Photo by: ufufnmitsue.

Spotted this pic in the recent uploads on Flickr. Nice scenic pic of the ocean and the seaside. The sky is well exposed (see the blueish tint to it), and the clouds add some visual appeal. But it looks like this little cove is in a shadow or something – the foreground is really shadowed, while the background is much brighter. Notice the rocks in the mid left that appear to be brighter (no shadow?). The picture is nice compositionally, but a little exposure adjustment in Photoshop/Lightroom to darken the background and lighten the foreground would help it out I think…

Photo by: richseow.

Found this pic in the recent uploads of Flickr. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but when I saw a little thumbnail of a sports pic I thought I’d check it out and see if it was any good. Turned out to be a decent shot of a rugby game in Singapore. There’s a quick enough shutter speed (1/1250th of a second) that there’s no motion blur at all. However, the image seems to be a little bit under-exposed. The turf is fine – nice and saturated – but the players are a little dark. This is exacerbated by the fact that they’re shadowed from the sun (note the faint shadow pointing emanating from #9′s foot). Mightta been a good candidate for an exposure compensation adjustment or just a little tweaking in Lightroom.

Whether you’re shooting for yourself or working for someone else, backing up your pictures in some way is crucial. Hard drives die, and if you don’t have any kind of back up… there goes your family vacation or your latest client’s photoshoot.

I’ve got a desktop and a laptop that I work with, and I have a 2 terabyte external hard drive (2tb Fantom Drive) that I back everything up on. I wanted another layer of backups after this, and I was looking into various options – DVDs, another external hard drive, etc.

The problem with DVDs is that I have a lot of files… and it will take a lot of DVDs to back them up. I’ve got over 100gb of pictures/files from last years yearbook, another 100gb of personal documents/music/pictures, and I’ll have another 1-200gb from next year’s yearbook and so on. That’s a lot of DVDs to copy and keep track of.

I could buy another 2tb external hard drive, and for another $130 I could have two copies of everything. But, this other hard drive would still be sitting on my desk at home. In the unlikely event of a theft/natural disaster, I’d be SOL.

So I thought about online storage. I was a bit skeptical at first, but after some research I decided that Mozy might be a good choice.

Overview: What You Get

When you sign up for Mozy, you install a backup application on your computer. You choose what documents you want to backup, and it’ll run in the background to send those documents to the server. You can easily pick and choose what you want to backup, and you can set a bunch of restrictions on when Mozy will run (i.e. at night, when you’re computer is idle, etc) so that the backup process doesn’t get in the way of your normal work.

As for storage, there are two options. A free account gets you 2gb of storage. If you take a lot of pictures, that’s nothin. The other option is to get an “Unlimited” account, which costs you $4.95 a month. You can also save money by signing up for longer terms, but I’m not ready for that yet… a month to month test run for $5/month is fine with me.

If you need your files restored, you can look through a kind of pseudo Windows Explorer, find the file/folder you want, specify where you want them to go (or send them back to their original location), and let it go to work downloading. Simple enough.

Is It Really Unlimited?

When something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Unlimited is big. That could be expensive. So can it really be unlimited for $4.95/month?

I wondered the same thing, so I dug around for some answers. I found a review with a nice conversation in the comments that suggests that both Mozy and one of its main competitors, Carbonite, will allow you to store upwards of a terabyte of information. I think that is reasonable. I’d probably look to eventually store 1 to 2 tb of information (the capacity of my external hard drive).

If business starts booming and I find myself with terabytes upon terabytes of picturess, then I’d probably invest some cash in more external hard drives and come up with a more sophisticated back up system. But, for my current needs, 1 to 2 tb sounds fine.

How Long Does It Take?

The biggest problem with an online storage solution is that you have to get the stuff to the server. At the moment, I’m looking to start off with about 250gb of data. That’s a lot. And it will take a long time to upload.

Today, I signed up for a free account to test out how long it takes to upload and download (restore) files from Mozy. I picked a handful of folders that totaled just under the 2gb limit (1.9gb, 1160 files) and I set it to work.

Uploading that collection took about 2 and a half hours. I’ve got a Cable connection that’s always worked pretty well. Based on this, it looks like something in the neighborhood of an hour or so per gigabyte. That’s not bad moving forward, since I would rarely have more than a few gigabytes of extra info at any given time (i.e. a memory card worth of photos). After an event or a shoot, I could backup the images to my external hard drive, set Mozy to run, and the new stuff would be on the servers by morning.

It is, however, a big time investment up front. I’m starting off with about 250gb of data, so if I sign up for an unlimited account, that’ll take somewhere in the neighborhood of 250-300 hours (10 to 12 days) to upload. Yowza. Two weeks?

As for restoring info, it takes a lot less time to download than it does to upload. I restored that same info to my desktop in just about an hour. That works out to about a half hour per gigabyte. Reasonable. But, again, if you’re hard drive crashes and you’re downloading everything, you’ll be at it for a while.

