A while back someone (my Dad I think) recommended I add Who Killed the Electric Car? to my Netflix queue. I had completely forgoten about it until it showed up in my mailbox last week.

I really knew nothing about General Motors’ foray into the electric car market in the late nineties, but after watching this movie, I really want to get a plug-in hybrid. Basically, GM built the first mass produced 100% electic power car, the EV1. The long and the short of it is GM stopped producing it after California zero emission laws were rescended. The car no longer exists (except a few non-functioning museum cars) because GM actually reposessed every single car (which were all leased and not available for purchase) and literally crushed and shredded them. Check out the trailor below.

Well today I came across this article about a new Nissan electric car that will be unveiled this Sunday (and suppossedly available for purchase in 2010). The article has little to do with the car itself and more to do with an iPhone app Nissan has built. Basically, while you car is charging you can monitor the battery power so you will know when it’s all charged.

Nissan seems to just be scratching the surface with what they can do (the only other announced feature of the software is to remotely control the air conditioning). This is the kind of stuff companies need to start doing with smart phones. There are so many apps that are rehashed and non-innovative…I can’t wait until we start seeing more smart integration like this.

I’ve done a photo shoot and two live shows with Elementary (the band!).  I gotta say, live music photography is fun. The above was my favorite shot from the Velvet Lounge show. I’d like to revamp my blog to cater more to being a photo-blog. Don’t hold your breath though…since all I do all day is build web sites, I’m kind of slow to actually update my own. It will happen at some point, but it could be a couple years.

Since your hero last blogged I had some visitors, traveled to a destination wedding in Bermuda, moved to a different state, and I’m sure some other blog-worthy things…none of which will be discussed today! No, first I have something much more exciting… a short word on color profiles!

Super high level overview: Color profiles basically tell your computer how to output images for a certain device – be it your monitor, you printer, etc. Beyond that, they are also software dependent – most browsers only support the sRGB color profile.

Now you may be wondering why I’m talking about all this. I might even say this is embarassing considering the thousands of hours I’ve probably spent using Photoshop… I realized a couple months ago that I’ve been saving and uploading all of my photos to the web with the Adobe RGB color profile and I’ve been doing it for more than two years (approximately 700 photos). Why did I do this? Well Adobe RGB was set as the default color profile in the Photoshop “Camera Raw” plug-in that I used when processing my photos.

What happens when you view an Adobe RGB image with software that only does sRGB? Basically it sucks the life out of your image. Colors are dulled and people are turned into zombies. On some photos it’s not that noticable…on others it’s definitely noticable.

Here are two screen shots from a browser that only supports sRGB. The left photo is sRGB, the right is Adobe RGB. Can you see a difference? I think it looks like my skin is going to fall off in the right photo (both due to the jowling and the grayish hue).

After a few marathon sessions spanning a couple months, I’ve finally finished replacing all of my flickr photos with sRGB versions! Huzzah! Lesson learned. I imagine in a couple years that this won’t be a big deal – some browsers already support multiple profiles, and hopefully that trend spreads.