In this computerized and digitized world, our computers set themselves ahead overnight. I have a watch that picks up the time signal from the National Institute of Standards and Technology world time clock signal in Fort Collins, Colorado and resets itself.

DST is supposed to help us save energy by making the day seem longer because the longer daylight hours fall into the evening. The truth of that claim has been debated and DST is not really a modern concept. Benjamin Franklin hatched the idea in 1784 in an essay An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light.

Old Ben’s idea didn’t catch on for about a century when the American railroads went to a standardized time for their schedules and then the government imposed it in World War I to conserve energy.

After the war ended, so did DST but it went into force for WWII and after that war some states used it and others did not and those who did imposed it at different dates of the year.

In 1996, Congress passed the Uniform Time Act which required states that used DST to do it at the same periods nationwide.  Today, Hawaii and most of Arizona stick to normal time.

My paternal grandmother has little use for DST.

“It’s stupid,” she would say. “It’s like trying to make a blanket longer by cutting a foot off one end and sewing it on the other end.”

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• Daylight Saving Time was first seriously (mobilebaldwinhomes.wordpress.com)
• MERLINE: The great daylight saving scam – Washington Times (gds44.wordpress.com)

The tenor of the conversation is usually the same:

“What is the Floyd Town Council thinking?”

There’s some talk of a petition to remove Mayor Will Griffin and other members of the town council.

Meanwhile, some Christiansburg residents express relief at getting ride of Terpenny while offering condolences to Floyd residents.

“Good luck, you’re doing to need it,” is the kind of comments we have received over the last couple of days.

Floyd interviewed Terpenny once and offered him the job the next day even though dozens of other applicants also sought the post.  From what we understand, they knew of his backroom dealings with Christiansburg Town Council that allowed him to leave the job with an extra 130 grand of taxpayer money.

The Roanoke Times, in an editorial, summed up Terpenny’s departure from Christiansburg pretty well:

Christiansburg Town Council’s decision to offer outgoing Town Manager Lance Terpenny a generous severance package is both inexplicable and outrageous.

While council had unwisely been debating offering Terpenny a three-year contract (the initial version of which would have guaranteed him payment for every day of the contract even if council let him go), Terpenny had been looking for a new job.

When council members found out Terpenny wanted to end his employment with the city, they should have simply thanked him for his services and offered good wishes for his future endevours.

It was undoubtedly time for Terpenny to go. But council did not need to give him a pile of cash on his way out the door. Council members need to either explain this decision better or rescind it.

Times columnist and blogger Dan Casey asks:

Question: who gets a $130,000 in taxpayer-funded severance in return for leaving and taking a new job elsewhere?

That works out to $7.65 for every man, woman and child in Christiansburg. The town could probably hire three cops and pay them for a year for that amount.

It stinks.

Floyd’s residents should, at the very least, demand accountability from their town government.

Related articles

• How Lance Terpenny took taxpayer money and ran (blueridgemuse.com)
• Serious questions about Floyd’s new town manager (blueridgemuse.com)

In a series of back room deals, Christiansburg’s soon-to-be-former town manager is leaving his $130,000 a year job under a cloud of controversy and will assume the Floyd town manager post that currently pays 43 grand a year.

Of course, Floyd’s town government — which operates with all the transparency of BP in an oil-spill crisis — isn’t saying yet what it plans to pay Lance Terpenny to manage a town of 436 after 14 years of running a community of 42,000.

“”He is coming to Floyd. We’re glad to have him and we’re excited about the opportunity to be getting to work with him,” Floyd Mayor Will Griffin told The Roanoke Times Wednesday.

Christiansburg, on the other hand, seems in a hurry to get rid of Terpenny. On Tuesday night, the Town Council there met to consider a contract with Terpenny and emerged from the session with a vote telling the Town Manager to resign by Aug. 1.

“The timing was right,” Christianburg councilman Jim Vanhoozier said after the meeting.

The timing was right for Terpenny, who saw the handwriting on the wall. For weeks, he had been trying to get a three-year contract with the town — something he never had before — and wanted it in place before a new town council took over with new members who made it clear they didn’t particularly care for their town manager.

