Alexa

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To readers in the United States, Speedlighter.ca is now available on the Amazon Echo. You can find it in the skills section of Alexa, listed as “Speedlighter”:

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You can use it, for instance, with commands like the following “Alexa, ask Speedlighter for the latest post”, and have the most recent blog post read to you. Not every post on the blog lends itself well to dictation (some depend heavily on images, like Picture of the Day, or some exposure lessons), so blog posts in the “Audible” category will be read. 

New features will continue to be added, and it will be available in the UK soon as well. To readers outside of the US, as Amazon releases the Echo in more countries, this will become available in them. 

Have fun, and let me know how it works for you!

Today’s pics

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I was hired to take some fall pictures of a woman and her dog today.

Like these:

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In pictures like this one challenge is that the dog is the same colours as the background. That’s where (off-camera) flash comes to the rescue. That allows me to make the subjects brighter, and the background dark. And the sun is the hair-light. (all that is what I teach in my courses and books).

Lenses: 85mm f/1.2 and 70-200 f/2.8. Camera Settings: 100 ISO, f/3.2, and 1/250 to 1/400 sec.

1/400 sec? Impossible. That’s beyond the camera’s “sync speed”. But actually: very possible; you just don’t get the entire picture being lit. Which is sometimes fine.

And finally: a no flash/flash comparison:

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Remember Willems’s Dictum: Bright Pixels are Sharp Pixels.

 

Me@Work

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This was me a week or two ago:

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A fun photo booth. I love doing them: not much money but a great job technically, and a fun evening full of happy people.

A lot of work. Here’s the hallway before I pack the car:

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You can see. it takes many hours to prepare, and then many hours to set up, pull down, re-pack… a lot of work, and that’s why it costs money. If you see it advertised for less, you get less – it’s as simple as that.

I look forward to the next ones!

 

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“I want to adjust a bunch of pictures by increasing their ISO by a stop”. Is that something you often want to do?

In that case, you have probably run into a problem. Yes, you can adjust one, then mark the rest in the DEVELOP module’s negative strip and SYNC them:

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Ah. But now they are all set to exactly +1 stop – not “whatever they were plus 1 stop”. And that, depending on how you got here, could be a problem. If you have previously adjusted some individually, you will lose those individual tweaks.

The solution?

Do it in the LIBRARY module. Mark them all and in “Tone Control”, adjust the exposure (or clarity, or vibrance) to the relative amount you would like to add. It will be added to the prior value, instead of replacing it.

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That’s it. Just one of those little nice-to-knows!

 

Photographer, or…?

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…or illustrator?

I am a big fan of being a photographer–meaning you do the work in the camera. But sometimes even I do some post-production work. Like here in this edited flash picture:

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That makes an OK picture a good picture, mainly because it dramatically simplifies it. See an earlier post for the “recipe” for this Andy Warhol-like effect – but I suggest you make your own. Much more fun. Simple (I used Lightroom) and quick.

 

Tomorrow…

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Tomorrow, Sunday: a long hands-on Flash workshop

The last two sold out, and people drive in from as far away as Peterborough for these.  So good news: still a few spaces open for this one. Think about it: you’d find this VERY useful. Hands on, so you do your own pictures, build the sets, connect the Pocketwizards, etc – and it’s a LONG one.

Facebook Messenger

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Today, a blog post that is only sideways about photography. It’s about more.

Facebook is where social media happens. There is no alternative: all our friends and relatives are on Facebook. It’s where the world communicates. Great stuff. Ping: Oh there’s Facebook!

Lately, FB has been trying to also take over the messaging world. First by creating their messenger app. Then by making its use (rather than doing it in the Facebook app) compulsory if you are using the FB app on a mobile device. Now, even when using a browser on a mobile device. They really want you to do all your messaging using their app.

But I do not want to roll over. No FB Messenger for me.

First, out of principle. I don’t like to be told what apps I must use. And I think social media and communication should be separate items. Facebook can cancel my account at any time without any reason or recourse. That should not then also kill my ability to communicate!

“But everyone can cancel your account”, people say. Not so. My willems.ca account is safe unless the willems.ca admin kills it. But since that is me, I am not afraid. Also, only FB can cancel your ability to communicate if you post something they don’t like on social media, or of someone makes something up about you (that happens, trust me).

