just a dumb picture of a bag to test how my little DIY grid works. It does the job and it's quite nice to exactly target which portions of an object you want to light.


So the quest of the bee vs the strobe continues and I read a very very interessing article about the power of the SB-600/800 vs the Alien Bee B400.
And its possible to mount the SB-600 on the large softbox from alien bee.


quote from link

Large Alien Bee Softbox Details:

http://www.alienbees.com/softboxes_detail.html
Price: $109.95
Size: 32"x40"
Connects to flash with a speedring that is designed for camera flashes -- this must be purchased separately (or bought with the Morris softbox which includes the right kind of speedring).
Time to set up: Took me 5 minutes the first time but I estimate it will normally take 2-3 minutes to set up at most.
Pros: Large size produces wonderful, soft light (especially when used with the internal diffusion panel/baffle attached). Perfect for studio. Comes with a speedring that will fit Alien Bee strobes (this won't matter if you have no plans to buy bees, but I do, so this will save me from having to buy an Alien Bee speedring down the road). Cons: Large and bulky -- fine for studio work but slightly more of a pain on location. Does not come with a speedring that will work with your speedlight flash.

Since the SB-800's flash capacity is between that of an Alien Bee 400 and AB 800, the SB-800 + large softbox combination is a fantastic alternative to an AB + softbox, since my camera will do the metering for me and adjust automatically (no need to buy a Sekonic meter!), and it's battery-operated (no cords!) and it's controlled wirelessly by the D70 (no expensive radio trigger system!). I did buy an extra set of rechargeable batteries in case I go dead during a shoot, but I haven't needed to change mid-shoot yet.

So it seems to be very promising so far and I can get away with my tiny and portable strobes instead of heavy pink studio strobes.

It's also getting closer to Christmas and Lindsay and I are thinking about things we could give our grand parents for Christmas. Our current idea is to make a picture book with potraets from her and me. So something like 6 - 10 pages.

We want to start with this in October, so that we got November to redo everything or order a second version of the prints in case we are unhappy with the results. And I want to get the umbrella first to optimize the pictures and learn something doing it :).

I just opened my blog on the mac book pro and noticed that all my pictures show way to dark here now the big question is:

which monitor is off?

It seems that I really need to order a tool to calibrate my monitors, cause honestly this explains why all my prints are to dark or my pictures get rejected because they seem to be underexposed.

update: I just ordered a spider2 for 50$ which should calibrate all my monitors.

I also did some basic math and calculated:

diy softbox: 60$ vs bought softbox: 99$
diy diffuser: 20$ vs bought diffuser: 14$ fabric + 30$ frame
diy lightstand: 15$ vs bought lightstand: 25$

somehow it makes not much sense to build everything your self. It does make sense to build your own snoots and gobos. Because it cost like 20 cent to make a snoot all you need is some duct tape and some paper...

tonight I decided to try to shoot some low key pictures and try some DIY lightning mods. Mostly grids and snoots.

So I put my little setup together to get as much as possible out of my single flash which was on full power. Which means I had several reflectors to soften the hard light from the snooted flash. Basically soft light mens, having a large lightsource close to the onject of interresst, in this case a bottle of wine. Th first reflector was basically a white sheet of paper, the second a 24" reflecto to give the bottle some shape and a gobo to block the bottle from the snoot.

We needed the gobo to avoid the tiny highlight from the flash. As you can see it stll exist, left side and just looks uggly to the nice and large reflections from the reflectors.

To the bottom you see my pattented studio

Cost factor:

black paper: 1$
tape: 2$
holding bottle of wine: 15$
paper reflector: 1$

How could this shoot be improved? No idea, I need to buy stuff to try out what works better. I will try it soon with an umbrella. only 15 days till this month is over.

today I got the possibility to play with a canon 40D and I have to say I'm impressed. It can do 2 things I miss on my Nikon D80

• 6 FPS
• liveview

The 6 FPS is nice to have but not the big deal. The lifeview on the other hand is wounder full and I would love to have it. Its to 95% of my work useless but in case of macros its just wounder full for focusing and so much easier than to use the viewfinder. Specially that you can zoom in and adjust the focus in micro steps.

