This is for everyone who sprung for a spiffy digital SLR camera and doesn't understand why photos you take indoors look like crap. My indoor photos used to look like crap, but I figured out why that was, and (with some expert guidance) came up with a relatively inexpensive solution. Now I get many more "keepers" when shooting indoors.
You probably already understand the problem: there isn't as much light indoors, and what light there is can be harsh or lousy. My struggle with this problem became most painful as I tried to photograph church services or youth group functions. Our church is dark. Its basement is super dark. When you're shooting in low light, you can do one of two things: you can use a flash, or you can set your camera to make an exposure without flash.
Before we dive into exposure, let's talk about lenses for a minute. If you're a new DSLR owner, there's a good chance that you're using some sort of kit lens, probably a medium zoom. My Nikon D70 came with an 18-70mm zoom. Great, versatile lens. Here's the problem: it's slow. "Slow," when referring to lenses, does not mean that it operates slowly. It means that its maximum aperture, the hole through which light enters the camera, isn't very big. Small aperture equals less light, therefore requires longer shutter speeds needed to make proper exposures. My 18-70 kit lens has a maximum aperture of f/3.5, meaning two-sevenths of the focal length. At longer focal lengths, the aperture gets smaller...shooting with the zoom fully extended, I get f/4.5.
OK, back to exposure. So you're inside at night, let's say a dinner party. You're trying to take memorable pictures with your spiffy DSLR and your medium zoom lens. If you set your camera on AUTO mode, your flash pops. You get a sharp exposure, but it looks like you just blasted your subject with a high-powered strobe light, primarily due to the fact that you just blasted your subject with a high-powered strobe light. Eureka! We've learned something! Using your camera's built-in flash indoors almost always makes for ugly pictures. What to do? Well, you can switch your camera to some other mode, which doesn't automatically pop the flash. Maybe Program mode or Shutter priority, or one of the preset modes with a cutesy little icon. You make a few exposures. Sure enough, your camera happily takes pictures, and they look OK when you check them in your camera's LCD screen. But when you get them home and look at them on your PC, they're not sharp. Phooey.
Why are they not sharp? Because in the low light with your slow lens and no flash, your camera (correctly) chose a long shutter speed to get enough light for what it thinks is a correct exposure. Hand held, I can take sharp pictures down to about 1/30th of a second. Slower than that and camera shake starts to blur things. At 1/20th maybe half of my shots look good. At 1/10th, none do. I could use a tripod, but that only fixes camera shake. If my subject moves, it will be blurry.
What to do, then, if I need to shoot in low light? Flash looks washed out and flat; flash-free looks blurry. What you need is faster glass. A new lens. One nifty option that the camera companies have come up with is what Nikon calls "Vibration Reduction" (VR) and Canon calls "Image Stabilization" (IS). Basically, there's magnets or a gyroscope or a little dude or something inside these lenses which counteracts camera shake. This actually works pretty well...a VR/IS equipped lens will give you as much as three more stops of sharpness in low light. The downsides are weight, cost, and in some cases, quality. Zooms are complicated by design...in order to get sharp exposures over a range of focal lengths, you end up with a lot of glass elements, and gadgetry to move them around. Throw in a vibration reduction mechanism, and you're getting really nuts. If I wanted to replace my 18-70 kit lens with a VR lens, I'd probably go with the Nikon 18-200 VR superzoom. Highly rated lens, but it costs $700. If I wanted to go a little cheaper, I might try the Nikon 24-120 VR, but that's still $500, and has been called One of the Ten Worst Lenses Nikon's Ever Made by one reviewer. There's a $200 18-55mm with VR, but even if it worked well, it would still only help with camera shake. It would't do anything for subject movement.
So let's forget vibration reduction for now. What if we just got fast glass? Something with a f/2.8 aperture or bigger. Fast zoom lenses exist. The problem is that they cost a fortune. Pretty much every professional news photographer in the world carries a 80-200mm 2.8 zoom. $1000. $1800 with VR. There are normal zooms in 2.8...all cost too much.
