Monday March 15, 2010

Last August 3rd, the only car dealer in town, Riverside Motors had a fire destroy their offices and showroom. Above was during the fast moving 20 minute fire. Below was taken less than 15 minutes ago and shows their new showroom/offices just about ready to move into. The rubble from the burn down was gone in less than two weeks and crews worked all during the coldest part of winter building this new building. It was moved to the back of the property and cars were moved up to the front. Since the fire the 'offices' were moved out to trailers not visible in the photo but to the left of the new building. Riverside also lost the GM part of the sales and service end of it with the GM restructuring. Too bad for the owners of all the GM cars and trucks in the area, like us, we have to drive to Sandpoint to a dealer there for GM service etc. About 35 miles away now. Riverside is now just a Chrysler/Dodge dealer service location. Pretty building though!

Photo below actually occurred last Wednesday evening. I only include it for the news worthiness of it. Kinda shows things happen here too, just like any other place, maybe on a smaller scale though.
The car with everybody standing by it was a Subaru that someone had driven to the Sheriff's office and for whatever reason admitted to having a rolling meth lab in the vehicle. That's why the hazmat suits and Fire department are also on site as the car was emptied of its cargo for inspection. They were all out there long after I went home.

Last weekend Sandy had a job related trip to Yosemite and took advantage of being in the area to get some pretty nice photos of the park. Although in our area we've not had any snow to speak of this winter, down in the area of Yosemite Sandy found a lot of snow is still around.
Sandy started a photo group on the photo site Flickr where she and I take photos of a subject of the week and post them there also and compare. She called it "anything you can do I can do better" and her subject for this week was the Forrest. We live in one now and she'd traveled to one. I'll have to post the shots I took later today or tomorrow.

On our Picasa Web albums I recently added some photos I'd taken over the years redone in the effect of "Tilt Shift". This is a technique that makes normal scale things/scenes look like a model or diorama set of the real thing. It really fascinates me. The professional way Tilt Shift started was to be used for Architectural and close up miniature photography. The recent popular way it's used is in adds and TV commercials, most recently is the add for Allstate Insurance where the house is viewed from above and the tilt shift is animated to be a video with the people and their 'toys' look like, well, like toys!
Luckily the effect can be replicated by one of a couple of computer programs instead of spending more than $1,000.00 to by the lens that does the same thing. I found a free program that I think works very well. Most of the on-line "how to's" talk of tweaking Adobe Photoshop to get the same results. As with many things like this, it still takes a creative eye to see the best results. I was going through photos on my computer and found about twenty I thought might look interesting in Tilt Shift view. I put 13 that I think came out pretty good on the web album.
You can check out my photos or just check out "Tilt Shift" images in a Google search, there are also some pretty interesting videos too! It has to be done in stop motion animation style since each photo is one to itself. Still looks good though!

Guess that's it for this week! Tad

Oh yeah, for those that 'par take', Happy St. Patrick's Day, don't forget to wear green!