Arlington National Cemetery

Just a quick note. I threw a few photos from Arlington Cemetery up on Flickr today. That's not the only place we took photos, but it's getting late, I've been up since very, very early and that was about all the time I had tonight. ;)

Arlington is a great stop, and viewing the Changing of the Guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns is truly impressive. To think that only 500 people have ever qualified to guard to tomb, in it's history, and that the post has never been unmanned, even during a hurricane, is really something. The photo's title above is based on the fact that during the 30 minute shift, the guard will take 21 steps, then pause for 21 seconds, before taking another 21 steps in the reverse direction. This is a symbolic representation of the 21 gun salute.

The cemetery certainly gives you some perspective on life, and on the meaning of sacrifice.

Labels: Personal, Photography

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A little Photowalking

With the weather turning quite Spring-like this week, we went for a change of pace. Instead of going to the gym, we just walked right on by it with the cameras and did a little photowalking around campus. It was a good idea, I felt like I got some exercise, got the stress relief benefits of that, and got a chance to shoot some photos, which I haven't done nearly enough of lately!

Perhaps I'll get a chance to take some more photos on an evening like this, at least before I take a whole bunch the first week of May when we're on vacation. :)

Labels: Photography

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Well it's a nice monitor

Well it's a nice monitor
Originally uploaded by mikemac29

Labels: Photography, Tech

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Event Photography

Aaron Hockley does a good job of listing out the things you need to take into consideration when shooting an event with speakers and a large group of people. I've certainly run into problems with most of the things he listed, especially the last time I worked tech support onsite for a firm event. Granted, I was there first and foremost to do the A/V setup, keep the mics and presentation running , etc. but many times I take the camera and try to get a couple of photos that our marketing folks can use to market future seminars.

The last time I did this, it was in a room with one entrance at the back of the room, one aisle down the center, curtains that didn't quite cover all of the window (on a very bright sunny day no less), and generally no way for me to get around at all without being in the way of folks who paid to be there. Obviously, I didn't get anything worth writing home about.

Anyway, while Aaron's list is good, I'm going to add a couple of other things to think about from my experience working events:

1. If you're working with the event organizer as their photographer, get the script. Know what's going to happen, when and where ahead of time. This is especially important if the event takes place in more than one room.

2. During the event, stay in touch with the organizer, because the script will change!

3. Be helpful to organizers and guests. They'll be much more likely to help you get the shots you want if you're not seen as a nuisance. If you're friendly with the attendees you'll get better candid shots.

4. Get there early, stay late, and shoot as much as you can. Like any photo outing, the more photos you take, the more likely you'll have some good stuff!

5. Don't forget the sponsors. If you're working an event on behalf of the organizer, make sure you go out of your way to get photos of the sponsors. If they have a booth or table, spend some time getting photos. If you're taking photo-op photos with the speaker, get the sponsors done first. They'll appreciate the exposure, and in some cases, they may contact you about using the photos in their own marketing.

In short, communicate with the organizer, have fun with the attendees, and try to stay out of the way! :)

Labels: Photography

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Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Naturally, there were bagpipes everywhere in Chicago this weekend, even at the lobby bar on Friday night! I guess they were just getting warmed up for the parade Saturday!

It was quite a lot of fun to get to see the Parade, and the Chicago River dyed green later on. After a few long days spent at Techshow then taking in all the sites, and finally flying home to a busy Sunday, I decided to sleep in today, in honor of St. Patrick's. I do, however, need to go get ready to head to work for the afternoon.

Enjoy, and have a safe celebration!

As always, more pics over on Flickr

Labels: Personal, Photography

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Dyed Chicago River

Originally uploaded by mikemac29

Labels: Photography

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Blizzard Warning? Let's go take Photos!

OK, so we're a little crazy about getting photos, but not that much. The strong winds limited us to just a few minutes outside, but trying to capture some interesting shots at least gave us a break from complaining about the weather! Looks like any plans we had for Saturday will be scrapped. I miss the days when Daylight Savings Time meant Spring weather was likely. Not this year!

Labels: Photography

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Photo lessons learned

I had the opportunity to do something new and different this past weekend. A friend of ours needed to have some photos taken of herself, and I offered to spend part of the afternoon shooting her. Now, since these were private photos, I can't show you examples of what I learned, I can tell you a bit about it.

