So, if you've been to my blog before, you may have noticed I changed the design. I had to change templates anyway, in order to take advantage of the horizontal page link bar, so I went ahead and changed my banner/header, which I'd been thinking of doing. It's a bit more vivid, and significantly less mellow than it was before, but hey, I guess I was just in the mood to "pop". I usually don't discuss my other hobbies here, but I'm about to make an exception... just 'cause :-)
So one of my other hobbies is photography. It is relevant to this blog because I use my digital photos, although sometimes with heavy post processing, to make the artwork for my blog. In this particular case, my new banner is a crop of a macro photo I took when I first bought my digital camera, a Pentax Optio MX4 (which I still use btw: 4mp and 10x optical zoom, for those who care). The subject was a kerchief that was layed directly on the lens to test the macro feature; turns out it really can focus at Zero cm from the lens, which is pretty uncommon, I think even now. The crop and soft focus was done in picasa, then the semi-transparent background for the text, plus the text itself, was added using PhotoStudio 5.5, which came with my old printer, if I remember correctly.
I do feel slightly guilty about the giant photo background, probably because it's only a few months ago since I got off the dial-up myself, but I seriously doubt there are too many folks reading this at all, let alone being on dial-up still, so I'm sticking with it like this for awhile.
