There is a reset button underneath the garbage disposal

If a disposal becomes stuck and makes a humming noise to tell you it's stuck, and you don't shut it off right away, and all of a sudden the humming noise stops, and the disposal does not turn on anymore after you have unstuck it (by turning the screw in the center of the bottom using a special wrench that came with it and you were lucky not to lose it), chances are the red reset button has popped - as a built-in circuit breaker.

I have already gone through the agony of checking the circuit breakers, electric outlets and the yellow pages once before, and I eventually learned the same simple trick. But not having started this blog back then, I forgot the lesson and had to relearn it the hard way.

Source: About.com

The difference between dodging and burning. (Seriously.)

Okay, so I knew that, in photo editors, a dodge and burn tool made areas of an image lighter and darker. I also knew that the terminology somehow came from the film and paper photography. But how? I tried imagining what tool one would use to "burn" a paper-based photo. Something hot that... leaves dark burn marks on paper? No, seriously, I went as far as imagining that as a plausible etymology.

And because I never understood what dodging and burning meant in a darkroom, I could never remember which meant which. Did dodging lighten or did burning darken? In my reasoning above, that would be the case.

Well, it all came together today, no thanks to my active imagination. I learned, upon landing on the Wikipedia darkroom page in search of some unrelated info, that dodging is an act of selectively reducing exposure of a portion of the image, and burning, by contrast, is an act of increasing or prolonging the exposure. You "dodge", as in "avoid", exposure of one area and "burn" another area with extra light. How simple is that? I had done both many times.

And as far as the tools - the use of the little pen-shaped "dodge and burn" tool in photo editing software must have thrown me off and sent my thinking in a wrong direction.  What you use to dodge and burn prints in a darkroom is your hands.

At least for a 4 x 6 print you would.

Communication Arts is a very, very cool magazine

Years ago, when I was learning English as a second language by reading books, in which I understood 70%, guessed 20% and guessed correctly 10% of the text, I made up a rule that if I saw an unfamiliar word for the third time I had to look it up in the dictionary.

Similarly, when I heard Communication Arts mentioned for the third time in as many days, and had no clear idea what it was, I had to look it up at the local bookstore.

Let me say it again. It is a very, very impressive publication. And it comes at a very impressive price of twenty-four dollars an issue (it is spelled out on the cover, too, just so that there aren't any doubts about it). There are six issues a year, and the subscription runs $53 (fifty-three dollars), which is 63% off the cover price, which is nice, though expected.

Several things impressed me about CommArts as their website proposes to abbreviate the name.

One, it is such a cool name.  When asked what photography magazines one reads, doesn't "Communication Arts" just roll off the tongue better than, I don't know, "Digital DSL Photography" to pick a publication at random?  It makes one sound sophisticated in an unpretentious kind of way.  Kind of like what the magazine looks and feels.  It just conveys that air of superiority without being arrogant.

Two, it is very, very well made. I am just talking paper and printing here. It is a pleasure to hold, to turn the pages, put on the shelf and pick it up a week, a month or a year later. It would feel at home on a coffee table, too.

And three, it has great photography in it.  You will not find the "howto", "Photoshop by numbers" or "before and after" type of images. Just finished works, again, very unassumingly but authoritatively laid out a few to a page, categorized and annotated with relevant data. Almost every shot has a "wow" quality to it and lives up to the distinction between photography and art that the magazine's title not so subtly implies.

And I didn't even get to the articles.

If I were to subscribe to one photography magazine, I guess I know what it would be.

A portable DVD player makes a great external photo viewer on location

I forgot the name of the guest the Light Source podcast team had on their show, but he mentioned a great trick.

Bring a sub-$100 portable DVD player to a location shoot, plug your DSLR into it using the video cable, and voila, you have a bright 7" viewer for your photos to check histograms, colors and sharpness.

Genius!

I guess you can also play DVDs on it when not shooting.

A deadline is a great source of inspiration

Actually, it's something I heard a couple of days ago in a Brooks Jensen's LensWork podcast and today I was able to learn in firsthand. In Mr. Jensen's case it was the necessity to produce some original prints for a new issue of his magazine. For me it was the Flickr 64 Challenge, a head-to-head photo contest I had signed up for about two weeks ago.

