Ever since the redesign of the iPod Shuffle in September 2006 from a remote-control-looking, lanyard-hanging plastic design to the smooth metal clip-on design, I’ve had a tough time resisting them. Functional and small, they seemed perfect for walking, hiking and cycling, and much less prone to damage if I happened to be involved in something that damaged me.

However, I’d been resisting the little player. My primary iPod is a fifth gen 80GB iPod, and I love the thing dearly. I’m not a big fan of the plastic front, but still, I rely on the thing to flavor my day, and make my walks and rides much more enjoyable. However, I’ve been concerned about damaging it during a fall or spill on my bike. I mean, the thing does have a hard drive in it, after all!

And that’s where the allure of the Shuffle lies. A little device, very survivable, and light to boot. But…. 1GB? Typically, I don’t know what I want to listen to at any given moment, which is why the 5G iPod is great for me. I can carry my whole library with me, and decide on-the-fly what music strikes my fancy. Some mornings are Pink Floyd mornings; some are Tiffany, ya know? Fer sure.

Last week, Apple dropped the price on the Shuffle from $79 to $49, which suddenly broke the paralyzing logjam for me, and I was all hot to get one. A D-note priced Shuffle was hard to avoid, and I had myself in a rationalized lather, ready to pull the trigger on one. It’s then that one of my grilling buddies pointed out that a 2GB version was in the wings, and only $20 more to double the space. OK, so that’s a no brainer.

Well, a little more rationalization, and Becky and I wound up in the Apple Store yesterday, with me deciding to save myself $20 and the torment of waiting for the new 2GB device. Now, the Apple Store at West County Mall has reconfigured itself, so there is no real place to checkout, or queue up to buy something that an Appleminion has to go to the storeroom to retrieve. You just have to look interested in buying something, create the scent of immediate purchase, and suddenly someone will show up to assist you. We did that, and presto! Someone appeared to retrieve a Shuffle from the back of the store.

I told our waitperson that I wanted a Product RED Shuffle. While there may be better ways to help the Product RED cause, I was gonna buy the Shuffle anyway, so why not do a little social good while putting money in Steve Jobs coat. At this point our salesperson pointed out that there was a 2GB model also available. Whhhaaaaaatt? She then proceeds to tell us that she saw them in the back of the store, and conveniently, the only ones she saw were the Product RED versions. I think I hesitated about a nanosecond, and told her to proceed with the 2GB product. I rang out, and merrily rode home, inwardly chuckling at all the rationalization chits I wasted on this purchase.

I hadn’t heard that the 2GB product was supposed to be available yet, and sure ’nuff, as I look on the Apple Store site this morning, there’s no mention of it. Do I have a product pre-release? Maybe. I do know I’m enjoying it.

So, with 2GB of storage on the Shuffle, I can put about 24 hours of music on the device, and I’m randomly selecting music from my highest rated music in iTunes. What I’m finding is that I’m enjoying the freedom from figuring out what I wanna listen to during my random listening times — exercise, work, etc. I don’t believe that the Shuffle will replace my 5G iPod, but I’m finding that this little thing is much convenient than I would’ve ever given it credit for.

I don’t usually shoot portraiture. I’m just not comfortable with it, and don’t generally have a good enough grasp of unnatural light to pull it off.

However, Sio’s new look warranted an attempt at doing some shooting. With Karen’s lights and backdrop, I tried to photograph Sio in three different outfits. Now, being fourteen, she wasn’t always the smiling kid for each of the photos — she’s got an image to uphold after all! — but I think there are some really nice photos of her out there.

Take a look, and let me know what you think!

It seems like this year is gonna be the year for photography books. Last year, everything was all about Lightroom. This year, it seems Photoshop CS3 techniques and general photography are the places to land. In the last two weeks, I’ve stuffed some authors’ pockets.

The first acquisition I wanted to mention was Scott Kelby’s 7-Point System for Adobe Photoshop CS3 by (wait for it….) Scott Kelby. Scott is the head of NAPP, and is one of the best Photoshop resources out there. And he’s a prolific writer, consistently at the top in technical book sales yearly. And he’s a Christian, and seems to be a nice guy. Scott released this book recently, and its been getting a ton of press. My understanding is that this book details a seven-step program for taking somewhat average photos and turning them into stunning works of art. Of course, you’ve gotta have good subject matter to start with! Can’t wait to get into this one.

