This is a picture of Nico Rossberg in his Williams F1 Car during the French Grand Prix in Magny-Cours. You can see the photographer in the picture. Looks like he's shooting with a 600mm lens on a monopod. If you're wondering about the crazy helmet, this is one of the pit crew (I'm not sure which team though). They have fully enclosed system complete with oxygen in case of a pit fire.

I found this picture here. The photographer was Andrew Ferraro from LAT Photographic. Nice job Andrew!!

Note - click on the picture for a huge version.

Check out the photos from www.boston.com of some flooding and tornados and such from Iowa. Wow.

The Eye-Fi 2gb SD card automatically uploads your pictures to your website over WI-FI (here's a map of the hotspots). Seriously cool. The Eye-Fi Explore also geo-tags your photos. Eye-Fi Cards work with virtually all digital cameras that accept SD memory cards.

Bill Wadman writes about why good lenses are critical for photography here.

I can't tell you the number of people I see who have this all wrong. Last year at the Grand Canyon, I saw a girl with a high-end Gitzo tripod, 5D body, and some crappy consumer level zoom lens on the front. Honestly, I almost pushed her over the edge.

This article on www.wired.com caught my interest because they have some pictures of diagrams that show how the photographer, Brent Humphrys, lit Steve Carrell for the photoshoot for the cover of this month's issue.

Portrait photography is something I'm very interested in and have been studying up on. For example I'm currently reading a fascinating book called "Light: Science and Magic: An introduction to Photographic Lighting". I recently bought a bunch of light stands, a backdrop stand, and I have a few off camera flashes now. For now I'm doing the strobist method, but eventually I plan to buy some real studio lighting. Anyway, I love to see how these photographs are made.

Looks like he used a ring flash, a couple of grids and gobos, a soft box, and a couple of bare strobes. Nice. Seems like a complicated arrangement, but you can't argue with the results.

Adding keywords to my photos is something I've been struggling with. It's just a pain. The website www.organizePictures.com has a good article on how to do this efficiently here. I also see some other interesting articles on this organizepictures.com that might be worth reading. Keeping my pictures organized is a big struggle. I'm still trying to wrap my head around it. Sigh.

If you want your head to explode, and you want to do more with keywords, go check out the website www.controlledvocabulary.com. I've been tempted to buy their keyword library, but at $70.00, this prices seems about twice as expensive as it should be. If you buy this library, you can import it into Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture and go from there.

I really enjoy Erin Vey's photography. She specializes in pets and children, especially her Great Dane, Gracie.

My buddy Rob invited me to go with him to the North American Buggy Expo (NABX) this year. For you that don't know, a kite buggy is a little three wheel cart that you sit in and get pulled along by a kite at insane and terrifying speeds about three inches off the ground. People live for this shiznit.

This event takes place in the Ivanpah dry lake bed in the Mojave desert near Primm Nevada. This lovely casino is on the border between Nevada and California, about an hour or so out of Las Vegas. We stayed in the Buffalo Bills casino and hotel and went out to the desert every day. I had a lot of fun practicing my photography and just relaxing. I also went on a buggy ride across the desert at about fifty miles an hour, which is just insane when you're a couple of inches off the ground. Here's one of Rob's pictures of me about to set out for my first ride. Notice my pristine white rooky gloves.

It wasn't too hot most of the time with the wind blowing and I met some very interesting people who I probably wouldn't normally run into. People that live to do wind sports. Lots of tattoos, mohawks, and other folks who live for getting dragged around by the wind from all over the world. Ultimately, I don't really think the kite sports are my thing, but I really enjoyed the trip and would go again just to hang out and take more pictures.

I just posted my pictures to my site here. Thanks to Rob, my photo mentor, for the crash course in sports photography I got over the weekend.

Thanks for the fun trip Rob, and remember, "He Drive Slow!".

http://photographyvoter.com. Nice. Kinda like Digg but for photo stuff. Also has a RSS feed if you're into that kind of thing.

I was down for the count for the last few days with some sort of mild virus. Symptoms included inability to stop watching Law and Order reruns. Twelve hour stunt sleeping. The scrambled egg whine (as in "please make me some..."). Power shots of cherry NyQuil. Delusion that a huge blue terry cloth robe and Sorel snow boots was acceptable "outside" attire appropriate for walking the dogs. In the front yard. Sorry. No pictures. Actually, be thankful.

