Cyberward.net

Yep, it’s true. I am still trying to sort out what it means. Actually, I know what it means. I just don’t want to admit it. I have been having some medical issues for several months now, and I have been attributing them to getting older. I tried changing my diet, but it wasn’t helping. I finally went in to have some tests done as it got worse. After talking to the Doc, he said he would still do the due diligence and do all the tests to be sure, but he didn’t think he would find a medical condition or have a pill that would help. That is what I was afraid of. Stress and lack of sleep. That’s it. I need more sleep and less stress. After listening to what was going on in my life he suggested I take a sabbatical from one of my two jobs. Programming (I own my own company), or Photography (I own my own company). Since I can’t even cover the ridiculous monthly payment of the cost of health care for my family (yes that’s commentary) with my photography income, that would be what I should take a sabbatical from.

By the way, I am not sure how the photo is supposed to connect to the post. It’s a yoga pose. Yoga is for relaxation? Something I am not doing?

I’ve been trying very hard to balance a full time job, time with my wife, raising two kids, and everything else that everyone deals with along with trying to get my photography business going. To do so, I have been trying to squeeze in the time at night and on weekends at the expense of my health. It sucks. I am confused, frustrated, and unsure what to do next. The doctor was talking about my business, and not eliminating photography all together. I am still crushed. I was trying to work toward a change of careers. Even if I take a few months off, then what? Back to the same schedule? That’s not going to work.

I know that what’s in the back of the minds of most people reading this, is that this is the opportunity to make the switch. If I need to give up one job, and the one I want to do is photography, then the one to give up is clear. Wish it was so easy.

I am going to spend the next few weeks trying to finish the work that I owe to clients from this fall. Then take a break from actively perusing clients for a couple months and try to figure out what this is going to look like in the new year.

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I have another blog. Because I don’t have enough places to post material already. Well, that’s not quite true. I now have a tumblr blog, but it’s about trying to get focus. I want one place to put my mobile shots. They were getting spread out. Hipstamatic, Instamatic, BestCam, twitter, google+, or stuck on my phone. They will now go here.

Part two of the reasoning is the inspiration from Sabrina Henry and her new mini-me photo blog. I am going to make another renewed effort to look for and take photographs daily. We get so busy, it’s easy to forget to shoot. More importantly, for me anyway, I forget to look. Training yourself to look, and see things that others pass by is part of the challenge and the fun of photography. I need to keep at it. The new tumblr blog is part of that effort.

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Ever been out with an iPhone or iPad and Craft&Vision has released a new ebook that just have to read right now, but you are not at a computer? Well, there is a way to download directly to your device. It is possible that the concept if not the exact method would work on an android. I don’t know the software on that platform.

The first thing you need to do is purchase an ebook. The site as it is currently is quite navigable by a mobile device. It isn’t optimized for mobile, but with a little pinching and moving around it is possible to follow the checkout process through e-junkie and PayPal and buy an ebook. This part of our exercise you could do from another computer somewhere if you have access. Just erase cookies when you are done if it’s a public machine.

Once you have made your purchase, you will get an email from Craft and Vision. Check for it on your mobile device email client. Click the e-junkie link.

This takes you to a page on fat free cart’s site. This is where the PDF is stored, and the link on this page contains the unique code that allows you to download the PDF. Now don’t worry. You get s very generous 9 attempts, so you can re-download at home if you want.

Press and hold for a second the “Click Here” link. This will bring up an option to copy the link. Press that button. Safari won’t let you save the PDF if you were to just open it. We need another program.

My favorite PDF tool is GoodReader. Navigate back to the main screen shown here if you had a doc open. There is an option for “Web Downloads”. Press that.

In the next screen press the “Enter URL” link.

In the screen that pops up, tap and hold a second to get the iOS popup that let’s you paste in the URL you copied.

GoodReader will download it to your device and you can read it right away! Enjoy your PDF’s on your iOS device without your computer.

PS. This post’s images were taken on an iPhone4. Parts blurred using filterstorm, and uploaded and the post started using the wordpress app. I finished it by moving the images into place in the regular wordpress interface.

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This is getting ridiculous. I have way to many places I am trying to update online. They all seem like a good idea at the time. A place to share this, a place to share that… Better get on here before your name is taken, etc. It is getting to be quite a chore to update all of them. Worse, you start to cross pollinate by posting in different places with the same content. Sometimes by cut and past, other times by one site picking up a post from the others RSS feed.

Ok, so what are all the places I am trying to update?

Well, for starters, your here. This blog. This is really the first online presence that I had. I have been posting computer, family, and photography related things here for several years.

Next I added flickr. Seemed like a good idea. Provide a way where the community could see my images and tell me how great they were. I never did get that many ego boost images, and the ones that did I could never figure out why. Mostly I upload mobile pictures here.