The other book is The Moment It Clicks by Joe McNally. Joe is one of the best photographers out there, and has been spotted at some of the DLWS events. This book got huge raves before it was even released, and sold out its first printing in just a week or so. The second printing is in progress, but I was lucky enough to find a copy at Barnes & Noble the other day. This book is described to be about shooting… mindsets, lighting, and other things at the time of the shot. I’ve read that this book is very conversational in its approach, and I think I’m gonna enjoy reading it!

Tonight’s sky offered a total lunar eclipse, and I thought I’d go out and shoot it. This was the first total lunar eclipse I’d watched like this since I was a kid. I can remember sitting outside with Mom and Dad, sometime in the ’70s, watching a total lunar eclipse on a nice summer night.

Tonight was not summer-like! The temperature was 15°, with a windchill easily down near zero. It was coooold. I braved it through to totality, and enjoyed watching the show.

For shooting, I set up two cameras. I set the 20D up for a timelapse shot. I expected I would take a frame every five minutes, and then stitch ‘em all together at the end, and make this great image. Well…… I sorta shot myself in the foot on that one. Midway through the shoot, I thought I had the lens on autofocus, and changed it to what I thought was manual focus. Bad move, as I had it exactly backwards, and once the lens was on autofocus, the camera wouldn’t shoot because it could get a focus lock on the very dark sky. Bummer.

The second camera was the 40D, and I put the Celestron 750mm/f6 lens on it for shooting near-fullframe images of the moon as it descended into darkness. I’d say that the biggest majority of those images were not very good. I had this set up on my Bogen trike, but even that didn’t appear to be stable enough for this big combination of lens and camera, especially in the light wind. Essentially, I got a log of blurring. I also shot some exposures, especially during totality, that were too long, causing the moon to drift in the frame…. blurring again.

So what are the lessons? Well, the first is to set manual focus on the lens while still in the house! I’d also recommend a heavier tripod, and frankly, a motor drive would’ve been peachy. Having a drive would’ve eliminated some of the drift problems, and would’ve make the shoot much easier. I have that kind of mount on my Celestron C8, but I didn’t pull it out. That was a big mistake.

The last thing would be practice. I need to work with my equipment more for this kind of shoot, perhaps shooting the moon through its phases. That’d be a good training ground, since the shooting conditions are similar, at least up until totality. Since the next total lunar eclipse visible from North America isn’t until late 2010, I think I have some time to hone my skills!

Happy Birthday Sio!!!!!

A few weeks ago, I alluded to some photography news outta me. Well, now I can talk about it.

A representative from the O’Fallon Photo Club reached out to me a few weeks ago to see if I’d be interested in speaking at their club meeting. We’ve worked out the details, and I can now announce that I’ll be speaking at their March meeting, on Wednesday, March 12th at 7pm. They meet at the Renaud Spirit Center in O’Fallon MO.

This is the first time I’ve been asked to speak about my photography, and I’m both thrilled and petrified! I think it’ll be a hoot, and like my father, I can usually find more than enough to talk about to keep folks edutained for the duration of my talk. I’ve got to put together a slideshow, and if I can figure out a way to put it up here, I’ll post it on the ol’ deauxmayne.

Well, it’s pretty simple. I’ve been working my backside off around the house. Some updates….

Scanning: I can finally see the light at the end of the projector, and have about 60% of Roaul’s slides scanned. However, my Epson 2450 flatbed is acting up, so I’m not sure how much longer it’ll take the beatings. It’s oldest piece of gear I’m using — maybe five years old? — and I’ve been beating it like a rented mule over the last couple of months.

Sites: I’ve joined a group of folks from my high school graduating class in one of Yahoo’s groups. There’s some limitations there, and folks wanted a place where they could post larger photos. I’ve spent a good part of the last week getting that set up, and you can see it here.

House: The massive office swap ‘twixt me and Becky is starting to draw to a close. Her new office is painted and just about ready. Last night, I built most of her new desk (finishing it up today), and tomorrow, our guy comes to finish it up. I think we’re gonna have him install some shelving in my closet, and that’ll pretty well finish up what he needs to do. With some luck, things will be settled down in my office in a week or so.

Life, The Universe, and Everything: Busy, busy, busy.

Today: I won’t get much done today on any of these projects. The NASCAR Sprint Cup season opens today with the Daytona 500. Boogiety, boogiety, boogiety!

Any of you who have read this blog for a while know I am just a little obsessive about my storage needs, and the means to back ‘em up…. just in case. I’ve been rethinking my strategies lately, especially in light of putting the new eight-headed monstrosity under my desk.

