Write More Quickly
by | posted in: Stimulus and Production | 1

with the DASH method!

I hate to admit it, but when I write on this blog, or any of my blogs, really, I often find myself floundering about.
Sometimes, I just keep typing until something mildly coherent comes out.  But, the better posts are the result of me stopping for a few minutes and contemplating what message I’m trying to get across to my readers.  And, although I haven’t written fiction in many years, it used to work the same way there, too.  My stories always came out easier when I spent a little bit of time figuring out where the story was going.

Phillip Vassallo of the American Management Association has written a short article title Writing with DASH that seems to bear that out.
DASH is an acronym that stands for Direction, Acceleration, Strength and Health and forms the basis of a pretty good writing strategy.  First, he recommends that you always take a minute to figure out the direction you want to take your writing before you begin.  Next, he suggests that setting aside self-criticism and other similar barriers to your work will allow you to accelerate your progress.  He goes on to say that you need to maintain your stamina in physical sense to keep the strength of your writing good.  And, finally, over the long-haul of your writing “career”, he quite correctly suggests that maintaining your health will make it easier to continue writing.
He also goes on to give some other general tips about writing, but, don’t take my word for it, go read the article for yourself.

And then get writing!

 

Creating A World
by | posted in: Photography, The Tools | 1

It’s been said that every writer creates the world in their fiction, even if it’s not science-fiction, for their characters to explore.
Photographers can do the same thing.

I’ve always been a fan of science-fiction and fantasy in all its forms.  I remember as a kid seeing Star Wars in the movie theater and being completely captivated.  And, of course, like most geeks of my generation, I played Dungeons and Dragons and other table-top role-playing games.  Games that were born from the world of miniatures and war games.  Entire books have been written about all that, but today, I’m only interested in one aspect.  The building of miniature worlds.
In the old days, before we had all the fancy digital effects, movies were made with models.  So, yeah, basically, they were made my favorite way, in camera.  And, as regular readers know, I’m all about making the photo in the camera, not in software.  So, here are two totally different ways to approach this.

First, there’s photographer Cera Hensley who makes fantasy worlds on a three-foot-by-three-foot table.
Now she makes her miniature tableaus and then photoshops people into them later.  I’d prefer to do something more like Slinkachu does, and use tiny, model-railroad figures instead.  It’s sort of like making a tilt-shift photograph by hand, but there’s a certain appeal to it for me.  In fact, I’ve always thought I’d like to get some fantasy miniatures and scenery, or even some science-fiction version of that, and build little scenes to photograph as realistically as possible.
Secondly, for something decidedly more other-worldly, I saw a tutorial recently for turning a fish tank, salt water and dyes into an alien environment for photography.  It looks amazing and, honestly, amazingly easy to do!  Though I have to admit, it’s probably harder to pull off well than it looks in the tutorial.  Combine that with model of a spaceship and, well, I might be able to photograph covers for science-fiction novels that I’m always planning to write!

So, there are two things to experiment with this weekend.  Go and have fun!
Next month, more writing related links!

 

 

Perfect Portrait Posing
by | posted in: Photography, The Tools | 1

So, as promised, or threatened, this month I’ve got nothing but photography posts for  you on Friday.
PrettyLadyPrettyTattoos-2
Two weeks ago, I mentioned how I wanted to do more portrait work and gave you a link to a portrait cropping guide.
Well, I have to admit, one of the reasons I want to do more portrait work is because I find people a little challenging sometimes.  Believe it or not, I’m actually really shy, and have been most of my life.  One of the ways I sought to over come some of that in the past several years is with photography.  I can still be a little hesitant in my street shooting, but I got more comfortable using the camera as an ice-breaking tool.  Not only does it give me something to talk about with any potential portrait subjects, but it gives me an excuse to interact with them at all.

ALifeInTheCarnival-2In the case of the woman with the eyes tattooed on the back of her neck on the left, it was really the first time I’d worked up the courage to talk to a subject of my street photography, as opposed to just being a photographic sniper of sorts.  She was really nice, actually, and, I think, a little flattered that I was taking her photo.  I did get a shot of her face, too, but only after I’d gotten the shot of her tattoos.
About a year later, I captured that fella to the right, working his booth at a traveling carnival.  I talked with him more, drawing him out, trying to get him to trust me a little more so I could get a better shot of him.  I don’t think he really quite got to trust me, but I think I did the best with what I could get from him and with my fledgling skills as a candid portrait photographer.  I really wanted to get a shot of his eyes, which were an intense, icy blue, but he was too shy to look into the camera.

