Attn: Canon Users

Canon replaced its mid-position on-camera strobe, the 430EX, with the 430EX Mk II a few months ago. Adorama still has some of the original 430EX's left at a very attractive price. You can buy them direct there or through Buy.com. Link below:

This is the Buy.com link. You can also go straight to Adorama's link. I've bought from Adorama before, they're a reputable discount dealer.

430EX at Buy.com

Right now they're selling at $199.95. The 430EX MkII sells for around $280 to $300, and isn't any more powerful than the original 430EX. (The MkII is a little more weatherproof and has a metal foot: however, there's a reason that flashes usually have plastic feet.) It's a very good deal on Canon's lowest-priced bounce-capable flash.

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Ah, Multiculturalism.

This is so hysterical I almost fell out of my chair laughing. If I were to say these things about Saudis, I'd be pilloried - literally, if some people around here had their way.

But if they say it themselves, who can refute them?

"Sending Teens Abroad," from the Arab News.

Oh, that's a scream. Read it for yourself. I dare you.

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A Last WindyCon Comment

I forgot to mention it before, but as always when I see a collection of artworks, I saw another thing... thousands and thousands of dollars worth of actionable torts.

I've said it before, I'll say it again. 765 ILCS 1075, the Illinois Right of Publicity Act.

In the Art Show, there were literally dozens of artworks which showed specific recognizable individuals - mostly, of course, actors shown in their well-known acting roles. A picture of William Shatner dressed as Captain Kirk is, at one and the same time, a picture of a copyrighted fictional character and a picture of a real human being. Both of these grant to their owners certain rights under various legal theories. Not only is commercially selling actor-in-character fanart iffy for copyright purposes, but it's clearly a violation of Illinois law, and this show was in Illinois. Every single one of those fanart pieces, on the wall, was a statutory-minimum $1,000.00, plus fees and costs, tortious violation of the IROPA. Walter Koening, who happened to be attending, could have made a quick three grand plus fees and costs, by my count, by going down to the art show and noting a few names.

Now whether Mr. Koening wants to do that is up to him. Since he makes a nice bit of money attending Cons, he might very well feel that it wouldn't be worth the bad publicity, and that is his right. But the point is that he could, and not only is it unethical to make money off other people's property - including their likeness - without their consent, at least in Illinois, it's illegal. I don't understand why people will insist on doing it. Draw your own pictures, take your own photographs. Please.

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I Have Declared Eternal Hostility...

I'm not much of a folksinging fan, but if Woody were still alive I'd go out and buy all his albums just for this.


"I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard travelling. I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you. I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think that you've not got any sense at all. But I decided a long time ago that I'd starve to death before I'd sing any such songs as that. The radio waves and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyhow."
-- Woody Guthrie.

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Science Fictiony!

Since I'm on my sci-fi kick, here are some nifty pictures I took a while back in an improptu science-fiction setting. They're from my old studio, which had amazing skylights.

This one is called "Black Morning."



The band of light behind her is from the skylights. No studio lighting for this one other than the overhead fluorescents. I did buy color-balanced bulbs for them. That was nice because I could leave them on without worrying about introducing a color cast.

I call this one "Pure Energy."



That was blowout from studio strobes. You can see the skylights reflected in her goggles. And here's the whole package. I call this one "Malevolent."



That's all skylight again - I just backed her up a little from the position in the first picture until the sun was shining on her face.

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Upsides of WindyCon

As I said, I did enjoy meeting many of the people I did - including an Internet friend and her family as well as author Michael Z. Williamson, his wife, and their children as well. Here are some links to cool people. Go see.

Here's my friend's blog:

http://brownkitty.livejournal.com/

Here's Mr. Williamson's website:

http://www.michaelzwilliamson.com/index.php

It contains a bibliography and links to buy his books. I've only read the one (it's called Better to Ask Forgiveness...) but can report that it was well worth reading.