First off, the reason we were doing this in the first place, is because this person is very uncomfortable in front of a camera, thus they don't have any recent pictures! I started out shooting with my 50mm f/1.8 lens. I love how this lens keeps the warmth of skin tone and gives me enough speed to not be blurry when I operate it without a tripod. Unfortunately, the fixed focal length has one draw back, though many might not see it as a drawback. If you want to get a closer shot, you have to move yourself closer to your subject. I quickly discovered that if I wanted to really get a close up of my friends' face, and get a good capture of her eyes, I had to stand fairly close to her, and that was, in fact, making her more uncomfortable than she already was! It showed in the photos too! I don't do a lot of portrait work, but even I know that an uncomfortable subject is not going to photograph well, no matter what lens you use, so the 50mm was quickly replaced with my 18-55mm. This allowed me to stand at a comfortable distance to the subject, and vary the focal length to suit my needs, from focusing on her face, to widening out to capture some of the background around her. This seemed to work much better for her. It probably also helped that I wasn't moving, especially towards her, so much.

The other thing I did, to help her be more comfortable, is simply let her talk. We chatted about work, people we both knew, stories from the 10 years we've known each other, etc. Obviously, having known her that long gave me a decided advantage here, but as she chatted, I shot. Now, that meant I had to do a lot of shooting, because she was talking as I took the photos, plenty of them have her eyes shut, or some silly mid-sentence look on her face, or a hand in her face, but she was comfortable, and laughing, so there was enough there to get what we were looking for. I took 245 photos in about 90 minutes. I think what I'll end up giving her will be somewhere in the 40-50 range, but I think it was worth it to get that many photos where she looks happy and relaxed.

The last thing about shooting with someone who's not comfortable is taking care about location. Yesterday was a beautiful day in Columbus, relative to what our weather has been like so many places we might have thought about going, would have been full of people. We started out at Northbank Park downtown, which was pretty empty, it being Sunday and all. That gave us some freedom to wander around to different places, while avoiding the possibility of us being watched. The second place we were going to go was the fountain in front of the Main Library downtown. It's an old Carnegie Library, a pretty magnificent building. Unfortunately, as we walked up, we realized there was about a dozen people just sitting out front of the building on the benches. We were going to have an audience there, so we just kept right on walking, over to the Topiary Park, a block away. That was much less occupied, and gave us some more time to venture around and take some different shots.

Overall, I think there are some real nice shots in that bunch, if I don't say so myself. I think we managed to get some shots that not only look nice, but also capture some personality, which was really the goal. The real test will be when she gets to see them after I get done processing later this week, but I suspect she'll be pretty happy with them.

Hopefully, the next time I get to do something like this, I'll be able to share some of the results.

Labels: Photography

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I'm a trend follower

It occurred to me earlier today, while I was sharing my love of the new Macbook and running VMWare Fusion on it, that I have become the thing I've always hated, trendy. Just since the new year I got a pretty trendy new lens for my camera, a Macbook, and now my wife and I have a Wii in the house!

See, the thing is, I've always fought against trendy tech tools because many times, they simply weren't the best tool for the job. Yeah Mac's have been the sexier choice for computers, but they never really made sense in terms of doing what I need to get done. There have been more trendy gaming consoles, but my Gamecube has always had what I wanted, so it was the right tool for me.

I realize now, that I haven't become trendy, the trendy tools have become tools that do the job better. There's nothing like the Wii on the gaming front, and now that Mac's run on Intel chips and allow me to access the Windows tools I need for my livelihood, it makes sense to own one. The 50mm lens adds a tool to compensate for some areas of photography that I had been ignoring for too long.

It's not that the old un-trendy tools I had weren't working, it's that, finally, the trendy technology isn't just trendy. It's actually a better fit for what I want to do. 

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get some ice, or a heating pad for my arm. Yeah, day 2 of having a Wii in the house, and my arm's sore. How cliche.....

Labels: Personal, Photography, Tech

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Proof and the compulsory fanboy photo

Here's something I'm sure some people never expected to see me working on...