The good news (for me anyway) is that all is well now and I've apologized to my neighbors and the kids that walk home from school in front of our house. They accepted my apology. At least that's how I'm choosing to interpret the rock throwing, picket lines, and subpoenas

Today we celebrated by getting massages at the Spa at the Ritz Carlton in Half Moon Bay. (Yes. I am heterosexual. Thanks for asking, Mr Limbaugh.)

Below is a shot of something you don't see everyday. This was taken in the Valet parking area just in front of the Ritz Carlton. Wow. Wow. Wow.

I believe these were two Ferrari 430s and one Ferrari 360 (the closest one). I know for sure the middle one was a 430 because it said so on the mirrors. I think the red one was too, but I'm not sure. The front is significantly longer than the middle one if you look closely so I wasn't sure. Gulp. Sorry about the fugly SUV polluting the back of the shot. I would have fricking paid for the guys valet parking to get it moved out of the frame, though the folks that drove the Ferraris came out in a shiny herd and paddle shifted away into the afternoon right after I took this, leaving me slack jawed and drooling in the tan bark under the rose bushes. I don't know if you've ever had the pleasure of hearing a Ferrari zip up through the gears. Holy. God. Pray that someday you do. Just pray. Mozart ain't got nothin' on Enzo Ferrari. That's all I have to say.

After that we went and watched the sunset and I practiced taking landscape and seascape photography. I really like this shot. I shot this hand held, crouching on a rock, praying that my camera would be steady enough. I really need a tripod. A carbon fiber Gitzo is the next item on my Photography wish list. I *really* was wishing for this today at the beach as the light was fading...

We met a seal on the beach. He was sleeping. We were hoping he wasn't sick. We kept barking at him and he would look at us, yawn, and then go back to sleep. He actually doesn't look that healthy to me, so I hope he was okay.

Anyway, Bunny and I had a nice day. Though we spent like eighty bucks on lunch in the bar at the Ritz. Lets just say the view was nice and not talk about the food's worthiness. I had to send back my burger. Yes. Burger. BURGER. Sent. Back. D'oh. Kinda ruins the joy of the moment.

So no more cherry NyQuil tonight, I seem to be okay now. So we now resume our regularly scheduled programming - Shung-Shung!!

Rob shoots Chloe with his fancy ring flash. Nice.

I've been planning to do a daily photo project for a while now. I need to practice, practice, practice, and nothing helps like accountability. In high performance driving, we call this seat time. The best modification to your car you can make is to improve the driver. And boy do I need seat time. I'm going to shoot every day and post one shot per day to a flickr page I set up just for this, here. I chose March 1, 2008 to start this project because I wanted to start on the first day of a month, and it was the day I shot my first wedding. Gulp. Maybe I'll post about my experience shooting the wedding once I've recovered. I'll say this though, I was more sore after shooting the wedding than after I was after Skiing at Squaw Valley for two days. I can now see why wedding photographers make so much money. I'm truly in awe of the folks who do this well (golf claps).

My initial plans are to shoot with my Nikon d300, my Nikkor 24-70 lens, and my SB-800 and SB-600 Speedlights. One of my first challenges I've set for myself is to expose all my shots manually.

Here's one of many great posts about doing a daily photo project.

Wish me luck.

I think this picture is absolutely stunning. There are a bunch more in this photostream as well. Wow.

Here's a picture of our dog Jack taken by my friend Rob over at Murphy Dog Studios. Jack died over the Christmas holidays and we miss him. Jack was a Weimaraner.

Experimenting with off camera flash. I actually held the flash off to the left of my camera.

Here they are. There will be quiz later.

Ah, all relaxed.

This is my fave.

I only paid $99,000.00 for it. You can see the details about it here.

PicLens is stunning photo browser plugin for Firefox or IE. It works with Flickr, Google, SmugMug, and a pile of other popular sites.. Trust me, this is very cool. Try it out. Here's the demo. I ran it on my Mac in Firefox. Frickin' Sweet.

I was hoping the changes in the Prokit update today would fix the Aperture problems. Nope. In fact it seems worse.

Check this out. Some of my images are actually corrupted in Aperture. Actually, I think its the preview in the Aperture library, but still. Come ON, people! This is with the Nikon d70s RAW format. I've also seen this happen with my Panasonic Lumix RAW files. At least I think I have. Regardless, the work around here is to convert these to DNG and reimport them. For @#$% sake.