And, as much as I love doing these kinds of shots, I would really like to do something more formal.  Mostly because it would be something different than I’ve already done, but also because, let’s face it, I’m more likely to make a little money that way!  So, clearly, I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.  This week, I thought it would be good to focus on posing a better portrait.  So, here’s a link to  Tips for Perfect Portrait Posing from the Photo Argus, folks who know a lot more about great photography than I do.
If you have ever had any thought of doing portrait work, go read this.  It’s a relatively short article, but it goes way beyond the old saws of  “always focus on the eyes”, though it does include that pretty important tip.

 

Light Painting
by | posted in: Photography, Stimulus and Production | 1

LightPaintingExperiment-Fire-4
Cool light techniques.

I love doing tricky things in camera.
Look, I work with software all day long at my regular gig, so when I get home, I don’t really want to spend hours and hours working with Photoshop to make a “photograph”.  To me, the whole point is to make photographs with the camera, not with software.  I know, it probably makes me an antique, but, well, there it is.
I’ve done some work with light painting, though, thanks to my tragic loss of archived photos last week, most of the results of that have been lost.  Still, it was fun and the few light painting photos I posted to Flickr did seem to be well received, so I’ve thought about doing it again.  And, this time, I think I’d like to make fancier light painting tools.
(That shot to the left there is one of mine from that set on Flickr.)

If you’d like to try your hand at it, check out this article on DIYPhotography.net, titled Light Painting and EL Wire Secrets Revealed.
For those of you not familiar with the term, EL Wire is “ectroluminescent wire“, which, in a nutshell, is phosphorescent wire that glows when you put a charge on it.  If you’re a science-fiction or movie fan, you saw a lot of that in 2010’s TRON:Legacy movie.  In the article I linked to at the top of the paragraph, the author uses EL wire to make amazing light painting effects, in camera.  In fact, even if you’re not interested in doing this, but just want to see something cool, go look at that article.  Trust me, those shots are awesome!

And, if you’re a photographer, why not give this a shot this weekend?  Really, it’s fun and a lot easier than it might seem.  And, you can use flashlights you probably already have around the house or some cheap LED “glow sticks”, like I did, that you can get easily and cheaply.
Give it a try and have some fun!

Portrait Cropping Guide
by | posted in: Photography, The Tools | 1

More photography links this month.

I started this blog, and this entire website, to highlight things I enjoy, things that give me life.
I meant that to be writing and photography, and maybe a little spirituality lightly sprinkled through all that.  But, I have to admit, lately, there hasn’t been a lot of time or energy in my life for those things.  Oh, spirituality is something I pursue constantly, regardless of my day-to-day circumstances, but the writing and photography have sort of drifted to the wayside a bit.
I blame happiness.
You see, I’ve been fairly content to spend most of my waking hours, when I’m not at work, with my girlfriend who moved in about two months ago.  She certainly adds to my quality of life!  But, I still miss the photography and writing.  So, you all are going to get another month of photography links, because I hope that will inspire me to get that Canon 5D MkII that I was so proud of getting out more often.  My last excuse of needing to install Lightroom and Portrait Professional on the new laptop has been taken care of now, so, I don’t really have any valid excuses for not shooting.  And, now that I’ve probably lost most of my old, saved photos from the past five years, I’m even more motivated to get out shooting!

One thing that I really want to do more is portrait work.
I’ve shot one friend’s family holiday photos for the past several years and I really enjoyed that.  And, I’ve done plenty of street portraits, as I “run and gun” through an event here in Houston.  Now, with a newish girlfriend, I’d really like to get her in front of the camera more.  (Is she still a “new” girlfriend when we’ve been dating for a year and she lives with me now?  Hmmm….)  So, with that in mind, here’s what I hope is the lamest link I have for you this month, the Digital Camera World Free Portrait Cropping Guide.
Since we all know that editing is what makes good photos great, I thought it might be appropriate to share a simple guide to how to, and how NOT to, crop a portrait.  Frankly, I’ve had questions about it and this sets things straight in my head.

Next week, hopefully, something more fun!
(I plead data loss worries for the slow start this month!)

