After realizing there is nothing for my son’s age, as far as usable photography books are concerned, I’ve decided to write my own. By posting my intent here, hopefully it will generate some pressure on my end to actually do it.
Today is one of those days where I should have taken my camera! I should know better than to leave the house without it. The air was crisp, the lighting diffused by some lingering mist… Oh well, tomorrow is a day, too.
As soon as I got my Canon Rebel xTI, I started to almost exclusively shoot in RAW. For essentially two reasons. One, I don’t have to worry about white balance. Two, I have complete control (OK, almost complete control) over the data.
That is important to me because even though I try as much as I can to prepare a photograph, set up light sources, blah blah blah – the way I shoot is almost always dictated by what happens at that moment. My best shots are born out of spontaneity.
This spontaneity, though, means that I may have an ISO setting on the camera that is not fast enough, a shutter speed that doesn’t work etc. RAW has helped me more than once salvage a photograph which, had it been taken in JPEG, would not have been salvageable, or only after LOTS of work. If the white balance is off, I can easily correct it. If it is underexposed, I play with a few sliders.
Inevitably, a lot of times salvaging a photograph introduces noise. I have come to appreciate that, however, because it can look quite interesting as a black-and-white. Therefore, I typically convert to black-and-white in such a case, and the results have been astonishing. Alternatively, I may take a picture in a very high ISO, then convert it to black-and-white at least partially. The photograph of the wine glass was taken at ISO 1600 with no flash present, then partially left a color photography, while the rest of it was converted to black-and-white.
A good book on RAW conversion, at least to start with, is “The Art of RAW Conversion” by Uwe Steinmueller and Juergen Gulbins. Even if you buy it only for the stunning cover photograph. It gives a very nice intro into what RAW conversion is, what potentials it holds and when to use it/not to use it (for the latter, any type of photograph that requires fast camera action, such as sports photography, probably does NOT lend itself to RAW). Check it out!
OK, so enough folks seem to have bitch-slapped Facebook for them to reconsider their new Terms of Use. Truthfully, in many countries they would have probably stood no chance (example: Germany) of getting away with this legally anyway. Here’s what was posted on my private Facebook page today:
“Terms of Use UpdateClose Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised. For more information, visit the Facebook Blog. If you want to share your thoughts on what should be in the new terms, check out our group Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.”
I have decided to take a wait-and-see stance for right now, before I reactivate and then feed my previous public Facebook page. As they said, they are still evaluating. I’ll be curious to see what they come up with next…
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843
Anybody who does web design in any serious fashion knows about Firebug, THE ultimate plugin for the Firefox browser, now available for Firefox 3. Firebug is the ONE way to quickly and efficiently diagnose style, i.e. css issues with your website. Or, how I used it, with the integration of several different freeware scripts into one serious app.
You can use it in SO many different, wonderful ways. Create mockups of a live site on the Web that might not even be yours. Play with different styles to figure out just WHY it displays in a weird way on your screen. The one time it will NOT help you is when it looks OK in Firefox, but not in IE.
Yet, who cares? I owe this tool to a friend, and I’m eager to pass it on to you. Download it here.
