McWilliams’ World

Okay…our shower/tub has been draining very slow lately. Since we own a fairly old house (nearly 100yrs old), we have a drum trap behind the tub. I’ve tried snaking from the tub, but getting little to no results. I’ve tried enzyme pipe cleaners, plunging, etc… only for it to work temporarily.

Today I decided to open the drum trap, and try snaking from there. Once it bit, I was worried that I wasn’t going to get the line back, since it wouldn’t budge, but I managed to haul it in. Much to my surprise I reeled in a real-looker.

Take a look:

It looks like some cap of sorts. How it managed to get in the pipes, we’ll never know. I’m feeling pretty confident this is the majority of my slow drain problems. Let’s hope!

Update:

Oops…forgot to mention how big this sucker is. It’s about 1.75in long, about 1/2in tall and about 1/2in wide.

Jake Ludington writes an article about fixing haze in digital photos which I somewhat disagree with.

I’m not sure that this technique is the best way considering he suggests using Photoshop’s Unsharpen Mask to remove the haze.

I typically use unsharpen mask to subtly sharpen an image any time I open it for the first time and usually use the following settings:

Amount: 100-200
Radius: 1px
Threshold: 10-15

I’d suggest using the following technique;

• After opening your image, use unsharpen mask (as I outlined above) to sharpen the image
• Duplicate the original layer and position the new one above it.
• Change the new layer’s transparency type to OVERLAY (even with this you greatly reduce the haze – just reduce the fill amount a bit)
• With the new layer selected, go to Filters > Other > High Pass
• You’ll have to play with the amount but I used 250% (max)

Here are the images:

The untouched image. I just sharpened it a bit with unsharpen mask.

Here we duplicated the image layer, set it to overlay. Looks better already.

Here we duplicated the original layer, set it to overlay and applied a high pass filter on that layer.

You can see the differences and no need to mess around with goofy unsharpen masks. Of course I didn’t play with levels (much better than playing with brightness/contrast) or any other tweaks but just a quick tip on freshening up your older images or making a hazy image pop.

If you’re curious, I have new photos up on my Flickr site. You’ll see some shots of the kids going off to school, McKennah’s 5th birthday, Jeff Weiss getting married (finally ) to his long time sweetheart Billie, and a few other misc. images.

If you want to be alerted when I have new image uploaded, just subscribe to my Flicker RSS Feed.

I’ve finally signed up with Flikr. This way I can share photos with you and not chew up my bandwidth.

I just posted a set of Christmas photos, so check them out.

Star Kids

Originally uploaded by mcwilliams132.

I was playing around a bit this morning with our new digital camera and the boys wanted me to take some shots of them posing with their lightsabers. So I took their shots and suggested we make a wallpaper of them.

Took me a while to get the lighting and swords right, but eh…good enough for 2hrs work.