Looking lonely: Sarah

Sarah and I did this shoot over the weekend. I wasn't really sure what my goal was going into it. I knew the idea I wanted to get across was loneliness, I knew they were going to be b&w, and I knew we were going to use a few smoking-related props... Other than that I made it up as we went along.

I think each of them gets the point across in its own way... though I am not sure which does it best.

All but the last photo was lit with a bare SB600.

Lesson learned: more light!

My friends Birgit and Gina decided they wanted to volunteer for a photoshoot.
I made cookies, we got together and decided to do our own version of a rather classic poster. Perhaps you have seen it at your local Spencer's store.

What we got looks nothing like it. Not in a unique and fun way, but in a way that tells me I needed to have a different lens on, a legit bed, a much taller room, and MUCH more light.

Such as they are, they don't suck so terribly I won't look at them... but they are not quite what I had hoped.

I lit the whole series with one SB600 flash pushed through a sheet, held up by the two armchairs in the living room. It was a huge light source... but it was very one-sided. Another light/sheet setup on the other side would have been perfect... maybe with some on-axis fill for good measure.

Two more shoots to come - both rather dark/morbid.

The ultimate showdown: a man against his mac

Regardless of your operating system, you've probably heard of the Blue Screen of Death.

I have had more than enough experience with the BSoD on Windows machines, from Win95 through Vista (though I have not played with Windows7 yet).

To my great surprise, my 3 year old Macbook Pro gave me a blue screen and rotating gear upon shutdown last week. I let it run for about 5 minutes before giving up and shutting it down hard by holding the power button.

It has been running poorly since then, not allowing me to use Spotlight, Finder crashing randomly, etc. It all culminated today when, whist running Aperture 3, it locked. Hardcore. No response.
I told it to shut down. After 10 minutes of thinking about it, the shutdown sequence started, which was immediately followed by the BSoD, where it remained for 15 minutes at which point I gave up and hard-rebooted again.

The problems with spotlight continued, as did shutdown time. I gave up and popped in my Snow Leopard install disc. It took about an hour to re-install the operating system, plus a solid 30 minutes for the reboot that should have taken 30 seconds tops.

Once the operating system had been installed, the machine rebooted itself. Shutdown time: 8 seconds. Much better.

I am currently backing up the 7.98gb of changes to Time Machine, at which point I will continue where I left off editing my photoshoot from this afternoon.

If all is well, I expect to load the three photoshoots from this weekend over the course of the next couple days... though originally I had hoped to get them all up today - it doesn't look like that is going to happen.

Have a great Monday!

iPad: one week

This is another fairly long post, all about the iPad, still from a college student's perspective. If you've had enough of the freaking iPad already, I won't be offended if you continue on with your life without reading this post. If you're curious - by all means read on!

If you haven't already read my first impressions, please do so!

I have now had the iPad for one week. For the last week I have carried it everywhere and taken any excuse to use it. Though I am used to people talking about me (I generally wear a kilt in public), I have heard many more people than usual whispering or mutter to one another as I pass by with my iPad... apparently everyone knows what it is but they are all too shy to come talk to me about it.

First and foremost - the Textbook issue: It appears that some of the e-book publishers are hoping to get on board and offer textbooks for the iPad. CourseSmart, a company that I already buy my electronic textbooks from, has an app for the iPhone and has one for the iPad in the works. Though I attempted to contact them to talk specifics about the new app, I got no response. IF they can get an app that works well and really offers me access to the books I buy from them, I expect my textbook issue would be 50% solved. CourseSmart only offers 10,000 textbooks, which might seem like a bunch but if the one specific book I am looking for is one they do not offer, the app becomes useless to me.

Outside of that, I have topics about general iPad use to discuss:

After using it constantly for the first weekend, I found that the iPad needed to recharge. My iPhone battery charges in two hours solid, so I admit I was hoping for a really quick charge time. Unfortunately, because the iPad has such a larger battery, it takes much longer to charge - about 4.5 hours from 20% to 100%. Additionally, it has to be plugged into a wall outlet to charge at that rate. Depending on the power of your USB port, it *might* be able to charge as long as it is asleep, though the charge rate is much slower.

Once I had it recharged, I loaded a few movies onto it and sat on my couch to enjoy The Dark Knight.

This is really where the glossy screen on the iPad made me want to throw it across the room. As long as there is any ambient light where you are trying to watch a movie, you get a lot of reflection. I spent half the time of the Dark Knight trying to convince my eyes to focus on the movie rather than my own reflection. Watching movies outside in the sun as I tried to do on one particularly nice day is impossible. I saw very little of the movie and a LOT of the grass, the sky, and the people wandering campus behind me. Overall, a fairly miserable experience with movies.

