Special Relationships
This is the first time that I’ve ever done this: Repeat a photo from one day to the next, but I think that it bears repeating. Today, I received a nice e-mail and I’d like to quote just a small line from it:
I can’t remember when I’ve seen a photo that captures the essence of a great human/dog relationship so perfectly.
I spent a good 15 minutes watching this man and dog work together. For anyone who loves dogs, you could tell that it was a great relationship. The dog was supremely confident, eager to do his job, and seemed to be totally enamored with his friend. Notice, I didn’t say ‘master’, I said ‘friend’. They certainly had the bond of friendship going. It was a very easy-going relationship. Here, in the picture, a single finger, touched lightly, on top of the dog’s head was all the reminder needed to wait for the whistle.
At the time that I took it, I thought not much of it other than it being a great moment. I didn’t really think of what it might mean to someone else, but I’m certainly glad that it did have meaning, even more than it had for me.
I would suppose that when we are out shooting, we recognize something that is special to us, capture it, and then when we share it with the world, we sometimes get pleased to find that it is special to someone else, too.
I have a dog, Hobbs, who is my good friend. I miss him quite a bit and we are always happy to see each other on the weekend. It brings a smile to my face just to think of him. One of his behaviors that I enjoy the most is gratitude. When I take him for a long walk, I like to take him to the area that is not quite finished and let him run freely. He loves. Every once in a while, he’ll come back to me with what seems like a smile, jump up, give me a lick, then take off on a new destination. I simply hug him and tell him that he is very welcome. I think that it’s way of thanking me for the opportunity to run.
BTW, today is Hobb’s birthday! He’s 9 years old and, according to the chart in the vet’s office, that is about 45 – 54 human years for a dog his size. Smaller dogs age a bit slower than the larger breeds.
And it’s Halloween! I’ll have to give him a special treat when I get home.
Just showing up makes the diffference
Go! Go! Go!
There have been many times when I’ve gone out to shoot, done the shooting half-heartedly, and come back home with nothing. There have been other times when I’ve gone out, tried to be clever and think my way into good shots and, once again, arrived home to some very disappointing shots. The question then is: “Why were you thinking?!”. It never works.
Let us say that I’ve become very spoiled working so close to the beach. I never thought that I’d visit it so much, but I find my self there about 4 times/week. There is a practical reason for it. When I leave work, traffic is horrendous! If I leave at my usual 4:45 PM, I will get back to the apartment at somewhere between 5:30, if I’m lucky, and about 6:15, if all is ‘normal’. Without traffic, it’s a 30 minute drive. Should I decide to head the other way, towards the beach, I can be there in about 20 minutes … no traffic going that way for the most part. So, I like to go there, do my walk, catch the sunrise, then head back to the apartment for some food, reading, and sleeping!
Today, I didn’t feel like sitting in traffic, so away I went, off to the beach. When I arrived, I wasn’t so much in the mood for taking pictures, so I walked. After a short walk, camera in hand, I just stopped, sat on some steps leading down to the beach, and enjoyed the breeze and the sound of the water. I had taken few pictures.
Soon, the evening turned orange as the sun began to set. A young man and his dog had come out for an evening of playing. The dog was straining at the harness, ready to get into the water. It was time to play. I sat and watch the retriever run lustily after the orange ‘stick’ that the boy was throwing. Then I became a bit more animated and decided to let the D40 be a sports camera and it did really well. The top picture is my favorite shot of the group, but I got lots of good ones.
After hanging with boy and dog for a while, the evening was becoming a darker orange. Mind you, not a cloud in the sky, but interesting nonetheless. I headed on down the beach and suddenly saw a guy doing Tai Chi! Fantastic. I watched him practice for a bit, shooting all the while and really enjoying myself. We were both communing with Nature in our own way. It was getting pretty chilly and the wind was picking up a bit, but it just made it seem all the more real. I was enjoying every sensation that I could.
There was no thinking involved, just feeling. Even when you don’t feel like it. Show up. One thing is for sure, if you don’t go, you won’t get the picture!
I’m glad that I showed up for these shows!
Wait ’till you hear the whistle …
Nikon D300 sensor cleaner
Yesterday, I was going to write about this, but got sidetracked trying to find out how many pictures I had taken with this camera when I got all tangled up in the whole raw/DNG thing!
One of my favorite features on my D300 is the sensor cleaner. Why? Well, formerly, I had to clean my D2x about every month or so. Looking back, on average, I take between 800 – 1000 photos/month. So, pretty much, I have my camera out about 5 days/week, here there and everywhere. I’m not so careful with it either. Fortunately, I’ve not dropped either one, but as far as changing lenses, etc. I do it right out in the open with no care for prevailing breezes, unless it’s really windy, then I’ll turn my back to wind and change lenses. Also, I’m likely to take one lens off, throw it into the bag without caps, add the other one, zip the bag up and keep shooting. I’ll add the caps later as well as giving the lens a light dusting-off. 
