A Call From the Cloud

Today I made a big commitment to one companion and pushed another further away, though not entirely.

I emailed a large number of friends and family with my Google Voice number and asked them to update their address books with it. Until now I've only given it to people I text with often, placing the burden on them to keep track of both numbers, but now I'm taking a few more eggs out of AT&T's basket and putting them into Google's.

Texting has become a big part of my life over the past year or so. I was late to the game compared to the younger generation, but paying for every message seemed silly, so I made due with IM and email. When I bought my first iPhone my there were 200 text messages included in my plan, so I started to use it a little more.

Then when iOS 3 was released in 2009 and I had push messaging, I installed Textfree on both Becky and my iPhones and we began texting each other several times a day. I tried to get others I knew with iPhones to install the app, but it was a pain to setup and only worked with other people on Textfree, so I kept my 200 text message plan to use with everyone else.

Then in September Apple relaxed its ban against Google Voice apps in the App Store so I began using it for text messaging instead. We had already increased Becky's text message limit to 1500 so I could use GV to communicate with her, and eventually I started using it with others.

The experience thus far hasn't been perfect. The first version of Google's official app was terribly slow and buggy in its first release while the third party apps were much better but didn't give me push messaging. Now Google has updated their app to 1.1, which is a major improvement.

Beyond the iPhone app it's really nice to be able to send and receive text messages using my two full hands instead of just my thumbs through GV's browser interface. I can even send and receive phone calls from a computer, so I can have long conversations at work without using up daytime minutes.

Last but not least, I can make calls from my iPhone over wifi, which is nice because even though I've lived in a high density neighborhood for five years, my cell reception still sucks!

Getting the people I communicate with to switch to my new cloud-based number is the first step in my plan to eventually drop my cell phone carrier entirely. I'm hoping within two years to trade in my iPhone for an iPod touch and a mobile wifi access point. Not only will this save me a ton of money over time, it moves the carrier into the only roll it is any good at, providing bandwidth... though even that point is debatable.

Better Indoor Photos

The easiest way to create an amateurish looking photo is to take a casual picture of someone indoors in low light. Now that daylight savings time is over this is a common problem.

This is a picture I took over a year ago. The camera (a Canon Rebel XS) was set on Program mode with an ISO of 400. The camera picked an aperture of f/4 and a shutter speed of 1/60th of a second. Aside from not being well composed, the boy is lit up with the on-camera flash and you can see that the light falls off very quickly; even the top of his head is dark. This is your classic mediocre indoor photograph.

Here is a more recent example which looks much better. Here is what is different:

• The flash is still coming from the camera, but I'm using a hot shoe flash head and pointed it at the ceiling to bounce the light which is far more even on the girl and also lights up the background.
• I'm shooting in Manual mode with the aperture set to f/2.8 which throws more of the background out of focus (particularly since it is a tighter shot).
• I'm shooting at ISO 800, meaning that I needed half of the flash power than I did at ISO 400 and provides for softer lighting.

There are two lessons to be learned here.

First, the better you know your camera settings and get comfortable choosing them for yourself, the better your pictures will look. The camera is trying to be safe by trying to keep as much in focus as is reasonable, but if you isolate your subject with a shallow depth of field your pictures will look more professional. The drawback is that it will take more effort to get your subject in focus.

Second, you get what you pay for. The second picture was taken with my Canon 7D, which costs a lot more than the Rebel XS, but performs better at high ISO making me more comfortable setting it at 800 or even 1600. Also, I added a hot shoe flash and got rid of the kit lens in favor of a fast 50mm f/1.4.

If you're willing to learn a little more about photography and spend a little extra, you can make your holiday photos look much cheerier.

Get Off Of My Cloud

I've had this back and forth relationship with Gmail and MobileMe, like a friend of mine who in high school kept bouncing back and forth between two girlfriends. Each girl had something appealing about her that the other lacked.

At first I was a big fan of Gmail because of it's unique approach to conversation threading and message archiving. But then after I got my iPhone in 2007 I couldn't stand being limited to POP access, so I switched to .Mac so that I could keep my inbox in sync with IMAP. Google addressed this shortcoming and offered IMAP for free, so I switched back.

