Matthew Botos

Armed with a some tips and inspiration from Digital Photography School, I undertook my first baby shoot this weekend. Jerry and Marlena invited me to photograph their six-week old daughter, Giada. Not only are they friends, but very accommodating parents, which made things a bit easier.

Between a few ideas I had sketched out and the shots they wanted, we found enough to fill the hour of shooting we managed to get. As noted in the link above, babies do add a certain chaotic element that rewards preparation, patience, and flexibility. Though even some the feeding break provided some good photos.

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Firing off rapid action shots with a telephoto lens from the back of a boat with the wind blowing past could really convince me to focus more on sports photography! The 70-200 on a small sensor is just right for water sports, and with bright sunlight reflecting off the water I was able to shoot ISO 100 at 1/500 most of the time and not mind the fact that it’s only a F4 lens without stabilization. Of course, the L-series sharpness and solid build were certainly noticeable.

A polarizer definitely cut the glare, and the hood doubled as a good splash guard. Resting a slightly loose tripod ring in my palm also made it easy to switch from horizontal to vertical. Being out on the boat for a few hours also gave me a change to not only get crisp freeze-frames, but to experiment with some other angles, compositions, and motion blur effects. The 70mm end of the zoom also yielded some nice portraits.

There were only three problems: my back got a bit contorted following the action for hours, my hand did finally cramp up on the smaller grip of the Rebel XTi, and I need to bring my trunks so I can try some wakeboarding!

View all the waterskiing photos

The biggest photo news of the week isn’t another new DSLR camera, but the announcement of Getty to License Flickr Images. It’s been getting lots of coverage in photography blogs, but I’d like to throw in my own thoughts as a photographer and member of both Flickr and Getty’s iStockPhoto site.

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With gas prices holding at $4 a gallon, I’m averaging $60 a tank to fill my Maxima with cheap gas. Yet last month, I actually made a net profit on the machinations of Big Oil. Here comes the math:

Gas: -$120

Discover Gas Card Cashback: +$5

Energy Stocks ETF (XLE) Gain: +$134

Total: +$19

So this month I beat Big Oil! My fortunes will probably change next month, though; I usually average 3 tanks.

I enjoy Morgan Spurlock’s work; both Super Size Me and 30 Days provide a fresh, provocative look at modern issues. It got me thinking: how would each of us cope if we had to live a lifestyle opposite to our own for 30 days?

The first step in this thought experiment is figuring out what that personally meaningful opposite is, be it a belief, lifestyle, or position on a certain issue. For me, I think something that shapes my life significantly is the regular use of computers. It’s how I earn a living, communicate with friends and family, and even meet women. How would I fare if unplugged for a month?

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You can now search by multiple tags in my photo gallery! (Since spaces are usually allowed in tags, the whole search was previously treated as one tag.) If you’d like to add this feature to your own Gallery2 installation, replace TagsSearch.class with the file in this zip:

Download Multi-Tag Search for Gallery2

My sister Catherine just got graduated from college, has some money in the bank already, and is about to start her first job. She’s already starting to think about investing, which is great, so I pulled together some links from my del.icio.us collection for her:

Links for young investors

What would you add or remove from the list?

Turning 30 is intimidating because it’s supposed to be a milestone: you look back at the fun times and early accomplishments of your 20’s as you look towards settling into a more serious life in your 30’s. Of course, 30 is a pretty arbitrary age for any accomplishment, so perhaps it’s better spent just taking stock of the last decade and the next to come.

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It’s pretty cool to see one of my former projects, the Unity enterprise social suite, getting plenty of coverage at the Enterprise 2.0 conference. (Naturally, the news came to me through the social grapevine of my del.icio.us network.) I was involved in the first year or so of the project, and it looks like it’s really evolved - this photo by David Terrar gives you a hint.

As noted in the articles, it was a big undertaking with lots of technical challenges. Sharepoint seems a little overemphasized; we also built a handful of custom web applications, feed infrastructure (ATOM as well as RSS), Google Search Appliance integration (one of my contributions), NewsGator Enterprise, and security.

Of course, the bigger challenge in any enterprise is cultural adoption by employees and management. To that end, deploying enterprise 2.0 takes passionate advocates from project management to grassroots early adopters. The Unity team has carved a solid beachhead there, so it’ll be exciting to see how it continues to grow!