The reason? With the viewfinder the alignment of your eye counts to 100%, if you shift your eye, it seems that the focus shifts. You don't have the problem with an LCD display, because the angle of view is constant.

Now if you compare the price of the 40D (1200$) to the D80 (900$), if nikon would had such a camera at this time, I would had bought it instead. The newly released D300 has the same features like the 40D, but also cost 1700$ which is way to much.

I also got another rejection of istockphoto, my picture was not in focus...

I finally managed to enter the Aggie stadium and snap off some pictures and I'm highly disappointed with them. I need to convert them to a sepia look to get any feeling into them. Ok the light was perfect (sunset) but there is just nothing to see...


So I'm also still debating with my self if I ...

a) need a second flash
b) should it be a second SB-600 from nikon (portable small flash) or an alien bee not so portable flash.

pro nikon:

• small
• battery powered
• supports wireless remote configuration with my camera

pro bee:

• powerful
  
• highly customizable
  
• modifier are cheaper than hot shoe attachments
• available in fancy colors

Most likely I will go with the nikon because it's just smaller or just skip on the flash till next year before I rush any decisions

for some reasons nothing is so difficult to shoot like roses. I never get sharp and nice looking pictures of them.

At least that's the best I could do with one flash and a reflector. A second SB-600 would be so wounderfull...

dear god help me I'm addicted to icecream from haeagen daaz...

This also demonstrates a shot from my 3$ do it your self shooting table based on tape, paper and some string :)

currently I really start to consider buying an umbrella and light stand to improve my portraits.

cost for umbrella system:

- umbrella 15$
- clamp 15$
- light stand 30$

which tops out at 60$ in total which is not to bad, but on the other hand I decided to not buy any stuff this month except some gaffer's tape. I need this to build some lightning mods like you can find here. But I still try to figure out why black duct tape doesn't do the job, I mean I can't find anywhere this gaffer tape.

oh I manage to sell my vivitar flash, I should have gotten an SB-600 in the first place now I have only one flash again and will some day find the cash for a second SB-600, only 90$ to go.

maybe I overdo it a tiny bit...


...but the list of stuff I want to have get's short and shorter, why does everybody I know has to use canon :(

currently I trying my best to understand the new "oh so cool standard ajax" and my first impression is whoever decided to mix java and java script is mentally insane.

For example I found the really cool portlet framework and trying to rewrite everything to use my existing authentication's. And boy its a freaking nightmare.


Now people could ask why do you use portlets in the first place, well they are kinda nice and I can give the user some right to arrange his own website. My final product is supposed to display some statistics of my database and provides me with a simple way to configure the database.

Last night I posted this picture in a newsgroup and finally got some nice reviews about my pictures from other photographs.

The reason I'm doing this is not to get responses like:

• nice picture
• wow
• wonderful

I get these responses from friends and I highly appreciate them, but they don't help me. I want to here critique so that I learn to avoid mistakes in the future. As an example this was a review I got for a picture from June last year:

Hey, I went to your link and your images all need work starting from the basic. Composition is off, lack of defined subject matter, exposure, etc… You are not using your photography skills to focus the viewer. I get lost in your images because; I am not sure what you want me to be looking at. Learn some rules like Rule of 3, Leading lines, Sunny 16 etc… Then expand your knowledge by more professional standards by reading, viewing other professional images, workshops, mentorship, etc…

Which told me, your pcitures suck, stop wasting my time and learn the basic. The problem with this was, when I showed these pictures to friends at this time, they liked them and told me great pictures.

Lesson: friends tell you most of the time it looks good, but to hear it from another photograph you don't know is way more value able.

So since this review I read a lot of books, put my camera away for 3 month and gave up, came back to it and invested in some good glass and started reading more and more about the topic and browsing a lot of books at stores.

Now what can I say about books:

• they show you pictures and tell you how they where taken
• you read them once or twice
• you can get the same information in the internet for free
• they improve your technique, but only to a certain point
• they are really boring to read
• they mostly repeat them self over and over again, like books about exposure.
• they show how me how difficult photography was in the old days when you had no display to evaluate your picture after a shot and to correct to exposure
  

Now one year later I got these reviews for a potraet which was done with a simple flash shot against the fall and a reflector to fill in some shadows. Basically do it the strobist way. Means use small strobes, be portable and flexible, break the rules and just have fun. (you do need to learn the rules first, thats why I read alot about them)

My best review was:

Re: C&C on a potrait please NEW
Martin Caie - 12 hours ago

Looks awesome to me. Looks like the kind of shot that would be in a biography if this lady were famous. I was going to say it was obviously a longer focal length because you avoided distortion, and now I see it was indeed (90mm).

