If you aren't already sick of hearing about our new car, here's more! The new car is going great. Got it registered and insured, so everything's done. It's still running on the $20 of diesel I put in last weekend when we got back, and we've driven it heaps since then. My old car (180SX) has a dead battery so I bought a new one last night. I need to put it in and continue cleaning the car up to prepare it for sale.

Anyway we're getting into planning our South America trip. It looks like we'll spend the majority in Peru because there is so much in Peru to see. We have booked flights from LA to Lima and just now need to book the Inca trail. We were considering doing the 7-day Inca trail but there are heaps of 4-7 day treks available, so we think it might be better to do the (standard) 4-day Inca trail and then a seperate ~5 day trek.

One dilemma I had until this morning was photos, and uploading them to the net. I have a Nikon D60 DSLR camera, and I take photos only in RAW (raw data), not JPEG. This is because it's better quality and gives you more flexibility for adjustment later. In the past I've taken photos with real dark areas, some totally black. But in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, I've been able to brighten the image and bring out details from the blackness. You can't do that with JPEGs. The dilemma I had was while we are away, I want to upload photos to Flickr, so people can keep up with what we're doing. But Flickr only accepts JPEG photos. Anyway I found my camera can create both RAW and JPEG files (2 files for each photo) on the memory card. This way I can jam the card into a public computer somewhere and upload the JPEGs to Flickr, and keep the RAW ones for when I get home (then I can convert to better quality JPEG or get them developed or something).

I did a comparison to compare the RAW vs JPEG this morning:

The bottom one is the JPEG. The JPEG it creates is not high quality, but it'll be good enough for the net for the time being. Maybe after I get home I can touch up the photos and re-upload them. Also what you see there is 1:1 ratio (not the full image), so the difference is very noticeable. When the image is resized to, say, 1024 x 768, there won't be the hugest amount of difference.

Anyway, till later...