Photoshop Magic

This was more work than you could ever imagine. The sky, bluffs, and road were all edited separately.

One of my first attempts at cloning, probably about four years ago.  Check out the backgrounds.

D1 - First Year Summary

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know I'm really bad at updating the blog.  I've scraped together some photos to share with you all.  Hopefully, this will give you a pretty good idea of what I've been up to for the past year.  

I don't really have much to say about the classes that weren't Restorative Dentistry, despite them being 75% of my class time.  You all probably don't care that much about Histology, Biochemistry, Neuroanatomy, etc.  Not to mention, I don't have any cool pictures to go along with this post. BORING.  

So, Restorative Dentistry is the most important class in dental school, so much so, that we have it every semester for a very long time.  As such, these classes are affectionately called "resto" (rhymes with pesto) or "RDI" (or RDII, RDIII, RDIV...).  The first semester is RDI, and I had such a great time.  We spent the majority of our time doing what is called waxing.  Waxing is a step in the fabrication of a crown, but it is really helpful when you are learning the shapes of teeth and how they fit together in the mouth.  During our first week, we were given a fractured maxillary central incisor and told to recreate the missing portion out of wax.  

Here is what mine looked like:

By the way, the fake mouth is called a typodont.  The teeth are interchangeable, so we can easily replace them if we mess something up.  Trust me, we replace a lot of teeth.  We waxed up all sorts of teeth during the first semester.  Here's a shot of the waxing instruments as well as most of the waxing projects before I turned them in:

We also got our first opportunity to work with amalgam during the first semester.  For those of you that don't know what amalgam is, it's an alloy consisting mostly of mercury, silver and copper that hardens when it is shaken together.  It's one of the most biocompatable materials we have available, and it is close to the natural hardness of teeth, which is important, too.  It is also relatively inexpensive.  

This was definitely one of my first amalgams.  Nothing special, anyone can do something this easy.  We also did our first provisional crowns during the first semester, but I have better pictures of my second semester stuff, so you'll just have to wait...  The following restoration is a bit more complicated, but it is still first semester material.  In fact, this one was supposed to get turned in, but I wanted to bring it home and take a picture of it and it never made it back.  I still got my A in the class, so I think I'm in the clear.  

So, that's pretty much all of first semester.  I personally felt that it was a very easy introduction to the shapes of teeth and a few common dental materials.  Oh, yeah, this was also in December:  

Second semester (RDII) was much more difficult.  Dr. Boberick pushed us very hard and I always felt like I was behind on my labwork.  The course focused primarily on restoring decay i.e. drilling and filling as well as fixed prosthodontics (crown and bridge) and boy was is long.  We had class from January to June, for a total of six months.  It was intense, but I learned a lot.  Most importantly, I had a great time doing so.  I've definitely chosen a great career.  

Anyway, getting back to pictures, here's some of my first cavity preps:

Here are a couple of shot of large amalgam restoratations.  We did a lot of these, but a bunch of upperclassmen have said that these types aren't very common. Good practice, I suppose.

Once we moved onto crown and bridge, we spent a lot of time doing crown preps and then making provisional crowns out of acrylic.  Acrylic is basically a polymerizing plastic, which is also used in fake nails.  You've probably smelled the inside of a nail salon.  Imagine how it would smell to have 128 people in one big room mixing their own acrylic.  It was awesome...   Can you tell which of the two teeth below are temporary crowns? One is much better than the other one, but I'd bet they are both clinically acceptable.  

The final project for RDII was quite intense, but left me very satisfied once it was competed.  We were required to to turn in two preps for a bridge, as well as a provisional bridge for those preps, a crown prep, and a provisional crown and gold crown that fit on it.  Here's the three unit bridge:

For the gold crown, we didn't use gold because it wasn't going in a patient's mouth.  That said, it still polished up quite nicely.  I was very proud of the quality of work I was able to turn in for this project.  The first picture is my roommate Chris polishing his crown.  The next two photos are my finished products.  

That's it.  Let me know what you think.  If you have any questions, ask!

My Sister, The Scientist

Despite claiming to not enjoy science, my youngest sister entered a few science fairs this year. She did quite well, and I am proud of her. Her project had to to with the chelation of metal ions by insulin to increase its shelf life. She was awarded a $20,000/year scholarship to Westminster, and the honor of representing Northern Utah at the International Science and Engineering Fair sponsored by Intel. At that fair, she received an $8,000 scholarship from the United States Army. Please join me in congratulating Frances for her hard work, and my parents for their continued support.

