The T3sk3y Defenestrator

I saw this out my window as I was heading to bed tonight and had to whip out my new Canon 70-200mm f/4L lens and take a picture of it:

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When I went to Bangalore, India in November 2005 on a business trip, I brought our new Canon Rebel XT along and shot a ton of pictures. Following good DSLR practices, I shot all of my pictures in RAW format so I could get maximum quality and so I could fix problems more easily.

Every night, I did a very quick conversion of the pictures from RAW to JPEG so that I could upload them to my SmugMug site. This allowed everyone back home to get a near real time update of my travels.

The problem was that I didn’t spend a lot of time – heck, any time – on editing. There is a huge difference in RAW converters – and if you don’t have them set up right, you may not get the best quality. The colors may not be accurate due to incorrect white balance, the sharpening may be too much or too little, the exposure may be wrong, or many other things.

The front gate at Mysore Palace

I always intended to go back and do it right – and didn’t get around to it until now. Using Canon’s free Digital Photo Professional, I went back and edited all of the pictures to get them how I wanted them. I mainly did it to get used to using DPP – since it’s widely claimed to have the best RAW conversion of any program. This makes sense since it comes directly from Canon. The downside is that the workflow is odd.. at best.

I also used a beta of DxO Optics to fix some images with severe lens distortion – typically when I had my Canon 17-85mm IS lens zoomed all the way out and stood too close to my subject.

The results of my conversion were great – see for yourself!

Before:

LOTS of barrel distortion at 17mm!

After:

Corrected with DxO Optics

Check out the rest of my gallery on my SmugMug gallery: Link

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Now that I’ve recovered from my “Pork Hangover”, I figured it’s probably a good time for a recap of that mobile celebration of all things Iowan – RAGBRAI. Heather, John Markey, and I joined about 25,000 others to ride the approximately 190 miles from Cedar Falls, IA to the Mississippi River at Bellvue, IA.

This year was different than past years for many reasons. For starters – the weather was deliciously cool – it never really got above the low 80′s. That’s a welcome change from the sub-Saharan conditions last year when it hovered around 100 the entire time.

Heather and John at Lunch on Thursday�

The second reason was actually about 400 reasons – each of the 400 miles that I put on BEFORE showing up at RAGBRAI. Yeah, things like that are easier when you are in better shape. Last year, I think I maybe rode 75 before showing up. This allowed us to ride much faster, get in to town earlier, and relax more.

Finally, we rode with a great bunch of people – The Balance Fitness Cycling Club. Balance is a fitness studio in South Minneapolis that organized a charter for the trip and signed up about 20 for the ride. They provided a big Ryder truck to haul our gear around, a plush air conditioned charter bus for the trip from Bellevue to Minneapolis, cold beverages and snacks when we pulled in to camp, and above all – good company. They were very welcoming to the three of us – especially considering that we joined the ride after the halfway point.

The Balance team had two camps – Team Fast, and Team Medium. Team Fast consisted of the serious Pro-level riders, the triatheletes, and the fastards in the group. Team Medium was, well, everybody else. We were absolutely in Team Medium – but we had to stay pretty motivated to keep up with them. This wasn’t a huge deal since we really only rode together on Saturday.

We started Wednesday evening in Cedar Falls, IA. We got a ride down and showed up right at dusk. We got our tent set up and headed off to the beer garden for our first bit of RAGBRAI culture.

Thursday was an extremely flat day that involved 62.1 miles of riding between Cedar Falls and Independence, IA. Heather didn’t make it out of the campground without getting a flat tire – we hoped this wasn’t a bad omen. The route took us down a ten-mile stretch through Amish country where there were lots of buggies, people making hay by hand, and little kids lined up by the picket fences in matching wide-brimmed hats. We pulled in to town about 2 PM and after showering in the local carwash (converted especially for that purpose) – we went in to downtown for some food and relaxation.

Relaxing after the ride on Thursday

The only bad weather of the trip hit us that night – a pretty good thunderstorm rolled through right at bedtime chasing us all to our tents. We stayed high and dry due to good tents and due to our bikes being in the truck – but one of our trip organizers had a flattened tent from the ordeal.

Friday was a grey damp day after the storm with a little more wind. It also had more hills than the day before. The route took us 63.2 miles from Independence, IA to Dyersville, IA. The second day is always the toughest – things are always a little sore the second day. Again, we were scarcely on the road before another blowout (John this time) slowed us down.

Friday was also the end of an era – it was the last day for Mr. Pork Chop, a RAGBRAI legend. Apparently he’s been having more and more difficultly keeping up with the rigors of slinging pork chops to the masses and he decided it was time to retire. Fortunately, his kids are going to keep the pink pig bus on the road next year.

Heather and Mark by the Pork Chop sign�

We rolled in to the ‘Field of Dreams’ town (Dyersville) mid-afternoon again, and got set up on the far corner of town. We rallied our team and made a beeline for the waterpark in town to get cleaned up and to beat the heat. Since we were so far away from the center of town, the shuttle buses ran about every hour and we had to sweet-talk the security guard into giving us a ride in for dinner. That night, a local legend in his own mind entertained us in the beer garden. Seriously, this happened:

Singer: “Do you want to hear one of my new songs?”

Crowd: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!

Rolling down the hills on Saturday

Saturday morning was the hilliest but the shortest of the three days we were riding. It was 57 miles from Dyersville to Bellevue, but it contained over 3000 feet of climbing. There wasn’t any giant hills – but it was a lot of smaller ones. We got a very early start (7AM!) and put in 28 miles through rolling hills before breakfast. The next 20 miles were some of the toughest of the route this year, steadily winding up into the foothills of the Mississippi valley. We grouped up with the rest of the team in the last town and rolled as a group into Bellevue where we dipped our wheels in the Mississippi River to conclude the ride.

Team Balance Fitness at the finish�

See the rest of the RAGBRAI 2007 pictures right here: Link

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