this beautiful city and can now say they’ve been to Spain!

Here is the border crossing coming from France into Spain: 

 La Rambla

 Smoothies from the St. Josep market were very popular on this hot day...

One of Gaudi's Houses. Casa Batllo.

 Refreshment found in a water fountain.

 Sagrada Familia proved to be inspiration for the following day's sandcastle building on the beach....

July Dates in France: The highs of the 14th and the lows of the 16th

Mid-July is a time for celebration here in France. Like our 4^th of July festivities in the U.S., all across France families gather to celebrate their independence day on the 14^th. However, there is another event that occurred in mid-July here in France that is not the cause for celebration. It is called Le Vel d’Hiv.

On July 16, 1942, French Police under orders from Pierre Laval and the Vichy Government who were at the time, cooperating with the occupying Nazi regime, began a series of roundups in Paris’ Jewish neighborhoods. There are differing accounts on who gave what orders for these “arrests”. Some claim that there was a certain number of men that the French police were ordered to detain while others say that entire families should be arrested in an attempt to quell public outrage that families were being broken up. None of that really matters because in the end, the reasons were simple. One group wanted to eradicate another and the reasons behind this objective can never be truly understood.  It is unfortunate that at this time France’s leaders were cooperating as though they were on board with Hitler’s mission.

Over the course of two days in July of 1942, Parisian police rounded up 13,000 Jewish residents and corralled them until July 19th at a sporting arena called the Vélodrome d’Hiver. Just to put this in perspective, 42,000 French Jews were deported to Polish death camps that year so nearly a third of those people were taken from Paris on these two days in July.

Planning for this event started the previous month and considering there had been other series of arrests during the spring of that year, rumors did begin to surface. There were undoubtedly people working in government offices who, upon learning of this secret mission, helped to quietly warn Jewish families. Some accounts of this event indicate that many people thought that the police would come to arrest just the men. Other accounts indicate that the Nazi forces asked for only people over the age of 16. Regardless of what was supposed to happen, 3,118 men, 5,919 women, and 4,115 children were forcibly removed from their homes and most were sent to their deaths. If you look at those figures and note that the women outnumber the men by nearly double, it seems reasonable to conclude that many of the men were in hiding. Perhaps some of them had already been arrested but it could be an indication that people may had heard rumors of a round-up and thought they were coming for just the men.

These people were held at the Vélodrome d’Hiver for 3 or 4 days with no food, water or sanitary conditions. Disease spread, babies were born, and people died. It immediately conjures up thoughts of the Superdome in New Orleans during the recent Hurricane Katrina. Inhumane conditions. The kind that if you really wrap your head around, your stomach will turn.

Between July 19^th and 22^nd the Jewish people were transported by train to either Drancy, which was a French internment camp, or Auschwitz. From some accounts I have read, men and childless couples were sent directly to Auschwitz and mothers and their children were sent to Drancy. What is seemingly in agreement amongst all sources is that at some point, children were forcibly and fearfully removed from their parents and left to their own devices at Drancy. Eventually, all these Jews were sent to a death camp.

What I find stunning is that a single event like this, that accounts for a third of the number of Jews deported from France in 1942, got so buried in history. Did you know about it? I certainly didn’t, and my husband who grew up in England didn’t learn about it either. I’d even bet that French school children don’t hear much of it as well.

I first heard of the Vel d’Hiv in February of this year when on a Sunday afternoon I picked up the book, Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay and the rest of my life stopped. I could not put it down. Tatiana de Rosnay tells two stories in alternating chapters. Both set in Paris. One, of Sarah who lives in the Marais in 1942 and the other, of Julia, a woman in present-day in a troubled marriage who is about to inherit an apartment. In the Marais. If I could recommend one book right now, this would be it. It grabs you from the first chapter and doesn’t let you go. You will find not only sorrow and grief in this book but also hope and tenderness.

Knowing I would be here in Paris on July 16^th I have been rereading sections of the book to gain a better understanding of where all the events took place in the city. When you read the book, because you must, you will then understand why I will be thinking of all the Sarahs from 1942 today.

(The photos in today's post were take at the Bir-Hakeim metro station which is one you might use to go to the Eiffel Tower)

Opposite of Windchill Factor

So I am trying to figure out why 33° c is killing me. It is only 91° f when you convert it so why does it feel like 104° f ? Because I have forgotten the pavement factor. City heat is so much worse than suburb heat especially when you are used to suburbs by the sea like I am. The pavement and stone buildings create an oven-like environment and frankly the heat this summer has become more than I can bear. There is no breeze. There is no shade. And our apartment faces west so we are screwed in the afternoons. Added to that, we have much longer days here in this northern latitude so by noon it is hot. By 3 pm it is oh-my-god-I-need-to-find-a-tree-to-sit-under hot. And by 6 pm it is so mutherfing hot you think you might actually die. We don't really sleep at night. Opening the windows isn't an option with the street noise factor. With it only getting truly dark around 11:00 pm, it doesn't cool off until about 3:00 am. By then the street noise seems to dissipate so we struggle until the middle of the morning hours when we can open the windows and get to sleep.

F.U.N

Today is probably our 10th day here with temps over 33° and we have now taken to closing our window shutters around noon to try to curb the heat in the apartment. The weather forecast is calling for things to cool down on Monday but they keep saying we're going to break the heat and it doesn't seem to happen.

In the winters they tell us it will be cold but the windchill factor will make it feel colder. I wish they'd acknowledge that in the summer it may be hot, but in the cities, it will feel hotter due to the pavement factor.