Final Notes on Obama’s 2009 « Whatever

if Obama were on fire, the GOP would call fire departments a socialist plot. The folks losing it on the left, on the other hand, are being a bit petulant about both the actual human they elected to be president, and the practical constraints on his agenda. The man has monolithic, unified opposition in the Washington GOP, a fractious and fragile base in the diffuse Washington Democrats, and was handed two expensive, unpopular wars, a profoundly degraded political environment at home and abroad, and a national and global economy which were dual scorching pillars of oh shit we’re all going to die. That the man got anything substantive done, much less had what is objectively a politically remarkable first year, is impressive.

via Final Notes on Obama’s 2009 « Whatever.

I normally avoid talking politics here, mostly because it tends to attract the loonies and trolls like the plague (and who really cares what I think, anyway?) — but John Scalzi waded in, and honestly, it deserves a “what he said”, because if I were to write about this stuff, this is what I would have written. Only not as well.

Stuff You’ll Like

A weekly compendium of stuff I found I thought you’d like. If you do, let me know, so I know to find more of it for you.

• X-Equals: Survival kit; what keeps the studio functioning.
• Virtual Photography Studio: Three Ways to stop quitting
• Jeff Lynch: A tale of two images
• Sherry Osborne: Photography in Extreme Cold
• Brian Auer: 60 second Post-Processing Technique
• Michael Johnson: The Tenset
• Dan Mitchell: Congrats to Stephen Oachs and Aperture Academy — Aperture Academy is a new gallery and training center in Campbell, near my house. Need to go in and take a look, but their training sessions look really interesting. Reminds me of Light Photo Workshops in Los Osos, where I took the HDR class at the expo this fall — both places are teaching things I’m looking for the time (and money) to take…. Scary feeling — all the places they’re going on workshops are favorite places of mine to shoot…
• Andy Long: Capturing birds in flight
• Art Howard: Keep your sock drawer straight. (chuq: amen. not there yet, of course)
• Zack Arias: Controlling the work you show
• Moose Peterson: High Noon in the Old West
• Harold Davis: Kiss from a Rose (chuq: studio and macro work needs to be a focus of mine in 2010; Davis impresses the hell out of me with his technique)
• Barrie Smith: tips on early morning photography

Inspirations

People and things that currently inspire me or include ideas and techniques I plan on borrowing. An occasional series…

Art Wolfe: now available, “stuff” from Art Wolfe via Cafepress. a good example of one of the sets of ‘tangibles’ I think is important to bring into the mix.

Stuff You’ll Like

A weekly compendium of stuff I found I thought you’d like. If you do, let me know, so I know to find more of it for you.

• Scott Bourne: Five reasons why photographers should build a blog rather than a website.
• Smashing Magazine: Styling HTML Lists with CSS (jCarousel looks like exactly what I want for something I’m planning)
• Gizmodo: how to overhaul your phones with google voice. Since I’m now carrying multiple phones, Google Voice has been a godsend for centralizing voicemail across them. Great overview of how to take advantage of this service…
• Lightroom Labs: Keyword Sets simplify your workflow
• Michael Frye: Digital Graduated Filters (or why I don’t carry them any more).
• Pictory: The first photo essay from Pictory is out, and it’s on San Francisco. This is just so beautifully done. Awesome.

Three rules “they” tell new photographers — and why “they” are wrong.

There are three rules that seem to be thrown out “by the pros” at new photographers all the time, ideas repeated constantly as part of the “how to be a better photographer” lectures.

• You Must Shoot Every Day. You Must Carry Your Camera Everywhere
• You Must Shoot in Manual Mode (and turn off autofocus, too!)
• You must shoot early in the morning or late at night, not in the middle of the day

And they’re wrong.

Okay, they’re not completely right — cliches are cliches because they are truths spoken until you’re tired of hearing them. These are truths that aren’t really true any more because they need to be updated to the current state of the art in photography. And so I will:

You Must Shoot Every Day. You Must Carry Your Camera Everywhere

This rule has a good intent — to get you in the habit of taking photographs and learning to see with your camera. In the day when people shot film and sent their film off to labs to be developed and printed, this rule mostly made sense.

Today, the photographer is also the lab; to be a really good photographer, you have to not only be strong behind the camera, you have to be strong behind the monitor; you have to work on both your capture skills and your processing skills — and because of this, telling people that they have to shoot images every day is a bad idea. It sets the mental mindset that the capturing of images is what matters, not the creation of the best possible images (this is, by the way, my only possible criticism of The Best Camera, and it’s a minor one as its strongest).

What we should be telling photographers is not to shoot images every day, but to work on their craft every day — although even that bothers me, because if you turn this into a grind, you’re going to turn people off on it. Weekends exist for a reason, and you shouldn’t be setting tasks that remove the joy from it.

What this rule is really trying to do is create the habit of thinking and acting like a photographer: that means spending the time to improve your skills and learning to see and think through your photography, to build the habits that allow you to be ready when a photo opportunity happens — and have your gear handy so you can capture it.

And THEN go back to the digital lab and create the best possible image out of that capture.

The core of the rule is good: becoming a better photographer takes time and commitment, you must be willing to invest in improving yourself, and that takes time behind the camera — but it also now takes time in the digital darkroom, and in many ways, the darkroom can be more important to taking that step from “pretty good” to “wow” as the capture.

Don’t just carry your camera around and take random pictures of random things and think that’ll make you a better photographer. Honor the intent of the rule, which is to commit the time and energy to your craft, both in the field and in the lab. Time spent taking pictures outside of your comfort zone and of subjects you don’t normally shoot is a good idea, but spending time honing your photoshop skills is at least important, and honestly, I think it’s more important to shifting the quality of your images to that next level.

You Must Shoot in Manual Mode (and turn off autofocus, too!)

The intent of this rule is good — if you just stick your camera in “P”rogram mode and let it make the decisions, it will save you (mostly) from taking really crappy pictures (mostly), but it will also prevent you from taking really great pictures, because it’s going to navigate the capture into the safe, conservative areas. As good as digital imaging is getting these days, no camera can make decisions that lead to the best possible images — not without help.

But the idea that photographers have to shoot in manual mode comes from the days when cameras were stupid; that’s far from the situation now, and if you follow this advice blindly you will be hurting your ability to take the best possible images because you will be cutting yourself off from taking advantage of the intelligence being built into modern digital cameras.

