One Year Celebration!

Today, June 18, 2010 marks the one year anniversary of iffles.com!

It’s been quite a year of ups and downs – articles that came out just how I wanted them to, and articles that really flopped. Days I was proud of all that I’ve accomplished, and days I struggled with what I would write next. I launched when I had the website “good enough for launching” but still had a To Do list with bunches of items on it left to clean things up. Wouldn’t you know it, there’s still bunches of items on that list.

I’ve learned so much about photography from running this site, forcing myself to learn new and different things so that I have something to write about, which was something I was hoping would happen… and it did!

I was also, however, incredibly shocked with how much time running this site has taken up, which is why I can’t write all that often, which means I’ll never be one of the Big Dogs when it comes to photography sites. And you know what? I’m totally ok with that. One of the main reasons I decided I never wanted to try to make money off of photography was because I didn’t want it to turn into a job, an obligation and/or a stress in my life. So if I get a couple of comments on a blog that posts once a week or so, I’m ok with that.

Speaking of comments – I want to thank all of you that have stuck around, offering encouragement and advice. I feel like I’ve gotten to know a number of you through your comments (and your blogs and flickr streams!).

Top Ten Posts

Ok, enough mushy stuff. Let’s do the typical “one year anniversary of a blog” thing and show you the top ten posts of the past year (for the record, I did this by pageviews. It’s debatable what the best method for this type of thing is, but, well, that’s the one I chose):

1. Gimp Script Showcase: National Geographic
2. What I Learned from the Death of my Computer
3. Why I Think You Should Go On the Third Annual Worldwide Photo Walk
4. Some New Features in UFRaw
5. Making Eyes Pop Using Gimp
6. Introduction to Using UFRaw to Edit RAW Files
7. Faking HDR in Gimp (I cringe putting this one on the list. This is my least favorite post I’ve written for various reasons)
8. Gimp Script Showcase: Warming and Cooling Filter
9. Adding a Vignette (or Blurry Dark Edges) to a Photo in Gimp
10. Gimp Script Showcase: Vintage Photos

What You’ve Missed

A few of my favorite posts didn’t make the Top Ten, and I figure it’s probably because some of you weren’t reading a year ago. I wanted to point out some of my favorite posts that you might have missed:

• Gimp 101: Levels. I think this is such a basic starting point for photo editing.
• Gimp 101: Curves – part one and two. Ok, so I needed two parts because I didn’t do a good enough job explaining the first time, so maybe I shouldn’t include these as a favorite, but I still think it’s good information that can dramatically impact a photo. (btw, there’s a part three to this series still brewing)
• 5 Things to do When You’re in a Photo Rut. Hey, we’ve all been there.
• Layer Blending Modes in Gimp. Ok, so, my hover-over-the-image thing takes way too long to load. And I apologize for that. But if you have a bit of patience, I think you’ll find this entry pretty helpful if you use Gimp.
• How I Did It: The Boots Photo. One of my favorite self portraits I’ve ever taken, explained step-by-step from set-up to final product.

A Final Thank You

I know I mentioned it above, but I do really appreciate the comments I get (even the negative ones – because those are the ones I learn from!), and so I’d like thank you by giving you one more chance to leave a comment. I’ll pick one comment at random from this post to get one year of Flickr Pro. I’m sure you all realize by now that I have one of these things, and while the unlimited uploads and storage, as well as the ability to archive high-resolution photos is nice, I have to admit my favorite perk of a pro account are the stats! Anyway, this is a gift from me to a random noter and is not sponsered by flickr in any way, I just happen to like the site a lot. All you have to do to enter is leave a note before midnight on Tuesday night (I’m in the Eastern time zone, but to be honest, I’m pretty flexible on this timing, but that’s the earliest I’ll choose a winner). One comment per person, please!

I’ll announce the winner on the blog and use the email address from your comment to email the pro code to the winner – flickr upgrade codes are not associated with the email account at all, so you can use any (working) email address in your comment and you’ll be able to use the code even if that’s not the same email address associated with my flickr account. This also means you can pass it on to a friend or family member that you think will really appreciate it.

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New Laptop - some old messy desk.

Before I get started, I just have to say that this is my 100th post on iffles.com! And we’re one month away from iffles.com’s first birthday. I’m a bit bummed that my 100th post doesn’t happen to be much about photography at all, but it is about something that, as digital photographers, we all should be mindful of – the possibility of a suddenly-dead computer and things you can do to help lessen the effect.

I’ve always considered myself to be pretty tech-savvy (I am a computer programmer by day, after all), but I also knew there was always more I could be doing in order to prepare myself for the inevitable Data Loss situation, which is exactly what happened to me when my laptop up and died earlier this week.

