Photography

Most of the photos in the DerangedTaco.com Gallery (DTG) were taken with my Fujifilm Finepix A610 point-and-shoot camera. I plan to purchase a DSLR camera in the future.

The old DT Gallery, prior to the website's renovation, seemed to favor quantity over quality. But my revised photo selection process involves sorting through a set of photos in Adobe Bridge CS4, archiving the mediocre ones, and then applying minor tweaks to the remaining images with Camera Raw (a component of Adobe CS4). Only the best photos end up getting published. And Photoshop is usually kept out of the process, because I am a strong believer in ethical digital photo enhancement. My goal is to make the photo appear on the monitor like how it was in real life - I never "cheat" by artificially boosting the quality of my pics.

In addition to Camera Raw tweaks, I will also sometimes build panoramas, which serves as a practical alternative to purchasing a more expensive camera with a wide-angle lens). I construct these panoramas by taking a series of photos and then merging them together using a feature in Photoshop called Photomerge. An example is shown below.

A selection of random photos from the DT Gallery are displayed below. Also see the Top Photos album (note that the Top Photos and the Top Graphics albums are different than the Top Rated list - the latter is based off of user ratings and includes images from the entire gallery).

Graphics

My interest in graphic design has always been an important part of DerangedTaco.com. Over the years, I've gained a good understanding of Adobe Photoshop, and have applied that knowledge to make some pretty cool sigs and other art.

A selection of random graphics projects from the DT Gallery are displayed below. Also see the Top Graphics album.

Gaming Screenshots

People ask about this all the time, so I'll answer this once and for all: I do not manually take the gaming screenshots that I put in the gallery. What I do is have Fraps automatically take a screenshot every 10 seconds while I play. Then, once I'm done, I sort through the captured screenshots using Adobe Bridge CS4 and select the best ones for inclusion in the DT Gallery.

Obviously, screenshots of games in the DT Gallery are not of my own intellectual property. I do not own the rights to these games. However, the sharing of these pre-existing works constitutes fair use.

A selection of random gaming screenshots from the DT Gallery are displayed below.