Then in 2008 Apple relaunched .Mac as MobileMe and included push email notifications. This was appealing so I switched once again. Both times that I used MobileMe as my primary email address I continued to give out my Gmail address which I forwarded to my me.com address. This works pretty well but it is a source of confusion for some people who notice that I'm responding to them from a different address. They often send their messages to both and then I end up with two copies.

Google fired back by giving its users push messaging by implementing the ActiveSync protocol. I was tempted to switch again but initially choose to stick with MobileMe.

Then in October I felt it was prudent to start using a Windows machine at work while I was engaged at Microsoft, so I was forced to use MobileMe's Web interfaces (well I could have used Outlook, but that just didn't sit right with me). These Web interfaces look great in demos, but in practice they pale in comparison to the usefulness of Gmail and Google Calendar.

So I've switched again, hopefully for the last time.

I've fallen back in love with Gmail, and she hasn't been cruel in light of my infidelity. On the contrary, Gmail has gained some useful features like priority inbox and the ability to make phone calls from my Google Voice number. These are features that it will be difficult for Apple to match since they assume you're using Mail.app for email which only gets updated with Mac OS X every two years or so.

Google Calendar is also far better than its MobileMe doppelganger. Hell, after learning it's keyboard shortcuts I would say it is more usable than iCal. Plus it has more robust sharing features so Becky and I can stay in sync.

I never got much use out of iDisk and recently I've become a fan of Dropbox, which I really believe Google needs to buy.

The remaining feature that MobileMe had that did not have a free counterpart was Find My iPhone, and Apple recently decided to give that feature away for free. Even though I'm paid up on MobileMe until July, I have disabled automatic renewal as I have fully moved my life from Apple's cloud to Google's.

But don't get me wrong, you should expect a blizzard in hell before you should expect me to give up my Mac or my iPhone. The beauty of Google is that they don't care whose hardware or operating system you use as long as you use their Internet services and see their ads.

First Attempt at a Portrait

On Thanksgiving, as the night was winding down my cousin asked me to take a four generation picture of her family with her parents and grandparents. She had me use her camera so that she could process the pictures herself.

I've never been asked to do a portrait and I was excited to try. No one was expecting this to be a "session," so I had about five minutes of good humor for the attempt which didn't leave me with a lot of time to experiment.

The backdrop was the curtains in my uncle's bedroom. The camera was a Canon Rebel XSi with a 17-85mm IS lens. I had my 7D there with my 50mm f/1.4, but I stayed with my cousin's lens because I was too close to get the shot without a wide focal length.

I mounted my flash to the Rebel I pointed it at the white ceiling, then dialed the camera to Manual mode with an Aperture of 5.6 and a shutter speed of 1/60th. I set the ISO to 800, which is what I typically set my 7D to when shooting indoors, but I'm not sure how well the XSi controls noise at that ISO since you can't really see it on the camera's screen.

The first shot I took was in a landscape orientation, but I realized that was a mistake as soon as I looked at it. The grandparents were sitting with everyone else standing tightly behind them, so a portrait orientation was more natural.

In my second series of shots I laid on the bed in an attempt to look silly to the two year old I was trying to get to smile, but this lower perspective made the grandparents looked bloated.

Finally I stood up tall and shot slightly down on everyone (I can do this as I am 6' 3") and I got a decent shot in the series where everyone was smiling with eyes open. The only issue is that there was a curtain rod above the subjects' heads that looked crooked, but if you printed the photo as an 8x10 it would get cropped out.

Considering my limited experience and set up time I think I did OK, but I don't know for sure because the camera didn't go home with me. Hopefully I'll get another chance before too long with better results.

Brett's Photo Tips

For over a year now my passion has been to take my photography to the next level. I'm not a professional but I've learned a lot so I figured I pass along some basic tips.

