Thursday, May 15, 2008

Random SmugMug Photos

Since I’ve pretty much abandoned Flickr for SmugMug, and since I want to start featuring a lot of my photography right here on Pixeldust Films.com, I figured I’d try some experiments.  Getting my photos from Flickr to the bottom right corner of the website footer was pretty simple, and I’ll now attempt to do something similar, perhaps even better.  This post will be evolving over the next couple of weeks, as it’s sort of a “live” experiment.  Depending on the day and time, you may find something highly appealing or something highly unusual.  So it goes with all experiments…

Refresh the page to see it in action

Random Albums

This causes some layout problems since not all photos are the same aspect ratio, but here goes:

If anyone wants to utilize the last technique, which places your album thumbnails side by side using validated markup with css, here it is:

The CSS

The Markup/HTML

Here is the markup in a text file. Basically, just use this markup in conjunction with the CSS above and you'll get the layout I've achieved. Naturally, change the html code to reflect your own Smug Mug galleries, and feel free to tweak the CSS! Let me know if you need any help!

Sunday, February 24, 2008

I’m officially putting photos on Smug Mug

As I’ve continued to grow my photography collection, as well as the photography part of Pixeldust Films core business, I’ve started to look around at some other photo storage solutions besides Flickr.  I love Flickr, especially because of the huge community they have there.  Frankly, however, I haven’t really found the community to be very beneficial to me in terms of building out my photography business.

In fact, there are SO many people on Flickr that getting noticed at all takes a heck of a lot of work.  In the end, with over 1000 photos there, I have yet to receive any real feedback from anyone (except my mom, go figure).  Of course, I’ve only recently started to avidly post there, and I know all that will change over time.  And, in fairness to Flickr users, I generally don’t comment on people’s photos either, so it’s probably not fair to expect the world when I’ve hardly given it myself…

Anyway, I’ve been aware of Smug Mug for many years, as a good friend of mine has been using it exclusively and has, to date, well over 300,000 photos up there (they say they have no storage limit, and apparently they mean it).  As well, I found a heck of a lot of pro photographers over there, a lot of useful photography tips and tutorials, as well as some very robust client and organizational tools.  While this is not a head-to-head comparison of the 2 services (I may do that another time), it is clear that Smug Mug promotes themselves as a family business with personal service and more of a boutique approach to digital photography storage.  As well, there were a few other cool things that really pushed me over the edge to sign up as a pro user:

• Smug Mug makes multiple, redundant copies of your photos for maximum security in case of data loss
• There’s this insane plugin called Smugglr, which literally allowed me to move my entire Flickr album (1000+ photos) with virtually no effort.  I set it up, walked away, and when I came back my entire Smug Mug Gallery was totally loaded with my Flickr photos, tags, descriptions, and even my Flickr galleries.  It was just ridiculously easy to migrate the content.
• I got 50% off my first year as a Flickr defector (I signed up for a Pro account)
• Smug Mug offers pretty robust image management categories, and an especially useful set of tools for hiding and showing galleries.  This for me will make Smug Mug the place to house all my client-related photos.
• Smug Mug offers some pretty nice themes, and the ability to create your own.  I’ll eventually make my Smug Mug page look more like it’s integrated into the Pixeldust Films website.
• Smug Mug is a family-run shop, and that’s largely in alignment with where Pixeldust Films is headed.  More on that later, as I’ll have some cool announcements on this in a few weeks!

Anyway, I guess the list goes on, and maybe this is the beginning of a head-to-head shootout, but in the meantime, check out my new Smug Mug gallery of photos!

Saturday, February 02, 2008

The Macro Lens came, saw, it kicked grass!

I absolutely knew a thing or two when I purchased my new Sigma 70-300 mm Macro Telephoto Zoom Lens.  This first thing I knew was that the lens was going to need a lot of light to take the shots.  I was right on all counts, as I took the lens out today into a wide-open space outside, and it performed in a stellar fashion across the board.  I actually brought 2 other lenses with me, but it was clear within 10 shots that the Macro was staying locked on the camera for the entire day of shooting. 

When I read this lens could zoom up on objects that were over 50, 60 feet away, they weren’t kidding.  It was like I was in the water with the geese.  It was like I was in the mud with the cows and horses.  I could see the texture of the willows springing up out of the pond (and have some great shots to prove it).
Things seem a little soft at the widest angle of the zoom, but certainly not unacceptable for a lens that’s in this price class.  The lens is selfish, and absolutely demands the light of day to do its best work.  I hung the lens out there at 300 mm with the F stop as wide open as I could get it.  With the telephoto fully extended, I found that with no Image Stabilization I had to pump the ISO up to about 400 to give me the shutter speeds I needed to compose the shot with no blur.

