Any Secret Santas Reading?

Just in case Santa is reading my blog, here's my wish list for this Christmas.

Wacom Cintiq 12WX

The Cintiq 12WX is a new offering from Wacom that would be a perfect "stocking stuffer". Ok, it's more of a "laptop case" stuffer. It's basically a 12" widescreen LCD monitor with a pen tablet interface over the top. Wacom has has the Cintiq 21UW for a while, and that would be a lovely addition, but the 12WX is much more portable and practical. I lug around a Wacom Intuos 3 pen tablet between home and work right now and most of my digital editing is done on that. The Cintiq line allows you to edit directly on the screen, which would be a very nice improvement. The price is just under $1,000

Canon 1Ds Mark III

21 Mega-pixels of professional camera. I'll make room for it in my camera bag just in case. At a mere $8,000 I'm sure it at the top of the list, but then Santa has the factory at the North Pole right, so it's only materials for him. :)

MP-E 65mm f/2.8 1-5x Macro

This is a cool macro lens from Canon that can shoot at 1:1 or 5:1, which means that a grain of rice would be displayed 5 times larger than life on the camera sensor. Why? It would have come in handy the other day when I had capture vitamin capsules. B&H has the lens listed at $829.95.

If you are going to wish, why not wish big.

Standards....Or Lack There Of

Standards, as in general rules to follow, are all around us. From the way we print an address on an envelope, to the qwerty layout of the keyboard I'm typing on, to the layout of the gas and brake pedals in our car. Mess with standards and things get harder to use.

What brought this to my mind is a recent quest to provide my children with entertainment in the back seat of our car on an upcoming trip. Yep, an in-car video system. I checked out screens mounted in the headrests, on the ceiling with drop-down screens and portable systems that attach to the headrests but are removable.

A Seemingly Simple Goal

My goal was to have a system that wasn't DVD dependent. Burning DVD's is a slow and painful process on my system, and having to carry around a stack of DVD's just doesn't seem necessary with current MP3/Video systems like the iPod.

I found a two-screen portable DVD system that has a good headrest mount and has an A/V input plug, the Philips PET708. Reasonably priced at Target. Then the decision on what MP3/Video player to drive it. The choice are many these days: iPod Touch, iPod Classic, Zune, Creative Zen W and other choice from sources like iRiver.

I almost went with the iPod Classic, not wanting to shell out for the new Touch, but I ended up with a 30 GB Zune.

Oh The Joy

Now the fun part...getting them to talk to each other. The Zune has A/V out capability through a 3mm A/V jack. I looked at the Zune website and saw what look like standard composite video cables (yellow for video, red for audio right, and white for audio left, with a 4 band 3mm jack). I had two already, one from the DVD system, and one from a camcorder. I tried using both of them to get video out from the Zune. No luck.

After a trip to Radio Shack I had another, higher quality, cable to try. I went next door to Target to test it out since the input jacks on my own TV are tucked far behind a large and heavy set. I ended up with only garbled video out with one of the cables.

Once I got back home I had the bright idea of switching the plugs going into the TV to see what would happen. Turns out the Zune was sending video signal out the Audio Right jack of my cable (at least for two of them, the third didn't get me anything).

How It All Mapped Out

Then I sat down with a voltage meter and mapped out the various connections on the jack to the audio and video plugs. Turns out the two cables that worked were both wired the same (and gave me video out on the audio right jack). The third cable's ground was in the wrong place, but I'm sure it worked for my camcorder.

So is there a standard layout for these types of cables? I surely don't know but I assumed there would be, and the 3 systems I was working with (DVD Player, Camcorder and Zune) didn't follow the same rules.

What should have been a a quick and easy interaction between video devices has turned into a time-wasting excercise in futility.

Worst of all instead of being able to go to a Radio Shack or Target and get a standard cable I had to order the Zune compatible A/V connection cable, and I had to order another A/V connection cable for the DVD system so I can get them to talk to each other. It will still require another trip to Radio Shack to by a coupler for the cables, but at least they can't screw with that.

I guess Microsoft and Philips got a little more money out of me this time, but this little experience will be hanging around my brain for a while.

Microsoft Photosynth - Practical or Not

Have you checked out the Photosynth technology that Microsoft has been working on?

