Rick’s Rants and Raves

I’ve lived in Columbus nearly all my life. I remember going past the entrance to the Sharon Woods sledding hill as a child. But it seemed that every time we went by when there was snow on the ground, the hill was closed. As a result, until today, I’ve never been to the hill.

After the great wet snow fell yesterday, it seemed like an awesome opportunity to go sledding today. We’d originally planned on a Scout/family outing to Mad River Mountain, but their county had declared a level 3 snow emergency. So after deciding against <judas priest>breakin-the-law</judas priest> in Logan county, and receiving an invite to join friends at the hill, we loaded up the 4WD Pilot and headed out.

I’ve been nursing a sore/injured knee for a week and a half now, so I knew I wasn’t going to be sledding. Instead, I was in rapid-fire-shutterbug mode, shooting over 400 pics in 70 minutes (a frame every 10 seconds, on average!). Ain’t digital great?

The snow was packed solid, and the hill was very fast. Video of some of this stuff would have been very fun. I got to the point where I could predict someone who was going to wipe out by the way they left the top of the hill. OK, this wasn’t all that challenging to foresee with some of them–four teens piled high on a dime-store sled? Oh yeah.

I made triptychs of a number of the wipe-outs, but this one is by far my favorite.

Of course, the best of the shots are in a Flickr set. But I really want you to see them, so I’ve embedded the slide show for the set below. I didn’t go down the hill once. I was having way too much fun shooting.

As for shooting technique, I primarily used the 70-300mm lens, shutter priority, ISO 400, exposure compensation +1. This kept me at a motion stopping 1/800 second most of the time. And as you can tell by the number of shots I took, I also went with the “spray and pray” attitude, with no chimping, except to occasionally check exposure. Except for crop, all of these pics are straight-out-of-camera.

We had a winter storm yesterday which blanketed our neighborhood with 9-10 inches of snow. Anne and I took the opportunity to take a photo walk up our street to see what we could see.

The biggest challenge for me was choosing a lens before we left–it was snowing really hard, with big wet flakes, and I didn’t want to change lenses in the middle of it. When we first departed, I chose my 35mm f/1.8, mostly because it’s new. The shots I made with it were pretty blah. After we saw a robin in a nearby tree, I decided to trudge back home to switch to the 70-300mm. With that lens, I could get close to the more interesting details in the snow storm.

We returned to a tree where we had seen a bunch of robins earlier, only to find that they had moved to a tree half a block farther, and 50 feet higher. We waited for a moment, while I shot some of the berries in the tree, when lo, the robins returned. In force. There were probably 10 robins in the tree.

We took turns with the camera, shooting frantically while the birds feasted on the snow covered berries. I tried my best to shelter the camera from the falling snow while Anne shot, but the lens was still pretty wet when we got home. I think Anne took the two robin pictures I’ve posted here, but neither of us are sure at this point. It was a fun 20 minutes with some very nice results.

This is a request to anyone out there who’s managed to figure out the basics of photo management in the post-gigabyte-card-size era. How do you manage your photos? Specifically what software do you use to manage them?

Here’s what we struggle with: including cell phones, we have 6 digital cameras in our household. At some events, all four of us are shooting. We also have four computers in the house–3 laptops and 1 desktop.

Storing all the photos is not really a problem–we’ve got an NSLU2 device with two drives attached (for redundancy), and all of the computers map a drive to the public share on this device. We call this “The S: Drive (TM)”. When we download pics off a camera, the photos almost immediately get moved to The S: Drive (TM). The Photos folder is then separated by year, and for the most part, the pics are then stored in a folder with the date as a name, usually with some additional description. For example, the train pictures are stored in the “2010-01-02 Trains @ Library” folder. 99% of the time, the files are named the same as  the folder with a sequential identifier attached.

What we want is to be able to a) easily browse the folders with thumbnails, and b) tag/categorize photos with searchable key words. And the tag/category database must be shared by all computers, ideally on The S: Drive (TM). It would be nice if the thumbnails were shared, but that really isn’t a requirement.

It sounds simple right?

We tried ACDSee. Unfortunately, its database stored the thumbnails and the tags/categories in the same place, and once you’ve cataloged more than about 1000 files (we’ve got more than 800 so far this year alone!) the database across the network becomes incredibly slow for every single operation. It seems that ACDSee’s database needs to read/write the whole darn thing every time a single file is touched. And don’t get me started on the rest of the bugs in the photo manager. Tears have been shed in our household over those bugs.

Windows supports storing thumbnails in the thumbs.db file, but it seems like nearly every time it is accessed, the thumbnails have to be refreshed. My guess is that the format of the thumbs.db file changed between XP (2 computers) and Windows 7 (2 computers) so just about every time we browse a folder using Windows Exploder, it has to re-read the thumbnails. And that doesn’t solve the tag/category problem.

I looked briefly at Adobe Photoshop Elements, but it too was very slow when I told it to store its database files on the network. I’ve looked at XnView and IrfanView but didn’t find a centralized tag/category database concept, though their cached thumbnails were very fast.

I’d be willing to pay a not-too-exorbitant price for this to work. FOSS would be awesome, but I’m will to compensate someone who’s created a solution that will work for our family.

What have you gotten to work?

Thanks for your comments and suggestions.

Cross posted to DPS, Strobist Flickr.

Previous assignments here.

This week’s exercise among the Flickr folks doing the Strobist 102 series is Apparent Light Size. The idea here is that the apparent size of the light (not the actual size) is what determines the fall-off of the shadows, or the “softness” of the light. Large apparent light size makes for soft light, where as small apparent size makes hard light. Or large lights make for gentle fall-off of the shadows, and small lights make for rapid fall-off (e.g. sharp edges) of shadows.

The official assignment is to use a fruit, and to vary the distance of the flash (or other light) to the fruit while attempting to keep the angle the same. I chose a rather yellowed acorn squash. Here’s my set up:

The flash is on a light stand with my homemade diffuser directly over the squash. This was the best way I could figure out to make the angle stay the same with each change of the light distance. I made four pictures with the flash 12″, 24″, 48″ and 72″ away from the squash. With each increase in distance I had to double the flash power to compensate, and I tweaked the exposures just a bit in post-processing to try to make the green place mat about the same exposure.

Sure enough, the shadows are very different from one foot to six feet. At one foot the shadow of the stem is barely discernible, whereas at six it is perfectly solid. The body shadow exhibits the same features: soft at one foot, crisp at six.

This wasn’t terribly difficult for me to execute, especially after I’d read some of the comments in the discussion of the assignment. I’m glad I followed the advice to not use a white surface, so that the shadows would be crisp.