Photography and Life Journeys

Using Photoshop Levels - Quick, easy, effective

2012-02-21T17:32:00.001-05:00

Hello again, everyone!

It's been a long time since I've posted to my blog (about two months!). I can blame life for that. :-)

In addition to a new role that I got at work that has created 15-hour work days recently, a lot of things have been going wrong or simultaneously breaking around our house and these things have taken high priority to resolve over everything else. Washing machines, dishwashers, cars, you name it. Things have not been going well...

But since I got a minute to breathe this weekend before heading out for a hike with my daughter, I came across this short article and decided to post it here because it makes some good points about using Levels in Photoshop for quick and significant fixes to the most common technical/exposure photography issues.

The article is located here:
http://www.lightstalking.com/why-you-should-use-levels-in-post-production

For a variety of reasons (e.g., camera settings, exposure mistakes, etc) photos can sometimes come out of your camera looking flat and dull. They lack the "pop" of a properly exposed and edited photo. People often ask me what the fastest way is to fix this in Photoshop, but that single question opens up a Pandora's box of answers because there's always more than one way to fix things in Photoshop.

Since Photoshop is such a massive beast of a program, I often try to guide people to the easiest way of doing something and still obtain proper/usable results. For the type of situation that I'm talking about above, often using the basic Levels function is enough.

Check out the steps in this article on a sample photo of your own, and if you like the results that you get then I suggest developing a further understanding of what Levels can do for you quickly and easily. There are any number of tutorials available on websites like Digital Photography School and others. Enjoy!

'Twas the Night Before Christmas at World Disney World Resort

2011-12-24T09:59:00.000-05:00

I would like to say Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year to the readers of my blog!

Whether you arrived here by searching for something on the internet or you're a regular reader of what I write, I appreciate your support throughout the year and the nice emails that people have taken the time to send me from all over the world.

2011 was a hard year for many people. I hope that 2012 is better, and that the world can take a pause, get itself back on track, and that we can all have more to be happy about.

To spread some holiday cheer, here's a short video from Disney about the "Night Before Christmas". Enjoy!

Review: Apple TV, streaming your photos from your computer, and much more!

2011-12-18T11:36:00.002-05:00

This is another one of my "real world" reviews where I provide feedback about what a product does for me in every day use, and what I like (and/or don't like) about it.

The latest great thing to enter my family's life is Apple TV. Talk about a magic little black box! This is the best $99 that I've spent on home entertainment in a long time.

You can search the internet for all kinds of exhaustive technical reviews of Apple TV that detail every feature and specification of the device, but that's not what you'll find here.

What you'll find here is a short article about why this product impressed me, and why I hope that Apple continues to build on this platform in the future for home entertainment.

Let's get some essential links out of the way right now:

And now the background information on why I went out and bought Apple TV...

Problem:
As anyone who has tried to do it knows, streaming your media (photos, music, movies) from your computer onto your wireless network and around your house for watching and listening on your stereo and TV's is a giant pain in the neck. I've been trying to find an easy way to do this for years, and every approach that I've tried ends up running into problems or limitations. I've tried stand alone software to do it, Windows Media, Player, and other mechanisms, and every one of them had a problem that made the solution fall short.

The Digital Living Network Alliance was supposed to make this a lot easier, and it has in some respects....but it still falls short because its standards are not keeping up with the expanding technology that it was meant to work with. I'll give you a perfect example of this....

My blu-ray player can stream photos from my PC to my TV using the DLNA standards. Although the streaming was painfully slow, I did eventually get this to work and was thrilled to finally see my photos appearing from my computer on my widescreen high-def TV. Or so I thought.

One night when looking at photos using this setup through my blu-ray player, I noticed that all of the photos from one of my cameras were not showing up. The problem? The DLNA standard only streams photos up to a certain size. So, advanced cameras that produce large image files are out of luck with DLNA devices. The photos will not get streamed.

Damn. Back to the drawing board. After doing more research on this, I was not able to find an easy and cost effective way around it, so I gave up. To this day, I'm amazed that someone didn't come along and solve this problem before Apple. Companies like Microsoft, Cisco, Netgear, Sony, etc, are all right in the middle of this dilemma, but none of them offered a holistic solution. So, as has been the case in the past, Apple came along and kicked them in the butt and offered up a great solution.

Solution:
I went to the Apple website and read all that Apple TV can do. It can stream photos, music, video, internet content, etc, through my internet connection to my TV. Plug it in, and go. I wondered if it could really be that simple, but knowing Apple I figured that it probably was, so I went to the Apple Store and bought one.

I bought it home, took it out of the box, spent ten minutes setting it up, and my photos appeared from my computer on my TV. I was blown away at the ease of it!

I then tried to access my iTunes music library from my couch using Apple TV to play it through my stereo. It worked. Easily.

I also tried to access my Netflix account to stream some HD content through Apple TV. It worked. Easily.

After installing the Apple Remote app on my iPad and iPhone, I can now control Apple TV and my music streaming, etc, from anywhere in my house. Fantastic!

There are other set top boxes that also handle these functions, namely those from Roku. The issue there is that I'm not sure how tightly integrated they are with iTunes or the iPad/iPhone. I doubt that Roku would be able to harmonize with the Apple iTunes entertainment paradigm as easily as Apple TV does. This is why I purchased Apple TV. I wanted an easy environment to handle all of these things seamlessly.

What doesn't Apple TV do? For one, it doesn't stream content from services like Amazon Streaming and Hulu Plus....yet.....but Apple could probably add those services in the future if they want to. Apple has to walk a fine line between working with their competitors to make their own Apple products more appealing, but they can't cross the line too far and let their competitors sneak too far into Apple's domain.

In summary, for $99, Apple TV is hard to beat for the specific purposes that I mentioned above. I encourage you to visit the Apple TV website to see if it's a match for your needs. If not, then check out Roku as a next option, but as I cautioned above......I don't think Roku will work as nicely with the Apple iTunes environment.

In any event, the main benefit of these boxes is to liberate your photos, music, and videos from your PC in an easy way, and I can say for sure that in that respect Apple TV highly succeeds!

Treasure trove of iconic Corbis photos

2011-12-14T08:57:00.000-05:00

Below is an interesting video from CBS News that discusses the massive historical photo archive of Corbis that's stored underground at an Iron Mountain facility in Pennsylvania, USA. I thought people might be interested to hear what's in this massive photo archive, how it got there, and why.

Gobble This Up!

2011-11-23T17:50:00.002-05:00

I saw this just now and I had to put it up here. I cracked up laughing when I saw this Thanksgiving cheese ball recipe. This little guy looks so cool, I don't think I could eat it!

Just a note to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving! If you're traveling over the holidays, I wish you safe journeys!

Gobble This Up: Thanksgiving Cheese Ball
http://blog.cookingchanneltv.com/2011/11/23/gobble-this-up-thanksgiving-cheese-ball-recipe/

An important CNN article to read: "Have they gone nuts in Washington?"

2011-11-21T20:05:00.000-05:00

I have a pretty optimistic viewpoint in general. Not many things get me down and you won't see me filling this blog with post after post of complaints because that's not what I'm about. But today I'm downright depressed, and I'll tell you why.

I keep up to date on the current happenings with the debt crisis because it will have a profound impact on my family's life for probably a decade or more to come. As I've watched this crisis unfold over the period of the past few months, I absolutely cannot believe the level of stupidity that exists in our government today. Almost every major politician is a complete moron. Listen to them speak. Morons. Listen to their points and counterpoints as they argue with each other. Morons.

Most people will say, "Isn't that the way it's always been"? My answer would be no. There's something more going on here. The sheer recklessness with which these people are operating is beyond comprehension. I don't proclaim to be "Mr. Politics" or anything like that, but what's happening here is something that I (and many other people) have never seen before.

To read what I'm talking about, read this editorial piece from David Gergen on CNN.com today:

http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/21/opinion/gergen-reckless-congress/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

David hits the nail right on the head with this statement: "It's difficult to remember a Congress that has put the nation at so much at risk in the service of ideology and to hold onto office. Partisans on both sides are grievously failing the country".

The principle of compromise for the common good that this country has always operated under is completely gone these days.

You can look at this from any viewpoint and it's a disaster. The reputation and well being of our country is faltering. The finances of millions of Americans are in ruins. People who were counting on retiring in a few years now have to scrap their plans and find a new way to get by. People (including me) saving for college for their kids have seen those savings accounts decimated which will alter the types of schools that my kids can attend in the future. Unemployment is soaring. Companies are faltering. This is an absolute disgrace.

And President Obama, a man that millions of people (including me) thought would be able to bring this country and its politics together when he was elected, has completely and utterly failed as a leader. I certainly don't expect Obama to fix the economy on his own, but I do expect him to be a leader...which he has not been.

Like him or hate him, Donald Trump said something that's very true today. He said that if President Obama was so worried about the Supercommittee succeeding, then he would have chaired the committee himself to guide it through these troubled times. I couldn't agree more! But instead, Obama was completely hands off and let the committee go down in flames.

So, yes, this depresses the shit out of me because there's no light at the end of the tunnel. All of the Republican candidates running for President are idiots. If Obama wins again, the deadlock will be even worse because Republican resentment toward him will be out of control.

So who the hell can we vote for? I have no answer to that question......and what I'm afraid of is that nobody else does either, and that we're in for some real, long, hard times.

An update on the Cape Wind project

2011-11-19T19:39:00.001-05:00

In my previous post at this link on the topic of the wind farm project off Cape Cod called "Cape Wind", I railed against the people opposing this project because it represents such a milestone for major U.S. alternative energy projects and it will be a real shame to see it defeated.

The people opposing this project are short sighted and naive, it's as simple as that.

But what makes matters worse is the fact that the government compounds the stupidity of the project's opposition by slowing the project's progress to a crawl. This sentence caught my eye in the article: "The FAA has reviewed Cape Wind for eight years...". Seriously? Does the Federal Aviation Administration need to take eight full years to review flight patterns over this proposed wind farm site? Eight years?!

Here's a link to an article in USA Today with more information about the status of the project:
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/energy/story/2011-10-28/cape-wind-aviation-ruling/50977156/1

At this rate, alternative energy in the U.S. will catch on when we're all gone and the animals roam the earth freely once again. The U.S. government is one of the biggest obstacles that exists to alternative energy, and any politician who says otherwise is a liar. Did you know that the U.S. government still subsidizes the oil companies? Exxon/Mobil made $50 billion last quarter alone. Why do they need to be subsidized?! Seems like they're doing just fine to me without anyone's help...

The U.S. government needs to step in and for once make a difference in a positive way. These alternative energy projects should be given an express path to approval. They save energy and create jobs. The government should mandate that all new construction obtains some percentage of its energy supply from solar panel installations. Etc, etc, etc. The government has the power to do all of this, but they do none of it.

As long as projects like Cape Wind continue to receive this type of intense opposition, alternative energy in the U.S. will remain nothing but a joke and we'll continue to rely on oil for the bulk of our energy. The government needs to stand up for what's right and the opposition to these projects needs to clear out......for the good of the country and the environment.

The whole world is watching and the power of social media is in your hands

2011-11-04T17:15:00.001-04:00

It has slowly gained momentum over the past 2-3 years. In 2011, it absolutely exploded. Everywhere you look social media is impacting people on a daily basis.

Finally, the "little guy" has a voice. Anyone can speak out about anything, any time, and get local or global attention on their cause if their message is supported by others and spread using social media tools. Most importantly, social media is being used to expose and correct government, social, and corporate injustices around the world. This is perhaps one of its most compelling uses. As I said, it gives the little guy a voice.

If you watch the news (and your favorite social media sites), there are countless examples of global change going on at all levels right now that would have been impossible without social media.

Governments in Egypt and Libya have been toppled. Syria is probably soon to follow. All because the world connected through social media and saw the cause of the citizens of these countries, and it fueled the fire that was already burning. Ruthless dictators must go, and social media gives the citizens their chance to make it happen.

The Occupy Wall Street movements have brought unprecedented exposure to corporate greed, and social media spread the protests globally and they've caught on in other countries as well. It has shed light on global corporate greed in a way that's never been done before....from a grassroots level.

Let's look at things from an individualistic consumer viewpoint, and how we interact with some of the companies that we do business with and how social media has changed the playing surface...

Netflix, in one of the greatest corporate blunders in recent memory, went to change its entire business model in ways that completely angered and alienated its subscribers. Netflix clearly has no understanding of its customer base or what they want. What did people do? They hit Twitter, Facebook, blogs, news outlets, etc, with a massive social media campaign that literally pounded Netflix into submission and forced them to reverse direction on their business model. Individual people.......affecting the business model of a major corporation in only a matter of weeks. Netflix was ruthlessly punished by the very customers that pay for its services. People canceled their subscriptions by the tens of thousands to voice their opinion to Netflix. Great!

Or, how about bank debit card fees. Certain banks announced recently that they would soon be charging monthly fees to use their debit cards. Social media to the rescue! After just a few weeks of very public outcry and rage, the banks backed down and reversed decision on their new fees. Score another win for social media.

Social media tools will force people, corporations, and governments to begin to act in a more socially conscious way whether they like it or not. All of these institutions are being stung by citizen and consumer backlash through social media, and don't think for one second that they're not worried about it. They are. It will change things, and it already is.

Use social media to your advantage. If you feel wronged by a local company, politician, major corporation, etc, hit the social media tools and let people know. Spearhead a movement to force change for the common good. Right the wrong.

And on the other hand, if you have a positive experience let your friends on Facebook, Twitter, etc, know about that too. Point them to the people and companies that do responsible business. Reward the good, and punish the bad.

The whole world is watching. Let's use social media and work together to make it a better place to be. The potential for everyone to do this....now....is here.

Good old innovation at work

2011-10-27T06:49:00.000-04:00

You want to see something cool? Check out the video above about what these people who run JP Aerospace did for a fraction of the cost of what the major aerospace companies are spending to do basically the same thing. Their JP Aerospace blog is located at this link. Look at the photos in their blog post from October 24th. Fantastic stuff!

I really like to see these types of stories. People thinking of out-of-the-box ways to get amazing things done that big, bloated, hierarchical companies can't achieve with ten times the resources.

Way to go JP Aerospace! I hope these experiments lead to great things down the road!

The story of the Walt Disney World Railroad

2011-10-20T17:33:00.005-04:00

Did you ever wonder where the trains that run around Disney World as part of the World Disney World Railroad came from, and why? As with most things Disney, there's an interesting story behind it.

The video below provides history and footage of Walt and the Disney trains and how they came to be. Many people don't know that Walt Disney had a lifelong love of trains and that he even had a scale model working railroad in the back yard of his house in California that he used to take people for rides on (it's shown in the video).

On a side note, the person narrating the video (Disney Historian, Jim Korkis) has a great book out called "The Vault of Walt" that's filled with tons of historic Disney information like that found in this video. It's a fascinating read that provides a lot of insight and anecdotes about who Walt Disney was, what he was all about, and why he was driven to do the things that he did. Very good read...

Enjoy the short video!

The Dark Secret Of Digital Photography - Rob Sheppard

2011-10-14T16:07:00.000-04:00

Every once in a while I post a link here on my blog to what I think is an exceptionally good article published in one of the major photo magazines that will help people. This is one of those times!

Here is a link to an article called "The Dark Side of Digital Photography" by Rob Sheppard. It's one of those articles that cuts right to the point of how to easily and effectively improve the quality of your images during post-processing in photo editing applications.

Specifically, this article deals with an effective way to handle the dark areas of your photos, and why you should do it to improve the overall quality of your images. It's enlightening reading, and it contains several example photos that match up with the simple technique (sliding one slider!).

Additionally, Rob makes some comments that I agree with about the "expose to the right" technique in digital photography. I never really brought into that concept and I'm glad to see someone of Rob's status in the photo industry debunking it to some degree. He makes it clear that this photography exposure technique might get you some benefits in some limited situations, but you'll often end up losing more than you gain.

Understanding tonal range and balance in your photos is a critical concept to improving the quality of your images. Having an easy way to help with achieving that balance is great! This is an effective article on how to understand and achieve that balance....easily. Check out Rob's article. It's time well spent...

Apples and Autumn

2011-10-11T18:46:00.002-04:00

"Apple Orchard"

Nothing says "autumn" to me more than the smell of an apple pie baking in the house, a slight chill in the air outside, the first fire of the season in the fireplace, and the colors beginning to change in the leaves. All of those things are happening at about this time, so the autumn season has begun!

The photo here was taken on a recent apple picking trip that we took with some of our extended family to a farm near our house. We hit the picking season just right because the trees were filled with apples that were perfectly ready to be dropped into pies, cobblers, and other good desserts.

I gave this photo a selective color treatment because the background was very green and intense and was distracting from the apples in the foreground....so I got to thinking of just trying a few ways to highlight the bin of apples in the foreground and this is what I came up with that worked out nicely. It also seems to make the photo a little more timeless for some reason, which black and white often seems to do. A little drop-shadow around the edges completed it.

Another approach to this photo to emphasize the bin in the foreground would have been to partially desaturate all of the colors in the photo except for the apple bin, which is a technique very often used in commercial photography to isolate the main subject in a color photo.

Anyway....I digress. One other food thought before I leave. Apple cider donuts! I can't even tell you how delicious they were at the farm where we picked these apples. They were the best that I've ever had. Piping hot straight out of the cooker with a little sugar on them and into our mouths. I couldn't stop eating them! Just that one smell alone says "autumn" to me. I'm halfway thinking of driving back down there just to get some more!

I hope you enjoy whatever activities you're doing to ring in the autumn season. It won't be long until the first below-freezing nights are in the forecast! :-)

Photo Carousel #12: "San Angel Inn - Mexico Pavilion in Epcot"

2011-10-08T08:57:00.001-04:00

"San Angel Inn - Mexico Pavilion in Epcot"

Here's my next Photo Carousel entry, "San Angel Inn".

One of the things that I've started to do lately is take photos of the cool places that my family dines while we're traveling. I realized that eating is an important part of traveling, yet I rarely take photos of the restaurants that we stop at along the way. This is a pretty big gap in the overall group of photos from any given trip because a lot of good times are shared.....while eating! If you don't have a few photos of those dining stops, some of those memories can sometimes slip away...

With that in mind, on our recent trip to Disney World in Florida, I photographed each restaurant where we ate. Some of the pictures are just casual snapshots to capture a moment, but the one above took a little bit of work to get right (and the subject deserved it).

If you've ever been to the Mexico Pavilion in the Epcot theme park, you can appreciate the work that went into it. When you first enter the pavilion, there are displays of Mexican art and culture, and after you view that area and walk through the crafts section of the pavilion where artists are working on souvenirs, you enter a different (and dark!) world.

It takes your eyes some time to adjust to the darkness, but when they do you'll realize that you're standing in the center of a recreated Mexican town market with craft and artwork vendors, souvenir stands, people standing around shopping and having fun, and in the back....there's the San Angel Inn restaurant.

Off in the distance there's a scaled replica of a Mexican pyramid like those that you'll see at the Chichen Itza historical site in Mexico. There's also a ride that has its entrance on the left side of the pavilion called "Gran Fiesta Starring the Three Caballeros".

This area is a visual feast, and it's so well done that it's easy to quickly forget that you're in Disney! At the back of the pavilion is the restaurant in my photo above. It's a large restaurant, but if you're thinking of going here for lunch or dinner, be warned that you absolutely will not get in without a reservation. Plan ahead!

From a creative perspective, I was trying to capture the overall mood and size of San Angel Inn. I feel that this photo does that by using a layered approach of showing the dining area in the front, the pyramid in the middle, and then beyond that is the background wall painting with the volcanoes. The dining area where the tables are is somewhat more intimate and slightly darker than it appears in this photo. I over-exposed this shot intentionally to show the detail in the seating area better, but you can still get the idea that each table is candlelit and relaxing (i.e., no overhead lighting).

From a technical perspective, the shutter speed for this shot was slow (about 1/25 second) to gather enough light from the dark scene to create a useful photo. I didn't use flash because that would have ruined the mood of the photo. Hand-holding was out of the question due to the low shutter speed, so I propped the camera on a railing and used the self-timer to steady it while framing the shot as best as I could. There was nowhere else to put the camera, and that's why those two chairs are blocking the low part of the shot. I couldn't reach over the railing to move them.

For me personally, this shot succeeds because it really captures the mood of the San Angel Inn and I think it conveys the thought of this being a relaxed place to sit and have a meal. Because of the effort that I put into it, this photo turned out to more than just a travel snapshot.

Going back to the point that I made at the start of this post about capturing memories, just seeing this one photo reminds me of the mood and atmosphere that night at dinner, and the great time (and food!) that our family had there.

On a side note, if I do humbly say so myself, this photo blows away the official Disney photos of this restaurant that appear on their website at the links above! Maybe I should sell it to them! :-)

Review: Disney Imagineering Field Guides

2011-10-06T17:32:00.001-04:00

As I mentioned in the post at this link, I really like to learn about all of the details that went into designing the Disney parks, rides and attractions. The level of detail is amazing once you start to find the little things that are hidden all over the place. The tiniest little details were all put there for a reason.....to bring a smile to someones face who happened to notice them.

I read the great book by John Hench mentioned at the link above that discussed this topic in an overall fashion, but many people don't realize that there are a few other books that discuss the details and effort that went into designing the parks in deeper detail. These books are called "The Imagineering Field Guides", and there's one of them for each park (Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Animal Kingdom, Hollywood Studios).

