Cloud Backup

Posted on by Jordan

After having brought Hannah home, and taking a few pictures to prove it, I started to worry, as I am sure many new parents have… “Are my backups good enough?” “Should I be doing offsite backups?” “How am I going to be able to accommodate the sheer volume of digital media being produced here?”

As luck would have it, I happened to be catching up on my Security Now podcasts, and a solution was mentioned that sounded ideal.

CloudBerry is a program that manages archives on a number of 3rd party storage solutions, and allows you to compress and encrypt data before shipping it off to be saved. That wouldn’t be revolutionary, except they have good support for Amazon Glacier.

Glacier is a very low-cost backup option, that was designed with backup in mind, meaning they don’t really expect you to need the data, and you agree that you could be waiting a few hours after your request before they give you access.

Being low-cost was key for our situation, as we have discovered that the appearance of a new baby in our lives sucks up *all* projecting time. That means the “delete extra photos so the backups aren’t huge” project will not be getting done any time soon.

I haven’t actually completed a backup yet… pushing 50+ gigs up to the cloud over our feeble internet connection takes some time, but I am very excited to have found something that appears to meet our needs and won’t cost a small fortune to accommodate the dismaying magnitude of disk space consumed by photos within our network.

-Jordan

Pulling Out The Stops

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We are now under 50 days until the expected arrival of “Baby N”!

 

So far we have:

  • Prepared a room
  • Found and reconditioned baby furniture
  • Ordered and assembled a new crib
  • Decorated the room, complete with large hand made initials
  • packed enough clothes into the room that I suspect “Baby N” will never wear the same outfit twice until well after age 2
  • Performed extensive tune-up maintenance on our designated baby hauling vehicle.

What could be left you ask?

A photography studio! Not to fear though, pintrest has guided us to a whole host of ideas to build one right here in our living room!

As you can kind of see, the design is fairly simple. Just some 2×4 stands over some hardwood flooring, a piece of nice wide trim and a fabric backdrop and you have your very own mock room!

We found the flooring (Real bamboo!) at the local Habitat for Humanity “restore.” We were looking for, and found, a partial box of flooring to use, rather than having to pick up an entire case of something. We also found some scrap wood with neat texture to it that may end up in the background if we manage to get it cleaned up a little before it gets too cold.

Now, you may also be wondering, why this was all setup in our living room? Well because Heather had a friend with a two-week old baby who was willing to let her take some pictures. Sadly I forgot to clear it with Heather and the mom so… just to be on the safe side I will avoid posting anything from their session except to say I think you can look forward to some very nice pictures of our daughter in the near future!

-Jordan

 

 

Three Years

Posted on by Jordan

This post is a few days late… but that doesn’t change the fact that the date seems worth noting.

(Roughly) Three years ago:

 

We took a basic photography class on the actual day of our anniversary. Perhaps not the most romantic thing we could do, but we both learned a lot and enjoyed the class. I may expand on this later, but while I am thinking about it, it was somewhat embarrassing how little we knew about our camera. On the other hand, Heather is able to turn out amazing pictures just by letting the camera automatically configure it’s own settings, so maybe it wasn’t that much of a detriment.

Three years… A lot has changed in that time. I don’t think Heather and I could have ever guessed we would be where we are, doing what we are doing today three years ago. Makes thinking about the future seem both exciting, and futile as we aren’t going to see the interesting stuff coming anyway 🙂

To put it simply we have had a great three years, and can’t wait to find out what the next has in store 🙂

 

-Jordan

Winter Weekend Inside

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We had the kind of grey, hard, cold, cloudy, weekends that makes you want to stay inside forever. Fortunately, Heather had invited a friend over for the weekend, so we still had something to brighten the day.

Given the options, Heather and Elise decided to work up some new head-shots that Elise would use to help promote her vocal music aspirations. After a fair amount of re-arranging furniture and trying different  approaches, they managed to pull together a studio of sorts.

We are really lacking when it comes to indoor lighting for photography, but even on a grey day, the south-facing windows pick up enough to let Heather get something done. While we don’t have lighting, we have sheets and a fan…apparently all vital equipment.

As funny as the makeshift studio looked, it’s hard to argue with the results:

And what was I doing throughout all this you ask?

Well, a week or so back I broke down and ordered a desktop computer from the Dell factory outlet. It was really rough on my pride to buy a pre-built machine, but I just couldn’t match the price they were offering. So, I spent most of the day setting up the new machine and fussing with it.

I think everyone had a good day 🙂

 

-Jordan

Topic-O-Rama

Posted on by Jordan

And now, a handful of news I have been meaning to post.

