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Bodybuilding, Florida, life, and beyond

2013 Gainesville Classic women's competitor
Shots from the 2013 Gainesville Classic are up on the site.

I really love the lighting in this auditorium, despite it being a bit cramped. The secret of course is that the backdrop is not stark ebony, giving me a little room to work with.

The fluorescent colors in the physique guys’ shorts are still causing me grief, as they as reflecting a bunch of light that the camera can see but I can’t, causing massive underexposure; I may have found a workaround for that, in the meantime I converted the “problem children” to black-and-white so there would at least be something to show.

The show was another well-run Tony Curtis production, and as always it was a delight to not have to drive much to get to the show. :)

Enjoy.

2013 Daytona Classic competitor
Just finished post-processing on the 2013 Daytona Classic show.

Normally held at the Peabody in Daytona, the show moved to Seabreeze High School this year, and from the audience perspective I think it’s a great improvement.

The show itself featured plenty of excellent competititors and ran as smoothly as you could ask. Great job Tony and Mike and everyone involved.

Enjoy the shots. Next week: Gainesville!

Shots from the 2013 Lakeland show are up on the site.

“Wait,” you cry, “what about the Floridas? And the Ancient City Classic?”

I’ve always heard “it’s a poor workman who blames his tools”, so this is on me, but since having such nice success with the well-lit shots at the Galaxy, I’ve had hard luck trying to get the new camera to behave in the trickier lights. I went back to full manual for the Lakeland, and though the consistency looks bad, it’s actually a pretty good representation– I love that little theater, but the lights were really uneven. I think some of the automatic settings on the old EOS would have compensated for that a bit… Anyway.

The Floridas I pretty much wrote off as an experimentation exercise– it was going by SO flamin’ fast I couldn’t keep up anyway. If I’d have known, I would have just done full-class shots and been quite happy. But I didn’t, and there were at least a couple of other photographers there in any case, so I’m not going to worry about it. If I promised you photos from that show, drop me a note; I’m pretty sure I can post-process some decent shots out of what I did get.

The Ancient City shots just came out a bit over-exposed; I’ll need to set aside some time for post-processing that out and I just don’t have it right now because…

I’ve also had an external drive, less than four months old, crap out on me; and while I have all the originals, it’s going to take considerable time to re-aggregate them (unless against all hope I can repair the drive and pull the data back off). I’ve been trying to avoid investing in a RAID enclosure but the prices keep dropping and it certainly would have avoided this debacle.

So that’s where I’m at right now– still paddling upstream and wishing I’d checked the paddle for termites. Enjoy the shots and stand by for updates.

To-day is Erwin Schrödinger’s birthday.

Or maybe it isn’t.

Immediately after renaming the program “Bushcare”, the media discovered that it was laden with pork, kickbacks, inefficiencies, loopholes, unfunded mandates, and corporate payback.

Moreover, they became suspicious of the tactics used to pass Bushcare, outraged at how the House was effectively cut out of the process by calling the bill “deemed passed”, furious at the creation of “death panels” to ration care, and rhetorical about the damage the bill would cause to the medical system and the already-weakened economy as a whole.

They even noted multiple ways in which Bushcare violated the Constitution, not least from a over-broad interpretation of the Commerce Clause.

That… was a pretty good week.

I’m still not 100% happy with the layout in the popup, but I can tweak that later if I get inspired. Meantime I think I’ve got the Florida contest schedule looking about how I’d like it to look:

  • The general style fits the rest of the site.
  • The number of clicks required to navigate has gone way down.
  • It’s easier to look at.
  • The ability to sort by column is at least as easy to use as running separate database queries.
  • The upcoming contests (now next three) are easier to find in the sidebar.
  • The contests that are already done are greyed out.
  • The page automatically scrolls so that the first upcoming contest is near the top.
  • The popups are attractive, fit in with the site style, and the maps work.

I’ve also made a minor update to the overall site style, which is working in current IE and Firefox, broken in Opera and untested in Chrome. One of these days I need to give the site a good checkup in Chrome…

Anyway. I learned a lot doing this little project, and the usual hat-tips to the creators and maintainers of code libraries everywhere– I could never have things running this quickly if I’d had to code and test it all piece by piece. Enjoy and let me know if you have comments or suggestions.

The Age of Aquarius is not only near, it is literal. I for one welcome our new dolphin overlords.