Up and down and round and round

Over at Mission Bay is a historic roller coaster, the Giant Dipper, in Belmont Park. It was built in 1925. The twin to the Giant Dipper is at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk in Santa Cruz, California. They are the only two remaining roller coasters on the West Coast that were built by Prior & Church, noted builders of roller coasters throughout the nation.

A couple of days ago I got some pretty good pictures of it, something that’s not easy to do because of tall trees and lots of traffic:

I realized that the last two pictures actually got the whole roller coaster so I went to CorelDRAW X6 to create a panorama:

I thought that was pretty good for hand-holding a camera and having no plans at the beginning to create a panorama. With some diligence, I could even use Photoshop and its layers and masks to make the brightness and contrast match, but I don’t have time to play around with that right now….

Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, DRE #01458572

If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!

A rose by any other name is still a rose

 

My apologies to the literariasts (!) for bastardizing a great Shakespeare quote in Romeo and Juliet (“What’s in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would  smell as sweet”), but I just discovered that in many software programs you can define black, white, and gray.

I started having a little fun by telling CorelDRAW X6 that a deep dark red was actually black. I took this picture of a giant hibiscus at the San Diego Zoo yesterday:

 

I clicked on the color definition eyedropper for black and then clicked a dark red. CorelDRAW then reprocessed the image in just a couple of seconds. Then I clicked on “Auto adjust” and got this:

 

I was trying to analyze just exactly what CorelDRAW did and determined that if red is black, then there is a lot of the picture that is underexposed. Thus, when CorelDRAW went to auto adjust the picture, all those black (red) areas were brighted up a wee bit.

This opens a whole new realm of creating something that is me, kind of like Rubicorno has defined himself. The difference is that I can create my own preset, a preset that no one else in the world has.

At the very least, I’ve found something to do with my 73,000 pictures in my old age. 🙂

If my wise old grandmother were here, she’d say, “Interesting….”

 

Looking for real estate services in San Diego County? I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor with Century 21 Award, DRE #01458572

If you’re just looking for a home inspector,
I can highly recommend Russel Ray; that’s me!