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.

Image Editing Tools

For those of you out there interested in image editing, I thought I'd pass along what I know about the best tools available. A few weeks ago friend asked me for recommendations on an image editing tool, so I thought I'd share what I compiled with the world.

The best photo editing tool out there is Adobe Photoshop. If you're looking for the short answer you can stop reading and go buy it. I've been using it for a long time and I highly recommend it. It's not just another program, it's a tool that's been the industry standard for about 15 years so there's a lot of information available online.

The current version is Photoshop CS4 and it's $700. If you can find the previous version (CS3) you may be able to get it for cheaper. If you find it for a lot cheaper check to see if it's an "Educational Version". Educational Versions are pretty much the same as the regular version, except that you're not allowed to use it for profit. If you're ok with that you can probably get CS4 for a lot less.

Photoshop also comes with an application called Adobe Camera Raw. It enables you to do amazing things with pictures from your digital SLR, especially when you shoot in NEF mode (Nikon's RAW image format). Boosting certain colors, changing the hue of certain colors, altering the way color photos are converted to black and white and all sorts of other stuff. If you do a lot of photography this feature alone might be worth a couple hundred dollars.

Photoshop is great, but it'll take some time to learn. Here are a couple of resources:

• Here's a crash-course in Photoshop
• Lynda.com - this is a subscription service. $25/month, but it has a wealth of information. There's well over 100 hours of training materials specific to CS3 and over 40 hours of material specific to CS4. If you subscribed for only a month or two and "crammed" it would be a great value.
• Me - post your Photoshop questions in the comments of this post, and if I know how to do it I'll do another post on it.
  

If you're looking for something more economical, there are a couple of free choices. I haven't used any of these myself so I can't vouch for them, but they're free so you have nothing to loose (except of course your time) by trying them out.

• GIMP is a popular image editing application that's been around for a while.
  
• Artweaver is supposed not only have a lot of the same features as Photoshop, but also has the same layout.
• SumoPaint is a web based Photoshop clone. It certainly doesn't offer anywhere near the functionality of the real thing, but for a simple little project it might be worth a try.
  

Picasa on a Mac

For a few years now I've been using Google's free application Picasa to keep track of all our digital pictures. I used to be an image-editing snob who did everything in Photoshop, but since we've had kids I have a lot more pictures and a lot less time, and I just can't keep up using Photoshop. Luckily Picasa does 99% of what I need to do and makes it all easier and more efficient. If you haven't tried it, I highly recommend it.

And the really good news is that for those of you on a Mac, they finally released a version for OSX! Here's a little preview for you.

If you give it a try (Mac or PC) let me know what you think.

A Bit Ironic

And this one takes the cake. Apparently Microsoft is whining to the Justice Department about an advertising partnership between Google & Yahoo because together they control 80% of the search market. Yes, this is the same Microsoft who dominates 90-95% of the PC Operating System market. What's next, congress lecturing us about not being in debt?

Google Analytics

This is for Tate and anyone else out there wondering how they can learn a little more about who visits their blog. I'd like to suggest Google Analytics. GA is a free tool provided by Google that can not only tell you how many people are visiting your site, it can tell you where your visitors are from, if they found your site from another site or if they found you through a search engine (and if so what words they were searching on).

You can determine what posts are the most popular. You may find that most of you visitors find you from another blog that you didn't even know linked to you. You may find that you have a secret following of readers from Wisconsin or Switzerland. And for the other geeky people out there, it also gives you information like browser usage, OS and a ton of other stuff. It's all pretty interesting, and you'll probably find that you have a lot more people reading your blog than you thought. (Keep in mind that it won't give you the names of the people visiting your site or any other identifying information.)

Google has a comprehensive guide to setting everything up that covers everything, but I'm going to offer a reader's digest version here. Don't be intimidated, it's really quite simple and only takes a few minutes to set up.

1. The first step is to create a GA account. If you're using blogger for you blog, or if you already have a Google account for anything else like Gmail, you can use that user name and password to log in. Follow the instructions to set up your account.
   
2. Once everything's set up, from the main page in the "Settings" column, click "Edit". Then on the next page, click "Check Status" (it's towards the upper right hand corner of the page). On the next page you'll find a box with a bunch of code in it. It will look pretty scary, but don't worry about it, just select it all and copy it. This is your tracking code.
   
