Share the love, take some time to pat someone on the back today.

Go into flickr and look through the last few pages of your contacts’ images. Favorite a few or just leave a comment on an image or two. Do you know that flickr allows testimonials? Write one for someone you think has really great work! Reach out to someone who is on your contact list that hasn’t posted in awhile and tell them that you miss seeing their work. E-Mail an old friend that you haven’t heard from in awhile. Do you have a few favorite websites you like to visit? Send them an e-mail thanking them for being there. Next time you receive great customer service, ask to speak with the rep’s manager and tell the manager how pleasant it was to talk with the representative.

This is *NOT* an attempt to drum up anything for myself, so use that energy and spread the love into the world instead. It’ll make someone feel awesome.

And no ones gonna save you from the beast about strike
You know its friday, friday links
Youre fighting for your life inside a killer, friday links tonight

1. Top Ten Tips for Getting Attention on Flickr - Thomas Hawk has some great information on his weblog about how to get those counters racking up the views on Flickr. Great information here and really only helps you in the long run. It seems that Flickr likes well organized photos. Tags, Groups and Geotags - just the same things that will help you remember where that image was taken ten years from now. Help Flickr help you and read this great article now! Link: http://thomashawk.com - Via: PhotographyVoter.com

2. Crazy new flickr group - Pants Pocket. Shoot a photo of the inside of your pocket with the camera in your pants pocket. So far everything is dark and out of focus, but I’m sure this new photo craze will fuel new super macro / no light technology. Link: http://www.flickr.com/groups/pantspocket/

3. The Strobist Weblog posted an article on a WizWow video showcasing the ol’ rope trick. No, not the one where you take two cut pieces of rope and magically meld them back together - I’m talking about taking a piece of rope and attaching one end to your light stand. Now you mark on the rope f/16, 11, 8, 5.6, 4 and so on.. Why you ask? Because not only can you use the rope to know what your aperture needs to be set at, sooner or later you LEARN your light. You will KNOW that your strobe, or even hot lights will be f/8 at six feet. You’ll at least get in the ballpark and then can compensate in camera without breaking out your meter. So, watch and enjoy. The Ol’ Rope Trick + funkalicious hawaiian shirt, revamped for the 21st century. Link: http://strobist.blogspot.com/2008/08/strobe-on-rope-episode-three.html

4. I need to stop reading Tony Sweet’s weblog and seeing him in person. It’s all his fault that I ordered the complete line of Lensbaby accessories last year and now he’s showing off Infrared. I’ve got a 10D I would love to send away for IR conversion. Must. Fight. Urge. Link: http://web.mac.com/tonysweetphoto

5. Darn you Brianshaler for getting me addicted to the Blockies game at the www.iminlikewithyou.com website. Its like multiplayer tetris and you can get powerups to help your game board or mess up others’ game boards. Website contains ‘colorful’ language, may not be safe for kids (which is silly since sans some of the language this would be a great kid hangout). Link: http://www.iminlikewithyou.com

Its been a long time since my last posting, too long. Work life has taken quite the turn for the better, I’d rather be busy than twiddling my thumbs but the avalanche of busy-work has been overwhelming over the last many weeks.

In addition to a major number of moves at our home office location, we’re also gearing up to take two already mammoth sized warehouses and making them one. A cuh-old one of about 600,000 square feet. Fun!

I had told myself ‘No Weddings’. Well, that didn’t stick for long as I was talked into video taping a wedding at the end of May. I brought my still camera with me to get images for use on the DVD, making sure not to step on the official photographers’ toes. Thankfully I shot a little more than I should have, according to the bride and groom some very important shots of grandparents were never offered from the photographers (lost images? bad exposures?) and I happened to have some shots here and there for them. And with that, I was talked into another wedding in October - main shooter - but more as a favor to a friend. So, who knows, come November and a wedding and a half later maybe I’ll put in my mouth guard and offer to be abused by brides.

Over the past few weeks I’ve shot at the DC/NOVA/MD Strobist picnic and had my thirst for teaching photography quenched just a little more. I shot about two dozen shots that day but had more fun setting up lights and dishing out information as long as I had brains to soak it up. Those who can’t do - teach? I don’t think that’s always the case. In photography I feel that as I speed away from the basics into advanced territory I lose some of my fundamentals. Teaching brings me back to using good habits I learned to trust when I was still new to the art.

Two weekends ago I was asked by a friend to accompany her on a client shoot. It’s always a lot of fun to work with miserable ‘real world’ situations and this was the worst situation possible. Bright, HOT, Noon-time sun. Fast athletes and the best we could do was match ambient light or maybe a stop or two above ambient. The athletes were outrunning the strobes and we had to have them ‘fake it’ a bit. Two shooters and one set of strobes. Remind me to buy the parts needed to make more batteries for my strobes because the sun was so bright the best I could do was three heads at 1/4 power to beat the sun. No diffusion. Add two shooters to the mix and every other shot was dark due to both shooters shooting at peak action and no time for a recharge in a fraction of a second. Later in the day I added a 5×7′ light panel (Botero) to the strobes to help fill in some of the shadows.