Since then I have added another site at christopherwardphotography.com to cover just my professional wedding and portrait services. I finally have a place that my business card can direct to that is just photography.

Then I added a Photoshelter site for my clients to be able to review the images I take of them. I don’t use this for much else. I don’t have many public images up here.

Then Facebook came along. I have a personal wall that I was using to communicate with family. Unfortunately not all my family is was on Facebook.

So I created a site for family pictures at annieandchris.net. I like the idea of having this site separate from Facebook anyway.

I have a Linked In account. Yes, I do! It may not be all that popular, but it has been the most productive for me business wise out of all the social sites. I use this site just for computer consulting, and have found my last few consulting jobs via this site.

Where would life be without a 140 character limiting per post twitter feed? I have met a lot of neat people here. I mostly use twitter to interact with other photographers, and find links to photography and Photoshop information.

Then came the need for a Christopher Ward Photography page on Facebook. The idea being a place I can interact with clients and they can help promote my images. However, now I need content here, and on my website.

I also have a presence at bestcam, instagram, and hipstamatic. These are all mobile photo sites.  I don’t really spend time on, or try to view these sites. I just post images to them when I take a picture on my phone with their app. They really only work as mobile apps, although there are starting to be web sites pop up that use their API’s.

Which brings us to the the glamor children of the moment. 500px and Google+. Yes, I am on both.

I started up an account on 500px as a way to make sure that cwardphoto wasn’t taken by someone else. I kind of like it though. Looks pretty. I started using it as a bit of a portrait portfolio.

I connected up Google+ just for the heck of it. I like it better than Facebook for the moment, but I hardly know anyone on Google+ yet, and the mobile web interface on my phone is very limited. I do like the idea of circles though, and hope it takes off.

I think.

It is with this last sign up to Google+ that I feel like I hit the wall. I have more places I try to update my “social status” than I have friends. Not more online friends, more PLACES. That’s wacked. It might mean I don’t have many “real” friends, but I am too busy updating my status to a group of people that hardly know me to have many real friends.

I need to consolidate. Keep just what I need for family/friends and for business reasons. I might have to listen to one of the social media experts that keep pinging me on Twitter. Or not.

Don’t forget to Like me, friend me, comment on my posts, +1 my content, give my pictures an award,  and slap me silly.

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My friend Eddie and I headed up to Mounds View Park in St. Paul for a little evening photo shoot. I wanted to let you know how I took this shot.

First, we are in the twilight hour, just before the sun goes down. I decided not to meter this manually. I set the camera on aperture priority, with -1 2/3 exposure compensation. This is what is controlling the background exposure. For the lights, I used manual. I usually shoot in TTL, but I both wanted to experiment, and I knew that for the light on Eddie it was going to need pretty much full power.

I started with a SB800 speed light toward the front of the car, that is skipping across the side. I had one SB900 mounted on a stand to the left of the car in a 24″ lastolight softbox. This was pointed at Eddie. My 3rd light was on the camera, a SB900 acting as a commander. But, the back of the car was too dark, and as the light went down, I was able to switch to just the popup flash on my D7000. I was surprised, but happy that I had another light. I was out of stands, (only 2) so with only the foot, and pointed up at 45deg at the car, I lit up the back end of the car.

So, if you caught that, I am using the pop up flash on my camera to trigger the flashes in manual mode. The cool thing about this, is that I could change the power of the lights without going over to the units themselves. I would have had to do this in SU-4 mode. Instead I was able to adjust the power and settle on 1/4 power while staying at the camera.

The next issue was that I didn’t get enough power out of the flash on Eddie. I had it zoomed to 200mm, but it was fairly far back to stay out of the frame. (Shooting at 55mm if you were wondering). So, to fix it, I upped the ISO from 200 to 400. This gave me the power I was looking for from the flash, and we were good to go.

The rest was all composition. I think some of the best shots came from the low position when I was kneeling on the ground. The only issue is that you can’t really see the city in the background this way. Anyway, there are some other pictures on my portrait site.

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This is my first attempt at a composite using my girls as subjects. The inspiration for the photograph came from Justin and some of the pictures that he has created of his boys. I have been thinking of creating some more creative pictures of the girls for awhile, and have kept putting it off. This weekend I gave it a go. This is the first idea that I had.

I think the concept worked. I envisioned a picture of Kate flying through the air, and Lily trying to catch her. I gave her my ball glove to try to make it look like she was ready to catch. I had trouble getting Lily to look like she was nervous about being able to catch Kate. Kate’s jump worked well though. Also, to simplify, I went with a picture outside that I didn’t think needed flash. Most of Justin’s images are inside using flash, which I will move up to when I think of something good.