Here's his wife's photography website. She's a combat photographer who joined the Army when she was in her mid-thirties. This is no small feat. There's a story about it on his website which is worth reading if you'd like to know how one joins the Army these days.

http://www.combatcamerastudios.com/index.php

Here's his blog, which is pretty funny in a way that won't appeal to you much if you're what the nitwit media mistakenly refers to as a "liberal" these days. Fair warning.

http://mzmadmike.livejournal.com/

I was going to link to his daughter's website - she's an actress and child model - but instead I'll just say that you can find a link to her on his website if you're in need of an actress or child model. She's adorable and sharp as an obsidian chip.

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Shame on Me.

So last year I had some photos at WindyCon (the largest, if I understand it correctly, of the Chicago-area science-fiction conventions) I was trying to sell. It didn't go so well.

Well, this year, someone I knew was going to try to go, and I thought, "Perhaps I should try to go as an attendee, and see if that works any better."

Well, it didn't. Although I did meet some interesting people and geek out about photography for a while, it was if anything on average worse than the last time as far as enjoyment. I guess I'm just not very social, even in a crowd of anti-social sorts.

These two had very cool costumes, though:

Ironically, they weren't even registered for the Con and couldn't do any events, including the Masquerade Ball. They just wanted to walk around in their costumes somewhere where people wouldn't look at them funny.

Ironically, the hotel had also rented a ballroom on the same concourse with the con to a very, very upscale wedding. The looks of horror on the faces of the guests at the army of nerds surrounding them were very Amusing. Here's the photographer for the wedding party trying to get shots of the groom next to a lovely fountain wall in the hotel lobby without including any of the peons in the shot. He looks perplexed.



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In Honor Of the Fact

... that I finally read Atlas Shrugged last weekend, I present my first LOL.



Lame, I know, but what can you do?

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Hmmph.

So, as I said earlier, I'm the only person on Earth who has no luck with Apple's built in calibration utility. I got the new monitor to where I didn't hate it but it wasn't where I wanted it to be. So I decided to bite the bullet and buy a color calibrator. These are little doohickeys with color sensors that go up against your monitor, read target color blocks, and reprofile your system until red is red and blue is blue and so forth.

So I went to Calumet and asked the girl behind the counter about "basic color calibration tools." She clicked around on her computer and told me that they didn't really have anything in stock, then described some of my choices.

On my way out, I noticed a Spyder2Express - the very model I'd been thinking about getting - in the display case. I pointed this out to her, and she got it out. I examined it and decided to buy it. Why she didn't think of this, I'm sure I don't know. Perhaps her inventory was off (although she didn't even bother to walk down and look.) My theory is that she recognized me from the Chicago store (that part's not theory: I know she did) and thought that the S2E was simply beneath a photographer of my high ability.

(pause for laughter)

It sounds good, anyway. The thing is a snap to use, I'll tell you that. My homebrew calibration wasn't too far off, but this is still a lot better. Now if I could just get my printer to work, I'd be a happy camper.

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Yet Another Post

Just feeling talkative.

Anyway, here is the latest inspiration: a fellow who uses the camera he owns as a reason models should come shoot with him. I've heard of people claiming that their cameras made them professionals (or that other people's cameras meant they weren't.) But this is a new one on me.

Now, maybe if he had that life-size Polaroid camera, I could see that. That thing is freaking cool. But this?

http://www.modelmayhem.com/118

Let me get this straight. He's having an old Leica rebuilt to have modern automatic stuff in it, and therefore models should pay him oodles of money to be shot with it.

This. Makes. No. Sense.

He's basically taking the two things that make modern and vintage Leicas unique and building something that has neither component. Old cameras are cool because they are more demanding of the photographer (call any Leica demanding and the ghost of Matthew Brady will appear and break an 18x24 sheet of glass over your head, but still) and require them to be utterly in command of their technical art. Modern Leicas are cool because they have all the Leica elan while having modern exposure control technology. Put it in an old Leica and you have... an old new camera.

I won't claim to know enough about Leicas to know that this isn't the Holy Grail of Leicadom, but still, in the end, it's a 35mm rangefinder camera, shooting what is likely excellent glass but 35mm format glass all the same. Would it kick ass for photojournalism/docmentary work? Almost certainly: We might very well have to import ass from underdeveloped third-world countries just to have sufficient ass for it to kick.

