Lewis Studios

On a recent trip I had a chance to spend some time playing at a playground. We were visiting good friends and stopped at the playground to entertain their children on our way to dinner. Since my camera seems to be surgically attached, I naturally took it along even though we were walking a mile or so each way and I knew I'd end up carrying a child at least part of the way. My instinct was productive as the playground provided some nice photo-ops. As the children and, in some cases, adults, raced down slides I got a chance to shoot some action sequences with continuous shooting.

Examples of great lighting technique are everywhere these days. There are books, blogs, online training and workshops galore on lighting techniques. The range of equipment and methods can be overwhelming. Where does one start?

I've been having a lot of fun playing with my Nikon AW100 lately. It is small and light compared the D7000 so it goes with me more often, to more places. I've also been reading a lot of blogs and articles lately suggesting that the newer generations of mirrorless or "EVIL" cameras are getting to the point where they will replace the DSLR for most people. I'm not convinced.

Now that I've been using the Nikon AW100 for about two weeks I've learned a bit about what it can and cannot do for me. In good lighting it makes good decisions most of the time. In tricky lighting, I am learning that it is best not to let it make all the decisions.

I had been planning to leave GoDaddy for a while now. The performance has been inconsistent and I've never been a fan of the way they list and sell their services as it makes it too easy to pay for something that comes free with something else you have to buy. My renewal was coming up in February so my plan was to leave them around now to allow time to work out any issues in the transition.

Today I enjoyed some fishing with a new AW100 in my pocket. I only had a few chances to take pictures and one or two movie clips but so far I am impressed. It will take more time to determine if this camera is good enough to be the one and only camera on a vacation where I don't want to lug around the DSLR and lenses. I know I'll miss a longer reaching zoom as well as the width of the 10mm end of the 10-24mm zoon on the D7000 but enough to want to carry the big kit? Probably not. So then it becomes a question of picture quality and whether I can live with not much manual control.

I recently recorded narration for an auto-running Powerpoint presentation using the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 USB interface and pre-amp. The results were good and I learned a few things along the way. The first lesson is don't record the narration in Powerpoint directly. I learned this lesson a long time ago and had to re-learn it as apparently I forgot. Powerpoint doesn't do a very clean job of starting and stopping recording and makes it hard to access the clips afterwards to trim them of the various pops and clicks.

I recently needed to create a short presentation that would run on its own and include narration, various clip art, standard bullet points and a video clip on one slide that made a key point. I created the video on a Mac with Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects so my first choice was to export it as Quicktime. This worked great for presenting from my Mac but when I went to test in on Windows, even with Quicktime Player installed, I got the bouncing line visual with the audio instead of my video.

It is the holidays which means I really need to finish that DVD project from this summer's trip. The movie itself is done with titles and credits and audio. It was created with Aperture's slideshow tools and came out great. The Ken Burns effect seems to know which way to move when -- I think this is luck, not image interpretation in the software but it came out perfect.

It started out innocently enough. My wife wanted to see a presentation at the local historical society but could not attend. I thought "why not ask if I can shoot the presentation on video?". I asked, the speaker and society said yes and we were good to go, or so I thought. It hit me a few minutes later that I could not shoot this with the DSLR as it was too long. The D7000, like most DSLRs, can only shoot about 20 minutes before it needs to cool the sensor and it can get noisy even sooner.