I took this photo last summer, but never got around to editing it until now.

A bit of handywork

Two of my three Xbox 360 controllers have been unhappy recently. The buttons on one stopped popping back up after they had been pressed down. The other controller had the misfortune of being the one I was using when I lost my 10th straight game in Halo 3's fiesta double experience playlist a couple of weeks back.

I had two controllers in need of repair, so I bought a special tool online so I could undo the screws that Microsoft uses (tamper resistant Torx, size T8, just in case you care). Long story short, when I was putting the controllers back together, I realized I could mix and match the pieces from the different colored controllers (white and black) to make a unique look.

I was so pleased with the result, I took a couple of photos.

Spring Cleaning v3

If you can't tell, I'm having a pretty good time here... More photos! This time we have a selective desaturation and an abstract.

Spring Cleaning, v2

These photos didn't really work well with the last post's somewhat unintentional nature theme. The previous photos just so happened to come from the same folder (surprising, I know) and I felt that a new post was appropriate.

Spring Cleaning

So, here I am, once again, looking through my hard drive and finding some pretty cool pictures that I've taken in the past. It is an unfortunate occurrence in this digital age, that after taking hundreds of photos and then dumping them on the external disc, many get forgotten and never get to be shown the love of photoshop. Hope you enjoy a couple of old ones I found.

La Perrita

Summer Fair Entries

So, every year I enter some photos in the Davis County fair. I'm not going to lie, I have a love/hate relationship with the judges. They really make me angry. Last year, I entered one of my favorite photos ever, but someone gave me the wrong ribbon (first place was clearly circled on the paper). A few years ago, I didn't have a single photo place, but I somehow managed to win the special prize for the best macro photograph of the entire fair. The prize was given out by an independent judge from the Nikon corporation. For the record, one of the judges told me that he didn't like my use of depth of field in the photo. I think I'll dig around on the hard drive and find a copy of it...


In any case, that's all in the past. This year, I'm pretty proud of my entries. Here we go!

The final result for this photo was a third place. The judges said they liked my execution of the image, but that the cropping wasn't tight enough. They wished I had cut and inch or so off the right side so that the half leaf wasn't there to detract from the composition of the picture. Very sound advice, if you ask me.


This photo did not place. I was told that the focus wasn't sharp enough, and that the lighting was too flat. Also, it might have been too much of a close up.



This photo received a second place. As I predicted, the judges wanted to see a longer depth of field. One judge told me that the photo was "heavily unbalanced" with the left side of the bottle out of focus like it was. He suggested showing both sides of the bottle to add more balance to the image. I was also told, even though I think it is a cop out, that images are judged on subject recognition, and that it was difficult to determine what this photo was. What does it look like, fool?

Old photo, new tricks

So, I took this photo about three years ago. However, at the time I was completely clueless about all things having to do with photoshop and photo editing. It doesn't matter how hard you try to take *amazing* pictures straight out of the camera, because in reality no matter how good your photo is, you can always make it look better in photoshop. I decided to revisit my old photo, and use some of the tricks I've learned to see what I could come up with.

Happy Presidents' Day!!!

I'm very glad to have a long weekend (even though it isn't until next week), courtesy of Washington and Lincoln. Kudos to those dudes, I appreciate the extra day of sleep. In light of this wonderful holiday, I'm uploading a photo that I took this afternoon while working on an assignment for my photo class. I'm not really sure how it happened, but somehow I got this amazing photo. For me, I think the coloring makes this one fantastic.

Back to Business

My original intention for this blog was a place to showcase some of my photos. I haven't really done as much of that as I'd have liked to... but today's a new day, and I'm going to post a couple of photos.

This semester I'm taking a digital photography class so I can fulfill the fine art general education requirement, otherwise I wouldn't be able to graduate this May. Our first assignment was due on wednesday, and we'll have a critique on everyones' photos tomorrow. I'm really excited for this, and I'm not exactly sure why. I definitely got out of my comfort zone for this project. We were supposed to use depth of field to help portray the emotions of disdain, distrust, and resistance. Emotions are hard to portray, whether you do it abstractly, or have your friends come over and make faces for you to take pictures of. Usually, I take photos of things that are pretty, don't move around a whole lot, and most assuredly don't express emotion. (Not to say that you can't use an object to illicit an emotion from someone.) Nevertheless, I think my photos turned out pretty well. Please post a comment and tell me your favorite one, and why.