3. Pasting the code
   • Sign into you blogger account, and select the "Layout" tab.
   • On the next page, select "Edit HTML".
   • You may want to follow the instructions at the top of the page for backing up your template, because if you mess up the next few steps your blog may not display correctly.
   • In the box of code, scroll down to the very bottom. You're looking for the "body end tag", which is usually in the second to last line of code and looks like this: </body>
     
   • Place your cursor just to the left of the body end tag, and paste the tracking code you copied in step 2.
   • The last part of you code should now look something like this:
     
     <script type="text/javascript">
     var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
     document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
     </script>
     <script type="text/javascript">
     var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-0000000-1");
     pageTracker._trackPageview();
     </script></body>
     </html>
     
     
   • Hit "Preview" to make sure everything looks ok, then hit "Save Template"
4. Go back to your Google Analytics page, in the "Settings" column, click "Edit", then on the next page, click "Check Status" (just like in step 2). In the yellow box it should say
   

   Tracking Status:

   Receiving Data

5. At this point you're done, but you'll have to wait about 24 hours for results to start showing up. To view the reports, just sign into Google Analytics and click on "View Reports".

As a side note, if you ever change your template it will erase the tracking code, so you'll have to repeat steps 2-5 to get everything working again.

There are all sorts of other things you can do, like have it not count when you visit your blog (seriously, who cares if you blog was visited 20 times yesterday if 19 of them were you checking to see if anybody left any comments?), but that's another post. Good luck, and feel free to ask if you have any questions.

The Firefox One Week Test Drive

If you're reading this, I'm going to jump to the conclusion that you use the internet. I also know that statistically, most of you (about 66% at the time of this writing) are using one version or another of Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE for short). You're probably using IE because you simply are not aware that there's a browser out there that's faster, safer, more useful and just plain better. It's called Firefox.

Until a few weeks ago, my wife was an IE user, and despite my best arguments for her to use Firefox, she stuck with IE. Then one day (after getting rid of a virus that we had gotten while using IE) she said she would give Firefox a try for one week. Now I realized that this was probably just to get me to stop bugging her about it, but that was OK. I set up a profile for her, so she could have her own set of bookmarks and features, and the trial began. The first day or two was the break-in period, getting used to the different layout and features. By the third or fourth day she announced that she was starting to like it better. A week or so later, and she is a convert.

"So what about me?" you ask. "I don't have a nerdy husband bugging me about what browser I use, so why should I switch?" [sorry about that; I've been reading Lou Priolo] That's a great question, but there are so many great answers that I can't fit them all in here. So I''ll be doing as series of posts highlighting the advantages of Firefox over IE. If at any time you want to give Firefox a try, just go to firefox.com.

Pictures of the Kids

Last year, after having mixed results taking Elise to the portrait studio, we decided to buy a better camera and do photos ourselves. After using Kara & Ben's Nikon, we bought a Nikon D40 from B&H. We also got the Nikon SB-400 flash, both of which are absolutely wonderful. We've gotten a ton of great candid photos of the kids, but we also wanted to get some posed shots too.

So last week Katie & I went outside to take some pictures of the girls. It was a nice sunny day, and I had the flash one the camera to provide some fill light. We started out with Elise in the sun, until a helpful neighbor (who happened to be a professional photographer) suggested we put her in the shade. This turned out to be very good advice. Below is one of the pictures of Elise.

That's the original image as captured by the camera without any processing. Nice, but a little flat and washed out. Below is the same picture with the default processing by the camera. Better, but still leavs a little to be desired.

I shot the photos in RAW mode, which means the file is a .NEF instead of a .JPG. It's sort of like shooting on film and having access to the the negative - it has more detail than a print.
I opened the RAW file in Adobe Camera Raw, part of Photoshop. This gave me all kinds of tools for correcting exposure & white balance, boosting saturation, and adjusting individual colors. This let me do things like fix the blue ribbons on her dress that had previously been washed out. Anyway, below is the finished picture. Isn't she cute?

And here's a split of all three pictures:

Open Office

This post of the first of many that probably won't be entertaining, but hopefully useful.

Microsoft Office is a great tool, but fairly expensive. It's goes right now for just under $400. That pretty steep for a lot of people. If you're one of those people, you might want to check out OpenOffice.org, or OOo as it's commonly referred to. OOo is free, open source (that's generally a good thing), can read and write MS Office files, and contains most of the functionality of Microsoft Office. In some cases, OOo has a step up on Microsoft. For example: Excel hasn't yet figured out that time began before Jan 1st, 1900. Yup, so if you're making a list of historical events or birthdates of ancestors and want to sort them, Excel won't help much. Calc (the spreadsheet tool in OOo) handles that just fine. Enjoy!