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.