I’ve been, unsurprisingly, taking a lot of pictures of the baby recently. My dad visited a few weeks before the baby was born, and showed me how to adjust the white balance on my camera, and a little of what changing that can do. Pictures of the baby have made it even more clear to me how important correct white balance is to good pictures.

Here’s a striking example:

Here is a photo I took with the default white balance setting:	Here’s that same photo, corrected using Aperture’s white balance “shade” preset:	And here’s the photo I took immediately afterward, with the D5000’s “shade” white balance preset:

What a difference! Adjusting the white balance in post-processing is cool, but good techniques (and good tools) still really matter.

Very cool:
NASA - Hubble Space Telescope Captures Rare Jupiter Collision

This video is completely awesome.
Thanks to Bad Astronomy for the pointer!

Scenes from the zoo - The Big Picture - Boston.com.

As usual,

The Big Picture

                                    <p><a href='http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/02/at_work.html'>At work - The Big Picture - Boston.com</a>.</p>              [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="990" caption="Polishing Clocks in Medfield, MA"]<img alt="Polishing Clocks in Medfield, MA" src="http://cache.boston.com/universal/site_graphics/blogs/bigpicture/manuf_02_20/m01_16895561.jpg" title="Polishing Clocks in Medfield, MA" width="990" height="644"  />[/caption]

[caption id=”” align=”alignnone” width=”990” caption=”Working with gunpowder in Siliguri, India”][/caption]

[caption id=”” align=”alignnone” width=”990” caption=”Spinning silk in Kigali, Rwanda”][/caption]

So, between Cake Wrecks and Photoshop Disasters, my mornings are well supplied with schadenfreude, but this doughnut really takes the cake (so to speak). The ad would be a Photoshop Anti-Disaster if the real thing weren’t so sad. Go art director! Beautiful soft focus, appetizing-looking frosting, nice coloring and good background color.

Maybe we need to talk with the bakery staff.

Before: [caption id=”” align=”alignnone” width=”640” caption=”Gilchrist, Texas before Hurricane Ike, from Google Maps via WunderBlog”][/caption] After: [caption id=”” align=”alignnone” width=”640” caption=”Gilchrist, Texas after Hurricane Ike, National Geodetic Survey via WunderBlog.”][/caption]

[caption id=”” align=”alignnone” width=”640” caption=”Google Map of Gilchrist, Texas”][/caption]

This is Gilchrist, Texas. (hat tip to Wunder Blog for the pictures) Or, at least, it was. Now, it’s completely gone. No structures, no wreckage, no anything. Swept into the sea.

Putting aside the completely wrecked bridge, look at the places that used to be beachfront walkways. Where those houses were is underwater. I guess this is the risk you take when you build on a sandbar, but I can’t imagine losing my home in that way. I hope most of those people evacuated, and that they were summer homes with relatively little property left in them, but I bet some of them didn’t and some of them weren’t. I like the Jeff Masters’ idea of buying that land (where there is land, anyway) from the homeowners and making it a park (a la the Fire Island National Seashore). I think that’s a much safer way to help these people who’ve lost their property—without setting up the bad incentives which will cause it to be repeated in the next hurricane.

I wonder how much it would cost to buy all of NOLA and turn it into a park…

The Boston Globe’s Big Picture feature is neat. (Thanks to my favorite Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait, for the link to the volcano pictures, which got the RSS feed into my newsreader!)

But even better than volcanoes is volcanoes on Io:

The rest of the Jupiter pictures are also fantastic.

Rainbow in Sudbury
Originally uploaded by katsniffen

Little bits of beauty in the midst of suburban desolation make commuting bearable. I pulled into a parking lot to take this one.