We stumbled upon a really tasty way to prepare brussel sprouts.

They’re super easy, here’s how:

• Preheat oven to 500F
• Clean and cut small brussel sprouts in half, larger ones in quarters and place on greased baking sheet.
• Pour a little extra light olive oil over the sprouts and sprinkle a little kosher salt
• Roast the sprouts for about 15 minutes, stirring at least once to keep them from sticking to the roasting pan.
• The outer leaves will be black or brown, and the rest of it will be nicely browned.
• Once out of the oven, drizzle a little extra virgin olive oil over them
• And serve.

Went out KAPping today with Michael L and Scott Haefner. First flight with my new controller and film camera:

A nice collection of digital images of the Naval Air Station. More to come shortly:

I’m diving into this film-scanning stuff. I haven’t yet done the high-end film scanning, but that will come. Here we have, five different options (click for full size image):

A through D were done on my Canon 8400F scanner, which is a pretty decent flatbed with a film tray:

A & B: 1200dpi scans, B has an unsharp mask applied. Both have dust removal at “medium”, total time is about 2 minutes per frame.

C & D: 3200dpi scans, D has unsharp mask applied. Dust removal as above, total time 8 minutes per frame.

E: Costco 2000dpi scan on the Noritsu Koki — This is about $2.50 for the scan & CD above processing. I was glad to see that the pointilism in the blurred sections is not on the film, but is some artifact of their scanning process.

The one thing I will say about the Costco scans is that their color correction and curves are quite good. They do not dust the scans at all, and the pointilism thing is just annoying. For what it’s worth, I can do low res scans (600dpi) on the Canon scanner, including the unsharp mask for preview images at less than 45 seconds per frame. See here for an example.

So it is looking like I can do pretty much anything for web-use on the Canon scanner, reserving film scanner time for things I want prints of, or really need to work on.  The rest of the gallery is here, with lots more images & test parameters.

As I’m getting back into film photography from a long stint doing digital only, I’m testing a couple varieties of film. Click the image below for the gallery. The first few images are Fujifilm Reala Superia 100, the rest are Fujifilm Superia 100. I couldn’t see a difference between them (at least on the scans) — anyone notice any differences in their work?  I should have set up several similar shots, but didn’t get a chance to.

Robin Ferrier suggested that I write about what to buy to photograph one’s own quilts. The problems you need to solve are pretty simple:

• Hang the quilt in a flat manner — you probably already have this if you have a design wall.
• Light the quilt reasonably evenly and maybe show some texture.
• Photograph the quilt so it looks as square as the quilt is, and maybe as sharp and detailed as possible.

I’m going to present a few options, none of them particularly cheap.

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Scott Shafer from The California Report was covering Charles Jennings, who is a professional Santa. I was there doing the photo booth thing previously blogged about.

Here’s his report. (Scroll down to Santa For Hire)

On a jobsite yesterday, using my nifty clamp-tripod thing, got a two-shot pano of the room. Still well under construction, but a nice little high school auditorium.

So I really didn’t mean to, but I apparently made Katy Kelsey’s yarn look a little suggestive. I guess it’s just what happens when you have pairs of things and you drape them across each other.

Anyway, she is selling this yarn, I’ll link to that when she lets me know, but for now just drop me a line if you’re interested in any of it (click the image for the gallery).

The setup for this is pretty easy — the backdrop is the tail end of a 36″ roll of plotter paper from work, top light is an AlienBee bounced into an umbrella.  Left key is another AB direct with no reflector.  Shot with a tripod just so the framing would be similar shot to shot.

I did a photo booth setup for St. Stephens school in the Sunset.  The requirements were simple, they wanted a photographer photographing kids with Santa, and prints immediately available as folks exited Santa’s snow cave.  They also had a pretty small budget to accomplish this.  Details follow.

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