Pack up yer troubles in yer old kit bag!

Photo of the glass art of Dale Chihuly,
taken while I was on a business trip.

I don't know anyone who enjoys packing, except perhaps someone who is packing to run away from an abusive situation. And even then, they'd probably prefer to just wipe their feet on the welcome mat on their way out and be done with it.

I enjoy going on trips (more or less), but really do NOT enjoy the process of deciding what to put in the suitcase. I've travelled enough in the past five years or so that I've gone one thing down pat: my toiletries are already in a bag and ready to tuck into my carry-on. I keep a supply of travel-sized refills in my bottom drawer along with my bathing suit, flip-flops and a generous pareo.

[I would love to stash a spare cellphone charger and laptop charger as well, but those are too expensive to just leave hanging around.] 

[Although, now that I think of it, I have (more than once) had to buy "universal" laptop chargers. They are ^&%R%$##$! expensive, about $100! So buying an actual spare one might be a wise investment.]

[And, actually, I used to have a spare cellphone battery which I kept fully charged.]

[Have I mentioned that I've stopped taking ADHD meds? Fasten your seatbelts - you're in for a bumpy ride!]

[How, in the name of all that is holy, did my parents put up with me?]

Anyhoo.

I have learned the hard way that it is a very good idea to take an organized approach to packing. Make a packing list. Here is a short list of things I've had to acquire because of careless packing:

• pyjamas (cannot sleep without 'em)
• previously mentioned laptop charger
• coat (What? It rains in Vancouver?)
• umbrella (see above)
• sinus rinse (I now DO keep a complete spare kit in my go-bag)
• camera battery

Stephen, my frequent co-traveller, has refined the skill of creating a packing list. He never packs without one. Here is a sample of one he made for our family's 3-day trip to Toronto over last March Break*. 

OCD is a very good thing.

Isn't he thorough? No excuse for failing to pack your homework or the requisite three pairs of underwear! 

I don't make packing lists. But I do use the ones Steve creates and am very grateful for them. In fact, as I write this, he is preparing the packing list for our trip to Montreal this weekend.

What about you? Do you improvise when you pack? Or do you plan everything ahead of time?

* About that list. All that booze (and the specification for a clean outfit for Saturday night) were because we were going to a family pot-luck on the Saturday night, and our contribution was the booze.

Thinking: You're Doing it Wrong

Have you ever heard of "thinking errors"? It's a therapy term that captures the many and varied ways our ingrained thinking patterns lead us astray. This blog has a good synopsis of ten of them (I'm sure there are many more). Here are the ones he lists:

1. ALL-OR-NOTHING THINKING – (Also called Black-and-White Thinking) Thinking of things in absolute terms, like “always,” “every,” or “never.”
2. OVERGENERALIZATION – Taking isolated cases and using them to make wide generalizations.
3. CATASTROPHIZING – (which he calls "Mental Filter") Focusing exclusively on certain, usually negative or upsetting, aspects of something while ignoring the rest.
4. DISQUALIFYING THE POSITIVE – Continually “shooting down” positive experiences for arbitrary, ad hoc reasons.
5. JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS – Assuming something negative where there is actually no evidence to support it.
6. MAGNIFICATION and MINIMIZATION – Exaggerating negatives and understating positives. Often the positive characteristics of other people are exaggerated and negatives understated
7. EMOTIONAL REASONING – Making decisions and arguments based on how you feel rather than objective reality.
8. SHOULDING – (Necessity) Must, Can’t thinking. "Should"ing is focusing on what you can’t control.
9. LABELING and MISLABELING – Related to overgeneralization, explaining by naming. Rather than describing the specific behavior, you assign a label to someone or yourself that puts them in absolute and unalterable negative terms.
10. PERSONALIZATION and BLAME – Personalization occurs when you hold yourself personally responsible for an event that isn’t entirely under your control.

(Click over to his blog to get examples and ways to challenge these bad habits.)

One of the best therapists I've met specialized in behavioural therapy and she was able to listen attentively and with genuine concern and yet still nail you on faulty thought processes.

"Do you know what thinking error you just used?" she would ask, and you would replay what you'd just been saying until you realized, "Oh, yah, I totally disqualified the positive of my encounter with [ ___ ]."

My two handiest ones are black-and-white thinking and catastrophizing.

• Black-and-White Thinking: When I am in the pits of depression, it is almost impossible to believe I could ever be anything other than depressed. The present moment expands until it fills my field of view. 
• Catastrophizing: [I consider this akin to minimization, but not in the sense he uses minimization.] When Emily broke her arm, I found myself saying, "Oh, it could have been much worse!" Why would I leap to visions of Emily hurtling head-first into a tree, breaking her neck and dying? In doing so, I effectively undermined the appropriateness of Emily's reaction to the trauma.

