Had a great weekend up in the Seattle area, visiting Tara. We saw a couple of movies, listened to Nanci Griffith play music at the zoo, and played a little WoW (when the internet connection allowed). We also visited the Gasworks Park (after a stop at a bakery for breakfast) and took a walk along the water. Here are a few photos from that.

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I’ve used several different methods of getting my photos online to share them with friends and family. I’ve settled on flickr as the easiest for me (which means that I’ll get more photos up there to show off). Lately, though, I’ve run into situations where I want to just show those photos on flickr to my friends and family, not the whole world. There are a couple of reasons for this, the most sensitive is that some of my daughter’s friends families do not want just anyone to be able to see their pictures online. Yet my daughter would like to share pictures of herself and her friends with our family, so what do I do?

Well, there’s a privacy setting in flickr, you can set it for each set of photos or for individual photos. The privacy setting will make it so that only flickr members that are listed as your friends and family can see the photos. That’s fine, but only my mom and sister are members. What about other friends and family that aren’t members?

Flickr has a solution for that problem, as well, but it was confusing to me at first. It’s called a guest pass and the idea is that you create a set of photos, then you create a guest pass to those photos, and you can email this guest pass to anyone you want. When they click on the link, they can see the photos included in the set.

But I like to create my own email when I’ve set up some sets for my relatives. I just found out that you can just get the guest pass link to the set, instead of having flickr send out an email. That should work for me. I can create a set of the photos I want to share, set their privacy to friends and family, then get the guest pass link to send out to my friends and family.

That way the photos will be hidden from the general public but my relatives will be able to see them, even if they aren’t members of flickr.

So, here are the steps I take to share my photos (but hide them from the general public):

1. Upload the photos to flickr, set the privacy level to friends and family only (I usually create a new set at the same time).
2. Visit the set I just uploaded and click on the ‘Share This’ button
3. Click on the ‘Grab the Link’ button at the bottom of the drop down window
4. Add a guest pass by clicking on the Friends and Family checkboxes
5. Click on the ‘Get New Link’ button
6. Select the link at the top and copy and paste that into the email I send out to friends and family.

A few extra steps, but now my private photos are private and still shareable with my family.

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We purchased a Nikon D40 Digital SLR and we love it. We chose the Nikon because Ted had a Nikon ages ago (when we shot film) and has lenses for it. We went for the D40 versus the 10 Megapixel D40x for two reasons: price and the fact that David Pogue has been saying for awhile that Megapixels don’t really matter, 6 is enough.

So far, we’re very happy. First impressions: the camera is very, very fast, to start up and to focus and to take pictures. I took it to the Flower Festival in Lompoc and got these shots:

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We’re always looking for the perfect, portable tripod to take along with our camera gear. We’ve had full-sized tripods, we have a mono-pod (like a walking stick that you put your camera on top of, we don’t use it much), and we’ve had many different small, light weight tripods, but I think I’ve finally found my dream tripod: the Gorillapod.

This is a fantastically versatile tripod. You can wrap it around a post, set it up on any kind of surface and it’s light weight and small enough to stick in a (large) pocket.

Besides, it looks really cool and it could probably be sold as a fidget toy. Each of the little joints on the legs bends and slides.

It comes in two sizes. We have the larger size, which is a bit sturdier than the smaller size and is designed for larger cameras.

Either size would be a good addition to a camera bag. You can see the gorillapod in action in the shots below.

You can check it out in my amazon store, by clicking here.

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I love card readers. I don’t think I’ve every plugged my camera into my computer to download the photos, I’ve always had a card reader. My first one came free with the compactflash memory card I bought and it was a pc card, that fit into the pc card slot on the side of my powerbook. Very cool. It’s much easier to pull the card out of my camera, put the camera safely in its bag, and then download the photos to my laptop.

I’ve graduated to a 15 in 1 USB 2.0 reader for a couple of reasons. My current macbook pro doesn’t have a pc card slot (it has the much smaller express card slot that isn’t large enough to take a compactflash card and I now have two kinds of cards I need to read. USB 2 is plenty fast and the reader is quite compact (similar to this one in my amazon store).

Even for people who have just a single kind of memory card, a multi-card reader could be a good buy. Why? Because those of us using a digital camera tend to be the photo people in our families. I like being able to download photos from everyone else’s cameras to make a quick slide show or burn a photo cd.

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A lot of people have a love/hate relationship with digital cameras, love the instant gratification of being able to see the photos on the LCD, hate the lag between the time they press down the shutter release button and when the camera actually takes the picture.