But things weren’t working out like he planned, so he applied for the town manager job opening left by current occupant Korene Thompson’s departure.

Floyd’s town town government interviewed Terpenny and offered him the job the next day — an incredibly impulsive move for a town government and one that doesn’t leave a lot of time to check out any problems he may have had with his current or other employers.

Terpenny called Griffin and accepted the job Tuesday night — the same night the Christiansburg Town Council sacked him.

In government as in comedy, timing is everything.

“He fits the mold perfectly,” Griffin tells the Times. “We knew he was our guy.”

What mold is that? Is this why the town is raising taxes to burden its its citizens in bad economic times when it already has a budget surplus?

It appears our new town manager was actively looking for another job while negotiating with with his current employer for a new contract. Will he be looking for another job even before he starts working for Floyd?

Roanoke Times columnist and blogger Dan Casey notes that “Lance Terpenney really must have some kind of hold over the current majority on Christiansburg Town Council.”

Looks like he has the same kind of hold here in Floyd and he’s not even on the job yet.

Related articles

• Why is Floyd town government raising taxes? (blueridgemuse.com)

Floyd takes on an wispy, historic look tonight with the annual “Dickens of a Night” celebration in downtown. It kicks off the start of seasonal weekend that culminates Sunday with the Christmas Parade.

The Jacksonville Center is also hosting its annual Winterfest for the weekend and the Floyd County High School girls’ basketball teams kick off their home season tonight against Bassett.

Polls opened at 6 a.m. and close at 7 p.m.

Remember to vote.

American Newsreel: I started it in 2002 as an observer on some of the absurdities of our land. It hadn’t been updated for a while so I redesigned it and put it back online. Still restoring some archives but it’s up and running. (WARNING: Newsreel contains adult material and often deals with America’s obsession with, and hangups about, sex. It is not for the easily-offended or the politically-correct.)

FloydCounty.Com: I’ve tried a couple of times over the last four years to launch this as a community news and resource site. Maybe the third time’s a charm.

DougThompson.Com:  While speaking to a media communications class a few weeks ago, a student wondered why I didn’t write about the many problems the media faces today.  Good question. This will be a media commentary site.

Each of the sites uses a different publishing platform and each gives me a chance to stay up to date on the changes and updates to Drupal, WordPress and Movable Type.

Give them a visit and let me know what you think.

A swarm of bees descended on a large rock near the Village Green Tuesday, obviously taking part of that spring ritual where the workers do their thing with the Queen Bee. Guess that’s why they call it the birds and the bees.

We’re working on it. If you’re looking for a specific post and it doesn’t come up, please be patient. We may have to do a database purge and then restore from backup.

UPDATE: Found, I think, the problem. The new server is case dependent on directories. The old one was not. I’ll need to make some changes in directory structure. Also, the image sizing software of the old server did not port over to the new one and I’m having to go in and resize images that are more than a couple of years old. Please be patient. We’ll have this sucker fixed as soon as I sort everything out.

Another photojournalist who shoots for an area daily has problems with a moon photo I shot at FloydFest. He points out that I shot the photo on July 26 and the full moon did not occur until July 30.  The debate that now rages here and elsewhere deals with what is or is not an acceptable level of alteration in Photoshop. It also stands as a personal lesson to me on what happens when one is not specific enough on what is or is not done to digitally alter a photograph.

Full moon photos are something of a specialty of mine and it’s not the first time I’ve had one questioned. I admitted up front when I posted the image that it was "Photoshopped" (enhanced using Photoshop digital manipulation software).

In looking back over the files, I did enhance the moon too much. When I enhanced the moon I cropped tightly and rounded the edges because the moon, to many, appeared "full" that night..

Even though the calendar full moon was still four days away the moon often appears full due to atmospheric conditions.

The U.S. Naval Observatory says this about full moons:

Although Full Moon occurs each month at a specific date and time, the Moon’s disk may appear to be full for several nights in a row if it is clear. This is because the percentage of the Moon’s disk that appears illuminated changes very slowly around the time of Full Moon (also around New Moon, but the Moon is not visible at all then).

