DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Nearly in time for your holiday spending spree, here’s a miscellaneous collection of stuff I think is neat. I’ve searched the entire planet to bring you the most intriguing stuff money can buy, at an incredible value to you. Well, not really, but you get the idea.

Art and stuff that looks like it

• Gorgeous photos of the World Trade Center and NYC skyline from 1976.
• Two online stores now offer prints of Art Radebaugh’s Jetsons-era futuristic illustrations: Keystone Pictograph and Palace of Culture. Check out the swoopy technology!
• Adbusters’ Corporate US Flag provides a subversive commentary on the influence of corporations upon government policy. You can buy a 5'x3' polyester flag, or, for free, download a high-res PDF and print it yourself.
• For the photographers and illustrators in the audience: make a photo calendar. PhotoAccess.com offers a nice product. If you have twelve images that someone could stand to look at for a month each, a calendar makes a great gift.
• Chock full of conspiracy theories (some of which are actually true), the Deception Dollar is a unique piece of political propaganda. Matted and framed, it will serve as a time capsule of the American political landscape in 2003. Be sure to get two copies, so you can show the front and back within one frame.
• The Sierra Club offers free World War II Conservation Posters (which I’ve written about, at length, before). As with some of the other free art downloads described here, these could be printed in poster size by your neighborhood reprography center, to make an inexpensive and uniquely noncommercial gift.

Gifts for Photographers

• Professional Photoshop is the one book every digital photographer has to have. My review contains before-and-after examples illlustrating the color-correction and image retouching techniques in the book, which is an instruction manual for image restoration experts.
• Peter iNova has published two hardware-specific books on CD-ROM covering Nikon and Sony digital cameras. I own the Nikon version, Mastering Nikon Compact Digital Cameras, and have found it to be a fantastic resource. iNova has a separate edition covering the Sony Advanced Cyber-shot

Gifts for People who wear Clothing

• Grass Roots Natural Goods sells a wide variety of hemp and organic (“green”) cotton clothing and accessories. I’m a repeat customer; I’ve found their service to be excellent.
• Hemptown sells, you guessed it, hemp clothing. Their 3-packs of Hemp T-Shirts are a great deal.

Important Books

• (Regular readers are invited to cover their ears while I bang this drum one more time.) Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser. Just read it, OK?
• I’m halfway through this: High and Mighty: SUVs — The World’s Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way. It’s fascinating, both as a study of Detroit marketing and of the American psyche.

I generally don’t list mass-market items here, because you’re innundated with them 24x7 via television, radio, and the-entire-internet.com. But I just stumbled across a DVD that needs to be better known. I make that claim because I’m the perfect customer for it, and even though it came out last year I only discovered it this morning:

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy DVD is the classic TV adaptation of Doug Adams’ triumphant 5-book trilogy. If you know it, I need say no more, and if you don’t, buy the books first (e.g. The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)
• Which reminds me, I recently saw a companion book, a biography of Douglas Adams by noted fantasy author Neil Gaiman. It’s called Don’t Panic: The Official Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Companion and it’s on my own wish list.

If you’re not yet sated, check out last year’s edition: 2002 Gift Guide.

Dan Margulis holds the keys to the digital darkroom. If you own a digital camera and a copy of Adobe Photoshop, you need this book, for it will show you how to get the most out of your photos.

Even if you’re shooting film and scanning the prints (or negatives), Professional Photoshop will show you how to extract the best picture from your scan.

The book contains over 300 pages of instruction, with hundreds of photographs illustrating the techniques. Topics include: removing color casts, extending dynamic range, plate blending, sharpening, contrast enhancement, recovering too-dark originals, photo restoration, conversion from color to black and white, and more. I’ve put together two quick examples to demonstrate the most important, and most immediately useful techniques.

Use Curves to remove color casts
Humans perceive true colors no matter what the ambient light is like. But cameras aren’t as highly evolved. See the left side of my example; the photo was taken at dusk, when the lack of sunlight made everything appear blue. The left side of the example photo was not doctored — that’s the raw original image.