You can miss a lot in that fraction of a second, especially if you’re taking a picture of something moving fast, like a dolphin jumping out of the water. With two quick tips, you can learn to get rid of that lag.

Tip 1

Press the shutter release halfway down. This will make the camera focus and take a light reading. Now, it’s ready to take the picture right when you push the shutter release all the way down.

Tip 2

You’re probably planning to take a picture of something that isn’t there (like that dolphin that’s under the water when you focus where it’s going to be jumping), so focus on something that’s in the same place. I usually choose the ground where I know they’re going to be (or the water) and then move the camera up (still holding down the shutter release half way).

Tip 2.5

To be able to focus exactly where you want, you need to set the auto focus to focus only in the little square in the middle. Recent cameras are ’smart,’ they try to guess what you want in the frame in focus. You’ll have to read through your manual so you can set the focus to the center square.

Here are a few photos we took at Sea World (one by my daughter, who’s 9 years old, so pretty much anyone can use this technique):

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We got a new camera for our trip to Hawaii at the beginning of August. We didn’t go out looking to buy a new camera. Here’s what happened:

We really wanted to take pictures underwater. We had two digital cameras, a Canon Powershot G6 (7.1 Megapixels, pretty expensive and we love it) and a Nikon Coolpix 2100 (2 Megapixels, cheap and we don’t particularly like it).

So, we looked into getting an underwater case for one of the two cameras. We’d rather use the Canon, but had killed its predecessor on Maui using an underwater casing. We found a casing for the Kodak, but were reluctant to spend $150 on a casing for a camera that we really didn’t like using and didn’t have much resolution.

I started to look at underwater digital cameras. At first, I thought we could find a cheap one like the disposable underwater film cameras. Nope, but I found this camera: Pentax Optio W10.

It was $260 from Amazon when we bought it (take a look in our new Amazon Store: Pentax Optio W10). It’s waterproof (though they’ll only say it’s good for a depth of 1.5 meters) and dustproof, has 6 megapixels resolution and a large LCD. The reviews looked good, so we went for it.

And we’re happy we did. The camera isn’t perfect, but for the price and for taking pictures and movies underwater, it was fantastic.

Plusses

The camera operated as advertised underwater. The only opening is a single cover for the battery and memory card. It’s easy to open and easy to close. The little toggle has orange behind it so you know when it’s closed correctly.

The LCD is large, it can get washed out in bright light, but I managed to use it underwater. The size of the camera is just about perfect, small enough to fit in a pocket but not one of the credit card sized cameras that are awkward to hold. And it’s pretty tough, it survived a 6 foot fall off the porch of our vacation rental.

It has a dozen plus modes, which were fun to play with, though it took me a few tries to get the settings for the focus and exposure like I wanted them (focusing at the center of the LCD, then keeping the focus when I recompose the shot).

The pictures looked good to me and it takes nice, high quality movies. Take a look:

Minuses

The focus was a bit finicky compared to our Canon. There were times when I couldn’t get the Pentax to focus, even on distant objects, when the Canon would focus fine. Low light focussing was also difficult.

Some people complained about the wimpy chord on the camera, especially since you’re taking it into the water. We solved that problem by attaching a boogie board leash that we could Velcro around our wrist when we used it in the water. Worked just fine. It was also easy to tuck into our wet suit.

Probably the worst flaw is the sound when taking movies. This is something I read about in some of the posts about the camera. And now I know what they are talking about. There’s a loud clicking on the sound track of the movie, much louder than anything else that’s recorded. It makes the sound function unusable. But, I know what’s causing it and how to stop it: the sound is the lens auto-focusing. To prevent it: set the focus to pan focus (which is a 4 click process, not too bad). Wish I’d researched that while I was in Hawaii and used the fix.

You can check out the Pentax Optio W10 camera (and other cameras) in the Cornercode Amazon Store.

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We’ve been taking pictures (film and digital) for many years. Ted (the computer consultant half of the Cornerstone duo) even minored in photography in college. We’ve always tended more to pictures of people and animals than pictures of plants, but lately, I’ve been turning the camera towards flowers.

I finally figured out that the advice I’d been hearing and taking about people (get closer, any picture can be improved by getting closer, from Derrick Story’s Digital Photography Pocket Guide) applied equally well to flowers. And flowers don’t get embarrassed when you shove a camera in their face and suddenly look like deer caught in headlights.

Take a look at the three photos below, all of flowers in our turtle pond:

Only difference is how close I got and how I chose my point of focus (what the photo’s about).

Which do you like best? I like the last and closest one.

Here are a couple more flowers I’ve taken recently:

Artichoke

Lavendar

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