So far, so good. I'm not having too much difficulty getting things setup the way I like, and I've been pleasantly surprised by silly little things that are just nice. For example, the fact that the power cord is magnetized on the end, so I only have to get it close to the connector on the laptop. For some reason that seems pretty cool to me. :)

I am not overly impressed with the touchpad, but I generally dislike touchpads anyway. Luckily, my MS wireless mouse works just great!

Once I have the OSX side setup the way I want, it'll be time to get VMWare Fusion and get a Windows VM setup. Responses on that last entry seem to favor just using a VM instead of Bootcamp so far. Thanks for the feedback!

Labels: Mac, Photography, Tech

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Speaking of New Experiments

I used the Picnik integration with Flickr to put a very small, and hopefully unobtrusive, watermark on the last batch of photos I uploaded over there. It's an experiment at this point. Don't worry, I'm not suddenly going all professional on you, I just want to see if I can put a watermark on the photos, to sort of keep my name out there should someone decide to use it in a blog or something, without messing with the enjoyment of sharing the photos too much.

I may continue to do it with my photos going forward, I may not. I still allow any non-commercial use of my photos, and I'm still willing to send a higher-res, and watermark-free, version to anyone who asks for one to print. I'm not a professional, I take photos because I enjoy doing it first and foremost. If there's any "payment" from other folks it's seeing them enjoy the photos as much as I enjoy taking them. I doubt that will change.

Let me know what you think.

Labels: Photography

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Franklin Park Conservatory

If you're looking for a good place around town to do some shooting without getting frostbite on your hands, the Franklin Park Conservatory is a pretty good choice.

 

The plant life and flowers currently on display make for some nice experimentation with light and color, and the giant palm leaves make for some nice textures to play with.

  

We had a good time, and took plenty of photos. As always, you can see more over on Flickr, as well as in Angela's set.

Labels: Photography

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More 50mm f/1.8 lens fun

We had a very productive day today, including a trip downtown to see the monet exhibit at the Columbus Art Museum. Naturally, while we were downtown, I had to take the opportunity to play around with the new lens a bit.

More pics can be seen at Flickr.

Labels: Photography

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New Lens

I ordered the Nikon 50mm f/1.8D lens on the recommendation of a few folks last week, and it arrived at the office today. Naturally, I couldn't wait to try it out.

The one thing I was really excited about was how well people told me this lens works with available light when you can't, or don't want to, use a flash. So I took it for a spin around the house this evening and I have to say I am impressed. I got some nice quality, without having to resort to using the flash, which definitely made for a warmer photo, and nicer skin tones.

I've got a few more in my 50mm lens test set on Flickr. Can't wait to get some more time this weekend and see what else I can do with this lens, I hear it's great for playing with depth of field, and taking photos of lights at night, we'll see!

Labels: Photography

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Best of 2007

Thanks to a challenge from Kevin Devin, and his own collection, I put together a slideshow of my favorite shots of 2007 from my Flickr collection.



Keep in mind that these are really the photos that mean the most to me, you may not agree with the "best" monicker, but hey, they're my photos and it's my blogs. :)

Labels: Photography

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Flickr Stats, a Good Start

After spending a few days living in a world that has Flickr Stats for Pro accounts, I've decided that it's incomplete at this point. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate what's there, it beats the heck out of what we've had prior to this, so I'm not complaining. I do, however, have some suggestions.

Right now, when you click over to look at your account stats you see two sets of stats, "yesterday" and "all time". That's it. If you were offline for a couple of days, there's no checking out the hits from the last few days, or even the last week. The only thing you see is the total hits for each of the last 28(?) days, no detail at all.

Secondly, there's no information other than photo views, and referrers. That's useful, but it'd be even more useful if they gave us some more info about visitors, so we can see how many people are clicking through to one photo and leaving, how many are browsing the photostream, etc., and maybe a little bit about where they are located and such.

Truth be told, I think they could give us this information, but they get into quite a bind trying to store it. I can understand that, visitor details for all of their users could get rather burdensome. Still, I hope they can find a way to accomplish that!