I photographed the scene of the moon over the state at FloydFest using three different focal lenghs: 200mm, 300mm and 600mm (a Canon 300mm f2.8 lenses with a 2x tele-extender. In all I took shot 27 image. Because the shots were taken with a Canon EOS-1Ds, which shoots full-frame at 16.7 megapixels, I did not have the "multiplier" effect of most digital SLRs which use smaller sensors.

The photo at the right is how it looked when it came out of the camera. Lots of fuzziness around the moon in the photo but those who saw the moon that night could see the shadows and detail.

Because the image was shot in RAW format, there is a lot more detail in the image. You can change the exposure, the contrast, the shadws and much more. For example, I can isolate the moon in Photoshop and then use enhancing tools to incrementally pull out the detail that was not immediately visible.

It’s a painstakingly slow process that must be performed at pixel level but if the detail is in the image file you can sometimes retrieve it.

So I isolated the moon and pulled out just that image and saved it as a new file. I made several copies and experimented with different enhancements. With each step, I saved a copy of the image and then went back and worked on another one, saving each so I had a trail of changes. My plan was to use the image in an upcoming class that I would be teaching at The Jacksonville Center to show how Photoshop can bring out detail most might think is not there.

I also sharpened the edges of the moon and cleaned up the haze that was more visible in the photo than to the naked eye. On one version, I cropped in tight and rounded the edges, making a not quite full moon appear full. Working just on these versions took over three hours. Then I worked on two of the background images and dodged out the hazy moon and inserted the enhanced moon back into the image.

The first image I posted was, in retrospect, too enhanced and the moon too sharp and too rounded given the conditions. I went back to another version of the image and backed off three levels  of burning and sharpening and rebuilt the image which is the currrent illustration posted on this web site (left).

It is an example of what can be done with Photoshop if one has the patience and training.

Is it dishonest? It is if you don’t reveal the photo was enhanced. I initially thought I had but I did not include enough detail on how the image was manipulated. The National Press Photographers Association has guidelines on digital manipulation of photos:

As journalists we believe the guiding principle of our profession is accuracy; therefore, we believe it is wrong to alter the content of a photograph in any way that deceives the public.

My intention in creating the image was not to deceive the public. When it was posted I explained it was digitally enhanced to improve the detail on the moon. Attendees at the festival that night remarked about the brightness and size of what appeared to be a full moon. Too many, the moon apppeared to be full. It also appears in the video I shot that night and the video was not enhanced. I feel the image above was closer to how the moon looked to the crowd than the one  that first came out of the camera and I tried to explain that when it was posted on this blog. But is is a photo illustration, not a photograph — and there is a difference.

News organizations have differing guidelines for what may or may not been done to digital images. Some prohibit even dodging and burning (lightening or darkening an area of the photograph for emphasis or detail). As one photo editor told me this week: "Our photographers are told to shoot, crop, write the caption and send. Nothing more."

I did explain on this blog that the image was Photoshopped and I submitted another version of the image to the local paper that I freelance for and explained what I did to the editor.  The caption in the paper partially explained how it was taken but the photo was not labeled a photo illustration and it should have been along with an explanation that it was digitally altered. I accept the fault for that and have written a more complete explanation for this week’s edition.

With the exception of a free-lance gig with the local paper, I don’t shoot for journalism purposes, I’m a commercial photographer who produces images and illustrations for clients and for display in galleries and shows. Many of these are enhanced with Photoshop in ways that are acceptable for gallery use but not for publication by a news organization. I also post Photoshop enhanced photos on this web site. It is important for me, and other photographers, to remember that when we work in both venues that journalism has different rules and guidelines. This was the only time in more than 40 years in journalism that I submitted a photo illustration for a news publication and, based on my experience I doubt I will do so again. In the past I have limited my photo illustration work to this blog and for photos which hang in a gallery and which are displayed for sale. I also teach a class in Advanced Photoshop techniques at The Jacksonville Center and will use this photo to both show what can be done and to explain the pitfalls that come with digital manipulation.

It is also important to identify when an image has been altered or enhanced. I tried to do so when I posted the image last week. I apologize to anyone who feels they were misled. It was not my intention.

(The issue is being discussed in the post that included the original photo. I’ve disabled the discussion here so it can be discused in one place and we can avoid redundancy.)