I spent the evening at Great Falls, MD on the Virginia side trying to get some decent photos in the evening light. It’s very difficult to take pictures here. The light doesn’t seem to want to cooperate. I got lots better results a few years ago in the middle of winter. I think that at that time the sun was setting more in the direction along the river rather than directly across the river, like it is now. Last time, there was a period of about 10 minutes at sunset where the cliffs on the sides of the river bloomed from dull grey rocks into pink and orange. No such luck this time. The most I accomplished was to have the sunlight diffuse, bringing out the green of the vegetation and the orange in the rocks. Then it all went dark.
Another frustration is that the 18-200mm lens is adequate with VR but nowhere near the clarity I want. Next time I’ll bring a solid tripod, disable the VR and do things the old-fashioned way.
Also, I am hating the way Picasaweb is resizing images on the fly for the destination browser and distorting the photos. For these darker landscape photos, it makes them look pretty ugly.
Now if only my photos looked like these. Here is a view from the Maryland side, they have a better panoramic view over there!
I have been trying out the .Mac Web Galleries and am disappointed. While it does offer 10GB of storage, the features of the gallery itself are strictly for consumers showing snapshots.
1. The data transfer and website is very heavy. Its slow. Much slower than it needs to be. Someone clocked the initial download hit for scripts, etc. at 2MB.
2. All images are resized on the fly. There is very little thumbnailing and no possible way to see the image in its native resolution. When trying to view images full-size, the resizing messes up the image quality, at times quite severely. There is no fixed resolution view mode to show the image at high quality.
3. Reflections. I am showing photos, not eye-candy reflections at the bottom of the photos.
4. Upload options. There are none.
5. When clicking through full-size images and there are multiple pages of thumbnails, a user is told they are at the end of the gallery when they reach the end of the thumbnail “page”. In a test this caused every single user to miss the second half of the two-page gallery.
While this Gallery is as easy as possible to use for your average iPhoto user, I think that it could do a much better job with less of the bloat.
PicasaWeb, with all of its features and Google maps integration and an iPhoto plugin, is still lightweight and plagued by none of these problems. It just works. Of course, with the release of the new iLife 08, the Picasa iPhoto export plugin is broken, but the separate uploader app works and an update to the plugin will be released soon.
Here is an example for you to compare:
.Mac Web Gallery
Picasaweb
Here is a new photo gallery from San Diego. All pictures were taken with my Nikon D40x and an 18-200mm VR lens.
Do your portrait photo subjects look like a deer in headlights? I hate taking indoor pictures of family with my point-and-shoot pocket camera because the flash washes everything out. The most unflattering picture you can take of someone is with a flash pointed right in their face! This does NOT sit well with the wife!
The single biggest thing you can do to take amazing portraits is use an external flash which can be pointed at the ceiling or a wall. The light of the flash bounces off of the wall or ceiling and diffuses onto the subject.
I got a new Nikon D40x today along with a SB-400 external flash and a Nikon 18-200mm VR lens. A picture is worth a million words.
D40x with built-in flash pointed directly at subject.
D40x with SB400 flash pointed at wall.
D40x with SB400 pointed at wall and in Portrait Image Optimization mode.
You can see full-size photos here.
It’s been cold and rainy in Sao Paolo (it’s winter here), but last weekend was nice and warm so I went with a co-worker to his hometown, Ubatuba. Ubatuba is a small beach city on the coast, south of Rio. The beaches were empty given that the past week had been cold, which made it a perfect day. Many of the beaches are local, since there is no parking available. Having grown up there, my co-worker knew the area so we were able to park at people’s houses and use the hidden paths to the beaches.
Normally the surf is quite strong, but the tide was out and it was close to the middle of the season, so the gravitational pull had the water way out. About half-way through the afternoon, sitting in a chair nursing a beer ($1) and some fresh fish, I realized that I was in a Corona moment and had to resist chucking my Blackberry into the surf. Why did I ever move away from San Diego? Oh yeah - there is lots of tech work in VA.
BTW, every woman on the beach in Brazil wears a bikini. Most wear thongs. I saw a grandma in a bikini, I saw fat women in bikinis. If the sun is out, everyone flocks to the pool or beach to lay out. This is quite different from the Philippines where white skin is considered beautiful and people stay out of the sun for fear of getting dark. But, I digress… Here are some photos:
These photos are not very good quality because I was limited to a point and shoot camera for this trip.
Here are some photos of Sao Paolo, Brazil. The size of the city is overwhelming. These photos are taken from the top of the Italiano Edifico, and the skyscrapers stretch to the horizon in literaly every direction you can see. What is scary is that this is the smaller half of the city. The larger part is over the horizon! Because I couldn’t bring along my good camera, I didn’t get very good pictures of the city as the sun set.
