I had to reconfigure my home network from 192.168.2.0/24 to 192.168.0.0/24 in order to support some IPsec policy exclusion stuff.  In the process, my MN-500 decided to stop forwarding packets from the Internet to the server.  Even after a reboot, it still was not happy.  I ended up removing the port forwarding rule, re-adding it and then everything was fine.

I've lost a blue tang, four false percs and a peppermint shrimp with no good explanation.  The other day I happened to glance at the base of a rock and saw some nasty looking worm-like thing protruding from a hole.  It had to be a good 4 inches long.  I didn't see a head, but it looked like a segment of a bristleworm.  I tried to pin it with my fish feeder, but it retracted back into the rock.  Haven't seen it since.  I'm wondering if this may be the culprit that's been killing off my fish ...

The brown algae problem now seems squarely under control.  The lights are on for only 8 hours at a time and I've dropped in 6 large turbo grazers.  Combine that with the phosphate magnet I threw in the sump and the water is looking more clear than the day I set it up.  Only problem is that the snails have zero concern for the coral and tend to knock my brain coral and some other pretty thing I got from Mark to the ground on a regular basis - small price to pay right now for having the tank looking good.

Of particular note ... I measured the phosphate levels the other day and they are still really high - over 1.0.  I'm going to measure again tomorrow and see if I've crossed some threshold and they've come down, but I think I'm still struggling to get the phosphates down - even after a number of water changes.

I'm trying to make sure that none of the links from Casa dé Hambone cause a new browser window to open up.  Personally, I hate Web sites that do that.  If I want a new browser window to open, then I'll Shift+Left Click to control it myself.

If you find a new window being opened, please let me know.

I've been developing my “workflow” in Photoshop Elements, and thought I'd share in case anyone is interested.  Before I jump in, let me just say that I highly recommend Scott Kelby's The Photoshop Elements Book for Digital Photographers.  It's a fanstatic step-by-step book that cuts through all of the theory and goes right to the heart of showing you how to do what you want to do.  If you want to learn the in's and out's of Elements, this not the book for you.  But if you want to immediately be productive in Elements and learn by doing, you can't go wrong.

Now for my workflow ..

1. Layer | New Adjustment Layer | Levels ...
1. Adjust the left and right sliders to the left and right edges of the histogram, respectively
2. Layer | New Adjustment Layer | Brightness/Contrast ...
1. Brightness -3, Contrast +7
3. Filter | Sharpen | Unsharp Mask
1. Amount 65%, Radius 4, Threshold 3

Some may say that my Unsharp Mask is a little aggressive, but this is what I developed when shooting up-close portraits of my kids and I tend to not get the focus exactly on the eyes.

I've been spending a lot of time chatting with a very kind and knowledgeable indivudal, Doug Kerr, on the subject of how my Digital Rebel calculates exposure when using a flash.  One of the most interesting aspects is that when taking a picture with flash, you are actually getting an exposure that consists of both ambient light and the flash.  This is illustrated this timeline (ignore the absolute times and treat them as relative:)

 

Consider a subject that is backlit.  If you take the picture without flash, you will end up with a silhouette of your main subject.  If, on the other hand, the camera allowed you to only use flash - and not ambient light from the background - your main subject would be properly exposed, but your background would be underexposed.  By combining the two - flash and ambient light - in a single exposure, you end up with both your main subject and the background properly exposed.

From my discussion with Doug, it goes deeper than this, but this was definitely enough to help me understand how flash interacts with the camera's main metering system.