Some of this is going to seem obvious. Some not. Mostly in this third installment of my “week of lists” I’m just going to be handing off a few of the tips that have helped me improve my photography in the last year or so. Consider it an abreviated ‘how to use your camera’ course in blog-list form. 1 : Delayed Gratification Digital cameras have spoiled us in the past few years. It’s easy to get into a bad habit, though, when you’ve got [...]

This is a cross post from my photo-per-day blog, Pixelated and Back Again. Many people get all excited about minerals. Some folks dig them out of the ground, polish them up, and sell them. Others put them on stands and bestow them with imagined mystical powers, so-called spiritual energies, and scrying insights. Still others use them as photography props: that’s me. Thanks to ebay, cheap international parcel service, and the inspiration of a thousand fellow online photographers, I recently came into possession of a [...]

This is a cross post from my photo-per-day blog, Pixelated and Back Again. About a month ago I picked up a digital photo frame for my office. It’s just a small one — seven inches or so — but it has a terrific quality of resolution. The logic behind the purchase was really quite simple: I take all these pictures, but I don’t print many and can’t be sitting flipping through my online collection while I’m working, so… digital frame. But getting a frame [...]

So, here’s what I’m thinking… A club. A group with plans and regular meet ups. A bunch of people who plan a monthly photo expedition, grab their cameras, and go take some photos. My questions would be, then, before we go much further with this plan: 1) Are you or is someone you know interested? 2) What is the best day or evening for a regular monthly meet up? Comment below…

I’ve been archiving photos. I have a lot. I haven’t always been good at tracking all the pictures I’ve taken. But a while back, around the same time I bought my last desktop computer and actually had hard drive capacity to put them all in one place, I decided I wanted to give Picassa a try for managing my collection. Before that point I had little micro collections, and collections with a lot of overlap between them, on CD-Rs, DVD-Rs, external hard drives, internal [...]

A “reloaded” post is a quick-clipped summary of a bunch of small things from the past few days. I want to write them down, but I am either lacking in (a) details or (b) time. That’s just how it goes sometimes. Enjoy. Coffee Fix I’m sitting at the computer, writing (obviously), and enjoying my first cup of brew in nearly six weeks. That’s right, my celebration of my own personal un-lent has ended, and my caffeine addiction can take it’s rightful place back within [...]

This is a cross-post from my photo-a-day project blog: Pixelated For sake of disclosure, I’m just going to start off by calling it FAKE tilt-shift. The new point-and-click camera I acquired back in January, purchased because I’m not keen on spending every day of an upcoming spring vacation lugging my dSLR around and would rather just have something I can stick in my pocket, has some interesting features. While some folks might be fascinated by various action modes or night modes or low-light imaging, [...]

There are just some things you can’t learn from a book. Leading into the holidays, Karin and I simultaneously noticed a Groupon promotion for an Alberta-based photography school called FotoScool (www.fotoscool.ca) where they were offering their introductory “basic” workshop for about one-third of their list value. I told her. She told me. And… Well, guess what I got for Christmas. When I attended last Saturday I found myself sitting at a table with three other guys who’s wives had also bought them the same [...]

This is a cross-post from my photo blog: Pixelated. At some point later this year we’re going to Disneyland. I won’t say exactly when or for how long, but rather simply that it presented an interesting technological problem. See, I’ve always been a big advocate of the philosophy: “Why buy a big, fancy SLR camera if you’re afraid to take it on vacation?” But then, along came the question of Disneyland. I’m going there to have fun, not take photos. But I want photos. [...]

Admittedly, my efforts in keeping my photo gallery up to date over the last month have been weak at best. Considering the lingering promise of new daily photos and a busy holiday season just passed, the sad reality remained: I just never got around to posting pictures. Well, I never got around to it until last night, that is… The Holidays Two collections await your curious eyes. We split our festive celebrations down the middle, spending the days leading up to Santa’s arrival with [...]

I’ve been reading through Scott McCleod’s Understanding Comics, a kind-of non-fiction graphic-novel-esque work that deconstructs the art of comics in the form of a comic. It is an aging work, originally published in 1993, and thus has little to say about the advent of web comics and such (topics I assume are covered in his newer books written in a similar style.) But this is largely inconsequential because the perspective McCleod takes is easily translatable to newer and (likely) future mediums. What struck me [...]

A “reloaded” post is a quick-clipped summary of a bunch of small things from the past few days. I want to write them down, but I am either lacking in (a) details or (b) time. That’s just how it goes sometimes. Enjoy. Tree & Cold The downtown business association last weekend held it’s annual tree-lighting celebration, where the forty-one foot spruce that will adorn the pedestrian strip in front of City Hall was set to power and all ten-thousand-ish (or so they claim) lights [...]