As far as computer disasters go, it wasn’t too horrible – I had enough money to get a new laptop right away, I had all my RAW files and full-sized edits on my drobo (I’ll get to that in a sec for those you that don’t know what it is, but for now just think of it as an external hard drive), I have a phone with internet access so I could manage to still keep in touch online, and almost all of the software I use on my computer (which, other than a browser, is pretty much all photo editing or music-listening stuff) is free.

All that being said, none of us are perfect, and I still learned a bit for next time, so I’m sharing it with you – though I hope you never have to actually use any of this advice because hopefully, the next time you buy a computer, your old one will still be running and you can happily transfer all your data over at your own leisure!

You probably want to be backing up more than you are

And I don’t just mean more often, I mean what you’re backing up. I mentioned that I have all my photos on my drobo – it’s a device that can hold up to 4 hard drives in it and automatically mirrors the data for you across the hard drives so that if any one of them should fail, all your data is still safe. Technically, this isn’t backing up, and I’ve been talking about setting up an online backup service for about a year now, and maybe this will finally be the kick in the butt to do it.

Currently on my drobo I house three things: all my photos, all my music, and a backup of iffles.com. I figured that was all I really needed, and couldn’t really think of anything that I actually stored on my computer itself other than the resized versions of all my photos that I post online. Let me tell you something: as soon as you lose all your data, you realize exactly what you don’t have. For instance, I write all my entries for iffles.com in notepad. I have my reasons – they may not be the best reasons, but they’re my reasons none-the-less. I save them all to my desktop until they’re posted. Well, sitting my Dead Laptop’s desktop is the entry of all my favorite People photos from the iffles.com Monthly Theme Group.

We still haven’t figured out of the hard drive on the old laptop is recoverable. We’re doing our due diligence, but since we have to go out of town for a funeral this week, it might be a while to find out. So, the April photos might end up being posted at the same time as the May ones… sorry about that!

Oh, another thing I should have backed up? My scripts folder for Gimp. Luckily, I’ve already posted about most of the scripts I use often, so it will be easy for me to find and download them all again… but if I had been backing it up on the drobo, it would have been a quick copy/paste

Keep Computer Shopping

If you’re anything like me, then before you make a major purchase, you like to have spent a good amount of time researching what’s out there and what a good price is. I consider a laptop purchase to be a major one, so when I had to buy one right away, I was a bit bummed that I hadn’t done any research on it at all since I bought my previous laptop 3 years ago.

I’m lucky in that I know a thing or two about computers, so I could quickly come up with a priority list and shop around online (although, I ended up actually finding the best price at Best Buy, so I was able to have it in my hands the same day, which was nice). The thing is, there’s still that little part of me that is questioning and wondering if I really got the right computer. I love my new laptop so far and have no complaints – I really was able to get everything I wanted for only a tiny bit more than what I wanted to spend, so I can’t complain (yet, at least!), but I’ve also used it for less than a week, so who knows how I’ll feel in a month or two down the road.

Use this Opportunity

I will say one good thing about the death of a computer: it really forces you to clean up your computer act. Not only do I have a fresh and clean hard drive, but I don’t have all sorts of other crap I don’t need on my computer like apps I downloaded to test out and just never uninstalled.

It’s also given me an opportunity to try things that I’ve been meaning to try and had always been too lazy or stuck in my ways. For instance, I’m using Chrome now instead of Firefox – when Chrome first came out, the inability to use Greasemonkey meant I didn’t even give it a chance. Since they added Greasemonkey support I just became too set in my ways to change because I was so used to Firefox. But since I had to start over anyway, I went for Chrome (and so far am happy, though there are one or two things I have to get used to).

It also means I’m getting the latest versions of all the software that I never bothered updating, and oh-my-goodness – I’m kicking myself for never upgrading my UFRaw before. If you don’t have the Lens Correction tab in your version of UFRaw, please update it now. This tab uses your EXIF data to figure out what camera and lens you used to take the photo, which in and of itself isn’t all that impressive, but then it uses that data to – if you want – automatically correct for lens distortion! I’ll have to write an entry about this nifty feature later, but I loved it so much, I felt it was worth discussing here.

Finally, I definitely learned from this scare and am going to get my butt in gear and start doing some online backups of my data, as well as periodic backups of things other than photos and music.

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I’m writing this from my phone just to let you all know that until the current laptop is fixed or a new one is purchased, I’m afraid there might not be any entries over here.

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f/22; 1/15sec; 105mm; ISO 400

I did not intend to go without a post here for so long, I apologize!