Re: C&C on a potrait please NEW
K huack - 8 hours ago
Excellent photo. Can't find anything to fault.

Re: C&C on a potrait please NEW
allreddv - 4 hours ago

I think it a really great photo and a great pose. I have a couple of suggestions but please take them with a grain of salt. Since you are trying to concentrate on skin I think she is a little over exposed and you have lost quite a bit of detail in her skin. Especially around the nose and in the hand. The same is true with her lips and around them. I see you shot with at 3.5 and ISO 400. Why such a large aperture? If you step down just a but and lowered the ISO this might have given more detail. You really caught the look for her I believe and it is a great portrait. Again just some thoughts from someone else trying to learn to do the same. Would you mind posting the original?

The complete discussion can be found here.

Maybe one day I will consider to use an umbrella, they are just so:

• I wanna be pro but don't make money
• now I went totally nuts
  
• take this thing out of my face

So I think I stick with little flash's and diffusers.

Update:

I got some more critic and needed to update the picture. These seems to be the current final version.

Ok now I got a car insurance which covers me in case that somebody breaks into my car or steals my car.

And I also spend the last 2 hours playing in photoshop and trying to create another B&W which I'm most likely going to print next month. I just wished the focus was on the eyes and not on the nose, so it is a little bit to unsharp for my taste.


oh btw, I gave up uploading high res pictures of persons, people complained to much about to much details. You can find most of the pictures on my zenfolio page so you can print them in full resolution.

another day another break in into my car :(

I think I upgrade my insurance to anti theft insurance, it starts to make sense I think...

right now I finally start to work with OSX and after using it for 2/3 days I really have to say I will never ever buy a ppc again. I can run OSX/Linux/Windows on one system. It is very easy to use like a windows system, but give me the features of a unique system and last but not least it is very fast.

now I just waiting that you can install OSX on a IBM X60 some day and trying to find a good online source to get more out of it.

Another thing what I'm trying to figure out, how can I work on my pictures from different pc's and have a build in backup solution. My best idea is to setup a CVS server, but I'm honestly lacking HD space for this project. I got like 20GB of pictures right now and want to access them from any of our pc's at home. Maybe I can setup a mini mac to work as tiny server, but with a 40GB harddrive it is a little bit too limiting.

I'm also thinking to get rid of some pc's at home, right now we got:

3 x laptops
2 x desktops
1 x mini mac

and this for 2 persons is kinda much.

What we do with all this stuff?

2 x laptops needed to work at home
1 x laptop needed for lindsay to do her homework
1 x desktop so lindsay can play games or I can play once in a while

1 x old desktop collecting dust and to slow for everything (celeron 1GB, 64MB ram)
1 x mini mac, not in use since we got the third laptop, was used before as a mini database server for testing

after reading the first chapters in the book skin I decided to give it a go and took a couple of nice pictures of lindsay and started to play with them. And I must say, the book is really helpfull. For example how do you evaluate if the skin tone has a yellow cast or a green case?

For example in case of a yellow cast make sure that the midtones a related to each other like:

yellow is ca 10 units higher than magenta
cyan is arround 25 - 33% of the yellow value

So step one would be to define the white/black point using the curve function in photoshop and afterwards adjust the curve for blue to adjust the yellow/magenta ratio. In case of midtone adjustement you need to move the curve in the middle region till you have the correct ratios.

But before you start with this, it would be smart to calibrate your monitor. Cause right now the pictures are looking different on each of our systems :(

So I'm going to spent 70$ on a calibration tool and maybe I can share the cost with some friends who are most likley need the same tool. We will see

The pictures on the top are

(1) straight out of camera
(2) after lightroom adjustments
(3) after playing with photoshop a bit, like adjusting skin tones

The second series is basically a picture which was underexposed by 2 stops because my flash was out of battery so I tried my best to recover it. Which doesn't work very well in color, because It got to noisy so i tried to make a creative B&W out of it and I like the result so far, but some parts are still not perfect. Maybe I invest some more time later tonight.



