The Cake is a Lie.

This week I bought The Orange Box for Xbox 360 and have been playing a game called "Portal." It is probably the most intelligent game I've ever played. It has a gun but it's not a shooting game; The gun shoots the wall to create portals to other areas.

The game has an incredible physics engine that allows you to gain momentum by creating infinite portals. The premise of the game is to see what the test subject is capable of when offered a reward for successful completion of the test chambers. That reward is a piece of cake. In one chamber, you can find a section on the wall where another test subject has carved in the words "the cake is a lie" over and over again.

What I liked most about the game is that it makes you really think to try to figure our how to complete the puzzle. There are countless ways each puzzle can be solved so you can keep replaying the game but find a different way to win each time.

Fall Retreat

Last weekend I went to Talullah Gorge and Unicoi State Park with Chi Alpha and we had an amazing time!

Here are some of my favorite photos from the trip. I hope you enjoy them!

The Greer Warehouse on Old Woodruff

On Monday night, Josh and I finally got the chance to take some pictures of the old abandoned warehouse over by Taco Tuesday in Greer.

It was fast paced, exciting and interesting. I'm gonna be honest, the area was pretty sketch. But Josh said that you will oftentimes take some of the best pictures in areas just like those.

I'm dedicating these pictures to Kyle Lyons, because he spoke about doing a photoshoot there numerous times after we would go to Taco Tuesday.

Wenn in Bayern...

This weekend I will be going to a small Bavarian mountain town in the Blue Ridge mountains called Helen. It has excellant chocolate and beautiful half-timber houses. I'm sure it will remind me again of all the amazing sights that I saw while I lived in Germany this past summer.

Aside from just going to that town, I'll be returning to Tallulah Gorge/Anna Ruby Falls to take some pictures with the D40. I'm sure that I'll leave with some amazing photographs and maybe I'll even get some of them printed :-)



Now all I have to decide is whether I want to do an extreme hike down into the glacier-carved gorge or do some rock climbing closer to the falls. Either way, this weekend will be a blast and I'll enjoy seeing everybody again.

CS Veir

Guess what I got last night... : )

Black and White with Color Highlights

Recently I have been learning a bit more about Photoshop (more specifically, the freeware/open-source photo editor, The GIMP) and I learned how to reclaim some color from a photograph that I made into a B&W.

It's probably one of the oldest techniques known to digital photo editing so I won't go into any details on how to do it but needless to say I'm really happy with the results it produced.


I took this picture of my parent's tomato garden this past weekend and figured that it would be a good picture to help learn how to work with a color masking layer.

Food Photography Tips

This bit of advise came to me last night from my roommate, Josh (http://joshjonesphoto.blogspot.com/.)

Photographing food isn't really that tricky, but if you don't have the settings adjusted right, then your food will look disgusting, no matter how delicious it might taste.

Start off with having your food in a well-lit area. This is probably one of the biggest problems with most photographs in general. Low light areas will produce a bunch of noise.

Depending on your personal preference, adjust your exposure to around +0.3 or +0.7. The next step is probably the most important step in the whole process. Manually set your white balance. If you don't do this, chances are your food will have a yellow or green tint, depending on whether it is under fluorescent or incandescent lighting. Manually setting your white balance will also help you avoid getting over-exposed pixels.

Set your camera to your preferred ISO setting and set your shutter speed to something that will not be affected by you holding the camera as opposed to having it on a tripod (if you do a tripod shot, of course you should set a low ISO and your shutter speed can be as fast or slow as you like.)

Try to get an interesting angle. You don't like boring photography that looks flat. Try to keep your image fairly level and take your shot. Hopefully, your food will look even better and you will be satisfied with your meal!