02.11.08
Under the Sea
How I took this picture.
I plan to start posting some of my better work and detailing where and how I took the picture. Not exactly Mac stuff other than all the tools I use are on a Mac 
This is one of the underwater scenes from the newly redesigned submarine ride at Disneyland. It has been greatly improved and is alot of funEquipment List
• Nikon D80
• 18mm
• 1/160
• F6.3
• ISO 1250
Shooting this image was relatively simple with a few tricks. First,you need to crank up the ISO (film speed) unless you have a very fast lens which I did not, F3.5 was the best it could do. So I took the speed to 1200 ISO and manually set the aperture to F6.3. I wanted F8 but I lost a stop of shutter speed and the subs move at a pretty good clip. This was aperture priority so I let the camera decide on shutter speed but I did add 1/2 stop compensation to the exposure.
The real trick is that your autofocus will go nuts under water and trying to shoot through the port hole even with the lens pressed close to the glass (not touching, the subs shake). So it’s manual focus with a 2nd trick. Keep as wide of an angle as you can. The 18mm give me alot of room to miss the precise focus point and still get it sharp.
So the short version:
Fast ISO
Mid F stop
auto shutter
1/2 stop comp
very, very close to the glass port hole
manual focus
wide angle
As a follow up point. I shoot RAW for images like this that I know will need work. RAW gives me the ability to color correct and work out exposure adjustments better than an already baked setting in a JPEG file. If you can, shoot this type of image raw for max range of adjustments. If not, then shoot the highest quality JPEG or TIFF you can.
I did my post processing in both Lightroom and CS3 but CS3 by itself will do fine. The big trick is to run a levels adjustment layer for each channel (RGB) and this will get rid of the green color cast from the light being absorbed by the water. I also used a saturation layer to punch up the blues and other colors as they were a bit faded. Only some minimal sharpening was done.
02.02.08
Busy, busy, busy…
Yep, that pretty much explains my life for the past few months. It was interesting how more complicated a third child can make one’s life. And I thought two little ones made it tough. This is not a linear progression
I have been having alot of fun with my flashes and umbrellas of late and the wife is long suffering about having tripods, light stands and backdrops up in the front room 24×7 lately. To be sure, we have gotten some very nice portraits of the girls when I can pin them down for a few moments in time.
This portrait was taken with my D80 and I used two SB800 flashes shooting into two white umbrellas. The back drop is a piece of black fleece hanging from my cheap but useful background holder I bought from B&H. I did my post processing in Lightroom and CS3. ISO was 200 at F8 and about 40mm.
I have been gathering ideas and details on how to actually get paid for photography in some manner. I joined the PPA a few months back and it’s only been now that I have been able to really see what I joined. Equipment insurance for cheap, liability insurance for cheap and nice legal forms are all part of the package. The insurance alone makes me alot more comfortable in thinking about shooting weddings which up to now I have been avoiding like the plague. I did get a few new books, one of which is by Glen Johnson called “Digital Wedding Photography – Capturing beautiful Memories”. Alot of good information and ideas and pictures. I really like this book for starting to learn about getting the wedding pictures right.
New websites are slideshowPro for Lightroom. Make a very cool flash presentation for your website with this app. Photocamel (what a name) has a very active forum and some way cool interviews posted. Another cool site is a site dedicated to shooting real estate pictures like interiors and exteriors for listings etc. The owner of the site is very active and shares his knowledge with the photography community readily. He has an eBook for 15 bucks that is worth every penny if you ever thought about taking pictures of homes professionally or even just really nice shots for yourself.
Speaking of Lightroom, I added an extra gig of ram to my iMac (3 total) and Lightroom really works well now Go figure, like anything else, the more RAM the better I suppose. My reinstall of OSX after three upgrades and migrations worked very well in clearing away the weird problems I was having with the Lightroom export and DRM. Also with Lightroom, I have fallen in love with the print module. This is what CS3 should have but doesnt. I bought a new (read as refurbed) HP A616 5×7 printer for 40 bucks which included a real ink cartridge. I also bought the bluetooth adapter and now from Lightroom I can rip out 4×6 cards with my logo and the image really easy.
02.17.08
Services and Apps
Posted in Commentary, OSX Technical at 9:08 am by hackamac
For the past few months I have been using a new (to me) DNS service called “OpenDNS” which gives me the ability to block and manage some stuff that I dont want the family to stumble over by mistake now that my small ones are surfing on their own a bit. The service is a freebie and gives nice stats and a good way to break out unwanted sites. For example, you can filter on adult sites, or just bikini sites or offensive sites because they divide the content into small parts of an overall group. If you want to see the bikinis but not offensive(horror, shocking etc) sites, you can do that. You can also customize the splash page saying it’s been blocked and they actively court businesses that would like to do this type of blocking without yet another appliance in the racks to learn.
In this same thought, I had my Time Warner cable go belly up for two days. Lost data and VoIP but kept the video so I knew it was a data problem. I have business class service here from TW which gives me a way to by pass the idiots on first tier with their scripts. Not that it did much good, something major had failed and there was not any ETA to when it would be back.
A few months ago I had bough AT/T DSL for both backing up data online and to backup my day to day usage. So I rolled over to the DSL full time without too much pain. It works well enough but I soon found out that they are blocking port 25 outbound. So no mail to speak of. But I did find out that Dot Mac listens to port 587 for SMPT per spec and sure enough, that port was NOT blocked. “You’ve got mail” !!
My DNS was tied to my static IP but I changed it to DHCP and enabled a service called “DNS-O-Matic” and installed an Applescipt called “DNS-O-Matic” updater which talks to OpenDNS and sends them the latest IP address. I decided to keep this in place even though I have a static since I may be rolling back to DSL in the near future since it’s a 6meg download stream vs the 2 meg on cable.
(For Windows users reading this, I know you are there.. go to another service I use call DynDNS for a windows client)
So I was back in business for Saturday with only a minor amount of pain and a few “to do” things to cut even that down in the near future.
I spent bit of time yesterday at a site for templates for making web galleries in Lightroom. This is not a trival undertaking and these4 guys have done a nice at Lightroomgalleries.com. I am using one of their galleries for showing some pictures on my site and because it offers a paypal integration. The downside is their documentation just plain sucks.
I spent the better part of 3 hours working out how to use the template correctly and their website did not offer much in help. In fact, there were several calls for better (some?) documentation. In a few days, I think I will post some details here but not today. I will also post a link once I get my galleries up and running with the correct pictures in place instead of test images.
I installed and tried the new Aperture 2.0 from Apple. Major improvement overall. It’s faster, easier to use and overall just a nicer feel to it. But the printing sucks compared to Lightroom and I personally find the menus easier on Lightroom. But I might just use Aperture in conjunction with Lightroom because of the books that you can make from within Aperture. They look to be more professional then iPhoto but I need to really look closer later.
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