Bottom line – I’m Gonna Try It

After reading about it and testing out the free account, I think I’m going to give it a go. I’m definitely not ready to commit to a 2 year subscription, but I’d be happy to pay for a month or two to see how things go.

I can store all of my info offsite. It’ll take a while to get started, but once the initial chunk of data is uploaded it’ll be manageable going forward. It might take a while to recover the data, but I’m really not looking forward to ever needing to download the info. Just like insurance, it’s something you buy and something you hope you’ll never need. And I can always go in and selectively restore one or two folders if I need something right away and can’t wait a few days for the whole download to finish.

I’ll check back in after a few weeks of the unlimited service, and share how it’s going.

When you look at the dial on top of your camera, there’s probably an option labeled ‘A’ or ‘Av.’ This is “aperture priority mode.”

So what is aperture priority mode?

It’s a semi-automatic mode for your camera. You pick one setting (the aperture), and the camera automatically adjusts the other settings to get the exposure right. This gives you a certain amount of control without forcing you to constantly adjust the settings to maintain exposure (as you would in manual). The camera will automatically choose an appropriate shutter speed (and an ISO level if you leave that on auto).

So When Should I Use It?

Well, that depends. Some people use it almost exclusively, while some people prefer the control of manual. Here are some reasons you might want to consider aperture priority mode…

The Light Keeps Changing. If the lighting level around you is constantly changing, the proper exposure for the camera is changing too. If you’re in manual mode, you’ll need to constantly change the settings yourself to stay within a decent exposure range. If the light changes often, this can be a real pain… and it can also be disastrous if you don’t have the time to make those adjustments.

For example, I was recently at my sister in laws wedding. I was sitting in the crowd, snapping a few pictures of the ceremony. It was outside, and it was mostly sunny – but a little cloudy. When the ceremony started, there was a cloud blocking the sun, which limited the amount of light in the scene. Just as she started to walk down the aisle, the sun came out… increasing the amount of light. With the camera in aperture priority mode, it automatically adjusted the shutter speed. If I had it in manual (which I often do), I would have either a) shot the picture and overexposed it or b) taken the time to adjust the settings and missed the moment. Hmm… neither of those outcomes is very good.

Control the Depth of Field. The aperture controls the depth of field in a picture. There are other semi-automatic modes on your camera (Programmable Auto and Shutter Priority Mode), but Aperture Priority is the proper choice if you want to maintain a certain depth of field. If you want a shallow depth of field, open up the aperture and let the camera pick a shutter speed. If you want a big depth of field, do the opposite. This gives you some creative control without taxing your brain thinking about all the camera settings at once.

Photo by: Marco Nedermeijer.

I found this cool shot of seashells in the recent uploads section of Flickr. It was shot with a f/1.8 50mm lens wide open, giving it really shallow depth of field. The small group of seashells in the middle is in focus, but the picture very quickly drops out of focus as you move away from that center point. In this case, I think the depth of field is just a titch too shallow, and the image might be better served if the other parts are more in focus. After taking a second look, it’s also possible that the outer parts of the image were blurred after the fact in Photoshop. If so, then I think it was a little over-zealous…

But a cool image nonetheless, and a good illustration of selectively focusing on one subject and one subject only.

Photo by: Sangudo.

Last night, I got some new lighting equipment and I wanted to test it out. Since my wife rarely humors me, that left… the cats. The trouble with cats is that they don’t sit still and let you take their pictures, making it really hard to light them. So this morning I thought I’d look through the “Cats” tag on Flickr and pay homage to the patient photographer who caught a cat in a calm moment. In this case, the kitty is sitting in a bag, and it looks like the light is coming in from a kitchen window to camera right. The other problem with cats is that they like to get into tiny places that block out the light – like my kitten who wanted to jump in a box last night instead of chilling on the floor.

And, for the heck of it, here’s a picture I took of my kitten Finn last night while playing around with the new stuff.

This was lit with a single light, camera left about 45 degrees. I triggered it wirelessly with the Opteka radio triggers that I wrote about yesterday. I shot a Vivitar 285HV through the new Honl traveller8 softbox (which just came in the mail yesterday). At this point, Finn finally decided to cooperate and sit still on the pillow long enough for me to focus the camera…

When I first started reading about off-camera flash at Strobist, the biggest thing that baffled me was… How do I get the flash off the camera? David Hobby suggested Pocket Wizards, and while I’m sure they are awesome I wasn’t ready to plunk down that kind of cash just yet. Then, he started talking about other solutions involving PC cords, and that’s where he lost me…

I actually gave up on the site and the whole idea of lighting for a few months, and when I came back I picked up on the suggestion of “eBay” triggers – or basically cheap alternatives to Pocket Wizards. I found the Opteka wireless triggers on Amazon, and I decided to give them a shot.

Why Did I Pick These?

Too things drew me to the Opteka triggers.

One is that they are cheap. I think the prices are pretty standard for these off-brand eBay triggers, but in general I liked paying around $25 for a starter kit and an extra $10-15 for extra receivers. That beats $1-200 per receiver for Pocket Wizards, eh?

