Cyberward.net

It’s official, I am going to Seattle in June. The hotel picture shows a room with a great view of the space needle and the ocean. I bet I am in an inside room.

Some of you may be wondering why I am going on a vacation in the last month of my programming contract. You would be wise to wonder, but Annie is going for work, and I am going to tag along. I love the West Coast. I couldn’t pass it up.

I am planning a drive to Vancouver for a day too because I haven’t been there in many many years. What the heck I say. So, anyone have any ideas for photo oportunities? In Vancouver or Seattle? I have some ideas, but I am open to suggestions.

This Sunday I went to a MN Strobist meet up event. The MN Strobist group is a flickr group that uses small (usually) flashes to light their pictures. This was the first meet up event that I have attended. This event was held at the Jackson Street Roundhouse. It’s a train museum, and I had no idea it was here. I definitely need to bring my kids back here. There are a ton of cars that you can walk through, and see what life on the train would have been like.¬† There are also a bunch of toy train tables to entertain kids if they get bored and you want to wander.

Looked like a movie set!

The event was very interesting. I am not sure what I expected, but it was very loose. The location was organized, but once there you are on your own. You need your own equipment, your own vision, and the gumption to grab a model and start taking pictures.

I was a little overwhelmed. I have been using my single flash a little bit, but dropping into an unfamiliar location and coming up with a place to shoot and an idea in my head of what to do was difficult for me. I mostly wandered around and watched others. There are some very good shooters here. There are professional studio photographers, location photographers, and other amateurs here. I was one of the few rookies Sunday.

In a sleeping berth.

It seems like a good group. Many people knew each other and formed up little groups right away. Like in most of these situations I don’t tend to jump right in. I am a little more reserved, but I did meet and talk to several people. I did set up a shoot with Jorge Rimblas, and globbed on to a shoot that Ben and Martin had set up. Martin helped me out quite a bit, so thanks! My pictures from that shoot didn’t turn out unfortunately. I really need to pay more attention to the expressions on the model faces, and be more prepared and willing to direct. The pictures of Michael here were from the setup that Jorge and I did.

Head shot for Michael

My pictures are definitely not up to what some of the others shot, but I really shouldn’t let that get me down. It seems like many of these people have been to a lot of these things and have quite a bit of experience setting up their equipment. I have a lot to learn, but there seems to be people there that will help me out, especially if I step up and ask.

I’ll be back.

Check out the MN Strobist group on flickr for more of the pictures from the day.

Available light shot taken while others were working.

I am finally finished reading my copy of the Hot Shoe Diaries by Joe McNally. If you want to check out what Joe had to say, here are links to a couple posts from his blog. But don’t forget to come back

Why did it take so long? Is it that dry? Far from it. It is an awsome book. Joe manages to work in quotes from several movies, including the Princess Bride. That was funny. I like his style of writeing. It might not be for everyone. Joe writes just like I imagine him talking, if he was talking to me. Just one photographer who has been around the block (or globe, really) to another photographer who wants to know more about this whole lighting thing. It feels very personal. You get to step into the shoes and life of someone who has taken shots with 47 Speedlights, or maybe it was 108. Not sure.

The book doesn’t really have seperate chapters per say. Some of the content is grouped into chapters, but the content is really one shoot. So it feels like every 2-4 pages is another chapter. This is good and bad. It’s great because I can read little bits at a time. I can read about one shoot while waiting for my kids to finish something. I can read about another shoot just before bed. You never have to stop in the middle of one of thes sections, because you only ever have a page or so to go. That’s where it got me. I never sat down with the intention of reading the whole thing, or 40 pages at a time. I just read bits and pieces every once in a while. Now that it’s done though, I wish there was more. I will probably start over with the location shoots again. I did with his previous book The Moment it Clicks too.

I found myself stairing at the pictures and rereading the text, trying to figure out where all the lights were hidden. He calls it a game of inches. Some of the lights are set up to just give that extra little flick of light that most wouldn’t notice, but taken all together, make for extrodianary images. I would find myself tyring to figure out the sight lines for the triggers too. How did he manage to fire that SB900 that is outside shooting through the window? With two extension cords from the hotshoe to a MU800 bounced off a reflector? What? Really?

As I am starting to get more and more into using little flashes, I am realizing just how amazing his pictures are. The lighting diagrams that he has in his head are astonishing. How he can look at a scene and know how to light it is still beyond me. Never mind the pulling it off. And yet it tells you how to do it. It’s all there. You just have to go out and give it a try yourself.

