It's when the polar bears at the Pt. Defiance Zoo swim that they are most entrancing. It was a delight to watch them for over an hour the other day. They seem as cuddly as my dog.

Walking through the W.W. Seymour Botanical Observatory has become a Tiffany experience with the jewels of Dale Chihuly's glass career on display. After dark is when the exhibit really shines, or perhaps glows, with spotlit intensity. There will be three evening public viewings till 8 p.m. of "Chihuly at Seymour 100" on Dec. 18, Jan. 15 and Feb. 19 in conjunction with the third Thursday Art Walk. Daily viewings are from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays, excluding holidays, through February. A $5 donation is suggested. The exhibit celebrates the 100th anniversary of Wright Park's Victorian-styled conservatory at 316 S. G St. in Tacoma. Explore The News Tribune's After Dark – Chihuly at Seymour photo gallery here.

This slightly amusing shot didn't work for the story about a new parking facility under construction, but it can have a home in our photoblog.

Students from Japan’s Kitakyushu University perform a traditional Japanese dance Thursday during Culture Fest at the Student Center at Tacoma Community College. Twenty-eight students from Kitakyushu University are attending TCC for two quarters. Culture Fest, which included ethnic foods, fashion and music, was held as part of International Education Week at the college. Janet Jensen/The News Tribune

On election night I stopped by the spontaneous revelry in the streets near Pike Place Market to get a news photo. The street lighting was that common sodium vapor lighting-- extremely yellow. It's even more yellow than the usual tungsten bulbs that most of us still have in our homes.

I shot a few test frames and settled on a manual white balance setting using the strongest color correction that my Nikon D2H is capable of: tungsten, with a "+3" set via the front control wheel. The camera was pushing the color as far toward blue as it can, yet the picture is still overly yellow:

JPG FILE, NO WORKUP

The lighting looks really yellow to the human eye and not just to the camera, but I wanted to remove more of the yellow. This is the kind of situation is where it's really helpful to shoot in the "RAW plus JPG" mode, which is what I usually do.

So when I sat down with the laptop a few minutes later I opened the raw file and "corrected" the color by completely removing the excessive yellow. Perhaps I overdid it-- there's no excessive yellow:

RAW FILE RENDERED TO REMOVE YELLOW, NO WORKUP

I'm amazed that I was able to remove so much of the yellow and get this much blue into the shot. How powerful the raw rendering processor is! (Raw files can't simply be opened like a jpg-- they must be "rendered" by a computer application such as the one in PhotoShop CS3.) Those sodium vapor lights have almost no blue light at all, yet this version looks almost like daylight color.

The only obvious color error is that the Pike Place sign is now magenta instead of red, which could easily be changed with a rough selection and using the hue/saturation tool to move the magentas to red.

Since I was on deadline, I didn't have a chance to tweak or re-do the rendering. I just shipped the photo back to the TNT like this.

But one doesn't have to shoot raw files to achieve strong color-correction. One can also correct the jpg in Photoshop. How well? I wondered.

Below are two more versions. First is the raw file with only the slightest workup: the shadows were pushed away from blue slightly toward yellow. Following is the jpg file with color correction done using a variety of tools: levels, hue, and saturation. In both cases I made no selections, making all changes to the whole frame.

RAW FILE RENDERED TO REMOVE YELLOW, MODEST WORKUP

JPG FILE, HEAVY WORKUP TO REMOVE EXCESS YELLOW

As you can see, they aren't very different. The color in the raw file is generally richer, especially the skin tones in the nearby faces as you can see in the side by side below:

DETAIL FROM RAW FILE ON LEFT, DETAIL FROM HEAVILY WORKED UP JPG ON RIGHT

Perhaps the skin color is oversaturated (too vivid) in the raw version, but that would be easy to fix, unlike the splotchy color in the jpg. And look at the hair: smooth tones in the raw version, funkiness in the jpg, probably due to the camera's sharpening, which is only done manually with raw files, either during rendering and/or later in the workup.

As I mentioned above, I probably "overcorrected" the color in this particular raw file, but in this case with strongly colored lighting, raw files are a lot easier to work with.

Hooray for "RAW+JPG"!

I wanted a shot with little but a person and leafy trees in it. No cars, no tree trunks, no buildings et cetera.

How does one go about finding it?

Think telephoto, of course. When you want to isolate something and not show the surroundings, use a long lens.

But the real trick was to look toward the crest of a hill. If a subject is on the crest, then the cars, houses and sidewalks beyond will be hidden by the hill. Only the middle and tops of trees will be visible beyond the subject.

In this case I drove along North J street and looked down North Fifth, then Sixth, then Eighth, Ninth, et cetera. I could see each numbered street as far as North I (one block away), then it would drop away more steeply toward Yakima. So in this case, the far side of the intersection with I st. was effectively the crest of a hill and I could see little but trees beyond.

Likewise, if I looked up a numbered street from Yakima, the effective hill crest would be in the same place, but the trees that were visible beyond would be between I and J streets.

It turns out that my favorite hill crest was looking up North Steele toward North I street. Even from standing on the roof of my car in the middle of Steele, I couldn't see anything but leafy trees beyond North I.

Then it was just a matter of opening a door so I could hear NPR on the car radio and waiting for nearly an hour.

William Blue, 9, wields his "guitar" and Allen Greenberg, 8, looks out of a shark's mouth as they prepare to go on stage in a "Trashion Show" in which kids make clothes out of recyclables and trash. This is at the Lakewood branch of the Boys & Girls Club.

As a host, Fudge Fujita signals that there is a pair of open seats for dining at the Tacoma Buddhist Temple's annual Fall Food & Crafts Bazaar, Sunday November 2, 2008. At midday the temple's basement was packed with diners. Japanese take-out food, sumi paintings and handicrafts were also on sale to raise funds for the temple.