In this contest, the admins randomly (I assume) pit applicants against each other in a draw, two to a contest.  There are 32 brackets to start.  The contestants are to take a photo during a specific week (can't use an oldie but goodie), then post it to the designated group thread for a total of two photos to a thread. The public then takes 1 day to vote on each pair.  The 32 winners of the brackets are reseeded into 16 new brackets, and so on until there's only one.

I had never played this game before and completely forgot I signed up for it until I saw a post in another group's discussion, where a member was asking for advice on which photo he should submit. I rushed to check what the deadline was and discovered it was 1 hour away.  I had not uploaded anything this previous week, so I had no qualifying shots in my photostream, not even crappy ones (in case my opponent did not post anything and forfeited).  And I was away from my storage drive, so I could not upload anything I had shot.  So I typed up an apology and said I was defaulting.

And then Mr. Jensen's theory of deadlines as motivators popped up in my mind. What good is listening to all the great advice if I never put it to good use? Also, what good am I as a photographer if I can't make a stupid deadline in a game? What about working with customers, weddings, events?

So I decided to go for it.  Good thing I had my camera with me.  And a USB cable.  I have no software to process the photos on my work computer, but that's what Picnik is for.  Of course, by then 15 minutes had elapsed and I had only 45 left to produce a contest entry.  And so I did.

It was not the first or the last shot I took over the 25 minutes I spent outside, but somehow I knew it would work the moment I took it.  I then spent about 15 minutes looking at the 28 or so images, deciding on the one I knew I would go with from the beginning, uploading it and cleaning it up in Picnik.  I submitted it with 3 minutes to spare.

The voting is not over yet, but barring some massive reversal of fortunes, being up 22-8, I should survive the first round. I am sure there is a lesson in all of this, or two. One being, apparently, that it's never a bad idea to carry the camera around, even if you have no intent to shoot when you leave the house. And the other is the subject of this post.

Source: Experience, LensWork podcast episode LW0007

Photographing kids in numbers greater than two is like herding cats

With one arm tied behind your back.

Source: Experience.

E-TTL is not all it's cracked out to be

E-TTL is the technology that fires ultra-brief flashes imperceptible to the human eye and measures and adjusts light output from a strobe to make it "just right" for the subject, distance and ambient light. It is, in effect, the "auto" mode for the flash.

What I found from a few brief and completely unscientific experiments is that when using my Canon 430EX flash on-camera in E-TTL mode the shots come out consistently overxposed outdoors and underexposed indoors.

There are threads in Canon and Strobist forums explaining why it is so. The universal agreement seems to be that indoors the FEC in E-TTL mode should be set to +1.

My question is: if all photographers know that, why doesn't Canon?

Source: Experience, photography-on-the.net, Strobist on flickr

FileNet IS server does not clean up dead sessions until recycled

If you have a web server running IDM WS, and you use server login context when connecting to the IS server, any user sessions that the Session Manager does not kill, remain active on the IS server side. Reboot your web server, and your users may be out of sessions if the limit is not set high enough.

The question is: how can you gracefully close user sessions under management by Session Manager if you need to reboot the box? Why doesn't Session Manager, when shutting down because its host process is being shut down, send a logoff request to the server for all outstanding sessions?

And for that matter, what process space does Session Manager run in? Never can get any answers from IBM or anyone else for that matter.

Source: Experience, confirmation from FileNet admin

My gym was featured on The Real Housewives of Orange County

I feel like showering.

Source: TV

I don't like Braeburn apples

It's not a good time for watermelons, nectarines, plums, pears or berries right now. They are all either overpriced or gone entirely from the grocery store shelves. In fact, it's not a good time for just about any fruit - except for apples. There is a dozen kinds of apples at my local store, some of which I have never heard of. So I am making it a rule, in addition to a normal bag of organic Galas, to pick up a couple of new and exotic apples on every visit. If I like one, I have another one to firm up the impression. If I don't - well, at least I did not buy any more.

The results are in: I do not like Braeburns. They are way too firm and tart for my taste. Like Granny Smith with an attitude. They would probably be great in an apple pie, but I'm having a hard time biting into them, and sliced they just shock my palate with acidity.

(Guess what, I wikied Braeburn and they do descend form Granny Smith, so points to me for tasting the similarity).

I liked Rome apples earlier, but I had not started this blog back then, and besides, chances are I had learned something a little bit more exciting that day. Today is just a little slow in the learning department.

Source: Experience.