Curiosity

While walking around in Havana I got to know an artist who offered to show me around in the city. One place he brought me to was the place he was raised at. It was the home of a woman he called his aunt. While we were resting there from walking in the sun all morning, my camera got more and more into the center of attention of some of the kids. After a few snaps and discovering themselves on the camera display, the guys started to have a blast. Snapping, looking, snapping, looking, snapping...I had the feeling they wouldn't stop if I wouldn't.

Google+ anybody?

I'm wondering who of my visitors are on Google+. If you are on it, hit me up right here. The way pictures are shared and presented on there is pretty nice so I can't resist adding them there as well.

Man Sitting in Doorway

Cuba, 2010

Website got hacked

Thanks everybody who sent me emails, Facebook & Twitter messages about issues with the website. My online store was using a popular script for re-sizing images. The script is called TimThumb and happens to be part of many Wordpress themes. This means that probably thousands of blogs are currently vulnerable. I think the whole thing started just a couple of weeks ago when Mark Maunder detected a security issue with this script. Shortly after the issue got public, my site started to behave strange in several ways. It's pretty weird when you suddenly have to fix things on your website even though nothing was officially touched. Anyway, I don't wanna go more into detail. If you are generally interested in what is going on with the timThumb problem, you could start reading on net-security.org.So now after resetting passwords, I simply deleted all scripts from my website and installed Wordpress fresh from scratch. Even though the blog looks almost same old (and messy) as before, everything behind it is very much up to date and very clean.The online store is not back to life yet and I won't rush with it as I'm thinking of revamping it.

Reading the News

A store in Havana. I'm not sure what things were usually sold there as the store was pretty empty. I think the owner was waiting for a delivery.

For this image I took a slightly different processing path from what I usually do. It's hard to explain as I mostly just follow my intuition. Technically I played a lot more with gradient curves. Those curves I apply only patch-wise by masking those adjustments out where I don't want them. If you do this to an image a lot I think it's important to look at the image in its whole from time to time to see if it still has an harmonic appearance. If a picture looses its "pop" or you're looking for some extra spice, the presets in Topaz Adjust are there to help you out.