The guides are filled with all kinds of interesting facts about how the rides and parks turned out the way they did, and most importantly why.

For example, in the Magic Kingdom edition they talk about the design and construction of Cinderella's Castle and why it ended up at the exact height that it did. It's 198 feet tall. The reason Disney chose that height is because any building in Florida that's 200 feet or taller is required to have a blinking red aircraft warning light on top of it. Obviously Disney didn't want a blinking red aircraft light on top of their centerpiece castle, so they made it as high as they could (with a little room to spare) so that they could keep their design and not have to spoil it with a red blinking light. The same consideration went into Spaceship Earth, Tower of Terror, Space Mountain, and the other tall ride structures in the parks.

If you're a Disney fanatic and finding out those types of little facts is interesting to you, then these are the books for you! I've had more than a few good laughs and "Aha!" moments while reading them. Things that I always wondered about since I was a kid are explained here for the first time.

The books also show a lot of interesting photos and sketches about how the parks and rides were originally conceived versus how they turned out. In some cases they're almost exactly the same, and in others there were key design changes made along the way. Those design changes are explained as well. Interesting stuff....

These guides are inexpensive and well worth the money to get some more insight into the terrific Disney design principles. If you decide to purchase them, watch out! They're going to make you want to go to The World to check the parks out all over again! :-)

Pathways #4: Stop looking, and begin seeing...

2011-09-22T07:56:00.000-04:00

Everyone around the world enjoys Coke...

Wow! Has it been six months since my last post to my Pathways series??? I completely lost track of time over the summer as I've been traveling about and enjoying the outdoors.

I've received some nice emails from people around the world on this series, so I want to continue to put these posts up here to communicate some of the key things that I'm learning while I continue to develop my photography skills.

I enjoy the emails that I get from people all over the world about this blog. They remind me of how connected we are and how the internet has made the world a much smaller place. It also reminds me of the power of search engines, because I've done nothing to promote this blog over the years, but I get a regular number of hits to it every day and the web traffic reports show me that people are spending time to browse around the site at the content I've written. That's great!

With that in mind, this is my next post in the series...

This post is about details. Seeing details, photographing details and enjoying details. One of the things that I wrote about in my last Pathways post at this link was about finding photographic subjects that really interest you and ignite your passion for shooting. This is is critical for improving your creativity (and therefore your photography) because when you're shooting things that you really like, you'll be more interested in how you ultimately represent your subject.

Once you find the subjects that ignite your passion, the next step is to study them to see the details that lurk below the surface so you can bring those details to life to show your subjects in a deeper and more thorough way. To show things that others might not even notice, but that you see and enjoy. If you're passionate about your subject, this will come naturally. As David duChemin said in his terrific book "Within The Frame", to improve our photography we need to "stop looking, and begin seeing".

Prayer offerings to wish the climbers success...

I had a chance to practice this on my recent trip to Nepal. The trip was a very long journey, but when I was in the villages near Mount Everest, I spent a lot of time absorbing the details in the local village. It was easy to get wrapped up in the process, and I started noticing details all over the place that made excellent photo subjects.

In addition to capturing the standard photos of the area around Mount Everest, these photos posted here of the finer details serve to enrich my presentation of what the place is all about and what goes on there. Anyone can point their camera at Mount Everest and take a postcard photo, but what about all of the other details all around it?

So how do you "stop looking, and begin seeing"? I think that developing the ability to "see" starts with slowing down. When we spot something that interests us photographically, especially if we're rushing during travel, we tend to jump right to the process of firing off many shots to try to capture the moment and then we move on.

A cautionary sign about drinking the local water...

Instead of rushing around to grab shots, I would suggest slowing down a bit. Think about what originally drew your attention to the scene and how to emphasize that aspect of the scene. Is it a grand scene that should be photographed with a wide angle lens to show its grandeur? Or, is it a smaller detail in the scene that should be picked out with a telephoto lens. Is it color? Shape? Texture? How can you emphasize it?

When you slow down and start to think like this, you will begin to "see" your subject and what's going on around you much more effectively and naturally. You'll find that the process of discovering great little details starts to become second nature in your photographic process. Additionally, your photography portfolio of a particular subject will be better/deeper and your photography skills will certainly improve. Try it out the next time you're out shooting. I'm sure that you'll soon see great results in your photographs!

Interesting wiring for light switches on side of building...

On a side note, I have to confess something and tell you that I've never been to Nepal, I've never seen Mount Everest, and none of these pictures were taken there. I was just kidding about that part of this post. All of these photographs were taken at Disney World's Animal Kingdom theme park in Orlando, FL USA near the Mount Everest roller coaster attraction.

I waited to mention this until the end of this post because it serves to make my point even better. There are interesting details all around you that you might be walking straight by in your rush to get somewhere or do something else. This is especially true at Disney! Slow down. Look around. Enjoy the details.

It also serves the other point in this post and my previous posts about finding something that you're passionate about and truly "seeing" it.

I really enjoy going to Disney World, so much so that I've been there with my family 5 times in the past 10 years. You could say that we're passionate about Disney and the fun that we have there.

Typically I've rushed around Disney shooting photos all over the place, but over the years I've missed many great pictures like these here that expose the detail and effort that went into designing and building the Disney parks. These are the details that make Disney much more than an ordinary amusement park. The attention to detail in the parks is truly amazing, and it's a labor of love by the Disney designers that should be enjoyed and appreciated by visitors to their parks if you're interested in this type of thing. On our last trip, we slowed down and appreciated the small details more than ever...

In closing, it's irrelevant where I took these photos. I included them here with my story of going to Nepal as a humorous way of making my points about slowing down, thinking, and truly "seeing" your subject so that you can bring the details to life. Have fun, but go slow! Your photography will thank you...

Oktoberfest 2011

2011-09-18T18:26:00.003-04:00

Me enjoying a beer in Wurzburg, Germany

UPDATED 9/20/11: Here is a link to a short photo essay at Time.com regarding the history of how Oktoberfest came to be.

It's not going to be long now before the cold starts to arrive, then comes Indian Summer, and then all of a sudden you'll notice that you need a light jacket before you go outside.

For the past few days near where I live in New York, there's been an early autumn snap of cold in the air. The heat on the first floor of our house went on both mornings of this past weekend.

On one hand it was soothing because I like the smell in the house caused by the heat when it comes on for the first time in the autumn as I sit drinking my morning coffee. But on the other hand, it gives me an anxiety attack because it reminds me that fall and winter are coming, and I still have a ton of outdoor house chores to do before winter!!! But forget that for now....This post is about Oktoberfest!

I work for a German company, and I've had the opportunity to travel to Germany several times on business over the recent years. In addition to seeing my friends and colleagues over there, I get to eat some really good food and drink a lot of excellent beer!

Although I've never been to Europe at this time of year when the giant Oktoberfest celebrations are going on (especially in Munich), perhaps one day things will coincide and I'll get to experience one of these memorable festivals. My wife has been to one, and she said it's quite the scene to see! But since I'm not in Germany, going to an Oktoberfest in my area is the next best thing.

Enjoying a Warsteiner on my way home...somewhere over London.

Now is the season for these festivals, and some of them are great family events. In addition to....beer....they have delicious food, many craft vendors, and German and Bavarian music. Hunter Mountain, Bear Mountain, West Point, and Belleayre Mountain in New York all have festivals, although the one at Hunter Mountain needs more German beer! I don't think that Budweiser and Bud Light really belong in multiple taps on the Oktoberfest beer wagons! I plan to check out Bear Mountain or Belleayre this year for a change of pace.

The nice thing about these festivals is that they act as a milestone in the change of seasons. Shortly after enjoying them, the autumn colors start to arrive in the trees, the first delivery of wood for the season is dumped by the delivery guy on the driveway (which I then have to stack!), and the fireplace is lit up for the first time as we settle into autumn....

Warm sunlight, an open door, and a menu I couldn't read...but the beer was good!

I encourage everyone to get out and enjoy an Oktoberfest celebration and the beginning of the change of seasons near you. It's a fun family activity to see the crafts, eat the food, experience some different types of music, and of course for the adults.....drink good beer!

If you know of good celebrations in the Northeast U.S., post them as a comment to this post so that Google will pick them up and others can find them as well.

9/11 - Ten years gone by....

2011-09-10T20:53:00.002-04:00

As I wrote in my blog post at this link last year, I dedicate this post this year with my best wishes to everyone, everywhere, who was affected by 9/11.

I can only hope that the people in this world can eventually find a way, somehow, to work toward a coexistence that's peaceful enough so that an event of this type never occurs again.

Through photography, in the last year or so I've developed what I would describe as a significant interest in "the world". I read a lot of photography and travel books, magazines, and blogs. Through this material and the photographs within, something was sparked in my brain to want to learn more about all of the different countries and people in the world, and what makes them what they are.

As I read through these books and look at the photos, I'm learning much about the world and its people and why things are the way they are. How thousands of years of history have shaped the people and countries on this planet. I don't agree with a lot of things that many people in this world do, but at least now I'm beginning to understand it better.

Perhaps if we all took a little more time to study the world and the people around us, we might begin to reach an understanding of each other that would some day lead to something closer to the peaceful coexistence that I mentioned above. I can only hope...

This year my kids began asking more sophisticated questions about 9/11. They want to understand what it's all about, why it happened, and why so many people died on that one day. It also helps them to understand things like why they hear "Afghanistan" and "Iraq" on the news every night...

My wife and I do the best we can to answer their questions in a way that they can understand that doesn't scare them, and we've let them watch some of the 9/11 television specials this year. I think they're at an age where it's important for them to learn these things. Without letting it become overbearing on them, I think it's OK now for them to learn on a more complex level that there are good people and bad people in the world, and sometimes the bad people do some really terrible things.

As I write this on the eve of the 10th Anniversary of 9/11, I'm very sad. I sit and stare at the 9/11 specials on TV. Just absorbing them. And after ten years, there's some part of me that still finds the whole thing quite difficult to comprehend. But I maintain my hope that I wrote about above that some day, somehow, the world will become a better place to be. The future generations deserve better than this....

Now that the 9/11 Memorial in New York City is open and almost complete, I will go there with my wife and kids some day soon to see the park, the memorial fountains, and the new One World Trade Center building. I'm sure it will be a very emotional visit.

And from this day forward, I will no longer call that area "Ground Zero" anymore. It deserves better than that. I will call it what it used to be called. The World Trade Center.

9/11: The Photographers' Stories

2011-09-07T19:11:00.000-04:00

(Peter J. Eckel/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

I have a personal connection to 9/11 that I wrote about in my blog post at this link. For that reason, I'm probably likely to read a lot of news stories and photography stories about it as the 10th Anniversary approaches.

I found a good article today on the Popular Photography website at this link called "9/11: The Photographers' Stories, Part 1—"Get Down Here. Now".

It's a four part article (all four parts are at the link above) that tells the story of 9/11 from some of the photographers who documented it.

It's definitely worth a read...

"Photographically Speaking" by David duChemin

2011-09-05T16:19:00.002-04:00

If you read this blog, you know that I'm a fan of David duChemin's books and photography. He speaks a language that I can relate to about understanding the many aspects of photography and improving my photography skills.

He has a new book coming out soon called "Photographically Speaking", and the video below offers a glimpse of what it's a about. The sentiments expressed in this video are very similar to my thoughts about photography, which I guess is why I relate to what duChemin is all about.

It should be a good read...

Why do we accept such pathetic mediocrity in our politicians?

2011-08-18T16:17:00.001-04:00

In one of their songs, the band Gov't Mule has the following lyrics:

"We're at a place in history where the bar is at an all time low

We've applauded mediocrity till there is no lower we can go".

Those lyrics are so true these days. Every time I watch the news and see the moronic things our politicians are doing, I'm stunned at how stupid, clueless, and totally disconnected most of them are. It does indeed seem like the bar is at an all time low. I don't know where these people come from. Not to mention that they still haven't learned not to send half naked photos of themselves on Twitter, but that's a whole other story...

I don't have to speak at length about the debt debate that took place within the last month. It was so disheartening to see that our elected officials can't put aside partisanship and posturing long enough to do something right for our country for the long term. Instead they took us to the brink and made a bad economic situation even worse. They should all be voted out of office in the next elections, but they probably won't be because by then we'll probably have settled into the "life goes on" mode that we normally fall back into once the fury of political unrest dies down. That's how these people stay in office.

So let's get to one specific person who epitomizes mediocrity and the bar being at an all time low: Michele Bachmann.

About a month ago, Bachmann made some completely idiotic public statements about same-sex marriage and the gay/lesbian lifestyle. She basically said that the gay lifestyle deserves no recognition and some other ridiculous things that were even worse. You can find her comments just by searching her name and the word 'gay' in Google. Then the press dug up some undercover recordings that profess to show that a clinic that she and her husband run attempts to "cure" people of the gay lifestyle. What? I heard the recordings, and they were quite bizarre and creepy to say the least. I'm sure you can find them by using Google.

What the hell? How does a person running for President of the United States get off making comments like this, especially in these technological times where they know everything that they say and do will end up going around the world on social networks almost instantly?

I'm not going to say in print what I think she is. As I was watching this on TV, I just sat there stunned and it left me thinking of the lyrics above from the Gov't Mule song.

So, what happens next. The Iowa State Fair, where they were conducting a straw pole of the GOP candidates to see who the front runners are. Guess who won. Michele Bachmann.

She was subsequently taken to task in every interview that I saw with her, and she tried to back-peddle and explain her way out of her comments.....which only made her look 100 times worse.

I'm telling you....I just don't understand this. Why does the U.S. public tolerate, and actually further endorse people like this? She should be stripped of her current office, run out of town, and never be elected to any public office ever again. People should not forget the things that she said, or the misguided things that other politicians say either. These are the people who WE are choosing to represent US. I certainly don't want her representing me. She's a complete embarrassment.

I absolutely cringe at the thought of Michele Bachmann being President of the United States. This country should be able to do so much better than her. If she ever makes it to the 2012 Presidential election, please don't vote for her.

Review: The best apps for reading effectively on the iPad

2011-08-08T18:27:00.003-04:00

I'll give you the punchline to this post up front...

All you need for great reading on the iPad are the following apps:
iBooks, Kindle, Zinio, Feeddler, Zite, and Flipboard.

Now read on to find out why...

This is another one of my "real world" reviews. You can talk about every feature of each app that I list here for a long time. But instead of doing a feature by feature review, I'm simply going to talk about why they work effectively to make reading on the iPad a great experience. An experience that has, in fact, led me to go paperless for most of my reading.

In order to set yourself up for reading effectively on the iPad (and to make it more fun!), you first need to determine what it is that you want to read. Books? Magazines? RSS feeds? All of them? The reason I suggest this first step is because there's no one app that does all of these things, so if you have broad reading tastes then you'll want to get several of the apps on my list to get the job done right for you. I'll cover these content sources one by one below with my recommendations.

Books:

If reading books is your pleasure, use the iBooks and Kindle apps. There are other book readers out there (like Google Books), but they simply don't compare to iBooks and Kindle.

If the cost of a new book is one of your primary concerns, then always check the price of a new book between Kindle and iBooks. I've found that Kindle is almost always less expensive than iBooks in the US. If you don't have a strong preference for which one of these readers that you use, buy your books from the least expensive choice.

Cost aside, both Kindle and iBooks offer a lot of similar features and some other unique ones as well that may help you to pick one or the other as your primary reader. For sure, the format of the ebooks for both readers will be around for a long time, so you don't have to worry that your books will suddenly become obsolete. eBooks are here to stay.

Some (but not all) of the key features of iBooks:

Seamless experience between the iBooks store, your library, and the reading experience.
Capability to store your books in 'Collections' to organize them by topic.
Capability to import and read PDF's like any other book.
Built in one-touch dictionary and/or search for a highlighted word or phrase.
Fully searchable content.
Capability to bookmark.
Capability to select fonts, font sizes, and sepia or white page color.
Capability to highlight text and add notes to highlighted text.
Many classic books from famous authors (e.g., Charles Dickens) are free!

Some (but not all) of the key features of Kindle:

Kindle eBooks are typically less expensive than iBooks.
Capability to select fonts, font sizes, and sepia, white, or black page color.
Built in one-touch dictionary and/or search for a highlighted word or phrase.
Capability to highlight text and add notes to highlighted text.
Fully searchable content.
Capability to share your highlighted items with the Kindle community for the book you're reading, and have their highlighted items appear in your book as well. I guess you could call this "social reading". I'm not entirely sure of the major benefit of this, but it is unique to Kindle.

Have eBooks totally replaced paper books in our house? No. I still buy print books when there's a likelihood that I'll be referencing a book frequently or it's an art-book like a large format photography coffee table book that needs to be seen in all of its large format splendor. But other than those two exceptions, almost all books that we buy now are electronic because the benefits of eBooks far outweigh the paper versions....especially being able to take your whole library with you anywhere that you go!

Magazines:

If you're a big magazine reader, then use the Zinio app. Zinio has over 4,000 magazines available for online subscription and/or individual issue purchase, and the price is always the same or less than the print version of the same magazine.

The nice thing about reading electronic magazines is that the publishers often add extra interactive multimedia content to their electronic versions. Even if it's just live web links that have been added within the text, just having that is better than the print version. But often, there's much more than that. National Geographic, for example, adds video, audio interviews, and slide shows to the electronic version of their magazines. Obviously that's something that you can't get in the print versions, and it makes for a much more interactive and enjoyable reading experience.

On top of that, here are two other great things. First, there's no clutter. You don't have stacks of old magazines hanging around. Second, your entire library is searchable. So, for example, if you remember an article about traveling in Australia that appeared in National Geographic but you can't remember when you saw it, simply search and you shall find! I rarely use the back issues of my paper magazines for just this reason....it would take too long to find anything by flipping through the pages of so many paper issues.

All of my magazines are now electronic.

RSS feeds:

If you look in the Apple App Store, there are a lot of RSS readers out there. Some of them are free and others can cost up to $5 for an ad-free version. If you subscribe to a lot of websites and/or blog feeds, a good RSS reader is essential for easy reading.

You could just use Google Reader to read your RSS feeds, but I'm going to give you a much better strategy here....

First, definitely use Google Reader to subscribe to your feeds to keep them all in a central location. The reason I suggest this is because all of the most popular RSS reader apps will interface with your Google Reader account to pull in your feeds from Google, so if you centralize all of your feeds in Google Reader then you'll be impacted minimally if you change your RSS reader app down the road.

Second, don't use Google Reader for RSS reading. It's downright clunky at best, and it can be confusing at worst when you're trying to find new feeds instead of ones that you've already read, etc. As with all of the Google tools (Gmail, Calendar, etc), Reader is outdated and in serious need of a total overhaul.

Third, download the free version of Feeddler to actually read and process your feeds from your Google account. Feeddler is a fully customizable RSS reader that you can set up to manage and read your feeds the exact way that you want to. Want to see all new items from all of your feeds since the last time that you opened the app? Want to go back through items you've already read to find something that you want to reference again? Want to mark something as a favorite and have that mark synchronized with your Google Reader account for future reference or to share with someone? All of these things are no problem for Feeddler to handle. And there's so much more. It really pays to spend some time exploring this app.

Feeddler makes managing my feeds and getting through new RSS items as easy as I think it can possibly be. There are other apps that are similar to Feeddler (most notably Reeder), but for some of them you have to pay for the full version up front, while Feeddler is free if you're willing to have some banner ads on the bottom of your screen. If you don't like the Feeddler banners then you can buy the full version for $5 and get rid of them.

Customized Magazines:

This is where the fun starts....

Zite and Flipboard have both revolutionized the concept of creating a personalized online magazine that gets updated daily with content of your choosing.

Both apps offer you the capability to have many sources of news content sent to your virtual magazine (including pulling in content from your social media accounts and RSS accounts if you want), but Zite takes it one step further with the fact that it begins to "understand" the articles that you like and mark as favorites, and it will load your magazine daily with more content of that same type. Flipboard does not do this, and therefore it's more of a simple news-pushing type of app.

Both apps have curated content in which editors select the best and/or most popular news stories from a large variety of topics and news sources. All you have to do is include the sections you want in your magazine, and you're done. It's updated daily with the latest news.

Both of the apps feature elegant but different interfaces, the capability to email links to articles, include social media in your magazine, mark items as favorites, and post to your social media tools.

The reason that I use both of them instead of just one is because they both offer slightly different content sources, so when I use them both I get a very good cross section of topics that I'm interested in, instead of using just one and missing some key news areas that I like to follow.

So, in a nutshell real-world sort of way, the information above explains why I believe these apps are just about all you need for reading on the iPad. I'm sure the latest and greatest apps will come along to knock Zite and Flipboard off their popularity pedestal, but I think that iBooks, Kindle, and Zinio are here to stay for sure. They are very solid at what they do, and they deserve their strong and loyal user-bases.

I hope you'll spend some time to fully explore these apps to learn all that they have to offer. Enjoy your reading, and I hope you find this post useful!

Vinylmations

2011-08-03T17:07:00.005-04:00

Uh-oh. I ran across this picture today in the Disney Parks Blog and it got me thinking, "Who's this little guy?".

As I read the article posted there, it seems like Disney is starting out what I'm sure will be a hugely popular collectible series called Vinylmations! You can read all about them at this link and you can see them in the Disney Store at this link.

