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Lighting Techniques 3: How to get that shadow on the face
This one’s another subtle one because it’s so obvious, but if, like me a few months ago, you’ve only shot with available light, on camera flash, or bounced your light because you were told to – you probably haven’t thought about how light affects your portraits. And so you have always taken portraits where they…
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So, how much free will do we have?
Here’s an email I sent to some of my friends based on an piece I heard on The Naked Scientist: This group did a study and found that women who were lap dancers and not on the pill (ie they had a normal menstrual cycle) go more tips on their fertile days. (I can’t imagine…
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Lighting Techniques 2: How to get that flashlight look with your flash
You may have seen a photo like the one above where the light fades away as if it were a flashlight. How do photographers do that? It’s pretty easy, they snoot their flashes. A snoot is basically a light tunnel and professional snoots have a honeycomb grid at the end. The snoot directs the light…
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Lighting Techniques 1: Getting that White Background
Here’s a non-obvious problem that photographers come up against all the time – I bought a white background so why doesn’t it look white in my portraits? The reason that it’s a non-obvious problem is that you have to remember that the camera doesn’t see the world the same way you do. The internal circuitry…
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February Background Calendar
Here’s the calendar for February. Click on it to get the full size so you can make it your background. (edit: I noticed a bug in the way the calendar appeared and fixed it on 31 Jan 2010 so just download a new version, thanks!) For square screens: For wide screens:
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Review: Ubuntu 9.10 64-bit
I last looked at Ubuntu 9.04 a little over six months ago. So I decided it was time to see what has changed. Since I’m now testing on a 64-bit machine, I decided to test the 64-bit version of Ubuntu. So here we go: I like the desktop, it looks pretty good. I liked 9.04…
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Review: Tiny Core Linux
The guys over at Linux Outlaws are always talking about Tiny Core Linux because it always seems to be releasing a new version. I was impressed back in the day that Damn Small Linux could have a working Linux distro in only 50 MB. I know that Tiny Core Linux is technically not a full…
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A Daily Photo: Northern Mockingbird
This Northern Mockingbird is one of the many birds in my yard. I can’t quite pinpoint what it is about birds that fascinate Danielle and I, but we love to watch them cavorting around the yard and interacting with each other.
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Review: Arch Linux
I’ve been wanting to try Arch Linux for quite some time now. They seem to have a similar aesthetic to Gentoo in that the main mission of Arch is to build your operating system from the ground up. You only add the things you need. So you don’t have any cruft on your system based…
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Mini-Review: Zenwalk 6.2
I looked at Zenwalk 6.0 back in June and Zenwalk 6.2 is now out. I’m going to do a mini-review just comparing 6.0 to 6.2 to see what has changed. This may end up being very short if it’s mostly the same. One difference right away is that it’s using ext4 instead of XFS. The…
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A Daily Photo
This was taken as I was testing the effects of different f-stops on diffraction.
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A Daily Photo
It’s been a very snow-filled winter this 2009-2010 winter season compared to the last five or so years I’ve lived here. I think I’m over it. Spring couldn’t come quickly enough.
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Slackware 13 Revisit
In my Slackware 13 review mfillpot gave some suggestions to improve the Slackware experience and I thought I would give them a shot. First off, changing the init level to 4 to allow KDM to show up instead of this startx business. I was happy to note that Slackware had emacs. So many distros have…
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A Daily Photo
This fox likes to sleep on a pile of grass in the back yard. This grass came from the first time I cut the grass after buying the house. The grass was so tall that it filled the compost unit and there was still too much grass. I didn’t know at the time we had…
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Programming to the Rescue: Amortization Automation
What I love about programming is the instant feedback. In most programming languages, after you set up a framework for the barest bones of a program you can then run it at every step of the way to confirm that you are moving towards your goal. What I love second-most about programming is the fact…