Dan over some cupcakes that Danielle made for him.

It was busy at the bird feeders with all the new birds. This little guy was unable to find a spot to land. I don’t know what he didn’t like about the bottom peg.

This is one of our neighbors clearing the snow out in his yard. Not sure what he was making a path to. Perhaps for his dog to be able to get to where he goes to relieve himself?

In case you’ve been under a rock lately, Maryland, DC, and Virginia got rocked by a huge El Niño system over the weekend. It dumped over three feet of snow in my neighborhood and nearly three feet everywhere else. The birds weathered it pretty well. Well, it helps that I felt bad for them and kept refilling the bird feeders. They were especially aggressive on the feeders this weekend for two reasons. 1) It was cold and they needed food to heat themselves by moving and 2) We had a bunch of new, large birds join the crowds in my backyard. The new birds included Red-Winged Blackbirds, Common Grackles, and European Starlings. Neither of these birds like Sunflower seeds, so they all kept going after the bird feed mix feeders. When I ran out of bird feed mix (a few days later) and was unable to buy any because of the snow conditions, I filled the feeders with sunflower seeds and they remained untouched for most of the day until the birds figured out that’s all they were going to get. Then they finished that off. I’ll be interested to see if they stick around after conditions improve.

Sometimes the simplest things in life give the best pleasure. I love watching animals do the things they do. I pass by this lake chock-full of geese every day on my way to work. They’re only there in the morning before they go out in search of food and whatever it is geese do during the day. I wanted to catch them when the lake was frozen over to see how they dealt with it. Basically, they mostly treated it as though the shore extended out onto the lake. I shot at least a hundred frames and put up my best few onto flickr. This one became my favorite shot of the day.

In this post I decided to take you through my thought process in lighting the photo.  Because I wanted the knife as close to the camera as possible (while still being in focus), I had to lower the intensity of the flash on the camera.  But that meant I would end up too dark, so I had use another flash to light me.  I wanted to make sure that the flash lit only me and did not add any extra light to the knife, so I put a snoot on my flash.  As we covered before, the snoot directs light forward with a very quick drop-off to darkness from the projected circle of light.

I took a look at openSuse 11.1 nearly a year ago and so it’s time to see what’s changed with openSuse 11.2.  For those new to my blog, when I review a new version of a distro I’ve reviewed before, I usually just do a comparison to the previous review.  Also important to know is that I review distros the point of view of ease of installation and ease of use.  While I’ve often been told that I should use a distro for X amount of time before reviewing it, pretty much all Linux distros are the same in day-to-day usage.  The only real difference being whether updates break stuff or not.  But, since all versions of Linux basically all have the same software, I don’t really see what I would gain from using a distro over a number of days.  Also, there are tons of other reviewers that do that.  Finally, I only tend to get those comments whenever I’ve said bad stuff about a distro.  Whenever I say all good stuff I never get people saying that I should spend more time with the distro or that I shouldn’t use a virtual machine.  So, I think there’s something to be said about that.  At any rate…let’s get into openSuse 11.2.

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 came out good enough if the people were photogenic and not so good if they were average.  Well, the key is creating realistic, but soft shadows.  (Although, in fashion photography and other styles you may eliminate all shadows)  The problem with on camera flash is that you end up with super harsh shadows.  (Also, the behind-the-head ugly shadows that make the person look like they grew an afro) What you want to do is to soften up the shadows and move them to the side.  Just remember this thing you learned as a child - shadows appear where light is blocked.

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 the grant application process for that study.  “Yeah, we need to study strip clubs…this is important, somehow….”)

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 and keeps it from spilling out to the sides so it all goes forward.  The grid pattern at the end affects how wide the beam appears.