A good way to learn something is to to hear multiple people give their views. Recently both David Hobby (the Strobist) and Zack Arias (Mr. OneLight) have written posts on the use of umbrellas with off camera lights.
Tag Archive for 'photography'
Long time readers will know that my girls embarked on a series of videos starring their guinea pig, Chatterboy. Julie facilitated this by getting the girls a blog for Guinea Pig TV. For a variety of reasons, Guinea Pig TV has been on hiatus, until a few days ago when the crew put up a new episode, inspired by the Seattle Flickrites’ escapades with Chase Jarvis.
A little more than a year ago, I gave myself a birthday present and took Zack Arias’ OneLight workshop when it was here in Seattle. I had been reading David Hobby’s Strobist blog for some time, but there was something about the time that I spent at the OneLight that brought it all together for me. If I know anything about lighting at all it’s in large part because of David and Zack. Zack has been working on rebranding himself, and has just launched a new blog. I’ve already subscribed, and if you’re interested in lighting, you should too.
David Goodger asked if I would take some photographs for the conference while I was at PyCon, to which I happily agreed. So fair warning that if you come near my camera, you may end up in my Flickr stream.
Update: PyCon pictures will be tagged “pycon2008″
I haven’t been taking as many photographs as I would like recently. One thing I have managed to find some time for is some new photography books. Several of the photography blogs that I read have been talking up Joe McNally’s book “The Moment It Clicks”. McNally is a very accomplished magazine photographer, and the book is an accumulation of his experience in 30 years of shooting. There are over 100 little section in the book. Each section begins with a short quote/quip, and is accompanied by a full page photograph along with a full page explanation of the lesson, and often times an explanation of exemplar photograph.
Several other reviewers, including David Hobby, reported getting the book and then staying up way too late reading it cover to cover. I was sorely tempted to, but there was just too much information to do that. There’s an enormous amount of content and when I finished I was grateful for all the experience that I had just run by my eyeballs and brain. This is a book for working shooters, and if you don’t put the stuff to work, you won’t really get the value out of the book. The challenge for me, and I suspect many others, will be translating these short pithy lessons into a part of our regular photographic practice. Since we’re reading a condensation of 30 years of Joe McNally’s life, there’s no telling how long that will take. But at least now we have something that we can turn to periodically to remind us.
Even better, McNally has started a blog that picks up where the book left off.
Blog: subscribed. Book: highly recommended.
I’ve been using Photophlow a fair amount over the last few days - It’s been pretty fun, although the real value will come if we manage to use it for shoot planning or review, which hasn’t happened yet.
One thing that I’ve noticed is that having Photophlow open in a browser while I’ve got other webapps running tends to make the overall experience a bit less nicer. So taking a page from Travis Vachon, I created a Prism (Webrunner) application for Photophlow. This lets you run Photophlow as a standalone application, in a container which is essentially a custom version of Firefox. You can get the webapp here. You will also need a copy of Prism to make this work.Last night, Scoble mentioned Photophlow on Twitter. I went over to see the site and then begged and pleaded for an invite - and got it. Photophlow is kind of like an IRC customized for dealing with Flickr photos. There is a global chat room, each user has his or her own chat room, and there is a chat room for every Flickr group. Within a chatroom, people can search Flickr photos and the room can follow along to see what they are searching. You can select photo out of the search, which will be transmitted to the room. There are some other features, like turning off the following of other people’s searches and turning off people’s ability to see what you searched for.
The Photo 2.0 angle
People like David Hobby and Chase Jarvis have been talking about (and living out) “Photography 2.0″, where there is massive sharing of photographs and photographic information. One of the things that I’ve often wished for is the ability to talk (in real time) to someone to get/do a critique of a photo. I think that this is something that happens best in real time. You could do that via IM and hyperlinks. You might even be able to do that via IM group chats, if all the people in the critique were using the same IM system. (It’s 2008, IM vendors). The value that I see in Photophlow is having a realtime way of talking about photos in a group. It would be even better if there was a way to annotate the photo being broadcast at the moment, so that you could focus attention on particular parts of a photograph. We’ve been doing some interesting group photo stuff here in Seattle lately, and I definitely think that Photophlow is something that could really help with some of the things we have done, as well as some of the things we are thinking of doing. Besides annotation tools, I would also like an easy way to log/archive a whole chat session or parts of a chat session.
The Web 2.0 angle
Photophlow is technically interesting for a number of reasons. It’s an app that’s built entirely on top of another web applications’ API. And it’s pretty substantial. There’s a lot going on here - a lot of AJAX, and API calls to Flickr. The app feels kind of pokey because it’s pushing the limits of what can be done in Javascript. Indeed, if I run Photophlow in Safari 3 instead of Firefox, the performance is noticeably better. This is a situation that we also see in Chandler Server. It’s going to be interesting to see how well this is able to scale up.
Photophlow is also pushing the limits of how some people think of using a web application. It’s designed to be used a lot and in a highly interactive fashion. I know that I would probably keep chat rooms for my personal group, the Seattle Flickr Meetups group, and the Strobist group open all at once if I could. The designers have also built in bridges to IM notification and to allow you to Twitter from within Photophlow. Too bad their isn’t a way to get a Twitter stream instead of an IM notification - but that’s more a limitation of Twitter than of Photophlow.