(1) straight out of camera
(2) after lightroom adjustments to save the pictures
(3) after playing with photoshop a bit, like adjusting skin tones and converting to B&W

we planned ro have a nice trip to the coast or to the Sacramento zoo, but somebody decided to break into my car last night and now I spend the day talking to the police, which basically told me they can't do anything because tey found no fingerprints, my insurance tells me they don't cover it.
And last but not least on Monday comes a mechanic and charges me 200$ to put a new window into the car.


Eigentlich wollten wir heute zum Sacramento Zoo fahren oder in einen National Park. Dieses konnten wir jedoch nicht tun, da jemand meinte es sei witziger meine seitenscheibe einzuschlagen und mein auto aufzubrechen. So verbrachte ich dann den Tag damit meine Versicherung anzurufen, welche mir mitteilte da sie den Schaden nicht bezahlen werden. Oder damit das die Polizei mein Auto nach fingerabruecken untersuchte und mir mitteilte das sie leider nichts machen koennen. Nun am Montag kommt dann wenigstens der Technicker und wird mir ein neues Fenster einsetzen und ich darf dafuer 200$ bezahlen...

mhm at F/3.2 the Focus is fine and the sharpness too, maybe did something wrong.

the result of lindsay midnight adbenture to make the perfect cake. Now we just need to eat it...

It also shows me that I have problems to get sharp pictures with my 50mm F/1.8 wide open latley. Somehow I got focus issues.

And it happened again, I got another message from the stock agency I want to join with following text...

We found the overall composition of your lighting could be improved. Technical aspects that can affect the overall quality of lighting are: direct on camera flash, flat/dull colors, blown-out highlights, harsh reflection, shadows or lens flares. These all can limit the usefulness of a file. Try shooting in natural light or bouncing the flash from a reflective surface and/or using a custom white balance.

+ Please replace this sample so we may continue to review your application. Thank You.

which means I improved my technique, they at least approved 2 of 3 pictures, so only one to go till I finally get accepted. But this also tells me all the pictures I took so far are not suitable for sales.

At least I can still use the excuse Art != Stock. I start to understand whats the difference is.

On the top is one of the "Lab series" pictures straight out of camera and after slight adjustments in light room.

---

Und ich habe schon wieder eine Ablehnung meiner "Stock" Agentur bekommen. Diesmal hat ihnen meine Ausleuchtung nicht gefallen. Hauptproblem war das dass Bild etwas überbelichtet war. Allerdings war das eigentlich Absicht.

Jedenfalls fange ich an den unterschied zwischen Kunst und Stock zuerkennen. Stock ist vom Prinzip her nichts weiter als Bilder für Advertising.

...zeit für einen neuen Versuch.

Dies war das Bild was ihnen nicht gefallen hat

yay I finally got my hands on the book skin and so far I'm very impressed with it and got a lot of learning to do. But it really pisses me off that it's 23$ at amazon and I paid 39.99$ for it...

We also discovered a frozen joghurt store in davis...

...we will see what this means for the future, but right now lindsay is really sad...

to the left you see a part of our robot, basically it moves arround, mixes stuff, heats stuff and injects it into the gctof

I finally got the time to shoot some pictures in the lab and like always I'm surprised how much I like my macro lens and my ultra wide angle.

For example the picture on the left was shot at 10mm with a SB-600 Flash + Blue Gel from the left and the onboard flash to highlight the microscope.

The second picture is a part of an Agilent auto sampler and uses an orange filter in front of the SB-600.

To say it short I really start to make progress with my flash photographies since I got the D80, it's just wonderful to have a wireless flash.


Tonight we are going to go out for sushi, again, to celebrate the good bye of Mercedeh, which is leaving tomorrow.

By the way both pictures are more or less straight out of the camera. I just applied some curve management.

ok I finally hit the problem every photographer has, my stuff gets to heavy and my lenses are not long enough. For example the attached picture is a 100% crop of a picture I shot with my D80 and my 70-300mm VR zoom and as we can see I was not able to get close enough to the bird, which was flying above me.