The direct sunlight was less of a problem when reading, though it definitely made it less enjoyable than with a real book. I found that I had to face a certain direction (into the sun) and that I had to remove my sunglasses to read. Doing so with a hat or cap is no big deal, but without one it gets fairly miserable.

I was able to finish The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes while getting my tan sunburn started and i'd give the overal reading experience an 8/10, because it performs wonderfully in low-light and almost acceptably in sunlight.

One of the things I hoped to do was to take the e-books I already have (nearly all of them are by David duChemin) and convert them from PDF to ePub. I downloaded Calibre, a free program for your real computer that converts a host of formats to the iPad-compatible ePub format. It works like a charm and I now have Mr. duChemin's photos and writing at my fingertips whenever I like, thought it does mess with the intended format - some landscape photos that ran full spreads are divided and put a few pages apart to make room for text.

A lot of people have been having issues with the iPad's wifi. I have been connected to my internet constantly at home and the only problem I have had is when the device suddenly decided I had the wrong password for my network. It prompts me to re-enter the password and then lets me right back onto the net. I expect Apple with have a fix out for this fairly soon.

One of the biggest things about the iPad is that it has a host of apps available. When i'm not doing anything I've taken to perusing the free section of the App Store and downloading apps that look good. One I very much enjoy is the NY Times Editors Choice app. It's free, and pays the NY times by showing you an add every once in a while. You get the option to "Skip this ad" and continue to the story, though I figure wasting another 15 seconds of my life to help out the NY Times can't hurt too much, so I watch the animated adds that Chase Bank has to offer me.

Here is a list of the FREE apps that I use:

PCalc Lite (because the iPad does NOT come with a calculator app built in)

Feeddler RSS

iBooks (duh)

Dictionary

GoSkyWatchP (I'm in an astronomy class this semester)

Planets

Twitterrific (doesn't allow for "old" retweet style)

Tweetdeck (doesn't allow clicking links in landscape)

The Weather Channel MAX+

Editors' Choice (NY Times)

Pandora (duh)

Netflix

Adobe Ideas

I've decided not to pay for any Apps until I know whether or not I'll be keeping the iPad. At this point, I'm about 50/50 on it. I plan to watch CourseSmart to see how their app works for reading textbooks, and of course I have to watch my bank account, as I significantly decreased my available funds when I decided to review this sucker.

On a closing note, I am now nearly proficient at typing on the iPad. I make much fewer mistakes than I did a week ago and I can comfortably sit and compose an email of pretty much any length without too much pain or gnashing of teeth.

I shall continue diligently using the iPad for all I can think of - attempting to find reasons to save it or sell it. I will know by the end of April whether I will be keeping or selling mine.

Competition

I shot this during a walk through Downtown Flagstaff the other day. The photos in the post have nothing to do with the topic of discussion...

It seems to me there are two major camps among photographers: Those who jealously guard their secrets, their clients and their time, sit in one camp. Across the river sit those who freely give away everything they know, who refer clients to other photographers, and who aren't afraid to sit down with young photographers looking to start their way into the world.

One of these camps has a future. The other does not.

It seems to me that in the current "tough economy" we are all so familiar with, a lot of people have been temporarily moving from one camp to the other. When asked about their reasoning, they cite tough competition as their primary motivation to defect. You know what? The competition really isn't that big.

IF you are looking to get any old picture from anyone who owns a camera, the competition is fierce. Everybody is a photographer these days. Everyone has a camera. 99% of the population is smart enough to look at a screen and press a button a few hundred times. Most people can download Picasa or even Photoshop and apply some generic actions to make some photos look decent. Because there are so many of these people out there, competition for this quality of work is insane.

IF, however, you are looking for quality photos from someone who really knows photography, the competition isn't that huge. Sure, there are gazillions of wedding photographers out there. But not all of those photographers have a style that appeals to me, and what appeals to me doesn't necessarily appeal to you.

Shot at sunset in the alleys downtown.

Lets take 100 photographers in the same industry - weddings. They all live in the same city, own the same expensive camera gear, and are all available to photograph your wedding. The only differences are the prices they charge and the portfolios they display.

You as a client need to first look at their style, and then the prices they charge.
If you don't like the style of photography they put in their portfolio, the bottom line is that you aren't going to hire them regardless of their price. If you find a few whose style you like, you'll chose either the cheapest, or the one that you think gives you the most VALUE.

The one thing every photographer has that is unique to them is their style. Their gear, website, techniques, client list, whatever. All of that comes down to nothing because photography isn't about all that. The end picture depends entirely upon the VISION that the photographer has.