Clean Slate
by | posted in: About The Author, Photography | 1

“Two is one and one is none” – Navy SEAL training slogan

In my other life, I work with data.  Lots and lots of data.  All of it is what’s called “mission critical”.  In other words, if any of it gets lost or damaged the boss will have my guts for garters, as the old saying goes.  So, bearing that in mind, you’d think I’d know better than to have a single copy of my photos.  Yeah, you’d think that, wouldn’t you?
In the world of data and backups, nothing is more true than that oft-quoted Navy SEAL slogan “two is one and one is none”.  And, nothing is more true.  Tuesday night, I was reminded of that the hardest way possible; a crashed drive.

For five years, I have shot photos.  In fact, I shot somewhere in excess of 18,000 photos over the course of those five years.  Sure, not all of them were “keepers”, at least in the sense that I may have only chosen to share one out of every five or ten I actually took, but, still, that’s a lot of data that’s gone up in a puff of smoke.  Or, in this case, the horrifying clicking of a bad hard drive.
This all started when the hard drive on my laptop, which I use to process most of my photos, started getting full.  I got an [amazon_link id=”B004I3ZTU6″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]IOMega Two Terabyte Network Attached Storage device[/amazon_link], hooked it up to my network and moved all my photos there.  And, it worked great.  I got all my data up there and updated my Lightroom catalog with the new location and everything was great for a couple years.  I kept meaning to get a second NAS drive to back up the first one to, but, well, I never quite got around to it.
What I did get was a Pogoplug, which is a pretty nifty device.  It lets me connect up to four USB drives, of any kind, and share them on a network.  Basically, it works like Dropbox, once you install the companion software.  So far, it’s been working great!  And, if the Pogoplug device fails for some reason, I can just plug the USB drive directly into my PC until I get a replacement Pogoplug.  Right now, I’ve got two one terabyte drives hooked up to it, and have one set to mirror to the other, which is like creating an automagic backup every time I update the main drive.  Sadly, I was about to copy my photos to that system on Tuesday when something was “suddenly” wrong with my old IOMega NAS.  The drive, it seems, had finally gone bad.  It happens.  I mean, eventually, a hard drive will stop spinning.  And, I have to admit, this one has been running for literally years.

It’s not a total loss for me, I suppose, since I have most of the best shots uploaded to my Flickr photostream.  But, still, that’s only about 4,000 of those 18,000 originals and not having all those originals makes my heart clench just a little.  I’m going to get a quote on data restoration for that drive, but if it’s very expensive, I probably won’t pay the money for it.  If I were a professional photographer, I would have to pay the money to get my photos back, but I’m not.
And, really, I should have known better.  As I have told people so often, if  you only have one copy of your data, whatever it is, then you don’t have a backup.  You only have a backup if you can delete one copy and know that a second one will be there to replaces it.  So, going forward, I’m going to get two more drives, that I can mirror together via that Pogoplug and start shooting again.
Rather than look at it as a disastrous loss, I’m going to look at it as wiping the slate clean.  I get to leave off the old baggage of my past work and go forward, creating something new and, hopefully, beautiful.

But, let my mistake serve as a warning to all you photographers out there; one copy of your work on an external drive is NOT a backup!
“Two is one and one is none”!

Perspective Change
by | posted in: About The Author, Photography, The Tools | 1

One of the many things I love about photography is its ability to shift my perspective.
But, sometimes, I need to adjust the perspective of my photographs!
I take a lot of different kinds of photos.  Mostly, I take candid shots of people and animals, but I also take photos of my friends’ art as well as the occasional bit of industrial work, as you can see in my local photo gallery.  On very rare occasions, I’ll take architectural photos, but only for fun.  So, while I professional might spend thousands of dollars on a special lens to help correct the perspective problems of shooting up the length of tall buildings, I’m not quite willing to make that kind of investment.  So, what’s a poor, amateur photographer to do?

Enter Perspective Image Correction software, a free, Open Source software available for download from SourceForge.net!
This little beauty will let you select several “pivot points” in your photo and correct the perspective so that those points form the correct front-facing focal plane.  Granted, this process will trim some of that photo off at the edges to get the correction, but it does work quite well and, as I mentioned before, it IS free.  One cannot have everything, after all, and for a free program, I think it’s pretty awesome.