Have you guessed the answer yet? Fixed focal length, aka "prime" lenses. Nikon and Canon both make a 50mm 1.8 for less than $150. f/1.8 is really fast. My 50mm 1.8 lets in more than six times more light than my 18-70 zoomed to 50mm. That means that a picture I'd have to expose for 1/8th of a second on the kit lens can be exposed for 1/50th with the 50mm. That's the difference between a sharp shot and a mess. As an added bonus, these lenses are simple...not many elements, light as a feather, and super sharp. If you want to go even faster, you can get a 1.4 or 1.2 for more money, but unless you're rich or a pro, why bother?
I hear you. "Waaaah. Waaaaah. I like zoom lenses. I'm lazy. I don't want to walk around or get close to my subjects." I call bullshit. Your legs turn any prime lens into a zoom lens. Use 'em. Then take the $1,000 you saved because you didn't shell out for a fast pro zoom and travel somewhere picturesque.
Note to owners of Nikon D40/40x/60 cameras: Unfortunately, your camera doesn't have an internal autofocus motor, so if you want to autofocus, you'll need to buy an AF-S version lens, maybe the 35mm 1.8.
Note to anyone lamenting the uselessness of their camera's on board flash: There's actually a great, and somewhat counter intuitive, time to use that on board flash...outdoors, in broad daylight. As in bright sunshine. Seriously. Noon sunlight is harsh, and positioned poorly. That's why your subjects will have ugly dark shadows under/around their eyes. Your camera is perfectly happy to take a picture without flash in broad daylight. After all, there's plenty of light, it's just ugly light. So put your DSLR in Program mode and pop the flash up manually. This will give you what's called 'fill light,' which will nuke those nasty shadows.
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Sometimes, Bret, You Need More Than Just a Good Time
Sometimes, you need a helmet.
Monday, June 08, 2009
Obsession 2009: Tomatoes
I tend to flip out about something, in a midlife crisisy kind of way, about once a year. Last year, it was paintball. This year, it's tomatoes. I think it all started when I read a post on some blog, maybe Lifehacker or Cool Tools. A tomato genius named Ray in California invented something called an EarthTainer, which is basically a capillary-action watering system/growing container that you build out of plastic tubs and PVC pipe. I'd never really thought much about growing things, but Ray had a video of putting an EarthTainer together, and all that sawing and drilling seemed like fun. So I built two. The instructions were excellent. My versions came out looking exactly like the ones shown in the video. They're even the same color.
I transplanted some store-bought seedlings into my EarthTainers today. (Yes, I realize I'm about three weeks late for Massachusetts, but you can't time your manias.) Each unit can accommodate two plants. Here are the four varieties I chose, with a little rationale behind why I chose them.
Better Boy. This is a hybrid variety, known for its good flavor, heartiness, and high yields. All over the intertubes, it says that if you want to grow tomatoes and are either lazy, unskilled, or both, this is the variety for you. So this is my bet-hedging pick. If I can't grow Better Boys, I'll probably have to find a new obsession. Some crazy bastid is in the Guinness book for growing 342 pounds of tomatoes on one Better Boy plant. Scale, +1. Oh, the other thing is that they mature in about 75 days, which is pretty quick. I wanted to spread the maturity dates out, so that I wouldn't be picking everything at once. Kind of like laddering bond or CD maturities. That finance reference will probably cause my Better Boys to die, but I guess it's too late. I said it. Now What?!?! (As Sophie would say.)
My next choice, also a hybrid, is the Marglobe. My other three varieties are what's called 'indeterminate,' meaning they grow up and up and yield fruit the whole time. Determinate varieties only grow to a set height, and have one big crop of fruit all at once. I wanted to try a determinate, and that's the Marglobe. It's also old-school. Certified by the USDA in 1925. Medium-sized fruit, with some reports of varying fruit shape and flavor.
OK, with those two out of the way, it's time to talk about the plants I'm most psyched about. Brandywine Red is among the most famous of heirloom varieties. Universally cited as having excellent flavor, this indeterminate plant can have fruit weighing up to a pound and a half. Looks great, too, with purply-red skin and pinkish flesh. Google's probably going to send me some pervs for that description, but there it is. Apparently Brandywines were originally cultivated by the Amish in Pennsylvania, so there's some roots appeal there for me, too. 80 days to maturity, so that should put us in the last week of August.