I’m currently on vacation in DC (and surrounding areas), but what really threw everything off is that a few days before I left, I was attempting to write an entry or two to automatically post while I was gone, but I managed to spill an entire glass of water on my laptop! The good news is, the laptop appears to be fine now, but the bad news is, that in order to play it safe, I had the laptop sitting in a box of rice attempting to dry it all out before I left, and I didn’t take it out until we left, which meant no entries to write and post for those few days, let alone line any up to post while I was gone.

And so, since our days are pretty well packed until we get home Monday evening, there might be an even longer delay in entries.

Thanks for understanding, and I hope you all have a great weekend!

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The first was a request for an iffles.com icon to put in the sidebar of a blog to show support for this website. I’m pretty blown away that anyone would actually want to do this, but I surely do appreciate the thought. So of course I put my incredibly awesome graphic skills to work (that’s sarcasm – give me a photo, I can edit it, tell me to make a graphic and I flounder) and came up with this:

Which you can add to your page with this code:

<a href="http://iffles.com"><img src="http://iffles.com/images/bloglink.png" alt="iffles.com - phototalk for the rest of us" title="iffles.com - phototalk for the rest of us"></a>

I’m going to create a “resources” page here on iffles.com that I’ll eventually put that code over there so you can find it again easily if you need it.

The second thing I’ve done is create a fan page on facebook for iffles.com. You can find it here (or by clicking on the facebook icon in the “follow iffles” section of the sidebar. I’m going to try really hard to remember to update the fan page whenever I post something new here so that you can be notified via facebook when there’s something new over here.

The thing is, though, I’m not on facebook very often, so I’m not going to promise that every link gets up there right away, so I might forget. But I will promise that every entry will be linked up there eventually.

If you have any other suggestions for iffles.com, or things that you’d like to see, please let me know in the comments, I’m always open to ideas for improvement!

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f/3.5, 1/125 sec, 10mm, ISO 200

You guys are all aware that I’m attempting three photography-related projects this year. Well, less than two full months into the project, I’m already cheating on one of them (my 52 photowalks). I started to feel guilty about this for about 2 second before I fully rationalized my decisions and decided, ya know what? It’s ok to cheat on our photography projects sometimes. I know the arbitrary rules of “a photo a day” or “a photowalk a week” are reasons why some people don’t do these projects at all (and if you’re dedicated and motivated enough to go out and use your camera creatively without a project – I salute you… I’m not one of those self-motivated people), but for those of you that are doing a project like mine, and have perhaps missed a 365 photo, or couldn’t make it on one of your 52 photowalks, I present you with my reason as to why it’s ok to cheat on your personal photography projects.

Meeting the Goals of Your Projects

When I did my 366 project (it was a leap year), I used to jump out of bed at 11:45 PM (scaring John who was sleeping next to me, of course), and start muttering something about not taking a photo, and end up with a lousy camera-on-auto, badly-lit, arms-length self portrait. Yes, I met the goal of taking my photo during that 24 hour period – but was that really the goal of my project? I started that project for three reasons:

• To document a year of my life
• To learn how to use my camera
• To take more creative photos

One day during my 366 project, I realized I hadn't taken a photo of myself that day, but was relieved to find this photo of John's and my feet on my memory card for that day. Very out of focus, but it still counted!

The same thing applies for whatever rule you broke, of course. Perhaps you’re doing a self-portrait 365 and forgot to take a photo of yourself on some day, but did take a really great photo without you in it. So? If your goals were similar to the ones I listed above, doesn’t that fantastic photo still apply?

Avoiding Risk to Yourself or Your Camera

This is a big one for me during this time of year when it’s snowing a lot. I’m actually terrified of snow when it comes to my camera. I’ve read all the articles online about how to protect your camera and lenses, but I still think the best way to protect your camera from snow is to not go outside when it’s snowing. Since I have to go outside for my photowalks, and I work during most of the daylight hours of the week, that really narrows down the amount of time I can find outside when it’s not snowing. I’d rather skip a week in my photowalk project than damage my camera or lens.

I’m also not going to risk my own health (do you like how I wrote about the dangers of risking my camera before risking myself? Does that say something about me?). I’ve been fortunate enough that this has never really been an issue for me, but there was one year (before I got into photography) that I was hospitalized for almost a week, and then essentially bed-ridden for the following week. I wouldn’t have had many options then if I were in the middle of some projects. I don’t think anyone would look down on me for putting my camera down for a week or two then.

Related, of course, is the health of your family. Once again, I think this is an obvious one, but if you have a loved one that is suffering, I’m not sure it’s really appropriate to say “hold on, honey, I see you’re in pain and all, but I really gotta go take some photos – be back in an hour or two!”

