The arrival of autumn means many things to many people. Fall colors, farm harvests, football contests and so forth. Around here in Winston-Salem, it means that the Dixie Classic fair will be starting up again.
With the fair, comes the rides, the huge quantity of food, the music, the lights and sounds, animals galore. But being a fair that is based on the agricultural roots of the region means that people will be bringing their best creations, whether it be a quilt, a cake, a floral arrangement or their home grown pumpkin to the fair to be judged and get a ribbon.
Of course, for me, it is my photography.
Last year, I managed to win a 5th place ribbon for my black and white photo of some Triumph motorcycles. I had higher expectations for other photos I entered but I as pleased with what I won.
So this year, I will be entering more of my collection into the amateur photography contest. Considering that I have nearly 5000 images in my portfolio, I was not sure what I could select. One problem was that out of the various categories, I tend to be overweight on some like my landscapes while having little in others like birds or sunsets.
There is also the problem of how to account for the various tastes of the judges. What are their preferences? Conservative or experimental? The bold new look or the tried and true? it is difficult to say so I will go with what I like and see what happens.
So without further ado, here are my entries in this year’s contest:
Color – Other
Color – People
Color – Flowers
Color – Animals
Color – Landscapes
B & W – People
B & W- Landscapes
B & W – Other
A new football season, a new Fantasy football team.
This is the third year now that I have played fantasy football. In the past I have dabbled with similar things through leagues run by newspapers for baseball or hockey but it was nothing I was really that serious about.
Now, though, with the leagues run from the Internet making it easier to start and maintain fantasy leagues, I am running with the tide as many people indulged their inner general manager. It is fun to try to assemble a team together that through the season will get through to the end and to the playoff season. It also appeals to the competitive nature of the predominantly male fans who play in the leagues.
In the past two seasons, I have drafted fair to build my team. Inexperience with many of the players lead to some more choices which caused me to lose badly in the first set of games. But as the season progresses and as start players start getting injured, I was fortunate to pick up decent second tier players which allowed me to put together some nice winning streaks and redeemed what could have been some disastrous seasons. Still, though, I did not make the league playoffs.
This year, I resolved to do better. Now I did not try immerse myself deeply into the mintuae of every player’s stats and history. There is no such thing as the perfect team especially as you have 11 other people also selecting from the same pool as you are. As well, in football there is always the realistic probability that your star player may become injured and lost to you for the whole season. The key is to be flexible.
So in the beginning for my team, I started on running backs as traditionally they have the opportunity to run up some high points per game; as well, teams usually have a primary running back that gets most of the carries which means more opportunities to rack up yards and points. Then I moved onto my quarterback and then my tight end.You can only have one starting tight end per team but in the past few years, quarterbacks are using more of their tight ends as receivers on short yardage situations as well end zone targets. Wide receivers, though tend to be low my list of picks as spread offences used by many teams mean that fewer wide receivers now will be the the quarterback’s favorite target. Everyone it seems gets a chance now and it is now unusual for teams to spread the passes around to 5-6 players a game.
So I have a good team at my nucleus, built around a tandem of Matt Ryan at QB, Michael Turner and Ronnie Brown as RBs, and Jason Witten at TE. In the first two games of my fantasy football season, they have proven their worth as I have won my first two games in my league.
Of course, managing a fantasy football league does take some effort as you try to balance the players you have and see what ones you start and ones you bench based on who is going with the hot hand and who their real world team is facing that week. You have to contend with bye weeks in the league as you can see many of your players being benched for a week and you then have to fill the holes. Much the same if a player goes down with an injury.
Sometimes you get lucky with a player who makes a big play like a 80 yard touchdown run/reception that really jacks up the points for a player. Other times, your star player goes stone cold. The key is having depth where you need it.
Sometimes a player just is not working at all or is going to be down with an injury for weeks. With other teams in the same boat as the season progresses, the key is then start identifying the players that will take over for the benched starters. Sometimes it works out extremely well. I remember last year after Brian Westbrook went down with an injury for several weeks, I picked up Cornell Buckthaler who took his place as the primary running back for Philadelphia. For several weeks, Buckthaler proved to be a high point scoring machine for me.
Having a league though always proves to be a good way to start a conversation with your colleagues. If you have nothing else to talk about, you can always talk about your league team and how well it is doing. You can get an animated conversation on what players are the better ones this year and the how the waiver players are working out for your team.
Bottom line, though, for me is the sense of competition. Nothing like doing well and coming out on top if you can especially as we have prizes for the various winners for the league.
I am in to win.
Adobe announced the release of its consumer photography editor tool, Photoshop Elements 8, this week. Unlike the prior release, Adobe will be releasing a parallel version for the Mac. This is good news as Mac users had to deal with a version that was a version behind and feature deficient compared to what was available for Windows users.
I have been a faithful user of this product way back when it was called Photo Deluxe, a mere toy of an application compared to what it is capable of now. With this release of Elements, I have something like the capability of Photoshop as it was a few years back which was then a very powerful application in its own right. I have used various other products for editing photographs like Pixelmator and I continually come back to this one as it is the most capable application out there.
Now my primary editing tool these days is still Lightroom as it capable of taking a RAW format photo and bring out its best details. But it is not a composition type of tool which I need from time to time like adding text, merging images, panorama photos and so forth. Those tasks are something which I do on occasion but are not really a big part of my output these days.
What I really need though are some of the editing tools like Noise Reduction and image enhancements which I need for some problematic images. For example, when I was working on some of the family images taken back in the 1960’s, I had issues with scratches and graininess that Lightroom could not do but Elements can.
That’s the limit of my everyday needs and Elements handles them just fine. The big brother application, Photoshop, offers more tools and more powerful versions of the tools found in Elements but they are more than I need and to be honest, more than I can afford.
With a new release of Lightroom supposedly to be released in the next few months, the combination of these two applications gives me a very capable workflow setup that can produce for me the best possible images from the photographs I take.
