Spring

Springtime! I encourage families to meet me at gardens so that the lush greens and splashes of flower colors will be included in the photos. Here we are in Elizabeth Gamble Garden in Palo Alto.

Gardens are a good place to take advantage of bokeh - that is, the blurring of background and foreground to really set off the sharp focus of the subject, by using a lens with a low f/value. The blurred back and foreground creates a vignette (a roundish frame within the rectangular photo) that adds an aesthetic touch. If the back and foreground were in focus, the leafy detail would be too distracting to create a good vignette.

Yelp has finally caved under pressure to change its ways. Recall my fuming about review removal? (Reviews are "hidden", ie removed, if written by an unestablished reviewer.) Apparently many businesses were similarly fuming, bigger businesses with more clout and lawsuit potential. While Yelp maintains they have done nothing wrong, hidden reviews can now be viewed, in an effort to make Yelp process "transparent". At this point, I'd already given up on Yelp as a means to promote my business, so I feel rather numb to the news. This must be a PR nightmare for Yelp - it's even made it onto local evening TV news.