Disney fans are going to go bonkers for these things, especially those who like Mickey Mouse. All Vinylmations are in the shape of Mickey, but the sky's the limit with regard to the artwork painted onto the Mickey form. They have tons of these little guys....and I'm sure there are many more to come.

Well, it looks like this will be another thing that will suck money out of my pocket on the next trip to Disney! I wrote in this previous post here on my blog that I just started collecting Disney pins, and now this comes along!

I give up....At this point, I think that I should just turn my bank account over to Disney. :-)

Travel and Review: Fire Island Lighthouse, NY (with photos)

2011-07-29T18:16:00.000-04:00

I took a recent day trip out to Long Island, NY to go to Robert Moses Beach and the Fire Island Lighthouse. This is a relaxing way to spend a beach day in this area, so I thought I would put up a quick post about it for those who might be interested...

There are two large beach complexes with various parking fields in this area, all accessible via Ocean Parkway. If you're driving from west to east on Ocean Parkway, the first you'll come upon is Jones Beach State Park and the second is Robert Moses State Park. I don't need to repeat a lot of the information available at these links to explain these two state parks. Suffice to say that there's more than enough information there for you to read....

In a nutshell, these two massive beach complexes each have their own personality. Since Jones Beach is the first complex on Ocean Parkway that people come to (and thus the most accessible), the primary ocean front parking fields tend to fill up fairly quickly on any given summer day. Spillover parking then goes to the non-primary parking lots, which require a short walk to get to the beaches. Jones Beach tends to draw a younger crowd than Robert Moses, and when combining that with the crowd levels that can swell there (especially on weekends!!!), it can be too much for comfort for my beach-going tastes. We only go to Jones Beach when I take the day off from work and we go on a weekday. Weekends should be avoided unless you go early in the morning before the crowds get there and then leave when the crowds start to swell too large.

To avoid some of the crowd levels at Jones Beach, I take the extra 20 minutes to drive further down Ocean Parkway and over the Robert Moses Causeway to the Robert Moses State Park complex. You'll drop some of the crowd just because of the extra drive time and the beaches here are typically a little less crowded than Jones Beach. Robert Moses also tends to be a little more family oriented but still obviously draws its fair share of young people. Some of the beaches at Robert Moses are designated as radio-free zones.

We typically park at Field 5 at Robert Moses, which is the eastern-most field that's right next to Fire Island Lighthouse. The nice thing about this field is its proximity to the Lighthouse, which allows you to take a little walk on a boardwalk through a nature preserve to explore the Lighthouse and the museum at its base. Additionally, it's nice to park at Field 5 because if you take a little walk east up the beach from the parking field the crowds drop off dramatically. Be cautioned that if you walk far enough east and the beach becomes isolated enough, you'll probably bump into some nude sunbathers. Whether or not that bothers you is up to you to decide! :-)

If you do go to Robert Moses and you park in Field 5, I would recommend spending about 90 minutes out of your day to walk to the Lighthouse, climb to the top, take some photos of the great views, and explore the nice museum at its base. It's easy to spend even more time than this while there because there's plenty of history in the museum about Fire Island Lighthouse and lighthouses in general, as well as a gift shop and nice staff that will be more than happy to engage you in a conversation about the history of Fire Island Light.

Depending on where you live and how you go home, a stop in Freeport, NY for dinner is a nice idea. Specifically, there's a street on the waterways there called Woodcleft Avenue that has a long line of waterfront restaurants and bars to choose from. I've eaten at several of them and they're all pretty good, although I wouldn't say any of them are "great". The dinner crowd starts to pick up around 6:30pm in this area and by 7:30pm it starts to get pretty crowded, so make sure you get there before then if you don't want to wait for a table.

With all of this being said, click on the photo below to see a few pictures from a recent day-trip that I took to Robert Moses State Park and the Fire Island Lighthouse with my family. Enjoy!

Fire Island, NY

Travel and Review: Newport, RI (with photos)

2011-07-20T16:49:00.004-04:00

Castle Hill Inn, photographed from Newport Harbor

I've been going to Newport in Rhode Island for vacation since I was a kid when my parents used to take our family there. Thirty years later, I now take my family there, and it's a relaxing and enjoyable trip.

My impressions of Newport now as an adult are echoed by the same types of memories that I have of Newport as a child. As soon as I make the right turn off the Newport Bridge and drive toward America's Cup Avenue on the water front, a wave of relaxation comes over me every time and stays with me the entire time I'm there. Good stuff....

The general vicinity of activities in Newport is encompassed within a couple of square miles, but the core of the primary activities that you'll probably do is located in an area of just a few square blocks along the Newport water front of America's Cup Avenue and some of the surrounding blocks in that area.

What to do:

Let's get some information out of the way up front in this post with the following links for good things to do while you're in Newport:

Fodor's profile of Newport
Newport Chamber of Commerce
Whale watching out of Provincetown
Whale watching out of Barnstable
Sailing on the custom 50' Flyer catamaran in Newport Harbor
Information on touring the Newport Mansions
The beautiful Cliff Walk hike above the coast alongside the mansions
Fort Adams State Park
Visit Castle Hill Inn to relax on the lawn with a drink overlooking Newport Harbor.
Shopping in the quaint shops on America's Cup Avenue.
Cape Cod is within an easy drive of Newport, and this might merit adding some extra time to your vacation if you want to explore the Cape while you're in Newport.
Going to the beaches, although this is not my primary choice of activity in Newport.
Enjoy a few pints of Newport Storm IPA beer! :-)

That should keep you busy!

I've found that three full days in Newport is a good amount of time to strike a balance between activities and relaxation, especially if you're traveling with kids. That would generally mean an activity in the morning, a break for lunch, and an activity in the afternoon. If you're not traveling with kids (who get tired eventually) or you want to add some time on Cape Cod, then four days is probably better.

The Elms mansion....definitely a must-see activity!

Of all the activities above, I can particularly recommend the Cliff Walk, sailing on the Flyer catamaran, and touring one or more of the mansions. These are classic Newport activities that everyone should experience. If you go to the mansions, then try to see The Breakers, The Elms, and/or Marble House. These are the best of the mansions and they offer an incredible glimpse of the wealth of the gilded age and the lifestyle of the rich and famous in Newport at that time. Every time I see these mansions I just stare at the beauty of them. What craftsmanship and extravagance! There's a bathroom in The Breakers that actually has hot and cold running sea water in the bathtub! And the ballrooms are magnificent...

A note about the beaches. Newport has several beaches to pick from (Easton's Beach, 1st Beach, 2nd Beach, 3rd Beach) but I would say that Newport isn't exactly known for its beaches. First, they can be rocky and have a lot of shells. Second, due to the geography of the region, there's often a lot of seaweed that washes into the coves where the beaches are located. Don't get me wrong. The beaches are OK, but if you're looking for beautiful wide sandy beaches with crashing waves, Newport is not the place to look for that. You would need to go out onto Cape Cod for "better" beaches...

Where to eat:

The outdoor section of The Black Pearl. Good food, great location!

When it comes to dining, the water front wharfs on America's Cup Avenue are packed with restaurants to choose from. Most of them offer some kind of outdoor dining with views of Newport Harbor in addition to their indoor seating. I don't think I've ever had a bad lunch or dinner in Newport. Many of the restaurants have been in their current locations for a long time, and that's a good indicator because competition on the water front is fierce. If any of the restaurants were truly bad, I'm sure they would close quickly. One note....If you're headed out to the water front for dinner on the weekend in the summer, make sure you get there by 5:00pm or you'll be waiting for a long time to get a table. Weeknights are a little better for seating, but not much.

Some of my favorite restaurants include those at the links here:

Where to stay:

Store fronts on Thames Street

There are many different types of accommodations in Newport. Right in the center of town by America's Cup Avenue and Thames Street there are quaint Victorian bed and breakfast inns and a few larger hotels (Marriott, Hyatt, Newport Hotel). All of these book up early in the summer for the prime summer weekends, so unless you plan ahead you might be prevented from getting a room in these areas simply because they're all full. The other issue with staying in the prime areas of town is the cost. All rooms in these locations are over $200/night, and some of them are a lot more. The Hyatt on Goat Island is one of the most expensive hotels in Newport.

If you're OK with staying 5-10 minutes outside of town, then the Holiday Inn Express at this link or the Courtyard Marriott at this link in Middletown are perfectly viable options. In fact, I just stayed at the Marriott and it was nice, clean, convenient, and had a good indoor/outdoor pool.

In summary:

The shops and restaurants along Bowen's Wharf in town...

As you can tell from this post, I really enjoy visiting Newport. It's a bit on the expensive side and I wouldn't put it on my list of places that I need to go every year for vacation, but every 2-3 years I go back there for a few days and I always enjoy it. It's like re-reading a good book or watching a good movie that you've seen before. You know what it's about, but you still love reading and watching them again. Newport is like that. It doesn't change at all over the years and has been kept up nicely, and it's always ready for a return visit. It's consistently a fun, relaxing, nice way to spend a few summer days. Enjoy!

Disney Pin Trading - The addiction (and fun) begins!

2011-07-05T18:03:00.003-04:00

My starter set of pins...

When I went to Disney back in the 1990's with my wife, Disney was just getting started with pin trading. For those who don't know what this is, it's the process of buying and trading metallic pins that you can get at stands in the Disney parks around the world that are adorned with all kinds of scenes related to the Disney parks, characters, movies, etc.

There are thousands of different pins available to date. Anniversary pins, annual pins, specialized pins, limited edition pins. You name it, there's a pin for it. Shockingly, a big missed opportunity for Disney is that they don't publish an annual guide of all the pins, which I'm sure many people in the hobby would love to have and be willing to pay for.

Even back in the 90's when it was just getting started, I could see the potential popularity of the pin trading hobby because people of all ages swarmed the few pin buying stations that Disney had in each park looking for pins to fit into their growing collection. I was intrigued by this and went over to one of the stands to check out the pins.

I quickly saw that it can be an expensive hobby! The most basic pins are about $7, the typical fancier pins are around $10, and they get even more expensive than that depending on how complex/fancy the pin is. Over the years, the prices have remained pretty much the same, and I would imagine that they have to because how expensive can you make a pin??? There's a price point that these things need to stay at so people will buy them over a period of years.

At the time, I didn't get into the hobby because quite frankly I didn't want to spend the money on it. Then, on our last trip to Disney in 2010, my kids expressed an interest in buying pins. Although I heroically resisted this additional expense on what was already turning out to be a very costly trip, I caved in and bought the kids some pins. They were thrilled to get them. And thus a new hobby in my family was born...

We all started talking about the pins, stopping at the pin stands, looking at other people's pins, etc. Once you get into it, all of a sudden you'll notice them all over the place! And the Disney cast members walking around the parks wear them too, so you can walk up to them and ask them to trade (which they always do). Even I got into it when my wife bought me a collector's edition starter kit for Christmas. You can see it in the photo above where they're attached to the red pin lanyard. I like to collect the pins that have scenes of the parks and Disney hotels in them.

Now I can't wait to get there this year to see which new pins to add to my collection!!! I can feel the money being sucked out of my wallet before we even get there....at $10 a pin! When you add this to my "Disney coffee mug" hobby (I buy at least two on every trip there), I'm not going to have enough money for gas to drive home!

It's now a little over ten years since Disney started pin trading. Wisely, they've made it possible to get some pins online at the 'Pin Trading Around The World' website at this link to extend their selling opportunities once people leave the parks. At this site there are links to their pin trading blog, the pin store, and other helpful information for those just starting out with collecting.

Here are two interesting stories about pin trading:

If you weren't previously aware of all this, check out the Disney Pin Trading website and all of the pin trading activities and locations the next time you're in the parks. But bring some extra cash, because I bet that you too will soon be hooked on collecting and trading Disney pins. See more photos below...


Decisions, decisions. Which pin to buy???!!!


A smile as they check out the shiny new pin purchases...

Happy July 4th - Independence Day

2011-07-04T15:09:00.002-04:00

Happy July 4th!

I was out with the family this weekend and saw this flag on top of the Walkway Over The Hudson. I was feeling patriotic so I snapped this shot of it in the wind from far away and added an inner glow to the edge of the frame for a unique look.

Wherever you are and whatever you're doing on this U.S. Independence Day, I hope you're enjoying your barbecues, cold beer, fireworks, and good music with family and friends.

Add a thought of hope that we can work together to get this great country of ours out of the wars that we're in overseas so that our military can come home and we can focus on getting the U.S. back on track to enjoy peace and prosperity once again. We need to stop spending so much money overseas on wars that we can't win and instead start taking care of ourselves for a change....

New free photo apps from Fotopedia (North Korea and Burma)

2011-07-02T09:04:00.000-04:00

In this previous post about Fotopedia, I mentioned the nice photo apps that Fotopedia has put together and offered for free or a nominal charge. This is just a quick post to let people know that they've added two more nice free apps to their catalog that are available for download now:

"Dreams of Burma", which is available at this link.
"North Korea", which is available at this link.

Both of them share all of the features that I've previously mentioned about these apps. Enjoy!

"The Photographer's Eye" - Now available as an iPad app!

2011-06-24T18:48:00.002-04:00

Back in 2009, I wrote a brief review at this link of one of my favorite photography books called "The Photographer's Eye" by Michael Freeman. I've read this book twice now and it stands up well to repeated readings, and in fact I discovered new things the second time around that perhaps I didn't quite fully absorb the first time.

This is one book that I consider essential reading for any photography enthusiast. Considering that, I was pretty excited to hear that this book has now been converted and enhanced for release as an iPad app! A very well selling iPad app, at that. You can read the details about the new app at this link.

Even though I already own this book, I enjoyed it so much that I plan to purchase the iPad app as well. I'm intrigued at the thought of the extra multimedia content in the app that goes above and beyond the book, and I consider the price small relative to the amount of value that I've gotten out of all of Michael Freeman's books.

If you buy the app, I would like to hear your feedback on it. Please add a comment to this post with your thoughts. Thanks!

Review: Incase Book Jacket for iPad 2

2011-06-22T21:01:00.005-04:00

I occasionally put reviews up here on my blog about products that I think are well designed and that will probably be useful for a lot of people to read. Since millions of people own iPads, and many of them probably want a good case for their shiny new purchase, I thought this would be a good topic for a review.

We recently got an iPad 2, and with the swapping from person to person and location to location that this great device is going to end up seeing because everyone wants to use it all the time, my thoughts turned to getting a good case for it right after I walked out of the Apple store.

You'll discover that the Apple Smart Cover is really quite silly after you spend some time checking it out. First, it offers very little actual protection for the iPad. If you drop your iPad with a Smart Cover on, the iPad is going to get damaged. It's as simple as that. Second, it's clumsy. It flops around when it's open, it unfolds when you're trying to use it as a stand, etc. Third, it scratches the back of the iPad in the spot where the magnets attach, if you care about such things. Fourth, the price of $40 is a complete rip-off.

So...After eliminating the Apple Smart Cover, I went to the local giant electronics store (near me, that's Best Buy) to check out the myriad of iPad 2 cases they have. I was in the market for:

A case made of high quality material
A case that's compact
A case that would protect the iPad well but also give access to all of the buttons
A case that's comfortable to hold. I didn't want to have to take the iPad in and out of the case just to use it.

I quickly eliminated most of the cases at the store because after brief examination it was clear that they didn't meet the four essential criteria above. Some of them were flimsy pieces of junk, others protected the back but not the front, others were far too bulky, etc.

Then I saw the Incase Book Jacket for iPad 2. Perfect! This case is priced around $50, but that seems to be about average for the better quality book-style cases for the iPad. The Book Jacket completely protects the front, back, and edges of the iPad. The iPad securely fits into the right side of the case and a velcro tab holds it very securely in place. Perfect.

More than offering simple protection though, the case is also versatile. It can be opened and held like a book, or the cover can be folded back to make it easier to hold. Depending on how you fold the cover, you also get some other different functionality. You can fold it and use the handy built-in strap to create a working angle to type on. You can flip the cover over the other way and prop the iPad up at one of three different viewing angles for movies, TV shows, or reading. Photos of all of these positions are available at this link on the Incase website.

This is all contained in a thin, well built, suede lined book jacket that adds (relatively speaking) very little additional thickness to the iPad for what this case is.

After owning this case for several months, it still looks as good as new and I still think it's great......and that's the sign of a good product. If you're shopping for a case for your iPad and you want a nice book style design, definitely check out the Incase Book Jacket. If you don't like this case, they also make lots of other cases for the full line of Apple products. Good luck with your shopping!

Pathways #3: I've had a photographic epiphany!

2011-06-16T22:17:00.000-04:00

Unfortunately, I haven't posted much over the past two weeks. I think I've been somewhat jinxed. Many things have been going wrong around the house and fixing those things (including my newly dislocated knee!) have taken priority over everything else for a while.

But now I'm back...and returning to my Pathways series for a quick post.

My previous posts focused on learning more about your camera so that you can take it off full automatic mode to take control of the photographic process, and how to manage your in-camera exposures to get punchier and livelier photos straight out of your camera without editing them afterward on your computer. This post is a bit of a divergence from those topics, and I hope you find it a valuable change of course....

I had an interesting discussion with another photographer recently. We were discussing the fact that your photography will usually improve by leaps and bounds when you have a strong passion for what you're photographing. If you're walking around not really caring too much about what you're taking photos of then you won't strive to improve your photography and how you represent your subjects. But if you have passion for your subject and really want to do it justice, then you'll find a way to do it better.

Another topic we discussed is how I have an interest in many different types of subjects (old architecture, decaying objects, storms, odd things, etc) and that I don't focus on just one with excessive passion. He proposed to me that I should try to focus my attention on one subject area for a while to try to hone my skills when dealing with just that subject matter.

As I thought about his point last night, I can't say that I disagree....but the problem is that I'm not interested in dialing in on one specific subject matter for any period of time. It's just not my thing to restrict myself that way. Then I thought a little more about the subjects that I shoot and how I shoot them, and I had a photographic epiphany.

Photographically speaking, one of the primary things that interests me is extreme lighting. It doesn't really matter what the subject is, but extreme lighting on a scene (either light or darkness) almost always catches my attention right away.

When I look back at some of my best photos, they fall into the category of having extreme lighting. I have photos of children in extreme light, landscapes in extreme light, even photos of barns, other random objects, and flowers in extreme light. But for sure, extreme lighting is the single common denominator that runs through my better images.

Two simple images from my library that show what I'm talking about are below. I went against conventional wisdom in the first photo and shot directly into the setting sun for a nice effect. In the second photo, I carefully metered the scene to get my daughter's face right and then I let almost everything else go dark. They're two simple examples of how to use extreme lighting for nice results.

Shooting directly into the sun to silhouette the playing children....

My daughter cleaning up her spilled cereal in a shaft of sunlight....

If you want to read a great book that discusses the type of lighting and shooting situations that I'm referring to in this post, check out the above book by Duncan Evans called "Extreme Lighting Conditions in Digital Photography". This book has many samples of exactly what I like and how to achieve success with shooting in these types of lighting conditions.

Moral of the story: I don't necessarily have a single subject that I'm passionate about, but I do have a single style that I'm passionate about....which is extreme lighting. Now that I've realized this after doing it unconsciously for years, I can hopefully make a big jump in my photographic portfolio by trying to use my passion for this type of lighting to create better photos. I'm looking forward to the challenge!

Try to spend some time finding the subject or style that you're passionate about, and work to improve your skills in that area. It's a great way to jump-start your creativity and improve your skills.

This is why we should have let GM fail

2011-06-07T20:35:00.000-04:00

This article is the epitome of why the U.S. government should have let GM fail.

http://money.cnn.com/2011/06/07/news/companies/gm_gas_tax_hike/index.htm?hpt=hp_t2

Dan Akerson is a clueless moron, as are the American auto industry executives in general. I can’t even imagine that an executive would come up with this idea, let alone back it with his company’s name in tow.

One thing is for sure....You would never hear the executives of Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Hyundai, or Kia making this type of idiotic embarrassing recommendation. They found a way to clobber the U.S. auto makers at their own game decades ago, and still do. They don't need to mess with gas prices to succeed. I can only imagine them laughing when they saw this headline.....

I resent the fact that I would need to pay higher gas prices to make up for the mistakes of the stupid GM executives that have been in place over the decades. I also resent the fact that my tax dollars went to helping with the GM bailout in the first place, which will eventually fail...it's only a matter of time. Historically, auto company bailouts have not worked here or in other countries.

This has nothing to do with the U.S. auto workers. I whole-heartedly support the American auto workers and what they do, I just don't support the stupid companies they work for.

Do you want to rescue the American auto industry and save the auto workers' jobs at the same time? Do it this way:

Let GM fail.
Provide labor and financial incentives for the Japanese and Korean manufacturers to come over to the U.S. (more than they already are).
Lease them our auto factories so that we can keep American jobs here.
Have the U.S. auto workers building high quality efficient foreign cars that don't need artificially inflated gas prices to survive.
Everyone ends up happy.

The American auto industry executives are completely clueless. Utterly and completely clueless. This is why I will always have foreign cars parked in my driveway. Period.

Go beyond...for getting the best shots of your kids

2011-05-26T19:09:00.002-04:00

I don't often re-post other people's links, but this is such a short article with great advice for getting more compelling photos of your kids that I couldn't resist posting it here.

