Mike Cohen

The 1 Focal Length Weekend Challenge

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I’m planning to take Digital Photography School‘s photographic challenge: Shoot at just one focal length for the next couple of days.

Choose a focal length to shoot at this weekend (or for at least one day) and don’t allow yourself to shoot at any other focal length.

  • If you have a prime lens it’ll be easy – fit it to your camera and don’t take if off.
  • If you have a DSLR with a zoom lens just choose one end of the focal range and resist the temptation to zoom.
  • If you have a point and shoot camera with a zoom – again, just choose one end of the range and stick to that.

When choosing which focal length you go with – try to pick something you don’t normally shoot a lot at. For example if you tend to shoot fully zoomed in – try shooting with a wider angle. If you normally shoot with wide angles challenge yourself at the other end of the spectrum.

I’ll attempt to use only my 50mm/f1.8 prime lens, which also means I won’t be able to use auto focus.

Widespread problem with NVIDIA GPUs

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The dead display problem I had with my MacBook Pro last month seems to be widespread. However it looks like it isn’t limited to Macs. According to Engadget, “significant quantities” of NVIDIA’s laptop GPUs have been failing at “higher than normal rates”. Laptop makers have apparently already been given an updated GPU driver which kicks in fans sooner to reduce “thermal stress” on the GPU (I notice that the fan on my MBP seems to run more often since the motherboard was replaced).

When to use manual focus

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I still have difficulty using manual focus, thanks to my glasses and less than perfect eyesight. For anyone who doesn’t have perfect vision, it can be difficult to see if the subject is perfectly in focus, especially when using a large aperture with a narrow depth of field.

However, there are some instances where you have to use manual focus. With my D40X, any non AF-S lens, which lacks the internal AF motor, can only do manual focus (although the focus indicator will light up when it thinks the subject is in focus). I have a love/hate relationship with my 50mm/f1.8 lens for that reason – it’s the sharpest lens I own with the largest aperture that can produce a wonderfully narrow depth of field, yet I still find the manual focus difficult to use.

For certain subjects, like this spider web I photographed this morning, auto focus won’t work, since it will try to focus on a higher contrast object behind the spider web rather than the web itself. I took about 10 shots to get 3 that were perfectly in focus.

Spiderweb

For this one I cheated a bit by spraying the web with a fine mist of water to make it stand out more.

SmugMug vs. Flickr

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After trying SmugMug for a few days, I’ve decided to keep it, although I’ll still continue to use Flickr.

SmugMug
Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

SmugMug has several pros & cons in comparison with Flickr. SmugMug lets you create really beautiful galleries where you can customize both the color theme and the photo layout. The default layout shows thumbnails on the left side with a large view of a single photo on the right. You can even let your visitors choose which layout they want to use.

Smugmug Album View
Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

SmugMug does have some significant weaknesses, though. On Flickr, all of your photos appear in your photo stream and it can also be included in multiple sets or group pools. SmugMug doesn’t have a photo stream; it has albums and every photo can appear in only one album. Flickr also feels more like a community.

For general use, I prefer Flickr, but for a professional, SmugMug seems like a nicer way to show off your best photos.

Check out my SmugMug gallery at mike3k.smugmug.com, and as always my Flickr photo stream is at http://www.flickr.com/photos/mike_c/

A waste of time

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It turns out that my work on Watermark was a complete waste of time. After I released it, everyone told me that Aperture has a built-in watermark feature (which I was completely unaware of), hidden in the export format window. If I had known, I wouldn’t have released it. I most likely won’t release any future updates since it landed with such a thud.

Qikking

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I’m trying out the unofficial iPhone version of Qik, which requires a jailbroken iPhone and uses the standard installer. A new version was just released today, which works pretty nicely. I recorded this video and streamed it live from my iPhone.

Watermark

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The Watermark plugin is fully working. I’m now working on the documentation and I hope to release it in a day or so.

Baby Bird

Here’s my first official copyright marked picture, which I took today. This baby bird is nesting outside my neighbor’s window.