A Quick Story

So, most of y'all, my dear readers, are bloggers, and most are also avid picture takers. You know how much room pictures take up, and how important it is to backup, and thus how wonderful external hard drives are. Well, I was near a Circuit City yesterday and thought, "Ooh, they are going out of business, I wonder if they have good deals on HDs..." I walked in and couldn't find them right away, so I found the one person actually working there and the following conversation ensued:

Me: Where are your external hard drives?
Employee: Oh, they are over here. *points, as I start to walk that way* Do you know what you are looking for? There are...*starts to explain*
Me: No, I'm just looking to see if there are any good deals.
Employee: *walks over to HDs* Well, there are two basic kinds...
Me: *cuts him off, smiling* Yeah, I know.
Employee: See, there are smaller, more portable ones...
Me: *cuts him off again* Or the bigger ones you can plug in. I know. I have three at home.
Employee: *realizes I might not actually be a dumb girl* Oh, ok.
Me: Thank you. =)

It sounds a lot ruder in writing, haha, it really wasn't, I promise! He just kept trying to explain hard drives to me, and I kept trying to politely insinuate that I had a clue, and he just didn't quite get it. "I just want to look for cheap storage, sir, because I'm a technology addict!" It was kind of surprising that he was so helpful, because he really was the only employee in the store (that I could see) and so I'm sure he spends all day answering questions...so props to the nameless Circuit City employees who are helpful even though they know they'll be out of a job soon. Just please don't bother me too much when I'm trying to bargain shop. ;) Oh, and on that note, drives were only 20% off, making them still more expensive than just waiting for a sale at Staples, which happens about every other week. So I didn't buy any, but maybe I'll check back in a few weeks to see if the prices go down any more. I was with a friend who's a new grad student, and I think she was surprised when I said I didn't want to buy one that was less than 500 gigs. Um, yeah, I already have 750 gigs at home, and about 500 gigs of that full. So, yeah...

And so this is not a picture-free post, I present me testing the range on my new toy, a remote for my camera:



We were doing a knitting photoshoot on campus (yep we got some strange looks) and wanted to take a group picture at the end. There were very few places to set the camera - this is the first one we tried (it was on a trash can about 30 feet away, haha), and it worked pretty well. The next one was awesome, and a tribute to the Gorillapod...hopefully A will send me the pictures of that soon and then I'll share. =)

Randomness

You've probably seen it already on other blogs, but if not, go check out Wordle.net. You input some text, a blog/RSS feed, or your del.icio.us address, and it spits out a cool word map, for which you can change the font, color, orienation of the words, etc. The more frequently the word appears in the text, the larger it is on the map. Some examples!

This blog:



My del.icio.us tags:


And that, my friends, sums up a large reason why I haven't been blogging much lately. Astronomy. Research. Software. Technology. It's an exciting life I live!

In other news, my Granddad turned 91 (!!!) last weekend. Besides getting to see him and the rest of my Mom's side of the family, the most exciting part was playing with my Uncle T's new camera:



Oh that's right, it's a Leica D-Lux 4. And yes, it's even cooler than it sounds. Shout-out to Nin who posted about it when it was announced, so I knew exactly how amazing (and expensive, ouch) it was and could take advantage of a lot of the fun features. =)

The WB.

No, not the network. ;) WB = White Balance. I've talked about it before, and I play around with it a lot. I don't know why, but I find it really interesting. Here's a series of pics I took the other day for my knitblog. I took them in what I now know is called open shade (thanks Miz Boo!) in the morning, when it was good and bright outside. I used three different WB settings: Shade, Sun, and Auto. In that order, here they are:


Shade


Sun


Auto

The Shade is awful. Sun and Auto are much better, and pretty similar. Sun is actually probably closer to real life, on my monitor at least, but I prefer the slightly cooler colors of Auto. (This is probably because I have an affinity for cooler colors in general.) I ended up using a different pic, but still with the Auto WB setting. I've noticed before that Shade (and Cloud) generally give worse results than Auto, and even Sun. I kind of wrote that off to the fact that, on the scale of DSLRs, my camera (the D40) is the cheapest. But now I read Miz Boo's excellent post over at Ree's, and she says:

Personally, on my camera I do not care for the shade and cloudy options. I think their effects are too strong on my D80. So I almost always shoot on “A” for Automatic white balance. (Except when I’m inside, and then the incandescent and florescent options work wonders.)