I bet that you could do some of what Photophlow does with a custom IRC bot. But I also bet that it would be substantially less accessible to people who are photographers first and computer users second (or third, or what have you). Then again, maybe here’s another opportunity for VOIP…
If you haven’t gotten into the beta yet, there’s a short tutorial video.
Technorati Tags: photography, photophlow, flickr
Here’s a round up of the highlights of my photographic year.
January
A trip to San Francisco gave me the chance to hang out with the San Francisco Flickr group - one of my favorite things to do in San Francisco - that is when the stars align.
February
I was the official photographer for Bainbridge Island’s second annual Chinese New Year Festival. I got the gig because my pictures of the previous year’s event showed up in the top 5 results for the search “Bainbridge Island chinese new year”.
March
A trip to the Seattle Aquarium:
April
I attended Zack Arias’ amazing One Light Workshop. Shortly thereafter I bought some PocketWizards and started my journey to the lit side.
May
June
July
The Kitsap Sun bought this picture and ran it in the Bainbridge Islander (the local local paper).
August
I attended my first Seattle Flickr Strobist event, and finally connected with some local camera nuts.
Also in August I got to meet David Hobby in person at the Seattle Strobist Seminar.
I confirmed my status a a photography nut by staying up to photograph the lunar eclipse:
September
I finally got around to making some Strobist style grid spots
Which I promptly put to use during my first studio shoot with the Seattle Flickr Strobists.
I also did a Strobist architectural shoot:
October
I practiced my lighting and people shooting skills
November
I framed my first picture in order to display it in the November Seattle Flickrites photo show
I also covered ApacheCon, as I have in previous years.
This year I also put my new skills to use by shooting a bunch of headshots for ASF folks. Average time per person: 5 minutes
December
Another Seattle Flickr Strobist shoot (including video) gets featured on Strobist.com.
It’s been a great year of learning and improving. Thanks to all the people (and there are a lot) who have helped me out along the way!
There have been a few photo related blog posts and twitter conversations that I wanted to comment on.
First, buying digital SLR’s. Tim Bray commented on Dave Sifry’s Beginners Digital SLR buying guide, and ranted on the insanity of buying a camera based on the number of megapixels, which is a very common metric. Buying a digital SLR is a sizable task — I wrote about it last year. I didn’t recommend specific cameras, but I did try to point out a bunch of things that I wish someone had told me, in addition to the initial purchase of the camera. One thing that I would note is that there’s a lot more to taking photos than just the camera. Technology people tend to get obsessed with the specifications and features of the gear, but the most important piece of photographic equipment is between your ears. People think that having a good camera will automatically result in good pictures, but that just doesn’t make any sense. It’s like saying the buying really good paintbrushes will make one a painter, or that buying really good pots and pans will make one a chef. There’s nothing wrong with wanting a nicer/newer camera, just be aware that you aren’t going to turn into Ansel Adams when it arrives.
Second, post processing software. This one is a result of a late night Twitter storm between Stephen O’Grady, Tim Bray, and to a lesser extent, me. Steven wanted to know about choosing between iPhoto, Adobe Lightroom, and Apple’s Aperture. People on a Macintosh probably have iPhoto lying around, and it is decently competent for people are not photography enthusiasts. The cost of trying it is pretty minimal, since it is bundled with Mac OS X, although if you have an older Mac and haven’t upgraded iLife recently, it’s probably worth it to do that after giving it a try. iPhoto leverages OS X’s system wide RAW conversion, so it can even handle RAW files from DSLR’s and high end point and shoots.
That leaves Lightroom and Aperture. I was an early fan and adopter of Aperture, and I was pretty happy with it until recently. Since October, I’ve stopped running Lightroom and Aperture side by side and am only using Lightroom. I’ve now had a chance to really work with the Photoshop integration, which works decently well - I wish there was a way to go back and re-edit a Photoshopped version instead of Lightroom creating another copy, but you can work around this by opening the Photoshopped version with Photoshop directly — Lightroom correctly updates once you save the file. The Lightroom API’s have started to show, although not as quickly as I thought they would. Right now you can mostly get export plugins, which means there is now a way to publish to Flickr directly with Lightroom, although none of the plugins (or Flickr’s on Uploadr 3.0) is anywhere near a match for Frasier Speirs’ FlickrExport, which doesn’t have a Lightroom version.
More importantly, I’ve really lost a lot of faith in Apple in terms of the future of Aperture. I thought for sure that there would be an Aperture 2.0 when Leopard was released. We might still see it at MacWorld or PMA in late January, but it doesn’t build my confidence that Aperture is an important product. When I got Lightroom, on the other hand, it was at version 1.1 and is now up to version 1.3.1. Adobe was very public about Lightroom/Leopard issues, and has been relatively quick to address them. Apple, on the other hand, is following its usual tight lipped policy. Both of these programs are first versions, and each needs additional development. Apple is leaving me with a reasonable amount of doubt as to whether they are really committed to Aperture.
The Seattle amateur photography scene is exploding. Here’s some video that shows what we’ve been up to recently.
My favorite picture from the event:
Maybe now David Hobby will move to Seattle…
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