I've tried all of these techniques in the past so it was nice to see them all written up in one place. If you give them a try, you'll instantly notice your photography of your children jump to a more interesting and creative level.

http://www.digital-photography-school.com/how-to-go-beyond-the-regular-composition-advice-for-getting-the-best-shots-of-your-kids

Grab your camera (and your kids) and give it a shot! Enjoy!

Fotopedia: Explore our world with fantastic photos and iPad apps

2011-05-20T12:11:00.002-04:00

I got an iPad 2 recently and it's an absolutely fantastic device. I'll write another post about that in the near future to give a mini-review of my impressions of the iPad and the iOS platform....but for now.....

The subject of this post has to do with one of the many photographic discoveries that I've made recently while using the iPad and some of its great photo apps. The quality of the iPad's screen and the touch interface lend themselves well to working with photography websites, viewing photos, etc.

I'm writing this review because the Fotopedia apps that I mention below are the absolute epitome of what a well designed, highly functional, content-packed iPad app should be. And three out of the four of them are free!

I like to explore the world visually (which I guess is obvious, since I like photography so much). If you gave me the choice between one book about the world and all its countries and people that has mostly text and some small photos, or, a better/larger book with nice large color photos and a significantly higher price, I will gladly spend the extra money on the more visually interesting book. Pictures help me connect with a place much more than words do. It's as simple as that...

So, with that in mind, I stumbled across a link somewhere to Fotopedia.com. If you have not yet seen or used this website, I would highly encourage that you spend some time checking it out. It's a very unique way to explore our world using photography. It's a combination of great photography, Wikipedia, and user-driven content. It's a unique combination and definitely worth a look.

In addition to the Fotopedia website, they've created four fantastic iPad apps filled with content and tons of beautiful photographs from around the world. In addition to continually updating these apps, Fotopedia has put bookmarking and travel planning functionality into the apps. Great for planning future adventures!

The Fotopedia apps include:

Fotopedia National Parks ($2.99) with a promotional video on YouTube located at this link. This app is filled with a wealth of information and photos about the US National Parks....all in one app. When I say this app has nice photos......I mean gorgeous!
Fotopedia Heritage (free) with a promotional video at that link. This app takes you on a journey to all of the World Heritage sites and the description reads: "All of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites. 25,000 Pictures. 4,000 Points of Interest. Thousands of photographers. Hundreds of curators". Another beautifully presented package...
Fotopedia Memory of Colors (free) with a promotional video at that link. The description of this app says: "Memory of Colors is a message of peace, tolerance and respect, for the people threatened by globalization. A 12-year project to assemble a rainbow of 1,300 photos 40 unique cultures in 18 countries (from Algeria to Yemen) and across 4 continents. It is a pause in time and space to preserve the beauty of these disappearing cultures, before it is too late. Look into these eyes and see … the reflection of your own humanity". It's a great way to learn about and see the different cultures around the world.
Fotopedia Paris (free) and the description of the app reads: "A Paris vacation without leaving your home. Dreaming of Paris? Now you can discover and explore the City of Light, as it’s never been seen. Packed with visual surprises and more than 4,000 spectacular photos, Fotopedia Paris makes it easy to find your way through the beauty of Paris and quickly find whatever interests you: art, architecture, cafes, castles, fashion, history, romantic sights, shopping or street life… everything is at your fingertips. As you browse through the city, simply pick your favorite photos and places and Fotopedia Paris creates an interactive map to help you discover familiar places and “hidden gems”. This app is gorgeous and fun, just like… Paris".

I hope you take some time to try the Fotopedia website and apps, and send feedback to the Fotopedia team to encourage them to build more apps of this type. With encouragement from its user base, hopefully Fotopedia will continue to produce apps that can take us on breathtaking photographic journeys around the world. Enjoy!

Is sugar toxic? Check out these two articles...

2011-05-06T08:46:00.000-04:00

When it comes to health, I believe in the old adage of "everything in moderation". Eating, drinking, alcohol, exercise, sleep, etc.

This approach seems to have done me fairly well throughout the years because I'm in pretty good shape for 44 years old, but I need a little more aggressive exercise so I've recently added biking back to my exercise routine since the weather warmed up and my back injuries from past years are healed. I also recently got tennis rackets for my wife and I, and the kids already like tennis, so that will be another family activity to burn some calories and tone up.

Back to my point.....

The one area where my diet falters is sugar. Now more than ever, sugar in its various dubious forms (e.g., high fructose corn syrup) is so pervasive in our foods (especially processed foods) that it's almost impossible to get away from it. Make no mistake about the fact that this huge increase in sugar over the past 10-15 years can be tied directly to an increase in diabetes. My line of work at my current employer puts me in the know about that....trust me. The facts are pretty clear.

I'm making an effort to cut back on my sugar intake whenever I can, and I'm helping my family do the same. It's not easy. You really have to think about what you're putting in your mouth. I'm not going totally right-wing and trying to eliminate all sugar from my diet.....that's not reasonable. All I'm trying to do is cut back where it's easy and common-sensical to do it.

The thing that really motivated me to cut back on sugar are these two articles. The first one is an article that also contains a long video about the problems caused by excessive sugar in your diet and the science related to it. The second is a good article from the New York Times.

Once you read these two articles I guarantee that you'll give sugar a second thought. Again, I'm not saying to go right-wing on this like Dr. Mercola sometimes suggests that people do. I'm simply suggesting that you think about it and maybe make some adjustments in your diet that will do you some good in the long run.

iPhone - The ultimate lifestyle convergence device

2011-05-04T19:02:00.000-04:00

Now there's a mouthful of a title for a blog post! But I really believe it's true. The iPhone is the ultimate convergence device for improving your lifestyle, your efficiency, your work....just about everything! It's part phone, part computer, part personal assistant, part organizer, etc.

Let me say up front that much of what I'm writing here probably also applies to the Android platform and its related smartphones and apps, but the iPhone is what I have experience with so I'm writing about that specifically here.

I got my iPhone a few weeks ago. My wife had one for almost a year before that so I had ancillary experience in using hers and saw the huge potential of the device. The problem is that I was too cheap to buy one for myself! Let's face it....these things are expensive. Not so much the phone itself, but the monthly data plans and cell service! Add it all up over the course of a year and it's a whopper of an extra expense to take on.

So.....the expense kept me fretting about getting one for quite a while until I just couldn't take it anymore. There are so many times when I've been out and about doing something and it occurred to me that having an iPhone would not only come in handy, but it would also enhance the enjoyment of my life. I finally broke down and got one. Not once since then have I thought about the expense of owning and using it. It's that great. Once you have it, the expense of it fades into the distance and you forget about it.

Maybe a statement like "enhance the enjoyment of my life" sounds extreme, but to people who own and use.......and I mean really use......an iPhone, you know what I mean. Not only do I use it for the common every day things like sending/receiving email, calling people, calendars, etc, but the world of the App Store has let me load up the phone with about 25 apps that have organized and improved my life, let me enjoy my hobbies more, let me get around easier, and many other things....including some gaming as well!

Most of the apps were free. The most I paid for any one app was $10 for a specialized photography app that I purchased to make planning my photography outings easier. But all together I probably didn't spend more than $30 on apps for my iPhone.

Now the iPhone never leaves my side. I find myself reaching for it when I would have ordinarily gotten up to go to the computer in another room to do something. News, Facebook, sports, weather, email, Flickr, Twitter, internet, casual photography, reading my RSS feeds, managing my To-Do lists, listening to music, checking prices while I'm out shopping, checking what the latest bird is in our back yard feeder, mapping my bike rides with the GPS, etc. I do it all on the iPhone.

I read a great quote the other day in an article about smartphones. The author of the article was trying to pin down a generic definition of what a smartphone is. He said, “A smartphone is a device whose uses go well beyond calls and messaging. In fact, I would define it as a phone you use at least half the time for something other than calling and messaging”.

I completely agree with that statement. In fact, I almost never use my iPhone as.......a phone.

Yes, the screen is relatively small when comparing it to a computer, but I don't sit there staring at it for hours at a time like I do with a computer screen. It's a bit here and a bit there throughout the day, and that's what I mean when I say "convergence device". You find yourself using it for so many different things at so many times during the day that it becomes a part of the way you function.

If you're debating whether or not to get an iPhone, don't waste your time. Just get it. Don't wait on the iPhone 5 because you never know when it's going to come out and you'll miss enjoying the iPhone every day until then. Just go get the iPhone 4 and start enjoying it today.

As part of this blog going forward, I've created an iPhone category on the left side and will be posting about the iPhone, great apps that I find, and other topics in the future. In fact, I like the iPhone so much that I also purchased an iPad 2 and will be blogging about that as well. I hope you find the articles interesting...

dontflushyourdrugs.net

2011-04-26T19:10:00.000-04:00

With the steadily increasing use of pharmaceuticals over the past 10-15 years, one has to wonder what people are doing with all of their expired or unused medication.

Back in the day, people were told to simply throw them out in the garbage. But then everyone wised up and realized that young unknowing kids could go into the garbage pail and grab a whole bunch of medicine that could kill them, so people starting flushing their old medications down the toilet or pouring it down the sink instead.

In fact, when I first saw this link the other day I asked about ten people who I know: "What do you do with your old medicines when you're ready to throw them out"? Every single person who I asked said, "I flush them down the toilet". Every one of them. Wow! Now you can see the magnitude of the problem we're creating here.

All of this drug-flushing got us into the mess that's detailed at this link: dontflushyourdrugs.net

It makes complete sense that this has now contaminated our waterways and it's affecting fish and wildlife, as well as aquatic life. It doesn't take much imagination to realize that this could also very easily affect humans (and almost certainly already does) because all of these waterways lead to watershed areas, sources of residential wells, recreation water areas, springs, etc.

If all this junk could feminize a male fish and make it produce eggs, I don't even want to know what it could do to a human!

The web site above outlines how to properly dispose of unused pharmaceuticals. Please take a few minutes to give it a read and follow the directions the next time you have a batch of pills to throw out.

If everyone helped, we could cut the course of this completely human-made problem that's affecting everything around us...........including humans!

Thanks!

Don't forget the atmosphere photos!

2011-04-21T16:05:00.000-04:00

A secret team photo from behind, but someone peeked...

Spring has......sprung! And with spring comes......spring sports!

Now is the season when we run around town heading from soccer to baseball to softball, all the while snapping photos of our young ones as they learn their sports and have their fun. But as we do this, don't forget one thing: Take some photos of something other than the game!

Unique view of the first base action under the lights...

Like what, you ask? Atmosphere photos...

Sports are about a lot more than the action happening out on the field. They're about the people that come to see the game, the equipment, the weather, etc. So many things!

Try taking some photos that tell something about what's going on at the games without showing the actual action of the game. Or perhaps they show the action of the game framed in a unique way, like this photo taken from the dugout of the action at first base during my son's first night game ever.

Take some photos that show the teams and their spirit, the excitement, the camaraderie, the anxiety that comes from a close game, the pep talks from the coach, etc.

All of these things are part of the game, and when you think about creating a holistic memory of these times, I would argue that these types of photos are just as important as the action of the game itself.

So grab your arsenal of lenses, position yourself in unusual locations with unusual views, and create some great atmosphere photos to bring home some memories other than the hits, slides, and tags. Don't forget to crank up the ISO to ensure hand holdable shutter speeds if you're shooting games that are occurring at night.

I've added a few more samples of what I'm talking about below. Enjoy!

Pep talk before the big game...


First night game ever, on a field of green under shining lights...

Some day my daughter will say, "I remember that pink helmet Daddy"!

The emotion in the dugout near the end of the game: "Please get a hit"!

Is "Camera+" the best camera app for the iPhone? Yes!

2011-04-19T16:39:00.002-04:00

I finally got a shiny new iPhone 4. I love it, but I'll write about how great it is in another post. :-)

The subject here is photography related, not phone related...

I always try to have a camera with me when I'm out and about so that I can grab serendipitous photos whenever I can. The native Camera app in iOS on the iPhone is OK for grabbing quick photos, but it has one huge flaw. You can't control autofocus and exposure metering independently of each other. Meaning, on the native Camera app, whatever you focus on will determine your exposure. That's logical for casual photography, but it's bad for more serious/creative photography.....

Most people might think that this setup is OK for casual snapshots on a camera phone, and in good light for a casual shot maybe it is most of the time. But I saw right away that the photos come out poorly if you're trying to shoot in any kind of questionable lighting situation. I immediately started looking for a solution.

The answer is "Camera+". Here is a link to Camera+ in the iTunes Store. You can also read much more information about it on the Tap Tap Tap web site at this link (the creators of Camera+).

This app costs $1, and for that cost you get the problem above corrected but you also get a lot of other handy features as well. Specifically, with Camera+ you get:

Separate control of autofocus and exposure metering. This is a must for creative photography!!!
A handy and responsive zoom control that's always visible. On a side note, I would suggest avoiding zooming on the iPhone in general unless you really have to because it uses a digital zoom (not optical) and it deteriorates the photo quality.
The capability to simultaneously save photos to the Camera+ "Lightbox" (for editing) as well as the iOS Photo app. This is handy because you can edit your photos right in Camera+ without needing to open a separate application. The capability to save in both locations is handy because then you don't need to move photos around on your iPhone.
A grid to use to level your photos.
Useful "Photo Info" panel with an integrated map of where you took your photo based on geotagging embedded within the image.
A shooting self-timer.
Quality settings.
Innovative "Photo Flashlight" utility.
Stabilizer function that senses when your camera is still before it snaps a photo.
Photo editing effects built into the app. Each effect has an intensity slider to control how much it affects your photo. It's handy to have these effects in Camera+ itself instead of having to go to a separate app for editing. There are also borders and cropping available.
Built-in social network sharing capabilities (Facebook, Flickr, Twitter).

It's easy to see from the comments above that Camera+ is far superior to the built in Camera app. For $1, it's a total bargain! The one drawback is that it doesn't shoot video....yet....so if you want to do that then you need to jump into the native Camera app. But I'm sure the creators of Camera+ will add this capability to their app quickly. Even without video, it blows away the built in Camera. Completely blows it away.

Get this app! You'll love it.

This is AWESOME! Go Trump!

2011-04-12T16:50:00.000-04:00

Photo credit: CNN.com

Thank god:
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/04/12/cnn-poll-trump-tied-for-first-in-gop-horserace/

And if he doesn't make it as the GOP nominee, he'll run as an independent:
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/04/12/trump-now-considering-independent-run/

This can only be good for this country. It will really stir up the pot, so to speak.

Trump says things bluntly and plainly that other politicians would never say. I like that.

He will certainly make a lot of enemies (and also some friends), but whatever the case I think this country could use a good dose of “Donald Trump reality”. Which is that other countries think the U.S. is a joke, we never get any payback for “policing the world”, our economic negotiations with other countries are always disadvantageous to us, etc.

Our country needs to be run like a business. Trump is obviously good at that.

If he can get a good political coach to smooth some of his rough edges, he might do OK. That guy James Carville (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Carville) worked wonders for Clinton. Trump certainly has the money to get him involved.... :-)

Video for perfect pushups and plank exercises

2011-04-09T14:27:00.000-04:00

I'm not big on working out (i.e., lifting weights, core exercises, etc). It bores me. I prefer to get my exercise from walking on the treadmill, riding my bike, hiking, or playing basketball. This year I'm taking up tennis and may try golf again. These types of things are what I call "active exercise".

Doing "active exercise" has kept me in good shape over the years, but a while back I hurt my back and I had to adjust the way that I do some things. After I was better, the back doctor told me that since I'm a tall and thin guy, I should do some core and chest/shoulder exercises to take some of the load off my back when doing normal activities. I thought one thing: Boring....

But today I saw the video at this link that contains time proven methods for doing pushups and planks the proper way for maximum benefit. In addition, the video recommends minor tweaks to the form of the exercises to target specific muscle groups while still doing the same basic motions.

It's worth a few minutes to check it out to get some more well-rounded exercise into your routine. I plan to start doing these types of exercises to add a little variety to what I'm doing and see if it helps out my back.

The U.S. government is run by a bunch of morons! (no surprise)

2011-04-07T17:01:00.002-04:00

I've always kept my mouth shut on the topic of politics because quite frankly I'm not overly interested in it. However, whenever I see blatant government stupidity and disregard for the overall good going on, I'm motivated to speak out.

If the U.S. government shuts down this week because our elected Congress-men/women can't resolve their disagreements, then I fall firmly in the camp of feeling that our leaders are complete idiots.

http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/04/07/6424941-reid-on-shutdown-it-looks-like-its-headed-in-that-direction

http://www.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/04/07/congress.budget/index.html?hpt=T2

Additionally, if the government shuts down then the paychecks of our elected people in Congress should stop too. Better yet, they should all be voted out of office. Maybe that will get them going! If I didn't do my job and did nothing but argue, and contributed to my company failing, then I would get fired. Simple as that. These guys should get fired too....

I said it before and I'll say it again. If Donald Trump runs for President (which he's considering doing and I wrote about it at this link), then I bet he would really rattle our traditional government ranks to the core. He might not win, but he would hopefully scare a lot of people into seeing things straight and make them understand what has to happen to "fix" the U.S. economic situation. I would vote for him in one second. Listen to him talk about political topics and you might give him a second look too. He did a great interview today on CNN.

What do you think?

"Designing Disney" - John Hench

2011-04-04T16:56:00.003-04:00

A note to my friends on Facebook...My posts that appear there are automatically coming from my blog over here at http://www.johnolszewski.com, so if you want to see the full picture of what I'm doing online, check out my blog URL above in addition to watching on Facebook.

I'm adding a new section to my blog with the keyword "Disney" in the My Topics navigation on the left side. You can click that keyword to see everything that I put up here that's related to Disney. I hope you'll come back often to check it out, or you can also simply subscribe to the RSS feed for my blog to get automatic updates in your RSS reader or email.

Everyone who knows me is aware of the fact that I've always been a total Disney fanatic. I think I've been there around nine or ten times, and I even got engaged in front of Italy in Epcot. But my interest in Disney goes far outside of the parks. It reaches to books, movies, and now the family has even gotten into Disney pin collecting!

Some day I will visit the other Disney parks. I've never been to DisneyLand but that seems to be the next one for me to try considering it's in the US. The other parks around the world will need to wait for a while. I've also been on the Disney Cruise Line, which is fantastic and I highly recommend it.

To me, Disney has always been my ultimate "feel good" place. As soon as I walk through the front gates to the park I'm instantly converted back to being a kid again and my inner child runs wild. Memories come flooding back, everyone is smiling and laughing, etc. It just feels great to be in a place that makes so many people feel so good. On top of that, the parks have been kept immaculate and innovative over the years....and they just keep getting better! I would like to go there for a week every year if I could, but the family budget prevents that. :-(

The official books from the Disney company that I've read about the parks over the years provide much insight into what went into designing, planning, and building them. It's really fascinating to get this "behind the scenes" look into the parks because it makes you appreciate the care and attention to detail that went into them, and the total mindset of Disney designing virtually everything that they do for their guests.

A unique view of "Spaceship Earth" that I captured during our 2006 trip

That concept of "designing for the guests" reminds me of a funny anecdote mentioned in one of the books about Walt Disney talking to one of the groundskeepers in DisneyLand one morning. Walt was touring the grounds before the park opened, and he stopped to speak to a groundskeeper. The groundskeeper told Walt that he was frustrated by people cutting across one nice section of grass from one part of the park to the other because it was killing the grass and making it look ugly. Walt explained to the groundskeeper, "Don't get frustrated by this. This is feedback from our guests that the path through this part of the park that we built is not right". Walt told the frustrated groundskeeper to accept feedback from the guests in whatever form it comes, and put in a nice path through that part of the grass and line it with flowers and trees. The path became one of the busiest walkways in that part of the park. Moral of the story: "Listen to the guests", and this concept pervades everything that Disney does.

That level of attention to detail is all over the parks, you just have to know where to look for it other than the obvious views that are all around you.

So, with that in mind, to start off this new Disney section of my blog on the right foot, I'm posting some information about the book above called "Designing Disney" by John Hench that I think true Disney fans will find very interesting.

John was a long time "Imagineer" at Disney and worked hand in hand with Walt and all of the key Disney management and park designers over several decades. He had a major role in much of what you see at all of the Disney parks, the rides, the stores, attractions, theaters, etc. The book is a fascinating look into how and why Disney does what it does, how their ideas go from plans to realization, and even discusses details like why certain color schemes and music are chosen for the parks, walkways, rides, etc.

Disney is certainly not what you would call a "relaxing" vacation, per se'. It's an action-filled and fast-paced vacation during which you buzz from one place to another trying to soak everything in and have as much fun as possible before you have to go home. Being a fast paced vacation destination, you sometimes lose focus of the little design details of the parks, rides, and overall atmosphere.

After reading this book, I wanted to get on a plane to go to DisneyWorld just to walk around and look at the parks.....really look at them.....and soak in the details that went into them that were mentioned in the book. In fact, the next time that I go there, my mission is to photograph and capture the nuances of the park, instead of just taking the traditional "stand in front of this ride and I'll take your picture" photos. The photo that I put above of Spaceship Earth is a good example of what I'm talking about....capturing a different view. It will be a fun photographic challenge!

If you decide to give this book a read, I hope you enjoy it. I will be posting more information about other interesting Disney books in the future.

Capture those funny little moments that make you laugh forever

2011-04-02T08:57:00.006-04:00

I'm not a great candid photographer or people photographer. Over the years I think I've gotten better at it, but it's still not really my thing. The nature of my photography is usually to take my time to frame and capture the shot I want and relax in the moment a bit.

