Archive for July, 2008

Subscribing to Equine-L

Wednesday, July 30th, 2008

Equine-L is a mailing list for horse enthusiasts. You can join the list and edit your list preferences via the form at:

http://lists.psu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=equine-l&A=1

If you are old school, you may want to just do this all thru email. To join, send email TO:

LISTSERV@lists.psu.edu

With the following in the body of the email:

subscribe equine-l Firstname Lastname

(Use your full real name. If you don’t, you won’t be added to the list.)

The list server will send you a confirmation message. You need to click on the link or reply to the message to join the list. Then the list owner needs to approve your subscription.

The default list subscription is digest mode, with [EQUINE-L] added to the subject header, and you don’t get a copy of your own posts to the list. I don’t like these default settings. Once the subscription is confirmed, I send another email with the following commands:

set equine-l mail
set equine-l nosubjectheader
set equine-l repro

The first one sets you to “regular mail”. If you want to change back to the default digest post later on, use:

set equine-l digest

The second one gives you regular subject headers. If later on you decide you prefer the default setting so your list email says [EQUINE-L] in the subject use:

set equine-l subjectheader

The third one sends you a copy of your own posts to the list. I like this – this way I know the post was sent out. If you try this but find you don’t want a copy of your own posts coming back into your inbox, use:

set equine-l norepro

If you want to stop receiving email for a while (but not leave the list) use:

set equine-l nomail

When you want to get mail again, use one of these (as you prefer):

set equine-l mail
set equine-l digest

Finally, to leave the list use:

signoff equine-l

That covers all the listserv commands that 99.99% of subscribers need.

Posted in Horses | No Comments »

Hints for taking great photos of babies

Wednesday, July 30th, 2008

I recently posted the following in another blog – answering a query about how to take great baby photos.

1) The MOST important thing (the primary thing that sets most professional photos apart from snapshots) is the lighting. It needs to be soft indirect light. If you use a window as the primary light you need a white card or white wall to bounce light from the window to the “dark side” of the baby. If you want to shoot outside, do so only on an overcast day, and again you will probably need a bounce card to reduce shadows.

2) The next important thing is the background. When you find a baby photo you like, don’t look at the baby – look at everything else. How can you make your “set” look like that? Many excellent baby photos use a plain white sheet or black velvet as the background. You can drape the cloth over a beanbag chair to create a baby posing station. There are more great tips in the How to Photograph your Baby book by Nick Kelsh.

3) You will have trouble getting enough light to get a depth of field deep enough to bring all the parts you want in focus. It’s very easy to end up “too shallow” and end up with a great shot, except you wish you had more DoF.

Go to flickr and smugmug and search for “newborn baby”. When you find a photo you like, use the “more info” options to see what the camera settings were for those shots. Here’s one on Smugmug. Put your mouse over the image, and an overlay will appear on the right. At the bottom is an “i” icon, click that and another overlay will appear that shows the camera info for that image. You will see it was shot with these camera settings:
Camera: Canon EOS 20D
Exposure: 1/160
Aperture: f/5.6
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 45mm (75mm equivalent in 35mm)

Drag the overlay down (off the photo) and then use your keyboard arrow keys to move forward and back in the gallery, and view other photos (and their settings) without having to take extra steps to see the settings on each photo.

Here’s one on Flickr. Scroll down to the bottom of the right hand column to the More Information section and click on the “more properties” link to get the camera properties for this shot. You will see it was shot with these camera settings:
Camera: Nikon D200
Exposure: 1/125
Aperture: f/7.1
Focal Length: 80 mm
ISO Speed: 250

4) Bump the ISO if you must, but don’t do it unless necessary to get fast enough shutter and high enough f-stops. Lower ISO is always better. See the shots above – shot at ISO 100 and ISO 250.

5) Shoot in RAW. No exceptions. If you want top quality images NEVER shoot in jpeg mode. Don’t do B/W conversion in the camera. RAW only! Do the conversion in your post processing. Over time you will learn more about post processing and will want to go back to your earlier shots and reprocess them, making them even better as you learn new post processing techniques.

6) Your images are only as good as the glass used to gather them. There is a reason why people pay $1500 for a lens instead of $150 for the same focal-length lens in a lower quality line. If you have the “kit lens” consider renting a top quality lens for a week or several weeks. You may think all the hype about good lenses is “just hype” but it’s not – once you shoot with a top quality lens you will be itching to buy one. Fortunately you can rent them so you don’t have to break the bank!

7) Cull! This is the hardest part – especially when shooting a baby because the images are “your baby” in two ways – of your newborn baby, and your photos are also (themselves) your baby. But you MUST cull. This is another trait that defines the professional photographer – they never show you all the photos. They cull, cull, cull. You only see the very best shots. Do the same with your own work. You should only keep about 10% of what you shoot, and of that you may only share or print 10% – so only 1 in 100 ends up being shared.

8) Post processing is just as complicated and important as shooting. If you want color prints you need to color profile your monitor. If you send your images to a lab for printing, see if they offer printer profiles and learn how to soft-proof your images with the printer profile. Run some test prints and compare them to how they look on your screen to make sure you have everything configured right. I highly suggest you get one (or several) of Scott Kelby’s books on using Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, and/or Lightroom to learn post processing tricks.

Posted in Photography | No Comments »