Rick’s Rants and Raves

For my birthday this year, my dad bought me a travel tripod for my cameras. Unfortunately, I didn’t trust the tripod enough to put a camera on it, because the legs were flimsy and don’t have a good locking mechanism. They’re only slightly better than a collapsible radio antenna. My dad had cut part of the packaging off, evidently so that I couldn’t see the price tag, so that ruled out returning it.

Aside from the legs however, I like the head on the tripod. So I took the legs off and started trying to think of what I could do with just the head. One possibility was to make my own shock-corded legs out of copper pipe sections. That could have worked really well, but I probably would have spent as much on copper as the tripod cost in the first place. My next idea was to mount the head on a tree-trimmer so that I could do pole-mounted photography. Perhaps I could attach the head to some camp webbing with a buckle so that I could mount it to a tree.

Then I remembered a previous gift from my father: a portable work light that came with a detachable clamp. I’ve used the light a couple of times, but never the clamp. As it turns out, the bolt from the head of the tripod fit the threads on the mounting bracket of the clamp.

The result is a very strong spring clamp with a 3-way tripod head attached.

I’ve tried it with my lighter camera in all kinds of orientations, and it seems solid so far. I’m not sure if I’ll feel comfortable putting my DSLR with 300mm lens on it.

So now that I’ve got it, hopefully some creative ideas will start to surface where I can make use of it. The best one I’ve got so far is to clamp a camera near the ceiling of my front porch to take pictures of trick-or-treaters as I attempt to scare them.

When people ask me what I do for a living, the short answer is “I fix computers.” Now, I know today that is no longer the novelty is used to be, so I typically go on to explain that I support call routing software, like you hear at banks or the cable company, or whatever your favorite-toll-free-number-to-hate is. My company has roughly 1000 agents in four locations taking 35,000 calls per day. The software I support has to react perfectly to every one of those calls. Since these are customer calls, our goal is to never lose a single call. As such, every application has a backup installed on a different server, in a different location. Every server is chock-full of duplicated hardware–redundant network cables to connect to the rest of the organization, redundant hard drives, fault-tolerant memory and CPUs, etc. So I tend to spend my days thinking about redundancy, how to implement it, and researching why we’ve exposed a stupid little scenario in which the arcane cascade of 7 improbable events led to a 2 minute outage, impacting 250 customer calls.

I was in just such a frame of mind when I was downloading pictures from my camera the other day. I struggled for about ten minutes to get my computer to recognize the SD card that had been in my camera.  Eventually I got all but one of the pictures, and I learned that one of the family portraits I had taken was corrupted. Given the work I’d put into that day, I was pleased there wasn’t more damage. I immediately bought a new card, and threw the old one in the trash.

So this got me to wondering: How do professional photographers protect against digital media loss? On a professional shoot, I’ve seen extra cameras, and flashes, and batteries. And I’m sure there are extra tripods, and remotes, and probably some duct tape thrown in for good measure. But how do you know that your digital media card hasn’t failed during (or shortly after) a shoot?

As I was musing on this a couple of days ago, I told my wife that the obvious solution that the whole camera industry was missing was dual card slots. If the camera would just write to two cards simultanesously, then the whole problem was solved. If only someone as bright as me had such great ideas at Nikon or Canon, this problem would be a thing of the past.

Alas, the $8000 Nikon D3x has dual Compact Flash card slots: “with overflow, backup, and copy options.” With the backup and copy option, the only excuse you have for losing a picture is yourself. Other cameras may have it, but that appears to be the only one Nikon carries. Now, my hobby doesn’t justify an $8000 camera, but I do hope that some day that feature will trickle down to the consumer grade DSLR cameras, in much the same way that redundant computer hardware has reached high-end consumer PCs.

However, I’m still left with the question–how do professional photographers that don’t have a D3x protect against digital media loss? I’ll pose this question to a few semi-pro folks I know, and post to a few message boards, and see what kind of response I get. If you have thoughts, please feel free to leave them in the comments.

Yesterday, the 70-300mm lens that I ordered arrived. Fortunately, my wife and I had been planning a trip to scenic Hocking Hills today, so we had plenty of opportunities to try it out. The first thing I realized is that 70mm is pretty narrow. I’ve been using the 18-55mm kit lens that came with my camera, and I spend most of the time at 55mm end. Therefore I figured the 70mm would be pretty close. Well it isn’t, especially for anything scenic.

We first went to Rockbridge State Nature Preserve. The primary attraction for most visitors is the natural rock bridge.