This is a cross-post with my photo-per-day blog: Pixlated. I’ve pretty much decided I don’t like photo themes. On the very last day of my second attempt at a “themed week” for my photo-per-day project, I’m feeling decidedly stifled by my chosen collection of pics. Here’s four reasons why: 4. Too much focus on an unknown. I mean, call me out on my original assumption that a theme would narrow the focus in a good way. Albeit I’ve only got two theme experiences as [...]

This is a cross-post (from a couple days back) from my photo blog. It might make more sense in the context of that blog, but I re-read it again and I thought it deserved a reprint here. I work in downtown Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. I may have mentioned that before. Edmonton is something of a prairie boom-town that often struggles to find an identity. Case-in-point: just this afternoon another milestone went by in our hotly-debated local quandary of whether or not we should be [...]

It’s been nearly a full month since I gave a proper accounting of the photo per day project, so I figured I probably should. October started in shades of orange as I spun out the first (of probably many) official twist on the project, proffering the idea of a themed week of photos. Mid-week, and even late into the enterprise, I was feeling somewhat adrift, snapping a whole lot of images of “dead leaves” to fulfill the vague (but oddly specific) concept of “Autumn [...]

This is a cross-post from my photo-blog: pixelated (and back again)… because I really like this photo and wanted to share it. Really. It was just a stupidly lucky shot, but like so much photography it is being in exactly the right spot at the right moment. I had been tempted to just give you a pic from my iPhone today. You almost got one. It was almost that kind of day. A Friday. A post-work, too-exhausted-to-care photo day. Almost. But then, timing being [...]

A “reloaded” post is a quick-clipped summary of a bunch of small things from the past few days. I want to write them down, but I am either lacking in (a) details or (b) time. That’s just how it goes sometimes. Enjoy. Walks in the Park Autumn arrived in a splash of colour, and with it the temperature dipped out of I’m-wearing-shorts-everywhere range and into the better-wear-a-hoodie-when-you-go-out range. Along with the changes in weather, the abrupt and familiar disappearance of usable daylight outside of [...]

The September Saturdays Stockpile of Silly Schemes seeks to detail the spark, struggle, and stress of those projects. In each Saturday post I hope to reveal a bit of the speculation, study, and strategy behind one particular project, summarized in a week of thought but a single post. And in concluding each post, I hope to give you, my readers, a sense of the shape, status, and steering that I strive to send myself to some sense of success for those efforts. 1. How [...]

If you haven’t been following my photo project blog itself, you have been missing out on some photos. I’m twelve days into my photo-per-day project (pixelated) and things are going quite awesome. And I say awesome, but like anything there are going to be good days and there are going to be bad days. The bulk of the project has been good. I mean, it’s still early. The enthusiasm is still strong. The motivation is holding out. And I just got myself not just [...]

This is a simultaneous cross-post from my photo blog: pixelated (and back again) The days are getting noticeably shorter. The sun is rising a little later each day. It no longer peaks through my window before my alarm goes to warn me of the impending day. And that is making for some amazing light shows: If it weren’t for the new distracted driving regulations, I would have pulled my camera out of my bag as I was driving through Smyth Crossing this morning shortly [...]

A “reloaded” post is a quick-clipped summary of a bunch of small things from the past few days. I want to write them down, but I am either lacking in (a) details or (b) time. That’s just how it goes sometimes. Enjoy. School Dazed Pre-school? Playschool? The one before kindergarten, anyhow. The first day approaches rapidly, at any rate. And that’s just the formal stuff. We were a blur of school-minded planning this weekend, thinking ahead to not only Claire’s first day of preschool [...]

Day Two of my new Photo-Per-Day Project, and yeah… two photos in the hopper. Lots to go… I’ve already figured out what’s going to be one of the major obstacles of this project: either I’m going to have a day like today, where I’ll have too many opportunities to take photos, hours in which to narrow down, pin down, define the day in a single image is going to seem impossible… or I’ll have days where photos just don’t happen, and you’ll get a [...]

August is over. September has arrived. And photography-wise I’m onto grander and more daunting projects. Real projects. The (un)project concludes with just a last few notes at some last highlights from the (un)collection… a fatherhood edition. A while back we ordered a copy of everyone’s favorite tile-based strategy game, but in the Kid’s Version. Kid’s Carcassonne is a hit around our house, as far as games go, and while this is not a review, you can take it as a recommendation: solid. That said, [...]