Here's Aperture failing to display my Nikon d300 photos:

Here's the crash in import:

Thread 12 Crashed:
0 com.apple.Aperture 0x0000cbe9 0x1000 + 48105
1 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x92644329 __raiseError + 521
2 libobjc.A.dylib 0x929ce09b objc_exception_throw + 40
3 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x9264b46a -[NSObject doesNotRecognizeSelector:] + 186
4 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x92649a6c ___forwarding___ + 892
5 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x92649b32 _CF_forwarding_prep_0 + 50
6 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x9255dac8 CFArrayAppendValue + 168
7 com.apple.ImageIO.framework 0x92c190ce storeDataInXMPDictionary + 1018
8 libxml2.2.dylib 0x94673cb0 xmlParseAttributeType + 2080
9 libxml2.2.dylib 0x9464b698 xmlParseElement + 1748
10 libxml2.2.dylib 0x9464c347 xmlParseContent + 206
11 libxml2.2.dylib 0x9464b284 xmlParseElement + 704
12 libxml2.2.dylib 0x9464c347 xmlParseContent + 206
13 libxml2.2.dylib 0x9464b284 xmlParseElement + 704
14 libxml2.2.dylib 0x9464c347 xmlParseContent + 206
15 libxml2.2.dylib 0x9464b284 xmlParseElement + 704
16 libxml2.2.dylib 0x9464c347 xmlParseContent + 206
17 libxml2.2.dylib 0x9464b284 xmlParseElement + 704
18 libxml2.2.dylib 0x9464c347 xmlParseContent + 206
19 libxml2.2.dylib 0x9464b284 xmlParseElement + 704
20 libxml2.2.dylib 0x946489ef xmlParseDocument + 1176
21 libxml2.2.dylib 0x94646c86 xmlSAXParseMemoryWithData + 116
22 com.apple.ImageIO.framework 0x92c174e0 readXMPProps + 476
23 com.apple.ImageIO.framework 0x92c3b36a readXMPData + 136
24 com.apple.ImageIO.framework 0x92c38453 initImageJPEG + 1630
25 com.apple.ImageIO.framework 0x92c37dea _CGImagePluginInitJPEG + 65
26 com.apple.ImageIO.framework 0x92c08cba makeImagePlus + 503
27 com.apple.ImageIO.framework 0x92c0e618 CGImageSourceGetPropertiesAtIndex + 120
28 com.apple.ImageIO.framework 0x92c0e572 CGImageSourceCopyPropertiesAtIndex + 120
29 com.apple.Aperture 0x002f804f 0x1000 + 3108943
30 com.apple.Aperture 0x002f31d4 0x1000 + 3088852
31 com.apple.Aperture 0x00130637 0x1000 + 1242679
32 com.apple.Aperture 0x00131f4b 0x1000 + 1249099
33 com.apple.Aperture 0x000db56c 0x1000 + 894316
34 com.apple.Aperture 0x000daffa 0x1000 + 892922
35 com.apple.Foundation 0x9165f04d -[NSThread main] + 45
36 com.apple.Foundation 0x9165ebf4 __NSThread__main__ + 308
37 libSystem.B.dylib 0x963c5075 _pthread_start + 321
38 libSystem.B.dylib 0x963c4f32 thread_start + 34

Here's a great overview of what is coming out in 2008.

On paper, the Sigma DP1 looks great. Shoots RAW. Has aperture priority, shutter priority, and manual modes. Has a huge, supposedly SLR sized, sensor. Has different metering modes. I may have to pick one of these up when it hits the shelves.

This looks like it might actually work. Some string. A washer. A bolt. Presto. Better low light photos.

$1 Image Stabilizer For Any Camera - Lose The Tripod - video powered by Metacafe

I wish they'd hurry up, for the love of peter the pumpkin eater. I can't use Aperture at all. Two reasons, no Nikon d300 RAW format support, and I found a crashing bug. Edit your photos in Adobe Lightroom. Key word them. Import them into Aperture. Aperture crashes. Parsing XML EXIF data. Dammit all to heck. To be clear, key word any photo in Lightroom. Even a five year old jpeg. Aperture crashes on import every single time. I doubt I would have run into this at all if I could have just used Aperture to manage my new d300 photos in the first place.