Microsoft Photosynth Website

The project takes photographs from many different photographers, but all from the same general geographic location and builds a 3-dimensional model of how the photographs relate to each other. The latest set they have released is of the Space Shuttle on the launch pad and in it's maintenance hanger. It is fun to fly around and check out the different angles of the same object that the project brings together.

There is some serious processing going on behind the scenes if you read about the technology on their website. Each photograph is processed and analyzed and unique details are found within the image. Those details are cataloged and compared to the other photographs in the collection. If the same unique details are found the images can be placed near one another in the 3-D model. The analysis also figures out camera angle and location in relation to all the other pictures. It's quite impressive.

Uses

So how could this be used? The most obvious would be to make an online repository for photographs from anyone that wanted to upload them. In time entire locations could be completely recreated in this virtual 3-D world, allowing anyone to click through and get an idea of what the place really looks like without having to travel there. Google Earth is doing a similar type of virtualization by allowing people to upload 3-D models of buildings. The Microsoft technology has the advantage of using actual photographs.

I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually are able to warp the images into actual 3-D models of the buildings being photographed.

For me this would be very interesting to use for residential real estate or virtual tour type applications. It would be quick and easy to take a bunch of photos of a location and then have then processed by Photosynth technology and be made available for online viewing. If the processing didn't take days this could be very cool.

Bunnies in the Backyard

I guess the title says it all. We have bunnies in our backyard. And I don't mean the proverbial backyard, I mean our fenced in backyard. The one our golden retreiver calls home.

Now we have always known that bunnies come and visit us and munch on the clover in our grass. We see them quite often. Shala (the golden, pronounced with a long 'a') loves to chase them out of the yard, and does so frequently. Most of the time they live across the street in a small green belt.

This is different. One of the mother bunnies decided that our backyard was a good place to raise her babies. Maybe it was the week of vacation we took and lack of canine activity that lured her to our yard.

My wife did see a bunny digging in our yard before we left, and I had seen evidence of digging just outside our fence. We didn't think much of it.

Two days ago I let Shala out back to take care of business and she walked around the side of the house. I followed thinking she was going to bark at our neighbors again and I would have to try to keep her quiet. Strangely she started pawing at the ground near our fence. When I pulled back the dead grass laying near where she was pawing I found two baby bunnies and their eyes weren't even opened yet.

Yesterday and today the mother bunny has been hanging around the yard or just outside the fence. We see her at times sitting directly over her babies, apparently feeding them.

We have since put up a barrier so that Shala can no longer get to the part of the yard with the babies. It should be fun to watch them start hopping around, which I can only guess will be very soon. My two kids (4 and 2) want to see the bunnies every chance they can. My wife and I limit the viewings to once or maybe twice a day.

In the second picture you can just see the nose and eye of one of the babies coming out of the ground just in front of the mother. Click on the small versions to see larger images.

The picture of the mother rabbit above was taken from a second story window. I removed the screen and stuck the camera out the window. The camera was a Canon 5D with a 70-200 2.8 L IS USM with a EF 2x II extender. I set the camera to 400 ISO to keep the shutter speed at 1/25 second with the aperature at f5.6. With the Extender I lose two stops of aperature (2.8 - 5.6). The Image Stabilization (IS) helped keep the image sharp even though I was hand holding at 1/25.

The picture of the babies was with the 5D and a 24-70mm 2.8L USM at 63mm. 1/125 at f5.6. I cropped the picture to highlight the babies. I like this lens because it has macro focusing capabilities which came in handy in this case.

Copyright vs Fair Use

It's all over the news again. Now Microsoft and Google among others are contesting copyright warnings issued by major league sports broadcasts.

I have links to articles on this and other copyright issues on the Photography News page of my website.

Fair Use

What these issues boil down to is "fair use". What am I allowed to do with someone else's copyrighted works? These issues come up frequently when new methods of copying movies and/or music become available. When videotapes came around the movie industry was worried that their business would crumble because people could make copies of their movies. Same worries with DVD's and now the internet. Of course there has been, and probably always will be, some amount of bootlegging. That's not really what these articles are talking about as the reproduction and sale for profit of other people's copyrighted works is obviously against the law.

What if I'm not selling a copy? Can I record a TV show from my local cable broadcast? Of course I can ever since the VCR came out. Can I record that show to a DVD and play it for my kids on a car trip? I'm sure makers of DVD's for kids would hope I don't so they can sell me a DVD of the same program. But what if the programs aren't available on DVD or tape for that matter? DVR's have now given me the ability to record shows and watch them when I have time, and Slingbox gives me the ability to send those same shows to my cell phone if I want. Is that a fair use of copyrighted content?