Level of Cheating

This is something that’s a personal choice for you, and is all going to depend on what the project means to you. For instance, last year was my first year doing 52 photowalks, and I would have been pretty devastated if I had missed a week completely (and I never did, actually). But as the only rules I ever gave myself were “leave the house once a week and take photos”, I suppose I was a bit flexible in my definition of a photowalk on some weeks. For instance:

• The photo at the top of this entry? That was on one of my “photowalks” that was actually a bike ride I went on and stopped to take some photos at one point. This was probably the least “cheatingish” thing I did, but I still felt a little bit of guilt about it.
• I spent Easter at my sister’s house, and took a lot of photos around her house (and of her kids). It was not a walk at all, and something I would have done project or not, but… I did leave my house, so I figured it counted.

Does an Easter Egg Hunt count as a photowalk? It's up to you!

Another example – When I did my 366 self-portrait project, I insisted that I actually take every photo with my finger hitting the button, whereas I know other people are perfectly ok with allowing someone else to take the photo, as long as they themselves set up the entire shot. Like I said, it’s a matter of personal preference.

You have to draw the line somewhere, of course

Just because I’m justifying doing some cheating here and there on your project, don’t let it become a habit! If I had cheated on my 366 project and took 7 photos every Saturday instead of one every day, that’s no longer really documenting my daily life, is it? And I’m sure they wouldn’t be as creative, because I’d be rushing to get each of the 7 photos done in a day.

Besides, another main reason I do these projects is to be able to look back and think “look what I did, I really accomplished something”. If you cheat too much, you’ll lose that sense of pride.

Why I Cheated

In case you’re curious, since I mentioned above that I already cheated in my 52 photowalks, I thought I’d tell you what I’ve done. I consider my “weeks” to be Thursday-Wednesday. Today is Wednesday, and for various reasons (mostly travel and snow-related) I haven’t had a chance to go out and do a photowalk. Why am I not sweating it?

• My goal was to continue to enjoy my photowalks that I had already been going on, learn more about my camera, and take less nature (and more urban) photos. If I go on two walks this upcoming week, is that hurting any of my goals? No.
• The main reason I wasn’t able to go out this week is because I wasn’t home often when there was light out AND no snow. I don’t like taking my camera out when it’s snowing, and I’m not going to risk that just to get a photo before the end of the week
• As far as my level of cheating? Last year, I’m not sure I would have let this slide. But because I’ve already finished one year of 52 photowalks, I’m a bit more relaxed about my “rules” this year. I’ll make up somehow, and if I don’t? Meh. then I’ll have done 51 photowalks in a year, and that ain’t bad, either.

So, if you’ve cheated on any of your projects and still kept going, I give you a pat on the back. Virtually, at least.

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This photo doesn't have much to do with this article, but I edited it while writing, so I thought I'd include it

I know I owe you guys another gimp editing tutorial – and I’m in the middle of working on one that was specifically asked for – but when I was working on it last week, Gimp crashed on me (for only the second time ever), which annoyed me enough to stop working on it that night. And then I got sick over the weekend and didn’t do much of anything.

Since I’m still feeling a bit under the weather, I’m going to write something that’s a bit easier than the Gimp tutorial so I can go back to making sure the sofa stays put.

As you know, I use only free software to edit all my photos, and one step in my workflow is Picasa. I’ve touched on this before – though that was more of a complete start-to-finish of my photo storing and organizing process. Today I’m going to talk specifically about the features I use in Picasa – some of which are new since that article anyway.

Importing and viewing RAW files

Note: this section applies even if you shoot in jpg.

I have my computer all set up so that when I plug in my card reader that it automatically starts importing my photos into Picasa. The import screen looks something like this:

Click to make bigger

Let me point out some of my favorite features:

• Photos organized by time – On the left hand side, you’ll see all the photos that are on my card – the first group (of my lazy cats) all of little red Xs on them because they’ve already been imported into Picasa before – so basically it’s saying that it already has that photo, so if I click “Import All”, it’s not going to import those. The rest of the photos are grouped into sections all based upon the time they were taken. So the pictures of me with two of my cookbooks were taken at a different time than the section of me experimenting with my brand new remote. The thing I love about this grouping of photos is that – if you wanted to – you could easily import into separate folders for each date that you took photos on. I don’t bother doing that, but it’s nice to know that Picasa makes it easy for me if I want to!
• Preview – Even before importing the photos onto my computer, I can preview any of the images on the right hand side of the import screen. As you can see in the screen capture, I have selected a photo of me using my remote for one of the first times. Don’t I look wonderful?
• Importing into my own folder structure – See at the bottom there’s three dropdowns? The first one is “Import to:”. Picasa is going to put all my photos into a folder, and the Import to: dropdown is asking me what folder I want the newly created folder to go into. It defaults to “My Pictures” on windows computers, but you can change this default folder under Tools –> Options on the General tab (see screenshot below). I want all my photos to go onto my Drobo, so I have mine set to a folder on there. Anyway. The next dropdown allows you to type in the name of the folder you want these photos to go in. I use a naming convention of [Today's Date] – [short description]. So this particular batch says “2010_02_02 – by window, downtown photowalk” (I use that format for the date so that when sorting all my folders by name, they’re still in chronological order). The final dropdown determines what Picasa should do with all the photos on the card after importing (as in, delete them or not). I always leave this set to “Leave card alone” because I’d rather reformat the card later on my camera than just delete them in Picasa.

