I filmed the city from above when I was on a business trip last week.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juLXLP9AHNg[/youtube]

I went with a friend yesterday shoot the Carnival floats as they were lining up for the parade at night. Geez, this was something I had been thinking of doing for years. It's awesome, so colorful and with so many interesting details. I was lucky to have this friend with me because he had already shot there before, so he knew how things are organized, a lot that I had no idea about.

The floats line up along a main avenue, on both sides of a transverse avenue where the parade is. So one side had good sunlight that made the colorful decorations really pop up, whereas the other had sun in the back and shade. Awful, but we tried to do the best we could with this inconveniece.

My photos are here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/adelaidephotos/sets/72157629410361661/
and here (a special selection of the workers finishing the floats):
http://www.flickr.com/photos/adelaidephotos/sets/72157629418857053/

Got the announcement from Calumet:

http://www.calumetphoto.co.uk/eng/gallery-canon12lens?t=CM02&a=CM02&cal

http://www.worldpressphoto.org/

This is the main winner, and I saw it being referred as the "Yemenite Piet�"

I went to a photo exhibition yesterday, with some fantastic images by Hungarian photographer Gyula Hal�sz, whose pseudonym was Brassa�. He was born in what is today Romania and went to Paris in the 20s, when he was 25. He worked as a journalist and had a passion of photographing Paris at night - its streets, cafes, cabarets and brothels. The exhibition I saw was exactly about this period and has some awesome night shots of the city (I'm not much into the brothel images, I find this kind of photography, as well as shooting homeless, drug addicts and people with mental problems very disturbing).

I didn't know about him before this exhibition started, and maybe you don't either, so here is a link to some of his work, and attatched is a photo of one of my faves in that exhibition:
http://www.atgetphotography.com/The-Photographers/BRASSAI.html

I want to add one of those widgets of sharing content in my blogs. I believe AddThis and ShareThis are the most popular ones. Is it any difference? Any preference? Any other recommendation?

Wow, what a match today! I wished Argentina had won, so we would have another match. 

Hi everyone,

Last year many of you here helped with a Christmas campaign (this thread).

As usual, our Mail has set up the "Adopt a Santa Claus letter"
http://www.correios.com.br/papainoelcorreios2011/
also on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/papainoeldoscorreios

This year again I organized a 2nd hand CD auction and people were amazingly generous - the CDs sold at an average price of US$30! We collected a lot of money from that. We have already selected 60 letters for starters and began buying their presents today. The school from which we got the letters have some kids with mental disabilities, so it is very comforting to know we will make them happy this Christmas. We hope to buy most of the presents tomorrow and if possible get more letters from the Mail along this week - their deadline is Dec 9th, so we don't have much time.

Anyway, last year many of you contributed for the campaign, but in the end we ran out of letters and the money was spent in a cr�che in a slum near our office. When we visited it last year, we were enchanted by the good, loving work they do with those kids. I was wondering if you guys would like to help them again this year. I am going to contact the girls there and see what we can arrange.

I won't be collecting any money right now, I just want to know if people will join me again. I totally understand if you don't, and I'm sure you will help other charities, which is what matters in the end.

http://www.dreamstime.com/thread_29453

Hello everyone,

A very off-topic subject.

Every year I run a 2nd hand CD auction for raising money for charity (Mail's Santa Claus, I've told you about his here before). The auction is currently done by email - people send me their bids, I put values in a spreadsheet, tell people when their bids are surpassed or are inferior to previous bids. I keep track of all the bids so I can show them to all participants later. Then I select all the winning bids and manually separate each participants' results. This takes of course some time.

I have just found a spreadsheet that helps in this procedure. I haven't ried it yet, just downloaded it. I'm not sur eit will make my life any easier in lieu of my own spreadsheet.
http://www.theopenauction.com/

I was wondering however if there is some freeware I could use online, or a website, so my friends would log on and place their bids and it would check automatically if their bids were surpassed, all that, without taking much of my time. This would not need to handle any payments, just control the bids automatically. It could be something I could set in my own website too.

Please, if anyone knows something that may help, I'd be very gratefull.

Hi,

I recently had my parents' 50th anniversary photos scanned. I was horrified when I saw the results, all images have a very strong bluish hue, among other problems (such as a noisy texture on darker areas - low dynamic range, I suppose).

I noticed this when I used Windows' viewer (Win XP's Image and Fax Viewer), and when I opened the images at PSP, I got a message of "Color profile mismatch" and that it was replacing the embedded "Samsung Natural Color Pro" by the sRGB color profile of my working space. Then I opened the same image in Irfanview and the colors were much better. I try to edit them, I am not good at such strong corrections and the result was not quite good, especially skin tones.

Given that Windows viewer and PSP were not showing colors properly, I assumed there was a problem with the files, a problem that Irfanview was somehow able to address.

So I took the CD and the album back to the lab and talked to the guy who scanned them. He showed me the CD with Windows viewer in his PC (which has a Samsung monitor) and colors looked ok. Contrast was much stronger - a bit too strong for me - and there was little of the noise problem I had seen. He put the CD in another of their PCs, one that doesn't have a Samsung monitor, and the result was the same. He asked me to try at another computer.

I have a notebook, and the images also look bluish in it. The noise problem looks stronger, but that can be a monitor adjustment issue (I don't use the notebook for photography, so I really never bothered much about adjusting it).

I then went back to my PC and to PSP's settings and changed Color Management to "ignore embedded profiles", and then the images look better as I see in Irfanview - still with some problems, but not the bluish hue. From this point the edition is much easier and within my limited skills.

Now, what is wrong? Are the files wrong, should I insist with the lab? What have they done wrong?

I had some slides scanned with them in the past, and color was not much of an issue. But that was years ago, probably other scanner, computer and software.

There is an area in my site that I built with Wordpress. Two weeks ago there were 120 spams of medical stuff, all in one page. I removed the option of commenting that page.

Now I've just found 180 spams, this time in diverse entries. They were several random general comments ("great information" etc), and all with the same type of mispelling error of switching letters (such as ansewr instead os answer).

All comments require approval, so these didn't go live, anyway it's a pain to have to deal with that. Any good solution? I know there are anti-spam plugins, but I would like experienced opinion.

Ok, I got one of my images in eight sites (4 in Brazil, 4 abroad) with DT watermarked. I posted comments in all of them saying that the watermarked image is for evaluation purposes only and putting a link to the image at DT so they purchase a license (I can dream!).

One reply so far, the image was removed.

The BR sites are blogs hosted at Blogspot and Wordpress. I will wait a few days before reporting them to the admins. One of the is the blog of a politian.