That has to change when you have kids though. This is the one area where I was forced to get better at capturing candid photos because kids are only young once and the time flies by. These are the memories of a lifetime...

I've tried to "spy" on the kids with my cameras as best as I can over the years and a lot of photos of them doing their thing and learning about life turn out to be simple snapshots. And that's OK....not every photo needs to be a work of art.

I guess that's the point of this post. I think a lot of people who get into photography (including me) occasionally start to take it a little too seriously in their quest to become "better", and then they start missing out on the little candid things in life.

This photo here is one of my all time favorite candid photos of my daughter. We were in Disney World in the Animal Kingdom section of the park. They have a nice little petting zoo there where the kids can go into a fenced in area and pet and brush a variety of goats, sheep, etc.

My daughter saw this little black goat and she followed him around the whole time we were in there. The goat wanted nothing to do with Nicole. Every time she got close to him, he quickly walked away to another part of the enclosure. She was persistent though, and she slowly followed him around mumbling something like "Come here goat. Don't run. Come here goat". It was very funny to watch...

Finally the moment hit. It was almost like the goat said, "OK. Fine. If you're going to follow me around all day then let's get this over with". Nicole saw him standing still and she bent over in front of him with her little butt sticking out....very slowly getting closer step by step until they were almost face to face. They just stood there staring at each other....I don't think either of them knew what to do next.

SNAP! Got it. Every time I see this photo it makes me laugh. It brings me back to that day like it was yesterday and I think about how much this simple candid photo perfectly expresses my daughter's personality. She is endlessly curious, fun spirited, persistent, and very humorous.

If I was worried about choosing lenses, the composition of the shot, the lighting, the background, etc, then I would have missed this moment. Sometimes you just have to snap and you end up with a better and more meaningful photo than you ever could have planned.

Photography can be as simple as that. Quickly capturing a candid photo that will make you laugh for a lifetime...

Welcome to the 2011 Formula 1 and IndyCar seasons!

2011-03-28T13:17:00.000-04:00

It's a sure sign of warmer months coming when the Formula 1 and IndyCar seasons begin. Formula 1 started this weekend with the season opener in Australia, as did IndyCar with its opener in St. Petersburg, FL.

Seeing the races this weekend reminded me of when I took our family to see the IndyCar race at Watkins Glen International Speedway in 2009 and 2010. I decided to post this photo to celebrate the season!

This is a shot that I grabbed at 1/2500 of a second of Helio Castroneves leading the pack at the IndyCar race at Watkins Glen in 2009.

There's nothing like the sound of 20 or so of these Indy cars when they all go screaming by together at 170 MPH at the start of the race. 650 HP each. It takes your breath away...

The Photo Argus

2011-03-23T09:10:00.000-04:00

I ran across this nice site yesterday called The Photo Argus. Here's a link for you to check it out. Nice collection of articles, photo galleries, tips, etc. Enjoy!

Photo Carousel #11: "Player in the Park"

2011-03-20T19:41:00.004-04:00

Here's my next Photo Carousel entry, "Player in the Park". Click the photo above to see it larger and read more about it beyond what I wrote below. To see it even larger you can click on this link.

From a creative perspective, this photo was an exercise in compromises to get what I wanted from a candid situation. So the point of this photo is to "work your subject" until you get the image that you want.

For this picture I wanted to hide most of the player's face while still getting most of the saxophone and the open music case in the photo. Not easy to do. Every way that I tried to reposition myself to improve the composition ended up putting another bad background element in the photo.

Ultimately, I comprised to get this composition and left to go back to our hotel.

The issue with the color version of this photo is......the color! There's too much of it! The grass behind him on the hill of the park came out very green. And the red bricks on the ground in front of him were also pretty bright. Yet I knew I wanted to do something with this photo...

Finally I hit on the idea of desaturating the whole image and leaving just him in color. This achieved the effect I was looking for, which is to draw the viewer's eye to him and not the other elements that I couldn't get rid of.

In the end, it came out nice as an 8x10 print....but not before some coaxing to get its center of attention clearly defined. It was a fun exercise playing around with this shot. I wouldn't use this black and color technique often because it's kind of cliche in a way, but for this shot it worked.

Japan

2011-03-16T15:49:00.000-04:00

This is a link to one of the most incredible photo galleries I've ever seen on CNN. The aerial photos show the mind-numbing extent of the damage from the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

The extent of the damage is really incomprehensible to me. I can't even begin to imagine how this will all be cleaned up. The suffering seems immeasurable. Not to mention that this is all going on in the midst of one of the world's worst nuclear accidents.....

Throughout watching the coverage from Japan on CNN and MSNBC, I repeatedly saw one thread weaving its way through all of the TV coverage that I think is a true shining moment for Japan. I keep seeing stories of how the Japanese people are banding together to help one another and their nation in this difficult time. These are values that are taught to Japanese people at a very young age. They have an incredibly deep culture rooted in these values and it shows in times like these.

There's no violence or looting on TV like other countries occasionally see in these circumstances. Just people working together under impossible circumstances.....

Perhaps we can all learn a lesson from the Japanese people and their culture. They are a shining example of putting the common good and their nation before themselves.

Stay away from the Apple iOS 4.3 update for iPhone and iPad!

2011-03-14T10:35:00.006-04:00

As readers of this blog know, I like Apple products. My wife's iPhone is a pleasure to own and use. Extremely useful device.

Throughout the time that she's had her iPhone, I've always updated it with the latest release of its operating system, Apple's "iOS", to get better performance and new features. I've never had a problem with the updates or the update process.

Until now....

I'm posting today to let readers know that the latest update to iOS, which is version 4.3, is a complete piece of crap. The update process (for me) was as easy as always, but from what I read on the Apple user forums that has not been the case for many others. But the trouble doesn't stop there...

Beyond the update process is the real meat of the situation, which is the 4.3 update itself and what it does to the phone.

To that end, I can say that the 4.3 update "broke" our iPhone 3GS. Since updating to 4.3 this weekend, the key internal iPhone apps (Email, Contacts, Settings, etc) have slowed to a crawl. There are giant pauses between scrolls on the screen.....and I mean pauses of 5-10 seconds or more before the 3GS will respond to a swipe of your fingers. This obviously makes the phone quite unusable. It's faster to just do work on the computer.

If you want to see the trouble that you're probably in for if you do this upgrade, check this link on the Apple web site. The forum at that link is filled with people having problems with their iPhone 3GS and 4, and the iPad, after moving to iOS 4.3. Broken connections, crashed phones, lost data, horrible performance, etc.

For now, I would recommend to anyone who happens to read this that you stay with iOS 4.2 until these problems with iOS 4.3 are resolved.

Come on Apple. This update sucks and you've crippled your customers' devices. Get it fixed!

UPDATE on 3/15: Here's a link to a thread on the Apple forum dealing with the problems on the 3GS. There's a rumor going around that Apple has provided some people with info that a 4.3.1 release is already being worked on, but that's just a rumor as far as I know...

UPDATE on 3/18: We've noticed that the battery life on the phone has plunged and it will drain a full charge in a few hours, even when just sitting there untouched. The phone also gets quite warm when in a pocket or purse, something that never used to happen before.

UPDATE on 3/20: Well, as quickly as the problems appeared after the iOS upgrade to 4.3 on my iPhone 3GS, the problems disappeared. Yes. All problems are gone. If I didn't know better, I would say that Apple pushed out a secret fix to iOS 4.3 that suddenly fixed my phone but that's highly unlikely (if not impossible). Instead, a member on the Apple forum posted a seed of an idea that might have caused the problem. Since the battery was acting so strange, he suggested that perhaps the batter management subsystem somehow got corrupted during the update process on my phone (which has not been unheard of in the past with iOS upgrades). This could probably explain some of the strange behaviors that we were seeing, but in any event, there's something wrong with the 4.3 upgrade if it could even cause this problem in the first place. Knock on wood, my phone is now working fine with iOS 4.3 in place, however a lot of people on the Apple forums are still having problems so I would still recommend staying away from this until a cleaned up iOS 4.3.1 is released.....

UPDATE on 4/14/11: I recently purchased a new iPhone 4 that has iOS 4.3 on it already, and the phone is running fine. It has none of the problems mentioned above. I have not updated to 4.3.1 because I don't have a reason to on either one of our iPhones, and I don't want to risk it. So, for now, we have two functioning iPhones on 4.3. Seeing as how I just bought a new iPhone 4 with iOS 4.3 on it and it's running fine, and the problems with my wife's 3GS seem to have completely cleared up, it's really making me wonder what's going on. My sneaking suspicion is that the 4.3 and 4.3.1 updates themselves might actually be OK, but instead it might be the update process itself that's causing a lot of strange problems. Many people are complaining that things are going wrong during the process, and those errors and problems might be corrupting the phone somehow. Just my guess...

Under-the-radar tick diseases spreading across the U.S.

2011-03-12T14:47:00.001-05:00

I wanted to post the article at this link from MSNBC called "Under-the-radar tick diseases spreading across the U.S." because there's a lot of valuable information in it that people should be aware of as we move into the warmer months of the year when ticks are most active.

At one time or another during the summer months of recent years, we've found ticks on all four of us in my house. We found dog ticks on me, my wife, and my son. Several times we found deer ticks on my daughter, and one of those times involved seven or eight at the same time that somehow got in her hair and on her eye. Those little deer ticks are a pain in the ass. They're almost impossible to see.

None of us got Lyme disease until my daughter unfortunately got it last year. She never felt a tick bite, we never saw a tick on her skin over the days that it might have been there, and she had zero symptoms.....except the infamous "bulls-eye rash" that eventually showed up that's a sure symptom of Lyme.

The picture here shows the rash that we found on the back of her leg. We immediately called the doctor when we found it, he said it was a classic Lyme rash, and he put her on antibiotics without waiting any further. After three weeks, the rash was gone and she never had any other symptoms.

The article that I linked to above tells of some much more serious diseases that can come from tick bites. Everyone should be aware of them because some of them (and their symptoms) sound pretty miserable.

We've always been cautious about checking and brushing the kids off when they come in from outside, they don't play in the woods near our house during the summer months, and we always check them for any bulls-eye rashes at night during the warm months. Even with that, Nicole got Lyme, so we need to step it up a notch.

While I'm not a big fan of spraying chemicals like DEET all over the kids every time they go outside in the summer, I'm going to do some research into what other things might be used to repel ticks from our bodies. I'll post anything that I find back into this article in the future.

In the mean time, stay cautious as it gets warm. Check yourselves and your kids when you/they come in from outside, and check in the mirror each night for the Lyme rash. If you miss seeing the initial rash, it will go away and the next Lyme symptoms that you get could be much worse (i.e., neurological problems, heart issues, etc).

More to come on this topic if/when I find the information that I'm looking for...In the mean time, here's the link to the Center for Disease Control web site on Lyme.

"What doesn't add detracts from an image" - Robert Rodriguez Jr.

2011-03-10T13:59:00.000-05:00

Here's a link to a short post over on Robert Rodriguez's blog about simplifying your photos to make them more effective. Definitely a principle that I've worked on in my photography over the years, and it helps to always keep it in mind.

Pathways #2a: Michael Frye - Reading Histograms (and using them!)

2011-02-19T20:54:00.001-05:00

In my Pathways #2 article on this blog, I spoke about getting better exposures straight out of your camera. It makes such a huge impact on the visual appeal of a photo to have it properly exposed. Within that article, I posted an example photo of mine to drive home my point. This post is related to the one I mentioned above, so I called it "2a". :-)

The two main tools to achieve better exposure are: 1) having the knowledge of how your camera's metering system works and what lighting situations will fool your camera into over or underexposing a scene, and 2) how to use your camera to correct these situations. I touched on both points in my article.

Related to #2 above, the main way to use your camera to understand and correct any given exposure situation is by viewing the histogram and understand what it's telling you about the exposure settings that you've chosen for any given photo that you're trying to take.

To that end, today I read this post by Michael Frye on his blog that drives home the point of getting proper exposure with even better examples than I provided in my article because he includes photos and histograms and explains what they're showing you.

It's a quick and useful read for anyone looking to get better exposures straight out of their camera. Enjoy!

Welcome, spring! Are you almost here?!

2011-02-17T16:16:00.005-05:00

Before the storm...

It's 55 degrees today where I live in New York. Tomorrow it will probably be over 60! Very nice, considering the brutal winter we've had this year. You can go outside in a sweatshirt, the birds are singing, the sun is shining, etc. All while we still have over two feet of snow on the ground!

I love the photo to the left. It was taken at dusk out of my garage door after I cleaned up the snow from the start of a big storm. The light in the sky was heavy and gray, and you could almost feel the storm coming in. We got pounded that night with over a foot of snow. I've seen this type of light many times this winter late in the day before overnight storms...

I didn't mind the harsh winter this year. In my opinion, I don't have much purpose for winter without the beauty and fun of the snow, so bring it on! :-)

My greeting in front of the garage door, blocked with 20 inches of snow!

That being said, it was a lot of work cleaning it all up! This winter, I was typically met with a scene like this when I opened up the garage door. A blocked door with swirling winds and blowing snow.

Of course, I learned the hard way about the new laws in the U.S. that were implemented in 2010 that increased the amount of ethanol in our gas. Why does this matter to me? You can't store your power equipment with gas in it during the off seasons anymore. The new fuel turns gummy in the fuel lines and carburetor and makes the equipment run very badly. Of course, not knowing this ahead of time, my snow blower was one of my pieces of equipment that I left the gas in over last summer and all of this snow was that much harder to clear because the machine was not running right.

Clearing the driveway after a storm of more than a foot of snow...

Eventually I got it running better, which helped me cut a path through the multiple storms that dumped over a foot of snow, like this one at left.

The kids had a lot of fun with the first few storms because there was so much snow that it was funny to try to walk and play in it. But then we got another storm. And another. Soon the snow was too deep for sledding. The sleds didn't move!

Then we got an ice storm on top of it all and that turned everything into a solid block of ice and snow. The fun was over.

Me, at work, on one of our smaller storm cleanups...

As the winter progressed, we ran into another problem. Many school cancellations. In a stroke of genius (insert sarcastic sigh), our school system only planned for one snow day this year. Huh? I don't really understand the logic of that, but go figure....

Now the kids will have their spring vacation chipped into so that we can return days to the school calendar.

Was it me who said I wanted all this snow?! :-)

So as we roll toward the end of February, I can say now that I've had my fill of winter. The storms were fun, everyone got to play around a lot, and now it's time for spring. I especially began to feel this way today with a classic day of "spring fever". The high temperatures and the birds singing brought that on...

The birds want their bath back...

So I end this winter photo essay with a picture of our birdbath. It's buried up to the dish in snow and it's tipping over due to the soft ground underneath it. In some of the past winters, it was so mild that the birds were able to splash around in the bird bath most of the winter. Not so this year. They land on the frozen snowcap on top of it and look around as if to say, "What the hell? Where's the water?".

Soon, my friends...........soon.

Subscribe to me on Flickr!

2011-02-05T09:35:00.001-05:00

Hi everyone...

As we move forward into 2011 (covered in snow!), I've started to increase my online photo posting on Flickr. I'm trying to get some of my better photos up there to get some feedback from people.

If you're interested in receiving my new photos automatically, you can use your RSS reader to pick them up from this link:

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=54191762@N02&lang=en-us&format=rss_200

If you're so inclined, please post your comments about any of the photos that you see there. I would be interested to hear your feedback.

Hope to see you there!

John

Photo Carousel #10: "Boathouse Restaurant"

2011-02-03T22:17:00.001-05:00

Here's my next Photo Carousel entry, "Boathouse Restaurant".

We spend some time almost every summer vacationing at Lake George in upstate New York. It’s a terrific vacation place centered around the beautiful (and big!) lake with many water activities to enjoy and a nice town with a ton of restaurants and other land-based activities.

This is one of my favorite photos that I’ve taken of Lake George, and there’s not even much of the lake in it! But it captures the spirit of the place for me and for that reason I consider it a successful photo. I hope others enjoy it as well, even though it may not have the same emotional connection for you. Click on the photo above to learn more about it…

From a creative perspective, there’s a lot going on in this photo to look at…which is precisely why I captured it. It’s all “calm” stuff though, so it allows you the time to look around it to explore.

You have the overall scene itself of the restaurant and the reflections of the lights on the water. I liked the colors there. Their reach across the water was what initially grabbed me about this scene. Then there’s the people eating in the upstairs alcove in the upper left. The boats at the dock, the waitress in the red shirt all the way on the right, etc. To me it says what it is: A waterside restaurant, and to me they’re very relaxing. A great way to spend an evening after a day on the lake. Pull up to the restaurant, dock, and relax.

I took a number of shots of this scene as the sun was setting. The most effective ones were after dusk when the lights of the restaurant impacted the scene. For shots like this, it’s best to try to capture them while there’s a little bit of light left in the sky so it doesn’t appear as total blackness in the final image. If I had waited just a few minutes longer, the blue sky would have turned black and that would have changed the mood of this scene in a direction that I didn’t want it to go.

I intentionally framed this with the restaurant at the top to allow the lights maximum room to spread across the water. As I look at this I can almost hear the water lapping against the boats and the laughter of the people on the dock enjoying dinner.

What I really wanted to do was go back to shoot from this same location with a more telephoto lens on a night when the restaurant was more crowded so I could pick out scenes on the docks, in the upstairs bar, etc. It would have been a cool vantage point to capture the hustle and bustle of the place on a busy night. But I never got the chance to go back on this trip. I’ll try again in the future.

LensAlign

2011-01-25T08:25:00.000-05:00

I've seen and read about enough problems with camera and lens calibration to finally put a post up here about it. I've had issues with it myself that finally necessitated sending my whole Canon rig (including lenses) back to Canon twice to get it fixed. It's frustrating, no doubt about it.

Mass produced cameras and lenses at any price point are manufactured within a certain quality tolerance. As the following two articles concisely point out, these tolerances can sometimes combine to work against you and you'll end up with slightly out of focus images.

I've read about many ways to microfocus adjust your camera/lenses on the internet if your camera has that function, and one of the more reputable methods is posted at this link. The problem with this method is that depending on how you set it up, you can get widely variable and unrepeatable results. Not good...

So what can you do about this? As mentioned in the articles above, other than sending your whole camera rig back to your camera manufacturer (which you can't do if you use third party lenses), the main choice for repeatable consistent testing seems to be LensAlign.

Since I'm now using several third party lenses instead of Canon's, I plan to purchase the LensAlign MkII product for $80 to try it out on at least two of my lenses that I think I have some problems with. I'll post my results here...

Rogue Flashbender and Stofen Omnibounce

2011-01-18T17:36:00.004-05:00

Photo by Neil van Niekerk

Accessory flashes are great devices. They open up a whole new world of lighting beyond what the pop-up flash on your DSLR can do.

Once you get into bouncing your accessory flash off of walls, ceilings, and other objects to get better flash photography results, you'll never again go back to straight ahead fired flash...which can be very harsh looking in the final photo.

The photo above by Neil van Niekerk is a perfect example of using bounced flash to fill in the existing light in a photo to get fantastic and natural looking flash results. This shot would have been impossible with straight ahead fired flash. It had to be bounced to achieve this even lighting on the girl with a nice balance of the background light. Neil is a genius on flash photography. I highly recommend his book entitled "On-Camera Flash".

If you use an accessory/external flash and you're looking to improve your results even further beyond simple bouncing to achieve the kind of results in the direction of what Neil does, then get these two cheap accessories:

Rogue Flashbender (see video below)
Stofen Omnibounce

I've been using the Omnibounce for a while with very good results. It produces a nice, diffuse, wrap-around light on your subject. But there are also times when I'm not looking to get the diffuse light that it creates. I want bounced flash all going straight ahead with a better sense of control, but I don't want it harsh like straight fired flash.

Back in the day, photographers used to achieve bounced straight ahead flash by aiming their flash up and rubber-banding an index card to the flash to bounce the light forward. It worked great to bounce the flash forward, but it wasn't very flexible.

And then along came the Rogue Flashbender. I got one of these for Christmas and it's great. Well worth the $25. It attaches to your flash with velcro and it bends and flexes into any shape that you want to bounce your flash forward (or any other direction). The animation picture to left shows the various positions it can be bent into. You can see photos of how it's used on their web site at this link. It can also be flipped over and used as a flash flag to prevent flash light from reaching a particular area of your subject.

It's not often that you can buy an accessory for your camera that's cheap but has dramatic results. These two simple devices work terrific and should be in the bag of every photographer who's interested in getting better flash results.

Out of the airplane window!

2011-01-17T09:21:00.003-05:00

I've discovered Flickr lately. Yes, I know, I'm a late-comer to it. :-)

Under a totally crappy user interface (Yahoo, please do some work on this!) there's some great functionality if you dig around to find it. So many great/interesting photographers out there...

While exploring some 'Groups' on Flickr and trying to find the right place to post one of my airplane photos, I ran across this link to a Group called "Airplane Wings".

One of the rules of this photo group is that the photos need to include the wing of the airplane. Interesting! Check it out for some very unique photos of the friendly skies.

Saving Eddy, one step at a time

2011-01-16T12:32:00.000-05:00

This is a link to Chris Johnston's blog called "Namibian Photography".

On his blog, Chris is currently documenting (with pictures and words) how he and a small group of people are trying to save a baby elephant that they found abandoned by its mother in the wild. It's a great story of caring and perseverance.