Using Images

What can you do with one of my pictures? If you pay me to take pictures for you we will have a licensing agreement on how you can use those images. It may be very broad, or it may be very narrow. If you don't get an agreement what does that mean? Good question and one that probably has to be handled on a case-by-case basis.

I got a question from a real estate agent about this very question. A previous real estate agent had paid for images to be taken of a property. It had been listed and then taken off the market. The original agent did not get any license agreement with the images. The new real estate agent wondered if it was OK to use the images in a new listing for the property. I referred him back to the original photographer, but without a licensing agreement it was probably OK to use the images in another listing. They aren't reselling the images and they are being used for the same purpose they were originally purchased.

Now what if that client wanted to submit those images to a micro-stock photography agency and see if anyone would license them for money? As he is not the original copyright holder this is probably not advisable. The original photographer has the exclusive right to license or sell the images.

Money, Money, Money

I feel the line is drawn when money starts changing hands. This can get a bit tricky. With music sharing sites, no money changed hands, but each person who downloaded a copy of a song didn't go buy it on a CD, basically keeping the recording artist from gaining revenue from his work. Now we have DRM software (Digital Rights Managment) that attempts to keep copying to a minimum.

Personally, I don't mind if you use a copy of one of my images as a background on your computer. Using an image on a personal (non-commercial) website with a link to my website would be fine too.

Now if you start selling advertising space on your site and make money from people visiting your site, that's a different story. You are now choosing content for your website that will bring you income. If you choose one of my images because you think it will help draw visitors and gain you revenue, then my image is valuable. You think it will attract more visitors than other images. That value should be paid for.

What Do You Think

Copyright is a huge and complicated issue for photographers, the music and movie industries, and anyone else who creates copyrighted works. What are your thoughts on the matter?

Copyright Links

Copyright Basics from the United States Copyright Office
U.S. Copyright Office

Give a Four Year Old a Camera....

My four year old son likes to take pictures.

He was pretty adept at using our Canon PowerShot S410 before it died. He now likes to use our Canon Rebel XT. This is our "family" camera that we use when taking most pictures of the kids around the house. It's small, and with a 50mm lens attached, very light. Not a pocket camera, but it also doesn't suffer the lag that most point-and-shoot models have. When the camera is on full-auto mode it exposes well under most circumstances and is easy to use by the non-camera people in the household.

Every so often my son will pull off a nice shot like the one below.

It just shows you how good digital cameras have gotten. With a quick focus and proper exposure they can produce very nice results (and not a bad composition either). Of course having the right lighting always helps.

That being said digital cameras can also produce not-so-good results. When the lighting isn't right for the exposure setting on the camera, the results can be less than appealing. The trick is in knowing how your camera handles the difficult situations and what to do about them.

Backlighting is always a tough exposure for a camera. Most cameras are going to be left in their default metering mode which usually takes the entire scene into account when trying to determine the proper exposure. With a bright background the camera is going to try to find an exposure that will show the background properly, leaving your foreground subject very dark.

Knowing this you can do one of two things. 1) switch the camera to spot-metering if possible. This will tell the camera to judge proper exposure off of the center of the scene, most likely the subject you want to be exposed properly, and to not worry about the background. 2) Add some fill-flash. If your camera has an on camera flash, make sure it is set to on and take the picture. The camera will use the flash to bring up the light level on the foreground subject to approximately the level of the brighter background.

Most point-and-shoots will not use the flash for a backlit scene, so it is important to know how to set your cameras flash to On rather than Auto. The picture above is a perfect example of a backlit scene. The kids are entirely within the shadow but the fence behind is in direct sunlight. Without the fill-flash the shadowed area would have been very dark.

Recent Work...

I thought it might be nice to add some of the recent work I've been doing.

Options for Seniors

I am contracted with Options for Seniors to provide photography of new adult family homes and assisted care facilities for their website. Options for Seniors provides listings of adult family homes and assisted living communities in the greater Seattle area. The nice thing about Options for Seniors is they will advise you and take you to the homes listed on their site so you can meet and interact with the care givers. The owner Heidi Sheldon takes great pride in finding the best home for each individual.