So, get out there this weekend and shoot up a storm of photographs and then try this software out!
(Be sure to read the requirements, as it will require some installed prerequisites that you may need to download first, and it only works on Windows.  Sorry Mac users!)

More DIY Japanese food
by | posted in: About The Author, Red Herrings | 1

Although, I suppose it doesn’t have to be Japanese…
I’m talking about bento, in this case.  Since I seem to be switching between photography links and talking about Japanese food, I thought I’d just go ahead and keep that up.
I’ll be honest, I’ve never actually had bento, but I have read about bento boxes and their cultural significance.  And, also, they’re a feature of virtually every really good anime.  I have several [amazon_link id=”1568363931″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]cook books that are dedicated to bento[/amazon_link], actually, though I’ve never quite gotten around to trying any of them out.  Traditionally, they’re made with various kinds of Japanese food, but, as this photo group on Flickr, Just Bento, shows, they can really be almost anything.
So, then, the question for me is how to actually get started making bento.  I hope that this article, titled “Bento 101“, may help, both me and whatever poor, lost soul has wandered into the cold, dusty, semi-deserted corner of the internet that houses my sad, little blogs.

Maybe, now that I have a brilliantly organized kitchen, thanks to my lovely girlfriend, I’ll actually get around to trying some of the recipes I have or that are found in the tutorial I linked to above.  Or maybe you gentle readers will and comment on it below.
It sounds like the perfect weekend culinary adventure to me!

11 Photography Cheat Sheets
by | posted in: Photography, The Tools | 1

I really need to start generating original content instead of posting links to someone else’s work.
I’ll get on that Real Soon Now, but in the mean time, I’m going to continue the way I’ve been going.
So, as anyone who’s followed this blog more than a month knows, I’m into photography.  Granted, I haven’t hardly touched my camera in months because I’ve been busy cleaning my house with my girlfriend and helping her move in, but, still, I do love photography.  And, I love cheat sheets.  In my “day job” as a technology professional (ie. a network geek), I use cheat sheets for all kind of things, especially operating systems that I don’t use on a regular basis.  Well, sadly, my camera has fallen into that category of “things I haven’t used on a regular basis” lately, so I went looking for cheat sheets to remind me about all the things I’ve forgotten about using it.
What I found was an entry by The Photo Argus titled Extremely Useful Photography Cheat Sheets for your Quick Reference.  And, what they have are a list of eleven photography cheat sheets for various situations.  Everything from shooting in low-light situations to wedding photography and most things in between.  Each has a short paragraph about what the cheat sheet is and why it’s useful, so you can pick and choose.
Also, there’s a good primer on basic, universal DSLR settings from the amazing graphic designer David Seah, which is another good review.

So, if you’ve gotten rusty, like me, why not download one or more that appeals to you and tuck into your photography gear bag when you go shooting this weekend?
(And, of course, get out there this weekend and get shooting again, also like me!)

Rating Ramen
by | posted in: Red Herrings | 6

Remember how I wrote last week that this month was going to be a little random?
This is what I meant.
So, people who know me well know that I love instant ramen noodles.  In fact, just back in January, I was going on about the joy of ramen and how much I loved it in all its reconstituted glory.  Well, once upon a time, I thought I would share my love of ramen with the world by rating all the different kinds of ramen that exist and that I have or could consume.  As it turns out, that old saying about no idea being original is pretty true, even in the world of ramen joy.  I knew there had been a Japanese fan of ramen, who obsessively reviewed them, but, that’s not so surprising considering that instant ramen started in Japan.  Besides, his site was all in Japanese which made it hard to share with all of us English-speaking ramen fans.

Thankfully, I’m not alone in my love of ramen.
An intrepid soul after my own heart, Hans Lienesch, has started his very own Ramen Rater blog where he shares his experiences and opinions about various varieties of instant ramen with the world.  And, it’s all in English, lovingly illustrated with amazingly comprehensive photographs of every aspect of the ramen he reviews.
It’s fantastic!
And, it’s more than I would have done had I done any kind of reviews of instant ramen.

So, if you’re like me and a fan of instant ramen, or even if you’re a poor college student forced to live on ramen against their wishes, go check out this wonderfully obsessive blog and make the most of your instant ramen choices this weekend!

UPDATE: The link to the site has changed and been updated.  Thanks for the info Hans!

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