Zen Photo Press

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I am not sure how I missed this. There is a plugin for WordPress called ZenPhotoPress. I even had ideas of trying to do this myself. Anyway, what this does, is allow you to get your photo’s from Zen Photo into your wordpress blog. It is built into the visual editor (tiny mce).

I have been working on a gallery with Zen Photo with my Cyberward theme. Still trying to decide what I want to do with it, but I think that I will move to migrate my family photos over to Zen Photo instead of Gallery.

Zen Photo just seems better in my opinion. Gallery (actually Gallery2) seems slow and burdened. Too many things activated and going on by default.¬† Zen Photo has fewer plugins, but that’s ok by me. It seems much easier to hack on too. I guess now I just need to time to do this.

I’m starting to get the vision thing

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Today, David posted on pixelatedimage.com another post on vision, and how hard it can be to take pictures. I get it this time. The last time he really went off about this: A Long Way to Go: A Rant, I kind of went off on him. (I even managed to pull Matt Brandon in on my rant-back) I was off the mark then. Way off.

At that time my picture taking was improving quite a bit. By improving, I mean that I was getting more shots in focus, with the DoF I wanted, with reasonable composition. I understood my camera, and could usually get it to technically do what I wanted. I was frustrated by a few things about my D40, and wanting a D90 pretty badly.

I went off on David that taking photographs really wasn’t that hard, especially if you had all the gear like he and Matt did. After all, I had only had my camera for a year, and my pictures were getting technically better quite quickly.

What I completely missed, was that David was talking about how hard it was to take a picture that represented the vision you had for the picture. I was just talking about getting the thing in focus. I wasn’t trying to get a representation of my vision out of my photography. I just walked around and took pictures of things that caught my eye.

Recently though, I have been trying to capture something more particular from my pictures. A particular mood or feeling that I saw or felt when I took the picture that I wanted to share. That is much harder. That, I am finding frustrating. Whether it is at point of click, or later in photo shop, I am finding that I just don’t have the chops yet to get what I want, when I want it. Sometimes it comes out, but it seems more like luck.

Now I get it. I have a bit more gear now than I had then. That, combined with practice is producing technically better shots more often. But now I move into the more difficult phase. How do I get an expressive photo, not just a sharp one?

PS. Thanks to David and Matt for giving me time to come around.

Studio Pictures of Hanna

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These are the pictures of Hanna from last week. Some of them turned out pretty good. I do need to get better at “directing” a shoot. I really don’t know what I am doing. I was lucky in that Hanna was a natural in front of the camera.

Hanna1 Hanna4

I tried to work with a couple of pictures to desaturate the picture a bit, but left some color in the eyes and lips. I have had a comment that it looks too washed out now, but it was a first attempt at a look I was trying.

Hanna3

These pictures were taken with an Alien Bees ring light. It was kind of interresting. It was a little difficult to shoot with. Because of it being a ring light, it was hard to just hand hold the camera. We had to put the camera lens into the center of the light to get the right effect. We had a lot of people that needed a turn, so we didn’t actually mount our camera’s to the light or a tripod. It was a little awkward.

The light that comes from these lights is interresting. It is pretty bright. It would be nice to do a better comparison between softboxes vs bare ring light.

Get Your Seat to the Digital Wake Up Call

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digitalwakeupcallbanner1

I briefly mentioned David Ziser’s tour before, and that I have already booked my seat, but I thought I would tell you a little bit more. Why you say? Three reasons: I want to see you go because David is an amazing photographer with a ton of information he is willing to share with you. Two, because I have a discount code for you, and three, because I am running my first contest, with the prize being a seat at the big show.

I forget now how I stumbled upon digital pro talk, David’s blog. I hadn’t done any weddings, and it looked like he was a wedding photographer, and I was ready to move along, but I decided to read a couple of posts. Well, I have been back many many times to read and reread his posts. He has so many¬† interesting things to say about portraits, lighting, gear, and the business of photography, that there is something there for everyone whether or not they ever shoot a wedding.

It looks like his digital wake up tour will have a ton of useful information.  What might you learn? This is from the tour site:

  • 32 ways to use your on and off-camera flashes for creative and dramatic effects.
  • 10 of the best camera settings and lens choices for creating striking images on every job.
  • 7 ways to use the new DSLR video capabilities to transform your product offerings.
  • 10 “Magic Bullet” techniques to make your digital workflow nearly effortless, highly efficient, and fun with today’s top software from Adobe Lightroom, NIK, and LumaPix: FotoFusion.
  • 20 new product and marketing ideas targeted to today’s customers¬†which will¬†add substantially to your bottom line.