Exactly! I would write the exact same thing! And she has a way fancier camera. I wonder if the same holds true for the super-duper fancy cameras like Ree's D200, or even the D300. Is it a Nikon thing? Canon users, what's your experience?

Sidenote: When I was at the airshow, I saw a woman using a D300 to take nothing but snapshots of her kids. My assumption is that she's a professional photographer, so she's got the nice equipment, and is most comfortable with it, so prefers it for snapshots, too. Because I cannot fathom spending $2000 on a camera for snapshots! That would be nice!

And on that note, I'm out. Work to do, dinner to eat, etc. (Hurricane already prepared for - check!) Ciao! =)

White Balance

I realized the other day that I've mentioned white balance (also known as color balance) a couple of times, but never explained it. Getting a proper white balance basically means balancing out the colors so that they are true to life, instead of distorted by the lighting conditions. You know how regular indoor light bulbs often give everything a yellowish tint, and fluorescent lights tend to give a bluish tint, but your eyes/brain adjust so you know what the colors really are? When you have proper white balance in a photo, you compensate for this tint. Your whites look white and all your other colors look accurate. What got me thinking about this? I was photographing a sweater I'm working on, and the first photo came out looking like this:



Ick. (This is one reason I love digital photography - when something is wrong in your photo, you know right away.) The problem was that my camera was still set to white balance for Shade conditions, from some pictures I'd been taking previously. In the D40, there are eight different white balance settings. Six of them correspond to the type of light you're shooting in:

Incandescent (most regular indoor bulbs)
Fluorescent
Sun
Flash
Clouds
Shade

The other two are Auto and Pre. Auto is what it sounds like it should be (automatically adjusts based on what it thinks the light source is), and Pre is used when you want to get a really accurate reading. Basically, you take a preliminary picture of a colored (often grey) card (like this one, for example) and the camera uses that data to get an accurate color balance in the following pictures. (I've never actually done this...never really needed to for the photos I take...)

You can certainly just leave your camera on Auto and forget about it. The software seems to be sophisticated enough that most images will turn out okay. Here's the Auto version of the purple sweater:



It's much better than the Cloud-balanced shot, but still not quite accurate. I was taking these pictures inside near a window (generally the best indoor place to take pictures of knitting, assuming it's sunny outside), and from previous attempts I knew that setting the camera to balance for Sun would probably work best:



Yep. It captures the color of the purple very well, and the white collar looks white, not blueish or cream. Just for kicks, here's what it looks like when set on Cloud:

Close, but not quite. Both on the camera's LCD screen and on my computer, the Sun-balanced shot looks the best.

The Auto is good enough on my camera that I usually leave it on Auto for snapshots, or when I'm going to be in multiple different light conditions in a short time period. However, if I know my lighting will be consistent for awhile, like when taking knitting photos or taking pictures at an indoor sporting event, I'll set the white balance to match the lighting. It only takes a few clicks, and it's usually worth it. My old point-and-shoot has white balance settings as well, although by the time I learned what it was, I already had my dSLR, so I haven't played around with it much. Point is, if you have a digital, you can probably adjust the white balance. Try it out. Let me know how it goes. =)

To learn more about white balance, you can check out:
Ken Rockwell
Cambridge in Colour
Wikipedia

A related topic is monitor calibration. I know pretty much nothing about this, as I cannot afford a monitor calibration system. Based on the tests at that site, I think mine's okay, and I'm not too concerned since I just take pictures for fun. =)

Shutter Speed, and Bubbles!

Note: I've created a photography glossary in the sidebar with links to definitions of terms I use often, like exposure, depth of field, aperture, etc. I feel silly linking to the same things over and over again, so if you see a term you're unfamiliar with that isn't linked, check out the sidebar! =)

So, a few posts ago I talked about aperture and how it affects depth of field in addition to exposure. (In my mind, the exposure effect is intuitive; the depth of field one is not.) Today, a similar discussion on shutter speed...

