Today's video from the fair:

I was at the Puyallup Fair yesterday as more than 3,000 people crushed the gates trying o get a job for the 17-day run of the fair this year. Employees from WorkSoft worked to process all the applicants but the line never stopped coming through the door of the portable office they had set up near the corner of the fair by the roller coaster.

Susan Brown, center, and Claudette Dean, right, with WorkSource, work to process fair jobs in a makeshift office near the corner of 5th St. and 9th Ave. in Puyallup, Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2009. About 3,000 people turned out today to apply for the fairs 3,000 jobs, a process that usually takes three weeks, officials said.

This morning, figuring there would be more people, I headed down there again. Today they handed out numbers to the first 600 job seekers and sent the rest away. The first group in line when I got there were four high school-aged teens from Federal Way. They arrived at the fairgrounds at about 12:30 a.m. They all hope to get jobs with the games this year. A couple of them said they wanted to make some money for cars or school and a few talked about having some fun and meeting people.

Cody Olson, right, from Federal Way, fills out an application at the Puyallup Fair as his brother Colten Olson, Keenan Walch and Levy Molina stack up to do the same, before the gate opened at the Puyallup Fair, Thursday morning. The group showed up at 12:30 a.m. to try and get a job at the fair.

I talked with several folks waiting in line and to the WorkSource supervisor for a video I am working on. Check back later, I'll post it here when I'm finished.
Joe

Part of my conversation with WorkSource's Theresa Hoffman:

The 600th person in line this morning was Peggy Coffey. Coffey has been working mostly day-labor for a while after her government job went away a few years ago. Things have been slow for her at Labor Ready and her gas has been shut off. She hopes to make enough at the fair to get caught up with the gas company before the cold comes. This is a bit of our conversation:

While working up a pile of photos from a Quinceañera I was once again struck by the difference between RAW and jpeg.

JPEG

RAW

I find it fascinating when I run across examples where the RAW is a much better image and I'm posting this assuming that a few others will, too.

Bear in mind that I'm not always able to output a better file from the RAW. There have even been a few difficult images with bad "color failure" in which the jpeg was a better starting point for my workup than the RAW output.

And it's also interesting to see, once again, how the brightest of the highlights in the RAW image have no color. This trait of RAW images has always puzzled me. Usually a few minutes of Photoshop work can fix that type of artifact adequately.