The more I read the writings of today’s top pros and the more I hear them speak, the more I realize that THEY are spending less and less time in manual mode. This rule isn’t wrong, but it needs to be updated.

The core of this rule is this: you can’t be a great photographer on autopilot. If you don’t let the camera control the capture, it will not try for a superior image but to avoid a disasterous one; you’ll get mediocrity. This is less true with every generation of digital camera coming out, but ultimately, it’s about who’s in charge.

If you let the camera be in charge, your images will be “safe” and safe images are rarely great.

This does NOT mean you have to shoot in manual, though. What it means is you have to spend the time and energy to learn what the camera can do — all of it. And then take advantage of what it can do and adjust it to make it do what you want. That doesn’t mean shoot manual, but it does mean know WHEN to shoot in manual. It also means knowing when to shoot in Aperture mode, or Shutter mode, or using exposure compensation or bracketing.

It means knowing when to adjust white balance and when to leave it alone, it means knowing how to take advantage of autofocus and when to shut it off and use manual focusing. It means understanding aperture and depth of field, it means knowing the noise characteristics of your camera so you use the proper ISO setting to eliminate that noise — or accentuate it.

There are a lot of capabilities in that camera body — learn them and learn how to take advantage of them. If you are shooting in manual mode, you are making your job harder than it has to be, and in fact, you aren’t putting yourself in control of the camera.

“shooting manual” is the code for telling the camera what to do. Today, there are many ways to do that beyond turning off the camera’s brain and doing it all yourself. If you aren’t taking advantage of them, you are hurting your ability to create the best possible images. In some ways, this makes your job more complex, because there are more variables and options to learn and consider. In practice, once you understand what those options can do and how to take advantage of them and once you learn the quirks of your specific model of camera, many things open up and your life as a photographer becomes easier.

What’s important is that you teach yourself how to take advantage of and control the features, so they don’t control you, and to do it so it becomes part of your habits of creating good images. It’s not enough to be able to think about how to take the next image, you have to just know and do it — otherwise, images will be lost before you get the camera set up.

It’s not about manual mode any more, it’s about not being in that green P of Program mode, and it’s about knowing how to adjust how the camera thinks so it does what you want, not what it thinks you want. Once you and the camera learn to think together, though, you’ll make many beautiful images.

Me, personally? I spend 95% of my time in Aperture mode, and 90% of the adjustments I might have used manual mode for five years ago I do via exposure compensations instead.

You must shoot early in the morning or late at night, not in the middle of the day

This is “the golden hour” rule; that time just before and after dawn, and before and after sunset when the light when you avoid the worst of the glare and shadowing and the oblique angle of light brings out the colors of your subject.

The reality is this: the golden hour can definitely enhance photos. If you can shoot then, do so. I certainly do. That’s assuming you don’t get up at 4AM to find your dawn shooting fogged out or a lack of any cloud cover giving you — well, blah, boring dawn sunrises.This also presumes THAT YOU CAN re-arrange your schedule into the golden hour.  If you are a photographer who isn’t a full-time photographer, that’s not necessarily easy and sometimes not possible.

I take a different view. For many of us, simply being able to go out and shoot is sometimes a challenge. I’m lucky to get to the Grand Tetons, spending a week of dawns and sunsets there waiting for the “right moment” is practically speaking impossible; in fact on my yellowstone trip, we got down to the Tetons for a partial day starting mid-morning. If you follow the “golden hour” rule, I might as well have not brought the camera.

Yeah, right. Fat chance.

So I turn this rule on its ear. It’s not about shooting only during those golden hours. Instead, I think of it in terms of what can I shoot that is compelling when I’m able to shoot. As it turns out, I think my Teton landscapes turned out pretty well, but there were other shots I was hoping for — especially the fall foliage aspens — where it simply didn’t work; in fact there was only one shot I took I felt worth keeping:

And that’s the key to rethinking the “Golden Hour” rule: don’t lower your standards because of the timing of your photography; instead, find the photography that works given the timing. Maybe that means going into the trees and shooting macro instead of landscape, or focusing on animals or birds instead of trees or mountains. Maybe it’s using a different filtration to cut the glare, or a different look to the location, such as my “blue” shot where I went for the distant hills and emphasized the blue haze instead of fighting it. For my Mt. Moran shots, I not only added both a polarizer and an ND, which allowed me to go with a slow shutter speed, which cut much of the ripples and accentuated the reflection — moving the emphasis away from the mountain with the fairly flat lighting. Is it a killer photo? It’s not Galen-Rowell-Alpenglow killer, but I rather like it (although I overdid the sky in post and want to fix that some day, a bit too much polarizer), and I really like the blue photo as probably my favorite of the day’s shoots.

I think they hold their own, even if they were taken mid-day in the glare of a full sun. And it sure is better than not taking the photos. This rule teaches the mindset that if you aren’t doing it “by the book”, you might as well bother. And some days,  that’s true. If I’d visited this spot in mid-June instead of late september, the lighting would have been a lot harsher and it probably wouldn’t have been worth pulling out the camera.

Which is my point. What I don’t like about this rule is that it’s defeatist. My rule is different; it’s that you should pull out the camera whenever you can, and then go find the pictures that are worthy of being taken. This rule is, in fact, in direct conflict with the first rule, which says you should be shooting every day, because it’s telling you not to shoot unless conditions are perfect.

Me? I shoot whenever I CAN shoot, given I have a “real” job and a life and all of the complexities that keep me away from the camera. I’ve been trying, frankly, to get to Mono Lake for three years now and still haven’t seen the damn thing, much less photographed it. Maybe in 2010. Think I’m going to only take the camera if I can do the golden hour dance? Fat chance. If I can get there, I’ll have my gear in hand and find shots worthy of being there for.

Or maybe not. Some days it happens. But as in my Teton’s trip, if I’d followed the common wisdom of only shooting in the edges of the day and avoiding the glare of mid-day, I’d have zero shots of the Tetons. I broke the rules going for my aspen foliage shots, too, and while I threw out almost all of the shots, I kept one, which is better than ZERO.

