My Parents Went to Disneyworld and All They Bought Me Were These ...

[nonelvis]

My parents just returned from the place where all aging Jews go for the winter: Florida. For some reason, even though my mother hates thrill rides and my father has weight and mobility problems, they decided they wanted to visit Disneyworld on this trip, and they just sent me a package of souvenir magnetic clips:



As columbina said, "It looks like what happened to Mickey after one of the cats got to him."



Posed on their own, some of the magnets achieve a strangely sculptural quality:


... or maybe they're just strange. Mickey's pants look a bit like a cartoon alien here.

Comments

[nonelvis]

You know, I was surprised by how grainy the photos were when I downloaded them to my computer, and I wondered what I'd done wrong, but was too lazy to reshoot them, knowing I could mostly fix the problem in Photoshop. These were taken using the camera's Auto mode, which automatically sets the ISO to ... something. When I went to go check, it unhelpfully listed the ISO as "auto."

[platypus]

Auto-ISO will bump the ISO up as much as it needs to in an attempt to get a hand-holdable shutter speed (generally 1/60 or better). Given that the shutter speed was 1/8 second, it must have maxed out, but I don't know where the cap is (or if it has a cap). That would be a pretty good result for ISO 800, even with some Photoshop (though it depends what you did to improve it -- what *do* you do about noise in Photoshop?). I mean, it's there, but it looks like a slightly cool effect rather than blotchy nastiness.

[nonelvis]

Ironically, I didn't need a hand-holdable shutter speed, because I just put the camera flat on the tabletop to shoot these.

The magic command in Photoshop was Filter > Noise > Despeckle. You can get fancier than that with other noise reduction filters, but I generally find that running Despeckle once or twice does all I need it to do, at least for photos meant for the web. I'd be much pickier if I planned to print these.

[platypus]

Ah, yes, I've occasionally used despeckle as a quick and dirty noise reducer. Sometimes it kills too much detail, but there are cases where it helps. I have a NeatImage plugin, but I'm very bad at using it. I think I have a tutorial link somewhere...

[kalleah.livejournal.com]

I've used NeatImage (http://www.neatimage.com/) for noise reduction before, although I compulsively shoot with as low an ISO as I can manage.

The only thing that I don't like about my Nikon D70 (other than that I can't fold it up and keep it in my pocket) is that the EXIF data doesn't contain ISO values. WTF?