I hope Eddy makes it!

Photo Carousel #9: "Going Home"

2011-01-15T12:29:00.000-05:00

This is my ninth Photo Carousel entry, "Going Home". If I do humbly say so myself, I really like this photo! :-)

I took this out the window of a Singapore Airlines 747 on my way home from Germany to New York in March 2010.

We were flying straight into the sunset for a large part of this flight and I got some amazing photos out the window. However, it was difficult to do it without getting reflections from the windows in the photos, especially when facing forward in my seat.

So....I turned around to try to shoot backward and I saw this great shot. The sky was perfect, I was able to get both engines in the photo while they were glowing in the sunset, and the ground is still visible in the dim light below.

Looking for a different vantage point from which to take photos (and some good luck with the light!) came together to make a cool photo!

For this particular entry of Photo Carousel, I don't have a specific compositional or technical lesson that I'm communicating. Instead, the point I want to make is a logistical one. It's a lesson that I learned from one of my favorite photographers a long time ago, and even though it's somewhat common sensical, it really never occurred to me when taking photos.

The premise is simple: As you're exploring a place or thing and spending time to photograph it, turn around in the opposite direction and explore further. See if there are more photos to take of whatever you're photographing by simply changing your vantage point.

I can't even say the number of times I've done this and ended up with additional great photos that were taken in a location looking in the total opposite direction than I was originally looking.

During sunsets, at the beach, in the mountains, even at family parties. Turn around and continue to look around. You never know what you'll find!

Easily build your own Photoshop panel with your most often used commands

2011-01-11T17:35:00.000-05:00

If you're like me, when you open a photo for basic editing in Photoshop, you probably use mostly the same commands every time....over and over. Select, crop, dodge, burn, levels, curves, brush, image size, red eye fix, unsharp mask, etc. You probably also go into the menus or use keyboard shortcuts to access these commands...every time.

Your editing life can be a lot easier. Simply use the free Adobe Configurator tool located at this link to create your own custom panel that can sit in your Photoshop workspace, and put all of your most often used commands in the panel so you can access them with one simple click.

There's a lot of power to doing this. First, you save time by not repeatedly going into menus (some of which are several levels deep). Second, you can build a pseudo-workflow into the panel simply by putting the commands in the order you typically use them. Third, any command or action can be included in these panels, saving you the time of clicking into other default Photoshop panels in the workspace.

To give you an idea of what this looks like, I put my main photo editing panel that I created to the left side of this post. You can see that I have some commonly used tools at the top of the panel, and I also included buttons for the commands that I use most often from the menus when I edit for some purpose (i.e., web, prints, etc).

It's great. It's free. It's so easy to do it! Give it a try and you'll be spending less time hunting around menus and more time getting your editing done.

Enjoy!

Pathways #2: Get better exposures straight out of your camera

2011-01-06T18:33:00.001-05:00

Background:

The first post in my Pathways series forms the essence of what this blog is all about...discovering photography, learning about it, enjoying it, and improving your own photography. This second post is about an easy way to get technically better looking photos straight out of your camera. Try it, you'll like it! :-)

You can read books, magazines, take photography classes/workshops, etc, to help you improve your photography skills. This is all great, but the key thing to remember is that you shouldn't do these activities in a passive manner. You have to be active. You need to pull concepts out of these activities that resonate with you, try them, expand on them, and put them in your "photography bag of tricks" to improve your skills and realize your photographic vision.

You also need to come up with your own ideas about how to improve. You can't learn photography just from books, classes, magazines, and the internet. Ask yourself what you can try that's new. What's something that hasn't been seen before? What's something that you haven't tried before? Be open to new ideas and try things, and that's how you'll improve.

Today's topic:

The topic for today is one of the things that had a major impact on the technical aspect of my photography when I finally worked on it a few years ago. I'm speaking about getting a much better handle on "proper" exposure. I put "proper" in quotes because proper exposure for a given image is somewhat subjective. But most people can look at a photo and inherently get a feel for whether it's underexposed, overexposed, or "just right".

This was an important topic for me because after looking at some of my older photos, I began to see how much better they could have been straight out of the camera if the exposure was a little more "right". A little more "punchy". Conducting some experiments in Photoshop I quickly saw that another +1/3 or +1/2 stop of exposure here, or -1/3 stop of exposure there would significantly increase the "rightness" of my photos.

Seeing the results of my experiments above, I was easily motivated to more actively examine the exposures I was choosing for my photos so that I could more accurately express a scene the way I wanted to instead of the way the camera wanted to when shooting in full Auto mode.

Before going down this path I read a few books to get some concepts down about "proper" exposure. One of them was Jeff Wignall's book "Exposure". Another was Michael Freeman's book "Perfect Exposure". I used these two books to learn more about the best times to take manual control of metering and exposure (instead of letting the camera auto-expose), and how to use metering/exposure to help enhance the subject of my photos and my creative vision.

Things very quickly opened up for me...

Once the concept of taking control of exposure for technical and creative reasons was hammered into my head, I now do it much more often than not. The two keys to being able to do this successfully are:

Developing a firm understanding of how your camera's metering system works and...
How the metering system responds to different lighting situations.

Once you understand that, the door is open to taking control of your camera in any lighting situation to ensure that you get better results. Here's the deal...

When you point your camera at a mostly bright scene, it's typically going to underexpose it. If you point it at a mostly dark scene, it's typically going to overexpose it. This is probably not what you want and both of these situations will make your photos less effective because in the former situation the colors will be dull, the image will feel lifeless, and it will be too dark. It won't feel right. In the latter situation your shadow areas will be too bright, your subject will probably be ruined, etc. Both situations will reduce the apparent sharpness of your photos as well.

So, how do you compensate for these things and prevent them? You have to understand your camera's metering modes, what you're aiming your camera at, and how your camera will respond. Most importantly though, you need to have a vision in your head of what you want the outcome of the photo to be.

I'll assume for the purpose of this post that people who are interested in this topic will be shooting with advanced compact cameras or digital SLR's (DSLR) that have various metering modes, exposure compensation options, etc.

Try this experiment:

Go find a very bright scene to photograph. Maybe something like your car on your driveway in bright sunlight. Maybe your house on a bright sunny day. Maybe a bright lamp in your house. Put your camera in automatic mode and take a picture of it. Now, open that photo in Photoshop and use the Exposure adjustment to add +1/3 stop of exposure to it. Look better? Most likely it does. Reset and try adding +1/2 stop of exposure to the base picture? Is +1/2 too much? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe you need even more depending on how bright the scene was. Only you can say for sure based on what you like.....

The goal of this experiment is to demonstrate my point in the paragraph above about understanding what you're pointing your camera at and how it will respond. With a very bright scene, your camera will likely underexpose it to try to average out the brightness. You'll be left with a bland looking photo that doesn't look quite right.

Let's use an example photo of mine. First is the photo straight out of my camera of a bright scene of some boats in Florida that was shot in automatic mode with evaluative metering. Second is the same exact photo after I opened it in Photoshop and did nothing else to it except add +3/4 stop of exposure to it using the Exposure command. You can see that the first photo is too dark, it's lifeless, and the colors are bland. The second photo looks "right", it's punchier, and the colors are bright and accurate.

Original photo, underexposed due to the brightness of the scene

Original photo with +3/4 stop of Exposure added in Photoshop. Much better!

Had I been thinking about it at the time, I would have realized that I was shooting a very bright scene and my camera would be tricked into underexposing it to average out the brightness. I then simply would have taken one second to dial in +1/2 or +3/4 stop of exposure and taken the shot. The out-of-camera picture would have been just right with this one simple adjustment.

If you understand this type of lighting situation and you know how your camera will respond to it, you can simply dial in +1/3 or +1/2 stop of exposure at the time you're taking the photo and you'll probably get better exposed photos straight out of the camera that will be more pleasing to the eye. Don't use your camera in Auto mode when you know that you're shooting a tricky lighting situation. Take control yourself to achieve better results.

The same exact scenario applies for very dark scenes. Shoot one in Auto mode and then use Photoshop to put in -1/3 or -1/2 stop of exposure to see which shot you like better. My guess is that one of the two adjusted images probably looks better than the one that came out of the camera.

Interesting, right?

By getting a better understanding of the lighting in a scene and what my cameras will do with it, I now know when I need to use exposure compensation for a particular shot. Doing this has led to much more consistent and "likeable" photos straight out of my camera with no post-processing, and the less time that I need to spend on the computer editing photos the better.

This article does not address overexposing or underexposing for creative purposes....that's a whole separate topic. What I'm trying to address here is simply getting better and more technically consistent photos out of your camera when you're facing tricky light.

All of the above was written with the primary thought that your camera was set to use evaluative or matrix metering, but most advanced cameras also have center-weighted, partial, and spot metering modes as well. I'm not going to summarize what they are because it's beyond the scope of this post and your camera manual will explain them for you. There are also these two quick articles that I found that cover the topics efficiently:

Understanding what these various metering modes do and when to use them, and then combining that knowledge with what I wrote above about exposure compensation, you can see that you should be able to achieve even more precise and specific results straight out of the camera for what you're trying to shoot.

Try some experiments to see how these topics come together for you. Hopefully you'll get more effective and properly exposed images without the need for editing on the computer.

Let me know if you have any feedback on this post...Thanks for reading!

Photo Carousel #8: "Glass Blower"

2011-01-04T16:30:00.000-05:00

"Glass Blower"

Here's a hot shot (sorry, couldn't resist!) that I took at the Corning Museum of Glass. This is my eighth Photo Carousel entry.

If you've never been to Corning area, I can say that it's a nice family trip with many things to see and do, especially considering its close proximity to the Finger Lakes region of New York. We live far away from that area so it's a long drive for us, but we combine the trip to Corning with the July 4th Indycar race at Watkins Glen International Speedway. We also do some hiking in Watkins Glen Gorge and rent a boat to go out on Seneca Lake for a 1/2 day. A nice way to spend a few days...

While at Corning, I wanted to capture the spirit of the place....which is all about making glass and the skill and concentration required to do it. There are many ways to capture that, but I thought this shot was a perfect opportunity.

My daughter got selected to be a in a glass breaking demonstration, and for her participation in the demo she won a small glass bud vase. They mentioned when they gave her the prize that the man who made it would be doing a glass blowing demonstration just across the hall so we went over to see him. I saw the opportunity for this shot developing so I quickly got ready for it.

From the creative perspective, I composed this shot to place the three major interest points (his face, his hand, the flame) in strategic locations to keep the viewer's eye bouncing around between them. I also wanted to create the black free space in the upper left to give the photo some room to breathe. There was no need to have anything in that part of the frame because it only would have distracted from the main elements.

I think this photo is successful and interesting because of it's simplicity. There are the three main elements within the frame that are closely tied together, and that's it. The slow shutter allowed the flame to blur a bit to give the photo some dynamic quality. I spot metered off the glove.

My goal was to leave no question what this photo is about....intense heat, concentration, and the skill required for glass blowing.

People, coffee, commonality, a tree, and New York City

2011-01-01T15:38:00.004-05:00

Happy New Year!

I hope everyone who reads this blog from around the world enjoyed their New Years celebrations last night and that you're resting/recovering nicely today. My first nap next to the fire on this tiring day is about to begin as soon as I hit 'submit' on this post to get it out there! :-)

To date this blog has been visited by people in 74 different countries, and I think that's pretty cool. I've received some nice email from people who have connected with it one way or another, and I hope it becomes even more widely read in 2011. If you like it, forward the link to your friends!

As is true with most of the posts on this blog, this one is tied to photography (albeit loosely for this particular post today).

Every year, my wife and I take the kids down to New York City to do some exploring around the area of Rockefeller Center. We see the giant Christmas tree, the windows of Macy's, Lord & Taylor, and Sachs 5th Avenue which are all decorated with Christmas scenes, St. Patrick's Cathedral, and just generally enjoy the good holiday spirit in the air. This year, we also went to see the show Wintuk, which was very good and I would recommend.

The colorful set of "Wintuk"

I was shooting with my Canon S95 just trying to grab some nice scenes and some things occurred to me during the act of taking pictures that I thought were interesting to share here...

Taking a trip down to the city at this time of year isn't necessarily about just seeing the sights, having a nice dinner, snapping some photos, and going home. On a deeper level it's about participating in an event with many thousands of other people and enjoying the common feelings that we all share around the holidays.

The "Believe" sign on the side of Macy's on 34th Street

As we were walking around and I was in the process of taking photos and disappearing into my "world of photography" where I concentrate on what I'm doing, I began listening to people talking. Not what they were saying, but how they were saying it. The excited tones of their voices, the enjoyment, the laughter. Adults, kids, teenagers, grandparents. Everyone laughing, smiling, enjoying the moments, and tolerating the large crowds as we all hopped over slush puddles and snow piles from the recent blizzard in this area.

The thing that really struck me were all of the different languages. I don't know what they all were, but I heard some Spanish, French, Arabic, German, Japanese, and many more. A very international crowd and a nice thing to see. People from all over the world coming together in the area of a few small city blocks to celebrate the holidays....and all gathered around the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. Smiling at it, taking pictures in front of it, pointing at it, and watching the ice skaters on the ice rink underneath it.

The tree, the 30 Rock building, and some holiday flags

I stopped taking photos just to watch the people for a while and I got a nice feeling inside. This, I thought, is exactly what the holidays are about. Pure joy. The commonality that we all share no matter where we're from of enjoying the holidays with our family and friends, reliving old memories, making new memories, etc.

We went inside to grab a coffee for me and Jan and some hot chocolate for the kids. As I was standing on this huge line to get the drinks, I continued to watch people come together over a simple thing.....coffee. Sitting, chatting, laughing, and everyone was looking at their photos of the day. Every year that we make this trip, I look around and notice more and more cameras. Small ones, big ones, smart phones, etc. Whatever the size or type, everyone was taking and enjoying their photos. Photography bringing people together, as it always has...

This is why photography is important in my life. I honestly don't think I would have noticed many of these things unless I had been looking around for photo opportunities. Actively looking around for possible photos, finding them, and taking them helps to open my eyes to what's going on around me and enjoy things more. I see things in a different light, even if I'm not actually taking photos at that instant.

As I was standing there I saw a sign that said "I lost a friend once. Yesterday I found her again over coffee". A nice sentiment about just sitting down to relax for a bit and talking with a friend or family member to reconnect. Happy New Year!

Out of the mouth of babes

2010-12-23T10:47:00.003-05:00

Although my kids are not babies anymore, every once in a while they say or do something that reminds me of that old expression "Out of the mouth of babes....", referring to the innocent way in which kids think and it goes straight from their brain to their mouth. :-)

My daughter asked me a funny question the other day. She said, "Daddy, if we have our home alarm turned on at night time, how will Santa get in the house to deliver our presents"? I laughed so hard when she asked that, because from a child's point of view it's a very logical question!

Then she exclaimed, "I know!!!! We'll use the motion sensors on our alarm to catch Santa!". She may have been onto something there (parents know what I mean), so I told her that we would leave it off on Christmas Eve so we don't have any problems. :-)

Along those lines, I was cleaning up the house today getting it ready for Christmas and I noticed a note that she hung on her stocking. She was telling Santa, "Thank you for all of my presents. Put the smallest present in here." with an arrow pointing to a small stocking that she pinned to her larger stocking. I thought that was very cute, and it fits right in the mood of the holidays as the kids get so excited for Christmas morning to open their presents and enjoy the excitement of Christmas day.

Every once in a while, parents (including me) get a little hung up on the fact that kids don't listen all the time (sometimes not at all!). Maybe they don't do their chores when they need to, they don't want to do their homework, they argue about going to bed "too early", etc. It can be frustrating to deal with these same topics every day, and we wonder why they can't just figure out that these things need to be done, and there's no way out of doing them....

When I sometimes get frustrated by these little things in life, it's the moments like the discussion I had above with my daughter and finding this little note to Santa that reset my brain and my disposition and remind me that they're only kids and we need to let them be kids. The chores and other things in life can sometimes wait for another day and we need to just let things be and enjoy the moments...

Have a great holiday season and a Happy New Year! Enjoy the moments...

Inspiration! "Within The Frame" by David duChemin

2010-12-20T09:38:00.002-05:00

I have a lot of photography books. I enjoy reading the thoughts and techniques of the photographers whose work I like. Not only do I learn many things, but I also get a chance to live vicariously through them and see some of the places and sights that I probably won't have time (or money) to see in my lifetime.

Some of the books are great and I refer to them often to re-read key sections until they sink into my brain and I can make the concepts my own and put them to work for me in my own photography. Others are not so good, and get placed on an upper shelf and are rarely touched again.

I'm reading an excellent book right now called "Within The Frame" by David duChemin. If you're looking for a last minute holiday gift to tuck under the tree for your favorite photographer, then this is the book to get.

This is not a technical book about photography or technique, per se'. It's about the journey to finding your own photographic vision and achieving the kind of photography that you most enjoy.

Surely, this is a lofty goal for any book. Finding your photographic vision is an intensely personal journey that every enthusiastic photographer takes. How can a book help with this?

Stay with me for a few minutes on this topic.....

I'll tell you where many books of this nature fail. They use too many words. It's as simple as that. I've read books that, although they're good, are written by an author that takes forty sentences to complete one key thought. So what happens? Your brain gets totally lost in all the written words on the page and the concept that you're reading about floats right by without sinking in.

This is not the case with "Within The Frame". David duChemin writes with a down to earth style and states his key thoughts very succinctly. This makes the book easy to digest. He then uses supporting text and images to drive home his points. I use the word "supporting" intentionally. There's plenty to read in the book, but the key thoughts in each section of the book can be lifted out quite easily. Those points make you think about how you can apply the book to your photography, and that is precisely what a book of this type should achieve. It should make you think, not try to ram ideas down your throat.

David speaks early on in this book about some key thoughts:

Passionate photography (duChemin says his goal for his image making is "Passionate stories told passionately").
Chasing your vision and telling your stories as clearly and passionately as possible with compelling photography.
Shooting what moves you.
Making the viewer of your photos care.

Having read this book, I totally understand where he's coming from. My brain is flooding with ideas about how to implement David's key messages in my photography. It's a completely successful book. Well worth reading...

"Image of the Year"? Huh?

2010-12-16T09:39:00.000-05:00

I always try to avoid being unnecessarily overly critical of the photography of other people. Everyone has their vision and who am I to criticize someones art, right? If they ask me for my opinion I certainly provide it without hesitation, and I've had many great and interesting discussions this way and I've learned a lot about myself and my photography along the way.

What I'm being critical of here is American Photo magazine. They recently published their list of "2010 Images of the Year". The image at this link of the blue house was actually selected as an 'Image of the Year'.

Seriously?

For the life of me, I can't find one single redeeming quality in this photo. Thinking that I might be off base and with my curiosity of other people's opinions now piqued, I've showed this photo to many people and they all said the exact same thing, "What's it supposed to be? It's a terrible picture".

I don't know why this annoys me so much, but a blog is about expressing your opinions, so I guess I'm just doing that here. I read American Photo magazine and they always strive to publish high quality content and photos. With so much great photography out there and the thousands of photos that must have been considered in this competition, I guess it just irks me that a photo of the side of the house with a satellite dish and some telephone wires is lauded as an 'Image of the Year'. I can't imagine people sitting around a table saying "That's a great shot....It's an image of the year"!

Come on American Photo. Please filter this stuff out and keep your content at the high quality level that it has been in the past...

Photo Carousel #7: "Milkweed In Cold Sunset"

2010-12-13T19:15:00.002-05:00

Here's a nice shot taken at the Mohonk Preserve in New York when I was coming to the end of a great day of hiking with my daughter. This is my seventh Photo Carousel entry.

I'm getting more comfortable executing these types of classic shots. I used to struggle to find nice compositions like this with the right lighting elements, etc, but all of my practice is starting to pay off nicely because I'm "seeing" these scenes more easily these days.

As we came to the end of our hike, the sun was setting fast and we were almost back to the car. The temperature was dropping quickly through the mid 40's and into the 30's in what seemed like just a few minutes. When we rounded the last turn in our trail and came to this open field, the sun was just finishing cutting across it with a great golden color. The photographer's classic "golden light"...

My daughter (8 years old) is just learning to take photographs and I showed her how to get behind these milkweed to let the sun shine through them to make a nice effect. Her response was "Cool, that looks much better. Thanks Dad!". She went to take some photos of some other plants nearby that she liked and I stuck with these to try to get my shot....

From the creative and technical perspective, a number of things came together nicely here that I wanted to mention as a learning experience...

I composed the shot that I wanted with the two primary large fluffy weeds positioned near two intersecting "Rule of Thirds" lines. Not right on them because I wanted to keep certain things out of the frame, but close enough. Dividing up the frame in my mind in various ways and placing elements where I want them was the single biggest thing that I did years ago to improve my photography.

Interestingly, I originally framed this shot to cut out the two smaller weeds in the bottom left corner, but then I realized that their shapes echoed the two larger ones and I thought that was cool so I put them back in.

With the composition and the light in place, I was ready to shoot but something was still missing. Warmth. This scene needed some warmth. I decided to wait for the setting sun to enter the top of the frame. I knew that the small aperture I was using on my Canon S95 would get me some nice streaks of golden light across the frame. Patience paid off, and it worked perfectly! I fired off a few quick shots at various zooms on this same scene just as the sun came into the frame and this is the one that I liked the best.