After taking pictures in several adult family homes over the past year I am very impressed with the quality, craftsmanship and luxury that some of the homes provide.

On the personal side, everyone I have met has been incredibly nice and seem to genuinely care about the residents they are caring for.



The two pictures above are from the Kelsey Creek Adult Family Home in Bellevue.

Pure Encapsulations

I have also been taking pictures for Pure Encapsulations in Massachusetts. Pure Encapsulations only sells to licensed heathcare professionals. They currently produce 5 catalogs a year and I take the pictures for the front and back cover as well as the individual product bottles.

I work with their graphic designer that handles the catalog. She has specific requirements for colors of the background (usually paper that she provides) and the bottles need to have vertical sides and have the tops slightly showing. To do this requires a Tilt-Shift lens which has the ability to "shift" the image down while keeping the camera perfectly vertical. It's a handy tool for architecture and product work. The Tilt ability can also be used to provide interesting focal plane adjustments in images.

Residential Real Estate

I've been working with a real estate agent lately that really understands that good staging makes a big difference in how a home presents to a potential buyer. Here are a couple of examples.

The first picture was staged by Dana Pederson of Masterful Staging. The second image was staged by real estate agent Rebecca Haas of RE/MAX Metro Realty in Seattle. Her site is Team Reba.

Scott Chytil

ChytilPhoto.com

Kids and Digital Photography

I've been noticing recently that digital photography has it's own drawbacks when trying to take pictures of kids. Every time I take a picture, the kids want to see it. Makes it hard to get a spontaneous shot when even before you click the shutter the kids are moving towards you to take a look at the LCD. Rather frustraing for a photographer.

The Dreaded Shutter Lag

Which bring up another topic. Shutter Lag. The small point-and-shoot (P&S) cameras have horrible shutter lag. Shutter lag is the length of time it takes for the camera to focus, calculate the proper exposure and actually take the photo. Anyone who has tried to take pictures of small children with a P&S digital knows that I mean. Blurry photos galore, or at the very least not quite the picture you were hoping for (probably because the kids were heading over to see the picture on the camera).

For myself I can drag out the DSLR, slap on a nice lens, pop on the flash if I need to and I'm set. At least that is until I actually want to get in the picture. Handing a big, bulky professional level DSLR (digital single lens reflex) to anyone except another photographer is a bit daunting, even if it's set in full auto mode. Something about the size seems to make them think it's more complicated than a P&S. Of course they may be worried about dropping it too (I try not to think about it).

What To Do?

So what are the options? You can check out the reviews of P&S models at http://www.dpreview.com and hopefully they will have an in-depth review of the models you are considering. The site has excellent reviews of many cameras and includes in their comprehensive reviews the timings of many camera operations, including shutter lag. Find one with a short lag, then go to a store and actually test it.

The other option is to move up to a DSLR. There are many choices today from Nikon, Canon, Fuji, Olympus, Pentax, Samsung and Sony. More often than not these DSLR are going to be rated in Frames Per Second (fps) where the P&S little brothers are more like Seconds Per Frame. Much easier to get the shot you want when the shutter clicks when your finger presses. You can find DSLR's with lenses in the $600 price range. Not a whole lot more than a really nice P&S, and it opens up a lot more options.

Oh Boy, Options

Of course the "lot more options" tends to be "lots more money" too. Yes, interchangeable lenses can be great, but it can also be daunting. There are so many choices available from wide-range zoom lenses to high-cost professional "glass" it does take some consideration.

Then of course there is the sensor size/focal length multiplication issues. With the consumer and prosumer DSLR cameras the sensor is usually not quite the same size as the original 35mm film size. This means all the lenses made for the 35mm format don't give the same "field of view". You will see numbers like 1.5 or 1.6 magnification factor. For example if you have a 50mm lens on a camera with a 1.5 focal length multiplier your 50mm lens will give you images as if you had a 75mm lens on it (50 * 1.5).

The smaller sensor size doesn't make your 50mm lens a 75mm lens, but because the sensor size captures a smaller portion of the full 35mm frame size, the image appears as if you had a 75mm lens. So to compose the same scene on a camera with a focal length multiplier you would have to move back or have a wider angle lens attached.

This can be really nice on the longer lenses where a 400mm lens now looks like a 600mm lens, but it also means a 16mm lens is really only a 24mm lens.