So here’s why these three rules are wrong: it’s not about shooting bad shots every day just to be shooting, it’s about working on your craft on a regular basis to become a better photographer, but not working so much you grow to hate doing it. It’s not about “shooting manual”, it’s about being in control of your camera and bending it to your will to get the image you see, not the image the camera wants to hand you. And it’s not about the Golden Hour (although, dammit, if you can do it, do it!), because if you wait until conditions are perfect to shoot images, you own’t shoot very often. It’s about thinking about how, when you do pull out the camera, to take images that are up to your standards.

The “Golden Hour” rule really bothers me, because there’s an implicit “it’s okay to not bother” approval given. It’s never okay to not try; it’s okay to fail, it’s okay to throw out 100% of the day’s shoot if what you try didn’t work — but it’s never okay to not try.

So here are my three rules, the ones I think “we” should be telling new photographers instead of these three rules:

• Commit yourself to being the best photographer you can be. Spend as much time as you can with a camera in your hand, but spend what time you have on practicing creating the best photo you can at that time.
• Learn as much about your gear as you can, and understand how to use the capabilities to create the image you want to create.
• There’s always something worthy of a photograph if you choose to look for it. It is better to take photos at a “bad” time than take no photos waiting for a “good” time. When you take photos, take the best possible shots available rather than bad photos of what you planned to shoot. Flexibility and an open mind wins out over giving up.
  

I mean, seriously, who in their right mind does bird photography in a white-out fog, anyway? Wouldn’t it be better to head for the Starbucks and wait for better weather?

Proposals For Librelist Moderation Strategies

To understand the feature requirements for moderation we need some goals. Keep in mind that no moderation will be perfect, and you can easily come up with scenarios that will work around anything we come up with.

Therefore, we should focus on just some initial goals that will work right now, and keep in mind that these will need to be constantly tweaked and worked on as the spammers evade the measures.

• If given the choice between restricting free speech and preventing unwanted communication, free speech always wins.
• The system should increase the quality of discourse for any project, regardless of human language used.
• It should never give a small group the ability to hide communications from others.
• It should be implementable and not have high hosting costs.
• It should not rely on a dedicated person’s constant intervention.
• It never gates email through system before sending it, but rather allows initial emails with moderation after.
• It should use information from people’s rating habits to classify them as “ratings trolls” to prevent abuse.

With those goals in mind I’ve teased out two potential list quality strategies that might work.

via Proposals For Librelist Moderation Strategies.

Someone I work with turned me on to Librelist because they knew me interest and history with mailing list systems, and I find it interesting that some folks have decided it’s time to rethink the mailing list again.

They’re right. When I faded to black on the mailman project, it was at least in part because many of us felt that mailing lists were a technological dead end, and that deliverability issues because of anti-spam systems made the “personal mailing list” an increasingly difficult thing to accomplish.

Both are — for the most part — true. I certainly would never run my own mail server again, because the advantages of doing so are far outweighed by the time and hassle of trying to manage deliverability and reputation to make sure mail it sends gets accepted, and the constant onslaught of incoming spam turns them into a permanent infinite time sink. That’s why I either retired our lists or moved them to Yahoogroups (which I personally think is a pretty good system).

But there’s still room here to rethink the concepts and the Librelists seem interested in trying, and I think that’s great. Email and mailing lists are far from dead — but instead of stand alone delivery tools, they really shine as part of an integrated web strategy; Yahoo groups is a nice first generation of that, although there’s a lot more Yahoo could do if they decided to.

Message moderation really breaks down into two big problems:

• “Subscribe spam” where spammers sign up to the list to spam it.
• “Member warfare” where existing, approved members get into fights and they escalate into unacceptable territory.

The first is really simple to solve: new members are moderated, and messages aren’t posted until reviewed by someone to vet their content. Simple implementation; Yahoo Groups does it today, and on the lists I still manage, it works well to keep the spammers at bay. The way I manage it is all members are moderated until their first post. if their first post is acceptable, I turn off the moderation bit. To minimize delays in propogation of new member messages, simply choose a moderator pool large enough to guarantee held messages get reviewed and approved in a timely manner — you could even make that moderator pool all members in good standing if you want, because all you really need is someone you’ve trusted to post vetting that someone new is trusted to post.

Member warfare is trickier. I hesitate to call it trolling because the pure troll is a subset of the larger issue of two (or a small group of) people getting pissed off and going at it. A troll is simply one person going off on the rest of the list.

I’m more and more convinced the answer here are reputation systems, where over time a user’s membership in a group is used to define their abilities and restrictions. The longer a member is in the group in good standing, the more often they contribute material, the higher their reputation goes and the more the can do and the more sway they have on the decisions of the reputation engine. You can tweak the details of the algorithm almost any way you want, but if you define it in terms of “how long they’re a member” and “constructive contribution to the community”, you can come up with a metric on how valuable that member is to the community, and then use that to rank that member’s contributions and recommendations.

Here’s one rough view of how to build this. Please note that I firmly believe karma rankings are private and users have no way to see what their ranking is or compare it to others, except in really broad user categories (“member”, “senior member”, “top contributor”, “advisory board member”). As soon as you create a list of any form, you will attract people who see it as something they can game, and so they will.

User Karma is a value between 0 and 1, which starts at 0.5. Every time a user contributes to the system (a posting, a reply, a moderation recommendation, etc), the number gets bumped by some value. How much the value is incremented or decremented depends on how it’s rated by other users — so if User A posts a message, User B flags it as spam, but 80% of the membership feel that was a bad decision, User B’s karma is reduced in future decisions, they lose influence. Over time, the system self-corrects by giving increased influence of those who’s decisions match the community consensus and reduced influence to those who’s postings and recommendations don’t match up well.

The system can then choose whether to accept or flag for moderation a posting based on a poster’s karma score. You could potentially reject outright users that have karma scores below some value, or allow other members to choose not to see messages by users with karma scores below some value. Over time, users who are disruptive to the community will get karma’ed into the moderation queue (or out the door), and users who are seen as top contributors will have stronger influence.