(18-55mm lens)

Fortunately, I packed in my tripod on this trip, so the picture above had a 13 second exposure time because it was so dark under the bridge. I also played with long exposure of the waterfall on top of the bridge.

We continued to hike nearly all the trails in the park, probably 3 miles total, looking for opportunities to exercise our cameras and creative abilities. At one point, Anne commented that she wished it were easier to capture the play of light and shadow that makes walking through a woods such fun. We were near a ravine that afforded a decent amount of visibility, with sunlight dappling all around. I decided to make my first attempt at creating an HDR image–it didn’t go well because of the leaves moving in the breeze. But I’m pleased with one of the shots from that stop–I think it captures the light and the dark in the forest pretty well.

This ferny-mossy stuff was nearly everywhere. I don’t know what its called, but its very soft, and looks like it would be a great place for a nap. For this shot, I used the macro mode of the new lens to get uber close up.

And this stuff was just plain wicked looking with the red stems sticking up everywhere.

On our way back to the car, I took this shot of a tree, a cloud, and a hill. It made me think of the windows desktop background called ‘Bliss’.

We also stopped to take pictures of elderberry blossoms using the macro on the new lens. Wow, is that a narrow depth of field.

Just before we got back to the car, I caught a glimpse of blue on my left side. It turned out to be an indigo bunting, which Anne immediately recognized, but that I don’t remember having seen before. I shot frantically, not paying enough attention to camera settings. I happened to be in program mode, over-exposed by one f-stop, and at ISO 200. Full auto would have been better. Since I was zoomed at 250mm, my 1/60th exposure led to a good bit of camera shake in most of the pictures. This is the best one of the bunch, and its still not great.

We left Rockbridge (after getting my car jump started, and having the battery replaced at Walmart–DOH!) and headed to Clear Creek Metro Park. This macro-shot of a mushroom on a moss covered log is my favorite of the day, and was the first inside Clear Creek.

We saw a pair of Eastern Bluebirds perched on handicap parking signs. I was just fast enough to catch the female.

When we drove by Written Rock, we couldn’t help but stop and take a look. It is a magnificent rock face that used to have petroglyphs on it. Unfortunately the ancient marks are long gone, and there are more than enough new ones. Yes Katie, we’re very proud that you “heart” Jeremy. Anyway, from the opposite side of the road at 18mm, it took 6 shots to cover the whole face. To give you an idea of scale, there is a small black hole in the lower left of the image that is about 5 feet off the ground. And here’s Anne in front of it.

We made one last stop at Lake Ramona. By the end of our exploring, we were pretty wiped out. But Anne is so wonderful that she always has a smile and a wave for me.

I’ve done a wee bit of photographic experimentation recently. These experiments don’t really form a cohesive thought process, or attempt at anything in particular, other than to just see what I can do.

Falling Water Bottle

In the last week of school, I volunteered at my son’s field day, running the sack race. 99% of the kids were great, and I only had to deal with the remaining 1% for a short time, so it was a fun time over all. The weather was beautiful with a clear blue sky and occasional cotton-candy clouds. In between groups of kids, I was killing time by throwing my water bottle in the air then catching it. As the water inside twisted and sloshed against the blue back ground, I was reminded of one of my favorite pictures on Flickr. After the field day was over, I decided to try to take a picture of my sloshing water bottle in the air to see what I could come up with. After about 5 minutes, I felt like I’d gotten a few decent shots. Here is the result:

This is the best of the individual shots.

Summer Breeze

Did I mention that it was a gorgeous day? At one point I was lying on my bed, looking out my window at the beautifully lit tree, watching the sheer curtains gently billow in the breeze. It seemed like an iconic sort of shot to represent a perfect summer day.

Heron through a scope

After dinner one evening, Anne and I went to a local metro park and went to a waterfowl nature preserve. It was getting a bit dark, and I didn’t have high hopes for much photographically. But I had the camera just in case. There was a young rabbit who was brave enough to let me shoot him (with the camera), and a raccoon with a youngster (the youngster skittered as soon as he heard my shutter). A long ways across the pond was a great blue heron perched in a tree. Evidently that’s how they sleep at night, regardless of how precarious it looks to us humans. I took a shot with my 55mm lens knowing that he’d be a few pixels tall in the resulting image. Then I sat down at the park’s long-range scope, and got a really good look at the bird. At that point I figured that if my eye could see it, then so could my camera. So I held my camera lens up to the scope eye piece (I hadn’t brought a tripod), set everything to manual and took a few shots. This is the best of them. It hasn’t been edited at all.