All of this adds to the possibility of dust getting onto the sensor. It happens! So far, I’ve taken about 7,000 shots with my D300. The other day, I stopped down to f/16, took some pictures of the open sky, and guess what?! No dust, at least not anything that I would consider problematic. Just a few very small spots here and there and I’ve never cleaned this camera. So, nearly 9 months in, numerous trips to the beach, a trip to White Sands, NM, the deserts and dryness of Utah and Arizona, it’s still clean!
Mind you, this is no scientific study, merely observation and comparison with a very well sealed camera with no sensor cleaning. There are many features in this camera, and others, that I don’t use or even think about, like HD video. 
But this is one feature that I’m glad that they included.
Next, they should probably start including vibration reduction internal to the camera instead of on the lens. This way, we can all have VR without buying a different set of lenses. I know that they can do it because Minolta did it 4 years+ ago on their Dimage A1! But … maybe the sensor cleaning and VR on the same sensor are incompatible. I’ll take the cleaning as I usually use a tripod anyway.
Your choices: Upgrade or convert!
I find it very interesting that this post was not even conceived when I sat down to write; however, just like my photography, I follow where the road leads, I suppose, and don’t really know, from one outing to another, where I’ll end up.
I was going to write a post about the efficacy of the Nikon D300′s sensor cleaner, but that will have to wait. Here’s how I got here:
In preparing to write the other post, I wanted to find out how many photos I’d taken with my camera. Unfortunately, this information can only be gleaned from raw data. From CS2, you can get to this information via: File->File Info…->Advanced->http://ns.adobe.com/exif/1.0/aux->aux:imageNumber.
So, I went back and gathered up one of my few raw files, attempted to open it up, and:
Presto Chango I got an error message:
Could not complete request because it is not the right kind of document!
WTF? After trying Adobe Bridge and getting the same message, I went to Google, searched, and found that many people had had this problem. Long story short, CS2 does not support Nikon D300 raw files! You either have to upgrade to CS3 or later, or convert to DNG. Yet another reason, for me, not to use raw! Incompatibilities between versions of software and cameras!
Lightroom to the rescue
Fortunately, Lightroom supports the D300 format, so I opened the images in LR2, right clicked on them, and exported them as DNG, then I was able to open them, get the information that I needed, and move on with life. Score 1 for LR2, add another point for DNG.
Unexpected side affect
After looking at the directory and seeing the .NEF (Nikon Raw) and .DNG (Digital Negative) file side-by-side, I noticed that the DNG files were some 50-60% smaller! Assuming that they contain the same data, I can only conclude that Nikon’s format is not very efficient in its storage, or that they have lots of overhead that Adobe strips out. Now, comparing a DNG file to a typical JPG file, I see that the DNG is only slightly larger, perhaps 10-20% larger. FYI: My settings on my D300 are for Large JPG (12.1 MP), minimal JPG compression (1:4), optimized for quality, so my JPGs range in size, depending on the scene, from 5 – 8 MB. The DNG files, 6 – 8 MB, the raw files (uncompressed), about 18 MB each.
No wars, please!
As I’ve said before, if I cannot see a difference in the print or on the screen, there is no difference! Also, I guess that I don’t shoot so much on the fringes so that I need to be able to recover that theoretical one extra stop, if it really exists! Were I to decide one day, in a fit of insanity, to shoot raw, I’m sure that I would import and convert to DNG. This would save disk space, and more importantly, future compatibility issues.
For now, and the foreseeable future, I’ll be sticking to with my JPG! It’s so much less hassle! Please understand, this post is not meant to convert you. You’re convinced with what you use, as am I. We both get what we want. It is merely a post to dump a bit of information that I have learned this morning!
Norman Rockwell’s America
The moments in our lives that are usually the most significant are the quiet moments, but we are usually too busy to notice.
–Kevin Rivoli
I’ve always liked Norman Rockwell paintings. They show a slice of life that is innocent and hopeful. Though I didn’t know, but am not surprised, there were many critics of his work who said that his work was “too idealistic, too nostalgic, too composed.”. My goodness! How cynical are some people?! If you show beauty, peace, and innocence, you are not portraying ‘reality’. They said that the America that he portrayed didn’t exist.
Fortunately, Kevin Rivoli, a photojournalist disputes that claim and has created his own book: In Search of Norman Rockwell’s America. In it, he puts side-by-side, some of the photographs that he has taken as part of his assignments and places them next to various Rockwell paintings, proving that Rockwell’s vision of America does exist.