My goals:

• A system like this can be built nicely with a good SQL backend and a bit of horsepower. I’ve actually done a detailed design and schema on this before, and it’s a fascinating thing I’ve always wanted to implement.
• It enables the power of individuals to police themselves.
• It limits the ability of an individual to harass or cause problems.
• It doesn’t lend itself to people playing the game of gaming the system by not exposing the details of the system (slashdot karma whores need not apply).
• Trolls get edited out of the system because the community will quickly recognize them for what they are and trash their karma, causing their postings to disappear to the bottom of the list.
• Cliques and Mafias have to be large to influence the results significantly. You don’t completely avoid the clique/mafia problem, but you can severely limit it’s ability to wreak havoc.
• It doesn’t require a lot of manual handholding or babysitting. Admins end up stepping in only in extreme cases.
• Because trolls tend to get edited out of the system quickly and automatically, they tend to go elsewhere because without feedback and controversy, they wither and die. And by editing them out of the system quickly, you avoid the whiplash and fighting that happens when people start fighting with the trolls and the wars break out.

Weaknesses:

• Any community tends to turn into an echo chamber. Automated systems like this encourage this because “different thinking” tends to get rated down.
• That’s usually a lesser evil to letting the trolls run wild.
• To my knowledge, nobody’s ever solved the problem of the conflict between the group-mind reinforcing the echo chamber and allowing the free thinkers to poke at the community’s comfort level by pushing them to think about things that make them uncomfortable. One person’s rebel is another person’s troll, and that’s not solvable in real life, much less in automated life like this…

These techniques are all based on (or stolen from) things that are in use around the net, with Amazon’s review feedback being one I really respect; while trying to avoid the pitfalls I’ve seen around the net (yes, I’m going to keep bashing on Slashdot’s karma system, it’s way too easy to game and always has been). It also (I believe) avoids the nasty politics that have made Digg a bit of a pesthole. And it’s also pretty lightweight and low-key, or at least it should be. The implementation details will be crucial, as will be tuning how the karma values adapt…

Protecting mailto links (my advice: don’t)

Got this in email the other day, decided the answer might interest some of you.

I actually just had a quick random question about your Contact Us page on chuqui.com

I agree about not putting a phone number on a personal or small business site unless you are prepared for the idiot factor.

Since yourself and of course myself too are all too familiar with the world of spammers I was wondering why you don’t obfuscate or somehow protect your mailto: link?

It’s a serious question, as I am actually wondering if you do want to see how much spam will come to it and which types of spam?

good question, complicated answer… Part of it is that my email addresses have been “out there” for so long — I’ve owned plaidworks.com since 1995, for instance — that I assume I’m on every spam list in the universe, because, from what I can tell, I am. So why hide when it’s too late already?

I also think those obfuscators are fake-security. Anything you can build programmatically, they can unbuild programmatically. All they have to do is care enough to try. They really don’t fix things, but they make you feel better, and over time, they get compromised — so you add complexity to things and in the long run, it doesn’t really solve the problem. Or it does, for a while, but how do you know when it stops working?

I don’t see any purpose in having an arms war with someone who can out-gun you from day one. I’d rather put my time into useful things.

So here’s what I do:

I hire someone else to worry about it.

I don’t believe it’s possible for an individual to “win” a way with the spammers. Or even “break even”, or even stick with “moral victories” for long. Even if I could, I’d much rather put my time and energy into other things.

So that means having your email hosted by someone who does have the resources to fight spam. I currently have three email hosts: gmail/google, mobileme/Apple, and my personal ISP (plaidworks.com/chuqui.com). Of the three, the personal ISP has the most leak-through, but they honestly do a good job and I have no complaints, given the complexity of the task.

Apple/Mobileme uses Brightmail for filtering (unless things have changed), and Google uses Postini, which they bought a few months after I turned down a job at Postini to work for Strongmail instead. Both groups have organizations individuals can’t hope to do better than (IMHO), no matter how much the geeks think they can “better mousetrap” the problem. My experience shows it to be a situation with rapidly diminishing returns for constantly increasing resource commitments.

So let the experts handle it. Then, realize it’s never going to be 100% perfect, and don’t get your knickers in a knot when it really IS imperfect. A few pieces of spam sneaking through won’t kill anyone; the stress you get spazzing out over the spam just might.

Right now my final mailbox lives on gmail, because it works best with my webos/Pre phone. When I was living on an iPhone, I used MobileME’s mail server. Depending on where I live, I have the other servers set to auto-forward to the final repository, and everything works pretty well.

In reality, the anti-spam aspects of email work pretty well now if you’re involved with a mail host that has their act together. Many corporate environments don’t. Most geeks fighting this battle on their own don’t (and complain about it loudly, so I think the general view is it’s a lot LESS solved than it is). Living on a mail host run by pros costs a few bucks (well, it doesn’t on gmail, but you get ads. I would happily pay a few bucks to do away with them..) but I’m a lot more worried about spending time than money in most cases.

Things like mail obfuscators never really worked well; they might have been ignored by spammers, but if the spammers decided they were worth investing in cracking, they got cracked. Very few geeks who installed them actually did any kind of scientific testing on how well they worked, they noticed no spam in their boxes for a few days and declared victory. A month later? three? six? Compared to non-obfuscated control addresses?

shrug. very little science here. Including myself. What science I do have is a couple of years old and pretty thin as well, so I don’t declare myself an expert, but when I did experiment, I just didn’t see anything worth the time investment, not compared to just putting my email on a server where a staff was in charge of solving the problem for me.

The proper place to solve the spam problem is on the incoming connection; even if you do obfuscate, all it takes is one mistake to leak, or someone else to leak it FOR you (and I found those leaks everywhere when I was tracking this stuff; painfully sad) to require having to do the incoming filtering as well. If you have to do that anyway, isn’t the proper answer to focus on doing that better and not do things that ultimately don’t really help solve the problem?

My bottom line: you aren’t going to keep email addresses away from the spammers. Trying to do so is a false security solution, and ultimately a waste of time and energy. Instead, it’s keeping spam out of the incoming email stream, and if you do that well, you don’t need to worry about the addresses leaking. So I don’t.

I guess I’m a real photographer now…

I guess I qualify as a real photographer now. I’ve broken a lens. My Tamron AF 28-300mm has turned into a 28mm lens, with the zoom not working and the unit stuck in wide angle. It first locked up on me in Morro Bay during the Expo (of course), but it allowed me to manually zoom it; since then, it’s decided to simply turn into a prime.

Oh well. it’s going to have to go off for repair. I’m tempted to open it up myself, but I think I’ll restrain myself and let the experts fix it. But this leaves me with a little problem — my widest lens is my 100-400; not a good lens for family photos for christmas.

So I think I’m going to rent; I have to decide what to take with. My as well use the time as an excuse to scout the replacement, or at least potential.

