I am not awesome. Really.: Portraits of Mafia

Portraits of Mafia

Sunday, August 30, 2009 at 3:27 AM | Posted by Juwen

First day after the submissions of all my assignments and it is off to a good start for the mid-semester break. Although it is only a week with a short assignment due at the end of this week, it is at least a good time for me to take a breather. But not without it's drama. My last assignment is due on Friday 9:30 pm and I have already uploaded my code to my Unix account in uni and went there for my lab session as well as to have another quick run of my code to check if I have ironed out everything before submission. Running the program, all worked well...except again the stupid matching brackets. After inputting another random line of brackets, it still gave me the wrong answer. Was about to pull my hair out for that one. Good thing I manage to spot the mistake and thankfully that was a small one. Am quite happy that now that assignment is now out of my hands.

To kick start the wonderful mid-semester break, we have our group social in College Square and for the second time we played Mafia. This time however will eventually build up to the climax of the last game where, in one word, was EPIC. There is no way I can describe everything in words, you just have to be there to witness the "awesomeness" of true Mafia gameplay. We wished that someone was there recording the whole game but even then I think it wasn't enough to give the full picture and consequence of the gameplay. That was a Mafia-gasm moment.

Took some pictures and I've decided to give Aperture a go with the 30-day trial thing before deciding on which program I am going to use for my photos. At first glance, I don't like how things are laid out and there is an awful lot of mouse clicks for you to apply presets to your pictures as compared to Lightroom. Presets in Lightroom seems easier to apply and view without having the need to actually apply them to see the results. With Aperture, the apply button is going to be your best friend. But, having said that, there are some usefulness to it. The presets are at the level of the categories that are available for you to tweak, so for example, there is one category for the contrast, definition, saturation and vibrancy. So if you have a particular preset (eg. High Contrast), you can apply that and say that you have a particular preset you use for black and white that normally be used for a not-so-high-contrast photo. You can click that preset for black and white and you have the best of both worlds.

So with Aperture, as far as I know, has the ability to have lots of small building blocks at your creation and disposal at the expense of loads of mouse clicks just to see how it all works out. Lightroom, on the other hand, has much bigger building blocks and so you might have lots of presets because you may one some characteristics from one preset but another characteristic from another at the benefit of speedy previews of the presets. Now I don't know which to use...crap.

Here are some of the Mafia who have been shot by a K20...post-processed with Aperture