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See more photos in the Gallery.
I’ve always been a big fan of making the computer do the arduous part of the work so I can concentrate on the more interesting parts. When writing software, that’s generally meant relying on terse or sophisticated languages like Perl and Matlab. I’m currently taking it to the next level, though, by using code-generation tool and frameworks to generate complete code layers with full unit tests.
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.
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!
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.
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:
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:
What would you add or remove from the list?
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!
Pretty much the first thing you learn as a homeowner is toilet debugging and repair. After 7 years, I’ve now moved onto advanced stealth toilet engineering.
My toilets flushed and filled loudly - to the tune of 70 dB on a sound-level meter sitting a few feet away on the sink. Tweaking the fill hose and float didn’t do much, so I purchased new “whisper-quiet” fill stacks. I was a bit skeptical since there was nothing to say how or why they earned that designation, but it actually proved to be true advertising. They loudest part of the flush is now 6 dB lower, and the fill is a pleasant gurgle 12 dB less than the old one. Not bad for $10 a piece!
This week’s Assignment: Sharp on DPS made me realize that the resized photos in my gallery always loose the sharpness they originally had. Thankfully, that problem has already been solved in Gallery2; this post explains how to automatically sharpen images on resize. Once that’s in place, you can dump the cache of existing images by deleting your g2data/derivatives folder.
Here’s a quick example of a normal and processed resize using the 0.2 setting from the above post:
Studio photographers and even the mug shot artists at the DMV shoot tethered to a computer, so why can’t you with your fancy DSLR? Here’s a rundown of some options for Mac users and their performance:
Canon’s included software does allow for remote control of a tethered camera; control the settings, click the shutter, and the file immediately downloads to the computer. Or at least as immediately as USB 2.0 allows: roughly 8 seconds for RAW and 3 seconds for a large, high-quality JPG. The complimentary Canon image viewer will watch the incoming directory and display a thumbnail; clicking that gives you a medium-size preview, which can then be maximized to fit the screen with more clicks.
del.icio.us/mbotos