Again, in my mind the effect of shutter speed on exposure is intuitive: the faster the shutter speed, the less time there is for light to enter the lens, the darker the picture. A slower shutter speed would then lead to brighter, more exposed pictures. The non-intuitive effect of the shutter speed is its effect on capturing motion.

This is more intuitive than depth of field...follow along with me...warning: science and math!

A basic formula of the physics of moving things (aka kinematics) is that:

speed = distance / time

We can rewrite this as:

distance = time * speed

For the purpose of most of the things we take pictures of, the speed is relatively constant, so we don't have to worry too much about that term. What we can control is time, via shutter speed. A faster shutter speed corresponds to a shorter amount of time. This corresponds to a smaller term on the right-hand-side of the second equation, and thus, since the right- and left-hand-sides must be equal, the left-hand-side must be correspondingly smaller. But the left-hand-side is distance, and so in our shorter time span, our moving object moves a shorter distance. So we have

fast shutter speed -> shorter time -> less distance

The same reasoning works for slow shutter speeds:

slow shutter speed -> longer time -> more disance

The distance the object moves is the effect we see in photos. Fast shutter speeds "freeze" moving objects, while slow shutter speeds lead to blurrier motion. Either of these effects can be exploited to get the photo you want, using the shutter-priority or full manual modes.

I was taking some photos tonight for my knitting blog (for a post on blocking and its magical effects) and decided to play around with my shutter speed as I was taking pictures of the "fill the sink with water" step. Check this out:



Bubbles!!! (Reminds me of this guy!) The shutter speed is 1/320, with my maximum aperture of f/3.5. (For an explanation of the numbers of shutter speed, click here.) I had to turn a flash on (it's dark outside and I was too impatient to wait until daytime to take pictures...). Since I was shooting in full manual, I could adjust the flash level, a dSLR feature that I love. Normally I adjust it down, but for some reason I decided to play with adjusting it up. (This picture was shot with the flash at +1.0.) Since I had the flash on and up, I could use a pretty fast shutter speed, and still get a bright image. Want a closer look?



Here's another fun one, same camera settings as above:



I like how the motion of the water is frozen into the wave forms. (I'm taking grad quantum 1 right now...I can't get away from wave forms...)

As a counterexample, here's a photo taken with a much slower shutter speed (more time!):



See how the water is just a blurry stream? Unfortunately, I can't tell you the exposure for that one, although it was around 1/50. (In addition to playing with flash levels, I was playing with shooting in RAW. Well, it turns out that Picasa, my editing program, can't pick up the EXIF data for RAW files, so I lost the record of all the settings. I've never had any problems with JPEGs, so I will just return to that and keep my data.)

More experienced photographers than myself can do even cooler things with shutter speeds:

Slow shutter speed:


(Image used under terms of CC License. Photo by Flickr user www.ericcastro.biz)

Fast shutter speed:


(Image used under terms of CC License. Photo by Flickr user chomp_on_that)

Neat, eh? =)

Monkshood...

...is another interesting flower. They line the stream beds in the French Henry area and bloom during the second half of the summer. I like the shape of the bloom, and how it's separated from the leaves; I think it lends a dramatic flair to the flower. Does the shape of the bloom remind you of something? Like a monk, wearing his hood? (Also, they're poisonous, so don't eat them, mkay?)

As for photography, do you notice how the flower is normally lit/colored, but the background is very dark? You can see the same thing in this shot, of Mountain Bluebells:



Obviously y'all are smart enough to know that the reason for the lighting differences is flash. It illuminated the flowers, but not the relatively empty background. Now, some people are very anti-flash. I don't love it, but I don't hate it either. I generally try to shoot without it, but will turn it on when necessary. I actually really like the effect in the first photo, because I think it draws attention to the flower. I don't like it as much in the second photo, but it was too dark to get a clear shot without a flash. (Obviously I just need a better lens with a wider aperture, so I don't have to use a flash if I don't want to...or a tripod...or both...)

So yeah...flowers are pretty, and flash isn't evil. =)

(Please forgive the lack of real content in this post, and the sporadic updates lately. Midterms stole all my time...)

Eye-Candy Friday

This was taken one afternoon during Camp Director training this past summer. We'd had an afternoon thunderstorm, and the clouds started to clear away as the sun was just beginning to set. The effect on Tooth Ridge was awesome - it was literally glowing!

