Busy Busy Busy

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I feel like I haven’t had time to get anything up on the blog for awhile. I have several things I am trying to get finished, so instead of telling you what I do have, I will tell you what I will have.

  • I will have part three of the Intro To Java series up soon. It is called “Revisiting Classes” and will get into class extension, as well as inner classes, and using composition.
  • I sure hope I will have part three on building a NAS up. I have the OS installed and I need to get RAID and LVM installed and document the process to put up here. I need my back-up back up!
  • I need to get some pictures up from the new lens. Maybe that will come from tonight. I have another class on Studio Lighting, and I will be taking the new lens to use.
  • I just got an iPhone, so I have lots to say about that, but little time to do so. Amazing how the next “new thing” makes you wonder how you ever lived without it.
  • I am working on a plugin for WordPress that will display the exif data of an image in user configurable ways. The first release will display the data captured by wordpress on upload and display in the title. Hopefully this will be out soon too.

Late Christmas Present

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I was completely floored this weekend. My father pulled out a BIG yellow box with the letters Nikon on the side.  What was inside the box, I would never have imagined my father to have picked up for me. I must have droned on for longer than I remember when we drove to Cleveland together last year about this lens. I have wanted this lens for the longest time, but it is quite a bit of jingle.

70-200

Nikkor AF-S 70-200mm f/2.8G ED-IF

The Nikkor 70-200 f/2.8 is a monster.¬†¬†Here is a dpreview. (that’s where the image is from) This is an amazing do everything lens. I am psyched to bring this to my studio lighting class. If I get to take more portraits and senior pictures this spring, this will be the lens on my camera.

It is not light, but it does let in a lot of light. It would require a few trips to the gym before you would want to carry this all day at a wedding. But, it is fast in every sense. I love the 2.8 aperture. I love how fast the AF-S ultrasonic motor focuses. I also love¬† that you get VR on top of that. I was shooting indoors at 2.8, and I still got sharp pictures handheld at 1/30. I couldn’t do that with my 17-50mm f/2.8 Tamron. I love VR.

Did I mention that this is sharp. I shot a picture of the door across the room at the hotel in Fargo. On the door was the usual drivel about the room cost, fire escapes, liability, etc. When I zoom in on that writting, it is very readable. It was only a postage stamp size on the picture, but I could still zoom in and read the words. Amazing.

Did I mention how happy I am to have this lens? Woo Hoo. Thanks Dad.

I will try to get some pictures up later from this lens.

Back from Fargo

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Back from Fargo with a bunch of pictures of the kids in the pool. We met some of the family from Winnipeg in the middle. Each of us had to drive about 4 hours. The Holiday Inn in Fargo has a water slide park called Ship Wreck Bay. I am sure I got some pretty good pictures of the kids having fun. The best ones are probably on the Stylus 790, a waterproof camera. I was great. We were in and out of the water all weekend, and it just lived in my pocket. I could pull it out whenever, and never needed to worry about it getting wrecked. It is a great camera to have to just take snaps of the kids.

Kate likes it too. I can give it to her, and she can wander around taking pictures without us worrying about her dropping it. Waterproof, shockproof. Awsome.

Anyway, hope to have some pictures later.

Studio Lighting Class

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The first evening in the studio when pretty well. It was good to get into a real studio with real lighting equipment, and get to use it. We had between 2-4 strobes in softboxes and grids going. This is the view from the back of the room.

35 of 365 (Studio Class)

The goal of this class was to look at how the use of the different lights would effect what the picture would look like. We had our model Maggie sitting on a stool. She had a couple of different wardrobe changes, and we used both a dark grey and a white background. These are the pictures from this shoot that worked out pretty well.

Maggie 1

Maggie 3

Maggie 4

New studio lighting class tonight

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TestI am psyched. Today is the second day of my studio lighting class. The class is going to be down at the instructor’s studio. He is bringing in live models, and we will be using his strobes. He has some radio triggers (pocket wizards I think) that he is planning to use. He will have the recievers set up on the lights, and just hand us the transmitter when it is our turn. I will have more about the evening later.

Whats for supper

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Annie and I made fried egg roll things for supper. They are Mexican egg rolls, or Chinese burritos or something. They are Mexican type fillings in a fried won ton wrapper. They turned out great. The kids even ate a version that just had rice, chicken and cheese.

32 of 365

This needs a bit bigger depth of field. I shot it hand held with available light, which is just the light above the table which wasn’t very bright. I should have got out the tripod and maybe my flash, but hey, the food was getting cold and I was hungry.

Very Cool Shoot and Post Tutorial

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Well, I just stumbled along this guest post on Scott Kelby’s blog. Ok, stumble is not the correct word as I usually stop by every day or two. This is from photographer Dustin Snipes, and a shoot he did of high school basketball stars.

This was just good timing, as I started the studio lighting class yesterday. It is great to see how others have set up their lights, and the effect on the pictures. Even better how he shows how he created the entire look, from the lights to the post processing. I like his use of the “high contrast” look. (Even better that he knows that this is not a look for every pictures.)

I learned a great photoshop tip from this post too. One way to “dodge and burn” is to create a new layer an fill it with 50% grey.¬†Then¬†set the blending mode to Softlight. Now, with a¬†brush opacity¬†of 5% and¬†hardness of¬†0%¬†, you can paint with either white or black. This will accent the highlights or darken the shadows just by switching the brush color on the same layer. Neat.

Studio Lighting Class

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Alien Bees B400I just got back from my first studio lighting class. It wasn’t too bad. We just went over equipment, so we didn’t get into any real detail. Next class is when the fun starts and we get to set up lights and shoot pictures of a model.

The class is through continuing education, with this class at Jefferson High in Uptown. The instructor is Gil Dignen, and he seems to be a great guy. I have signed up for the intro and the advanced course that follows it, so I have 9 weeks total I think.

A cool thing about the class is that we are going to go to his studio for the next 3 classes (at least), and he will be bringing in a real model that he works with. This should be a lot of fun.

Lameda Plugin

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Here is another plugin, Lameda, that uses the exif data that comes from the images as uploaded into WordPress. Lets take a picture:

Tulip in the Rain

Here is the exif data when you put this tag in your post: [lameda_exif id=556]

lameda

The thing with this, is you still have to go into the post html and find out what the wordpress id of the image is. Still a bit of a pain. I like that it is pulling this from wordpress. Looks like wordpress stores this in the post_metadata table in an entry about the image. Not all data is saved, just some of the more basic ones like those shown. We just need a more automated, and visually appealing way to show it.