I've spent a lot of time key wording my photos lately. I've individually key worded over 9000 pictures over the last weeks (I have about 3000 to go yet). This takes hours and hours and hours and frankly sucks my will to live. Though having them all key worded is so damn cool its worth the time. For example, now I can find all my pictures of Jack in the snow in Portland in 2005. Sweet. Plus I only have to do this once, since I've got into the habit of key wording photos when I import them now.

I did this all in Lightroom. Now, Lightroom is a great program. Everything works. The new Nikon RAW formats. Importing. Editing. Printing. Thank the photo gods we have it. It's worth every penny. Though I have to say some of the UI drives me out of my mind. The fixed panels on the side. Bad. Very bad. I want Aperture back. It's been months since I've been able to use it.

Here's the 100% factual, no possibility for error, post on a rumor site that I got this info from: Apple hints at forthcoming Aperture update.

Kudos to Ar'alani. Here's an amazing shot of a bridge over the Columbia River.

Be sure and check out the large version, here.

Check this out.  Scott Duke puts together a stunning photo of a Mini Cooper using several different source pictures. Wow.

Thanks Rob for the url.

A few weeks ago the power was out for a few days following a storm. Here's a picture of Chloe the Yorkshire Terrier in the dark. I used a flashlight to light her face.

I picked an Epson PictureMate Dash 4x6 Inkjet printers for printing 4x6 snapshots. So B. and I both could print snapshots. This is one really cool little gadget. It prints beautiful prints. It's fairly quick. And it has an adorable little handle (aw, how cute). It folds up until a lunchboxesc portable box. You can even get a battery for it (good for 100 prints!) or a blue tooth adaptor. Neat.

You can also plug your camera right into it and print from your camera (though good luck printing RAW files), or pop in a media card and print pictures from there. It has a nice screen for doing totally rad stuff right on the top (cropping, red eye removal, etc). And of course you can plug it into the computer and print from there, which is probably the only way I'll ever use it.

There are two versions of the printer, the Dash, and the Zoom. They are identical except that the Zoom has a CD burner, so you can archive your photos right from the printer. I actually think this is somewhat lame and useless, kinda like installing a BBQ in your BMW, but if it floats your bass boat, have it it. Weirdo.

Also, at $99, it's freaking cheap! I spend more every day on tube socks and cowboy hats (my favorite outfit).

A paper refill and ink is about $35.00 for 150 photos. Incidentally the paper and ink come packaged together in a Ink and Paper Pack, which, in my opinion, is genius. I love that I don't have to think about this.

I just got one last night and I stayed up so late only infomercials were on TV. And I took a picture of the the robot selling the microwave bacon cooker/cat box cleaner and printed it. Repeatedly. That's some good bacon.

 

Jud asks me the question, why not an iMac instead of a MacPro? I started answering in a comment, but I'll just make it another post.

There are a couple of huge differences between the iMac and the MacPro. Well, more than a couple, but the (configurable) ones that affect me the most are, video card, RAM, and options for disk drives. Also, of course, the machine is just faster. Faster bus. More cores. Blah blah blah.

The video card has a direct affect on how fast Aperture, Photoshop, etc., can process a huge photo, so the digital work flow is going to be much faster with a high end video card. Also, the MacPro has many bays for hard drives so you can throw in a RAID card and stripe 4 huge drives for speed. And of course you can stuff it to the gills with RAM. All these things speed up the digital workflow, which right now is bordering on frustrating slow on my MacBook Pro. This is why professionals use the MacPros, not the iMacs (though the iMacs are killer machines, imo, just not for photo or video editing).

Think about previewing hundreds of photos back to back. A single photo from my camera is about 15 megs, so it takes a while to load and render each one. Typically, I make several passes through all the photos, rating them, weeding out the bad ones, adding keywords, and all of this is very slow on the MBP. It would definately be faster on a current iMac, but not fast enough.

It's all about the digital workflow. In my experience, I spend much more time processing the photos I've taken, than taking them. It's too slow. Far too slow. Some of this is my inexperience. But some is definately down to the hardware. I want to spend as little time processing photos as I can. This is why I want a killer machine. I spend hours. Days. Processing photos. That's time I could be doing something else. Something useful. Like watching Bounty Hunter crush school buses in HD.

I just released it's been a month since I posted to my blog. Lame. I've had so much going on (not all of it good) that I just haven't found the energy. Plus I've been a bit overwhelmed. Still, that excuse is worthless and weak.

