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Between this morning and tonight I have gained FOUR POUNDS, or so says my bathroom scale. My esteemed readers, I assure you that I have not consumed four pounds of anything, in whole nor in sum total, the past fourteen hours.

I submit to you that this shocking gain in mass can only be attributed to the one thing today I have consumed copious amounts of… Ladies and gentlemen: air is fattening.

That’s right. The very air you breathe is turning contributing to the cellulite pockets on your thighs, taking a firm grip from on love handles to curl up by your pot-belly.

Don’t despair we can fight this: for starters, try moderating your consumption of air. Consider taking up non-air-fattening activities such as scuba diving, or cigar smoking.

Most importantly, to be fore-warned is to be fore-armed! Tell all your friends and together we will win the battle over air-fatness!

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I was rummaging through my crate of old CDs and turned up a copy of Office 97. A wave of nostalgia swept over me. I popped in the CD on my laptop—it’s still good! That’s not bad for a backup copy made over 10 years ago using a 1x SCSI CD-R on Windows NT4. Whoa—another wave of nostalgia. I’d better eject the CD before I go and do something nuts like actually install it. The thought of seeing Clippy again is harshing my mellow.

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So you plonked down some semi-serious dough for that big old digital-SLR camera. Surely paying that much money means you can't fail producing some really great snapshots right? Hell yeah! Why do think I paid all that money in the first place… For that kind of money I expect it’s guaranteed that I’ll become a great photographer.

Then you actually try to use the infernal contraption.

You thought parting with several hundred dollars was hard... just wait until you see those first few hundred photos. After about the 500th waxy-milky-fuzzy image you have to make a decision: you are a crap photographer, or its a crap camera.

Here's a hint: its not the camera.

Your New Favourite Letter: “M”

If you want to make interesting photos you’ve got to use the interesting settings. Using your camera into a glorified "point-and-shoot” by leaving it on all automatic settings is a phenomenal waste of money! Get used to “manual” mode – you get so much more control over how your pictures look when you choose the settings, F-stop, ISO, shutter speed and the focus—oh yes, you’re even going to turn off the auto-focus so no machine is going to decide with IT thinks you’re pointing the camera at!

Flip open your cameral manual and find out how to turn off every automatic setting you can find… If you’re not quite ready to walk the tightrope without a net, your DSLR probably has several modes that let you turn off just one automatic feature at a time. Isolating your learning to one feature at a time is a great way for you to put the feature into terms that you understand instead of the mumbo-jumbo you might encounter in a poorly selected “how to” book.

Your New Favourite Word: Exposure

Learn it, live it, love it. Having a good camera is all about how you expose the sensor to light. Control over exposure means three basics: aperture, shutter and ISO. If you’ve tried out turning off at least one feature at a time, you’ve probably noticed how variable your results can be… and probably many of them are just too dark. It’s amazing how the wrong setting can make a bright summer afternoon look like the middle of the night through your camera.

Not to worry, that’s what this learning is all about. Here’s some of my amateur thoughts on the main controls:

F-Stop

F-stop controls how much light comes in to the camera at once—too much light rushing in can wash-out the picture, especially out-of-focus areas like turning your blue sky of fluffy clouds into a flat, greyish blank background. A little less F-stop and you can get nice soft backgrounds, handy for portraiture. Take it too far down and your images are faded, the colours can go kind of flat.

Shutter Speed

Shutter speed also determines how much light reaches your camera sensor, but it’s how much light enters over time. Faster shutter speeds are going to make images darker because they’re not exposed to enough light to make a real impression. This could be exploited to make nice silhouettes. Slower shutter speeds are going to let light areas of your images “burn”. Stuff like clouds will seem to glow with an annoying coloured-fringe at the edges, but some of that depends on the quality of the camera’s sensor. Not so good sensors will probably have more fringe or more colourful fringe.

