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.

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 of the camera wants to meter for neutral grey.  So the cure is simple as long as you have an extra flash unit - you have to use it to light up the background.  One important thing to remember if you’re using a small flash (speedlite or speedlight), you need to pop a diffuser cap on that lens to spread out the light over the whole background.  In fact, if the background is wide enough you might need two or more strobes.  Another tip is that it may help to put your flash unit into manual mode so the flash itself doesn’t try to make the background neutral grey.

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:

[caption id=“attachment_3145” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“Feb 2010 - 1024x768 calendar (fixed)”] [/caption]

For wide screens:

[caption id=“attachment_3146” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“Feb 2010 - 1680x1050 calendar (fixed)”] [/caption]

[caption id=“attachment_3068” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“Ubuntu 9.10 liveCD boots up”] [/caption]

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:

[caption id=“attachment_3069” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“Ubuntu 9.10 loading”] [/caption]

I like the desktop, it looks pretty good. I liked 9.04 a little better, but there’s nothing wrong with this one.

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 Linux distro, but I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.  It came in a recent LXF disc and I decided to check it out.