Your still on the fence? How about all of this stuff you will get :

  • Tour Handbook including: program notes, photography, marketing and more
  • 2 Hour DVD with extended program content
  • $100 Rebate from American Color Imaging
  • 1 year membership to WPPI and Rangefinder magazine, a $99 value
  • FREE 3 month membership to DigitalProTalkPlus.com, a $45 value
  • FREE 3 month subscription to PPA Magazine, a $15 value
  • FREE PPA Indemnification (no-fault) insurance for all new PPA menbers, a $50 value
  • Over $2,500 in door prizes awarded each evening
  • And a chance to win 1 of 4 Grand Prizes worth over $5,000

David is bringing the event to 58 cities across the US, including the Minneapolis event September 16. I’ll be there. If you don’t win the contest, David has given me a discount code that you can use to get $20 off the event. Enter code:¬† ZCWDWC09 ( last digits are zero nine) on the registration page, and you will receive a $20 discount. Price will be only $59 after the discount.

Want to enter the contest and go free? Ok, the contest will be me arbitrarily picking the most dramatic portrait from the photo’s submitted to the Cyberward flickr group.

  1. First get a flickr account. They are free.
  2. Upload your pictures to flickr.
  3. Join the Cyberward flickr group
  4. Add the¬† tag “dwc09” to the photo’s
  5. Limit the photo’s you enter in the contest to 3 please.

The contest will run until April 11 at @ midnight (Saturday). I will choose on Sunday, and email the winner and post the winning picture on April 13 (Monday)

Good luck, and see you in September at DWC09!

Update:moved the contest end back into April (again) and added the registration code

Studio Pictures of Lorenzo

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Lorenzo1

I finally got the pictures of Lorenzo “developed”. This was a difficult shoot. He was not in the best of moods. He was tired, and bored most of the time. Very squirmy. I didn’t get any of the pictures of the family to turn out. They were never looking toward the camera at the same time. A couple of the shots of Lorenzo turned out.

We had a 1 to 1 lighting ratio set up. Two strobes at 45 deg from the subject in softboxes. There was a light on the background too. I don’t think we had the background light centered well, and with Lorenzo moving around, the light was often in my pictures. I found getting good pictures of him difficult.

Loading Java Resources Correctly

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I am currently creating a continuation of the java series on useing reflection. In one of the examples I was trying to read from a properties file. I completely forgot how to find the resource I was looking for. I found this article on Java World. It’s from 2003, but still relevent.

To start with. The myFile.properties file is in the same package as the class MyClass.

These were my attempts:

// 1. Just get a FileInputStream
InputStream aStream = new FileInputStream("myFile.properties");

// 2. Switched to getResourceAsStream
InputStream aStream = MyClass.class.getClassLoader().getResourceAsStream("my/package/myProps.properties");

// 3. Settled on 
InputStream aStream = MyClass.class.getResourceAsStream("myProps.properties");

So, the first attempt was me completely forgetting how to do things. The only way that works is if you are putting in an absolute path from the file system. Never a good idea.

The second one, using the ClassLoader went astray because I forgot to include the “/” at the beginning.

The third times a charm. If you get the resource right from the class, you can also use relative pathing, and I got to drop the path.

That works much better.

Trumpter Swan Pictures

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I finally got my swan pictures processed from Monticello a couple of weeks ago. I couldn’t get any of the heart shapes, when you have two of them facing each other and their necks make a heart. Part of the problem was there were too many swans. You couldn’t get a pair isolated. They would never get perpendicular to the lens either. Oh well, here are a few. More on flickr.

Pay attention to me 

Swan Couple 

DSC_5388 

Leave me alone

Intro to Java Interfaces

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This entry is part 4 of 13 in the series Intro to Java

Interfaces are a very important part of Java. They can also be quite confusing. In this lesson, we want to take a look at Interfaces, what they are, their relationship to classes, and how and why we use them.

Sun Trails

Index: http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/index.html

Link into Object Oriented Programming Concepts Trail: (interfaces) http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/java/concepts/interface.html

What is an Interface?

I think of an interface as like a contract. If you want to fulfill a contract, you have certain obligations to fulfill. The same for a Java contract (interface). An interface defines a set of obligations that an implementing class needs to provide. The obligations are nothing more than method signatures. No code, just the signatures. The class that implements the interface provides the code.

The other thing an interface does, is it allows different classes to appear similar, at least in so far as they implement the interface. As you will see, a Bird, a Fish, and a Mammal are not the same, but if they all implement the Animal interface, then we can treat them all like Animals.

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