Recently in the "Photography" category...
To follow up on my previous post about my introduction to flash photography, I’m learning…
Strobist info: Single SB-900 full power/85mm, on stand (at kid height) into a soft-silver umbrella camera left. Minor ambient coming from camera way right (err, the kitchen) and camera high-back left (err, the TV).
I hate using a flash. I hate the way it looks. I hate the harshness - the way everything washes. I hate red eye.
Of course, that’s because I have no idea how to use a flash properly and as a result I’ve got pretty good at taking photos in extremely low light conditions.
As I posted before, there’s a really cool site, Strobist, that takes all the mysticism out of using a flash and I’ve been catching up on my reading there.
Time to learn.
Yesterday I ordered a Nikon SB-900, along with a lightweight stand and a shoot-through umbrella. The flash was due to arrive today - we did have two UPS deliveries from Amazon, annoyingly both for my wife ;-)
I guess I’ll have to wait until Friday.
I’m really looking forward to working my way through the Strobist “assignments” and improving my photo knowledge toolkit - wish me luck…
Kris Krug just kicked off Gnomedex here in Seattle with a great presentation on photography.
Read. Absorb. Enjoy.
Via Mental Floss we find a very moving set of polaroids by Jamie Livingston, one every single day, from 1979 until the day he died on his 41st birthday in 1997.
Astounding.
[Thanks to various people on FriendFeed for the link.]
I think this is it - the Canon Vixia HF10.
I’ve been looking for an HD camcorder to replace my trusty, and seven year old, Canon Elura 2 and this looks like the right one.
Any thoughts?
I hate flashes. I really do. I hate the antiseptic feel; the hard shadows; the unnatural light. You’ll never see me use a flash.
Of course, this is because I have no idea how to use a flash properly.
I think I’ve popped the little built in flash on my D200 about three times and hated every single moment of it. As a result I think I’ve got very good at hand holding the camera - sometimes up to half a second. The stabilization in my primary lens doesn’t hurt either (neither does my 80mm 1.8f lens).
But I think I might be missing out.
I need to learn how to use a flash properly.
To this end, I’ve been reading Strobist a lot recently and man are there some great photographs there. And of course it all looks very geeky and fun.
Check out more of the photographer’s work - isn’t it astounding?
I think I’ve been too much of a no-flash snob.
So to set things straight I think I’ll start with one of these; a few of these; and maybe a few things from here.
Hmmm. My birthday is just around the corner…
The New York Times has a gripping presentation by John Moore (Getty Images) of his photographs taken before, during and after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.
I’ve finally finished with the photos from Steve and Rachel’s wedding. You can find them on Flickr.
During the wedding, Julian was also wandering around with a camera and captured this one of me! Nice shot, little dude.
Today we had the honour of attending the wedding of our long time friends, Steve and Rachel. What a wonderful time! Much merriment was had by all and I sincerely wish them the best that life can give in their future lives together.
Also, a few months ago they asked me if I would take the photos of their wedding. Talk about nerve-wracking! ‘Twas a good job I picked up that extra 4GB CF card as I ended up shooting over 500 frames…
It’s going to take me a while to delete all the rubbish and make the rest look halfway decent, but I know that some friends will be wanting to see some right now, so here’s a few rushed shots…
More on Flickr in a couple of days…
Update: The photos are now up on Flickr.
What a great way to start the week. Andy Summers was at Google in NYC this morning to talk about his new book I’ll Be Watching You - Inside The Police 1980-83 and his photography. We video conferenced into the talk.
This was a double treat for me - first, I’m a huge fan of Andy Summers the guitarist and second, I had no idea that he was such a great photographer.
Wow.
The talk was very amusing too - with lots of small anecdotes about life on the road.
Anyhow, just one more great thing about working at Google :-)
The talk should be up on YouTube later - I’ll update this post when it’s available.
Update: The video is now available.
When browsing my most popular photos on flickr, this one brought a tear to my eye. Again.
To all of Julian’s wonderful teachers - Thank you.
I was just playing around with a new slideshow creator, Animoto. I imported my photos from Gnomedex 7.0 and it came up with this:
Rock! This completely takes the ideas that other products such as Microsoft’s Photo Story 3 have run with and raises the bar through the roof.
Animoto is an interesting product, from an interesting group of people:
Animoto Productions is a bunch of techies and film/tv producers who decided to lock themselves in a room together and nerd out.
Their first release is Animoto, a web application that automatically generates professionally produced videos using patent-pending technology and high-end motion design. Each video is a fully customized orchestration of user-selected images and music. Produced on a widescreen format, Animoto videos have the visual energy of a music video and the emotional impact of a movie trailer.
The heart of Animoto is its newly developed Cinematic Artificial Intelligence technology that thinks like an actual director and editor. It analyzes and combines user-selected images and music with the same sophisticated post-production skills & techniques that are used in television and film.
Despite the buzzword and PR heavy description, it looks like they’re onto something. Man, they even have a press kit!
Our host…
Err, wow.
“Chang Cheng”, by Penelope Loom
Sometimes browsing interesting photos on Flickr gives me goosebumps.
Since somebody asked…
- Copy photos from camera to a temporary folder on my MacBook Pro.
- Import photos from the tmp folder into organized directory structure in Adobe Lightroom, e.g.
/photos/2007/2007-05/2007-05-25-Zoo/RAW- renaming the files in the process as2007-05-25-Zoo-001.jpg, etc… - Cull and process photos in Lightroom.
- Export the surviving photos as full resolution sRGB to, for example,
/photos/2007/2007-05/2007-05-25-Zoo/Processed. - Upload the processed photographs to Flickr - tag, title, permissions and licenses as appropriate.
- Copy the whole
/photos/2007/2007-05/2007-05-25-Zoodirectory to my NAS. - Resync the NAS to an offsite server as a final backup.
- Finally delete the photos from my camera once everything is backed up multiple ways.
Simple really :-)
So I took some photos of the band Breadline, a local blues band, just over a year ago when they were performing at a local bar.
Nice guys, great music.
I offered to email them with links to the photos, which I did, and they asked if they could use the photos with appropriate attribution, which I was more than happy to agree to.
Now look at their site, compared to the photos that I took.
There’s no link from the pictures to my source images and, to add insult to injury, absolutely no attribution at all. Anywhere.
Update: I’m blind. I’m named as a source for the photos at the bottom of the page, but a link sure would be nice… Ooops!
Via Boing Boing, we find a link to a government poster…
Man, does this smack of 1984, Brazil, V for Vendetta, etc…
[Photo by Numlock]
At the beginning of a little walk with Julian yesterday at the Seattle Arboretum, we stumbled upon two teddy bears getting intimate in a trash can…
A nice set of photography tips for the upcoming festivities from Digital Photography School:
14. Watch Your Aperture
I quite often shoot in Aperture Priority mode on a day like Christmas and am constantly changing the aperture depending upon my subject. For example when taking shots of a Christmas decoration on the tree I’ll select a large aperture (a small number like f/2.8) so as to throw the background out of focus, but on a shot taken from the end of the table of everyone sitting down eating I’ll choose a small aperture (like f/8 to f/11) so as to have a larger depth of field and keep everyone in focus.
[Tip’O’Hat to Lifehacker for the link.]