Philfolk - Don't you just love the first sentence of that Wikipedia entry? Do you think Ranger Bus Tour is an appropriate citation? =) Bonus points to whoever can name the CD in the foreground...

Random Wednesday!

(Click for bigger. You can see some cool depth-of-field effects in the big one!)

This is a Sego Lily - isn't it interesting? It's one of the many flower pictures from this summer that I alluded to earlier. =) According to my Philmont Fieldguide:

Early Mormon settlers ate the bulbs of the Sego Lily when other food sources were scarce. Today the Sego Lily is the state flower of Utah. The bulbs have long been a source of food for the Navajo and Hopi Indians as well. The genus name, Calochortus, is Greek for beautiful herb.

Neat, eh?

I'd love to link you to the Fieldguide so you can purchase your very own, but it's currently not for sale, as it is being re-written (which it desperately needs!). The writers and photographer came through camp one day on a flower hunt. We'd just had a hailstorm that destroyed a lot of our flowers (including this rose!) and so I showed them the pics I had on my D40. They really liked them and asked me to submit them, for possible inclusion in the guide! Cool! Maybe they were just pretending to be interested, to humor me, but I still thought it was neat. The new guide probably won't be out for a few years, by which time I'll probably have forgotten all about it. Hopefully they'll let me know if they do decide to use anything!

Happy Wednesday! =)

Architecture Photos

One thing I wish I could do is take really stunning photos of architecture. Here's one of the better ones I've taken recently:



It's an SOOC shot from my visit to LSU in May 2007 for my cousin Cat's graduation. Ironically, her degree is in Architecture, and this photo was taken inside the Design building. I liked how the light was streaming in from the skylight and making the shadows on the wall, with the ceiling reflected in the second story window, too. It's not a wonderful pic, but as I said in my last post, I don't have a great eye for composition. (Yet.) I've been trying to read up on it (here and here, among others), and pay attention to good examples (like here and here). If you have any suggestions, or other great photo-blogs to look at (in all my spare time - ha!), please let me know!

(I did manage to get some good architecture shots when I was in Italy - it's hard to take bad pictures in such an amazing place. I'll try to dig those up sometime!)

I heart computers. (Most of the time.)

One day, I'll graduate to Photoshop. For now, I can rock Picasa and Paint. Yes, Paint. No laughing. =)

One morning this summer, I was up at the mine, waiting, hoping, and praying that campers would show up for a tour. I know it was morning because I was bored enough to take this picture of myself:

Sometimes I like to pretend to be serious. =) It's an ok SOOC pic, but I see (at least) five problems:

(As always, click for bigger. The numbers show up better in the big one.)

(1) Big zit on chin. We didn't have running water. Cut me some slack.
(2) Greasy hair. See (1).
(3) Fly on hat. Again, no water = no shower. And the flies were bad no matter how delightful you smelled!
(4) Distracting ore bucket and rocks in the background.
(5) My arm.

Thanks to the computer, I can knock out all of those problems! First thing's first: crop! I love cropping, because I'm still not very good at composing pictures on the spot. I do much better looking at an image on a screen, and then figuring out where I want my focal point to be. I like the rule of thirds a lot. That probably is because I like fractions a lot. Sue me. So anyways, in this pic, I cropped out (3) the fly, (4) the distracting bits, and (5) most of my arm. I also got my eyes close to one of the rule of thirds lines.

Ok, so now we're left with (1) zit and (2) greasy hair. Hair is easily taken care of by ditching the color. I think lack of color also works well since I was portraying a miner in 1922, and we like to think that "the olden days" were black & white or sepia, since those are the only pictures we see from then. (I wonder what people from back then would think of that. Obviously they lived their lives in full color. Would they think it's strange that we think of them as black & white?) Anyways, back to the photo. Here's the b&w:



It's alright, but sort of ick. I don't like b&w pics of me. I think it has something to do with my skin tone. Here's the sepia:

I sort of hate sepia because it looks washed out and faded. I have enough problems looking washed out and faded because of my pale skin. I don't need the computer to help me out on that one! So instead, I "warmify" the b&w. Warmify is a command in Picasa that I love. It helps rescue color pictures where the white balance is off, and can be layered on top of the b&w to give this:

I suspect it has an equivalent in Photoshop, because Ree does a similar thing to her pictures. So that hides (2) the greasy hair, and I like the tone. Last but not least, (1) the zit. Open that baby in Paint, magnify, and pencil over it, sampling colors from all around to get a good blend. If you look closely, you can see it's still a bit smudged there, but I'm ok with that. If you didn't know what you were looking for, you'd never see it. I also added some glow in Picasa. (I like to think of it as a combo of two of Ree's favorite Photoshop tricks: Portraiture and Slight Mug Shot Pop.) Et voila!