What's Best?

A fine question and one that can only be answered by your own needs. The important considerations, in my mind, are shutter speed, portability and lens requirements.

For myself it means three different cameras. A Canon 1Ds for professional work with a nice selection of lenses, a Canon Digial Rebel XT for home use (with the added benefit of being able to use the professional lenses when needed) and finally a Canon point-and-shoot for portability.

If there is one thing I've learned over the years is that one size does not fit all when dealing with photography.

Update (3/21/07): I just read a nice article that explains zoom lenses pretty well. It's on the NY Times site at: Tweaking the Zoom

Scott Chytil
Scott Chytil Photography

Are You Practicing Safe Digital Photography?

Of course you are…right? You have protection…right? You backup your images to a second hard drive…right? Think about all the other files you store on your computer. Do you keep your finances in Money or Quicken? Do you have work related files stored there too? Do you really want to have to reconstruct all that information?

I know, you’ve been meaning to do it, but you just haven’t gotten around to it. Being a father of two small children I know there aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done. If only there was an extra 8 hours available when the kids are asleep.

The fact is hard drives WILL fail. The question is WHEN. So what to do about it? Well, the solutions range from mind-numbingly easy to entirely too complex. Here’s the breakdown:

External USB or Firewire hard drive: These drives are self contained and as long as you have USB2 or Firewire available through your computer they will be quite fast. There are many that have a “One Touch” feature specifically to back up everything on your computer, which is great if you only have one hard drive to backup. If you have an older machine with USB1 you will want to invest in an add-on card that gives you USB2 or Firewire ports. It’s worth the time you will save waiting for things to get backed up.

If you have more than one drive you will probably need to have some type of backup software. Windows XP comes with a backup utility, but it’s pretty bare bones. It will do the job and it is already probably on your computer, so it’s a valid option. For other options take a look at these sites:
PC Magazine List
Backup-Software-Reviews.com
If you have a Mac, you can get free backup software by getting a .mac (pay) account:
.Mac website on Apple.com
If you have an opinion on any backup software please post a comment to this article.

If you are computer literate you can always add a bare drive to your computer if you have the room. Then use backup software as mentioned above.

Want to go whole hog? You could implement a full-on Digital Asset Management system. If you are a professional photographer this is a must have in the digital age. A good read is “The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers” by Peter Krogh. It spells out a complete workflow and management system to make sure your photos survive your lifetime and beyond. Mmmm…Just thinking about multi-disk raid systems makes me drool.

So what do I run? I currently have all Seagate drives. One drive stores all my program files (Windows, Photoshop, etc). A second drive stores my data (pictures, financial, work files). An external Firewire drive is used for nightly backups. Every night I run my backup software (Genie Backup Manager Home Edition). It can be configured to turn off the computer when it finishes. For most people that will be enough. You would at most lose one days worth of changes. Not a huge deal. I also have a second external firewire drive that I use to backup my backup drive. Just in case something bad happens.

I’m also in the process of reading “The DAM Book” mentioned above and will be implementing a lot of the practices as I get through it.

Do I feel safe? Mostly. If my house burns down I’m in big trouble. That’s one of the principles of The DAM Book that I will be implementing in the next month or so. Having a backup copy stored off-site is just that extra level of safety that will keep me sleeping through the night (now that the kids do).

Scott Chytil
http://www.chytilphoto.com

About This Blog

Welcome to Scott Chytil Photography.

In this blog I will be writing about general photographic topics as well as what it's like being a photographer in this new age of digital technology. I hope you find the topics insightful and useful.

First a little about who I am.

Before I started a photography career I worked at Microsoft for 12 years. Part of my time was spent in the product support group where I got to know the inside of a computer very well. I also learned how to troubleshoot computer and software related issues.

My second job at Microsoft was writing Visual Basic programs for a team that designed and created some of the first and most popular websites at Microsoft. My programs were used internally to enhance productivity and transform and transfer data between various systems the team relied on.

After having enough of Microsoft I went back to school to learn more about photography. I had always been interested in photography and kept wondering how I could do more with it. I attended and graduated from The Art Institute of Seattle's Commercial Photography program.

And here I am. I do architectural and advertising photography with special interests ranging from pinhole photography to alternative processes.

Again I hope you enjoy the content and I look forward to any comments you might have.

Scott Chytil
http://www.chytilphoto.com