Doin’ Taxes Like it’s 1999

Posted on January 25th, 2007 by HuthPhoto.
Categories: Personal, Equipment, Funny, Photo, Internet, Photoshop, Games.

I rotate my taxes boxes over a 7 year period, so I just pulled my 1999 taxes to make way for doing 2006.

How different things were just seven years ago:


• Digital Cameras—I paid $900+ for my first digital pro-sumer camera a year or so before (Kodak DC260) and was in 1999 deducting my next digital camera, the Nikon CoolPix 950 for over $1000.

• Computer RAM…anybody up for the big 128Megabyte RAM upgrade (PC100) for $138!

• Blank CD’s for my burner—$2 per blank CD (they are about 25¢ each now)… ah, and on the same invoice, I bought the first version of the


Myst Game!

• Phone Bills—Back then I had a normal phone line and long distance via Sprint. It was around $35/month for the local phone and $40-$50/month in long distance.
Today, I have Vonage for my home line for less than $20/month and my cell service with Cingular comes with free long distance.


• Film & Chemicals—I would go to RIT and buy around $300 worth of supplies every three to four weeks. And then there was process and color at labs, and my time doing this all.
Today: Digital, baby! After you plunk down the big money for the camera, upgraded Mac, Software, etc, etc…as Lisa I’m sure will tell you ;-)

• A delivery service was needed back then to deliver things from here (45 minutes from Rochester). Now clients edit online and get their images from me by convenient download.


• My Photoshop 5.5 Upgrade was bought in 1999,

and I paid $70 to renew HuthPhoto.com for two more years (I just paid around $80 to buy it till 2015.

• I photographed Meryl Streep as my first big event for the George Eastman House in 1999, and I see that Geva was going strong as a big client

• Logos—Above, you’ll see I was phasing out the ‘film and sprockets’ logo (top of page, on the right) and was moving toward the big, swoopy H logo (up there again on the left).

I bagged that after a few years of getting payments to H Photo. Is my current logo, here, too dated yet?

So, that’s the trip in the way-back machine I just took and hope you’ll get a kick out of seeing how much has changed with digital photography, the ‘net and HuthPhoto in these last amazing seven years.

Comment (from my old blog):
Joe
I think I still have notepads with both of those old logos!
Monday, February 19, 2007 - 11:17 AM

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Screens

Posted on January 24th, 2007 by HuthPhoto.
Categories: Shoots, Skills, Schools, Photo, Photoshop.

It’s an interesting challenge to get decent photos of a presenter who’s using a screen like this.

If you use your flash and the speaker is at all close to the screen, it ends up looking mostly white. A huge white screen often makes the speaker look flat and uninteresting, or too dark with auto-exposure.

I do like to play around with screen photos like this, where the subject is actually being hit by the light and it can #1 give you a decent exposure on both the screen and the subject and #2 it can look cool :-)

Photoshop Tip:
You can very quickly improve the looks of a screen.
• Make a selection around a screen by using the ‘Polygon Lasso’ tool (an optional tool under the normal lasso). Just click for the points to make the lines of the screen edge.
• Adjust levels in your favorite way
• Then from the Image Menu, choose Adjust, Hue/Saturation. Tweak the image to correct off colors and make it look more natural.
• Anything you made look weird (like a hand inside the screen area), you can easily undo by using the ‘History Brush’ with the history set before you made the screen selection.
(and PS—These photos aren’t really prepped… they’re just for example!)

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Still Lovin’ the Wii

Posted on January 23rd, 2007 by HuthPhoto.
Categories: Personal, Funny, Games.

We’re loving playing on the Nintento Wii that we got in late November. Was it worth chasing and standing in line for at Best Buy??… You bet!

Here are snaps of standing in line for the Wii.

PS: I hate my Treo’s camera… I can’t wait for the iPhone from Apple!

The best part of the wait was the people. Goofing off is a lost art for most of us these days, so it was refreshing to do something so weird as this and pull pranks on the folks who drove up (telling them we were in line for an ‘American Idol’ tryout… (see photos right)

We now have over 24 hours logged playing Zelda and it’s really been a fantastic time with Colin and Lydia to solve things together and fight the baddies. I never could have imagined in the old D&D 1970’s that this kind of game could have evolved for my kids!

Hey, and I got my Wii Fitness age down to the minimum of 20! Now just to hit the treadmill to make my body look worthy of that Wii age ;-)

Learn more:
Wii.com
IGN: Wii Launch Guide

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