1. Avoid Clutter In The Frame: By far the most common mistake the average picture-taker makes is that he or she will have too much going on in the shot. Whether the subject of your picture is a person, place, or thing, that should be the only thing that draws your eye in the photo. Either zoom in with the camera, or zoom in with your feet.
2. Take Lots of Pictures: Taking more pictures doesn't cost you anything with digital, so if you want better ones take more of them. You'll benefit from the experience and increase the odds that you'll get a good one. How many times have you snapped a picture of someone and you happen to catch an awkward expression on his face?
3. Throw Most of Them Away: The greatest blessing of digital photography is the amateur's greatest curse because she will keep both the bad and the good. In photography quality always trumps quantity. If you took 10 shots of the same thing, delete 9 of them. The other 9 only serve to dilute the value of the best one. And if you only have one shot and it sucks you should still delete it, unless it is of a special occasion and a bad picture is truly better than no picture.
4. Avoid Centering Your Subject: If you take a landscape picture of a person, your natural inclination is to center that subject in the frame. You'll have a more compelling picture if the subject is off center (unless you've filled the frame with it). If the subject is looking to the right, put him over to the left. If the subject is in motion, give her space in the direction she is headed.
5. Get Down: Most people take pictures from a standing position, which isn't ideal if the subject is shorter than you. When photographing children, get down on their level to get a more intimate perspective.
6. Size Matters: Compact cameras are highly portable, but the sensors are very small by necessity. Smaller sensors gather less light making for pictures with less sharpness and more noise. An entry level SLR has a much larger sensor and better optical components than any point and shoot camera. If an SLR doesn't fit your budget then look for a deal on Craigslist because last year's SLR is still better than this year's point and shoot.
7. Organize Your Pictures: Don't just put them into folders, get software that specializes in photo organization. I'm a fan of Aperture but you can also use iPhoto, Lightroom or Picasa. Keep in mind these apps aren't any better than folders unless you use their features for adding metadata. For every shot that I keep I give it a title, keywords, and a rating.
8. Back Them Up: Your hard drive will fail, it's a matter of when not if. You could lose all of your photos, or you could end up spending a lot of money to recover them from the failed drive. I use Time Machine to back up locally and a cloud storage service in case of fire or theft.

Dude, I Got a Dell

When I first joined Slalom in 2006, I asked if I could use a Mac as my work laptop. I was told that wouldn't be a problem, as long as I bought it myself.

Since then I've used my Mac for both work and personal activities. Everything was easy when I did Java or iPhone development, and when I did .NET I would run Windows in a virtual machine. It has been very convenient to have only one go-to machine for everything I wanted to do.

Recently it has become a pain. I've been doing much heavier .NET development which pushed my MacBook Pro to the limit. It has four gigabytes of memory and when I run a Windows VM with only one gig the Mac side still worked fine, but I needed at least two gigs on the Windows side for this project and I was constantly hitting my memory capacity.

As a result I had to limit the number of apps I would run on the Mac side to a bare minimum. If I wanted to open iTunes I had to close NetNewsWire and vice versa. And the Windows side also ran at a snail's pace which was seriously cramping my productivity.

Eventually I concluded that I was living with the worst of both worlds, so I notified our IT department that I was in need of a beefy Windows laptop. They quickly set me up with a Dell Latitude E6410, which is an excellent little computer.

The most impressive thing is its speed. It's 18 months newer than my MacBook Pro which means a faster CPU, but I believe the biggest factor in its peppiness is the solid state drive. Now that I'm not lugging around my entire Aperture photo library with me I don't need a lot of disk space. I'm convinced now that my next MBP will have an SSD as its main drive and I'll use an external drive for photos.

There's no need to check the temperature in hell, I'm not switching back to Windows. My personal machine remains a Mac, and I'll use that for work again if I end up back on a non-.NET project. Windows 7 is a major step up from XP, but it is still no OS X.

Now I need to adjust to life without having everything I need on one machine. I'll write about how that goes in a later post.

Baseball Pictures

This Spring Kyla played baseball (technically t-ball) through Issaquah Little League.  She had a lot of fun and I had a lot of fun taking pictures of her having fun.