The fourth and final spot in my EarthTainers went to the Green Zebra. Do I really need to tell you why I picked it? It's the motherfucking Green Zebra, yo. Not clear if it's an heirloom or not. Indeterminate growth with smallish fruit. Tangy flavor, described as lemon-limey. Yellow skin with green stripes, and bright green flesh. Supposed to be great in salads. This is my latest yielding plant, targeted for the first week in September.
My dad, Dick, was a fairly gonzo organic gardener. Maybe in some small way, this is me reconnecting with him. (But the clothes are staying on. Suburbs, ya know.) Anyway, now that the EarthTainerators are built and the tomatoes are planted, what am I supposed to do? Well, water them, but that's only going to take 5 minutes every few days. I may have to make some sort of floating flag dealie so I can gauge the water level from afar. Then I guess I'll have to go play some paintball.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
I Feel Like This Most of the Time
Friday, March 27, 2009
There's No Escape
...once you listen. If you can make it the whole way through this and not get it stuck in your head, you're stronger than I am.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Hi Kids! It's Bernie Madoff!
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Moon Roof
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Where are the Bankers?
When people ask me what I think about the current financial crisis, my first reaction is generally "How the hell would I know?" We're faced with a bunch of really, really bad options: let the banks die, bail the banks out, or take the banks over. I'm not wild about any of them, and anyone who is, is either nuts or stupid. With regard to moving forward, however, I know one thing with absolute certainty: the "bankers" who got us into this mess aren't bankers in anything like the traditional sense, and we would be fools to let them continue to pretend that they are.
Consider the traditional role of the banker: intensely risk-averse, stability-craving, and happy with relatively modest and slow-growing returns. The 3/6/3 rule was a way of life: pay three percent on deposits, receive six percent on investments, and hit the links for a 3:00 p.m. tee time. That's not who's been running our big banks for the last decade. The folks in charge of Citi, Chase, Wells Fargo, and others have treated retail banking like it's the junk bond desk of an investment bank. In essence, a sub-prime mortgage is the junkiest of junk bonds, bought by a bank from The Town of Shitty Credit Water and Highway Authority. I think it's a lay-up to ask what our banks were doing in this business. I think it's a better question to ask how their top management let this business become such a gigantic part of their balance sheets. Finally, it's a super duper question to ask what in the sam holy hell Freddie and Fannie were doing underwriting some of this crappy paper.
There's sort of an implied hierarchy of responsibility, if you think about it. You'd hope that a borrower wouldn't take on a loan he couldn't repay. But his responsibility is really just to himself and his family, and he's not in the business of getting mortgages, so he was kind of out of his element to begin with. The loan officer who made the loan *is* in the business of making loans, so you'd hope he knew better, but he's getting a piece of every loan, and he's really just writing from his company's or department's playbook. The department and company managers should absolutely have known better. Sure, their competitors were posting huge profits from the subprime biz, but aren't these people supposed to be financial experts? The folks at Freddie and Fannie were just flat out delinquent, and the rating agencies who certified the CMOs that were built on this stinking pile of poo should all be out of a job and broke, if not in jail.
The question remains. Who should run our banking industry when the smoke clears and the rubble is bulldozed? Not the jokers running it now, that's for sure. Maybe the Feds should find little community bankers who never bought into this mania and give them a great big promotion.
What would be the word for the feeling you get when you go to drink a purportedly orange seltzer you just bought for $2 at a minimart, and as soon as it hits your taste buds, you realize it's orange creme flavored, sweetened with Splenda?
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Waiting in a Line of Cars
[Chris was rocking out to his own internal soundtrack, which was playing "I Eat Cannibals."]
Soph: You eat people who eat people?
C: Apparently.
Soph: Dad, that's so wrong.
C: It's just a song.
Soph: It's like a turducken.
Thursday, February 05, 2009
Completion Backward Principle
I spilled a goodly portion of Caffeine Free Diet Coke on my keyboard the other day. Despite my most earnest ministrations, it died. I went to Staples and picked up a cheap basic keyboard, but it was met with howls of derision from my females, due to the lack of an integrated volume control. Fine, said I. So back to Staples I went, and got one of these, thinking that if the shorties like a volume button, they'll positively love having a button for every single thing they do.