Do I like this lens? Absolutely. It fit exactly the needs I defined and wanted when I bought it. It’s a bit soft at 300mm, but that was expected and for my use is acceptable. I wanted a general “carry around” lens with a wide range that wasn’t too large and bulky and “obvious” — something I could put on the Rebel XT and carry around with me on a day to day basis with flexibility, but without screaming EXPENSIVE CAMERA everywhere I went.

It fit that role perfectly; now, if only I spent more time outside of my cube where I could take advantage of having a camera with me… (a quick hint to computer geeks with cameras, make your next computer bag a camera bag with room for your laptop. I replaced my laptop backpack with a Tamrac 3385 and I love it.

Having said that, would I but the Tamron lens again? No. Not because it broke, not because of any flaw with the lens itself, but because I’m finding there’s one aspect of it that I’d do differently. it’s not wide enough. I was too worried about getting the extra magnification in the zoom (the bird photographer in me) and not enough about the other side of the zoom range.

So if I were to do this over again, I’d choose a wider lens with a shorter maximum zoom range, because it fits the rest of my gear better. When I’m out shooting I usually hit a point where I want something wider than I have, and while the Sigma 10-20mm is on my list to get, I’ve come to think a better “street lens” for me would be in the 20-200 range instead of the 28-300, and my initial thought there is the Sigma 18-200mm f/3.5-6.3, although I haven’t tested it yet. So maybe that’s what I’ll rent and see if I like it…

Stuff You’ll Like

A weekly compendium of stuff I found I thought you’d like. If you do, let me know, so I know to find more of it for you.

• Jeff Atwood: Microformats: Boon or Bane? (boon, but damn hard to explain why. Jeff does a nice job)

Stuff You’ll Like

A weekly compendium of stuff I found I thought you’d like. If you do, let me know, so I know to find more of it for you.

• Moose Peterson: Or is it passion?
• Pictory Magazine: From the former editor-in-chief of JPG magazine comes a new venture, Pictory. Which is sort of JPG re-imagined. I’m really interested in seeing her implement her vision, I really like the approach.
• TUAW: building a bootable USB diagnostic and repair flash drive for Mac OS X. I am so going to do this….
• Boston.com: 100 days in Glacier National Park. Oh, man. I would so love to do something like this some day. The photography is just stunning.
• BBC Earth News: Clever Ravens Cooperatively Hunt. hint: birds are a lot smarter than most people think. Take it from someone who’s cohabitated with a cockatoo for 20 years.
• Audublog: Owens Lake Solar project. I’m of mixed feelings here; I sympathize with the potential problems created with the project, but I still think solar is a better option than carbon-based energy generation, and you have to generate the energy somehow. Still, perhaps the best lesson taken from this is that “green” solutions are not problem free; they simply create different problems that need to be mitigated. Both Solar and wind energy generation can have significant complications for local ecological inhabitants (wind energy can create significant bird kills, especially raptors); it all comes down to choosing which set of problems is least painful — and not thinking they don’t exist.
• Daily Shoot: From James Duncan Davidson and Mike Clark, a system designed to help give you structured goals for improving your photography. Check it out. If you like it, sign up and try it. Fascinating, if only to see how people are grabbing some of the online tools (Twitter, flickr) and using them in innovative ways.
• Joe Decker: Working with Silhouettes.
• 10,000 birds: Birds of North America, Photographic Guides. Illustrative vs. photographic guides is one of the best ways to start a friendly argument among birders. Sort of like vi vs. emacs for geeks. (me? I carry a sibley, but I also have 3-4 other general guides and a few specialty guides I have at home, and especially with the specialty guides for things like gulls, photographic guides are a must)
• Reuters Photographers: Polar Bear turns Cannibal. It’s something that won’t end up in the calendar under the tree this month, but one thing nature photographers know all to well is that nature isn’t always pretty and fluffy. Those teeth and claws are there for a reason, folks… (some of the comments on the reuters article notwithstanding, this behavior shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows bears; female bears don’t mate while raising cubs. Male  bears want their genetic material propogated instead of some other male bear’s genetic material. Kill the cub and hang around the neighborhood, the female will end up going into heat so the male bear can mate with her. It’s not exactly Disneyland out there, folks…
• Iain Williams: Photographing emotive situations – Polar Bears. A nice commentary on the previous photo. And yes, it is necessary to photograph that which makes us uncomfortable. Real life and real nature is not a Disney movie. And even Disney killed Bambi’s mom (and took a lot of crap for it, but it was both gutsy and an important piece of a powerful storyline).
• Rick Sammon: manual mode is a must for Panos. (yes, it is…)

Cranes and Geese and Swans (Oh my!)

I spent sunday out in the Lodi/Galt area birding and doing photography in the geese and crane preserves. The morning started at 5AM and I was on the road by 5:30. The original idea was to go over Mount Hamilton into Anderson Valley and pop out via Mines road, but the temperature (< 40 degrees in Santa Clara) made me worry about icing and I decided that was putting a bit too much into one day (I was right), so I drove straight to Woodbridge and arrived before 8 to 35 degree weather and a brisk, sustained wind (memo to self. gloves would have been nice).

There were good numbers of Sandhill Cranes in the fields around the preserve. The Isenberg preserve itself was fairly quiet but you could see flights of cranes, canada geese, greater white-fronted and some snow geese moving about. I tried doing some count estimating, the flocks won. (one. two. three. many….) Highlight birds along Woodbridge were the Tundra Swans and a surprising number of Belted Kingfishers each patrolling a different part of the irrigation channel long the road; I counted at least four, possibly five, all of them annoyed at my presence. Also notable was the only other pair of birders out in that weather sitting on the side of the road watching the flocks fly out.

After that I rolled into Lodi for a coffee (and a bathroom; thanks, Lodi starbucks) then went off to Staten Island arriving about 11. it was quite slow, about 100 cranes, a couple of small flocks of canada geese, a few raptors some shovelers. I didn’t stay long, and headed off to Consumnes. It was cold and windy with a sustained breeze; the ducks were primarily looking for bushes to hide behind and under. I parked down in the 2ndary parking lot and walked the wetlands boardwalk and other than a pair of stalwart birders from san mateo county, there wasn’t a lot going on. you could hear a good number of cranes in the area, but there were only two small flocks at distance, and a few larger flocks (about 100 total) of the greater white-fronted.

