Monthly Archives: April 2009

Guthrie Silhouettes

Posted on by

Art House Ghosts

I was out shooting in Downtown Minneapolis with some friends on friday night last week, and we decided to go have a look from the Guthrie’s overlook. None of us had been up there. Very cool overlook, and I will have pictures from that later, but here are a couple I took as we were on our way there.

There was this great big long glowing red wall. Very cool. At first I was just setting up for some geometric shots, but then some people cam by, and I think that made the shot. It is more interresting with the people in it, even if they are “ghosting” through the frame. I’ve got to remember that everything doesn’t always need to be sharp in a frame.

Then I set up for a self portrait of sorts. I was going to use a wireless trigger, but I got Rich to take the shot for me. I also tried a shot with a flash fired directly across from me, but that just made a weird shadow, and having one part of the picture show up (me from the flash) looked odd. The silhouette looked much better.

Silhouette On Red

BuzzBoost your Feedburner Feed via Javascript

Posted on by

Well, it was pointed out to me that there was an easier way to get RSS feeds onto your site. Feedburner. Guess what. It is also a Google product. Sheesh! Basicly, you need to get your feed registered with Feedburner. Then you can use their BuzzBoost to create a piece of Javascript that will get your feed for you. It is pretty similar to what the GoogleApi is doing that I talked about earlier. The difference here is that Feedburner has a control panel where you set up how  your feed looks. No need to figure out any Javascript at all.

So this is my feed via WordPress.

This is my feed via Feedburner.

This is a snipit of my feed from the BuzzBoost.

Subscribe to RSS headline updates from:
Powered by FeedBurner


And this is the code that was generated that I pasted in. Pretty simple. I had a hard time getting feedburner to recognize my feed, but I am not sure that is feedburners fault. WordPress appears to take a really long time to respond with the feed.

Studio Strobes vs Speedlights

Posted on by

Scott Kelby has a post up where he compares studio strobes and speedlights. This is somthing that I have had going on in my head for quite some time now.

I took a studio lighting class, and the instructor was pretty anti speedlight. Maybe he just hasn’t use them much. I sure wouldn’t want to tell Joe McNally and David Hobby that small off camera flashes don’t put out good light. So, I decided that I would start small. Leave the studio strobes for some later time. Let me be able to say that I can do everything that is possible with one light.

So what did I buy? Well, I had an SB800 before the price lept off the insanity board. I figure you need a hotshoe flash no matter what, so it wouldn’t be a wasted light purchase. I now use it all the time. So what other gear¬†I purchased was a strobist kit from mpex (without the flash). See this post from a couple of days ago. I still intend to post more about the kit, but¬†I took these pics recently with that kit and that mini softbox from the friday post

I have to say that you can get quite different pricing than Scott got. Not on the same equipment, but how “pro” do you want to go? Mpex has one light¬†strobist kits for $219 that includes a flash! Yes, I know that it isn’t as powerful or feature rich as the SB-900, but hey, the price of entry is pretty cheap.

Then there are the alien bee’s studio strobes. The AB800 is $279. That is quite a bit cheaper than the Elinchrom BXRI 500s. ($625 at B&H, but out of stock) So are the AB800’s second fiddle? I haven’t seen enough lights to know. I do know that there are several people that have appeared on Scott’s guest blog that use Alien Bee’s lights, including Zack Arias and Dustin Snipes. I also used the ABR Ring Flash¬†at my class which I loved. So… when I get around to it, I am leaning to the bees.

But for now, I have a lot of learning to do. I have the Nikon CLS video¬†waiting to be watched, and I have wanted to order the Strobist Workshop DVD’s¬†if not attend a workshop myself. I think it would also be cool to attend a One Light Workshop with Zack Arias. ¬†I have read Joe McNally’s The Moment it Clicks, and right now I am reading The Hot Shoe Diaries.

That’s a lot of material to master. I figure I might add another speedlight, or LumoPro LP120¬†from mpex or two in a little while, but maybe I will wait until I can pull of this group shot with a single SB26 manual flash.

RSS Feeds via Javascript

Posted on by

I set about recently to try to get a RSS feed parsed using only Javascript. Not as easy as I had thought it would be. I had figured that there would be several Javascript library’s around, and I thought for sure that someone would have a jQuery plugin for it. Well, I did find jFeed, but it suffers from a rather large issue. It can’t access sites from a different domain from where it is running. This is really a Javascript security feature. I did a simple AJAX test, and sure enough, Javascript stops us from directly accessing another domain (to prevent cross site scripting attacks).