As with basketball, when I was taking pictures of her games I decided to get shots of the entire team and not just her.  I was happy to do it because I'm already there with my camera and it gets me more practice at sports photography, plus the other parents seem to appreciate it.

I'm finding sports to be one of the most enjoyable things to shoot.  The photographer has to be very active, constantly moving around and zooming to get the best perspective, and freezing action makes for very compelling images.

When it came time for the team pictures I was asked to take them, which was exciting because it felt like my first "gig."  During one of our practices I gathered the whole team together for a group shot, and then pulled the kids out of practice one by one for individual shots.

Kyla was my guinea pig for the individual pictures as I wanted to try it from several different angles.  I found that having her stand with the sun to her left and slightly behind gave me the best lighting (this was at around 6:00).

I shot each kid both with and without flash with mixed results.  I meant to use it as fill flash to reduce the shade their hats put into their eyes, but I didn't do any manual adjustments to the flash power and it overexposed a number of the shots, though I corrected them in Aperture after the fact.  I need to spend some more time learning the settings on my Speedlite.

I'm not very happy with the team picture, mainly because they look too spread apart.  I tried to compress them when I positioned them, but apparently I didn't try hard enough.  I'm moderately pleased with the individual shots.  The kids were very patient with me as I tried to get them into the right pose (I'm sure they're pretty practiced at this) and I shot them all at f/2.8 at 70mm so there is a nice background blur and the facial features are properly compressed.

In the end the parents seemed pleased with the results, however I'm guessing they wouldn't feel free to criticize me since I did this for free.  Hopefully I'll get the opportunity to try it again sometime with the advantage of having a little experience under my belt.

My New Lens Strategy

Blake's birthday party is on Saturday, so as is my tradition I've been producing a short movie of the past year of his life using my collection of video and stills.

As I've been watching the video over and over again as I edit it together, and my favorite clip is one where my sister's dog was licking Blake's face. Aside from being funny, the video quality is noticeably better than any other indoor video I've got. Aside from being taken at midday with good light coming through the windows, it was the only clip I took with my 50mm f/1.4, most of the rest was with the 17-55mm f/2.8 IS.

Because of the favorable lighting this is hardly a fair comparison, but I'm pretty sure that the 50mm's wider aperture is a major advantage with indoor video because I'm unable to compensate with flash as I am with a photo. The 17-55mm has the advantage of stabilization so there is a tradeoff.

I shot one of Kyla's T-Ball games with my 24-105mm f/4 IS and while the pictures looked pretty good, I had to do a lot of cropping whenever I got a shot of a kid fielding the ball because of how far away from me they were. I've been wanting a 70-200mm for a long time now, but I've kept putting it off in favor of more general purpose lenses.

My dream lens became the 70-200mm f/2.8 IS. Canon just released a new version of this lens but it's MSRP is $2500, which seems to steep for a sole breadwinner hobbyist, so I went to Craigslist in search of a deal on a used one. The discounts on Canon's L lenses aren't great, so I decided to sell the 17-55mm to help smooth the purchase over with my wife. I bought the 17-55mm used in the first place and recouped my investment plus $25.

Now I'm left with the following arsenal:

Canon 50mm f/1.4

This lens will be used for shooting indoors when lighting is low or I want to take video.

Canon 24-105mm f/4 IS L

This is my goto lens for general purpose shooting outdoors, but I'll also use it indoors with flash.

Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 IS L

My long lens for shooting sports both indoor and out (I'll need to use flash indoors). I'm hoping it's adequate for shooting Kyla's dance recital (where flash isn't allowed); there will still be some blur but the 7D can fire at 8 frames per second so even with a low keeper-rate I should be left with a few good ones.

The Great Migration

Apple announced Aperture 3 just over two weeks ago. Unfortunately, even though a trial version is offered for download, I had to wait for it to be delivered snail-mail because I needed a licensed copy to upgrade my existing library. Why I still need a physical disk to install software in 2010 is beyond me.

