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So I''ve been MIA on here for a while. Not that I think that anybody noticed, but just in case you were wondering what I've been up to I thought I'd give you an update on what's been keeping me so busy. I spent most of March working on a set of commercials for the Kentucky Lottery. These are the alternate cuts that are slightly different than the ones on air. Here they are:





This one looks like continuous shot, but it's actually 4 different takes. Can you tell?



The actor in this spot kept looking around. It looked kinda odd, so we put a fly in.

Seriously?

Even though this article on CNNMoney was posted on April 1st, it doesn't appear to be an April fools day joke. Am I missing something? Some woman seriously asked the question:

The man I love is married to another woman. He wants to leave her, but he says that he can’t afford to get a divorce - that he’ll lose his house and end up with huge child support payments. I have the resources to help him out. But I’m wondering, is it ethical for me, his girlfriend, to subsidize Danny’s divorce?

If this woman were a bank robber, she'd probably loose sleep at night wondering if it was ethical to waste gas by leaving the getaway car running during her heists.

Sound Doctrine

From WKRC:

A Maineville woman says she's lucky after finding some divine inspiration while shoveling her mulch.
Mary Meyers moved to Maineville from Chicago, and she doesn't know many people out here. She says she was surprised when she found this statue of a saint in her mulch. She's not sure how it got there, but she says it's a sign things are going to turn around for her.
We did a little research, and it looks like it's Joseph, the patron saint of carpentry and workers. People have been known to bury statues of Joseph in their yards. The gesture is said to speed up the sale of a home.

I'm sorry, but how is this any different than witchcraft?

Irreverent But Funny

OK, if you're easily offended don't continue reading. If you're cynical enough to like Mike's blog, then you'll enjoy this.

For those of you who don't know, my dad died of cancer almost 9 years ago. His name was Henry. A week ago I got this letter in the mail:

The Real Victims

In all the chaos of the global economic downturn, it's easy to forget the real victims: fashion models.

For Krissy

A few days ago Krissy asked a photography question:

"How do you take great night pictures? I will be doing some photography for a wedding in two weeks and the bride would like an outdoor picture of herself with Cincinnati in the back ground, at night."

My first suggestion was to have them stand really still and take a long exposure (like maybe 5 seconds). People used to have to hold still for much longer times in the early days of photography, but to keep the subject still they would use a clamp on their head - I recommend you don't try that with the bride. Anyway, I think the long exposure would look the most natural, maybe with a little bit of a bounced flash (probably using either the slow-sync or the rear-sync modes) to make her stand out.

That's a tricky shot though, and may be tough to pull off when you're under the gun. If the person moves at all or even blinks, the shot will be blurry. As a backup method, I recommended shooting two pictures and Photoshopping them together. After I suggested this, I wondered how it would work in real life, so I gave it a try. Here's a recap of what I did in my test. While not a full-blown tutorial, it should give you an idea of how to recreate the effect.

Below is a picture I took of myself (using the Nikon ML-L3 remote) a few nights ago while I was out getting groceries. Clicking on any of the photos to see it full-size. (apparently when I'm doing photography tests my mouth hangs open)

Flash Used: Yes - Nikon SB-400 (Auto, return light not detected)
Focal Length: 18.0mm (35mm equivalent: 27mm)
Exposure Time: 0.0050 s (1/200)
Aperture: f/3.5
ISO equiv: 900
White Balance: Auto
Exposure: shutter priority (semi-auto)

Yeah, it's pretty awful lighting, but I didn't want to spend too much time on this so it will have to do. The NKU campus is behind me, but because I used a flash to light myself up the background falls off almost completely into the blacks.

I then took a long-exposure (5 sec) background plate, in which you can actually see the campus in the background and even some texture in the sky.

Flash Used: No
Focal Length: 18.0mm (35mm equivalent: 27mm)
Exposure Time: 5.000 s
Aperture: f/7.1
ISO equiv: 200
White Balance: Auto
Exposure: shutter priority (semi-auto)

I dropped both layers in Photoshop (I wasn't using a tripod, so I had to align them a little) . I added a layer mask (Layer > Layer Mask > Reveal All) to the layer of me, and used the paintbrush to paint the mask you see below:

The initial result is pretty bad because of the difference in lighting:

I did a little color correction to my layer to match the look of the background, although if I had spent a little more time lighting myself better this may not have been necessary. While I'm at it let's close my mouth a little:

And finally I'll blend in a little of my layer back into the foreground to make the difference in lighting a little more gradual and make the picture a little more believable:


If I had to do this again and wanted to make it look nice, here's what I'd do different:

• Use a tripod.
  
• Take several shots with the person in the frame at several speeds, maybe 5 sec, 3 sec, 1 sec, 1/10 sec & 1/60 sec. In each of these make sure the aperture is open all the way.
• On the shorter exposures I'd use a flash bounced off a white card, and on the longer exposures I'd either rear-sync bounce flash or use some constant lighting source. That would give me several options, and I'd pick the longest exposure that wasn't blurry (from the person moving).