The scene is -2/3 stop underexposed to make the colors a little more rich. A straight metering of the overall scene would have overexposed it due to the mostly darker field I was shooting, so I dialed in some negative exposure compensation. Any time you want to make the colors in a scene like this a little more rich, just dial in -1/3 or -2/3 exposure compensation if the scene can take it without ruining the mood.

About one minute later the golden light completely ended as the sun ducked behind the hill. We were left out in the cold gray light of the rapidly approaching darkness to finish our walk to the car.

We completed the day with a nice post-hike dinner in the town of New Paltz, NY at the Gilded Otter Brewery. Another great day out with my family, during which I was able to snag some nice photos...

I feel like Charlie Brown!

2010-12-06T17:09:00.002-05:00

In the classic cartoon "A Charlie Brown Christmas" that airs on TV every holiday season, we find the main character Charlie Brown fighting his way through the over-commercialization of Christmas to find the real root of the holiday season. Thankfully he does, and the story ends on a pleasant note that expresses the true meaning of the holidays...

I feel a little bit like Charlie Brown these days.

This is the first year that the commercialization of Christmas has completely pounded me over the head until I can't take it anymore. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, twenty-five emails a day with announcements of new sales, exchanging Christmas shopping hint lists, Christmas decorations in the stores in the first week of September! Argggggh! I've had enough!!! I want a simpler, less complicated, less shopping-oriented Christmas.

The kids having fun with a glowing string of lights...

This is the reason why my wife and I are going to continue to intentionally try to turn the holidays back in time at our house this year and in the future. We like to get back to what the spirit of Christmas is truly about...family, memories, and the simple joys of the season.

We've always had a few nice Christmas traditions that we carry on in our house. Some of them include things like:

Decorating the house a few items per day for the first week of December to surprise the kids with a new treat every day when they come home from school. They run around the house looking for what's new. :-)
Putting out photos from our past Christmas holidays to enjoy the memories and swap funny stories.
Visiting New York City to see the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, the decorated store windows, and a dinner at Ted's Montana Grill.
Hiking into the woods to put some Christmas decorations on "our" same pine tree every year to see if they survive the winter (we then go back in the spring to take them off).
Making some of our own Christmas decorations.
Baking Christmas cookies.
Turning out all the lights to watch The Grinch, Rudolph, and The Polar Express (which, if you haven't seen it, is a fantastic Christmas movie that should be in everyone's collection).

I hope you have (and keep!) your Christmas traditions too. Every family has them, but sometimes they get pushed aside in the hustle and bustle of the shopping season and this is what I'm trying to reverse. I don't want the holidays to rush by in a fury of sales and then be over before I have a chance to enjoy them.

So, in the spirit of getting back to more easy-going holidays, here are some thoughts for the future that I plan to do:

Find a traditional Christmas event in a town near my house and go to it (tree lighting ceremony in the town square, etc). They're out there, but sometimes they're not easy to find around where I live. I like what many other countries in other parts of the world do in this regard. In Germany (for example), many of the towns of significant size that have a Marktplatz (town square) have a traditional Christmas market to ring in the season with crafts, foods, wines, hot drinks, singing, a giant town tree, etc. This link to some photos of the German Christmas Markets shows exactly what I'm talking about.
I will not exchange Christmas lists with anyone. If I know them well enough (and vise versa), I should be able to buy them a gift without being told what it is, where to get it, and how much to pay.
I will log into every online store where I shop and change my account to use an alternate email address. This way my primary email account won't get pounded with emails at the holidays, which forces me to sort through all of this shopping junk to find the real emails that I want to read. I can then go check my "Christmas email account" when I want to, not when the stores want me to. This will go a long way in improving my psyche because I can just "turn off" the constant sales stuff.
I will not shop in any store that puts out Christmas decorations in September!!!
I will share these thoughts with anyone who will listen to me in the hope that the spirit catches on!

I hope that everyone reading this post enjoys their holiday season and finds some peace in these fast paced times...Enjoy your family, enjoy your memories, and skip that sale at the store so you can sit by the fire and relax a little bit longer. Happy holidays!

Topaz Labs - InFocus (Refine Detail, Restore Clarity)

2010-12-05T11:25:00.000-05:00

Here is a link to a new tool from Topaz Labs called "InFocus".

Topaz has a good reputation for its Photoshop plug-ins, so I thought I would post this here and you can try InFocus for yourself using their free trial offer to see if it lives up to its hype.

As the Topaz web site explains, fixing blurry photos is an extremely difficult computational process. There are so many factors that contribute to the possible causes for a blurry image that no one company has come up with a solution other than merely sharpening edges in the photo and hoping for the best results. From what I've tried of these tools, they haven't been worth the money. A blurry photo has always remained a blurry photo....

With this new plug-in, Topaz claims to be the first company to tackle the difficulties around fixing blurry images. If this plug-in truly works, it could be a lifesaver for an image that was otherwise ruined or heavily compromised due to accidental blur regardless of the source of the blur.

I'm a bit skeptical, so I'll try it for myself to test it out. But if it works, it could be a great tool to have in your photo processing arsenal for when a problem image comes up that you want to rescue.

Color management - A marriage between your monitor and your printer

2010-12-01T17:38:00.002-05:00

And 'huey PRO' is the priest! :-)

If you do a lot of high quality photo printing at home, you're well aware that printer ink costs a small fortune. Over the life of a printer, the cost of printer ink adds up to many times what you spent on the printer in the first place. To replace all eight ink cartridges in my Canon Pro 9000 Mark II printer costs me $85 each time! Yes, $85 each time!

So logic would follow that you want to get your photos out of your printer with the correct colors the first time so that you don't waste money re-printing photos that you've had to correct to get them to look right when printed.

Unfortunately, this is not as easy as it sounds. I talk to people constantly who say to me, "My printer stinks....It never prints my pictures with the same colors as what I have on my screen". Some of these people are using printers that cost $300 or more. Trust me, the printers don't stink.

My answer to them is that 8 or 9 times out of 10, it's because the person is editing their photos on a computer monitor that isn't properly calibrated, or isn't calibrated at all. They are then sending photos with dubious colors in them to a printer and expecting that their printed pictures come out "right".

The response I hear back is: "I took my monitor out of the box from the factory, why isn't it calibrated properly from the factory"? The answer is: It just isn't.....and there are a variety of reasons why.

On top of not being calibrated properly from the factory, your perception of the colors on your monitor changes as the lighting changes is in your room throughout the day. Sun pouring in the windows at one time, compact fluorescent or tungsten bulbs at night, etc. Lighting is very dynamic.

So how does a person level the playing field when there's all this to consider to get proper colors?

Answer: Calibrate your monitor so that you're displaying and editing colors based on a standard and accurate color calibration, and adjust the monitor throughout the day for changing light.

Sound hard? It's not. It's actually easy! Simply purchase and install the huey PRO device from Pantone and away you go. It really is that easy. Go to the link above to see what Huey can do for you.

Once you install the software and plug in the device, it will step you through the process of calibrating your monitor. It takes about five minutes. Once done, the custom calibration is loaded automatically every time you boot up your computer.

What's even better is that you can set Huey to automatically monitor the light in your room and adjust the monitor settings based on what it's seeing throughout the day so that you're seeing accurate colors all the time. Perfect!

After doing this with the initial version of Huey that came out years ago, my prints out of my printer are much closer to what I see on the screen because my monitor is displaying standardized colors and my printer is printing standardized colors. No more was I saying, "Damn...it's still not right" and going back for another round of corrections and printing. The prints I make after using Huey are very accurate.

Using Huey should get you much closer to your goals of accurate printing and I think you'll be pleased by using this device. However, on top of using Huey to achieve proper monitor calibration there are other things that you can do to ensure even better color matching between your monitor and your printer. You could inadvertently be doing some things wrong that you're not even aware of...

Some of things to watch out for that could be causing color match problems from monitor to printer include the following:

Make sure you're specifying the proper kind of paper that you're printing to in the printer dialog box for your printer.
Make sure that you're having either Photoshop OR the printer managing color when you print, not both. If you use them both to simultaneously manage color when printing then your colors will be far out of whack. You have to explicitly turn one on and one off and then they should stay that way as your defaults.
Make sure you're editing and printing in the same color space.
Make sure that your printer head isn't clogged (it will be very obvious if it is).
If possible, get a printer profile for the paper that you're printing to, and use it. These can often be found on the paper manufacturer's web site.

My hints above are just the tip of the iceberg. Sophisticated color management is the topic of many books and web sites, and I don't intend to echo those writings here. Simply Google "printer color management" and you'll see many of the issues that people face and their solutions.

My point with this post is that there's a simple way to get much more accurate prints the first time without struggling, and that's to use huey PRO to calibrate your monitor. If you have further issues after that then a little digging within Photoshop help, Google, and/or your printer manufacturer's web site should get you the rest of the way there.

I should note that there are significantly more sophisticated monitor calibration devices out there other than huey PRO, but they also cost a lot more. My thought is that huey PRO is probably all that most advanced amateur photographers really need to get their color management and printing on track.

Enjoy making better prints!

Inflation!

2010-11-29T07:54:00.000-05:00

Inflation!

I couldn't help but laugh at this photo from 2009 that I took in New York City. I found it when I was going back through my archives looking for something this weekend.

I remember when it only used to cost 25 cents to light a candle in St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City when I was a kid. Now it costs two dollars! Yikes!

Inflation hits everywhere! :-)

The genius of editing photos (even JPEG's!) in Adobe Camera Raw

2010-11-24T12:55:00.001-05:00

If you own one of the versions of Photoshop CS then you also own Adobe Camera Raw, which is Adobe's editor for photos shot in Raw format. Did you know that you can edit other photo formats (i.e., TIFF, JPEG) in Camera Raw as well? I've known this for a long time, but I only recently spent the time to seriously try it out.

I'm here to say that using Camera Raw for quick (yet sophisticated!) corrections to your photos is fantastic. Significantly complicated photo editing jobs will still be done easier in Photoshop, but for most touch-up editing Camera Raw is great.

First thing, if you're considering trying this then buy this book: "Real World Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS4" (or the newer version if you have CS5). It's a terrific book that walks you through everything you need to know about Camera Raw and how to get the most out of it with photo examples and easily understandable text. It's a must read for editing photos in Camera Raw.

The premise of my post here is to get the point across that making certain types of adjustments in Photoshop can be a chore, especially when dealing with layers, layer masks, etc. Quite simply, this is because Photoshop is more than just a photo editor...it's also a graphic design tool....which means there are a lot of options and tools in there for graphic design that clutter up the interface and functionality when you want to perform photography tasks.

Software companies like Adobe and Apple realize this, which is precisely what gave birth to photo-centric editing software like Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture. These are sophisticated pieces of software geared toward editing photos and only editing photos. The tools you need are presented in an easy to use way that supports a streamlined workflow.

What a lot of people don't realize about Camera Raw is that the processing engine and tools in it largely form the basis of the editing capabilities in Adobe Lightroom. Knowing this, you can now realize that you have a great photo editing tool at your fingertips in Camera Raw that you probably don't use often because everyone focuses so much on Photoshop.

To get a JPEG photo opened in Camera Raw on Photoshop for Windows, go into File, Open As. Then go to the folder path and find the image you want to open. Click it, select "Camera Raw" in the open as dialog box below, and click 'Open'. Your image should open in Camera Raw.

Or, if you want to automatically open all JPEG's in Camera Raw (which I've just configured my Photoshop CS4 to do), then just follow the three easy steps at this link.

This post is not meant to be a "how to edit your photo in Camera Raw" article. That's what the book above is for and I certainly can't duplicate the book in this post. But as you can see from looking within the Camera Raw editing window that you opened, you have a large set of photo-centric tools located on the right side of the screen that are very powerful and effective.

On the top of the editing window you can see two tools called "Targeted Adjustment Tool" and "Adjustment Brush". The usefulness and power of just these two tools alone are worth editing your photos in Camera Raw, but when you also consider some of the other tools like Parametric Curves, Vibrance, Graduated Filter, and Clarity.....using Camera Raw to touch up your photos becomes a no-brainer. In particular, the way the Adjustment Brush automatically creates layers with pins to identify them is terrific! You can literally paint your corrections onto your photo and modify them at any time. Brilliant! All of these features are also available in Lightroom.

As I said above, if you need to do really complex photo fixes (like complicated photo retouching), then Photoshop is still the way to go. But for most edits to your photos, I would bet that you can do them easier and with higher quality in Camera Raw than you can in Photoshop.

Try it! You might never go back!

Some gerbils, a Canon 7D....and a photo shoot?!

2010-11-22T19:03:00.002-05:00

Cheerio (left) and Charley (right)

Well, maybe not exactly a photo shoot. More like my morning coffee with the boys hopping around the couch to have their fun for the day! Only the 7D and me with two cups of coffee can keep up with them!

I've been trying to grab a few more photos of the little guys recently. I was pretty busy in October and November (and I was also sick for a few weeks), so I wasn't taking a lot of photos. I decided to try and get some nice pictures of them a few weeks ago.

Both of them are doing well. Their personalities have now fully exposed themselves since they're getting a little older. Charley has remained reserved and cautious, but still very curious. Cheerio went from being fairly normal to being pretty nutty. In fact, he's almost like two different gerbils. During the day he's his normal bouncy, energetic, overly curious self. But it's the weirdest thing....When the sun goes down, he turns into a total nut! When we take the lid off the cage at night he jumps right onto the edge of the tank and waits to be taken out. When he's out, he's very jumpy and overly energetic, almost to the point where we've had to stop taking him out at night because he's too hyper and we don't want to have an accident. We'll see how this develops over the next few months. Maybe he'll settle down...

Cheerio

Speaking of accidents...I have quite the story to share here. Back in October, Charley got a broken tooth and a cold. Seeing that the cold wasn't going away and he wasn't eating normally because of his tooth (and was losing weight quickly), I decided to take him to the vet. I wasn't quite sure what else to do about it because he wasn't getting better and I certainly didn't want the little guy to die.

When I brought him in to be checked, the vet who I met with gave me medicine for his cold (which has long since cleared up) and a pain killer so he wouldn't feel pain when he tried to eat while his tooth grows back. Thankfully, the tooth has indeed grown back.

I was satisfied with this portion of my visit to the vet because the issues of the cold and the tooth were resolved and treated properly. However, something much more significant occurred that was very strange.

When Charley was brought back out to the front of the office after his examination, I noticed that he had a very bad limp on his left rear leg and he wasn’t stepping on his foot at all. It’s important to note that he was showing absolutely no signs of pain or limping prior to me bringing him into the vet. In fact, before I left the house to go there, he was running vigorously on his exercise wheel and he was being handled and walking with no limp.

Charley

When I questioned the vet about why he was suddenly limping after his examination, she said to me that occasionally gerbils and other small animals could have a pre-existing broken bone in their body from a fall and they hide the pain from it. She said the act of a vet then handling this animal would irritate the injury to the point that the animal would be in severe pain and would then begin to limp.

This sounded odd to me, so I questioned the vet on this and said that it sounded completely absurd to me that an animal could have a broken bone and be running on a wheel and being handled daily without showing any signs of pain or injury whatsoever. He’s out of his cage playing an average of an hour every day and showed no signs of a problem. She insisted that it must be a pre-existing break, and since I felt horrible for this little animal, I told her to go ahead with the x-ray that she was suggesting just to confirm a break.

Cheerio (a Giants fan!)

After the x-ray, the vet came out and told me that Charley did indeed have a broken leg. Still finding these circumstances unbelievable, I told her to go ahead and splint it up because the poor little guy was now limping terribly.

Shortly after this all happened, I spoke with two other vets and received feedback from many gerbil breeders who all said that it’s extremely unlikely that Charley had a pre-existing broken bone and was showing no signs of pain or injury at all. In fact, when I told one of them that he was running on a wheel shortly before this disaster, he said it seemed extremely strange to him that Charley would be able to do that with a broken leg.

To make a long story somewhat shorter, I had a discussion with the vet and told her that I brought a gerbil with no leg pain and no leg injury into her office and I left with a huge bill and an animal with a broken leg. I can’t say what happened in the examination room that might have caused this, but something happened.

The vet denied any wrong doing and stuck with her original response that he had a broken leg when he came in. I was pretty angry at this point and asked for my money back for the portion of my bill related to the broken leg. There was no way she was going to give it to me because that would be admitting guilt. She did, however, offer to waive her fees if I wanted to bring him back in three weeks to see how he was doing. Yeah, I'll go back there (he says sarcastically).....

Charley, about to get pounced by his brother!

The moral of the story for pet owners: Find a vet who will let you go back into the examination room with your animal when you bring them in. This vet had a policy that the owner could not come into the back during the exam. I will never do that again, because had I been there, I probably would have seen what happened to Charley.

To end the story on a positive note....Most people I spoke with said that Charley didn't need the splint that the doctor put on (which is good, because he chewed it off anyway) and that his leg would heal fine on its own in a few weeks and he would lead a pain free normal life. That's exactly what happened. He's walking perfectly and showing no signs of pain at all.

Cheerio (notice his smile for the picture!)

So it was a pretty traumatic few weeks for my daughter's little gerbil, but she's happy that he's better now and back to his old self. All's well that ends well....

Photo Carousel #6: "Azure Moonrise"

2010-11-21T08:49:00.001-05:00

"Azure Moonrise"

It was a great moonrise here in New York last night. Cool, crisp, clean air and a full moon. This is my sixth Photo Carousel entry.

I've taken various pictures of the moon over the years that have come out nice enough to wet my appetite to try astrophotography, but there's such a huge investment in equipment required to do it that I never get around to actually committing to it. There are many other financial priorities around my house.....like eating! Maybe some day....

In the mean time, if you want to see some great deep space photos by a guy named Howard Cox, check out this link to some of his photos on the photo.net web site.

This type of moon shot is simple from a technical perspective. Here are some tips:

Always shoot in the time between sunset and total darkness so that you pick up the remaining blue in the sky. A moon picture with a totally black sky is boring....unless of course that's what you're intentionally trying to do for some other reason.
Expose for the moon. You don't want it to be too dark or too light in your finished photo because it's your subject. Let the exposure for everything else fall wherever it does, but get the moon exposed properly.
Use a long focal length. This was shot on my Canon 7D with the equivalent of about 385mm on a 35mm body.
Use a tripod. If you're using image stabilized lenses, shut off the IS feature when you're using a tripod.
Use a remote release or your camera's timer to trip the shutter to minimize camera vibration.
Use a shutter speed of around 1/200 (to prevent motion blur in the moon) and aperture of at least f/8 (to maximize image quality) and also ensure that you have enough depth of field to keep your foreground elements in focus.
Use a foreground element (and keep it in focus!) to add more interest to your photo.
Shoot in Raw format if your camera supports it. It will provide you with the highest image quality.

For this composition, I used the arc of the tree branches to keep the viewer's eye from leaving the frame and also to create a little spot to put the moon in. I chose this composition based on the simple rule-of-thirds principle because it suited this photo just fine. This setup clearly places the moon as the center of attention.

Try some moon shots...you'll get a kick out of it. If you do the above steps properly and you're shooting with high quality equipment (and a lens of at least 400mm), you can actually view your photos quite large on your computer monitor and see a lot of detail on the moon's surface. My kids were blown away when I showed them the detail on the moon's surface in one of my enlarged photos.

Why are my glasses coming out of the dishwasher with a white film on them???

2010-11-20T10:16:00.000-05:00

This definitely falls into the "Random thoughts" section of my blog, but I figured I would post it here because I'm sure many people are wondering the same thing...

Recently my wife and I noticed that all of our glasses are coming out of the dishwasher with a white residue on them. You can wipe it...it doesn't come off. You can re-wash dishes...it doesn't come off.

This residue started appearing all of a sudden. I checked the dishwasher for clogs, and there were none. I checked that water was spraying properly during the wash and rinse cycles. It was. What the hell???

I started to think it had something to do with our well water because we had a bad drought in New York this summer and I thought maybe it changed the chemistry of the water or something. I was just about to call in the well company to test it (at great expense!) when I saw the reason for this situation on the news.

All dishwasher detergent manufacturers in the U.S. were required to remove phosphates from their detergents in July, 2010 (which is right around when our problem showed up). You can read about it on this link at the Cascade web site.

I checked this out and learned that the absence of phosphates in the dishwasher detergent is what's causing the white clouding on the glasses. I don't yet know what can be done about it to get (and keep!) the white film off the glasses, but at least I know it's not a problem with the water or the dishwasher.

Good luck with this one! I think we'll have to wait until the manufacturers come up with some equivalent natural ingredient to phosphates to get the dishes to come out without this film.

Moral of the story: Don't call a repairman. Your dishwasher is not broken...

Photo Carousel #5: "Molten Sunset"

2010-11-17T17:14:00.001-05:00

"Molten Sunset"

This is the fifth entry in my Photo Carousel series. I call it "Molten Sunset" because it looks to me like someone dumped out a bucket of sunlight in the center of the frame and it's spreading across the sky.

This was one of the most impressive sunsets that I've seen in quite some time. The pictures that I took in the other direction behind me were even more impressive from a color perspective, but this shot had the dramatic clouds in it so this is the one I chose to post.

I had just finished hiking to the top of a local mountain with my daughter and everything started to slowly glow yellow and orange. The glow was unusually intense in both its brightness and the depth of color. Seeing the low and diverse clouds, I knew that we might be in for something special.

