alexleiphart asked:
What tips do you have for taking beautiful photographs like you do? How do you achieve the perfect sharpness, depth, color, exposure, etc when taking a photo? I own a Canon T3i.
I appreciate the compliment! First and foremost: I shoot everything in raw format. Raw images are like digital negatives and you can edit their settings and attributes with little to no loss of quality. Most memory cards are so fast and large these days that the larger filesize isn’t a big concern. Get a big, fast card and shoot raw.
Exposure is pretty easy with a DSLR because of the built-in light meter. On point-and-shoot cameras, it can be a little harder because sometimes that back screen lies to you a little bit. Most of the time, even with my 5d, I’ll take a photo, look at the result, and take several more. Sometimes, if I’m particularly worried about exposure, I’ll take a few extra pictures on the light and dark side.
Focus is just vigilance. I mostly choose my primary focal point, use the auto focus system to grab initial focus and then adjust if it doesn’t look right. Some cameras have a focus help system where they’ll pop up a magnified version of your shot so you can check focus (the X100, for instance), and if that’s available it’s a great tool.
The second half of this is editing photos. I use Adobe Lightroom 3. It’s a terrific photo catalog manager, and its built-in editing tools are terrific. I modify exposure, black levels, colors, noise, vignetting and more. I often add gradients of light and spot-fix issues. It takes time, but it yields much more polished results.
Tip: How to get an iPad 2 at Target
Today I snagged two white 16GB iPad 2s at a Target 10 miles from our apartment. As previously noted, I had an order placed with Apple which was still 35 days from shipping. I also tried—regrettably—to procure these devices once at the Apple Store in my local mall last week, which failed when I arrived at 8AM to find nearly 300 people in line and the store stocked with only 100 black 32GB models. I had given up hope and resigned to the fact that I would receive my iPad just before May 1st.
But then I read an interesting fact on MacRumors: Target stores expose their internal tracking information to the public. If you know the internal stock ID (DPCI number) of a product, you can use it to check for that product in all the stores near a given zip code. The stock system seems remarkably up-to-date (changes every few minutes), and it will even tell you where in the store the item is located (example: Digital Audio, aisle F20). Lucky for me (and anyone else looking for an iPad 2), a nice gentleman posted the DPCI numbers for all of the various models in both colors. He even included links to quickly check stock in your area.
To take it a step further, here’s a simple command you can run in Terminal to view the stock for a certain model in your area (this example shows stock for the white 16GB model near 90210). You can easily customize this by changing the label and the DPCI and zipcode arguments (in bold). Note that this should be one single line when you paste it into Terminal:
echo "iPad 2 Wi-Fi White 16GB: "; curl -s --data "_dyncharset=ISO-8859-1&asin=&dpci=057-10-1839&zipcode=90210&city=&state=" http://sites.target.com/site/en/spot/mobile_fiats_results.jsp?_DARGS=/site/en/spot/mobile_fiats.jsp | grep -A 2 strong | sed -e 's/<p><strong>//' -e 's/<\/strong><br\/>//' -e 's/<br \/>//' -e 's/<\/p>//' -e 's/--//' -e 's/^[ \t]*//;s/[ \t]*$//'
Over the past few days, I’ve been running this script every 30 minutes or so, and I began to notice a trend. It looks like most Target stores get a fulfillment of iPad 2s around 11AM on weekdays. Generally, I’ve only seen the 16GB models in this area (which, luckily, I was looking for), but your mileage may vary. From what I can tell, stock arrives at about 11AM, and is gone generally within 30 minutes. Based on phone calls (and what I saw today and heard from Target employees), they’re only getting around 3-5 per shipment.
This means you must act fast. If you see stock change to “Available”, plan on being at that store within the half hour. I was somewhat prepared today, and when I checked at 10:45AM and saw “Available” on three stores in my area, I drove to the closest one. The employees didn’t even know they had stock yet. I bought the two I needed and watched as three people ran in behind me and bought the other three. Gone, in 20 minutes flat.
It’s a bit of work, and a bit of a gamble, but it paid off for me today (and, from what I read in the forums at MacRumors, for a lot of people in the past week), so if you’re looking to get your iPad 2 and you don’t want to wait until May, this is a good bet.
Tip: Fullscreen Quick Look
In Snow Leopard you can view a document using fullscreen Quick Look by pressing Option-Space instead of just Space. Especially useful for larger documents, images, or when you want to view something on black.
Tip: Pin Your OS X Dock to the Corner
A friend asked me the other day if it was possible to pin the Dock to the corner of the screen without using an app or a hack. It’s actually very simple. In Terminal, use the following:
defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string start
Where “start” is which side you want the Dock to align with. The values are “start” “end” or “middle”. After you run that command, you need to restart your dock:
killall Dock
If you want to return your Dock to its normal position, just use the defaults command with “middle” as the string option. This works with the Dock on the bottom or sides of the screen.
Tip: Force Quit Apps in iPhone OS 3.0
Due to some features of the iPhone 3G S (notably Voice Control, which requires holding down the home button), the shortcut to force quit an app in iPhone OS 3.0 is different from OS 2.x’s hold home forever method.
In iPhone OS 3.0, to force quit an application, hold the sleep/wake button (the button top of the device) until the “Slide to power off” menu comes up, then release the sleep/wake button and hold the home button. After a few seconds the power off menu will disappear and your app will be forced to quit.
Tip: Make Safari 4 Look Like Safari 3
Want to get the nice new rendering speed and features of Safari 4 but not the new interface? Drop these three commands into Terminal (each should be a single line):
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeToolbarRedesign -bool NO
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4LoadProgressStyle -bool NO
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool NO
This will give you the old Safari 3 interface (including tabs below and the old loading bar) as well as the older Safari 3 behaviors for the tab bar like double-clicking dead space to create a new tab.
Don’t forget to customize your toolbar and add the Stop/Reload button.
Tip: Shuffle issues with new eMusic Downloader
If you’re having issues where iTunes won’t play music you’ve downloaded with the newer eMusic Downloader when in shuffle mode, there’s an easy fix: Select the music downloaded and do a Get Info on it (a group Get Info), switch to the Options tab and check the box next to “Skip when shuffling” (to tell iTunes you want to affect this setting for these tracks) and change the dropdown menu to No.
Unfortunately, this is a bug in the new downloader so you’ll need to do this every time you download music using the app until eMusic fixes this bug.
Tip: Photoshop CS4 Installation Components
The PS CS4 installer presents you with a crapload of optional “shared components” for install, and I wasn’t sure which were necessary or not so instead of installing them all I did a little research first and figured out what each item was and if it was important. This might help you too when installing.
Optional items you don’t need to install (unless you have a specific need for one of them):
Adobe AIR — The Adobe Integrated Runtime, which is a cross-platform runtime env for internet apps that can also live on your desktop. Many people have already installed this to run things like Twitter clients, etc, but it’s not actually necessary unless you want to run an AIR app, at which time you can install AIR stand-alone.
Adobe Device Central — For testing how your stuff will look/function on mobile devices. “Simplifies mobile authoring workflow.”
Adobe Drive — Makes Version Cue servers show up as standard mounted drives which makes working with Version Cue easier.
Adobe Media Player — This is mostly a way for Adobe to show you ads. You don’t need this, as QuickTime, VLC and many other media players play all this content and without ads.
Optional item you might want to install:
Adobe Extension Manger — “Easily install new extensions and manage the ones you already have.” Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever used this, but since it’s small (98MB) it might be worth installing in case you need it.
Page 1 of 2
