Archive for category Blog
Going to China
Sorry, no photos here today.
I’m going to China Tomorrow. Flying off to Beijing, continuing to Shanghai and concluding the trip in Hong Kong, two weeks later. Yahoo Weather suggests sunny yet cold (4° C) weather upon my arrival. Should be fun. See you on the other side…
Cupcakes(.co.il)
About five months ago, Efrat calls me up and convinces me to leave work early, so I can photograph a friend of hers for some fashion blog. This was the first time I met Ofer. That “Hippo Days” post in her blog was the first of many.
Happy Hippos - Behind the scenes
BTW – why didn’t anybody tell me that this is how I look when I photograph?
After almost a month, I decided I wanted in on the action. Ofer has suggested it to me several times, but it was only on July 5th when my first blog post has seen the light of day. After all, it took me a while to setup Wordpress, select a theme, find the plug-ins I wanted, select a name for the blog, create a logo (easy – I can’t design – so there isn’t one) and figure out what I wanted to write about. My initial plan was try and learn all those things photographers are supposed to know, and try to share my findings with others in the process. So I’ve written several tutorials, but the last of them was “published” two months ago. Since then, I found myself adding photos I took which I want to share. I’m really happy with what I came up with so far.
And during all this time, I’m still taking photos of Ofer for Cupcakes.co.il, my favorites (some never shown in her site!) are shown here:
 Ofer - A Colourful Summer |
 Ofer - Onot Maavar |
 Ofer - Going Under |
 Ofer - Not all that glitters is gold |
If you made it this far, I’ll share another small thing with you: I’ve decided on trying to write Haiku poems. This is my first attempt:
Squill of autumn late
Blooms free
As far as my eyes can see
Thanks for listening 
Musing on copyrights…
I’ve had a rough morning, troubled with these questions: do I need to protect my pictures? And if so, what’s the best way to do it?
Here I am, uploading my nice photos (if I may say so myself) for all to see. Others might use them to generate profit. I guess if I saw some of that profit I’d be singing a different tune… The biggest problem with this online world, is that it’s practically impossible to prevent this. I can watermark the pictures – but that can be easily removed or ruin the photo. I can make them smaller (harder to enlarge) but then both of my readers will suffer too. I can add a copyright notice, but then someone from the other side of the world might be using my picture as is and I will never know.
The Internet is an amazing place. The source of my “problem” with copyrighting pictures is also the Internet’s advantage. I’ll admit I used pictures I got off a google search for various private usages (a Facebook event or something). But I have two things to say about that: I never tried to pass something like that as mine, and more importantly: I won’t use it in this blog. The only picture in this blog which isn’t mine is one I got off Wikipedia after making sure the image is released into public domain, and still it was a hard thing for me to do (but I was too lazy drawing it myself for the DOF tutorial).
For the time being, I decided on the third option. I didn’ want to “damage” my precious photos by watermarking or shrinking them beyond recognition. So now I have a Copyright Notice page. I’ve also added a link at the bottom of all pages in this blog to that page. Will this suffice? I hope so.
I’ll end with an ode to the Israeli sunset:
Lucille
Lucille
Sorry for adding a cell-phone picture. Hoping to add decent photos soon enough…
So this is my new (used) Canon EOS 350D:
- 8MP produced from a 22.2 x 14.8 mm CMOS sensor (full details in the link above)
- 18-55mm Canon kit lens (minimum aperture is f/3.5), with UV filter
- 70-300mm Sigma lens (minimum aperture is f/5) with macro and a UV filter
- Nice bag, and an insufficient 1gb card
Why did I get this model? After several weeks of going over 2nd hand online ads, I set my maximum budget to 2000 NIS. Hoping to get change when possible. I can’t quite say why, but I payed more attention to the Canon ads rather than the Nikon ones. Perhaps because Canon sounds more powerful? I’ve been told that people hardly migrate from one camp to the other. So am I to shoot with a Canon my entire life? Time will tell. For the moment I’m just so excited about all the new features I’m guessing even a simpler model would have done the job for me. But the excitement would have ended sooner when I had reached the limit of the camera.
Bottom line, I’ll upgrade this camera at some point (should I pursue this direction of course). This model scored high on many digital cameras web sites. It’s not the first model of a series. There was a 300D, and models range up to 500D. What’s improved in the latter models? Mainly the total mega pixels (15 instead of 8), higher ISO range (extendable to 12800 instead of my 1600), bigger screen and HD video. Yep, it’s better, but I can’t really say that I need all that. And all the annoying things in the 300D were fixed in the 350D. Hoorah!
Get a second hand camera. Yes, the frustration almost drove me to buying a new one. Unless it’s easily affordable by you. And then sell me your old one…