I talked with someone at work — one of our storage guys — around Christmas about my hard drive strategy. He’d just bought a DSLR, and was looking for suggestions. I think he was surprised that I had spent so much time and effort to ensure that my files were safe. A storage guy was surprised at how I was approaching storage? That must mean I’m doing something right.

So tonight, I started catching up on a billion newsfeed entries — I’ve been a little lax in keeping up with feeds over the last month or so — and I found a great piece by Michael Stewart that talks about drives, specifically, although it also gets into RAID configurations and drive enclosure technologies.

I didn’t read anything in this piece that I disagreed with. I love the idea of big drives for archival storage, and the more devices those drives are in, the better. I think FW800 rocks although eSATA really has my attention, despite having no eSATA gear. I’m also kinda intrigued by using fast, small drives for system drives and cache drives. With eSATA on the outside of the box, having the smaller drives eating up the space inside the case doesn’t seem like such a bad thing. And frankly, if there’s time in an emergency, it’d be very easy to pull the eSATA drive array(s), tuck ‘em under my arm, and run away with them. It’s harder to do that with the Octoputer.

So, if you’re paranoid about your drives (like me), read this piece, look at some of my old rambles about storage and backups, and protect your data! Once I get my new strategy figured out, I’ll write about it, and give you more to chew on.

In the wee hours Sunday morning, I finished scanning Elma’s flats. 1500+ scans, a little over 30GB of storage, and many, many hours have been poured into this project… I am thrilled to have it complete. There’s still some post-production work to do — file naming, and eventually sucking it all into Lightroom for managing — but the biggest part of the work is complete.

Now I can turn the attention of both scanners to Roaul’s slides, and try to get them finished over the next few weeks. You’d think that would be the end of the line for the big archival projects, but Mom’s still looms out there, along with a medium-sized batch from my grandmother, and a big ol’ batch of my images.

I think there’s about 4000 family images preserved through my work so far, and I figure there’s easily another 4000 in the images I mentioned above. Perhaps I can have all that done by the end of the year! Now if I could just figure out how to put them on the web…..

So the other day, one of my Engadget-entrenched Canon buddies sent along a blurb about a new lens from Sigma. This pup is a 200-500mm f/2.8 lens, really seeming to be built for wildlife shots, although I’d guess it’d do well for sports shooting too. There’s also a teleconverter to take it to 400-1000mm at f/5.6. This little dude weighs in at a svelte 35 pounds, and can be had for a cool $25,000. It’s a beast. It also seems to be sporting a green paint job, which frankly, I kinda dig.

One of the threads talking about the Sigma lens started a shooting match of bigger, better, faster, more (again, apologies to 4 Non Blondes).

One of the posters to the Sigma thread pointed at the grandaddy of all Canon lenses (sorta; more on that later). That’s a 1200mm f/5.6L. It comes with its own tripod, and weighs in at a mere 36 pounds. It’s cost? Only $99,000 from B&H. This lens is so legendary that it has its own Wikipedia page, spouting specs, info about the lens including who owns some of ‘em. It’s that rare.

Another lens mentioned in the Sigma thread was an unusual Canon 800mm f/3.8 lens. Supposedly this thing was rare, rare. Weighing about 32 pounds, the only reference someone made to it was an eBay sale about two years ago, selling for just about $4500. It looks like there’s more info here, along with mention of a 2000mm f/11 lens, and a mention of the next monster on the list.

Next up, a really unusual Canon lens…. 5200mm f/14. I have no idea about pricing (although there’s a reference to someone selling one for about $23k), or even when this lens was built, but the document referencing it indicates that it’s also got a tripod supplied with it, and it only weighs 220 pounds without the trike. The closest the thing will focus is about 360 feet, and supposedly can shoot in the 18 to 32 mile range. It even has sighting scopes to train the lens on the target. Now that’s a lens.

Or so I thought.

Carl Zeiss AG also has a big lens. I mean big. It’s a 1700mm f/4 lens. Big. I mean, really big. It weighs over 500 pounds, and the folks at Zeiss claim it was designed for long distance wildlife photography. Duh! I sorta get the impression this was a one-off lens for someone with a Hasselblad 6×6 they were just dying to use for nosehair examination of beasties on the plain. Can you imagine having a lens that big custom-made?

So, as you sleep tonight, and vision of gray lenses dance in your head, remember that there are bigger, more lumbering lenses out there. They can’t dance, and they can’t hardly be carried. But man, do I bet they can shoot!