I've got a lot a could write about. Let's see if I can find some time to do so. I have another post in the queue which I'm working on.

Just in terms of gear, I bought the Nikon d300 (which I posted about and promised a review, which I failed to deliver). I also bought a new lens, the new Nikon 24-70, and a new photo printer, the Epson 4880 (and, yes, now I'm mowing lawns to pay for all this gear). Remind me to tell you the amazing story of how I bought the printer on line.

I've also been organizing my pictures and key wording everything. Yesterday I spent about four hours key-wording all my pictures for 2007. Painful. I've been using Adobe Lightroom for this. I would have used Aperture but Apple hasn't released support for the new raw files for the d300. Lame (and frustrating). Lightroom is a decent program but has some annoying things about it. For one, key-wording is at best awkward. At least it's better than Adobe Bridge (CS3) whose key-wording features are about as fun to use as getting waterboarded. I'm hoping to post more on this a bit later.

I also built a new Windows Home server and devised a new backup strategy for backing up my Macs. Basically its Mac -> Windows Xp via Retrospect -> Windows home server via WHS connector. I still don't have an offsite backup strategy. I was trying to use Mozy, but I have 12000+ pictures (and a bunch of video too) and I never have got it fully backed up in months of trying. I might need to do something more manual where I leave a big hard drive at work or something. That would be better than nothing but is definitely prone to failure (because I'm lazy and forgetful).

I also ordered, but haven't received, a Kindle. I'm very excited about this since I read so much. It'll be so cool just to download a new book instead of ordering it and adding it to my gargantuan pile of books. I'll try to post about this when I get it from an avid readers point of view (I average about a book a week).

We finally sold the SL500. So we're down to a more semi-normal three cars (from a high of five). Bunny's BMW 535xi sport wagon. My Nissan Titan. And of course the Z06.

But definitely the theme for me has been Photography. I'm trying to take my skills to the next level. Throwing in the printer adds a lot more complexity, but recent events in my life have really made me wonder why all my pictures (some of them are actually pretty good) are all on my computer where, mostly, *nobody* sees them. The Photography thing is very very challenging. The thing I struggle the most with now is the post processing. I want my pictures to pop. A picture of a dog in the grass? I want that grass to be so green you want to slather it with ranch dressing, throw on a couple croutons, and chow down. But I still don't get all the color stuff and my changes to my pictures still seem somewhat random to me.  If someone has any suggestions here, please let me know.

Anyway, I'm going to try to post more about this stuff.

Happy Holidays everyone!

Here's a good little film on tips for composing your photos.

Yesterday San Jose Camera called me out of the blue and said that the Nikon d300 I was on a waiting list for came in. It took me a couple of minutes to decide to go ahead and buy it and I did. It was expensive - I paid about $1800 - but I expect this camera to last me a long time. I was going to go ahead and wait until the dust settled with the new release of the camera, but since they called me a day before my vacation, I thought, hmm, maybe the camera deities are telling me something. Gives me a chance to spend some time with it over the next week.

So far I've turned it on and shot a couple of random pictures, and my initial impression is that it's much faster than my d70s showing pictures and navigating the menus and just in general. It feels extremely responsive. And its LCD screen is frankly amazing. It's a bit heavier than the d70s, but it's not really very noticeable.

I'll post more about it when I've done some more playing with it over the next few days. Can't wait!

Btw, here's more about the camera at dpreview.com.

Pogo is my sister's family's Cockapoo. I was inspired by the dog pictures I posted links to the other day and took these shots at a family gathering over the weekend. I use my Nikon D70S with my 10mm Fisheye lens. I was also playing around with depth of field, which is why the background is blurry in the first one - I really like that shot because I managed to focus the camera on the little furbag's eyes. He was a little scared of the camera so he was a bit tricky to photograph. Boy oh boy, I feel like I have so much to learn about photography. I do a little better every time though! Hope you like the shots. He's a cute little fuzzball.

A couple more shots of him here: http://pictures.mikeandbunny.com/gallery/1676055

I bought a sweet new fisheye lens for my Nikon D70s and had some fun. I'm still figuring things out though and unfortunately Jack is afraid of the camera when its shoved an inch from his nose. Ah well. I'll just have to cover the lens in peanut butter.

Here he is pouncing on a dog treat.

He looks like a puppy again in this one.

Could I possibly look any more pathetic?