I ended up walking the tree path up to the main visitor center and then exploring most of the riverwalk path. Along the way the sun finally broke through and it warmed up. The trees had a number of nice birds, a female downy chowing down on a seed pod, multiple ruby-crowned kinglets, a few yellow rumps, northern flickers….  It actually turned into a rather pleasant hike. Riverwalk wasn’t too birdy, but I heard two distinct kingfishers and another flicker on the river past the bridge back to the parking lot. Once I was done with that, I took the path back to the road and along the wetlands back to the parking lot and my car, chasing out some pipits and a rather cooperative loggerhead shrike. Actually two, because when the one I was watching called and flew off, it was answered by an identical call somewhere behind me.

Because I was curious how they’d work, I had brought my 25×100 binoculars (designed for astronomy use); they did both an awesome job of pulling in the distant areas of the wetlands and creating a crowd; their downside is they require a sherpa or a small forklift but they definitely seem useful for a place like Consumnes. I’ll have to try them on a seawatch some day. A couple of ten year olds were pestering mom for a pair when I packed up…

By that time the storm (3PM) was moving in and it didn’t seem like there was much promise for interesting photography of the sunset and/or fly-ins (things like or . I headed back to Isenberg to see if it was more promising; the sprinkles started when I got there (about 3:30) and it seemed the birds had mostly flown in early and were hunkered down. By that time the fields were loaded, and there were a large number of snow geese as well, which had been mostly missing in the morning, and I still don’t feel comfortable with my count estimates, but “hundreds” of cranes, “a thousand+” snow geese and “zillions” of canada geese, with greater white-fronted being “more than cranes, less than canada geese”. Some scanning the flocks for Ross’s and cackling didn’t turn any up, but that’s more speaking to the birder than the birds.  With the rain moving in and the light failing, I called it and headed home.

I didn’t see anything exceptionally rare or unusual, but it was a fun day (long and cold and windy, but fun)…

Location:     Woodbridge Ecological Reserve (Isenberg Crane Reserve)
Observation date:     12/6/09
Number of species:     35

Greater White-fronted Goose     X
Snow Goose     X
Canada Goose     X
Tundra Swan     12
Gadwall     X
American Wigeon     X
Mallard     X
Cinnamon Teal     X
Northern Shoveler     X
Northern Pintail     X
Green-winged Teal     X
Bufflehead     X
Great Blue Heron     1
Great Egret     3
Snowy Egret     6
Turkey Vulture     2
Northern Harrier     3
Red-tailed Hawk     4
American Kestrel     2
American Coot     X
Sandhill Crane     600
Killdeer     X
Black-necked Stilt     X
peep sp.     X
Mourning Dove     X
Belted Kingfisher     4
Northern Flicker (Red-shafted)     1
Black Phoebe     2
Western Scrub-Jay     X
American Crow     X
Common Raven     2
Northern Mockingbird     X
European Starling     X
American Pipit     X
Red-winged Blackbird     X
Western Meadowlark     X

Location:     Consumnes River Preseve
Observation date:     12/6/09
Number of species:     44

Greater White-fronted Goose     X
Canada Goose     X
Gadwall     X
American Wigeon     X
Mallard     X
Cinnamon Teal     X
Northern Shoveler     X
Northern Pintail     X
Green-winged Teal     X
Ring-necked Duck     X
Greater/Lesser Scaup     X
Bufflehead     X
Common Goldeneye     X
Pied-billed Grebe     X
Great Egret     X
Snowy Egret     X
Turkey Vulture     X
Northern Harrier     X
Red-tailed Hawk     X
American Kestrel     X
American Coot     X
Sandhill Crane     X
Killdeer     X
Black-necked Stilt     X
gull sp.     X
Belted Kingfisher     2
Downy Woodpecker     1
Northern Flicker     1
Black Phoebe     4
Say’s Phoebe     1
Loggerhead Shrike     2
Western Scrub-Jay     X
American Crow     X
Bushtit     X
Marsh Wren     4
Ruby-crowned Kinglet     5
Northern Mockingbird     X
European Starling     X
American Pipit     X
Yellow-rumped Warbler     X
Common Yellowthroat     1
Savannah Sparrow     X
Dark-eyed Junco     X
Red-winged Blackbird     X
House Finch     X
House Sparrow     X

Location:     Staten Island
Observation date:     12/6/09
Number of species:     18

Greater White-fronted Goose     X
Canada Goose     X
Mallard     X
Northern Shoveler     X
Great Egret     1
Turkey Vulture     1
Northern Harrier     2
Red-tailed Hawk     2
American Kestrel     2
American Coot     X
Sandhill Crane     125
Killdeer     X
Least Sandpiper     X
Mourning Dove     X
Black Phoebe     1
American Crow     X
American Pipit     X
Red-winged Blackbird     X

This report was generated automatically by eBird v2(http://ebird.org)

Best Photos 2009

Following on the idea of Justin Korn, I decided it was time to look at what I felt were my best shots of the year.

By design (and because of work commitments) I actually spent a lot less time behind a camera this year than last, but I think I took better photos. Part of the plan was to really focus on improving my post processing and spend time and energy thinking about the business aspects and the creative aspects more than mashing shutter buttons, and I’m happy with the results. It was a pretty good year, I think.

So here are my ten favorite photos of the year, with a bit of commentary.

10: Orion over Morro Rock

After taking the night photography class (see below), I got up to do some dawn photography around the harbor. My first stop was near the rock, and I looked up and saw Orion getting ready to set behind the rock, so it turned into some “pre dawn” photography first. This was taken about 90 minutes before the photo that was my favorite of the year below; “dawn” being somewhat of a relative concept, I guess. I really loved how it came out and the night glow on the rocks.

