Bits and pieces

I'd like an almost half a billion dollar slush fund.

Which is what it looks like George W. Bush is getting today.

It' complicated, in that way which is only possible when obfuscating simple facts is the best defense against prying eyes.

It goes back to the Canadians being, rightfully pissed at us for NAFTA related issues about the felling of trees and selling of lumber. To patch all that up there were court battles. The US lost, but the Harper gov't decided to pay out $1 billion (which most people think to be bigger than a million, which it is, but they lose the scope of that bigness. 1,000,000, is a fair chunk o' change. It's an order of magnitude larger than 1,000. Most people, however, seem to think that 1 billion is to one million as 100,000 is to 1,000,000. It ain't buy I digress), to appease the lumber barons, and the US Gov't.

While I may think it less than savory that Harper's gov't is paying a bunch of rich companies, that's not what concerns me.

CorrenteWire has a detailed takedown so I shan't try to go into exquisite detail, as plagiarism would be far too likely. Go read it there, or here (a Canadian view) for explication of the nitty-gritty details.

The bottom line is that, should this pass today, Bush gets $450,000,000 to do with as he sees fit. No Congressional oversight, no public accounting, no nothing. So long as the people he appoints think the things the money is spent on are, meritorious all is legal.

Money = power. Money also, per the courts, = speech. Half-a-billion dollars buys a lot of speech.

There are companies who make their money selling the appearance of free speech (and a tip of the hat to Making Light for those links. I wish I could recall the account I read of someone who took a couple of days work for Netvocates, or some firm of its ilk, but I didn't keep the link. If I kept every story which might someday be useful I wouldn't be able to find it without googling, and that's what I have to do anyway).

It could also buy a lot of dirty tricks, plain old; everyday ads (does Joe Lieberman need money?, what about DeWine?, or Bilbray, or the race in Eastern Wash. which is getting competitive?) and all the other things a campaign needs to keep itself alive.

That, however, isn't what bothers me, per se. It's that this is not only a slush fund, but one which is being provided by a foreign power.

Ponder that; the President of the United States is being given a huge pile of money by the gov't of another country. How would it look if Harry Reid got a mere (mere?) 45 million dollars from the Gov't of Mexico. Now imagine him getting 100 times that, and all of it out of sight. Able to be spent in any way he sees fit.

Fungus

There is a wounded carob tree near the house. Monday I went and took some pictures. I made some mistakes. I'll go back tomorrow, or Friday, and do it again. Macro work is funny stuff. One is so close to the subject that details are missing, until the image is seen. Digital allows me to see the images a lot sooner.

It also allows me to fix some of the mistakes. Not completely, and not perfectly, but mostly. In some cases it can even fix things which aren't really fixable with film. On the up side, having the chance to fix them makes it easier to remember them when faced with similar problems in the future.

So, here are the before, and after, versions of one of the mistakes. I did all corrections in the program I'm writing up. The image was tolerable after about five minutes, some of the detail fixes took longer (and one of them required printing to make mistakes which weren't apparent on the screen visble. I'll try to write that up).

The following open in new tabs/windows, so you can see them side by side/toggle as you read the commentary. RAW and diddled. These are large files, click through to see them at half of image size (I reduced them to a ten inch wide image for upload). They are also .jpgs, so the detail isn't all it could be.

The first thing you'll notice is how dark it is. This is half intentional. I was bracketing all the shots by 1/3 over, and 1/3 under. Now that I have the baseline, I can tailor the next shooting session, and avoid that. But it did give me at least 1/3rd of my shots which were going to be in need of help. Because Digital is more forgiving of over-exposure, I decided to play with the darker images.

The subject was in the shade, but it was also shading itself, which is why the underside of the upper portion is as dark as it is, even though the color is bright. This is a problem of the camera, not the eye. To the photographer (which is to say, me) it was vibrant, to the film/sensor, it wasn't.

More importantly the intense yellow of the underside of the fungus gave a decided color cast. This wouldn't be a problem, save for my having a water drop in the picture. If you look at the detail image you can see it, too, is yellow.

There is also a slightly different color to the light falling on the surface the droplet is resting on.

Corrections:

I drew a line across the picture, separating the part which was top-lit from that which was lit by reflection.

I then lighten the bottom.

I dublicated the division, and made chages to the inverse area.

I diddlled the saturation, riching up the yellows.

A bit of sharpening, to prick up the textural details of the fungal surface.

I isolated the water droplet, and made a pair of color corrections (duplicating the masked area), to give it a silvery-grey color, aiming for a hint of reflected sky.

The I printed it, and found the glaring horror.

If you look at the full-sized image of the uncorrected picture, the glint on the water is vaguuly rectilinear. That's because it's the sunlight (which was coming from the opposite side) shining on the windshield of the car, and being caught in the curve of the water. In the corrected image it was the dominant part of the image.

So I grabbed a cloning tool and reduced it to a smaller point. Without more indication it can be taken for a glint of sunlight.

Including a couple of false starts (trying to color blend it away, which looked good on the screen, but was out of gamut for the printer, and blocked up to 18 percent gray) the whole thing took about 20 minutes of actual fiddling.

The water droplet isn't really right (it shows some color noise, reminiscent of speculation, when printed)and I'll probably go back and try to redo the color set, but for a web-image, it's quite nice, and I like it.