Now that I've got a button on my keyboard for just about everything, from Firefox to Outlook to Calculator to Dreamweaver to Excel to Picasa to iTunes to my hours-tracking spreadsheet, it occurs to me that I basically just unraveled the last 20 years of personal computing interfaces. We were all so pleased to be able to start programs by clicking on their icons instead of typing on our keyboards, but now it's 2009 and I'm back to starting everything from the keyboard. Maybe I'll get a tablet PC so I can start all my work with a pen.
Somewhere, DEVO is chuckling appreciatively.
Note that the Logitech Wave does have one tremendously useful feature: you can disable the CAPS LOCK, Insert, and Scroll Lock keys. Now that's progress.
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
Thought Experiment
Imagine you live in a town whose elementary school districts look like this:
Festivebrook, Whisk, Carrington, Pudding, Buttress, and Archer are elementary schools. Now imagine that a state mental hospital, located in sub-area X within the Archer district (and colored red to denote its problematic nature) gets repurposed into a condo complex. People with children have the temerity to move in. Where do you send the kids to school?
Ready? Go.
Notes:
We had a big town wide redistricting two years ago.
Everyone hates redistricting.
The Archer School is overfull. Like bulging to the rafters. If you want the Area X kids to go to Archer, you'll have to move between 20 and 40 Archer kids somewhere else.
The "MS" boxes on the diagram are middle schools. Festivebrook, Whisk, and Pudding share the middle school in the Whisk district. The others share the middle school in the Buttress district.
There's one public high school in town. All the schools roll up to that.
*They've been renamed because, well, I like making up silly names. Their real names are Estabrook, Fiske, Harrington, Hastings, Bridge, and Bowman.
Spacing
The ol' clock on the wall says it's time to pick on Microsoft again. Our topic today is the email editor in Outlook 2007. I got a copy of Office 07 for a song from our church auction. It's been kind of a mixed bag overall. There are plenty of things I like about it, but I'm still struggling to find basic functions in the weird new menu system. But I digress. There's something so fundamentally wrong with the Outlook email creation screen that I can't imagine that even Microsoft let it get through.
I like to use the HTML format for my emails. Some of you are probably thinking that's a character flaw. You may go back to World of Warcraft now. For the rest of you, I like bulleted and numbered lists, I like clickable URLs, I like being able to include pictures in the flow of text. Basically, I like to be able to include features that every other popular document sharing medium supports. Because HTML is, you know, a standard, it's not unreasonable to think that an HTML email will look the same on a recipient's PC as it looks on mine.
Wrong. Here's what actually happens in Outlook '07. The email editor, when configured to create HTML documents, treats the ENTER key like an HTML paragraph tag. Which, to be honest, is OK. Lots of HTML editors, including the Dreamweaver I seem to spend half my life using, treat ENTER like a paragraph tag. Here's the problem: the allegedly WYSIWYG composition screen displays ENTERs as line breaks. So when I send HTML email to people who aren't using Outlook '07, or even when they are if the email has gone through an email listserve or Yahoo Groups, everyone one of what looked like single line-feeds when I composed my document, become double-spaced pagagraph breaks...adding a whole great shitload of whitespace to everything I send out.
The thing that makes this so maddening is that it would be so easy to fix. The best way would be to include in Outlook '07 a configuration option to have the enter key produce line break (<br />) tags instead of paragraph (<p></p>) tags. Alternatively, if the compose screen was true WYSIWYG from an HTML standpoint, you'd see that you were adding too many spaces, and you'd either reduce the number of ENTERs between paragraphs, or you'd remember to use SHIFT-ENTER to make single line feeds. But as it is, ENTERs have to be paragraph tags, and the screen doesn't reflect that.
Grr. Damn you, Microsoft, for making me be all geeky on my blog.
PS If you've got some easy fix for this...please let me know.
primarily due to the fact that you just blasted your subject with a high-powered strobe light. Eureka! We've learned something! Using your camera's built-in flash indoors almost always makes for ugly pictures. What to do? Well, you can switch your camera to some other mode, which doesn't automatically pop the flash. Maybe Program mode or Shutter priority, or one of the preset modes with a cutesy little icon. You make a few exposures. 
Sure enough, your camera happily takes pictures, and they look OK when you check them in your camera's LCD screen. But when you get them home and look at them on your PC, they're not sharp. Phooey.