So, why the hell would I as a photographer keep any secrets? There is no way you or anyone else can copy my style. If you buy the same gear I have, use the same software, even the same photoshop actions, my pictures are still going to be MY pictures! Clients will hire me because they like the way I SEE the world around me, because of how I interact with them while I'm shooting, because I'm professional and fun to work with at the same time.
As such, I am more than happy to share everything I know about photography. It's why the big name photogs out there are happy to do the same thing. Chase Jarvis gets a bazillion hits every day not necessarily from paying clients, but from photographers who want to see how he does things. The more people that know about you, the better off you are! Chase knows that so he attracts gazillions of people to his website, flickr, facebook, twitter, etc. Lots of people want to copy his style but they CAN'T!
David duChemin: same thing. Joe McNally: same.

These are some of the photographers who have "made it." And they made it big. You would think that these people would be the ones sitting alone on the other side of the river, guarding everything they know about photography. Instead, they give it out! They write books (to make a little $$$ on the side), they write blogs for free, do behind the scenes videos, show off their entire workflow sequence because they understand that the competition for high-level photography is minimal - nobody is going to steal their clients! Nobody two people have the same vision - so who cares if their technique is ripped off somebody else? If you aren't original, nobody is going to want your work.

When it all is said and done, if you know your photography and your business skills, the competition you face from other photographers is so INSIGNIFICANT compared to what you can teach them, and most importantly, what you can LEARN from them. If we can keep the doors of education open inside the industry, it gives all of us a chance to continue growing and learning (and making more money).

That's my rant for the day. What do you think? Comments are always appreciated - I love a good discussion!

One Light: Molly

I realize it has been a while since I posted last. I realize it has been even longer since I posted any real photography (though I do like my iPhone shot of the iPad and headphones).

To make up for that, at least in some small part, I give you Molly: an outstanding photographer and a great model, though she might not admit to the latter.

I was sleeping sitting in class when the wheels of cognition and creativity finally and very suddenly started turning again. Jess was rambling on about the business side of photography, which got a whole bunch of thoughts cranking through my head in a very short period of time. In my endeavor to write these thoughts down (on my phone, naturally) I noticed Molly sitting across from me with a super-awesome scarf-thing. I immediately hopped on Facebook so as to message her whilst sitting only feet away (in order to avoid disrupting class, of course). For some reason she agreed to be photographed and as soon as class ended, we headed out to the studio. 

I grabbed one Profoto head and one large diffuser, just to see the light quality vs. a traditional softbox.

The light is blasting into the diffuser from just below Molly's face height. The diffuser is large enough to light her "tip to tail," as Jess would say, and it did a great job with the light. The spill onto the background was a bit of a pain, but nothing that a quick flag/reflector couldn't handle.

In addition to the B&W shots above, I got some color versions that I am quite partial to.

Not a huge amount of post processing to these, at least as compared to what we do in the Advanced Digital Workflow class that I enjoy every Wednesday evening.

Contrast, black point, saturation adjustments. Then just a little blemish removal and skin softening. Add a vignette and some sharpening and you have a finished product.

It felt GREAT to finally get some photos, put on the headphones and work some photos for a few hours.

With any luck I'll have another shoot on Friday, another post about the iPad over the weekend, and something to say about the business and/or social media aspects of photography in the next week.

For now, have a great Thursday!

iPad for college students?

What follows is my perspective on the Apple iPad. I'm a sophomore in college at NAU and I'm looking at this device purely from a college student's perspective.

I caved yesterday morning and bought an iPad.

Writing this post (90%) on the iPad while listening to music

My original intention was to go to the campus bookstore so I could get my hands on one and to see which, if any, textbook publishers had signed on with apples iBooks program. My eventual goal is to use the iPad primarily as a textbook reader, though in order for that to be a viable option I need the various textbook publishers to get together with apple to provide iPad-compatible versions of their books. As it turns out, the staff af the bookstore didn't have a clue about what would be available and couldn't get into the iBooks store to check it out for me. My only option was to buy one and give it a test drive myself.

Looking through the iBooks store, it doesn't appear there are any textbooks available. Though there is a reference section, that's about as close as it gets for now. Much of the hype I have seen from the press proclaims the iPad as something geared very much towards college students. While it is definitely cool and easy to use, the current lack of textbook options, combined with the relatively high price (at least in terms of the percentage of a college student's budget) make it much less appealing.