Current identification says that's a red tail hawk, but I'm not 100% sure about this. Anyway after playing since 1 week with the D80 i finally archived correct exposures and my keeper rate is around 60-70%. At least exposure wise. So I think it was the right choice to buy it and time to save money for the next couple of month till we see a new toy which I need to have...

at least ducks tend to be very cooperative and don't run away, as we can see in the second picture.

-----

Nachdem ich seit einer Woche mit der neuen Kamera herumgespielt habe, kam ich zu zwei Erkenntnissen

1. ich bin glücklich mit der Kamera und muss jetzt mal wieder bissel sparen
2. wie immer ist das Teleobjektiv nicht lang genug

leider ist es auch so das man als Amateur sich grenzen setzen muss, und so sieht es aus das ich keine Falken fotografieren kann oder halt damit leben muss das sie sehr klein sind. Alternativ kann man ja auch probieren mal in den Bergen wandern zu gehen und erwischt sie da.

Wenigstens sind Enten dem fotografieren nicht abgeneigt, aber nachdem ich so ca 200 Fotos von Enten in allen möglichen Kombinationen habe sind sie nicht mehr so beeindruckend. Vielleicht komme ich ja mal näher an die Reiher oder Truthaene an ohne gleich angegriffen zu werden

the power of photoshop, currently I'm playing with the photoshop CS3 demo and I have to say I really like the new version. For an example the pictures we see are the basic 3 steps in my workflow, the color picture is straight out of the camera, the first B&W is after some adjustements and a B&W conversion in lightroom and the last B&W is after post processing in CS3. The main goal was to remove the stuff in the background from the picture. In total I spend maybe 35 minutes on this picture and it's far from perfect, but it's a start and I'm satisfied so far.

I'm also getting more and more comfortable with the D80 and finally start to get pictures where I'm happy with the results. Also the ISO 3200 speed proved to be very usefull. For example the picture bellow was shot at ISO 3200, mainly as a test and it works very well for B&W.

Die letzten Tage verbringe ich ueberwiegend damit mich in Photoshop CS3 einzuarbeiten oder wie ich denn die D80 benutzten kann. Zum beispiel die Serie am oberen ende dieses "Post" ist ein beispiel fuer meinen momentanen Arbeitsablauf. Als erstes werden die Bilder mittels "Adobe Lightroom" importiert und belichtungs fehler korrigiert und in schwarz/weiss konvertiert. Anschliessend benutzte ich meine PS CS3 Demo um stoerende elemente aus dem Hintergrund zu entfernen, oder kleinere optische Korrekturen vorzunehmen. Anschliesend werden die Bilder exportiert und landen je nach verwendungszweck bei picassa for blogs oder bei zenfolio fuer online Betrachtungen.

finally my database is working again and I found atleast one backup which did what it was supposed todo.

But now i really need a weekend...

for some reasons I had nothing todo today and did not feel like working on a saturday. So I went outside and watch one of the regularly softball games and snapped some pictures.

And i'm really amazed about the speed of the camera, except that I needed to switch sd cards so often and really need to get some sandisk Ultra III 4 GB cards for the future.

...the wishlist gets longer and longer. Sadly the D80 has also the problem that the high iso noise is pretty bad. I was really spoiled with the D50.

So the rest of the day I will spending at the pool, reading and working on a new backup program and hopefully get my database up and running...

The rest of these pictures you can find at:

http://berlinguyinca.zenfolio.com/p296703648

still trying to figure out if I want zenfolio or not. SmugSmug would offer me the possibility to sell pictures. Basically of each picture print you can define how much goes in your wallet. But i'm not paying 130$ a year for this service,not if i don't sell pictures for this amount of money.

for some reason I have a lot of time, prob related that every try to restore my database takes 4 hours, so I decided to grab my new toy and try to create some dramatic pictures on the cemetry near by.

90 minutes later i figured that the D80 is pretty difficult to use and I will take a while till I can use the metering on the camera. So far I have no way to predict the outcome, which kinda sucks. Also the noise is pretty damn bad over iso 400. I got 3 keepers out of 100 shots, which is pretty sad...

The best shot was the picture to the left. Which I don't know if I'm happy with it or not.

I also got an email from paypal that they are very sorry and will reimburse me for my trouble. Seems like we are making progress with this problem. I'm still waiting for feedback from the victoria insurance and my attempt to cancel the policy.