9: Brown Pelican with an attitude

The brown pelicans in Morro Bay are very habituated to people, which isn’t a good thing, but it gives you some interesting photo opportunities. I just loved the composition of this one, it really presents the bird to me as having a bit of an attitude (which was true…)

8: Sea Otter at Dawn

Taken my second dawn shoot at Morro Bay during the expo, the color washing the water just as the sun was cracking the hills was glorious, and so I decided to do silhouette shooting. I also had some early morning equipment challenges, so by the time I actually got the cameras rolling most of the light had faded — but I was able to, ahem, put it back in post. It was literally of those situations where by the time got the camera on the tripod, the light had come and gone, but the image remained to be refound. Why practicing with your gear is essential, folks…

7: Black-Crowned Night Herons

Black-crowned night herons sharing a nest. Night Herons always seem to have that “you’re not going to eat me, are you?” look to them? Working around nests you have to be careful not to push the birds too hard, because the chicks aren’t ready to leave and you can screw it up badly if the parent or chick panics. These two were clearly watching me watch them, but with the help of my hand-dandy 400mm lens, I stayed a good distance away and didn’t spend much time near them.

6: Common Loon

Shot during a boat outing on the harbor at Morro Photo Expo, it will become obvious looking at my photos that I have my favorites, and they include loons, pelicans, raptors, egrets and herons. This one was nice enough to sit up and show off for the boat of photographers, and the camera was nice enough to catch it nicely.

5: Flower Buds

Experimenting with really shallow depth of field and the Sigma 200mm macro, I was really happy with the almost abstract quality of this one. it was, believe it or not, handheld.

4: Sea Otters

I do love the sea otters down in Morro Bay. Surprisingly accessible. What you don’t see about this trio is the 45 minutes I spent watching them mostly sleep and do absolutely nothing, although the kid in the middle seemed a bit bored with hanging out doing nothing. Five minutes after this shot, the adult on the right was asleep again. Ah, the adventurous life of the nature photographer….

3: Lark Sparrow

Every so often the birds simply choose to cooperate. And I thank them. A gorgeous shot of a very pretty bird with very little work done on it other than darkening the background a bit more than it was to start, this one just sat up and waited for me to finish…

2: Say’s Phoebe

I traditionally don’t do a lot of “oomph” processing on photos, but I’ve been experimenting more with it to figure out how far I can push a photo I like while still being true to the image (where does improve end and manipulate begin? It depends…). This was a nice shot of a nice bird, but ultimately was a grey bird on a greyish background, so I dropped it into Viveza to try to darken the background and give th bird some better definition. As it turns out, I think it turned out quite well. The like flare behind the bird’s head was actually an accident where I pushed a knob the wrong direction and went “hmm. that looks pretty good!” — never be afraid to experiment.

1: Morro Rock at Dawn

I went to the Morro Photo Expo this fall, three days of seminars and photography that I thoroughly enjoyed. One class I took was the night photography class headed by Howard Ignatius, where we later went out and did some shooting around the rock. The next morning I decided to get up really early and try to do some dawn photography around the harbor, and everything came together just as the sun started hitting the rock. This may be one of my favorite shots — ever.

It’s interesting to me that seven of these photos were taken in Morro Bay, not local to home, and six come from the Photo Expo. Interesting, but not surprising, because the Expo was for me a time to drop everything and focus JUST on photography and to push myself into new areas and experiment as well as a time where I put some energy into locking in various things I’d been studying in post processing to be prepared for the trip; it all really came together well. I really need to write it up, but this kind of outing is something I strongly recommend to you.

Inspirations

People and things that currently inspire me or include ideas and techniques I plan on borrowing. An occasional series…

• Smashing Magazine: They do an awesome job of doing information surveys on specific topics, and creating a lot of tutorial material. I love how they help identify and promote good content around the net and aren’t “grabby” about trying to force visitors onto their site along the way (unlike sites like Endgadget, Gizmodo and TUAW, which far too often use third party content as a hook to generate their own page views)
• Craft and Vision: David duChemin’s e-books are really giving me ideas on how I can create information that has a distinctive style and a value to readers.
• Vlad Studio: this is a russian artist who does amazing work creating computer wallpapers. He was really the first person I saw with a financial model around wallpapers as both a marketing tool and a product — and he’s really good.
• Jeffrey Friedl: I discovered him because he’s written a number of Lightroom plugins I’m starting to depend on (especially his flickr uploader and his plug-in for geo-encoding using Google Earth. His financial model is really intriguing to me — pay what it’s worth. I’ve sent him some donations for his tools because they’re worth it, and I think there’s an interesting value proposition to be had here. Some folks are going to always pay zero, because they can, but if the suggested donation is $10 but someone thinks that’s too high, isn’t getting $5 instead of zero found money? It’s something I plan on experimenting with.
• Mark Williamson: Nature Light Photography. I love the design of the site, especially how the photos are used for the topics at the top of the page and the ajaxy animations. Very well-done and attractive.
• Serious Amateur Photography: love the design of the posters, and yes, that’s On The List because I like the price point and options it gives.

Following my own advice on backups….

While writing my article on backups (and it’s followup) I decided some of my practices weren’t what I wanted them to be. The primary issue was the online catastrophic backups, which used Jungle Disk as a front end to Amazon S3 for storage. I really like the setup — Jungle disk was almsot flawless in doing what I needed the way I wanted it done, and S3 was reliable and backed by Amazon, so I didn’t need to worry about the “not here tomorrow” problem you sometimes have with startups.

But there were a few negatives: the cost — I was spending about $17/mo on storage costs with S3, plus about $1.50 a month to Jungle disk for their advanced features. I also worried about the occasional delays (I was only uploading about a gigabyte of fresh data a day, so a few days of heavy photo shooting could cause backlogs before the data was stored offsite; uploading the network is an option, but costs. Everything costs…) and finally the time it would take to recover via online recovery if I ever needed the backed up data bothered me.

So I decided to move to a simpler strategy: clone my disks and keep them offsite. Over the weekend I disabled and deleted the S3 store and turned off my Jungle Disk setup, and ordered a new drive.

Not an offsite drive, which might surprise you, but a new internal drive for the Macbook, a 340 Gig Hitachi 7200RPM drive. Why, might you ask?

Well, let me tell you: if you read the previous pieces, you saw where I noted that one of the best ways to never NEED your backups (always my preferred policy!) is to replace my primary disks on a regular basis; my laptop drive was (over)due, so it made sense to replace it before it failed. By upgrading to a larger internal disk, I could take the files I’m currently storing on an external firewire drive and put them back on the laptop drive.

That simplifies my computing universe — fewer spinning things hooked up to computers, fewer places to misplace data and one less “i have that data, but it’s not with me” opportunity. And it means I can repurpose that firewire drive for my offsite backup.