I don’t own this book, but being a fan of Norman Rockwell, though not owning any of his paintings, I’m glad to see such a book. We need more idealists and humanitarians showing us that we still do have families, vacations, parades, picnics, and trips to the ball game. We need more photographers, painters, writers, etc. that look into those quite moments that many of us are too busy to see.
Probably, not only is this Norman Rockwell’s America, I’m sure that it exists all over! I think that I’ll probably purchase this book.
Synthetic Happiness
I like evening light, too! (Ashely River, Summerville, SC)
As much as I mourned the loss of my morning shoots in favor of walks, I switched to evening shoots. You know what? It’s certainly a different type of light, but it is lovely on its own. Also, I found that I’m quite happy shooting in the evening; it’s simply a shift in thoughts … acceptance if you will. Once that happens, it’s all good.
A coworker of mine listens to TED Talks almost every day. They are 21 minute talks about different subjects. TED is not a person, but an acronym for Technology, Entertainment, and Design. I have listened to a couple of them and found them moderately interesting. However, one of them really caught my interest: Why are we happy? Why aren’t we happy?.
I would highly recommend having a look. As I said, it is only 21 minutes. In it Dan Gilbert, the speaker, explores, scientifically, what he calls Synthetic Happiness. Briefly, that is happiness that we create ourselves through acceptance of our situation vs. that happiness (natural) that we get when something works out to our benefit. I found the talk pretty fascinating as well as the experiments that were done to prove out the theories.
It’s interesting that our economy is largely based on us being unhappy and trying to fulfill that void by purchasing more and more. We are constantly offered more pixels, better sensors, sharper lenses, better film, etc., to name a few things. Then, dissatisfaction sets in with what we have. Yesterday, before the announcement, it was good enough. Today. No! When we finally decide to accept what we have, either because we have no choice or because we don’t want to change something, suddenly, we are happy with what we have … and what we have isn’t really so bad after all!
After you look at the talk, if you decide to, I’d like if you’d drop a comment to let me know what you thought about it. Heck, you don’t even have to watch it to leave a comment.
Taking a chance
When I was younger, my mother was pretty protective. Not extremely overprotective, but certainly enough. So, as a consequence, I didn’t have many adventures. I’ve never broken a bone or had to go to the hospital for a childhood related injury, save the time I jammed a tooth pick into my right foot when I was sliding them across the floor. I can hear her now: “I told you to pick up your feet!”.
My only adventures, which my mother didn’t know about were riding a grocery cart down a fairly steep hill. I was on the inside. No steering. No brakes. No hope for a safe landing. LOL! We crashed many times out of the old shopping cart, but what fun that was! My second most memorable adventure was attempting to ride my bicycle through the water stream from an open fire hydrant. Note: Do NOT attempt!!! It doesn’t work. You could get slammed across the street by the force of the water! I know!
Those hard to reach vistas
Certainly, you’ll probably never see photos from me taken where I scaled the side of a mountain with only a rope and rosin bag! Too much adventure for me. It has been my experience that some of the most impressive vistas that I have seen, without the use of a rope, have been as I was speeding along a highway going over some bridge or another. As I am of a very practical and cautious nature (usually), there’s no way that I stop on the highway, set up my tripod, and commence to clicking.
Throwing caution to the wind … sort of
There is a bridge that crosses the Intra-Coastal Waterway, the Isle of Palms Connector, highway SC-517. It connects Mount Pleasant, SC with Isle of Palms, SC. The bridge is about 2 miles long, 2 lanes on each side, and has a speed limit of 55 MPH.
When driving over the bridge I see lots of people walking, jogging, or riding bicycles. Often, I’ll see someone stop to take a snapshot and then keep walking. I’ve been to Isle of Palms about 6 times, now, which means that I’ve crossed that particular bridge 12 times. Each time that I cross, it is just after sunset and a nice golden or intense orange light illuminates the various waterways that are present throughout the marshes.
Finally, yesterday, I screwed up my courage and made a small hike up the bridge, about a quarter of a mile, along the bicycle lane, which is actually about as wide as a car lane. As the sun had already set and there only remained about 15 minutes of light, I hustled on up the bridge, set up my tripod, and took quite a few pictures, enjoying it, but also keeping my eyes on those cars that were whizzing by! So, I couldn’t give my complete concentration.
When I left, it was nearly dark. I was thinking on the way back down that it would be a good idea to purchase some reflector tape and put it on my backpack and my tripod and to get a couple of reflective armbands! I want to be seen!!!
I think that I’ll visit the bridge a few more times … after all, I have to shoot both sides, east and west, and both ends, north and south!!!
I’m glad that I went. BTW, I walked back down. No shopping cart!!!