Click to make bigger

After I hit the “Import All” button I’m brought into the Library:

Click to make bigger

I’m going to take this time to point out that you’re looking at RAW files. Picasa does have the ability to read RAW files (see their list of supported RAW formats here) – but it’s important to note that I don’t consider it a RAW editor. Remember back when I discussed raw vs. jpg, I mentioned that RAW files weren’t actually images, but that they were just RAW data, and that jpgs are your camera’s interpretation (and compression) of what it thinks that image should look like? Well, Picasa is basically just doing the same thing that you camera does. It’s showing you it’s interpretation of what that RAW file should actually look like. If you it, great! But you’re missing a lot of the power of a real RAW editor if you only use Picasa to edit your photos (and, I might add, if you’re only using Picasa to edit your jpg photos, you’re missing out on the power of software like Gimp – but sometimes you get a great shot Straight Out of Camera, and so you don’t need to edit, of course).

Anyway… where was I? Oh yes, the library. It works like you’d expect it to work, you can see all your folders there on the left, and all the images there on the right. Nothing fancy in here. The cool stuff happens when you double click on a photo to open it up:

Click to make bigger

My favorite part is a new feature. Check it out – you can see your histogram and some important EXIF data on the left! By the way, if you want to see all your EXIF data, you can go to Picture –> Properties. If you wanted to edit your photos in Picasa, this is where you’d do it – you can see three tabs on the left (Basic Fixes, Tuning, Effects) that allow for some editing. I very rarely edit in Picasa, but it’s nice to know those features are there. The only reason I even open things up in Picasa is because I take a lot of photos, but I don’t edit them all (I’d guess I edit about 1 in 10 of my photos – I keep meaning to look up that statistic for sure), and by opening up the photos here, I can then use the arrow keys to move through them all and decide which ones I want to edit. When I come to one (like this photo of some shrubbery), I can look at that blue bar on the bottom and it tells me the name of the photo (in this case: IMG_7304.CR2), so then I can find that image on my computer, open it in UFRaw/The Gimp and edit it.

After I’ve edited my photo and save the new image into the same folder, Picasa automatically recognizes that there’s a new file in that folder and adds it into the Library at the end of that folder (personally, I like that it sorts it so all the new files are at the end, it makes selecting my files for uploading easier – I just grab all the ones at the end!)

Exporting/Resizing my photos

Once I’ve edited all the photos I’m going to edit, I select all of them (in this case, there’s only one, but usually there’s more) and hit the little star button:

Adding a star

Now, this is obviously just a personal preference for me and not required. This star doesn’t mean anything outside of Picasa, but it’s an easy way for me to mark which photos are keepers in each folder. I never delete any of my photos, so if I only want to look at the photos I’ve actually marked as keepers, I can set a filter (at the top of the library screen) in Picasa to only show me photos that I’ve starred!

Next, I tag all my photos. Tagging has been upgraded in this latest release of Picasa so now you can store tags that you use often so you don’t have to type them in every time. Here’s the new tagging screen:

Click to make bigger

The Quick Tags at the bottom allow you to easily add tags to your photos that you use often. The first two spots, by default, show the last two tags that you used, the rest of the slots you can configure to be whatever you want. Since I do a lot of self portraits and photowalks in Akron, Ohio, you can see why I picked some of the tags I did. The reason why I tag photos in Picasa is because I can easily select a bunch of photos and tag them all at once, and the tags are saved with the image itself, so when I export them and upload them to flickr, it will include the same tags there.

Another improvement with the tagging in this new release is that you can put special characters (like hyphens and ampersands) in your tags, which you didn’t used to be able to do! Exciting!

Note: I check out the new Places thing in Picasa, too, where I can add all my photos to a map. It’s pretty cool, but this information is NOT uploaded to flickr

So, at this point, I want to export my photos. I do this for a two reasons:

• To resize a bunch of photos at once, it’s easiest to do this from the Export menu. I don’t like to upload my full size photos to flickr – it takes a lot longer to upload, and it gives other people access to my full-size images, which I don’t like.
• Remember I imported all my photos onto my drobo (which is a fancy external harddrive) – this means when I’m on vacation and just have my laptop, I don’t have any of my photos. I like to export all the resized images to my laptop so that I can at least have those with me.