Technically there are a few problems. First is that Kate is blurry. I almost didn’t post this because of it, but decided to anyway. I learned that a kid jumping off a swing is faster than 640th of a second can freeze. Surprised me. I think I got the pictures aligned, but when I went to try to pose Lily, other kids kept looking in the camera and must have bumped it. (we had several over at the time) Also, there is a halo around Kate. I cut her out so I could move her up in the frame to make her look like the jump was higher. Every time I try to take someone off a natural setting I get this. I’ve got to get that figured out.

The other is the view. The kids are heavily weighted to the left of the frame. Not sure I like that. I did choose this angle on purpose though, and that was so that you only saw the garage in the background. I didn’t want to show the crap that is our parking pad and back lane. Thought it would be too distracting. I might try for a different location where I can get them perpendicular to the frame. Trick is to find that location where there aren’t a ton of other kids around.

Thoughts?

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I went to Wood Lake Park in Richfield on the Weekend. I got up at 5:00, and just got there in time to get a little bit of color. The sun is getting up earlier and earlier. It get’s harder and harder to beat the sun.

Anyway, it has been a while since I went to Wood Lake, so I decided to take the opportunity to get there this past Sunday morning. I was pretty happy with several of my shots. I got a few good ones of a muskrat, an egret, and some red wing black birds. It wasn’t until I got to my computer that I realized that I had taken all the shots at 3200 ISO. On the back of the camera the shots looked sharp, but back at the computer, not so much. Very disappointed.

I am actually fairly impressed with the combination of the D7000 and Lightroom 3′s ability to control noise. The images are fairly usable, but not as sharp as I want for a wildlife picture. This is not really the best way to judge the picture quality for how I intend to use 3200 ISO. I still need to take my own shots with a f/2.8 lens, 3200 ISO and a dim room.

So lesson learned? We will see. I need to double check settings before EVERY shoot.

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I’ve been snapping away with my iPhone lately. The app I have been using the most is Hipstamatic. I started with a few issues that bugged me, so I wanted to tell you how I set it up. This is not how everyone needs to set their camera up, just what works for me.

Resolution: this was disappointing. I shot a ton of images that I was going to put in a small book. They were all at the default resolution of 600px. Nuts. Too small to print. It took a long time to figure out that you set the resolution via a sliding switch on the side of the lens. You need to turn the camera around and slide the lever to the left of the lens up. You now have full resolution.

Push the lever on the left up

Composition: this drove me nuts. Some people might like the retro like aspect of not knowing exactly what picture they are taking, but not me. I like to compose carefully. To fix this, you need to be in the Settings app, Hipstamatic section. Here change the Viewfinder Mode from Classic to Precision Framing.

Hipstamatic setting page on the Settings App

Random changing film and lens: Again, maybe I am just not the target retro user of this app, but I don’t want the camera to randomly switch things on me when I shake the phone whether it’s accidental or deliberate. There are two ways to fix this. If you edit your lenses you can pick which lens you want it to pick on shake. Me, I use the sledgehammer approach and turned Shake to Randomize off completely in the settings app.

Set shake to change individually

Metadata: if you want tags and GPS info to make it to your photo sharing sites, you also need to make sure that this is enabled in the settings app. I think this is on by default. You can also set this each time you post. The biggest issue I had to getting this to work on flickr was that I had blocked this feature on the flickr account settings. Go figure.

Now, the reason I started and continue to shoot with this app is one lens and film combo. I saw Josh Bradley using this when he took the portrait that I am using in twitter and Facebook. I downloaded them right away. I use the BlacKeys Ultrachrome B+W film and the Lucifer VI lens. You can get them both in the Portland Hipstapak. It will cost you a couple of dollars via in app purchase. Its the only combo I am using. I know I should be more adventurous.

Anyway, this app is all about fun, so have fun taking pictures.

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Well, how about that, another panorama. This one is from the Guadalupe River. I worked this one area for a long time. Really until the light was very hard and bright. I had trouble getting much I liked. Most of what I liked were ones I converted to black and white. I’ll show those another time. This panorama was taken at the end of our time shooting at the park. I had just about quite, when I saw Josh taking a pano, and I thought, yikes, I almost forgot to take one of those. I had taken several shots across the river about here, but nothing this wide. Truth be told, I pretty much planted the tripod in the holes of where Josh was. Here was his shot. I decided to convert mine to B/W with a sepia tone. I am really liking Nik Silver Effects Pro 2.

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This has turned into pano week around here. Here is another panorama that I made in Texas of the Pedernales river. This one isn’t quite so wide. I was constrained by the position I chose across from the mini falls here. The big rock on the left and the sun on the right.

Anyway, the Pedernales river was running really low. Very little water. I was told that there was usually a fair bit more water running in the spring. The river basin is quite wide too. One of my earlier panoramas was shot in the opposite direction and shows just how wide it is. The reason for this is flash flooding. It is such a common occurrence, and the water can change so rapidly that there is a sign up at the trail head that shows a before and after picture that is only 5 min apart. The before shows a fairly lazy river, and the after a massive rushing torrent. Pretty crazy.

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