Professional Photoshop describes in meticulous detail how to use Photoshop’s Curves tool to remove color casts. The right side of the image is the result of a single pass with the Curves tool, using techniques presented by Margulis. Although it is not perfect, the corrected side of the image is a huge improvement.

Use Curves to expand dynamic range
“Expanding dynamic range” sounds like a mouthful, but all it means is to make the blacks blacker and the whites whiter. Even high-end cameras don’t make full use of the available spectrum… but it’s a simple operation in Photoshop to do so. Margulis shows how to find the important parts of an image and make them stand out.

The left side of the example image appears to have been shot through a cloud of flour. The detail on the right side is much more pronounced; the colors are more vivid. It’s a significantly better picture. The improvement took two steps:

1. Use Curves to increase dynamic range.
2. Use Unsharp Mask to bring out detail.

This correction took less than one minute.

I will caution potential buyers that Margulis’ book contains more than most people want to know. The learning curve for some of the advanced techniques is steep. But you only need to climb as far as you want — and the basic techniques have immediate payoff, as evidenced by my quick corrections above.

In my opinion this book is essential for digital photographers, especially for people who use online photo printing services like PhotoAccess.com, OFoto, ShutterFly, etc. I printed images straight from the camera for a few months, but now I’m going back and re-printing them, because the corrected versions are so much better.

You can see one more correction example here: using channel blends to correct underexposure.

Patronize these links, man:

• Amazon (paperback)

How to install a photovoltaic array in a few simple steps:

1. Arrange for a licensed installer to bring two vans full of tools, a work crew of five, several boxes of hardware and a few hundred feet of triple-galvanized steel.
2. Ferry a box of equipment up the ladder to the roof. Repeat endlessly.
3. Measure and mark, drill and caulk. (That was yesterday.)
4. Build a support rack for the PV modules. As you can see, our panels will be standing up from the roof, at an angle and direction calculated precisely to catch the most sun during those critical peak generation hours. We could have instead chosen a flush-mount design, but the reduced electrical output would have extended our payoff date by a year. (!) The angle is easier to see from below.
5. Mount and wire panels. This happens tomorrow.

I watched the crew in awe today. I can’t imagine a less fun job than working on someone’s roof, fully exposed, during a cold rain, bolting a steel rack together. OK, wait, I can too. These are hearty souls, though. They were cheerful about it all. They put in a full day’s work up there in the drizzle.

This module and 23 just like it are being installed on my roof today.

I’ve squashed a few bugs, implemented a few new features, and made some changes to the layout, both in response to reader feedback and my own testing:

• the RSS feed is back online (although still due for an overhaul) (or overdue for a haul, one of those two)
• the font in the channels list is smaller and somewhat less clunky
• the masthead photo changes every 60 seconds, increasing the chances that, at least sometimes, you’ll become convinced that I have as much an eye for color selection as I do for hats. (By the way, it won’t change if you wait for it; you’ll have to reload, or in some browsers, force-reload.)
• comments in image ALT tags are no longer highlighted in search-engine results (yes, this broke pages magnificently; thanks for asking)

Not yet changed, as of this writing, is the hanging nature of list-item bullets. The fact that bullets sit to the left of the text margin causes many people concern. I have not yet determined whether to change this… the stylesheets are not finished, but honestly I like hanging punctuation.

My publishing software attempts to honor the traditions of typography. Note the “smart” quotes — and the emdashes. And the hanging bullets, darn it!

• You’ll
• learn
• to
• love
• it!
  Or your money back.

You know what would be really neat: hanging all punctuation, like in the #3 example of Typography 101. I used to do that in Pagemaker when I did lots of design work on paper, approximately 400 years ago. Another rewarding challenge those days: making sure text baselines were consistent across columns. It was trickier than you might think, but the results were cooool.