This is Emily's arm in the temporary cast.
You can see the dip where the radius and ulna bones have snapped and are dipping in towards her waist.
It was a pretty serious break.

These are not innocuous little slips. They are habits that we've formed, in some cases because we learned them from others or they met an emotional need at a certain time. 

In my case, I learned the catastrophizing from my mother, who referred to my grandfather's abuse of me as "that little thing with Grampa," implying that I should just get over it already. (My own thinking error in that case was personalization: I thought I had "asked for" the abuse by being too needy and wanting to be Grampa's favourite grandchild.)

As for the black-and-white thinking, I tot that up to the disordered thinking of a mentally ill brain. And, well, that's why they call it an illness. It does help, I think, that I recognize what I'm doing, recognize that it is not healthy and I do something positive about it. 

What about you? Do you have a "favourite" thinking error that you find cropping up from time to time? 

Picnik/Ribbet Tutorial: Portraits

UPDATE: Although Picnik no longer exists, an identical online product, called Ribbet, is available. Try it!

Emily, one of my two beautiful daughters.
This is the unedited photo; I'm happy with the composition, the lighting, the crop and the alignment.

In my previous post, I showed you some of my before-and-after photographs and promised threatened to follow up with a tutorial on how I use Ribbet. Here is the tutorial. I decided to start with a portrait because that's probably the most common picture most of us take, as we document the moments of our lives.

Ribbet is an online photo-editing tool that is very similar to Picnik which I started using after a friend on Facebook mentioned it.

It just so happened that I had been looking for such a tool. I'd been using the software that came with my first digital camera and, while it did improve my pictures, it really only provided minimal control.

I started using the free parts of Picnik, and then I took a Photoshop course (part of my job is to design graphics), and discovered that Picnik offers a lot of the same tools, though far, far less sophisticated -- and only with the $24.95 annual membership. That price seemed a bargain compared to the the cost to buy Photoshop.

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ON WITH THE TUTORIAL

[These instructions and pictures are from the original Picnik software, but you should be able to find the same tools in Ribbet without hunting too hard.]

Once Picnik Ribbet launches (with it's lighthearted spin on "please be patient" while the app loads), and you have uploaded a picture, you will see a band of tabs:

With most pictures, unless there is something to fix with the straightening or cropping, I go straight to Advanced.

And the first thing I adjust is the levels.
The levels affect the clarity of the picture. I know my teacher explained how it works, but all I really care about is the results.

Click on the Levels button and you will see a colorful histogram. Click on the RGB button and a drop-down menu gives you the option to edit red, green and blue independently of each other. (Some tutorials suggest you just move them all together, but I prefer the results I get this way.)

In each panel, adjust the little inverted-teardrop slider until it just touches the edge of the histogram. The blank areas outside of that point (in this case, to the left) do not have any data, so in this case, the shadows were lacking data.

Staying on the Advanced tab, the next step is to adjust the curves. This affects the highlights and shadows. In some cases, I've used it to improve the exposure in just the midtones in a backlit picture without overexposing the highlights.

You can see why they call it curves.
In this case, I pulled the highlights up slightly and pulled the shadows down a little. This subtly increases the contrast.

So far, all of this takes less than five minutes.

Still on the Advanced tab, I now do the stuff that purists sneer at: I do touch-ups. But I do use a very light hand. This part is time-consuming.

Make sure you zoom in, so you can see what you're doing. 

Eye Bright darkens the black areas of the pupil, which really makes the catchlights sparkle.

Even male subjects benefit from a light touch of mascara as it defines the eye. (All it does is intensify the blacks.) Note that I reduce the strength to 60%

Don't we all wish our dentists were this efficient? Again, use a light hand (fade to about 50%) or you will end up with a freakily white smile. I know this from experience.

This may be one of the best features of Picnik Ribbet. Haven't we all been plagued by a zit on picture day? Blemish Fix is better than Proactiv!

Pretty impressive, I think. The picture looks clearer and brighter without looking "shopped."

But we're not done yet. Before I close the file, I go back to Basic Edits and sharpen the picture. With most portraits, I don't sharpen very heavily.

You really just have to eyeball this. Err on the side of UNDER-sharpening as the sharpening sometimes adds a grittiness or noise to the picture.

NOW, we're done. Time to save the file.

As I mentioned, I always used to overwrite my files, but I've since learned to add a version number to my edited pictures. This allows me to go back and compare the original or make fresh edits.

I also always save in the highest quality. It's always possible to go back and create a low-resolution version (which I always identify in the filename as lowres), but you can't go back and add pixels once they're gone.









After all that, this is how the two pictures compare.

I've also started working on a tutorial for pictures that require straightening and other edits. I'll post that one another time.

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P.S. This post is also available as a Google Docs presentation. You can launch it below. If you click to view in a new window, it has the option to print the slides.