But for stuff that a model wants and can use and would pay for?

Dude, give me a Hassy every time. Or, even better, unless the model plans to take out her own billboards, spare the umpty thousand dollars on Franken-Leica OR Uber-Large-Formatotron and buy some good lighting and hire a makeup artist and a hair stylist and a wardrobe stylist. Then the model might get something for her money. But a 35mm rangefinder is a 35mm rangefinder and it don't make no difference what you've wrapped around it, you have a relatively small lens and a 36x24mm frame of film and you get what you get.

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Breaking Technology News

I got a new monitor.

I had been thinking that I should get an LCD monitor for a long time since I use my computer a lot (duh) and the CRT I had used a lot of electricity and got really hot and I couldn't even clean it without taking it down because it fit so snugly in the monitor hutch on my desk.

I don't mean to complain, and I got a very good deal, but I hate getting new monitors. The colors look off, it doesn't seem as sharp somehow, etc, etc. Of COURSE it looks different. It's a totally different technology. And I need to tweak the calibration some more. (I must be the only person in the world for whom Apple's Calibrate Display control panel does not work very well.)

What's worse is I promised myself if I got a new monitor I would work on my portfolio submission, for which less than a month of submission time remains. I hate me.

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There's Only One Thing Better Than Two Hours of Sleep.

And that's being awakened from two hours of sleep by an explosion.

Damn, if I'd known how much fun that was, I might have joined the Army.

Too late now. I'm a shell of a man and before they could make me Army Strong I suspect I'd just be Army Dead.

Incidentally, it was an electrical transformer. Fixed now. Ironic that I stayed up reading Atlas Shrugged, which has as its main theme a continuous degradation of society and infrastructure.

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Today's Trite And Hackneyed But Nonetheless True Adage.

Inspired by the collapse of the market. (Which market? All of them.)

Life is an author who only knows two words: "What if?"

Evolution is an editor who also only knows two words: "Not now."

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The Kind Of Thing That Goes On.

As an IP attorney, I've seen cases of outright IP theft that were just as blatant as some punk shoving an old lady and running off with her purse. You'd think people would know better, you wonder, "How do they possibly expect to get away with that?" But they do and a lot of the time they do. For instance, here's a story of blatant theft from a photographer by another photographer who tricked him into giving up his RAW images. The only reason the thief got caught at all was that the original photographer tried to submit some of the images to a contest that the thief had already sent them in to!

http://kevingerman.blogspot.com/2008/11/stolen.html

Hopefully, the thief isn't sophisticated enough to have altered the EXIF data on the original images. If this is so, between the date/time stamps and the serial number (Digital SLR's record the camera's serial number into the EXIF data at exposure time) the original photographer should be able to prove that the images are his. He did strip the data from the images he posted, but that's much easier than editing a RAW file.

I hate to say it, but this is yet one more example of why you should never, EVER give up your RAW files to anybody for any reason. They're the negatives of the digital world, and once they're out, they're out.

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Just So You Know.

I did go and vote today, despite the fact that my vote is mathematically meaningless.

In and out in twenty minutes - I live in a precinct that, for whatever reason *coughjobscough* historically has low turnout early in the morning. Since I don't go in to my office on Tuesdays, I just go early and I'm usually in and out pretty fast. There were other precincts voting in the same polling place that had a line which was an hour or more long at 7 AM.

Illinois is an all-or-nothing Electoral College state, and Obama and Jackson couldn't lose here if God Almighty opened up the skies and yelled down, "I will personally throw anybody who votes for a Democrat into the Lake of Fire ten seconds later, you got Me?" Similarly, machine politicians will win all the races I'm allowed to vote in. More than half of the races, the incumbent was running unopposed. I won't vote in a race with only one candidate, and I expected to get an undervote warning when they scanned my ballot, but there wasn't one. Apparently it's okay not to vote when it makes no difference.