Fast forward to this week, pulled a muscle in my chest and have been out of commission. I drove home on Friday with high hopes of getting my website re-vamped, a new theme I have been looking at for my weblog and start learning Lightroom 2.0. Nah, I did play with Premiere Pro a bit though and ran some 24 fps video through the PC and liked what I saw. Replaced a car battery, front brakes and rotors, watched a beautiful weekend from the air conditioned sidelines. “Missed” a few muscle relaxers in the name of beer. Mmmmm Beer.

This week should be the end of the hectic schedule at least for another week or two. I’ll be at our local beach resort destination for a well deserved vacation in a few weeks and as crazy as it sounds, I’m thinking of contacting some models for some shoots. What in the world am I thinking?

One last comment. I can’t say enough great things about Canon service (specifically the New Jersey location). I broke my Canon HV30 Camcorder. Plain and simple and it wasn’t under warranty because of the damage. Long story short, a new main PCB and LCD Ribbon Cable and I am back in business for under $200. Canon replaced a shutter in my main body about ten months ago, a WEEK before I was leaving to go photograph the Grand Canyon. That was when I had one body, now I have three. Have I mentioned that having a second body is worth it? Either way, back then I begged Canon to rush my camera and had it in time for my trip, I told them to take their time on the Camcorder and it was back to me in about a week. How’s that for service?

In this installment of About The Shot we’re going to touch on Flash and Ambient light. This is David, he is frozen in time and lit by studio strobes but everything else is blurred. How can that be?

Here’s the thing. Flash units are fast. Your camera syncs with them very slow. So what you know of as your fastest sync speed (1/125 or 1/250) is nothing compared to what the flash can do. But why are we stuck with a sync speed? That’s a whole new post in itself. But a quick description is your sync speed is the fastest shutter speed in which the whole sensor or film plane is exposed at one time. Your camera fakes much faster shutter speeds by opening one side of the shutter curtain and then shortly thereafter starts closing the other side. The whole sensor is never exposed and the flash is so quick that part of your image is bright and the other part is dark. Make sense?

So, we think our sync speed is 1/250 and we set up the shot, flash goes off and we have a nice exposure. What if the ambient lights are dim? What is keeping us from shooting at 1/125, 1/60, 1/30? Absolutely nothing. Remember that those shutter speeds are slower than your sync speed so the sensor or film is exposed whole.

Okay, WHY would we want to expose at say 1/60. Its all about ambient light. If you shoot at a slow speed you expose the frame to a quick flash and then guess what? The shutter stays open to soak in ambient light! Depending on your shutter speed you can take an otherwise dark scene in which your subject is perfectly lit and give your background time to come up in brightness.

Great, that’s a wonderful technique, but what if you add other elements? Lets say a rotate or a zoom. See above. Now to tie it all together in the point I wanted to make. The rotate or zooming technique depends on light and blur. When the flash unit bursts lets say it bursts at 1/10,000 of a second. I don’t know about you, but I am not fast enough to make a 1/10,000 of a second exposure blur. Now what happens? The portions of the image that the flash froze are rock solid. Ambient light is blurred.

What are the pitfalls in ambient light? Well, if you have a dark area of your subject you run the risk of ambient light polluting that darkness, but only if the ambient light is as bright or brighter as the place where they converge. If I had zoomed this image with lets say the bike as my center point, the ambient light would all converge into the center and right across his shirt and face. Bad image.

Well? Have you? I know, I sound like a broken record. But I’ll get you to backup religiously one day. If you save one photograph from my nagging I’ll be happy.

As for me, I’m glad I backed up Sunday night because I had a drive die in my Hyperdrive on Wednesday. I did lose some images, but nothing I’m worried about. All the good shots and client data goes on multiple Hyperdrive units immediately. These lost shots were just tests with the new G9 and I didn’t copy the card to more than one Hyperdrive.

The Hyperdrive is back up, same chassis with a new drive is humming along just fine. Hard drives die, electronics go freaky, plan for the worst because when it does, you’ll give a big ol’ sigh of relief when you realize that even though that drive needs to be replaced, your images were safe.

Hard drive, CD, DVD, Tape - whatever, just make sure all of your eggs are not in one basket. Even one lonely extra copy on a different drive puts you way ahead of the game.

Still not convinced and have all of your images on one drive? Take this test:

Scenario: Your images from the last few years are in one location on a hard drive. The drive dies do you:

A. Scream, pull out your hair and then go take a walk into traffic.
B. Curl up in the fetal position and cry.
C. Send your dead drive to a drive recovery service and pay thousands for some, perhaps not all of the files back.
D. All of the above.

A little ol’ backup every now and then is worth averting any of the above options. Take this three day weekend to get a current backup!

Just when I thought it was safe to browse for Photography books Joe McNally hits us with his newest creation. “The Hot Shoe Diaries, Creative Applications of Small Flashes”. I already pre-ordered one, due out in December, what the heck. I am absolutely in love with his previous book ‘The Moment It Clicks‘ so this one may rank up there with that one. I quite rather enjoy putting small strobes in weird places and I hope this book fuels that fire.