How do you get around this issue? Well, a php based proxy is one solution. You call via AJAX, this php file that then makes the request to the real feed, and sends it back. That didn’t seem like a simple or elegant enough solution.

I found RssToHtml, which is a PHP script that you can use the parse the RSS feed. Using this, you can even use an server side¬†include to get the feed. This¬†didn’t work on my machine¬†that would only¬†run cgi scripts from the include.¬†

I had just about given up when I stumbled upon the Google AJAX Feed Api. Google to the rescue again.
Continue reading →

Busy Weekend Taking Pictures

Posted on by

Wow, this was a busy weekend. Friday night I got out to shoot some of Minneapolis from around the Stone Arch bridge. We also went inside the Gutherie and that new thrust walkway thing that juts into space. Very weird, but a pretty cool place to take some pictures. I am still going through them, but after a quick look, I think my favorites of the night were when I included my father with an off camera flash.

Then yesterday I was at a 15 year olds birthday party. Myself and a couple of others were there to take pictures of her and her friends. I don’t think a fashion shoot in Milan could have had more outfit changes. It was a lot of fun though, with pictures to come.

Intro to Java Reflection

Posted on by
This entry is part 6 of 13 in the series Intro to Java

Reflection is a very interesting part of Java. It is sometimes considered an advanced topic, but I think it is worth exploring here. There are several practical applications for using reflection, and we will look at a few here.

Sun Trails

Index: http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/index.html
Link into the Reflections Trail: http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/reflect/index.html

What is reflection?

Reflection is a little like cheating. It allows you to get access to classes and its methods and variables without accessing them the normal way. We don’t use the new operator to create an instance, and by using reflection we can get access even to private variables and methods. For this reason, we should be careful about using reflection. It is a powerful way of writing programs, but be sure not to overuse it.
Continue reading →

New Born and Family Shoot

Posted on by

One the weekend, I got to take pictures of my first newborn. Other than my kids that is. I also got to take pictures of the rest of the family, and use my new LightDome XS. For the whole family shot I used a shoot through umbrella. Things worked out pretty well considering it was the first time with the LightDome, but I think I could have moved my light closer. It wasn’t really a good time to experiment, as I was trying to “get the shot”. Anyway, here are some of the pictures. I took over 200, and felt that 80 were pretty good. Here are just a few.

DSC_7522

DSC_7496

DSC_7479 BW

DSC_7462

DSC_7412 BW

DSC_7353

DSC_7337

mike_kelly_family

Thanks Mike, Kelly, Adilyn and Emma for letting me take your pictures. I had a lot of fun.

If you are in the Minneapolis / St. Paul / Twin Cities area and would like pictures taken of your family, please contact me at photography@cyberward.net.

Think Tank Airport Security

Posted on by

I have been thinking about camera bags… How to get all of your stuff from point A to point B? I don’t travel that much by air, but I do need to get my gear around in cars, and when air travel comes up, you need something to put your stuff into.

My biggest issue right now is the 70-200mm f/2.8. I can just barely get it into my Lowepro FastPack. The only way it will fit is attached to the camera, and then the body is pushing against the door. Not the best. It is a backpack, which I like, but if I am taking everything, it is darn heavy.

I have been starting to hear a lot about Think Tank products. They look very well made, non-descript, and well thought out. A while back Matt Brandon reviwed the Think Tank Airport Security International, and then just recently Scott Kelby reviewed the Think Tank Airport Security V2, it’s slightly bigger cousin. These are very cool looking bags. If you could pick them up for cheap, I would run out now, but quality doesn’t come cheap, and we are looking over $300 for either of these. Yikes. It will take a bit more thought and saving before I bite.

Ok, on the sort of related category: I need to find a bag to hold my lighting gear. I am starting to collect lights, stands, umbrellas and other crap, and need¬† a way to store and transport it. On the weekend, I emptied out my family’s 6 person tent bag and used that. Any better ideas? And, uh, $300 isn’t a round number that will fit this need.

How to use Thickbox

Posted on by

I have had a lot of hits on my How to use Lytebox post, and I thought I might continue it as a series and do something on another of the light box clones. It also looks like lytebox has been discontinued by the author. I have started to use Thickbox. Why you ask? It uses jQuery, and I am starting to really like that library. One of the things that drew me to lytebox was that it had no dependencies. But now, more sites require javascript anyway, and my library of choice is jQuery. So, if I am using jQuery, why not the Thickbox plugin?

If you are not sure about this library, check out this matrix that lists just about every light box type javascript library around.

Continue reading →