Here’s the export screen:

The export screen

You’ll notice that you have the option to add a watermark, but it’s just text and not very pretty (in my opinion), but if you’re ever looking for a quick and easy way to add a simple watermark, this is a great option.

Picasa will export all my photos (regardless if they were RAW or jpg when they entered Picasa) to jpgs. I’m perfectly fine with that – in case you missed it, here’s a great article on DPS about file formats.

Other things I do in Picasa

The things I mentioned above are my “everyday” Picasa actions, but there are a few more things I’d like to mention:

Creating Collages:

If you want to create a quick-and-easy collage, you can select a bunch of photos and hit the “Collage” button:

Click to make bigger

That will take you to another screen where you have some options for the type of collage (default is Mosaic, but you can also do stuff like a pile of polaroids), spacing between the photos, background color, etc.:

Click to make bigger

The most annoying part is that you don’t have control over which photos go where, the only thing you can really do is keep hitting the “Shuffle Pictures” button at the bottom to move stuff around.

Set as Desktop Background:

I know you can easily do this in Windows, too, but when I’m already in Picasa, and I’m already looking at my photos, it’s really easy to do here, too. Just go to Create –> Set As Desktop

Adding Text to photos:

When I’m sharing photos on here, I often want to add text to them. Once again, I realize this is easy to do in Gimp, but I actually find myself adding text most often to collages that I’ve made (where I’m showing a before and after, for example, and want to mark one as before, and one as after). Adding text is really simple – remember when I talked about having the image open in Picasa and there’s the three tabs for simple editing? One of the options on the Basic Fixes tab is Text. Just select that, click on your photo, and start typing – you can select the font, color, and size – and even if you want it to be slightly transparent!

Quick Edits:

Remember how I said sometimes photos look pretty good SOOC (Straight Out of Camera), and they only need just a bit of tweaking? One of my favorite tweaks in Picasa is on the Tuning tab. Just click the One Click Fix for lighting and it will adjust the fill light, highlights and shadows for you – I find that 99% of the time it really does make the photo look tons better:

One click fix!

Well. I think that just about covers it. Do you do something in Picasa that I’m missing out on? Let me know!

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Also, I promise I’ll get back to my usual entries soon, full of photo tips and Gimp how-tos, but something has been on my mind lately. When I think back to why I started this site, it had a lot to do with sharing. When I first started getting into photography, I was overwhelmed by how good everyone else was, and what little I seemed to know, and I didn’t know where to start. The reason I started this blog was to help other new photographers so that we could learn together.

I started getting a lot more traffic when I started writing for DPS, both here, and on my flickr account. Since flickr is a community site, it was easy for me to reciprocate – anyone who added me as a contact that actually had photos in their stream became a contact of mine. And while it’s impossible for me to comment on every photo from all of these new contacts, I do my best to let someone know when I really like something.

Here’s the thing, though, I know a lot of you guys have your own blogs and/or twitter accounts that are photography related, and I see lots of links in the comments and have a lot of new followers on twitter, and I’d love to follow any of them that are photography-related, I’ve just found it a bit impossible to spend the time looking at every linked name in the comments and every new follower on twitter.

So here’s what I’d like from you…

Yeah, all that rambling above was coming to this: Do you have a photography-related blog or twitter account? Leave it in the comments below (you do NOT have to have a Disqus, twitter or openID account to leave a comment – just leave your name, email and website in the fields below the comment box and hit Post Comment). Not only is this going to give me a lot of new blogs to feed (I love more inspiration!) but it also means you’ll have a greater likelihood of showing up on my Weekend Links list, hopefully driving some more traffic to your blog.

In fact, I plan on visiting and each ever blog/twitter account that you mention below and if it is, indeed, photography related, I’ll find my favorite of your most recent posts and link to it in a special edition of Weekend Links!

One last thing, if you have a blog that’s NOT photography related, feel free to share that, too, and I promise to visit!

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Another 52 photowalks

f/8.0, 1/80 sec, 22mm, ISO 200

I debated this a lot. In 2008 I did a 366 project (leap year and all), so I attempted a second one in 2009 and I felt really dragged down by the project, and wasn’t getting anything out of it anymore, so I dropped it. I was afraid I’d get the same “burnt out” feeling from doing another 52 photowalks. I decided to stick with it anyway because I’m not tired of it yet – and I think there’s still a lot more for me to learn. Besides, I really enjoy it. I’m going to try to get out of the Metro/State/National parks some this year, though, and walk around the city some more.

