Covers as good as the original…

It isn’t very often that I think a cover of a song is as good or better than the original.  It often comes down to how committed the later artist is to the song.

This has to be one of the best covers I’ve ever seen.  I just wish I could buy this song on Amazon to support them.

Without further adieu, the Cleverlys performing Walk Like an Egyptian:

This song makes you want to dance like an Egyptian.

Thanks for finding this one, Jared.

Cool Picture

I really don’t have anything impressive that I did to make this picture happen.  it was really just looking for the right picture at the right time.

I took it at the Heritage Park (This is the Place Monument) in Salt Lake City. I really thought the mountains, the lake and the train between them made for a fantastic shot.  Hope you like it.

My Restaurant Style BBQ Ribs

Hello All,

I’ve had some requests for my BBQ rib recipe. These instructions should produce some good results for pretty much anyone.

You may notice the omission of Honey in this recipe. You are absolutely free to add this.  It really depends on how sweet you like your ribs. Honey can be glazed onto the ribs at the end of the second “session” and bake for an extra 15 minutes.

You’ll also probably notice that these instructions are for the oven.  This is because the oven is a more precise cooking instrument.  This recipe doesn’t require particularly high heat, so a barbeque grill isn’t absolutely necessary.

If you know your barbeque grill really well (and can be accurate within 15 degrees), feel free to use it. A grill may be especially handy if you want to omit the liquid smoke and go with a mesquite wood or briquette (this method would be less foolproof, but would make you a BBQ legend if you can pull it off repeatedly).

Please feel free to let me know of any alterations/experimentation/inspirations. I absolutely want to know if you have good or bad results, so I can tweak this recipe to be more foolproof.

Enjoy.

-Roy

---

Ingredients:

• 1 rack pork spare ribs!
• 1 cup ketchup – I believe this ingredient originated in China, but can’t prove it entirely
• 1/2 – 1 1/2 cup sugar – The amount wholly depends on how “diety” one feels at the time of cooking
• 1/4 cup A1 or Heinz 57 Steak Sauce – It depends on your political affiliations
• 1 tsp garlic powder – It’s better if you have 2 cloves finely minced, but any garlic is better than no garlic
• 1 Tbs Worcestershire sauce – I almost omitted this, because it’s impossible to spell correctly
• 1/2 – 1 tsp liquid smoke – You can change the amounts depending on how deep in the South you want your ribs to taste like

Instructions:

Fill a 12” deep sauce pan with 2” of water.  Bring the water to a boil and carefully place the rack of ribs in the pan as flat as possible. The ribs don’t have to be covered completely. Let simmer/braise for 20 minutes.

Combine the rest of the ingredients into a bowl and mix thoroughly.

Pre-heat your oven to 350 degrees.

Place the ribs flat on a cookie sheet (after the 20 minutes of braising has elapsed). Brush approximately 1/2 the total amount of sauce onto both sides of the ribs.

Put the ribs into the oven uncovered and let bake for 1/2 hour.

Brush the remaining sauce onto the both sides of the ribs (don't be shy). Then place the ribs back in the oven for another 1/2 hour.

Stitched together…

I took this picture(s) at the top of Timpanogus A & B falls (no not from the top of the mountain).  It’s actually 3 pictures that I took with my Nikon in panorama mode and stitched together with the panorama picture maker software.

I think it makes for a true representation of the view from the top near the falls.

The panorama mode is nice because after you take your first picture it shows an opaque portion of the right edge of the first “frame”. This lets you line up your next frame so that you can make sure you don’t have any missing portions of the shot.

On this hike I also learned the value of being able to manually adjust shutter speed and aperture.  You can really get a lot of the pictures right straight from the camera. I noticed that in the past I had to rework pictures with Photoshop in order to get contrast and color balance right.

With the right shutter speed and aperture settings, you can cut out probably 50% of the occasions to have to fix things on the computer. This picture, of whatever kind flower this is, is a good example of no-touch picture taking.

 

Next I’m going to experiment with some of the different color processing algorithms used to process the images in the camera. I’ll post some examples of the successful and not so successful attempts.

Where you wish you were…

I actually have no real reason to post this picture that I took the other day.  I just like the idea that somewhere, there’s a room dedicated to partying.

My new camera.

I recently wrote about my new point and shoot Nikon.

 

For anyone who might be curious, I ran into a very detailed review of it.

Here’s the link to photographyblog.com:
Nikon Coolpix P100 Review

New Camera Part II

So, I originally bought Fuji Finepix S1800 for my birthday, but the pictures weren’t coming out very crisp.  In fact, I thought they were blurry under many instances that should have produced nice pictures.

Fortunately, I bought the camera from Costco, and they have a 90-day return policy on electronics.  This is an outstanding policy, because it sometimes takes a long time to figure out if a piece of equipment, like a camera, will do a good job.

I decided to go with a Nikon P100 10 megapixel 26x Zoom camera.  The Fuji was 12 megapixel with 16x zoom.  The megapixels didn’t matter as much to me as the picture quality, and the difference in zoom was phenomenal.

I took some pictures this weekend and thought I’d post a couple so you could see how good they turned out. Most of the pictures I took were outside, and looked great even without the flash.

The duck and the rooster I took at wheeler farm.  I was at least 40 yards from the duck and 20 from the rooster.  The details in the feathers are great and the colors are really rich.

This is the Angel Moroni Statue on the top of the Salt Lake LDS Temple.  I was at ground level about 5 floors down to the east of it. I was worried the statue would be indistinct and washed out by the sun, but the details and color turned out pretty good.

So, I think this new camera is a keeper.