Author: Sarah Northway

We finally got a full day of rain.

Everyone has been saying we’re going to get weeks of it but before today we’ve just had 5 minute spurts. I’m a pretty solid BC boy in terms of the rain. When a month goes by without a full day of rain things start to feel wrong. Victoria doesn’t rain enough for me in the summer either. Blue sky is dull. Nature needs to mix it up a bit to keep things interesting.

I was hoping I’d get to go kite-boarding today because it was a little stormy but once again the wind didn’t pick up. This was the 31st straight day of not enough wind to go kite-boarding for those keeping score.

So instead of doing something we just hung about the house and enjoyed the rain. I took a ton of pictures. Almost all of them from the deck. Although there where dry spirst where I got to sorty farther afield.

We’re skipping full-moon tonight. We actually thought it was last night and went down to had-rin and everything, but it turns out it was postponed a day because the King turned 80 yesterday. Foolish us. Foolish us. Anyway we got to enjoy the beach under the full moon without the throngs. It is a beautiful beach. And we found my now favorite bar ever. It’s perched up the steep slope by the southern end of the beach. You climb up these steps leading steeply up from the beach to the place and it’s just a huge deck with low tables surrounded by mats. Up another level is the bar. No waiting staff to get in the way and no electric lights to dim the view of the moon-lit beach. It was a laid-back kind of place and Sarah and I drank Chang and cheap rum with our legs dangling into space over the side of the deck.

That and walking along the huge and totaly empty beach with the surf riding in over our feet were wonderful. Extremely romantic.

Just got back from an early morning stroll. There are birds around that make an owl like hooting noise. Sarah managed to convince herself that they are the greater coucals but I was not so sure.

Anyway I got up with the sun, or slightly before the sun, and could hear the hooting down the street. Along with the greater racket tailed drongos that make such a pretty racket in the mornings.

Op, there’s Beeya, hold on while I go get breakfast for 20 baht…

Back, I figured it would be a good opportunity to try to hunt down the hooting noise as well as get some pictures in the pleasent light of early morning. Momma came out with me and was generally roaming around and talking to other dogs. until we heard one of her pups squeal down the road. At which point she took off like a shot. This happens a couple of times a day. These puppies seem particularly trouble-prone to me.

I got a few pictures I like and walked along the beach some. When I got back to the house I heard hooting down the opposite street I’d come down so I wandered off that way. Looking quite the tourist with both binoculars and a camera hanging around me.

Anyway I walked past the law-office just a few doors down the street and started a conversation with a young Thai guy who was sleepily starting his morning. He said I looked like someone he knew.

We started talking about the internet. He’s doing some property scouting for a guy in Denmark and was complaining that there where no internets near the office/house. He genuinely seemed under the impression that the internet should just come down to every computer of it’s own accord… I suppose he’s right really.

Anyway I told him we get ours from the satalite dish and how much we pay. People here are extremely good at looking like they know exactly what you’re talking about when they don’t have a clue. Which makes conversations interesting but a little more circular than ususal. Serves me right for still not knowing any Thai.

So he suggested we get a big wire and run it from our place to his and split the bill. Which is so Thai, and an idea I’m very ameanable to. Of course wireless would be easier and he’s just down the road so I went and grabbed the laptop to see if the signal would make it there.

It did, but just. Anyway I helped him check his email and he gave me some banana’s. It was a pleasent morning.

I realised this morning that all the damage done to my psyche in Chiang Mai is gone. I am back to loving Thailand (Koh Phangan specifically) and the people here. We really are in a wonderful little slice of paradise.

Oh and by the way, Sarah was predictably right about the greater coucal. I caught one in the act.

Adobe Lightroom

Attn: Lawrence and other photographers! This is the tool for yous (if you haven’t got it already)! We finally got raw camera files working yesterday and have been playing around with them in Photoshop. Adobe has a new tool called ‘Lightroom’ in open beta right now – free download good until March or so.

Turn up the good,
turn down the suck! As the name suggests it’s meant for digital photo ‘development’, especially of raw files. Tweaking colour balance and lightness and such that with film would be done in the darkroom. So, I (Sarah) didn’t know this, but most fancyass digital cameras give you a choice to save images in a raw format that is unique to just about every model (and proprietary – grumble), but has a lot more information than the usual JPGs. It isn’t lossless bitmap quality, it’s more like.. well I can give you the best example:

You know, when you take a picture of a person’s face when the sun is behind them, the sky is all white and washed out? Even a lossless bitmap would have big patches of #FFFFFF in the sky and the best you can do is turn them into big patches of grey-blue instead. If you have the raw file, you can actually turn the exposure down, and suddenly clouds and hues appear – magic! The rest of the image would now be overexposed but you can easily adjust for that. Lightroom can do it all with a batch script, though it takes awhile to process each picture. It’s too much for our camera to do itself, so it uses a faster, dumber algorithm that sometimes results in big white splotches where the sky should be.

So – Lightroom has a nice interface, and really puts everything right where you can see it. Much easier to learn than Photoshop, in part because of the much smaller toolset. It does have its limits; you can’t fine tune curves enough or crank things up to 11, and there is no masking at all. But I just found a nifty dial to straighten photos without having to crop, and a crop tool that maintains the image ratio. Heaven!

We’re having fun with this, so please excuse if the next few pictures look a little oversaturated or surreal. Hell, there’s a vibrance dial: Vibrance = lots please!

Best Thai movie ever! (note: pool consists of 3 movies) You must all seek out and watch Last Life in the Universe when time allows. Amazingly beautiful. Not at all surprised to learn that the cinematographer was superfamous Christopher Doyle. I wonder what you have to do to get a guy like that for your film?

Director/writer Pen-Ek Ratanaruang made a second movie with Doyle called Invisible Waves that we’re downloading presently… or will be again once I relinquish the connection to BitLord.

Snorkling continues to be wonderful. We’ve been exploring the beaches up north from here and the visibility has been good. I’ve really grown an appreciation for the beauty of coral; the term “underwater garden” often comes to mind out there.

Put some new pics up, including more of puppies! Colin is busy taking pictures that contain both longtail boats and puppies. Hold on, I said something to Weas about it last night that sounded good: “noone can be frustrated with a puppy chewing her nose”.

Okay no, that wasn’t witty, I was just tired. And frustrated with Visual Source Safe, which as anyone who has ever used it knows is a sack of crap. But… ahhhh, puppies.

Okay so the yoga place up the street, in addition to offering courses on clairvoyance and astral projection, this spring will be hosting a week long workshop on Tantric Sex. You know, for those of you who needed another reason to come.

Those crazy yogans.