The idea, once again, is to leave my house once a week and take photos, that’s my only rule. My weeks are defined as Thursday-Wednesday.

52 Self Portraits

f/5.6, 1/80 sec, 44mm, ISO 800

I mentioned that I did a 366 project in 2008. It was actually a Self Portrait project, and it was very rewarding. Part of me has missed both the challenge and the creativity involved in self portraits, so I’m giving it another go, with a less restrictive time-frame. Just one a week for me!

Monthly Themes

When I was still trying to settle on what my project(s) for 2010 was going to be, I decided to tweet about it and ask for suggestions. I got so many great ideas that I knew I couldn’t do them all. However, @jeffehh suggested “Set a theme every Monday and shoot a photo in that theme on Sunday (Sunday so you have a whole week to think about it) :)”. I wasn’t ready to add another weekly project to my list, so I adapted the idea into a montly project. I’m not restricting myself in any way with these – I don’t have to have a set number of photos for each month, or post one every day or every week. They’re just jumping off points for me to think more creatively. Some topics are ones that I think are good challenges for me (Urban and Lights, for instance) and some are things I just LOVE (Bokeh and Sunsets, for example). Here’s my list of themes for each month:

January Textures. When I think “textures” I think of two different things – textures that you can use in other photos (as discussed here), and stand-alone photos with their own texture (like rough brick buildings). I hope to get some of both in January.

February Shapes. This is one of the topics attempting to get me out of my comfort zone. I photograph a lot of nature – not a lot of perfect squares, circles and triangles in nature. I’m hoping to be insipired by architecture and patterns around me.

March Mono. Suggested by @duckunix, I’d like to do another month of mono. I did an all B&W month for my 365 last year and learned a lot. I think it’s time I pick it up again.

April People. This is definitely another out-of-my-comfort-zone themes. It was also suggested by both @kbphotos and @catdubh – who actually suggested doing a 20 10 project – 20 people in 10 photographs (the idea is getting 10 photographs of couples).

May Colors. Suggested by @Megin – and should be a great contrast to March :)

June Urban. I think I’ve mentioned one or two times I want to concentrate more on urban photography than nature this year, so I want all my photowalks in June to be in cities. I picked June mostly because I like John to come with me when I’m walking around in the cities, and I’m probably more likely to convince him to come with me every weekend if it’s nice out :)

July Bokeh. Just because I loooove good bokeh shots!

September Shoes. Last year, I went to a wedding rehearsal dinner that was a cookout in someone’s back yard. I found myself fascinated with all the shoes around, and took photos of a bunch of people’s feet, and shoes that had been tossed aside to run barefoot in the grass. It was a fun mini-project that I’d like to expand upon this year.

October Lights. Perhaps by October I will have bought an external flash for my camera, in which case, I can play with lighting from that. Even if I haven’t, I’ve always seem fascinated by photos of lights – I really have a lot of them in my flickr stream, so I hope to add a lot more in October!

November Trees. I picked November for trees because it’s a great time of year for them – at the beginning of the month, they should still have some color left in them, but at the end, they should be pretty bare, and I really like both states.

December ???. I haven’t thought of anything for December yet – Do you have a suggestion?

I thought about starting a flickr group for these themes in case anyone else was interested in them, too. If you are, let me know and I’ll start a group, because I think it will help motivate all of us!

One Last Thing…

In addition to everything above, I plan on doing another 50mm day. On the 50th day of the year (Feb. 19), I’m going to take 50 photos with my 50mm lens. I might come up with other mini-projects like this through-out the year, too, if something strikes my fancy.

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Today I went on my last photowalk of 2009. Once a week, for 52 weeks in a row, I’ve left my house with my camera and taken photos. That was the only rule I gave myself for this project, too. I didn’t have to find other people to walk with (though I sometimes did), and there was no minimum number of photos I had to take, and no type of photo (I even counted following my sister’s kids around their backyard). The idea was, after a 366 Self Portrait project in 2008 (it was a leap year!), I was tired of taking photos around my house, and I needed an excuse to force myself to get up and leave.

It wasn’t always easy. I didn’t always get good photos. But I’m proud of myself for finishing, and I even learned a thing or two along the way – both about photography and about myself. And so I’m taking a break from my tutorial-like entries to share some of those things with you.

A Good Camera Bag Makes a World of Difference

I started the year with a small shoulder bag that could carry the camera with lens plus one additional lens. The size wasn’t that much of an issue for me at the time – I only had three lenses total and rarely used one of them anyway – but walking around with a shoulder bag wasn’t very convenient for hiking. It got uncomfortable after a while, and it was really hard to squat down or lean over to get a shot. I needed something that distribute the weight more evenly on my back, allow for easy retrieval of my camera and yet get out of the way easily when I need to take a more difficult shot.

