Depth of field help

I was listening to a 7 photography questions podcast the other day -- number 13, with Jennifer Wu. She corrected a few of the misunderstandings I had regarding landscape photography. Specifically she addressed what aperture she uses to get a great landscape shot. I always assumed your lens never had a better excuse to stop all the way down and make the dust on your sensor nice and sharp than it does when you are shooting a landscape. Jennifer states that she typically uses f8, f11, and f16 because her Canon lenses produce sharper images that way even if the depth of field isn't as wide as f22.

That brought up another related topic... how to establish your hyperfocal distance. She recommends checking out the tools at DOF Master. They have programs to help you print charts for hyperfocal distances. I will certainly be trying out her suggestions, as I have found my landscapes are not quite as sharp as I'd like even when I'm using my tripod, mirror lock-up, and the whole works.

Ring flash

I like the looks of a ring flash picture. I'd love to have one, but I think they are a bit on the spendy side for me (I don't make enough money selling pictures). I know there are tons of people talking about how you can build your own, but I would rather be taking pictures then building gear. That is why I got really excited when the Strobist blog mentioned the Orbis ring flash. I keep going back and searching for the Strobist blog posts so I can visit the site, as I can never remember the name. I thought I'd just post it hear so I can find it more easily. Tonight when I when there, they actually had some content in addition to their "coming soon" page, too. We'll see what comes of it I guess, but in the mean time I'm anxious to learn more.

New Canon Camera

Those of you following the hype leading up to Photokina 2008 will hear me mention the hot new Canon camera to be announced and think "he must not be talking about the 50D, as that has been announced... it must be the 5D MkII!". This is way beyond that. Read for yourself.

JUDE UML modeling

If you are looking for a UML modeling tool, I'd recommend you check out JUDE. I've played around with their JUDE/Community edition and really liked it. I posted a few feature requests in their forums and they were very receptive and worked with me to make sure they understood what I was asking for.

My UML needs are almost always the same... I have an existing codebase that I want to document. Either I want a package diagram so I can get a feel for the overall system, or I have a set of classes (typically the domain model) that I want to model in a class diagram. JUDE was one of the few tools that was able to reverse-engineer my java source code and let me create the diagrams I wanted. Unfortunately they didn't automatically show me the package dependencies when I dropped them on a class diagram, and they didn't show me generics in the way I found useful. If/when they add these two features, I'll be using it all the time. As it is, it is a great modeling tool.

I see they released a new version in July. I haven't had a chance to try these two features in that version, but I did scan the release notes and don't see any mention of them.

OTUG office

Last week I was elected as the president-elect of OTUG. If you know of a topic that you'd like covered at a meeting, or would like to volunteer to present, please shoot me an email at [jasontitus at spamcop dot net].

UI Mock-up tool

Some time ago a friend showed me Balsamiq for creating UI mock-ups. I had to go Googling to find it when I needed it, so this is a reminder to myself. You might enjoy taking a look too.

Emily

A friend I work with showed me this clip today. Wow.

Another Olympics shot

I came across this today. It takes a while to load, but if you weren't able to attend the Olympics, this will let you know how it feels to be in the arena. Oh yeah, and there's lots of Canon glass in the section too.

Whoops, I missed one

I just realized I forgot to mention Joe McNally's Blog. If you haven't ready The Moment it Clicks, you need to get a copy asap. If you don't feel like dropping any change on a new book, try your local library. Just get it. It is a quick read and contains some awesome photography.

Blogs to follow

As I've said before, I like keeping and eye on the Chase Jarvis blog, and Strobist.com. Tonight while I was trying to do some research on PhotoShelter vs. Alamy I came across Cycle 61 Photography and the links associated with it. One that looks very interesting is Stock Photo Journey. I'll be adding them to my Google Reader asap... in fact, you can now just look at the blog links included in the blog.

More Stock Photography

I've recently heard of another stock photo site called Alamy. I'll try to upload some images there too, and those images will reside here.

Olympics in pictures blog

I find this blog very interesting... a fellow Canon shooter albeit with a little more and better gear.

Chase Jarvis

As a follow-up to my previous post... if you don't know who Chase Jarvis is, you need to watch this video. It was my first exposure to his work, and I was an instant fan. Simply incredible.

Stock Photography

I've been thinking of trying out stock photography for some time now. I started an account at iStockPhoto.com (because one of the guys from the LightSource podcast is an image editor and mentions them all the time), but haven't uploaded any images yet. While checking out a new podcast series by Chase Jarvis, I came across one of his presentations, which happens to be for the PhotoShelter group. I decided to give them a try.

Check out my stuff and buy some pictures!