"Pay attention to the world." -- Susan Sontag
 

Category: exploring place

Feathers on Friday: Zoo Atlanta Parakeets

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Let’s make Friday more colorful with these parakeets from Zoo Atlanta! Here’s some background reading on parakeets, budgies, and parrots at The Spruce Pets:

What are the differences between parakeets and budgies?

Are parakeets parrots?

If you’re in for a little science and genetics this Friday, take a look at Scientists’ Colorful Quest To Discover How Parrots Became Green which describes the relationship between blue, yellow, and green colors in these birds and the gradual the blending of the distinct colors to emphasize yellow and green.

Bye for now!

Northern New York landscapes (and Lightroom experiments)

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Last week, I bought the Lightroom Classic CC Video Book by Tony Northrup to learn more about some of the features of Adobe Lightroom CC that I haven’t used much or didn’t feel like I understood. The book and accompanying video cover a lot of ground, and I’m only through the first quarter or so, but I decided to try using what I learned so far about radial and graduated filters; adjusting hue, saturation, and luminance; adjusting sharpness; and working with noise reduction. The photos below were taken in northern New York during several trips to visit my family and seemed like decent landscape photos to try out some of the techniques. You can select the first image to begin a slideshow.

The videos and book show detailed practical examples of enhancing photos Lightroom. I learned a lot in a few hours, much more than I’ve been able to figure out on my own, and paused the video often to experiment with my own photos. Below are a couple of before and after images for comparison (the last two gallery pictures above). Click the first image and page through all four to see the effects of the adjustments I applied in Lightroom. One thing that fascinates me is that these adjustments helped restore the images so they match how I remember these scenes … or at least how I think I remember them!

Thanks for reading and taking a look.

Bye for now!

Oakland Cemetery Tornado Damage Update

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The Historic Oakland Foundation now has a page up on their web site describing some of the damage to the property with a few photographs from the grounds, here:

Historic Oakland Cemetery Badly Damaged

As they state and as I discovered on Saturday, the property is currently closed for the reasons described in the article.

If you’ve enjoyed my writing and photography on this site and have ever thought about supporting it, please consider making a financial contribution to Oakland’s rebuilding efforts instead. The address for donations (also listed at the end of their article) is:

Historic Oakland Foundation
248 Oakland Avenue SE
Atlanta, GA 30312

Here are a couple of photographs I took back in November, 2007, while researching the Cemetery’s history, showing the Fickett monument:

Here’s that same monument now (photograph from the Foundation’s article):

If you’ve been following my series of articles on the Cemetery or have looked at any of my Flickr pictures of the property, you know I consider it a treasured historical and community resource unlike anything I had ever seen until I started learning about it. If you’re able to make even a small donation to helping the Cemetery’s reconstruction efforts, you’ll be honoring the memories of those who are buried there and you’ll also be recognizing the critical significance of Atlanta’s few remaining truly historical sites. Give Oakland a bit of help and I guarantee you that the next time you consider the meaning of some place of history or community that matters to you, you’ll look at it with a greater awareness and understanding of what these places really mean to our lives, our neighborhoods, and our place in this world.

I’ll be resuming my articles on the Cemetery and the neighborhood’s history within a few days….