Digital Photography

This is a great project and there are some simply beautiful photos here.

I'm Bill Wadman, a New York-based photographer who after completing my first 365 Project, and then a weekly 52 Project, has taken it upon myself to shoot and post one portrait every day of 2007. The photo will have been taken that day, and each day will be a different person. Some will be in the studio, some will be in the wild. Hopefully they will all be interesting.

My Aunt Peg is the portrait for November 5th. A beautiful portrait of a strong woman.

For my camera...

Liz called me today saying that the camera was failing to recognize the CF card and displaying an error 02 on the screen.

Then she discovered that there were two bent pins down in the CF card reader. That can't be good.

So when I got home, I took the camera all apart following this very useful guide by Gary Honis.

But when I tried to straighten the first pin, it broke off. So I figured I was all done.

Google only showed me one place to buy the circuit board with the CF reader on it and they wanted $275 for it! So I called my good friend Charles who knows all about cameras.

He told me to join the DP Review forums and ask what to do there. I did a little searching in the forums and came across a mention that the CF card has redundant pins for some features and it looked like the pin that broke off may have been an extra ground pin.

So I took the camera apart again (I had just finished putting it back together so I wouldn't lose any of the pieces) and did my best to straighten the second bent pin. I got it mostly straight, and put the camera all back together.

Miracle of miracles, it works!

I fear that I am living on borrowed time though, as the pin is pretty mangled. But as long as I'm gentle when inserting the CF card I think I can limp it along for a bit.

Here is the batch of photos from yesterday and today.

Can't think of much else to say. I ate dinner tonight at Tad's Steakhouse. "A Local Favorite Dining Establishment Since 1955"

It was pretty good, but the garlic bread was nothing to write home about.

Later.

This is a cool article about removing the built-in infra-red filter from your Digital Rebel camera. People do this so that they can perform astronomy photography, but it usually renders the camera useless for normal daytime photography.

This article explains how to replace the IR filter with a piece of glass, and that you can either use an external IR filter or setup a custom white balance setting to compensate for the lack of the built-in IR filter.

It's a pretty cool hack and there are lots of photos of the guts of the camera. Also, at the end of the article is a list of good references for hacking the Digital Rebel.

Will I be performing this hack? Not too likely. But it's cool.

We spent New Years Eve and New Years Day with Clan MacLeslie out in Marine on St. Croix.

They had two new kittens. These kittens are two of the most beautiful kittens I have ever seen.

Between the kittens and the new fallen snow I took a lot of pictures.

Here is an album of the best, and I'll be posting some of them to my blog over the next few days.

The best way to take good photographs is to take lots of photographs. The best way to take lots of photographs is to have your camera with you as much as possible.

With that in mind I want to start carrying my camera back and forth to work. I already lug my laptop back and forth and I have a pretty nice laptop bag now, but there is no way to put my camera in it. I also have a perfectly fine camera bag, but I don't want to have to carry two bags around all the time.

So I'm looking for a bag to carry my laptop and my digital camera around together.

I thought I'd found one the other day. LowePro makes a few combo laptop and camera bags and I thought I wanted a CompuTrekker AW. So I started watching eBay until I saw one go up with a buy it now price of $70. (The bags are $130 new.) So I bought it.

It arrived yesterday. It's a really nice bag. But it's huge.

My primary criteria is that it needs to fit into my motorcycle hard bag. There is no way this bag is going to do that.

So the search continues. LowePro makes a smaller bag called the CompuDayPack that looks like it's smaller and might do the job. West Photo sells LowePro gear, so I think I'll have to swing over there and check it out.

Here is an easy simple way to turn a color photograph into a stencil in Photoshop!

Cool!

This is a site about creating stencils for T-Shirt art and other usages, so there are other stencil art related tutorials here.

I just posted two photo albums.

The first one is from the Saint Paul Irregulars trip to Chicago for HMGS Little Wars. You can view it here.

The second one is just some misc images.

Here is a really good blog posting about a photographer who was hassled by some security guards while he was photographing the building they work in.

They tried to tell him that it was illegal for him to photograph the building.

This is complete bullshit. And he stood his ground.

Worth a read.

And here is a PDF by a lawyer listing your rights as a photographer. Useful to carry around. I'm going to put a copy in my camera bag.

I got the okay from Liz to buy a lens for my camera! Charles pointed me to keh.com - a used camera site - where they had the Canon 18-55MM "kit" lens used for $65! That's a pretty good price and not a bad lens.

I also tossed an RC-5 remote shutter release into the deal for $19.

Now I need to figure out what "long" lens I need...