But what really helped me wrap my mind about the off-camera flash was the compatibility of this trigger with my camera. Although there’s an option to use PC-cords, it works with any standard hot shoe. The trigger mounts on the hot shoe of the camera, and the flash mounts on top of the receiver.

For other people, this might not be such a problem… but I have a Canon t1i (which has no PC connection) and I started with a Canon 430 EX II (which also has no PC connection). I was understandably confused, then, when the off-camera flash solutions all seemed to start with PC cables…

The hot shoe capability also makes this compatible with all kinds of old flashes. I dug my parents old Pentax flash out of the basement for a bit of experimentation before I ended up buying two Vivitar 285′s. All I needed was an extra receiver for each flash, and they worked fine with my Canon camera and other Canon flash.

What Was I Worried About?

Well, cheap obviously brings with it the risk of poor quality. There weren’t a lot of customer reviews on Amazon, but they were generally good. One problem that people generally raised, if there was one, was reliability. So I wondered, would these triggers fire every time I needed them to?

I was prepared to put up with a little flakiness, as long as they were generally reliable.  I mean, isn’t 95% good enough?  Would it be the end of the world if a handful out of every hundred pictures had the flash mis-fire?

Should I Have Been Worried?

Umm… no. Reliability has not been an issue at all.

I think over the next few weeks I’m going to sit down and test these transmitters methodically, to see if I can get an error rate out of a couple hundred frames. But I’ve rarely if ever noticed problem. On the few occassions that they did fail to fire, I determined it was one of two problems – dying batteries in the receiver or dying batteries in the flash.

Solution? Keep fresh batteries in your gear, and keep fresh batteries in your bag, duh. That said, you can take a lot of pictures before the batteries run down in the receivers. If you regularly recharge your batteries, you’ll have no problem at all with reliability.

On the other hand, when you look at the construction of it you can tell it is a bit… cheap. There’s basically a thin plastic case around a circuit board. I wouldn’t expect it to hold up to a beating. In fact, the battery door on one of my receivers has become a little loose, and I need some tape to hold it in place.

Bottom Line

By now, I’ve acquired a transmitter and three receivers. I’ve been using them for five or six months now. Reliability is not an issue at all (although I haven’t really stressed the range on them, so I don’t know when/if that will become an issue). Build quality does seem a bit cheap, but you get what you pay for… it’s not a lot of money to replace a receiver if you smash it to itty bitty pieces.

Would I like a set of Pocket Wizards? Sure. But it cost me about $50 to put together this three-flash wireless set. Four Pocket Wizards would cost upwards of $600 or $700.  Ouch.

If you’re looking for a starter set of wireless triggers so that you can start working with off-camera flash, the Opteka set will work just fine. In the big scheme of wireless flash solutions, it may not be 5 stars… but it absolutely does what it’s supposed to do – be a cheap, reliable way to trigger your speedlights from a distance.

Photo by Bo No Bo.

Summer is awesome. But, one of the good things about fall is that football season arrives. Over the years, I’ve lost interest in most other sports, but college football is fun to watch, and high school football is even more fun when you get to roam the sidelines and take pictures of the action. That’s why I dove into the “Football” tag and looked for something good. This might not be the sexiest action pic, but it’s got all the good basics. Tight focus on the subject (the quarterback) and a quick shutter to eliminate the blur. I wonder where the QB is going to throw that ball…

On a side note, it was interesting to see the ratio of soccer pics to American football pics in the “Football” tag. I wonder if that’ll change come the fall/winter…

Photo by: ayeyister.

I stuck with yesterday’s theme and kept sifting through the “Portrait” tag for something interesting. There’s a color version of the same picture in ayeyister’s photostream, but I initially saw this black and white one and I thought it was nifty. It’s a self portrait, and the hair and facial expression are priceless. I’ve seen a couple of my students when their hair was like this, and no way in hell were they gonna let me take their picture. So kudos for that bit of bravery.

It looks like the picture is lit from camera right. You can see the shadow falling across her nose on the upper left part of her face, and there’s also a catch light in the bottom right part of her eye. I’d guess a window, as the light wraps around kind of softly. But it could also be a lamp I suppose. Curious now…

Photo by: Hyuni.

I was browsing through the “Portrait” tag on Flickr, hoping to find some nice strobist work that showed off a skillful use of light. Then I saw this picture, and I was really drawn by the pose. Stopping the action of the model flicking her hair is pretty cool, but at first glance I thought this was just a natural light shot… cause it’s got a nice muted look to the lighting.

Then, I looked a little closer and saw the flash on the light stand in the background, rather out of focus. Hmm… My guess is there’s a light to camera right (you can see a bright spot on the back of her left sleeve, as well as a shadow behind the railing). There’s also a light coming down from the left a bit – notice how the collar of the shirt is highlighted, but the rest of it drops into a gentle shadow (maybe that’s the sun coming down through the trees?). One way or the other, it’s a nice, gentle lighting scheme that fits the scene well.