The famous 52 Street Photography Now instruction can be found here

https://www.flickr.com/groups/instruction00/discuss/72157627757730866/

Otherwise, I will end up always looking them again and again.

Tony Ray-Jones was a British documentary photographer, who died in 1972 at the age of 31 from leukemia

He recorded the following advice to himself on shooting street:

Be more aggressive
Get more involved (talk to people)
Stay with the subject matter (be patient)
Take simpler pictures
See if everything in background relates to subject matter
Vary compositions and angles more
Be more aware of composition
Don’t take boring pictures
Get in closer (use 50mm lens [or possibly ‘less,’ the writing is unclear])
Watch camera shake (shoot 250 sec or above)
Don’t shoot too much
Not all eye level
No middle distance

So much advice has been recorded and published, particularly on street photography. Heck, there is even a list of 52 street photography instructions taken from the book Street Photography Now. Each instruction is given by a notable contemporary street photographer and, presumably, reflects their own style and credo. Try learning and following all 52. What would your body of work look like?

I wonder if a considerably more concise – both in length and level of detail – list from someone who died at 31 almost 50 years ago is worth internalizing.

Three things

One. I have not updated this blog in six years.

Two. Past entries are entertaining and educational, and I am glad I created them. The fact that they have zero comments does not seem to matter to me nearly as much as one might imagine. I was always the intended audience, anyone else would just be the accidental benefactor.

Three. Most photos and many links I linked 6-9 years ago are gone. This is 1)unfortunate, 2)understandable, 3)not something one thinks about while creating a post in the now, 4)almost certainly something others have noticed, given thought to, and solved this issue for themselves. It is almost certainly a good idea to liberally quote relevant portions of the post being referenced — specifically to guard against the post being lost/deleted/altered in the future. And the embedded photos are almost certainly safer being copied to one's own Google drive, but that can't be a good idea copyright-wise. Not to mention it's more work and may take out the fun out of (re)blogging something that one has just learned.

The one thing I still have not learned: how to format paragraphs in published Blogspot posts so that they have half a line space after them. Adding a blank paragraph creates too much blank space. Not inserting a space makes paragraphs stick together.

PFA in an email stands for "Please find attached"

EOM

Flickr follows a 'freemium' business model, as do many apps and games

'Freemium' is a new word to me, but its meaning was instantly clear from the context when Michael Arrington, the heavyweight tech blogger and founder of TechCrunch, wrote:

Freemium business models are always hard. You have to give users enough for free that they try your service out and get hooked. Then you hit them with fees for upgraded features that make it even better. With a perfect product people don’t mind paying because they feel like it’s good value.

The main thrust of the article, though is that Flickr is more of a hostage taking model than a freemium model. I tend to agree, but unlike Michael, I do not mind using Flickr. In the meantime, thanks for teaching me a new geekspeak word.
Come to think of it, almost all "free" Facebook and iPhone apps of any renown follow the freemium model. It's good to be able to put a catchy jargon term to a universally recognized phenomenon.

CTO does not stand just for Chief Technology Officer

I have always considered the use of gels fanciful (just as I consider the use of lens filters fanciful with the exception of the UV filter and, possibly, a polarizer).  But it has gradually sunk in — through listening to podcasts, reading up and, mainly, trying futilely to correct white balance on many indoor shots — why some gels are extremely useful, perhaps necessary.

First among these is CTO: "correct to orange" or, as some would have it, "color temperature orange".

When shooting indoors with regular incandescent (tungsten) lights lighting the interior — well, they have been regular so far, but they have now been outlawed — and the strobe lighting the subject, you want to gel the strobe (flash) with a CTO gel. It will make the white light coming out of the strobe orange. Consequently, everything in your shot — both your subject and the interior lit with the overhead lighting — will have an orange tint. You then correct white balance in Lightroom, Photoshop or what have you. Done.

The alternative would be to cover all incandescent lights with a CTB ("correct to blue") gel. Then their orange light (we may not realize it's orange, but the camera's sensor does) would turn white and the interior in the shot you take with a flash will lose the ugly yellowish tint that you always struggle with in white balance correction ("If I correct the wall to white, how come the face turns blue?")

The problem with this latter approach is that you will have a considerably larger gel, perhaps several, a stepladder and a bunch of tape or clams to secure gels to every lightbulb in the room.  

While with the CTO gel, you only need one, it's small, and it may even come with a handy holder that affixes it to the flash.

(I actually learned this over a year ago, but never finished the draft of this post.)  

Fly-tipping is British for dumping waste illegally

According to Wikipedia 

The term is derived from the verb tip, meaning "to throw out of a vehicle" and on the fly, meaning "on the wing" — to throw away carelessly or casually.

Too bad, because I had it figured out as "leaving garbage as tips for flies".
And how did I find out about fly-tipping? There is a website FixMyStreet, which invites you to

Report, view, or discuss local problems
(like graffiti, fly tipping, broken paving slabs, or street lighting)

And how, again, how did I stumble upon that whistle-blowing (or else tattletale) site? Glad you asked.
It was mentioned in a weekly Community Update for the OpenStreetMap project. And if you don't know about, or participate in, the OpenStreetMap phenomenon, then you are seriously missing out on the major crowdsourced, worldwide, volunteer cartography movement of our times.

While the UK-only FixMyStreet uses some klutzy map watermarked "Ministry of JUSTICE", the announcement deals more specifically with the newly inaugurated Norwegian version called, naturally, FiksGataMi. And that one uses the beautifully rendered OpenStreetMap.

The idea behind both FixMyStreet and OpenStreetMap is exactly the same: directing the energy of civic-minded individuals towards improve the surrounding world for everyone. OpenStreetMap does it virtually, by letting anyone detail or correct the map of the area they live in or are well familiar with. FixMyStreet aims to do it quite literally: by allowing citizens to drop little local "bug reports" onto the map, which are immediately routed to the appropriate municipal authorities.

Here's a representative list of what bugs the Brits who visited the site in the last few hours:

• Nuisance Alarm
• Waste soil dumping
• Speeding problem
• Rodent infestation
• Run down car park

In all, over 100,000 problems have been reported in the UK since the site launched three years ago. 3,171 of them were fixed in the past 30 days.

Calling Response.End() throws a ThreadAbortException. Always.

...So don't Try to Catch it.

If you do catch it, don't log the error.

If you log it, don't worry about it.

Here's the background and some workarounds.  I briefly tried using HttpContext.Current.ApplicationInstance.CompleteRequest as suggested, but it does not stop execution on the page the way Response.End() does.

"Malaria mosquitoes" do not carry malaria, do not bite people and are not mosquitoes

Some privacy please?
Originally uploaded by J-Fish

I can't tell you how many of these poor creatures my family members and I have destroyed over the years. Granted, we never saw them bite, but the look alone was enough to fill our simple souls with fear and disgust. "Malaria mosquito! — someone would shout, — Kill it!"
Here's the fact.
While there is such thing as a "malaria mosquito", these crane flies are not them. True, they look like oversized, poorly assembled models of mosquitoes, but on closer inspection they lack the crucial body part: the penetrating proboscis.

Marc Ecko is greatly overlooked, by me

This "for real" StarWars Boba Fett's hoodie, which I happened upon thanks to the Wired's annual wish list, alone would be enough to firmly put Marc Ecko's wares in the "cool" column in my ledger.

Navigating around the site made me seriously consider springing for some of his more work-friendly products.

2009 sucked, according to photographers

The New York Times' 2009: The Year in Pictures
A lot of good photography here, but by the time the viewer gets through June and reaches July, the cumulative negative impact becomes overwhelming.

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