I went to Centenial Lakes to try some night shooting. I got there a little later than I wanted, so I don’t have many with that deep blue sky you can get, but some of them turned out pretty good.
I saw this picture on flickr, and was looking to take the same image, but I couldn’t find the location exacly. Hmmm. Anyway, I think some of mine worked out.
I have used WHCC to print things for awhile. I have a friend that used them to print standout’s and other large prints, but I had only used them for 8×10’s primarily. So, I decided to go a little crazy. I had several pictures of flowers printed to fit in 10×10, 4.5×4.5, and 5×7 frames. (Weird Ikea sizing) We picked the ones we liked together and put up a collection in the livingroom. They came back great.
Next I had a picture of a window printed in a 16×20 poster on standout. It came back awesome. (outer border not on print)
Then I also had a picture of the girls printed as a 11×14 gallery wrap. Yeesh, those are expensive. It is canvas stretched over a frame, with the image wrapping around the frame. Wow, does that look cool.
All in all, I am impressed with White House Custom Color. The prints, standout and gallery wrap all came back very well done. They are packed impeccably, and upload to receiving is ridiculously fast. They usually fulfill the order the day you submit. One of my orders was even shipped that same day. Nice.
The gold standard for noise reduction in images is Noise Ninja. Aperture’s noise reduction tools are not the greatest, so it is pretty exciting to learn that Picture Code has released an Aperture Plug-in. Just one more thing to add to my list to buy. They have profiles for individual camera’s that enables the plug-in to get great results without a lot of user input after selecting a profile. Check out the before/after page, the images taken with a D70 (I have a D40) are very good. It would enable me to feel better about shooting at 1600 ISO inside.
Minneapolis has a leader for the World Photo walk day. Hurry if you want to join up. There are 50 people allowed per walk. I just did so myself. There are a ton of cities now. Should be a good time.
I have been reading The Moment it Clicks by Joe McNally. This is one great book. This book is a little different than others. Every two page spread is a story about a picture, and the picture. There are some great pictures, and an amazing amount of stories. Some have critized the book for not giving the exact focal length, F-stop, shutter speed, and all the other setting you would need to recreate the image, but that is not the point. Each story/picture has a point. It may simply be “don’t leave a window dark”, or “shoot now, don’t try to shoot tomorrow” wrapped into an amazing story. There are a few, I shot with this or that F-stop, but it is the context of the story that you need to get.
This guy is into light. Lots of strobes and small flashes going off. I have heard bloggers joke about wanting Joe’s lighting bag, and now I know why. Almost every picture involved placing flashes in several places around the image. I don’t see running out to buy 4-6 SB-800‘s anytime soon.
I am getting tired of my linux based setup. It just doesn’t work well enough. The biggest issue I have is that everytime it gets powered down (vacation, storm, etc) and comes back up, it doesn’t quite. I always have to execute some command line magic to get everything recognised. I have tried Gentoo, Ubuntu, Mythbuntu, all with the same issue. I think it is the add in SATA card I have in there, but I don’t want to swap out more computer hardware this time.
Delicious 2, an update to the del.icio.us web site is now out. They are now just delicious.com thank you very much. Delicious is a web site that allows you to store bookmarks out in the cloud (apparently our new word for server) so you and anyone else (if you want them public) can access your bookmarks.
I decided to enter this yummy new world, and uploaded my list of bookmarks. Fast. Looks neat. I have been using the foxmarks plugin for firefox to store and sync my bookmarks, so I am not sure how much I will use this. I haven’t used social sites very much in the past, but who knows.
WordPress has released the 2.6 version a little while ago. Everything appears to be working fine here, so I haven’t felt the need to jump on the new release. I always worry a bit about a new version, but Ars Technica is saying that the new version is being downloaded at record numbers, with very few problems. I guess I should upgrade. I have made some changes, but I believe I was smart enough to only modify a theme.
Photo walks are kinda fun. I have only been on one, with the Twin Cities group from flickr, on a night walk. It was nice to hang out with other photographers and see what they were taking pictures of.
I see that Scott Kelby is organizing a Worldwide Photo Walk. That would be fun. Currently there is no one from the Twin Cities that is leading one. Too bad. Maybe someone will sign up to lead one before Aug 23, the date of the walk.