“But all business is done on FB”, they say. Yes, that part is true, But to my mind, that is a good reason not to give FB more power, rather than the opposite.

Then, there’s also the practical side.

  • Another app means more memory, more processor cycles, more updates, and yet another UI to use.
  • More pings. When something pings or rings it could be one more thing…
  • It means even more things to check. Messages used to arrive via email. If someone said “I sent you that address last week”, you would check email.  Now, you check email, and you check SMS (phone text), and you check Facebook messages, and you check Facebook proper, and you check Skype, and you check Telegram, and you check Apple iMessage, and you check whatever other messaging methods you use – at least a few more for most of us. So this has made our lives much more complicated. Why add all these levels of complexity when it would be better, obviously, to have fewer rather than more?

 

It’s a free world: if you use and like Facebook Messenger, good for you. Enjoy. But it’s not for me. Please continue to use email as the main mechanism to contact me. Thanks!

 

Intermezzo, and, join me Sunday?

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A bit slow this week as I have been in bed with flu-like symptoms. Meanwhile, here’s some depth – remember, to make your images “real looking”, use a close by subject against a farther background (“close-far”):

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Now – flash. A long workshop, all hands-on, this Sunday. The last two sold out. But PLENTY of space for this one. Think about it: you’d find this VERY useful. Hands on, so you do your own pictures, build the sets, connect the Pocketwizards, etc – and it’s a LONG one.

The pendulum swings.

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You know how in life the pendulum swings back and forth? Thesis leads to antithesis, resulting in eventual synthesis, and so on?

Well, right now Apple is swinging backward.

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Let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine you wanted a tech company to fail. A recipe for failure for a company like Apple would have components like:

  • Let’s kill professional/prosumer apps like Aperture, Final Cut Pro, and so on.
  • Let’s kill the only web design app that’s any good: iWeb.
  • Ignore the iMac; make everything iOS. Pretend you can have one platform everywhere (my Apple TV auto-installs apps I buy on my iPhone, for instance).
  • Make the User Interface so complicated that people like me have to Google simple actions like “how do I watch Apple special events on my Apple TV”.
  • Make WatchOS 3 “the best running experience”. Fine, but I am not a runner.
  • Hang everything on Siri, which probably works fine – as long as your accent is average. If you’re me, it sucks.
  • Make it unreliable. Both my Apple TVs, Gen 3 and Gen 4, crash when I watch the Apple Special Event. The Gen 3 crashes after ten seconds; the Gen 4 after half an hour.
  • Let’s lag behind. We now get Touch ID, meaning using your fingerprint to unlock the Macbook Pro. Cool new feature! Only, um, I had this in 1999 on my IBM Thinkpad. That’s 17 years ago.
  • And worst of all: let’s remove connectors. I use power, USB, HDMI, connect displays… When teaching, for example, I always connect a laser pointer, my iPhone, and a VGA display. I need more USB ports, not fewer! But no: let’s kill all those connectors so that I have to carry a plethora of dongles.
  • Oh and the SD card, let’s kill the SD card slot!

But there’s no way Apple would do those things, right? Right?

Except they did.

Innovation is not removing useful ports and forcing people to buy dongles. I noticed that in today’s Apple Special Event, the audience looked subdued, bored and un-impressed. Oh wait. Someone smiled – after 35 minutes, finally.

Mr Cook is no Steve Jobs, unfortunately.

EDIT: added next day:

I see that they have also removed the best feature of the Apple laptops: the MagSafe power connector. That magnetic connector, that lets go when you trip over the cable (instead of dragging the computer to the floor), has saved my laptop probably a dozen times. Without it, my computers will not last more than six months. Remove MagSafe? Now I know Apple has lost it.

 

Another view of Toronto

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As seen from the Don Valley Parkway on Saturday around noon:

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Made at 1/500 sec, f/11, 400 ISO, with a 16mm lens.

Why and how those decisions?

  • 16mm to get it in and to make it easy for me in terms of shutter speed and depth of field.
  • 1/500 sec because I am doing this handheld in one hand.
  • f/11 to ensure focus and DOF: I am focusing without truly looking.
  • 400 ISO to enable the above.

…in a hurry! You may notice the similarity to the “sunny 16 rule”: my settings are just 2/3 stop lighter than sunny sixteen. When you are experienced in these things, settings become simple. Just try.