deepbrew

Remember this photo I was drooling over? Well, I’ve got my answer on how he did it!  Hooray for helpful people!  Paul, the creator of that masterpiece, took the time to write a nice little explanation of how it’s down.

One of the amazing things about that photo, which I didn’t realize at first, is that the sky AND the inside of the wall is correctly exposed.  If you’ve ever try to shoot a nice blue sky before, you know that to keep that nice blue color you can’t expose it too long.  But if you do that, then the wall would be horribly underexposed.  So what you do is take several shots at different exposures and merge them in an HDR image.  You do that with Raw Shooter Essentials, found here and it looks like it’s FREE! Then you do some other adjusting in your photo editing program of choice, (Paul uses CS2), and when you’re done you have this amazing WOW kind of image.  Paul sent me to this website for a great tutorial on how to create nice HDR images.  Check out this adjustment Paul made on The Man.  Pretty wild.  However, I am still debating the “ethics” of all that photoshopping.  Anyway, thanks a lot, Paul!

UPDATE:  Here’s Paul’s magnif processing job on Kelvin.  Pretty sweet.

I found a fascinating blurb over at Amy’s Humble Musings on the Amish. Since I was born in a nearly Amish situation I’m always on the lookout for this sort of thing–commentary from the “outside.”

Amy thinks the Amish suspicion of technology may be more than raw legalism, and she’s drawn to their careful preservation of community.

Roz in comment 8 asks a real question: “In what way are the Amish the hands and feet of Christ? Are we not called to love our neighbors in our home areas, in our nation, and in the world? Isn’t that a HUGE part of living out our spiritual life? Does Christ give us an example of isolation in the world? It is my belief that He did not.” I agree with you 100%, Roz.

Comment 21: “…It is very hard to sit in church, when the girls in this very evangelical, reformed congregation, were wearing next to nothing and neither they, nor their mothers or fathers, saw anything wrong with it!…”

Comment 27: “Weeeelllllll, speaking as someone who, just yesterday, had an Amishman challenge my husband & myself to a drag race :) I’m going to suggest that perhaps the differences aren’t quite as different as they might seem. :/”

Comment 34: “….A friend of mine had a buggy slam into his car because the driver and his girlfriend were too busy watching their battery-powered TV/VCR.)…”

Comment 39: “…The Amish are a cult, pure and simple–no matter how attractive their simple, nonmaterialist lifestyle may seem…”

I love to hear what people have to say about the Amish/Mennonite culture. I know that many of you Mennonites out there hate to be thrown in the same box with the Amish, and you’re right, there are vast differences, but there are probably more similarities then we realize. Anyway, I’m not exactly sure what I’m trying to point out here (other than Amy’s post) except to say that I value perspectives from our friends in the Christian community.

I just bought An Idiot’s Guide to Understanding the Amish. Very fascinating! I think it’s written by a Mennonite, or ex-Mennonite, and feels a bit reactionary, but is also quite thought-provoking.

So, if you’re a Mennonite like me, and you go around on the internet reading stuff like Amy’s Humble Musings, you have LOTS of questions about being Amish/Mennonite/Anabaptist, and wish that Jesus would make a sudden unexpected reappearance and tell us all how we need do it. But I am sort of afraid he won’t do that, and that leaves it up to us, which is very scary, in a way, but also feels like a vote of confidence on his part, because obviously he thinks he’s given us (or is giving us) what we need to follow him, and do it to his satisfaction. Anyway, with these thoughts in mind, let us….. take a Sunday afternoon nap. Amen.

Update:  And if you’re an Amish/Mennonite/Anabaptist, you are also very proud of Floyd Landis, who just won the Tour de France, and whose sister Charity is a person I know from school.  Very interesting write-up about the reaction in Lancaster here.