Labels: Photography, Tech

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Flickr Stats

Yes, apparently, there is a Santa Claus! Flickr's got Stats for Pro members. I just activated mine, so I don't know how well they work yet, but they tell me there should be some stats to actually look at in a day or so. I'll definitely post more when I see more!

Labels: Photography

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Edit Photos in Flickr

They've made it easy to edit your photos right on the Flickr site, with one-click access to Picnik's photo editing tools. I took it for a quick test drive tonight, and it works pretty well, I made a slight "auto-fix type of change to the photo below, and then saved it back. I was actually pretty happy with the way it made adjustments, and the range of features available.

The one thing that disappointed me, is that once you make your edits, saving it back to flickr in place of the original image, seemed to take an inordinate amount of time!

I don't think I'll be using it all that often, but it's nice to know it's there, and, as JR suggested, for photos I upload directly from my cell phone, it's nice to know that I have a way to do some editing to them!

Labels: Photography

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Photography Law

Brett Trout has put together a pretty good list of links to help explain all the various legal rights and responsibilities you have when taking photos. It's definitely worth keeping handy, if not reading through some of it to keep yourself out of harm's way.

This is especially interesting to me lately, not because I ran into a problem, but because I had some interesting discussions about this with a coworker. A couple of weeks ago, I worked tech support at an all-day seminar that we put on. I was assigned to get out there and setup projectors, laptops, and help with PowerPoint. It was requested that I stay out there to troubleshoot anything that came up. Since I assumed that would mean a lot of time sitting around, I volunteered to take some photos of the event.

When our marketing folks decided they wanted to use one or two of those photos in a brochure for next year's seminar, they approached me about getting permission, and how they needed to credit it.

My response was that, since I was "working" at the event, and being paid to be there, you could certainly argue that the photos were work product, and that the firm actually owned them, not me. I'm not exactly sure if that's accurate, but that's pretty much how I felt about them anyway. It's not like I had big plans to use them anywhere else. But it does illustrate how even amateurs can run into legal questions about their photos.

For the record, if they use one, they are going to credit me, not because they have to, but because it's the nice thing to do. I can't really complain about that. :)

Labels: Photography

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New York Photos

While watching Ohio State beat Michigan again today, I processed and uploaded a batch of photos from the trip to New York last week. Despite the generally gray, November weather, I think some of them turned out pretty well.

You can see them all over at Flickr.

The trip itself was a lot of fun. The extra time to visit with some family and friends I hadn't seen in years was really cool, and the conference I was there to attend, WestLaw's e-Discovery and Records Retention, had a bunch of interesting topics. They definitely provided some food for thought as I go forward into the Litigation Support world. Some of those thoughts have, and will continue, to show up here in the coming weeks.

Labels: Photography

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Lucky Accident

While walking around town the other day, in between meet ups with family and an old friend, I stumbled upon the International Center of Photography building on 6th Avenue.

I say lucky because the current focus of their exhibits ins the Spanish Civil War, which was a period of time that always fascinated me, so I thoroughly enjoyed seeing the photos and reading some of the history.

It also served as a learning experience in another way. They have an exhibit called "Other Weapons" which chronicled the use of photos and other propaganda during this war. Since you could boil down much of this war to a clash between Fascism and Communism, you can imagine the level of propaganda! It served as an interesting reminder that every one has an agenda, and a point of view, and even something that we sometimes take for granted as "truth", unaltered photos or videos, aren't. What you see is what the photographer or videographer has already decided he or she wants you to see.

The other interesting history was more of a professional lesson about always being careful when you're working with originals. They had the famous Robert Capa D-Day photographs on display, next to the story of how these are the only negatives that survived. You can read the history here yourself:

He had used three rolls of film and exposed 106 frames. After reaching England, he sped by train to London and delivered his precious film for developing.
   A darkroom technician was almost as anxious to see the invasion images as Capa himself. In his haste, the technician dried the film too quickly. The excess heat melted the emulsion on all but 10 of the frames.

Ouch.

The Francesc Torres project was also a very interesting, and disturbing, look into the history of the war, through the images of a mass grave being excavated almost 70 years later.

If you're in N.Y. before Jan 8, I'd definitely add it to the to-do list!

Labels: Photography

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Some Photos from the latest trip

I've got the photos from the first part of our trip u