As if we need evidence. It’s dry up there.

Carlon Falls 2006:

Carlon Falls 2007:

Now here’s a reason to post: to preserver a favorite recipe!

Years ago, when we first moved to San Francisco, Beth worked as a cook at two restaurants on Haight Street—The Grand Piano and later at the Yellow Rose Cafe. Both are long gone and mostly forgotten. But we’ve been making the Yellow Rose recipe for banana bread ever since.

I hand wrote it on one of the blank pages in the bake of my first copy of the Moosewood Cookbook. (Am I dating myself yet?) This was one of my main cookbooks from my college days and into the ’80s, and it eventually got thoroughly worn out and tattered. So I copied it to a blank page at the end of the Broccoli Forest Cookbook. (See another theme here?)

Which brings us to tonight, with some really, really ripe bananas that were crying out to be made into bread. But where was th recipe? Broccoli Forest is also falling apart—less from overuse than just getting old. Regardless, where was the recipe? After pawing through the cookbook shelf and finding some loose papers, I found it.

But now I’m putting it on the blog so I’ll have a backup copy I can always find. And so can you. I heartily recommend, the Yellow Rose Banana Bread:

• 325 ° oven
• greased loaf pan
• gather ingredients:
  

  1½ cups	all-purpose flour
  1 tsp	salt
  1 tsp	soda
  1 cup	really ripe bananas
  1 ½ cups	all-purpose flour
  ½ cup	white sugar
  ¼; cup	melted butter
  1	egg
  ¾ cup	chopped walnuts

• sift together the dry ingredients
• beat together the wet stuff, making sure to really mash up the bananas
• mix in dry ingredients thoroughly
• stir in the walnuts last
• bake for 50 minutes

Voila!

I’m back. It’s been a nice time away from blogging. Actually, its been a period of working too hard. More on that later?

Meanwhile, check out these panoramics I shot from Treasure Island last week.

I grew tired of the limitations of the photo stitcher that Canon bundled with their cameras, so I went looking for an open source alternative and came up with Hugin, which I used for all these images.  It is a lot more work to get an image out of it, but it is so much more capable.

I tried embedding Flickr slideshows on this blog a while back, but the cookbook I used didn’t spell out all the necessary details. Now Lifehacker has posted a link to another service which seems to work much better. Check it out:

Created with Paul’s flickrSLiDR.

HDR images have recently caught my interest. At their best they are stunning, evocative images that appear from a different part of your brain—someplace after you’ve peered into the shadows and squinted through the glare. Or else some place that just dropped acid. Some really cool stuff and some weird misses. I was intrigued.

I check into it and find I have the low rent ingredients to try it myself. My Lumix FZ7 supports exposure bracketing, and it can capture TIF images. Troy clued me into Qtpsfgui “a Qt4 graphical user interface that aims to provide a workflow for HDR imaging” and I’m off to the races.

And here are some of my early results from shots I took along Folsom Street.

This image taught me the use of single image (raw or TIF) HDR images. The 3 exposure image on the left has fun with a vivid, blurred, almost painterly effect, while the single exposure image on the right uses the color depth to see into the late afternoon moment.

Another single exposure image that worked out:

There were plenty of experiments along the way that you won’t see that were part of the fun. Qtpsfgui? Lots of rough edges. Slow. Hog. Endless incomprehensible knobs and levers to frob. The name, qtpsfgui, has about as much elan as the UI. After a while I found a handful of combinations that were useful. The rest? A waste of space as far as I can tell, that would melt away in a decent UI. But hey, the UI can get better. The image processing works (slowly) but the results often need help. I’m sure that’s where Photoshop comes to the rescue.

But I’m having fun with my low-rent HDR rig.

Which is actually my oldest home on the web. Imajazz.com was my first domain and I still use my kc@imajazz.com.

For months now I’ve been uncertain about the future of my personal blogging. This move is one step towards re-purposing and reinvigorating this channel.

The immediate motivation for the move is to let me directly tinker with my blogging tool. At blogger.com everything is taken care of for you, and there is less room for customization. Here I run the whole show. I install and administer the WordPress tools that publish this blog. I can configure the site as I want. I can install plugins to extend the basic functionality. Already I’m playing with Flickr integration and sitemaps. I may try out some polls and other goodies. WP also provides some content management capabilities that will allow me to publish other non-bloggy pages that will be integrated into this site’s navigation and share the same design.

But who really cares about KC’s blog? Almost no one. But I have my own reasons for experimenting and building a better home nest.

 One big reason for vacating my blogger blog is to exploit WP customizability and array of plugin extension.  My very first attempt was to install a blogger import plugin, but that isn’t going so well yet.  I have managed to install a cool Flickr plugin that I hope will let me publish my photosets here–when I figure out how all this works!