Enter the Lowepro SlingShot 200, which I acquired in March. It was a lifesaver for me. Not only was it extremely more comfortable and hold more gear, but it also held some extras – like an extra battery and memory cards, and even a small notebook I could use to jot things down as I walked.

I Really Like a Wide Angle Lens

I was lucky enough to receive a 10-22mm lens for Christmas in 2008, so it was brand new when I started off this project and it got a lot of use.

The above photo is in the running for my Favorite Photo of 2009 (such a tough decision), and it would have been impossible to get it without that wide angle set to 10mm. The photo was taken standing in the back of an amphitheatre in downtown Akron.

I Also Really Like a Nifty Fifty

I bought myself a 50mm just in time to take 50 photos with it on the 50th day of the year (you can see that set of photos here). After I bought that lens, I’d say that 99% of my Photowalk photos were taken with either that one or the wide angle.

The thing I love most about the nifty fifty is that even the cheap one – the one I have – can get as wide as f/1.8 which gives you an incredibly shallow depth of field, allowing you to draw the eye in to the small details – like John’s shoes in the above photo. I love the transition from the in-focus blades of grass to the bokeh grass, too.

The Golden Hour is Where It’s At

I know this is something you hear all the time, but I got my favorite photos during the hour before sunset (I only managed to wake up for the sunrise once all year, and it was so foggy that day I never actually saw anything impressive).

When I first started venturing out during the Golden Hour, I focused on some of my favorite metro parks that have lakes and ponds and tried to get photos of sunsets over the water (and got some, too, that I was happy with), but it wasn’t until I started walking on the trails through the woods that I started to see how warm and beautiful that light can really be – like in the above photo from my 45th photowalk, which I might call my favorite walk of the bunch. All the photos had such beautiful warm lighting in them and in early November the weather was actually quite beautiful, too.

Composition Matters

Before I got really into photography, I thought it was the subject that made a good photo. My photowalks told a different story – there were often times I would look at something and know it would make a good photo somehow, but I couldn’t figure out how to capture it.

On the other hand, this is just a photo of a leaf. Something we see a million times in Autumn and could have made for a boring photo. But the corner of the table, and the leaf-covered ground in the background is what really makes this one of my favorite Autumn photos.

Nature is My Comfort Zone

Out of the 52 walks, 32 were in National, State or local parks. I actually thought it was a higher percentage until I actually tallied it up right now. If I didn’t know where to go, I always knew the Summit County Metro Parks and Cuyahoga Valley National Park were open and could inspire me.

But sometimes I would venture into the city. I usually came back from these walks frustrated. I knew one or two photos would be good enough to edit and post, but I knew I had a lot I would trash, too. Which is especially frustrating because I’m probably most inspired by other people’s urban photography. It’s something I want to be really good at, but Nature just seems so much easier to me. This is the main reason that I seriously toying with doing another 52 photowalks in 2010 and forcing myself to concentrate on areas outside of nature.

Experimenting with Editing Can be Fun

Did you know when I first started this project about 90% of my shots were completely unedited? It wasn’t because they were so good they didn’t need editing, it was because I knew pretty much nothing about editing photos. Now 100% of my photos are edited to some degree (though some are only converted from RAW to jpg, which you may or may not count as editing.)

This leaf photo is a bit washed out and uninteresting. But I knew it had potential – I liked the subject, the composition, and the bokeh.

The editing on the photo really makes that leaf pop and, in my opinion, makes the photo much more interesting. Playing around in Gimp didn’t always make my photos look better. I can’t even count how many times I made a photo look much, much worse. But I played around – and I had fun, and sometimes – like in this leaf photo – I actually ended up with something worth posting.

The turning point for me that made editing fun instead of something I dreaded was when I opened a photo in Gimp without a final vision in mind. If I did that, chances are, I wouldn’t be able to achieve it and I’d be upset. When I opened a photo and started playing around with things just to see what would happen – that’s when it became fun, and funny enough, that’s when I started getting some really good results, too.

Shooting in RAW is Worth It

I’ve already written about RAW vs jpg, and I still agree that there are benefits to both methods of shooting, but for me, personally, RAW is worth it. I don’t really have a photo to share for this, but it’s so nice to be able to fix a photo that’s a bit over- or under-exposed, or the white balance is off. Obviously it’s best to get the photo right in camera – I’m not arguing that fact! – but we’re not perfect.

It was so hard picking just one photo for each of these lessons – oh, the wide angle shots I could show you! If you’d like to see all my photos from my 52 Photowalks, you can see them here (though I haven’t posted all the ones from walk 52 yet)

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