So what else,

i spent some time with my neighbors, or in other words tyler and I played a car racing game and kim was going nuts with my camera.

addicted to coffee,

since 20 hours I'm sitting here and trying to fix the database. It sadly lost alot of data after a bug in my software occured and for some reasons oracle does not like the thing i want;

please restore the backup from tuesday night...

nope its not happening...

To the left, I taking a break and playing with the D80 and filtered flashs, quite nice for out of camera with minor adjustments.

the smile of this little fellow represnts my current look,

my D80 arrived and I'm very happy that I got it instead of the D200. I really can use all functions over buttons and the integrated wireless commander mode is just wonderful. Not I just need to find a way to sync my Vivitar with it

Now I just need to learn how to use it.


...btw the picture needs a second a flash on the other side to highlight the nose shadow. But a friend of mine got my second flash so not much I could do.

ok since I get more and more pictures I need to find a new website to store them. Which brings it down too two possibilities:

smugsmug.com
zenfolio.com

so far i got a trial account at zenfolio which I really like and just playing around with it...

http://berlinguyinca.zenfolio.com/

so i just got of work and went to the camera store to compare the D40 with the D80 with the D200 and the D200 feels so right...

The D80 is so slow compared to it and just feels to small in my hands. I never thought there would be much off a difference, but certainly there is a huge difference between these 2 bodies. Is it worth 700$ difference?


Ok I gave in and did the smart choice, I ordered a Nikon D80 which is more than enough camera for myself and have to accept that it wont shoot at 5 fps. The Nikon D200 was just to much money.

crap,

my idea to wire money for free to Germany with paypal did not work to well. 31$ Transaction fee for wiring 800$ and it takes 2 weeks or so in total.

Next time I move my lazy ass to the bank...

..I also just managed to sell my D50 for 300$, which hurts badly but still better than have laying it around or breaking it during converting it to IR...

now what camera to get is the big question...

edit; now i was charged another 23 euro because the was some problem with my bank, pa pal ruely sucks

just playing with the 25 year ol d 200mm F/4 AIS. Which always suprises me how good this lens is. Specially for the price I pai last year, it was around 60 or 70$ and is completly manual, which means you need to:

- estimate the right exposure
- manual focus it
- estimate the exposure for the flash

which was quite easy, cause I only can use F/4 right now, otherwise the scratch becomes visible, and I just need to adjust the power of the flash.

Btw bottom picture is straight out of the D50, top picture is slightly enhanced.

I'm also really impressed with my database system at work, it just works right now. Scheduling/Import/Export, starting of cluster jobs, quality. All just seems to work.

So I finally can concentrate on some parts like Frontends and more statistics.

you are also never, ever supposed to google your own nickname. I use my nickname now since close to 3 names and boy I got a lot of hits with stuff I would had not expected.

- reference to photo forums, yeah I expected this
- reference to my mistake with feature pics, ok happens
- reference to my xbox gaming profile, I did not expect this, but it shows that I play not very much
- reference to work related stuff, ok seems logical
- reference to eve-online.com stuff, this now really surprises me. I was way to addicted to this game

0 references to my blog, time to change this

berlinguyinca
berlinguyinca
berlinguyinca

...maybe it's working...

ok another week, another fight with oracle procedures.

This time I figured out that I need some materialized views to speed up my statistics. So what you do?

You create a basic script...

bla bla bla

...create materialized view ...

bla bla bla


now you execute this script and all is fine and dandy, except...

the next time you execute this script, it crashes because of the obect exists already.

A simple fix to this problem is:

--check if the view exist and if this is the case drop it first--
open get_results for 'select count(*) from all_mviews where mview_name = UPPER(''MY_FANCY_VIEW'') and owner = UPPER('''||user||''')';
fetch get_results into maxCount;
close get_results;

DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE('count is: ' ||maxCount);
if maxCount > 0
then
DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE('dropping existing view');
execute immediate ('drop materialized view '||user||'.my_fancy_view');
else
DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE('no view exist with this name');
end if;

...create materialized view yada yada yada...


you can find the infos...

...about all registered views using:

select * from all_views

...about all registered materialized views

select * from all_mviews

...about all registered tables

select * from all_tables