My new Facebook photo. =)

Eye-Candy Friday!

I miss these trees. I'm 99% sure I took this pic on the way from French to Pueblano one afternoon. It's pretty much my favorite hike on the Ranch, in part because of trees like this. Other highlights of the trail include: following the mighty South Ponil Creek the whole way, the change in the landscape as you drop in altitude, the fact that it's mostly downhill, the cool mining remnants you pass, and the fact that there are always loggers at the other end! Have a great weekend y'all! =)

Wild Roses, and Depth of Field

I took a ton of flower pictures this summer, because I love flowers, and because there were so many. Northeast New Mexico has been in a drought for a long time, at least as long as I can remember. This past year, however, was really wet, and some of the old-timers think this is going to keep up for at least the next few years. *crosses fingers* That would be excellent, if true. Enough water means so many good things for the region, including great flowers! We had more wildflowers this summer than I've seen in ten years of going to Philmont, and luckily I had my sweet new camera to capture them.

Over the course of this blog, you'll probably see most of the good ones (or you can go check them out on Flickr...see the sidebar badge), but for now, here are two pictures of the same flower, a wild rose, and a mini-photography lesson.

Disclaimer: I know very very little about photography. But I am capable of reading (thank goodness) and am teaching myself, little by little. To learn more, click here and here.

Ok. Back to the photos:

Do you see the difference? In the top photo, the petals are in focus. In the bottom one, the stamens are. I like the bottom one better, because...well, I don't really know why, I just do. This is one of the things I really like about my D40, is that I have control over where to focus. I also have control over depth of field.

Now, up until about three days ago, I didn't really understand depth of field or aperture settings or how they are connected. I always got shutter speed, because that makes sense to me. (The faster the speed, the less light comes in, the darker the pictures. And vice versa.) I shot on S a lot, and let the camera control aperture. I had a vague idea that aperture had to do with how wide the lens opened to let in light, but didn't really understand how that made a difference. I decided that I should probably learn. I found these two great articles (one and two) and they made a ton of sense. I also liked the Wikipedia article on aperture because it explains the math. (Yay math!)

Which got me thinking about the flower pics. I reckoned that the aperture must have been set very wide (which corresponds to a low number...) to get such a shallow depth of field that I could have either the petals or the stamens in focus, but not both. So I zipped over to Flickr and checked out the Exif data (for some reason I prefer to look at it on Flickr instead of on my computer...don't ask me why...), and sure enough, the aperture for both was f/5.3, which is close to the max for my lens at that zoom level. This means the lens opened really wide to let in a lot of light, and, as I suspected, made the depth of field very shallow. Cool!

I hope you enjoyed this mini-lesson, and that it made sense. Please feel free to comment and let me know other cool things about aperture, depth of field, wild roses, etc. (Also, please let me know (kindly!) if I have said anything incorrect.) Ooh, and if you know how to blog multiple Flickr photos into one post (I can only figure out how to get one photo in the post using 'blog this'), please please let me know!

Thanks y'all! Have a great week! =)

Eye-Candy Friday!

A few of the blogs I read do "Eye-Candy Friday" features, posting pretty pics on Fridays. Here's one for you...with the focus on the "Eye" part of "Eye-Candy".

I took this at the beginning of the summer, when I spent a morning over at Cattle Headquarters watching and photographing the ordeal that is shoeing all the horses after the winter. Horses are pretty dumb, but beautiful anyways. =) You can see some other great horse photos here. Have a great weekend!

This blog is feeling neglected...

...so here are some pictures taken in my family's backyard back in May. Enjoy! =)

I think this one's especially striking in B&W.

My new camera!














My church, at night