I composed a number of shots in the Macro mode, and had to switch to manual focus to get the objects fully sharp within the viewfinder.  The lens is easy to use, a bit noisy, but tons of fun when you get the “rhythm” of its proper use.  It’s not the fastest lens, and when the landscape gets tricky it hunts a bit, but actually, in those cases I found it liberating to go into manual focus, and really separate the foreground and background in exactly the way I wanted.

The lens stops up very nicely when the light is sufficient.  Today was cloudy and I set the white balance accordingly.  The lens is a little heavy when fully extended, but is sturdy and easy to grip.  It was really cool to zoom up on animals that would have otherwise run for cover.  The level of detail contained in many of my shots was, in my perception, better than that of the human eye.

This is my first attempt with a Macro Zoom lens.  As I’ve read, it’s the kind of lens that makes you want to go out and take certain kinds of pictures in certain kinds of places.  I can easily see me bringing this as a primary lens to an outdoor zoo, the mountains, anyplace where the camera can get all the light it craves to frame up beautiful shots like the ones I got today.  With it’s flexible range, sizable glass and fantastic capabilities in well-lit condtions, I’m sure I’ll be hanging out at the macro end of the lens as much as possible.

Check out my Flickr set of outdoor shots to see the ever-growing pile of photos I’m amassing using my new Macro lens.  More next week for sure!

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Playing with Aperture Priority Setting

My new Canon 30d has tons of features, but what I’m really starting to love is the Aperture Priority mode, where I can “stop” the camera up or down and the shutter speed will follow accordingly based on the lighting conditions of the subject.  This feature really gives the photographer a lot of creative possibilities, as well as to appropriately control depth of field through forcing the aperture settings.  This type of control makes shooting a camera much different than the “point and shoot” mode, even on a camera of this quality; which produces nice photos in “auto” mode.

In this example, I stopped down pretty low, kept the flash off, and basically threw the foreground of the keyboard out of focus while keeping the upper register of the keyboard sharp.

Learning to control the shots, and even predict the outcome before you click the shutter button has been a great learning experience!  Stay tuned for some examples of Shutter Priority mode on some moving objects this weekend.  And don’t forget about my 70-300 mm lens, which arrives tomorrow.  I’m planning on finding something far away and zooming right up to it from a safe distance.  Big updates to the Flickr album in the next week or so.

Stay tuned!

Sunday, January 27, 2008

Bought a 70-300 mm lens today…got bugs?

Today I bought a Sigma 70-300mm Macro Telephoto Zoom lens for my Canon 30d.  This lens, in addition to my Canon EF 50mm and my Canon 28-135mm pretty much allows me to go shooting pictures anywhere I want.

The macro lens is pretty cool, because in that mode, you can zoom close to objects (like bugs, birds, insects, butterflies) that you can't really get near without scaring them off. Here's an example of a macro shot. Needless to say, I won't be getting this close to a bug that looks like this.

The lens looks a bit heavy, and it looks like it might benefit from some type of tripod use given the weight. In the meantime, keep your eyes on my Flickr account to see all the new photos I've been uploading with my Canon 30d.

The new lens arrives on Wednesday. Look for some closeups by this coming weekend.

Monday, January 14, 2008

My new digital SLR Camera

Well, I finally made the jump into photography and bought myself a brand new Canon 30D Digital SLR.  After a lot of deliberation, research, and conversations with my friends in the field, it became clear that the Canon was the way to go.

For me photography is different than using a video camera.  In fact, my new camera has way more gadgets then my video camera.  While the principles of light and shade, depth of field, f stop and other elments certainly apply, it seems that it all gets rolled up in one click of the shutter button on a camera.  In video, you get more time to prep the shots, create the light, and manage through the difficulties.  Not so in photography, which makes it, in my opinion, more difficult to get a good shot.

Camera Lenses:  Who’da thunk it?

Making a decision around which camera body to buy was one thing.  Making a decision around which lens(es) to buy was a whole other. 

Case in point: A good friend of mine, who is a concert cellist, describes the same difficulty in picking out a suitable bow.  He says finding the right cello was far easier.

There are seemingly hundreds of lenses you can screw on to this camera, and of course, they come in all shapes and sizes.  I basically wanted to find a good “walk around” lens that served my needs in most cases.  I also needed to be careful not to spend more on the lens than on the camera itself, which I found out is quite easy to do.  I ended up opting for a Canon 28-135 telephoto Wide Angle and then I found a great little Canon EF 50mm 1.8f that got wonderful reviews for the price.  Both lenses serve somewhat different purposes, but it’s clear to me that buying lenses could become an addiction all its own.  Taking the same shot with 2 different lenses can produce dramatically different results, and just getting to learn how to shoot with the different lenses will take some time.

More to come on my new camera.  In the meantime, you can check out my Flickr photos to see what I’ve been up to.