From my lightroom files - 1984 sunset with fishermen and seagull at the harbor in Oxnard.

1982 photo from front seat in open cockpit aircraft over Santa Paula.

No, its not spring baseball, its my Oktomat camera. It will not properly advance film. Sometimes I get double exposures or more. But if I shoot multiple frames of the same scene, the result can be interesting. Above is a recent double exposed wall at a fast food restaurant. Below is a grayscale triple of the skylight in the Bradbury Building.

Sunday was a visit to the 23rd Spring Arts and Crafts Faire at Borchard Park in Newbury Park. Besides taking a few pics, I found myself chatting with various artists, especially ones where where doing some of their work in their booths. Enjoy the pics.

Flickr Photo Set.


Carl and Angela Carrubba, above, show off a tie-dye sheet at their Rainbow Tie-Dyes booth. Of course, I had to shoot a couple of happy face t-shirts on the iPhone and use PhotoTropedelic, below.

The first Apple iPad commercial was broadcast last night during the Oscars.

Link at Apple.com

UTube link

Four weeks till launch on April 3rd.

Here are my recent photos of Diet Coke, my favorite drink. Yes I have diet coke in the morning - no coffee.

Left is image of Diet Coke run through the iPhone PhotoTropedelic app. The original photo was converted to grayscale and contrast increased in Photoshop Mobile. Then the pics was opened in PhotoTropedelic and various settings tried.

Below is my Diet Coke can in front of lights at the Cal Trans building in downtown Los Angeles. Topaz adjust was used on this image.

My new happy app is PhotoTropedelic - 60s Pop Art in your pocket.

PhotoTropedelic is just too much fun. I've been cranking out wild 60s era graphics for almost two weeks now. Then last night, after working on this photo of the LA Theater with Happy sign, I was jolted back to the present. I have to write up a column on this $1.99 app.

Ok this is a good 5 star iPhone app. In fact, PhotoTropedelic has a control to add up to 170 stars to a pic. Now which app can beat that?



Photo of Jack in the Box antenna ball with flowers given the star treatment with PhotoTropedelic.

This list of features if very basic:

1-5 Detail Levels

Tropedelic or Image colors

4, 6, 8, 11, 16 or 22 colors

0-170 Stars

On/off controls for: Circles, Rays, Gradient, Color Merge, and Mirror left to right.

But its in the mixture of these controls that leads to either very wild or only slightly wild posterized images.

The workflow is very straightforward. From the main menu, first go into the Change Setting menu and pick the combination of the above features you want to try. Then either take a photo or pick a photo from the camera role.

PhotoTropedelic immediately begins the process of applying the settings to the image. At the end, it automatically saves a jpg version back to the camera role. In addition, PhotoTropedelic saves a PNG and PDF version.

Once saved, you have the options of reviewing the image, changing the settings and run again on same image, or move onto another image.

In no time my camera role was full of different PhotoTropedelic versions of the same photo. I did notice about a ten percent failure rate where the app would lock up and not save the image. But no problem, rerunning the same image with the same settings will output the same results. I tested this, getting the same result several times.

Output size seems to vary either 768 x 1023 pixel or full 900 x 1200 pixel. But this large size is nice when compared to the downsized 300-400 pixel size output done by many iPhone creative photo apps.


Frame grab on my Safari window to download PDF or PNG versions of my images.

Then there is the PDF output.

Unlike most other iPhone photo apps, PhotoTropedelic saves a PNG and PDF version of the images that can be downloaded to your computer through a wireless ftp feature.

Guess what, PDF is a vector based version of the image. It can be opened in a program like Adobe Illustrator and enlarged to any size. Just for laughs, I opened one PDF in Photoshop. After the graphic was rasterized it was 50 megs.

Bottom line. With PhotoTropedelic, I can now make billboard size graphics on a $1.99 iphone app.

Version one of PhotoTropedelic always included a watermark for the product. After many complaints, the version 1.1 release removed the watermark.

About 50% of the 75 reviews on iTunes give this app 5 stars. I suspect this app will continue to be developed onto the iPad. Also the developer, Larry Weinberg has a good web site with examples. There is also a good active flickr and facebook community.

PhotoTropedelic web site.


The PhotoTropedelic PDF version of Tiger, my cat, can be made into a poster or bigger.

Today was fun, but sad. I took the day off to shoot the Newbury Park High School Varsity Boys soccer play in the 2nd round of CIF playoffs. But they lost 0-1 to Esperanza HS. I had two boys go through the NPHS soccer program and after six years of countless matches, I skipped this season. But several friends and parents asked me to shoot. So I relented and did. Maybe if I only promised to shoot the CIF Finals......

Dotphoto link.

Tuesday 2/23 is free Grilled Sandwich day at Jack in the Box - buy a large drink, get a free sandwich. Jack' web site. Me, I couldn't wait. I drove through my Jack in the Box in downtown Los Angeles and bought a grilled sandwich. My bonus is this photo of Jack. Someone found a creative use for two pieces of chewing gum on a exterior poster. Better than underneath the desk. And yes, the Grilled Sandwich is good.

Today I was able to run eighteen images through Topaz Detail 2.

YES ITS MUCH FASTER! And I cheated, I tested it on raw images from a new 15 megapixel camera. In 16 bit, the images opened up as 80 meg files. My previous files were about 45 megs. I am very happy to report that Topaz Detail 2 processed the new images in half the time.



The user interface has been completely redesigned, but is easy to use. In addition, there are new presets.

Topaz Detail is designed to enhance image detail without introducing halos common with the unsharp mask. The photoshop plugin allows separate control over small, medium and large image detail.

My previous complaint about the program was the long processing time. No more.

Topaz Detail 2 sells for for $39.99 at http://www.topazlabs.com/detail/.


This organ is one of 18 images I ran through Topaz Detail 2. The photos were all shot last Sunday during a visit to the Stagecoach Inn Museum in Newbury Park. The photos are posted on Flickr.