My goals for this photo were simple:

Emphasize the clouds, especially the burning center section and the wispy one in the upper left corner.
Get the photo composed and exposed correctly in the camera to minimize any degrading effects of post-processing later. I knew this shot would push the sensor in the Canon S95 hard.

From a compositional perspective, I didn't want to let the distant mountain range go to total black at the bottom of the frame but I had no choice. To me, this was an acceptable compromise in order to get the clouds exposed properly. I composed the burning sun area a little off center to make the photo more interesting.

From the technical side, I used evaluative metering and bracketed the exposure at -1/3, metered, and +1/3 and picked the best shot. I took many different scenes of this sunset and the -1/3 shots were always the best because the colors were more saturated. White balance was set to 'Cloudy'.

I consider this image a nice success because (in my humble opinion) I satisfied my two goals above and walked away with a nice keeper. At the same time, I enjoyed the time with my daughter as we shared these moments together watching a sunset that was memorable to me even after all of them that I've seen, and for her it was probably her first truly amazing sunset.

How will Canon answer....and when?

2010-11-15T16:55:00.002-05:00

A thought of the day...

Competition is a good thing. In business, in sports, etc, it drives innovation and performance.

This being said, I hope Canon has some tricks up their sleeves...and soon...or they're going to get clobbered, again.

The first time they got clobbered was back in 2007/2008 with the release of the Nikon D3, D700, and D300 in close timing with each other. This came after Canon led the DSLR revolution for almost ten years. If Canon knew this onslaught from Nikon was coming then they didn't show it because they really had no match for these new cameras from Nikon. The good thing was that at least partially out of that competition eventually the Canon 7D was born, which I believe was Canon's first truly innovative camera in quite some time.

Now we have the release of the Nikon D7000 and the Sony Alpha A33 and A55, all of which have full time auto focus during video shooting, a major shortcoming of all the current Canon DSLR's that offer high definition video as an option. Other manufacturers will certainly follow this full time auto focus trend (if they too can figure out a unique way to do it), and Canon better be one of them.

Having shot video on a Canon 7D DSLR for some time now, I have to say that the lack of auto focus during video shooting is a big operational burden that limits the use of the Canon DSLR video technology for the average photographer. I really didn't think that not having video auto focus would be that big of a deal in actual casual use, but it absolutely is a big deal.

I've seen people come up with follow-focus devices to handle focusing, but let's be realistic....the average person is never going to get and use one of these devices for vacation, travel, and family video clips. Auto focus is a practical and real need for casual DSLR video shooters.

The new 60D was an opportunity for Canon to introduce this technology in their camera line and they didn't do it, so clearly they don't have it ready yet. Will the eventual 8D or 5D MkIII have it? Who knows...but for their own good and the good of Canon shooters everywhere, this video shooting advancement by Nikon and Sony cannot go unanswered. We want full time video auto focus!

Which brings me to my point.....Canon knows all of this. They used to be the leader with these types of things and now they're becoming a follower. Who would have thought that Sony, which has hardly been an innovator of late with anything in their electronics lineup, would be the one to get full time video auto focus out there first in this class of camera. Wasn't it Sony that completely missed the portable digital music craze and still aren't in on it?! A market, which by the way, they invented with the original analog Walkman! They've fallen behind in TV technology, hand held gaming, etc. And here they are besting Canon in an area like this?

What's going on here Canon.....Give us what we want and need!

Canon S95 - It's a miracle!

2010-11-11T20:31:00.010-05:00

UPDATE on 9/19/2011: Since I originally wrote the post below, Canon has now announced the successor to the venerable S95, which is called the S100. You can read about it at this link. From what I've read so far about the S100, everything that I wrote about the S95 below is still accurate, except the S100 is better in many regards.

Original post:

OK, maybe not a miracle, but this is one darn good camera! Read on below to see why...

There are many reviews of the S95 on the internet, so it's not my goal to provide detailed technical analysis of image quality at 100% viewing or an exhaustive feature breakdown of the camera. All of that information about the S95 is already available at the great links/reviews that I've added at the bottom of this post so there's no need to repeat it here. I'm all about efficiency! :-)

My goal here is to present some real-world feedback on how this camera works, how the images look, and why it's such a great pocket camera.

Background

I primarily shoot with a Canon 7D and a variety of lenses. The 7D is a big camera, and there are certainly times when I can't (or don't want to) lug my SLR rig around with me and that's when a good pocket camera is an essential thing to have.

My problem is that not shooting with my 7D has always been a disappointment for me because my old pocket camera simply doesn't have anywhere near the image quality of the 7D. So when I would go out shooting with my old pocket camera, I always regretted it. Therefore...

I've been in the market for a new pocket camera for a long time. I've been shooting with a Canon SD850 for several years, but the photo quality just isn't 't good enough for me (especially in low light), so I've been on the hunt looking at all of the current options available in this very rapidly changing (and improving!) segment of the camera market.

What I Wanted

Camera manufacturers have taken many divergent paths trying to satisfy the different needs of the compact camera market. Many people want many different things out of small cameras. We have true pocket cameras, Micro 4/3 cameras, large compact cameras (Canon G12, Nikon P7000, etc), and so on.

What was most important to me in my shopping for a new pocket camera were the following:

Very high image quality. I wouldn't accept the poor low light and poor high ISO images from the old pocket cameras...
Small size. I wanted a true pocket camera, meaning one that I can easily slide into a shirt or pants pocket without me having to rip the seams on my pants to do it!
Manual control and good user design. I have to be able to take control of the camera when I want to and it has to be easy to do it. This is something from the SLR-world that I wouldn't be willing to completely give up when using a pocket camera.

Everything else on top of these three main goals is icing on the cake, but these three were must-haves.

After doing exhaustive research about possible cameras, my decision seemed to be quickly coming down to the Canon S95 and the Panasonic LX5. The older Canon S90 and Panasonic LX3 were direct competitors as well.

Both of these cameras are supposed to be fairly close in image quality, so I immediately kicked the LX5 off my list because of its slightly larger size. It's just a little too big to slide into a pants or shirt pocket and as I mentioned above this is one of my key criteria, so the LX5 was out. That satisfied the goal of small size.

I went to the store and shot some test images with the S95 at all ISO's and started to review them. I was very pleasantly surprised. The quality of the images looked great, and the noise levels at higher ISO's were low, especially in low light if properly exposed, and especially compared to my old Canon pocket camera from three years ago. Seeing this, the goal of very high image quality was satisfied.

Then I started pressing buttons and finding my way around the most important and often used features of the camera. This is where the S95 truly shines. This camera is EXTREMELY well designed and easy to use. Along with the standard "My Menu" option now available on most Canon cameras, the user has several ways to change the user interface to work more effectively and efficiently for them. It's easy to get to and use the features that you need most often.

Most important and unique to the S95 is the control ring around the lens. This ring can be set up to control a variety of functions within each shooting mode and this goes a long way toward making the control of the S95 a little bit more SLR-like. You don't realize the true usability of this little ring until you try it. Having it there keeps me out of the menu system for basic changes in any of the shooting modes because I can adjust key camera parameters with a spin of the ring. Combining this with the control ring on the back of the S95 gives the camera a mini SLR-like feel. Spin this, spin that, the adjustments are made. No need to dive into menus for basic adjustments. Fantastic!

The S95 has a mode dial on top that has all of the typical SLR shooting modes (Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority, Program, Auto, Manual, one Custom mode, etc). This was key for me. I need to have the capability to manually control the camera because in certain situations (e.g., tricky or difficult lighting) I want to make the decisions about what the camera is doing to have better control over the creative aspects of my photography....I don't want the camera to do it. Having all of these controls at my fingertips (and relatively easy to use considering the small size of this camera) satisfied the goal of manual control and good user design.

Beyond me mentioning these key control aspects of the S95, if you want to get a true understanding of all the useful features that truly make it a pleasure to use, I recommend downloading the manual from this link and reading it. It clearly outlines every feature of the S95 better than I can do (i.e., Hybrid Image Stabilization, Auto Exposure Bracketing, Focusing modes, High def movies, stereo sound, shooting in Raw, etc). There is no reason for me to re-state it all here. Read it from the source....Canon.

What's Not Right

Of course, no camera is perfect. As much as I like the S95, there are three minor things that I want to mention here but they're ultimately not big issues.

Battery life seems short. It's probably best to get a spare battery to carry with you if you're going to be out all day doing a lot of shooting. This isn't a big deal since a spare NB-6L battery is only about $25.
I don't like where Canon put the hook loop for the neck/wrist strap on the S95. They put one strap hook loop on each corner of the top of the camera. The problem is that this puts the strap in your way a little bit if you're making certain adjustments while shooting. This is not the biggest deal in the world because you quickly get the hang of keeping it out of your way, but I don't see why Canon didn't just leave the strap hook on the side of the camera body like they do with their SD line of compacts. This would keep the strap out of your way completely.
The control ring on the back of the camera turns much too easily. It should have a more definitive and resistant 'click' to it to avoid accidentally changing your exposure compensation setting when the camera is left turned on and hanging around your neck. This is probably the most significant of these three flaws listed here because this has the potential to impact your photos if you don't happen to notice that you've changed your settings accidentally.

UPDATE on 11/13/10: After I posted this #3 comment the other day, I happened to be back in BestBuy shopping for something else today. I tried the control rings on the back of some Nikon and Olympus pocket cameras and they all do this same thing. They're all much too easy to change by accident, so it's not just the Canon S95 that has this issue. All of the manufacturers need to make their back control rings a little more resistant to accidental turning...

In Summary

There's no doubt about the fact that the price of the S95 is high for a pocket camera, but high end compacts from all the manufacturers are pricey. At the end of the day the reality of the situation is that if you want the highest quality images possible in a truly pocketable camera, then you have to pay to play and the manufacturers know it. This being said, in my opinion the S95 is the camera to get for the purposes that I've outlined above.

It's important to close this review echoing a comment that I made above. I have never been a true fan of pocket cameras. Using pocket cameras has traditionally involved too much sacrifice in the area of image quality for me to consider them as a serious option to my SLR. This is not the case with the Canon S95. This is a pocket camera that I'm comfortable recommending to anyone who wants a small camera with great image quality.

Is the S95 a replacement for the high image quality and performance that you'll get with a Canon 7D or any other DSLR? No, and it's not meant to be. It's meant to be a great compact camera, and in the end that's what it is. The S95 meets my three criteria of high image quality, it can easily fit into a pocket, and it offers the right amount of manual control and good user design. What more could I ask for?! It was time to buy!

Here are some links to some other great reviews and information on the Canon S95. I'm posting them here because they quite frankly go into more detail than I do and they're all worthy of a read:

Joe McNally - Mistakes!

2010-11-09T16:57:00.000-05:00

I just read a funny post on Joe McNally's blog called "Mistakes". I'm sure at one time or another many of us have done or felt these things. Joe's comments on them are humorous.

What really rung true for me in his post is something that I will be focusing on here in my blog in my Pathways series, which is improving your technical and creative skills to get better shots straight out of your camera so you can spend less time screwing around in photo editing software.

Specifically, one thing Joe said was, "Get it right in the camera, don’t say I’ll fix that later. Photoshop is not an emergency room for grievously wounded pictures. Work hard in the field to master the camera, the lens and the techniques of shooting. Unless you like being a mushroom, sitting in your dark basement in front of a glowing screen for hours on end, trying to take the exposure from frame 101, the composition from frame 209, the expression from frame 333, and also eliminate the tree branch growing out of the bride’s elaborate hairdo that she spent a lot of money on. If it looks like a problem, it is. In other words, if you see something in your lcd that is bothersome, it won’t go away, it will just become more bothersome when you look at it on your home computer".

The other key thought of Joe's which I echoed here in my post called "Close to Home" is: "Don’t think all the good pictures in the world live in Bali, or Antarctica. There are good pictures right under your nose. Shoot what and who you love. And shoot that which is easily accessible to you. If you constantly think you have to climb mountains or jump out of airplanes to get good pictures, it will become an impossible chore to pick up your camera".

Get out and shoot....whatever you like....and learn how to do it right so that you can enjoy photography more and end up working on your photos less. Enjoy!

Close To Home

2010-11-01T22:48:00.002-04:00

In this post from this blog a while back and this post that I put up here about local photography, I mentioned that I occasionally get stuck in a creativity rut when shooting locally. Then I stumble across some great subject matter that pulls me out of it and I again appreciate the photo opportunities that are right in my own area.

It's easy to think that the grass is always greener for the photographers who are lucky enough to have easy daily access to really great photo opportunities like the National Parks, spectacular cities and coastlines, etc. I don't have easy access to those things without traveling a bit. But you know what? Sometimes you just have to make the best of what you have and free your shooting eye to seeing the possibilities all around your own area.

Nothing has said this better recently than this great little eBook that I just read called "Close To Home: Finding Great Photographs In Your Own Backyard". The eBook is only $5 in PDF format and it's filled with really compelling and motivational viewpoints from the author (Stuart Sipahigil) about finding inspiration and shooting in your home town . In addition to that, the book is filled with Stuart's great looking full color photos.

This book is worth the price just to set your head straight when approaching shooting in your local area. The great pictures and personal insight from Stuart are the icing on the cake. Highly recommended!

And while you're at it, you might want to check out the other small and very reasonably priced eBooks from Craft & Vision. I think they're all $5 each, and if Stuart's book is any indication of the quality, then they're probably all good. Enjoy!

Getting the most from Speedlites

2010-10-31T08:19:00.000-04:00

Flash photography is my nemesis. Or, I should say "good" flash photography is my nemesis. I have a feeling many people feel the same way.

I've read many books and articles on it and I've definitely improved my flash photography over the years by leaps and bounds, but I'm still not quite there on a consistent basis.

To date, this link to an older post of mine lists the resources that I've been using to learn and improve. I can now add this great book by Joe McNally called "Hot Shoe Diaries" to that list. It's a great read filled with practical and effective real world advice.

Today I stumbled across this link on the Canon Professional Network web site that is the beginning of a multi-part series called "Getting the most from Speedlites". Part 1 and 2 came out fairly close together, so if you decide to start reading this series then keep an eye open for the following installments.

Although this Canon series is not covering topics that are vastly different than those addressed by Joe McNally and Neil van Niekerk (two of the best in the flash photography world), it covers the topics from a slightly different angle. For me, sometimes reading similar subject matter from different viewpoints eventually helps me find a way to make the material "click" in my head so that I can put it to good use. I don't know....for some reason I occasionally need multiple reads of the same topic to completely understand and absorb it.

I hope you find these articles and books helpful. Without reading them, I would still be wandering aimlessly in a world of bright flashing light! :-)

X Marks The Spot

2010-10-29T16:16:00.001-04:00

Here's a link to a helpful article in the current issue of Outdoor Photographer magazine about using technology to get you to a desired photography location at the right time of day to have a better chance at getting the lighting results that you want. This was a great article for me to read, because quite frankly I didn't know that these tools did all of the things that they do (and that they do it so well).

I immediately downloaded the latest versions of Google Earth and The Photographer’s Ephemeris, plugged in a few locations and times of day that I was interested in testing out, and I was instantly able to see in a visual way what the lighting and shadow angles would be at those times of day, on those days, in those locations. I was particularly blown away by the Google Earth 'Sun' button that simulates the path of the sunlight (and its shadows!) throughout a given day at a given location.

So what does this mean for planning a shoot? It means everything!

Sometimes photography is about casually walking around and grabbing whatever serendipitous pictures you can find, and that's fine when that's what your goal is. But other times it's a very planned activity when you're on the hunt for a specific shot, in specific light, etc.

I can't tell you how many times I've driven or hiked to a given location with the intent of photographing something with the sun shining on it (or not shining on it), trying for a specific angle of lighting, etc, only to have my efforts ruined by getting there and seeing that I just missed getting the right light because of bad timing.

These tools allow you to plug in locations, dates, and times to see simulated lighting AND shadow paths! I can then say, "OK...For this location, to get the sun shining on that hillside, I need to be there by 3:00 at the latest or the sun will be past the hill". This is awesome insight to have when planning a photo excursion!

When planning a shoot from now on, no more will I have to say "I just missed my light and wasted my time!". I can now plan to be there when the light is where I want it, and it's only the quality of the light that I'll have to worry about...but that's up to Mother Nature.

Try these two great tools! You'll really like them!

Photo Carousel #4: "Artist"

2010-10-21T22:03:00.000-04:00

"Artist"

This is the next installment in my Photo Carousel series. I don't know what it is about this picture, but I really like it and wanted to post it here.

I've always been fascinated watching painters and sketch artists work. It's amazing to me the way they draw a line, smudge it with their finger to make it softer (such as around the girl's cheeks, chin, and chest), outline edges in such a meaningful way, and breathe life into their pictures until they're done and you stand back and say "Wow!".

I was at an Oktoberfest celebration near my house recently and I saw this artist drawing this couple. He was drawing them one at a time on the same sheet of paper and he didn't show it to both of them until he was done. They loved it!

While I was standing there, I became intrigued with trying to capture him doing his work. I had an idea for a great long exposure shot that would have showed his hands moving around the page while the rest of the picture was steady and sharp, but I didn't have a tripod with me. So my next best idea was to show just his hands and the paper. I thought this conveyed a slight sense of mystery to my photo because you know someone else is sitting there posing for him but you can't see them in my photo.

I wanted his hands and the all important pencil completely in the photo, but right at the edge of the frame to keep the viewer's attention inside the picture.

The main lesson I got from this photo was: Keep your eyes open when you're walking around at special events! Here I was drinking a beer and walking right by this cool scene and I almost didn't give it a second glance. There are so many interesting opportunities like this if you just keep your eyes open.

From a technical perspective, this shot was simple. I knew the camera would slightly under expose when it metered the mostly white scene, so I added +1/3 stop of exposure compensation to keep it bright. I then had to further increase the exposure slightly more in Photoshop because it still came out a little underexposed. I left the color balance the same because I like the glow of the tungsten light bulb that the artist was working under. I thought it added some warmth to the otherwise mostly white feeling.

All in all, it's a shot that I like and it's another compositional and technical learning experience.

Photo Carousel #3: "Layers"

2010-10-18T17:10:00.004-04:00

"Layers"

This is the third entry in my Photo Carousel series. The autumn colors near me haven't been that great this year, so instead of looking up for compositions, I looked down. That's how "Layers" came to life. I shot these leaves as they were....I did not move them. That's important to note for my explanation of how/why I took this photo below.

This photo is somewhat of a cliche. We've all probably seen too many leaf pictures to count and the leaves may have been prettier than these. But my Photo Carousel series is not necessarily about always presenting startlingly original or perfect images. It's about presenting nice images AND explaining the thought process behind them to communicate and exchange ideas about composition, light, etc.

My goal for this image was to present layers of leaves in a way that would cause the viewer's eye to wander around the frame looking on top of and under the leaves to see what's there. I think it succeeds in that goal because of three things: careful composition, lighting, and exposure.

I positioned the two orange leaves and the opposing brown leaf carefully in the frame to counteract each other and set the overall tone for the image. They also act like covers to the leaves under them and set the premise of what I was trying to do. The brown leaf is in that location for a reason. If you look carefully under the big brown leaf in the darker hole, there's just enough light under there to see more leaves. That keeps the viewer's eye right in there looking around. Same thing with the big orange leaf on the right. I had to get the camera just low enough to get that effect while still being able to get the hand held depth of field that I wanted. I could not stop the lens down to f/11 or further because I didn't have a tripod. This kind of intentional composition and perspective control gives the image some depth, instead of just shooting a single leaf on a rock, for example.

These leaves were coming in and out of shadow from the clouds above, so I waited until some sun hit them from the side to light them up. Careful metering let them go right to the edge of their luminosity without over exposing anything. I dialed in +1/3 exposure compensation because the scene was so bright that I knew the camera would try to under expose it. It was shot with 'Daylight' white balance to keep the colors more true. If this was shot in 'Auto' white balance, the colors would probably have been considerably more bland and neutralized by the camera.

All the time I was taking this picture, my daughter who I was hiking with was saying, "Dad....Come on! Let's go!". I told her to be patient for a minute and I would show her why later.

When I opened up the picture large on my wide screen computer monitor, she smiled and said, "Wow! That's neat!". When I showed her the leaves hidden under the brown and orange leaves, she said "That's cool, I never would have noticed that when I saw you taking this".

And I guess that's the point of this picture. To look around a little bit and notice things that you wouldn't ordinarily give a second glance to. And then perhaps spend some time with your camera thinking about how to use composition, light, and exposure to make a photo that, although it might be a little bit cliche because of the subject matter, also has some hidden elements that can bring about a smile when people discover them. And don't worry about getting your pants dirty when you get down on the ground! :-)

Creativity in the Photoshop Darkroom

2010-10-17T09:20:00.001-04:00

I've always enjoyed the writing of Harold Davis on the photo.net web site. He has interesting insight and opinions about the creative process of photography and that of post-processing in Photoshop to achieve his creative results.

In addition to this series of articles a while back on the photo.net web site about becoming a more creative photographer, he has recently been posting another series of articles called "Creativity in the Photoshop Darkroom" located at this link.

If you're interested in the options and techniques for how to tweak your photos to the next level in Photoshop, these articles are for you. Davis sometimes takes his photos further than I personally would, but regardless of that I think that most people can probably learn a great deal just from reading about his thought process and techniques. You can take away from these articles whatever works for you. Enjoy!