I highly recommend checking out ‘The Moment It Clicks‘ and feel the new book will be just as awesome. Amazon is accepting Pre-Orders and if the price comes down before the book ships, you get the discount. Oh, and you don’t pay until it ships. I saved $5 on the last season of LOST DVD’s this way.

Keep an eye out on this one, I’m sure we’ll see lots of video tidbits regarding this book in the next few months.

Happy reading!

I don’t like to get my camera too wet. A few hundred thousand volts of lightning doesn’t tickle my fancy. Hail and Wind? Nah thanks. But damn, sometimes I risk it all for some lightning shots. A few weeks ago I was lucky. I have always heard photographic religious pondering about when its your time to take a shot, it will be presented to you. I believe this shot was ‘my time’.

Here I was, enjoying a calm Sunday afternoon and out of the blue the sky started getting dark and the wind started blowing. Ahhh great, yet another summer storm. We already had one the week before that took down a good 75-100′ tree. Literally picked it up, snapped it at the base and threw it 10′.

Lightning has got to be really spectacular for me to pick myself out of my chair (or hammock) and go in, grab my camera, tripod, cards, battery, lens and remote. Its just a pain. Towards the west was some really good lightning - so why not. Little do I know that I would have captured the image above.

I did get some good shots, nice clear bolts of cloud to ground strikes. I ventured further and further down the dock, taking shots along the way. If I were to get hit right now I hope once they pull the camera from my hands they can still recover an image or two. I made it to the end of the dock where a 25′ metal flagpole was the only thing taller than I was. I was exposing one shot when behind me I saw a strike right over the houses. It seems like the storm was now circling behind me. In one motion I turned around the tripod, composed my shot and started making exposures.

Lightning shots are best done at a stopped down aperture and at a few seconds shutter speed. A tripod is a must and a remote helps even more. I had the camera set at f/11 and 3.2 seconds. I stood there and hit my remote button.. Counted off three seconds. Shutter closed. Nothing hit. Again, three seconds. And again. On the fifth exposure there it was, a strike that made my heart skip a beat. I got it, I know I did. By then I came to my senses and realized that the wind was so strong I thought a quick burst could have knocked me over. I picked up the tripod, collapsed the legs and on the way up it started to rain, the wind whipping the drops in my face.

I get to the house and power was out. There goes actually seeing if I had gotten the shot. Well, I could tell what I had on the back of my camera, but how often have you seen something that looked great in camera that didn’t hold up on the screen? I patiently waited. Power was out for seven hours.

Since then, the photo has turned out to be a big hit in our neighborhood, online and amongst friends. Goes to show you - if you’re there and whatever religious figure decides to give you a show, you’ll capture it. This shot was pure luck. Besides knowing what to set the camera at and having the equipment to take the photo - this shot was 99.9% luck and I’m grateful for the opportunity to capture it.

Gonna rock it up, roll it up
Do it all, have a ball,
Friday Links,
Friday Links

I found this link to Yeondoo Jung’s shots on the Craftzine weblog: A gallery of photographs inspired by childrens’ drawings. Very creative stuff, this would be a fun project for parents to introduce their kids to photography. Or even just a creative exercise.

http://www.yeondoojung.com

Over at the first part of this article we talked about storage and redundancy. I have given up DVD storage and have moved to Hard Drive storage only. Continued…

Now, we have this killer plan in place, but we don’t want to copy everything all over again every time we want to update one of our redundant hard drives. We need a program that synchronizes the data and only copies the files that have been changed.

Enter Microsoft SyncToy which is at version 1.4 and they do have a Beta version 2.0. For my purposes 1.4 works flawlessly and is very fast. The software will allow you to specify a Source (Left) directory and a Destination (Right) directory and then let you choose how you want to sync them. I use ‘Contribute’ mode which will copy New and Updated files from Source to Destination. Any Source files I rename will be echoed to the Destination and no files are deleted. Since I always rename my images first the rename feature is useless to me. No deletions is really good for me because once I make my first Sync I don’t want anything touching those files - ever. And really, copying Updated files from left to right is also useless as when I touch a RAW file for the first time I save it back as a new file - always. Never overwrite your negatives.

Once you have everything set you can Run the script and everything will copy to your new drive. Beyond that, you use the Preview button which will look at both the Source and Destination drives and compare both, telling you if files have been added or changed. Be aware of Drive Letters because I am guessing this program is not smart enough to tell a Backup Drive set at F: and the next drive that might be set as G:. Designate all of your removable drives as your same designations.

SyncToy is the key here but really any File Synchronization utility will work. I have just found Microsoft’s offering to work the best. Remember, Synchronization is the key as copying your whole photography archive to USB and Network drives over and over will take forever. I just wiped a Network storage drive to reload and 250 gigs of images took over seven hours to copy. Ouch. With synchronization will only copy what is new/changed and save not only lots of time but wear and tear on the drives.

And there you have it, give SyncToy a try. You can download it here: http://www.microsoft.com. One day you’ll be glad you had redundant backups in place.