Talking about Blurburger

Check this site out, very nice art for your desktop. Since you’re there, check his blog too.

Great job Pete!

 

Link

Blurburger

Rendevouz

On my way back to Seattle from Boston, I decide to spend the night in Memphis TN…
No, really, my flight got canceled for bad weather and I got stuck here.
Given that this sucks anyways, I decided to stop by my favorite place here: Rendevouz… The best ribs place around. If you ever come around here, you have to stop by and get a full order of the "world-famous Rendevouz charcoal-broiled pork ribs".

Good stuff.

Talking about Netflix: Buy Previously Viewed Movies

This is awesome, you can get previously viewed movies directly from NetFlix for $9.99 and free shipping.

This is very cool, I love this company.

Check it out

Netflix: Buy Previously Viewed Movies

Talking about Wma organizer: Tag&Rename

The search continues…

This tools actually looks very interesting and seem like it does everything I need: tag, rename and organize WMAs.

Link 

Wma organizer, ogg tag editor, mp3 organizer and iTunes aac tag editor: Tag&Rename 3.

Talking about Album Art Fixer

Cool application to fix the album art for all your MP3/WMA.

But… what I’m looking for is a tool that would allow me to tag my music files without having to rip them all over again. I’ll let you guys know how it goes…

Link

Album Art Fixer

Follow up on "Stupid Errors"

This topic got a good discussion going on DPReview, one of my favorite photography sites.

You might want to check it out.

A great "advanced user" tip comes from Petteri, to which goes the credit for this:

(1) If you see it happening, shoot NOW — even if you haven’t gone through the checklist. I’ve gotten some of my most memorable pictures as grab shots. There’s a big risk they won’t work, but if they do, they can really kick butt. Especially when shooting people, timing is everything: even an imperfectly framed, focused, and exposed shot can be really good if it’s shot at the right moment, while a perfectly framed, focused, and exposed shot five seconds later could be totally ho-hum.

Corollary: Keep your camera ready to shoot NOW. Adjust your exposure parameters as the light changes or you move from light to shadow, outdoors to indoors. Even better, keep the focus distance near middle distance, and when you can, aperture small enough to get "pretty good" shots even if you don’t have time to focus. (Slave AF to the * button instead of the shutter; if it’s slaved to the shutter, you’ll as likely as not ruin the focus when grab shooting.)

For example, if I’m shooting with a 20 mm lens, I can set it up at f/5.6 and about 2 meters. This means that everything from pretty close up to middle distance — the range for "people photos," which is where these sudden situations happen, will be reasonably sharp. If I see something going on, I can literally grab shoot, without having to wait for AF to lock, and without having to fear that the AF grabs on some random thing and ruins the shot.

Second, if there’s some particular situation I’m shooting, I can AF at that distance, and then bide my time until something develops — and then shoot instantly, without needing to focus-recompose or fiddle with AF points, and again without fear that the hurry will cause AF to lock on something different.

So, basically, it moves focusing into the "pre-shot" phase where it belongs, giving you much more precise timing in the "shot" phase.

Cool!

Thanks to Petteri

Stupid Errors You Can Avoid

I wanted to write on this for a long time. It seems like mastering the art of photography is very difficult to do.
So I wanted to highlight some of the things that we all can do to be better photographers. These tips are merely technical, we just need to remember to apply them to our day to day use of your camera.

 

Here are a few things to get started:

• Straighten those pictures: sometimes, for artistic reasons, you want your picture to be crooked, but most of the times we’re too concentrated on the subject that we forget the surroundings. So before pressing the shutter, do a final check to be sure vertical and horizontal objects in the composition are indeed vertical and horizontal.
• Look before you take a picture: closely related to the previous item, always to a final check for stuff that should not be in the picture: someone in the background waving at you, a pole sticking out of the subject’s head, a street signal, stuff like that.
• No rush (if you can): breathe and take a couple of seconds if you can. This helps prevent camera shake in most circumstances, but you’ll also have the opportunity to take a last look at the composition before you shoot. Of course if you’re taking a picture where timing is key, it’s better to have a badly composed picture than no picture at all.
• Check your settings before shooting: Oh My God! I don’t know how many times I fell for this. You end up you evening shooting a party (in the photographic sense) and you leave your camera at f2.8, ISO3200. The next morning you start taking pictures of people playing on the beach and you wander why your exposures are 1/8000s or faster. This happens all the times. Before you start shooting, especially after a long pause, check your settings: white balance, exposure mode, ISO settings, manual vs. automatic focus, shooting mode are just a few of the things you might want to reset.
• Check after you shoot: one of the advantages of shooting digital is that the camera can give you instant feedback on what you just captured, why not use it? Things that are good to check are: composition, presence of extraneous objects, over-exposure, histogram. Not very good: focus, minor blurring, DOF, noise. One thing you can do to spot possible blur or shakiness is check the exposure time, if it’s less than the inverse of the focal length (e.g. <1/70s @ 70mm), there is a good chance it is blurry; open the lens or pump up the ISO and take the shot again (if you can).
• Don’t be lazy: c’mon, climb that little hill, cross the street, get in front of people. Sometimes a little extra effort will make for a much better picture. Ah, I almost forgot, the tripod. It’s too heavy, I’m going to leave it in the car, then after a three hours hike you find the perfect spot, the great picture opportunity, but it’s late and you cannot get the appropriate DOF with low light 😦 too bad.
• Don’t be impatient: Wait for the right moment, sometimes it just takes a couple more minutes to capture the perfect sunset. If you can, take your time and wait for the right opportunity.

I personally experienced *all* of these and I thought that sharing the findings with fellow photographers would help.