Summer, where hast thou gone?

Well, here I am, nearly done with my first week of classes. It's always hard to get back into the swing of things. That said, I feel as if I should reflect on my accomplishments of the summer.

Right after finishing up spring semester I drove to Albuquerque with my Dad. My sister was competing in the Intel International Science Fair. She did quite well, placing 3rd in the Biochemistry category. The major reason I wanted to go to New Mexico was because I wanted to visit White Sands National Monument to take some photos. I took a day trip down to White Sands, and took some excellent pictures. Later, I was disappointed to find that I had inadvertently left my camera's ISO setting at 400, which resulted in some excessively noisy photos. I originally planned to watch the sun set from White Sands, but I decided to head back earlier and save that for a later date. Really, though, it's an incredible place:


As soon as I got back from New Mexico I immediately downloaded the Halo 3 Multiplayer Beta, and proceeded own n00bs. I felt that the beta build played really well, and took a little bit more skill than Halo 2. The new weapons and gadgets made for new and exciting gameplay situations, where ingenuity frequently ousted the standard run 'n' gun feel of the Halo franchise. I also found myself so thankful to spawn with an Assult Rifle, as compared to the traditional starting weapons of Halo 2, the SMG and Battle Rifle (underpowered and overpowered, respectively). My only gripe in the Beta was that the respawn system seemed to have a few kinks: the guy you just owned spawned about 30 feet from where you killed him, and is chasing you down before your shields have finished recharging. Spanking the same guy over and over again gets a little boring after a while... ;-) In any case, I throughly enjoyed the Beta, achieving the rank of Major.


While I played Halo by night (my personal motto is Carpe Noctem), I went to class during during the afternoon. After having the most wretched experience imaginable while taking a lab class during the summer of '06, I swore I would never do it again. Unfortunately, I realized that I should take a couple of classes to make my senior year at the University of Utah a bit easier. I ended up taking a ceramics class as well as intermediate writing. I rocked them both. Ceramics was incredibly fun. For the final project we needed to make a three dimensional object out of slabs of clay. Everyone in my class made a box or cube, that is, everyone except me. I made a dodecahedron. I think my classmates hated me, however they had the last laugh: I spent about three times the amount of time in the studio.

The rest of my academic time was usually spent sitting in front of my laptop plunking away at the keyboard or perusing sources I was using to write my papers. The theme of my writing class was Wealth and Poverty. I had just finished the book Bono: In Conversation, in which Bono spends a great deal of time talking about African debt and poverty. Following his lead, I chose to reseach, report, and argue on this topic. I couldn't have picked anything better to learn about. I did struggle with the large amounts of information, much of which was highly politicized, and the depth of the issues on the African continent. My final paper focused on the current debt of African nations. I was pleased to receive a perfect score on this paper. Thanks to my friend Megan for helping me with the editing (sorry, Megan, but I didn't take out all of the passive voice you underlined).

I was also able to take off on a few trips this summer. Most importantly, I was able to hang out with my friend Thomas, whom I met in Zion National Park. Along with Tommy's dad, Brian, we hiked the narrows, 16 miles down the canyon about half of that in the Virgin river. As if that wasn't enough physical activity for the weekend, the next day we went water skiing at Lake Powell, and then spent the night at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. It was an incredible three days. In addition, I went to Montana and Washington. Good times.

I've already touched on this, but I wanted to go back and talk a little bit more about my experiences a a photographer during the past couple of months. This summer, I have really been able to come to terms with my camera, especially with my macro lens (100mm f/2.8 for those of you who care). My familiarity with my equipment has allowed me to get some great captures in situations that previously would only have resulted in a poor photo. In addition, my skills in using Photoshop are constantly getting more refined. Last year I told myself that I wouldn't get another lens until I had built up a significant gallery of photos that I was truly proud of. While I never actually defined what "significant" was, I have definitely made progress toward that goal this summer.

This post is much longer than I anticipated, however, I've barely scraped the surface. The best parts of summer have been the little things: weekly lunches with friends, unlocking xbox achievements, halo parties, going to concerts, hanging out with friends until 3 am, slurpee runs to 7-11, and most importantly sleeping in until noon. It was an awesome summer!