Dustin Barbour » tacoma

Zero Balance

Dustin Barbour — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 18:04:17 +0000

Three and a half years and over 80,000 miles later, my truck is paid off. Glorious, right? You bet your ass. To celebrate I’m going to wash and vacuum it and take it out for some photos.

In light of this newly found financial freedom, I thought I’d share a video with you about driving for “free.” It’s a little idealistic and so-called “financial gurus” always come off to me as big douchebags, but hey… the principles are sound and not something to ignore. I don’t plan on having another car payment in the future because there is really no need to. Why lose money paying interest to the bank when the bank could be paying you interest on the money you’ve loaned them? (What? We loan our money to the banks and don’t “deposit” it as we think?) Oh right… impulse and emotion. That’s why I bought my truck and, three-plus years later, have learned my lesson. Debt is for suckers (as are brand new vehicles). Save your money for the things you want to buy. I think my next vehicle is going to be a motorcycle… lightly used and paid for in cash of course.

A CAFB Sunset

Dustin Barbour — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 01:40:13 +0000

This first one is definitely one of my favorite pictures up to this point in my photography career. It’s another HDR of my truck. I took this one at the departure end of runway 31R here at Columbus AFB. It was something of a rush to get out there for the picture before the sun set completely, but it turned out really well. The second picture is just a small demonstration of what Photoshop is capable of.

Natchez Trace Parkway

Dustin Barbour — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 01:29:03 +0000

Between Natchez, MS and Nashville, TN runs a 444-mile-long road called the Natchez Trace Parkway that is listed as one of the most scenic roads in America. The entire length of the Trace is a narrow two lane road and it features towering trees on all sides, open fields, swamps and other landscapes. Naturally, Wikipedia has a much better description of it so I suggest you read up on it there. I got onto the Trace at it’s nearest approach to Columbus, took it south to Jackson, MS and took pictures along the way. At one point I about got stuck in mud… two hours from home and without a tow rope… but my truck was able to pull out of it after kicking it into 4H and slinging mud everywhere. Pictures below.
Once in Jackson, I took my truck through a drive-thru car wash to get the majority of mud off of the body before getting onto the freeway. However, I still had a lot of mud on the undercarriage which I washed off today. There was an unholy amount of the stuff under there crammed into every last crevice available. I spent three hours trying to get it all and finally gave up accepting that it will still be there five years from now. On a side note, my truck appears to be my favorite photographic subject. I need something else to take pictures of. Maybe I’ll buy some more equipment, find some models and get into nude photography.

Experiments in HDR (Updated)

Dustin Barbour — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 00:47:29 +0000

I’ve done a lot of reading about HDR photography in the past and have always wanted to see what I could do using the technique. The only problem was that I hadn’t owned a tripod (pretty much mandatory for this sort of work) until yesterday. So today I took off on something of a sight-seeing tour of northern Mississippi. I took a lot of pictures, but most didn’t turn out nearly as I had intended. Consequently, I’m only sharing the four above. The first image was taken along US-45, the highway that runs through Columbus on down to Meridian, MS and then to the coast. The other three were taken on the west bank of the Stennis Lock and Dam just west of Columbus.

Per Wikipedia:

High dynamic range imaging (HDRI or just HDR) is a set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range of luminances between light and dark areas of a scene than normal digital imaging techniques. The intention of HDRI is to accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to shadows.

Next weekend I plan on hitting the Natchez Trace Parkway, a road identified as one of the most scenic in the country, to do some more photography. We’ll see how that turns out. Some of the pictures presented here were processed more than others, but each represents my memory of the scene pretty well. My favorite is the third one. Which one is yours? Do you have an opinion of the HDR technique?

Update:
I realize that my truck can look fake in these HDR pictures. So, as an exercise, I started playing with Photoshop a bit more and ended up with the following pictures. The first is a shot of my truck in a field of small yellow flowers… obviously. I think the truck looks far more realistic. This was accomplished in Photoshop with a layer mask and one of the original images underneath. I think I still prefer the more drastic images of my truck, though. The second is another shot of the lock. I thought this one looked great with the more extreme saturation and contrast. It doesn’t look at all “real,” but I like it.

Snow in Columbus

Dustin Barbour — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 18:29:24 +0000

After warnings that there was a chance of snow in Columbus (which I dismissed), I woke this morning to snow on the ground. Two inches, maybe? It had all melted by midday, but nevertheless… snow in March. I wish I had a garage.