ramble on...

a brand new year

Happy New Year! Does anyone even follow this blog anymore?

Sorry...it's been a rough few months around here and haven't really had the urge to blog much.

For my WW friends, I did start another blog specifically about my weight loss journey. If you want to read it send me an email or leave a comment and I'll send over the link.

I also decided to give the photo a day project everyone is doing a try. So far they've all been iPhone photos, and they may stay that way. I added a little link on the right to the gallery if you want to take a peek. Just a little disclaimer...these are average, everyday photos of things going on in my life - so nothing fancy and not photoshopped.

Here's my image from today...

opam for july

i thought i'd do a housekeeping project for my july one project a month. this project involves downloading all of the images from the various cameras throughout the house and then going through all of the photos on my harddrive. as of today, i have from december 2007 to today to edit - not good!i import everything into lightroom and then do a quick edit, resize and then export into a folder for printing. then i send everything in to costco to print them all in 4x6. ideally i should do this every 2-3 months so it's not such a big expense...but i don't. summer is when i typically get to these projects. remember the whole hibernating and staying out of the heat thing? yep...this is the perfect project for summer.

after i get the prints back they go into black photo albums from costco. i hope they never stop selling these things. i have an entire cabinet stockpiled with these things. i file them chronologically and then jot the dates down in the album. iain is a big help with this project, too. it's a monotonous job to get them all slipped into their pages. then tatum likes to go through all the albums and look at the pictures. not quite the same as scrapbooks, but it's what works for me right now.

so that's it. i have 7 months worth of photos to go through. some of them i haven't even looked at - just dowloaded the card and forgot about them. this should be fun to go back through them and see what we've been up to. i'll probably post a few as i go through them.

oh...and one thing i forgot to mention - BACKUP YOUR IMAGES! this is so important for digital shooters. i will be burning a dvd with all of the images (originals and my 4x6 edits) to get myself up to date.

ta-dah!

i'm pretty proud of myself for squeaking out almost an entire month of photos. i'm continuing on into february to see where this takes me. you might have to click on the image below to see it better.

ww update - down 3.6 lbs despite the fact that i had a superbowl party and a birthday party (with carrot cake!) this week.

my 15 minutes of fame

i have to brag one more time and then i'll leave it alone. i posted about this on my business blog so i figured i'd put it here too so my family could see it.

i had a photo published in the wall street journal! the wall street journal, man! my neighbor's catering company is catering a bunch of events over at the superbowl and they had me come down and get some press photos done for them. it's pretty exciting to see my name next to the photo. have i mentioned that i love my neighbors? they are so awesome to think of me when they needed this done.

back button focus

i thought i'd post this little nugget of info for my photography friends. i've resisted giving this technique a try for so long. i'm totally set in my ways and i'm a member of the 'if it ain't broke don't fix it' club. but i finally decided to give it a shot.

here's how to do it if you shoot canon:

1. go to the menu and scroll to the custom function (C.Fn), then choose custom function 04 (shutter button/ae lock button and then set it to setting 1 (lock/af).
2. go to your AF setting (on top, near the meter display) and set the AF to AI Servo.

now your focus will be controlled by the back button - which looks like this *. just use your thumb to hold this down while you focus using the red box in your viewfinder. to stop focusing just take your thumb off the * button. easy peasy.

From here, your focus will be controlled by the * button on back of the camera by your right hand thumb. When you press the * button the AF will be engaged and will focus on whatever the red box in your viewfinder is set on. To stop focusing simply take your thumb off the * button.

here's what sold me on this technique. the first is back button and the second is my old way of doing it - focus by holding down the shutter half way, recompose the shot, then press the shutter.