Let me know if you try this, or if you have any alternative methods. I'd love to see your results.

Backing Up

All three of my regular readers here use Blogger for their own blogs, so you might not be aware about the recent JournalSpace fiasco. Basically the folks at JournalSpace had a rather lousy backup procedure and lost all their users' data. Rather than trying to recover from this, they are simply shutting their doors (probably a wise move) and thousands of users are left without a trace of their blog.. Now I don't want to sound like your mom, but it might be a good time to learn from the misfortune of others and backup your own blog. I trust the integrity of the data I have stored with Google, but you just never know.

Fortunately making a backup of your Blogger blog is a pretty simple process. The first step is to export your blog itself. From your Blogger dashboard click on Settings which will automatically put you on the Basic settings tab. The first item on that page is Blog Tools and you will see three options: Import Blog - Export Blog - Delete Blog. Click on Export Blog. It may take a minute for this request to process, but after it does you will see a page with a button that says Download Blog. Click on that button ans save the file to you hard drive. The file it saves will be an XML file, and if you try to open it you'll just see a bunch of code, so the only way to use this file is to import it into Blogger should something ever happen to your blog. You may want to consider doing this every month or so.

The process above backs up all your posts and comments, but not your pictures. To back up your pictures you must have Picasa installed. Fortunately for you Mac users out there Picasa recently became available for OSX. After you have Picasa installed, make sure you're signed in to Blogger and then go to your Picasa Web Album. You may not have even known that you had one, but if you have a Blogger blog then you do. You should see an album with the name of your blog (it will have the little Blogger icon by it too). Click on the album and you'll see all the pictures you've ever posted to your blog. Above the pictures click on Download, then Download to Picasa.

That's it! Now you have all the elements of your blog saved to your computer. Hopefully you'll never need to use them, but it's nice to know you have everything just in case.

Buying a DSLR Part 4: Accessories

Memory - The camera doesn't come with a memory card, so be sure to get one. It takes SD memory, which is just about the least expensive and most readily available type of memory out there right now. A decent quality 2GB card can be had for as little as $5, and will hold about 1000 pictures in Normal quality mode (see the chart below). If you're going to be shooting a lot of RAW/NEF images then you'll probably want to go with a faster card for about $15 (although keep in mind that since NEF images are a lot bigger, you'll only get about 260 pictures on a 2GB card, so you may want to consider a 4GB card). I almost always shoot in Normal mode. With memory as cheap as it is today I could certainly shoot in Fine mode, but the quality is imperceptible and so I see no reason to create files that are almost twice the size.

Quality	Image Size	Pictures per GB*
Basic	0.7MB	1000
Normal	1.4MB	500
Fine	2.6MB	270
RAW	5.7MB	130
RAW+Basic	6.5MB	115

*The actual number of pictures depends on what you're shooting, so these numbers may vary.

Flash - The flash we have is the Nikon SB-400 - it's $100. It's a great little flash that I use constantly. If you're trying to decide between a second lens and a flash, I'd get the flash. The best part about the flash is that it rotates up 90°. This may sound odd, but when used indoors it bounces off the ceiling, creating the effect of lighting your subject with a 10' x 10' softbox from above. The results are amazing - bright, warm and natural. They don't look like they were taken with a flash. Nikon has a pretty nice page that shows some example shots (apparently using the SB-400 also magically makes people smile too). You can also turn the camera 90° and take a vertical shot (the flash will not be pointing sideways). This works best when the flash is pointing at a wall that is between 3 and As long as the batteries have a decent charge on them the flash is very quick to refresh. On a fresh set you can usually take 3 pictures in a row (in burst mode) before the flash fails to keep up (missing the 4^th one), and even then it will usually fire again on the 5^th one.

The flash takes 2 AA batteries, and lasts for at least 100 pictures. I recommend getting a set of NiMH rechargeables and a charger. I got a set similar to this, but if I were buying today I'd get a set of Sanyo Eneloops. Those chargers take about 8 hours to charge a set of batteries. You could also get a quick-charger, but that shortens the life of the batteries. The batteries come 4 to a pack, so as long as you charge 2 while you're using 2, you should never be without a good set.

Remote - Probably not necessary, but fun and potentially useful, the ML-L3 remote does what you'd expect a camera remote to do for about $17.

Camera Bag - We got the Tamrac 5533 which holds the D40, 2 lenses, SB-400 flash, cables adapters and chargers just fine.

Well, that's about all I have to say on the subject of DSLR's for now. Let me know if you have any questions, and I'll pretend to know the answer.