I'm not saying I want all Democrats or lose or that I necessarily feel the elections are "rigged." I live in a place that is overwhelmingly Democrat. A vote for a non-Democratic candidate "doesn't count," because Democrats always win. Increasing turnout would just increase Democratic vote counts. That's life. I'm not mad about it, but I do find it irritating when zillions of holier-than-thou types say that voting is your duty, and if you don't vote you can't complain, and similar nonsense. My vote, in every possible sense, makes absolutely no difference. Why I should be castigated for recognizing reality, I'm sure I don't know.

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Why Not To Get Carried Away

Sometimes too much of a good thing is wonderful. However, often too much of a good thing is... not so good. This applies very frequently in photography. Case in point: shallow depth of field/large aperture.

The first time you get hold of a fast (i.e. can open up to a very large aperture/very small f-stop) lens and a camera that can do good depth-of-field control, it's like "Wheee!"

However...

You can get carried away. Case in point: I took my camera with a 50mm f1.4 lens on it to the lake yesterday. My plan was to take pictures of seed pods and so forth with a shallow DOF and make all artsy pictures.

I switched to Av mode and opened the lens up all the way, despite the fact that the voices were telling me, "Don't get so nuts with the aperture, doofus."

Well, they were right.



Now that's some pretty shallow DOF - that dark blur in the upper right is a relatively large island in a lake which is only about fifty feet behind this feathery seed pod. Got that part right. However, the DOF is so shallow that a significant portion of the front of the pod is also out of focus. That's not so good. My plane of focus slices right through the middle of the pod, which is exactly what I wanted, but it's overdone. I might have been better off focusing on the front of it, if I had really wanted this shallow a DOF. However, what I really should have done is stopped down another two-thirds or so, say to f2.0, so that while the plane of focus would still have been right in the center, the foreground part of the pod would have not been so blurry. IMO, the picture would look a lot better that way.

In case you were wondering, while it was cloudy, there was tons of light (I love the gorgeous backlighting from the reflection of light off the lake - no polarizer on this shot) and this image was exposed at 1/3200s. It was a little windy, but none of that is motion blur, either from subject motion or camera shake. It would take a hurricane to move a plant enough to get motion blur at 1/3200s! The band of light in the upper-center is the lake, and the band of light in the upper area is the sky. The image is canted slightly in relation to the horizon, which is a relatively thin dark band comprised of the far shore of the lake and some trees.

Here's kind of a cool example of an unexpected DOF effect:



This is a tree trunk wrapped in wire mesh (there are beavers in this park as well as a lot of rabbits and they do this to trees they don't want chewed on.) Notice that since the object is cylindrical there's sort of a diagonal line of focused area. Part of the time the bark is in focus, part of the time the mesh is in focus, and part of the time nothing is in focus depending on where you are in the image. What controls the focal sharpness is absolute distance from the camera: since the object is has a pronounced relative dimension (I was really close to the tree) the areas in focus vary horizontally and vertically.

Summary: don't get nuts, unless you need to get nuts. Back it off a notch and see how it looks.

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Why I Hope I'm Wrong.

Wrong about the subconscious racist sentiments of a lot of people, that is. This is why:

I see the following scenario as completely feasible although I assign it a low probability of occurance:

1) Pre-election Obama poll numbers swollen by voters refusing to admit subconscious racist sentiments;

2) Enough voters vote against the way they claim to be planning to vote to throw battleground states to McCain;

3) Obama wins popular vote but McCain wins Electoral College;

4) Claims of "stolen election" cause widespread conspiracy allegations;

5) Mass hysteria causes civil disorder, widespread lack of faith in Federal Government;

6) Subconscious racist feelings of voters in #2 "proven" by civil disorder, etc;

7) Markets collapse under weight of uncertainty, US economy stops working, millions jobless and widespread shortages caused by disorder and disruption of transport systems;

8) Authorities come under pressure from Bush/nascent McCain administration to repress disorder;

9) Civil War II erupts.

Now THAT'S a cynical projection. Like I said, I hope I'm wrong.

Incidentally, Scott Adams also predicts some sort of zombie problem.

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