Today is the 3rd Worldwide Photowalk, hosted in cities everywhere. I participated in the downtown Durham, NC one.

I chose to travel light and I took only one lens on my T1i and carried it on my R-strap. That was a good choice as it was hot as hell and I was happy not to be lugging a lot of gear around. I did miss my macro lens a few times but I’ll go back to get some of those shot another day. The other gear I brought that I would highly recommend for anyone doing this in the heat were a wide brim hat and a camel back for water – those made all the difference in making it a great walk and not a hellish one.

The whole walk was great and we had a pretty nice crowd. I’ve shared my favorite shots from today on Flickr.

Well, I’m past the half way point for my Project 365! Even to my own surprise, I haven’t missed a single day yet.

It’s been a great way to force me to explore new techniques and subjects. One of the coolest aspects is that I can remember something about every single day this year by looking at the photos. It also reminds me that time moves far too fast!

The other aspect that I haven’t done enough of is the great community participation. Other people doing these projects contribute to flickr pools and we comment on each other’s work. That’s been helpful motivation to keep going and also provided some inspiration to try new shots. For the second half of the year I’m going to try and browse and comment on more of other people’s work.

I quit Facebook this weekend and I left Twitter a few months ago. I quit Facebook once before by deleting my account but I found that I still wanted to be able for friends and family to see photos and stuff so this time I’ve kept it active and have my Flickr account linked to it. We’ll see how long that lasts before I actually go delete it again.

The signal to noise ratio is all wrong on these platforms. Even after keeping your friends list trimmed and hiding all of the stupid games and such, what value are these sites bringing to your life? Sure, I like to keep up with people I care about but I can do that by actually talking to them. The bulk of the posts are not anything that will affect my life in any way, positive or negative. The time sink that these sites create though, will.

Social networking can be an addiction more than a value add to your day; just another way to kill time instead of doing something productive or with lasting value to your life. I quit watching network television a couple years ago for the same reasons and I don’t miss that either. Go cold turkey for a month and tell me what you’re missing… IF you can make it that long.

I’m long term fan of the guys at Manager Tools and I think there’s plenty to learn from those podcasts even if you’re not a manager. That being said, they’ve got a series of podcasts designed for the individual contributor role now too: Check out Career Tools.

Seth Godin: Quieting the Lizard Brain on Vimeo – you want to do great things? Focus on finishing things.

Practice makes perfect, right? I’m embarking on a year long “project 365” to take a photo every day. I’ll be posting them on Flickr.

I finally tried some of Starbuck’s new Via instant coffee and it’s actually pretty good. It’s not regular instant freeze-dried-whatever-the-hell-instant-coffee-is crap. Via is “micro ground” coffee beans that you just add hot water to and you’ve got a cup of coffee. You can see some fine particles in the last sip of the cup but you can’t detect them in the coffee in a bad way.

Via is going to be my coffee of choice for the next camping trip for sure.

Hearing about Google Wave and not sure what it is? There is a good 10 minute video from Google showing some examples of it being used here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6pgxLaDdQw&feature=player_embedded

Cool stuff. I think I’m going to plan poker nights with it… if only more of my friends can just get accounts already!

Just a sampling of my favorites from the past week:

“Why didn’t you tell us in advance of the unscheduled outage you didn’t know would happen?”

“Is there any technical reason you’re doing this?”

“It’s your job to figure out what I really needed even though you gave me exactly what I asked for, that’s called customer service.”

Sigh.

Thank you to all of you that make IT work! Happy System Administration Day!!!

Shooting macro photography without a tripod is hard. You need a lot of light and you’re trying to balance the depth of field with a fast enough shutter speed to get a sharp picture. Bump your ISO up too high and you loose detail and get noise.

So here’s a little trick I picked up. Set your exposure compensation down a stop or two. You’ll under-expose the shot but the detail will be there. Back home you can push the exposure back up in post processing the RAW file.

I got this little guy hand held at ISO: 400, Exposure: 1/45 sec, Aperture: 8.0 with -1 stop set. It works!

I plan on posting more on some of the features that those of you with digital SLRs should learn how to use and get off of that blasted full auto mode… however, let’s start with a basic thing: RAW.

If you’re not shooting RAW, that’s an easy one to turn on. If you’re nervous about it, most cameras will let you set RAW + JPEG and you can at least have the option of the power of RAW files. Granted, it will take more storage on your card but it’s worth it. Trust me… here’s a good article on RAW vs. JPG.

I’ve been showing a few of my HDR photos to some friends and one of them suggested I post an example of what the images would look like without the HDR process involved.

So, here’s an example of a sunset at the beach while we were on vacation with an average exposure:

We can go two stops over or under exposed but as you see we have to give up something to do that… either the details in the sky get lost or the details in the sand get lost:

After combining all three images into an HDR photo, you can see that all the detail is there in the sky and in the sand. Here’s that final image:

HDR for the win!

I’ve created a new planet on sysadminblogs.com for photography blogs. You can send me your category feeds (like my photography category posts will go to that blog as well as planet sysadmin) or send on any photography blogs you think are cool.

Check it out at http://www.sysadminblogs.com/photography/

I will be populating the list of feeds this week while on vacation

HDR Photography is totally cool if you haven’t seen it. My first few tries are here: http://picasaweb.google.com/joe.obrien/HDR#

Now I just need some more things to try it on… I’m thinking Centennial campus at NCSU may be cool.