As I wrote previously, I had intended to keep my iPhoto and Aperture libraries separate, leaving all of my pre-SLR photos in the former. I hit a snag with that strategy. One of the nice advantages of Apple product hegemony is that everything plays very nicely together. I can sync my entire photo library to my iPhone and to my Apple TV. In fact, the photo screen saver on Apple TV is its most understated feature. Whenever we have people over I turn on some music and random pictures float across the screen.

Unfortunately you have to choose either iPhoto or Aperture when you sync, so I had to move everything into one library, and that took a lot of work.

Aperture does offer a one step full import of your iPhoto library which carries over all of you metadata including Faces and Places, so that part was easy. Once I got it there, I went through each Event (in Aperture Events translate into Projects) to clean it up.

Did I have to clean up all of these legacy projects? Of course not, but I had my Aperture library in pristine shape, and I wanted to keep it that way.

First of all I wanted to clean up the keywords. I used to tag all of my photos with the names of who was in them, but that seems redundant with facial recognition, so I removed those. I added other keywords for activity, location, holidays, and other categories. I also tag photos that were taken by other photographers to make sure I give them credit ("By Kirsten", "By Leslie", etc). Before I had an SLR I relied heavily on others with better equipment and a better understanding of photography for good shots.

I also re-rated most of the pictures. I now have a stricter scale and am stingier with five star ratings. As of this writing I have only rated seven of my own shots rated this highly. Also, my standard ho-hum rating used to be three stars, now it's two.

Finally I cropped most of them. Now that I understand a little about photography I know how important it is for a picture to have a clear subject without much else. Ideally I try to take tight shots in the camera, but cropping can accomplish the same thing. It's better to have a low resolution clean shot than a high resolution cluttered one.

There are over 3,000 pictures in my library (not including all of the ones I've thrown away). After more hours than I care to admit, I've finally got a tightly organized library. Becky thinks I'm crazy but I can't help myself, I'm a perfectionist.

My Workflow

My workflow for processing pictures and eventually publishing them to the web via Flickr involves several steps, and I'm trying to think of ways to improve it.

First, I import my pictures from my camera to a folder through Image Capture, a utility that comes standard on the Mac. If I spent time playing around with my camera and have some obvious junk images, I'll delete them from this folder.

Second, I import these files from that folder into Aperture, Apple's raw editor and photo organizer. Here I reject bad, uninteresting, and duplicate photos, process the good ones (cropping, color correction, exposure adjustments, etc), and enter image names.

Third, I export the images from Aperture into another folder and then import them into iPhoto. Here I rate the images, add keywords to them (type of image and who is in it), identify faces (iPhoto '09 added a facial recognition feature, but it usually fails to identify the person so I have to do this manually).

In the fourth and final step I export the iPhoto event to Flickr.

This process seems like too much work because I'm maintaining separate photo libraries in both Aperture and iPhoto. Aperture can import pictures directly from iPhoto, but the reverse isn't possible.

To make my life easier, I need to remove either iPhoto or Aperture from my workflow. Aperture is the only real choice for me of course because it has more features for a serious amateur photographer such as myself.

However iPhoto has several useful features that Aperture lacks. The ability to organize photos by faces is really cool, though like I mentioned earlier it isn't perfect and I'm already keywording my pictures with who is in them. Also iPhoto has a built-in export to Flickr; I can do this in Aperture as well but I have to purchase a third-party plugin.

Aperture is overdue for a refresh, and I'm sure Apple is getting close to releasing version 3.0 even though Apple is really good at keeping new software releases secret, so it stands to reason that some of iPhoto's features will be included in the next release. Flickr export is a no-brainer, though I'm not sure about facial recognition which might be seen as more of a consumer oriented feature.

Moving off of iPhoto entirely is a scary thought to me, primarily because of the untold hours I've put into organizing my photo library with it, which today stands at 3,566 pictures. Instead of going down the path of importing everything into Aperture, I think I'll keep my older pictures in iPhoto and manage newer pictures with Aperture. The natural cutoff between the two would be anything shot since I got my first SLR in April 2009.

Hopefully by spending less time doing tedious work on the computer I'll end up spending more time taking pictures.