ISO

Considering the higher the ISO number, the grainier your images can appear (you know, globs of colour that run into each other instead of tiny points of colour), I like to keep the ISO low—200 or 400 if I’m outdoors. ISO 100 seems too hard to me and really takes the pop out of most scenery shots so 200 is often my minimum. Indoors, the sensitivity is going to have to go up to 800 or your images are going to be very dim.

A flash would let you lower your ISO below 800, but if you’re a snap-happy freak like me you’re better off avoiding using the flash as this is going to annoy your average party-goer or art-gallery/museum patron. For now trying to get the best photo without resorting to flash is my current challenge. I’ll either master it or I’ll learn how many flashes-per-minute will annoy the average person on the street then stay under that number.

Now That I've Told you It's All-Right to Fiddle-- Stop Fiddling

If you're ever going to enjoy that camera of yours, find your exposure setting quickly… only practice is going to help here. Once you have your settings right, you probably don't need to change them all that soon, especially if your outdoors since lighting depends more on time of day and weather and those don’t change all that quickly. So stay still and keep trying variations on your settings until you get it right (as in you like what you see coming out of the LCD screen on the back of your DSLR)  then forget about the exposure and start looking for things interesting to photograph.

Conclusion

If the above sound like a lot of work, save yourself some money: return the expensive DSLR and get a point-and-shoot camera instead. Resolutions on these are the same DSLR resolutions from cutting-edge cameras from two years ago and you’re going to enjoy the same automatic-mode settings as the DSLR but for less money.

Really the above should sound like inspiration or at the very least encouragement, the best part of getting a DSLR is the extra dials and switches. Experimentation is fun, now that there’s no film to waste and you can gauge experiment results instantly it should be more fun than ever. You can really amaze yourself with great pictures if you’re willing to not let the camera do all the work.

Tags: photography, dslr, imaging, colour

I dusted off my long-neglected copy of Les Misèrables. The difference between now and fifteen years ago is this time I’m certain I’ll actually finish the thing.

I’ve been reading on the train ride home all week. Normally that would put me well on the way to finishing an average novel but thing—thing is 900 pages of small print (about 12-15 words per line, the usual novel text runs 8-11 words per line). This got me to wondering—how on Earth did this book get read enough to become popular? Were people such voracious readers back in the day that a tome like Les Miz didn’t put them off of starting, much less actually finishing it?

Certainly in this day an age brevity contributes to popularity—In spite of the high page count you could finish a Dan Brown in hours, not weeks. If Victor Hugo were alive today his works could easily go unnoticed because honestly, not enough people would actually read books of this size and weight to popularize it.

Although, there is the “Ulysses” effect… That’s my pet theory that only a dozen people have actually read James Joyce’s Ulysses all the way through—But J.J. has such a good rep for “artistry” that no one wants to admit they don’t get it… For an example of this theory in a modern context, see the reviews of the TV mystery/drama/WTF/show called Twin Peaks. Nobody knew what the hell was going on there, but anybody who raved about the show was certain they knew what was going on.

Did the same fate reach Les Misèrables? Did people start off insisting it was great because they didn’t have 3 or 4 weeks of spare time to finish the book yet they had too much pride to admit the book beat them?

I know of at least one person who read the book all the way to the end, that guy who made the musical… Presuming the book also ends with the lost alien rejoining his parents on a spaceship to outer space.

Tags: novels, reading, classics, great books

I’m actually relieved.

A poster in the lobby of my apartment building saying anyone who didn’t have a registration card yet could sign up on Tuesday—last Tuesday… and they were a no-show!

Next, a quick glance through the Elections Canada website made me wonder if getting re-registered would be a PITA. I was hoping they’d suggest filling out a form at the post office or something. But no, there were numbers to call, postal codes to verify… Maybe the stuff to do wasn’t all that bad, but when you imagined it being simpler before you saw how simple it was—well, that is a let-down.

No matter. The card turned up in the mail today. Now I get to vote and retain my right to criticize whatever government we end up with… Free speech FTW!

Tags: election, voting