Buying a DSLR Part 3: The Lenses

With DSLR's, the cameras isn't tied to a certain lens. This is nice because you have a little more flexibility when you go to buy. In this post and the ones to follow, I'm going to assume you're going with a Nikon D40. There are several things to consider with a lens:

Focal Length - Focal Length is the distance in mm from the optical center of the lens to the focal point, which is located on the sensor. A more simplistic definition is that smaller numbers produce wider images, while higher numbers produce closer images. A zoom lens is also known as a variable focal length lens because by moving the optical elements in the lens you change the focal length of the lens (zooming in or out). The lens in the picture above has a focal length range of 18-55mm, and the lens is currently set to 35mm. 18-55mm is a common zoom lens that covers the range from wide (18mm) to medium (55mm). A 55-200mm lens picks up where the 18-55mm leaves off and provides a much closer shot.
As a side note I should mention focal length multipliers and 35mm equivalent. I'm not going to go into detail on these terms, but rather point you to an article that explains them. You don't need to know about these to buy a DSLR, but if you like to soak up all the information you can then it's good reading.

VR - Nikon lenses with VR in the name have Vibration Reducing technology which compensates for camera movement when taking a picture resulting in less blurry pictures, especially when taking pictures in low light without a flash (where the shutter is opened for longer). Keep in mind that this does not prevent blur resulting from a moving subject (like someone moving thier head during a shot). These lenses cost a little more, but I've heard they're worth it. None of my lenses are VR and I have not used one so I can't comment, except to say that if I were buying new equipment now I'd probably spring for at least one VR lens. (the lens in the picture above is not a VR lens)

AF-S - Since the Nikon D40 does not have an internal focus motor, you'll want to make sure the lenses you get are AF-S lenses, which actually have the motor built into the lens itself. Other Nikon lenses will work, but you will have to manually focus. (the lens in the picture above is an AF-S lens)


Below are some common lenses for the D40, the current price at B&H and my recommendations. For each lens I have a picture of the lens, along with two images taken at both extremes of the zoom range. Click on them to see a larger view.

Basic Lens $119 - 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G ED II AF-S DX or $149 -18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G VR AF-S DX If you can only afford one lens at first, then it should be an 18-55mm. This will be the best lens for indoor shots and is suitable for most outdoor shots. There is a VR and a non-VR version, although I have not seen the D-40 bundled with the VR lens, so you may be better off going with the non-VR.

Telephoto Lens $169 - 55-200mm f/4-5.6G ED AF-S DX or $198 - 55-200mm f/4-5.6G ED VR AF-S DX Your second lens should probably be a 55-200mm "telephoto". This will give you much more zoom power, which is great for several things:

1. (Obviously) shooting things that are far away that you can't physically move closer to.
2. Candid close-ups of people. People look the most natural when they don't know they're being photographed (if they know they usually look annoyed).
3. Narrow depth of field (DOF) shots. There are a couple of ways to accomplish the classic portrait look with the background thrown out of focus, but using a telephoto lens is perhaps one of the most practical.

Again, it is available both with and without VR, and you should be able to find both versions bundled with the camera. I would recommend going with the VR version. (If you decide not to get the VR because you don't want to spend the extre $30, go ahead and get it anyway and I'll give you my non-VR lens + $30 in exchange for it)

The Ultimate Lens $619 - 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G ED-IF AF-S DX VR II If you have a ton of money to burn, get the 18-200mm VR lens. It costs quite a bit more than the camera itself, but it's a great lens and you can shoot both wide & telephoto without swapping lenses.

Prime Lens $439 - 50mm f/1.4G AF-S The 50mm f/1.4 is a great lens for shooting people. f/1.4 means is needs very little light to shoot. It's also the best way to take shots with very narrow DOF. It doesn't zoom, so you just have to move closer or further away to get the framing you want. Unfortunately it's fairly expensive. Personally I'm waiting and hoping they come out with an AF-S version of their f/1.8 lens which isn't quite as nice but should be under $150.

Used Lenses - There are tons of quality used Nikon lenses out there. There are two problems with them. First is that if you're not an experienced photographer (I'm not) you probably don't know how to check the lens to see if there are any problems with it. Secondly, the D40 needs AF-S lenses, which are newer and therefore harder to find.

Other Brands - There are a few lens manufacturers out there that make Nikon compatible lenses. They can save you quite a bit of money, but I've heard a lot of photographers complain about the quality. I don't have any, so you'll have to decide this on for yourself.

Although you can buy everything a la carte, you'll get the best deal by buying a bundle or kit with the camera and one or two lenses. Right now B&H has 4 kits ranging from $450 (camera & 18-55mm lens) to $650 (camera, 18-55mm lens & 55-200mm VR lens). For every lens you have I highly recommend getting a UV filter. This will protect the actual lens from getting scratched or broken while in the line of duty. It's a very cheap insurance policy.

I'll leave you with one final thought on lenses. Consider that while your camera will become old and obsolete in a matter of a few years, your lens will most likely remain relevant for at least a decade. The next generation of Nikon cameras will work just fine with the lenses you buy today. It is not uncommon for photographers to upgrade thier camera body but keep thier collection of lenses, some of which may be literally decades old. This, combined with the fact that your lens has more to do with the quality of your images than your camera, and you have a very good case to spend less on a camera and more on a lens.

Tomorrow: Accessories