Thanks Joe. The book is great. I learned a lot, and expect to learn more as I reread it. I hope you sell a truckload. (To other non photographers that won’t try to put this knowledge to use

Above: Random spring picture from last year. I need to take more this year!

Ever wonder how someone could be a comedian, contemplate theology, and end up a passionate photographer. David duChemin has his story.

I ran across some cool inexpensive lighting equipment today. After watching a NAPP video via Kelby’s blog, I went to photobasics.net. This is a set of inexpensive gear aimed at non professionals. There is some neat looking stuff here.

Added a new book to my wish list at Amazon. David Ziser’s book Captured by the Light: The Essential Guide to Creating Extraordinary Wedding Photography. I am not a wedding photographer, but I bet anyone that wants to create great portraits could benefit from this book.

I don’t get to Moose Peterson’s blog every day, but when I do, I usually read through a bunch of older posts. Here is one from a couple of days ago where he talks about the Nik Color Effects filter plugin. Very neat. The particular filter: tonal contrast. Unfortunately it is only available in the $299 Complete version. (see filter list here)

The last of the Just Visiting pictures. This one gets a full view of the stone arch bridge in the background. A minus 2.0 EV and a 2.5 sec exposure at f/8 brought out the color of the lights on the bridge/water.

I had my camera on a tripod, and was triggering on a cord holding my SB800 with diffuser on, out to the right. Next time I am going to bring the umbrella and see if I can get better light.

Had to do some white balance/color correction to remove a lot of blue color in the concrete from the Guthrie’s lighting in Aperture.

In the last lesson we looked at patterns in general and why we might want to use them. So here is our first pattern. We are well on our way to creating a common language with which to talk design.

One of the reasons I picked this pattern to start with, is that it is very easy to understand. It models real word situations very well, and that is what OO design is supposed to do right, model real world objects?

The Adapter in the Physical World

The concept of an Adapter is easy to understand. It does just what it is named to do. It adapts one object to that of another. Take the wall plug. It has three rectangular holes set at angles to fit the plug. It does? In Europe it does. We are traveling and need to plug our laptop into the wall. What do we use? An adapter.

The Adapter in the Software World

The idea is not so different in the software world. When you want to connect one class to another class that was not designed to fit together, you need an adapter class. Let’s look at an Java example to see how we can adapt one class to another.
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Here is another of the “just visiting” shots of my father. This one was less about the buildings and more about the sunset. This image was underexposed -3EV to really bring out the sky. The colors were all there, but I did pull them up a bit in Aperture. I then hit him with the flash, a SB800 with the diffuser.

Now, after getting into Joe McNally’s Hot Shoe Diaries a bit, I wish I had tried something that he has done, which is to take the diffuser off and zoom in the flash. Maybe try a snoot. Something that would focus the light on the person and control the amount of light that hits the railing, which is kind of ugly.

I set out this morning to take this picture, but forgot that they would be closed. Didn’t look very good. Took these a little while before posting them this evening. I started with my 50mm f/1.8, but ended up using the 70-200 f/2.8 racked out to 200. The working distance was nice, but couldn’t get quite as close as I would like. Still, turned out pretty well.

 My father was visiting from Winnipeg. I used the oportunity to take a picture with off camera flash. The camera is triggered by a friend, I am holding a SB800 just out of frame at about 45deg from him. There is also a street lamp to his right.

I think I should have hit him with a bit more light. Maybe tried from the other side. Still getting used to this off camera flash deal. I think I need to try brighter than I think works in the viewfinder in these night shots.

Also, I am going to try bringing my umbrella with me and getting much closer to my subject next time. This one is just with the diffuser, and I am a little too far away.

Patterns are a very important part of Java. They allow us to speak a common language. The names can be misused, and thrown around by people trying to sound important, but they really do help us to be able to communicate ideas between us.

It does take some Java knowledge to be able to read, use and apply patterns, but I think we have seen enough Java and OO principles to start looking at patterns. It is good to start hearing about and seeing different patterns at any level of Java programming.

So what is a pattern? In the physical world, it would be a series of steps taken over and over again that could be written down and repeated. In the software world, it is not really a set of steps, but a software solution that people apply over and over again in their coding. Experienced developers have put these solutions together, and given their pattern a name. By looking at and studying patterns, we can take advantage of the experience of others, and learn from their solutions. One interesting thing about patterns, is that they don’t need to be language specific. If you learn about the Adapter or the Command pattern, you can apply that pattern to PHP, Ruby, or Java.
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