Amazon had a nice deal (about $75) on a Western Digital 320gig 7200RPM drive with a 16 meg cache (hmm. old phart warning: the first hard drive I ever bought — for a Mac 512K that plugged into the floppy port!) was a ten Megabyte drive that was wonderful and had more disk than I could ever think of using, especially compared to floppies… Now that drive is smaller than the performance cache on a hard drive… wow).

I could have gone as far as 500 gig, but that changes the price/performance,a nd even with copying all of the files off my secondary drive, I still have 150 gig free. By the time I start worrying about the disk filling up, the bigger drives will get cheaper, or I can simply buy a nice cheap external and split it up again. But for now, I’m happy on a single drive, a single backup drive, and a single offline external archive drive. Plus backups of each, of course.

I wired up the raw drive via USB to my laptop and used superduper to clone my primary drive. Then I let everything sit for two days with the new drive spun up, refreshing it daily with superduper — because infant mortality on your laptop drive really sucks, and giving it a couple of days before opening up the guts and swapping things is a bit of insurance. Just saying — nothing like putting your laptop back together and having it fail (or not boot).

A bonus feature of this change: the old drive in the laptop was a 5400 RPM drive. Upgrading to 7200 RPM improves the I/O characteristics and speeds the overall performance, especially if you’re doing things that eat lots of virtual memory (like, oh, photoshop or lightroom, or running both). On a mac, check /var/vm and see how many swapfiles you have and how big they are. The larger your VM set, the more your disk is going to affect overall performance, and in many cases, a slow disk is the real problem to performance, not lack of RAM. hint: people how are proud of NEVER REBOOTING THEIR COMPUTERS are never re-initializing their VM environment. Silly boys. I’ve seen major complaints about slow performance in firefox and photoshop magically disappear on computers that were simply rebooted. Just saying.

So for $75, I remove a $20/mon charge to pay for the online backups, I add enough disk to my primary computer to keep me for at least six months or longer, added a faster disk to speed up overall performance of the computer, and I really didn’t do anything to weaken my backup strategy. All I need to do is remember to bring the catastrophe disk home once a month, refresh it, and get it back offsite again; I can choose to do it more often if I finish a significant project, too. And that’s very manageable for me — just put repeating tasks in your calendar to nag you, right?

There is one other upgrade I’ll need to make, which is my bus-powered backup drive is now too small to fully backup my primary drive, but I don’t need to worry about that for another 50 gigs of data or so; that’ll cost me another $75 (or less by then) down the road.

So I now have my primary disk (320 gigs) with a time machine backup and THREE superduper cloned backups (one offsite, one nightly, one weekly); I also have a pair of 500 gig drives which store all of my long-term offline archival stored data; they’re clones of each other, and one is stored offsite. These hold the files I don’t ever expect to touch again but won’t throw out for a while just in case (the import backups of all of my photo shoots, for instance), so they are in fact more redundancy. Just in case, you know?

The old laptop drive? It goes into the anti-static bag and gets filed with all of my yearly paperwork and taxes; it’ll stay there until I dispose of this year’s paperwork down the road, at which point the drive will have a bad date with a big hammer and some other power tools and get tossed in the trash. I much prefer my hard drives not end up in hands of strangers (if I do give a drive to somene else, it’s generally after a multi-pass, multi-pattern write/erase sequence, but drives are cheap enough, I kinda feel they’re not worth losing track of until you know they’re destroyed, and there’s no sense destroying until later, because you never know when you might need it…. It hurts nothing to wait…)

So I’m following my own advice and fixing my own backups — again. Using simple technology to reduce “failure by complexity”, using as few mechanisms as reasonable, using multiple redundant backups and backing up on different time sequences to avoid the problem of corruption not found until too late — and keeping copies off site, without being anal about it.

It’s probably overkill, but disk is cheap enough now that it’s cheap insurance. And I’d rather have one too many backups than one too few.

Stuff You’ll Like

A weekly compendium of stuff I found I thought you’d like. If you do, let me know, so I know to find more of it for you.

• Virtual Photography Studio: Photography Disaster Protection and Recovery: Are You Prepared? A very good way to store stuff like your gear inventory and photos is Evernote; it’s a nice tool that has mobile versions for many phones as well, making it really convenient as a way to store stuff you might need access to on short notice.
• Austin Mann: 10 Ways I’ve Used Gaff Tape in the last year (via Scott Kelby) (Austin’s web site)
• Lightroom Labs: Keyword Sets make repetitive keywording push button easy. (I really need to implement this into my workflow).
• Zeldman: On Self-Promotion. Direct self-promotion is ineffective and will go unnoticed unless it is backed by a more indirect (and more valuable) form of marketing: namely, sharing information and promoting others.
• Steve Berardi: How to use the ‘special’ histogram
• Mike Spinak: Red-Tailed Hawk Photo Shoot. A great overview of the planning and thinking that helps you make a nature shoot successful.
• John Harrington: Nine Inconvenient Business Facts for Aspiring Photographers
• Dave Cardinal: Tack Sharp, a tale of three images
• audublog: santa clara valley audubon speaking up for local burrowing owl population.

The fun of Ottawa and San Jose

Tonight was the Ottawa vs San Jose game, Dany Heatley playing his old chums (and half of Canada’s sports journalists in town to cover it), with Michalek and Cheechoo coming back for their first visit since the trade.

Cheechoo had a really solid chance early on a wrap around that I still don’t understand how he didn’t score, and then was more or less invisible the rest of the game. That kinda sums up why Cheechoo is now a Senator (and on the 3rd/4th line there) and not a Shark. Great hustle, great guy, fading talent on the depth chart.

Michalek had a hell of a game. Heatley had a hell of a game. It was a lot of fun. The Sharks won pretty handily, but both teams made it interesting.Tonight’s three stars: Heatley, Michalek and Marleau.

But here’s what really made it fun tonight…

An old friend and Apple cohort is from Ottawa, and boring the hell out of everyone around us talking hockey was a time-honored tradition back at meetings we were at together. He was at the game tonight, so before it started, I texted him and set a bet — loser buys lunch.

Then I spotted him a goal.

THEN I found out Thomas Greiss was starting in goal instead of Nabokov.

So I spotted him TWO goals, just to poke at him a bit.

And I won the bet.

A good time was had by all, I get to have lunch with an old friend — and he’s paying….

How much fun is that?