Before and After

I've learned that, in the world of photography, there is considerable debate over whether (or how much) editing is acceptable. There are, of course, purists who feel that a photographer's merit should rely on what comes straight out of the camera (SOOC). There are others who consider what comes out of the camera to be a starting point.

Perhaps as I get better with my camera, I will spend less effort editing my pictures after I take them, but I'm not there yet. And, honestly, I kind of enjoy the process of tweaking - or even creating a piece of art that is photograph-based, but is not a photograph. Like this:

Not so long ago, I lamented that I felt "consciously incompetent" concerning my skills with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. I've learned a lot in a short time and I'm enjoying plying those skills. I've also been able to transfer what I've learned on the real McCoy to Picnik, the poor-man's version of Photoshop.

Either way, I consider these part of the creative process.

So today, I want to show you some pictures before and after I've edited them. These were all taken in October 2007 on my point-and-shoot KODAK CX7530, my very first digital camera. In each of these pictures, the "before" shot had already been edited by the KODAK software that came with the camera. In those days, I did not save a "virgin" copy of my pictures. If the edit was an improvement, I overwrote the original. I don't do that anymore; I save them with a version number.

Nowadays, there are three things I do to almost any picture that strikes my fancy:

• Adjust levels - this often cleans up the "muddy" or "faded areas of the picture and even brings out detail
• Adjust curves - this usually brightens the highlights and deepens the shadows, creating more contrast, but I've also used it to brighten the midtones without losing contrast or creating too much noise.
• Sharpen - I don't always do this. Portraits, especially, sometimes benefit from a little fuzziness. Especially for those of us 40 years of age or over.

Here we go. I have seven pictures for you, all edited in Picnik. [Note: clicking any of these pictures will put them into a slide-show viewer.]

I'd never really given the original of this picture a second glance. Nothing really "popped."

I guess it's still not a great composition, but I like that, in the edited version, you can see the texture of the wave foam. 

When I first saw the before picture, I was disappointed. It didn't have the vibrancy I'd remembered at the beach.
The after picture does a better job of showing the drama of these pretty purple shells nestled amongst the mossy rocks.

Wow! I liked the before version a lot - even have it printed and framed somewhere, I think, but the after picture really captures the contrast between the wet and the dry, showing off the textures. 

Another one that had originally disappointed me.
In this picture I also edited out a man who was standing far out on the rocks on the left.
Picnik could not correct the lens curvature. I'm sure there is a way to do that in Photoshop.

This is one of my all-time favourite pictures and, until I edited it today, I hadn't thought about how it could be improved.
The main reason I like it is that the beautifully textured stair railing draws your eye right to Stephen, whose body in mid-stride shows the contrapposto that is so hard for artists to show in their work - the way the body balances itself.
In addition to adjusting the levels, curves and sharpness, I also edited out Peter. Not because I don't like him, but because he distracted from the composition: his shirt blended into the sand and so it looked like Steve was striding happily towards a pair of legs and a disembodied head. 

I know sunsets are cliche and over-used, but I loved this picture from the moment I took it.
I was even pleased with how level I got the horizon (not easy for me).
I did my three usual tweaks on this and adjusted the colour saturation very slightly.
It was already so saturated that if I did much more to it, it would look like a cartoon.
I debated taking out the red flare, but decided not to as I felt it was part of the sunset.

The adjustments here really cleaned up the washed-out areas. I was also able to adjust the camera tilt (notice that it tilts on the side where the shutter-release button is?) and get rid of the silly strip of sky at the top.

That's it. If you're interested, in my next post, I think I'll share my little tutorial on how to get the most out of Picnik. Not just use it to put frames and stickers on your pictures or use the auto-fix features. Use the voting buttons at top-right to let me know if you're interested.

Time Expired

The "come hither" look is undermined by the pustular sore on the eye lid.
(This picture was really hard to take!)
(Hey! Look! My eyes are following you!)

I saw my doctor this morning. I told him that I felt like my warranty had expired. As with the corollary to Murphy's law, little things (and big) were malfunctioning: I had a stye that wasn't responding to hot compresses; I had a sinus infection; and I was trying to pull myself out of a depression.

He chuckled when I used that metaphor (he looks like Santa Claus -- white hair and a well-fed belly -- and his demeanor reinforces that impression) and told me about an al-Qaeda hostage who, at the ripe old age of 50, was seen by his captors as ancient, as if he were "time expired" and not worth investing much effort in keeping alive. (In that area of the world, average life expectancy is approximately 54 years.)

The doctor wrote me prescriptions for antibiotics and discussed causes and treatment for my depression. I mentioned that I had recently stopped taking meds for my ADHD (they caused intolerably dry mouth); he said that likely precipitated the depression and that it could take a few more weeks to sort itself out. In the meantime, I have a short-term med to keep things stable.

So I guess this means I've extended my shelf life. Yay for good drugs!