I'm going to be using my iPad for pretty much everything I can think of for the next month while I try to figure out if it's really worth the $$$. For now, all I have are my first impressions:

First off, it is heavier than I expected. It feels very solidly put together (unlike some netbooks i have toyed with), which is a huge plus for me, as I tend to beat on everything I own. Holding it for long periods of time does tend to get difficult, especially because its so darn slippery. I've taken to putting it in my lap or between my knees whilst browsing or reading. A rubber case like the one I have for my iPhone would make this much easier.

The first thing I did was to open Safari and hit a few websites. NY times, CNN, Facebook. They look amazing on the iPad's monster screen and require very little of the zooming and panning that iPhone and iPod touch users are so familiar with.

In order to get to the websites mentioned above, I couldn't help but use the virtual keyboard. It is a surprisingly simple experience. The iPad autocorrects just like the iPhone to assist those users who aren't familiar with a keyboard that provides no tactical feedback. The iPad defaults to make a little click sound every time a key is pressed. I don't like that so I turned it off. I don't experience any real difference as long as I'm watching the screen to see what I'm typing.
I find that I need to be sitting down to type, which is just fine for me.

Overall, typing takes just a little adjustment from a physical keyboard. I am used to resting my fingers on the keys while I think about what to type next. That does not fly with the iPad, so I have to keep my fingers elevated. The keys are spaced fairly well in the portrait orientation, and while I do find myself hitting "delete" more often than usual, I am confident that with a few weeks of use I could eliminate many of my typing errors on the iPad.

While I'm cruising the web, I usually like to listen to music. Depending on how I have the device oriented, the built in speakers can get covered up by my hand or buried in my lap. The speakers are surprisingly loud, and though they predictably don't provide much base, they do get the point across fairly well. When you really want to listen to music, you can take your headphones and plug em in. The headphone jack on the iPad is not recessed, so any pair of headphones will do, though it does not come with a pair of the apple earbuds we all hate. Thank you Apple. I plugged in my Sennheiser HD 202 cans to hear what the iPad had to offer. Unsurprisingly, the sound quality offered is fairly mediocre. I find it comparable to the sound offered by an iPod, which is considerably weaker than that offered by my MacBook Pro. The EQ is also similar to that of an iPod, with a tendency to clip bass notes and without the custom tweaking available on a standard computer.

Though I was surprised about the lack of cover-flow, I don't miss it.

Moving on, I explored the iBooks selection - after all, that's really what I want this device is for!
The iBooks store doesn't have a whole bunch to offer at the present time... it looks to me like the NY Times bestseller list is pretty much it. There are 50 free books available, all what my english teachers in high school would call "classics." Austen, Thoreau, Shakespeare, etc. Of course, there is a version of the Bible for free download as well. After enjoying a few samples of paid books, I chose The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (free) to read. The reading experience is great. After adjusting the font size and the screen brightness I was ready to rock. I read for a solid hour in very minimal light with no eye strain at all. I particularly enjoy the built-in dictionary, which allows me to increase my vocabulary without switching to the dictionary app (also free), let alone picking up a hardcover dictionary - I'm not sure I'd know how to use one anymore!

Showcasing the dictionary and how dark the screen gets - I was able to read comfortably with no other light in the room.

A lot of people have been saying the wi-fi only option is worthless, because only with 3G can you get the internet *everywhere* you go. That's a bunch of baloney, at least if you're in college.

As a college student, everywhere I go already has free wi-fi! My campus, like pretty much every college campus, has wireless that covers every single building. The coffee and sandwich shops that cater to college students know they need free wi-fi to get our business as well. Everywhere I go has wireless, so why on earth would I pay $30/month out of my already-limited beer money budget for 3G service from AT&T, a company that can't handle the number of iPhones on its network already!!!

Even if campus didn't have internet everywhere, I wouldn't pay for the service from AT&T because their service in Flagstaff is absolutely horrid.

So, after my first impressions, what do I think?

Its cool. Undoubtedly cool. BUT, it won't be worth the minimum $500 price tag until Apple gets the major textbook publishers on board. Even then, the price of these books is going to be have to be around 50% of the printed version for the savings to justify the purchase of the iPad for large numbers of students. I already buy the electronic or online versions of my books, which takes my average book spending per semester from $800 to $350 or so. Unfortunately, because these books are stored in a variety of formats either online or on my hard drive, I often forget which book is where, which program I need to use to read which book, etc. If they were all in one place, Apple and textbook publishers could stand to make some serious bank.

Once again, this is just my first impression. I'm going to give the iPad a fair chance to impress me over the next month. At that point if I'm not happy with it, I'll sell it.

Is there anything you want to know about the iPad? Anything I should try or elaborate on? Drop a comment below to let me know!