Woke up today before 7am on my own. I think this means I’ve adapted to London time.
Visiting Friends Alice & John
One of the benefits of visiting London is that we got the chance to visit with our friends Alice & John who moved here a little over a year ago. It’s an easy visit too since our apartment is only about four blocks from them. A short walk after Mazie’s nap yesterday and we were at their place. It took a while for Mazie and the girls to get in the playing mood with plenty of shyness to go around, but after an hour they were having a lot of fun. Mazie really enjoyed playing with other kids and more than the handful of toys we packed over here. Tammy and I enjoyed catching up with Alice and John and hearing all about their adventures in London. Good times around, finished with good pizza and a couple of pints.
We’ll definitely get a couple more visits in before we leave town.
Lightroom 2 Makes Vacation Look Even Better
I upgraded to Lightroom 2 as soon as it was available. I was lucky enough to be part of the beta program but I didn’t give it the time needed to really dive in. Now that it is released, I’ve upgraded and have really enjoyed the new features. Just like in Lightroom 1, I spend most of my time in the Library module. But perhaps the biggest feature in Lightroom 2 comes in the Develop module with the Localized Corrections feature.
Localized Corrections isn’t a great name for a killer feature. Basically, in Lightroom 2 you can create a mask and then apply develop effects to that mask. You can have multiple masks in the same photo. You could have done this stuff in Photoshop but that round-trip to Photoshop is painful and I know Lightroom so much better than Photoshop. I’m happy to avoid Photoshop.
With these tools easily at hand, I found yesterday how with just a few seconds you can really make pictures that once looked rough pretty good. Let’s take a look at three pictures from the bus tour we took yesterday.This first picture is just a shot down the Thames in London. It’s not very good with too many clouds and not even taken level. It was taken from a moving bus after all.
Before
I actually have fun with these wide shots because I can crop them out to give an expansive feel with a wide crop. While cropping we’ll level it. Here the localized correction is fairly small. A quick brush stroke along the tree line brings some additional light in. It’s a full +1 exposure added for the trees.
After
This shot of the Parliament building also needs some cropping, but worse, it’s just dark and dreary.
Before
Here it is cropped out with a localized correction is brushed onto the building with about 2/3rds stop of additional exposure to brighten it up. Remember, since I’m working with a RAW file here I’ve got a lot of color depth and data to dig into here so I’m not blowing out any highlights. You can see the artifacts of my rather quick and shoddy mask work in the halo around Big Ben. With some more attention and time I could make that disappear easily.
After
This picture of Big Ben was taken as we went by. It’s an odd shot, but I actually kind of like it. You can tell the camera metered right for the sky, but in the process Big Ben is way too dark losing almost all detail. This is an ideal Localized Correction problem.
Before
Here the mask is pretty big with an increase in exposure. You can see some halo effect again from my sloppy mask that could be cleaned up. Again, since I have a RAW image I’m not blowing anything out. Note that this is a big area and you could have just upped the exposure on the whole shot. If I would have done that though the sky would have been far overexposed.
After
iPhone App - Units
I had seen this application in the AppStore before we left for London but for whatever reason I didn’t think it would be needed or all that useful. I installed it a couple of days after getting here and have used it a lot.
If you find yourself needing to convert from one thing to another a lot Units is the application for you. Currencies, lengths, speeds, etc. – it does them all.
That isn’t enough magic to get me really excited about an application. What I like so much is how fast it is to use. It uses a calculator interface to make it super simple to get a conversion done. I had an initial complaint with how long it took to find the right mode, but they fixed this with a user-interface change in the newest release as well as some additional conversions.
Anyway, another great example of a very handy mobile application that adds significant value easily.
Harrods — World's Largest Something
This morning we decided to head to Harrods (store) and visit the worlds largest department store. My first piece of advise is to treat Harrods like an amusement park. Don’t plan to actually shop there unless you want to burn through significant £’s. There is some nice stuff there, but the prices match it. I was thrown back by kids shirts marked at £79.95 ($149.97 as of today). But then again, I don’t think I’ve even seen Juicy Couture for 3 year olds.1 Tammy compared Harrods to a casino without the gambling, which is a good approximation. Cruise ship would also be close, but not nice enough.
Even with the ridiculous price tags we had a really fun time just walking around. Mazie had a blast in the kids department with loads of toys and babies. She got to pick one thing to get and much to her parents chagrin desperately wanted a baby that we could get for $12 at home but got to pay £14.95 ($28.04) for.
It was fun to walk around in the household stuff and see all the cool Euro fixtures and such. There are so many more modern options here than at home. We stayed from open through lunch and had some very good pizza in the food hall followed by a nice gelato for desert. We wisely chose a weekday for our visit, and also chose the morning to avoid larger crowds in the afternoon. Happily we didn’t have to queue a lot and could tell that the afternoon was getting notably busier as we left.
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I think this is so funny. The Juicy Couture website, which sells way overpriced clothes based entirely on brand appeal, has the Sun Microsystems logo for it’s favicon.ico. Somebody at Juicy needs to call their web shop. ↩︎
Espresso Abroad
I really like my coffee. The apartment we are staying at here in London doesn’t have a coffee pot. There is a french press, and I’m not opposed to pressed coffee. It’s some good stuff. But, we are out and about everyday and I’ve just decided to get my daily espresso somewhere instead.
This is the double at Harrod’s – great stuff.
Watching the UK version of Big Brother. Very odd show.
Tammy has decided we should move to London. Hmmm.. Wasn’t expecting that. :-)
Just spent a great few hours with old friends from Minneapolis, Alice Kim and John Granholm, who now live in London.
London Apartment
Our London trip is a lot different from our Summer of Love West Coast Road Tour. Notably, we aren’t on the road very much for London and with the exception of a short jaunt to Scotland for Tammy and I, we are staying put in London proper.
We rented an apartment for the month and have gotten settled in. We are in the Kensington area at Philbeach Gardens. The apartment is good. We have about 800 square feet and behind the apartment is a very large private courtyard where Mazie can play. I think the nicest thing about the apartment is the dining room with a glass ceiling. I’ve setup my computer in this area with great light.
On the downside we are missing some niceties. Mainly what was advertised as included Internet access is really a 3G HSDPA Modem (Huawei E220). It’s better than nothing, but you have to tip toe around the Internet and wait for long delays. We have a washing machine but no dryer, I guess we just hang our clothes to dry.
We went shopping for some supplies at a nearby Tesco. It took us over an hour to find what we were looking for. It’s great that London is English, but there is no doubt you are in a foreign country. It took us about 10 minutes to find baking soda.
Here are photos for a little virtual tour.