First up, the week before thanksgiving, Heather and I went to Kansas City. The event was a birthday party for her grandma’s 85th birthday. The majority of Heather’s extended family was there, and we had a really good time. We also witnessed one of the best “we are going to have a baby” announcements ever. Heather’s cousin played a video, featuring his son singing happy birthday to Gigi, and then ended it with “and what are you going to be?” …. “a DINOSAUR!” “no, what are you going to be?” “A big brother!” and at that point the room went wild. I suppose it didn’t hurt that there were so many friends and family members packed into the room, but it really seemed like a great way to break that news.

Heather and I may have to wait a year or two, just so we can come up with a creative way to announce something like that… I mean the bar is pretty high at this point 🙂

Then of course there was Thanksgiving. Strangely, Heather and I did not even pack our camera… so I don’t have any pictures to post. The traditional meal and family time was spent with Heather’s family in Blair. We really enjoyed it! After dinner though, is when things got more interesting, somehow the women came up with a few copies of the sale fliers from all the stores doing Black Friday deals. The living room was total chaos as they passed around adds and debated plans for the big day. Next thing I know, it’s 2:30AM and I am sleepily saying goodbye and goodluck to my wife as she slips out of bed to trek to the mall. They got eight hours of shopping in before even stopping for breakfast!

While they were shopping, I went with Heather’s dad to the Nebraska game in Lincoln. We left at a much more reasonable hour than the shopping crew had, but still got to Lincoln with plenty of time to do a little tailgating before needing to find our seats. Being at the game was really enjoyable. It wasn’t a nail-biting game like the Nebraska vs. Iowa State game that Jim and I had gone to earlier in the year, but I can live with a less-exciting win!

I forget exactly where this falls in the chronology, but at some point Heather and I attended a “lighting of the Christmas tree” event at the mall next door. (For those of you who haven’t been to our hose… we really are next-door to a mall). I was a little skeptical of the event, but they had a live band and free cookies, so we decided to check it out anyway. Maybe you wouldn’t have been surprised at the number of people there, I know I was… At any rate they easily had a few thousand people all standing outside around the little courtyard lake area listening to the band and waiting for the lights. It was cold, but not unbearable, all the same I was happy when Santa finally arrived with his wand to light the tree. You didn’t know Santa had a wand did you? Apparently when Santa lights a tree with his wand, there are fireworks involved! I am a little sad to say the mall Christmas  tree lighting fireworks are going to go down as the best firework show I got to see in 2010. I am happy to say I really enjoyed them!

Speaking of Christmas events, Heather and I attended the Waukee Iowa Christmas festival. Waukee is just outside of Des Moines, and actually closer to us than downtown. We again got a free cookie, and got to watch ice sculpting. Probably the most enjoyable part of that little trip was meeting up whit a few friends from Church. It was wonderful to feel like we actually know people here in town. Some days it doesn’t feel like we have made much progress in that department.

The last, and most recent event I should record before bringing this to a close is photography related. Heather and I just returned from taking family pictures for another of Heather’s coworkers. We learned quite a lot on that trip. A good thing for sure, as Heather books these things to give us chances to practice. One thing we learned is that, although we got a beautiful sunny afternoon, 25 degrees with a 15mph wind is too cold to do outdoor pictures! We also learned that although our camera has a tiny integrated flash, it really can’t do indoor photography. Despite the challenges we encountered, Heather has some rather impressive results! As I write this she is behind me wrapping up the sorting and editing process. It appears we will need to buy an external flash if we want to do more pictures indoors.

And finally, a bonus future event! We are going to a Court of Honor for my Scout Troop! It will be the first event Heather has attended related to scouts in Des Moines, and the first Court of Honor I have been to. I don’t think it is going to be significant enough to justify its’ own blog post, but we will get to see the boys get recognition for merit badges and rank advancement.

I am still hoping that December is less exciting going forward 🙂

-Jordan

Name This Photograpy Style

Posted on by Jordan

I have said a number of times that Heather and I don’t necessarily like the same kind of photography.

For Heather, it’s easy to explain, she likes to take pictures of people.

I have struggled to define what it is that I enjoy with photography though. Over the weekend hunting in Nebraska however, I took a picture I am really happy with.

Not to say that I only want to take pictures of old or rustic things, but hopefully you get the idea? I just feel like I could look at that picture for a long time. It might be that it is a picture of ‘my home’ so I feel more affinity to it than most people would… all the same, I hope to learn to pick more of these kinds of thing out.

And to tie in the title of this post, anybody know the proper term for this? ‘landscape’ doesn’t sound right to me, but maybe it is…

at any rate, I am rather happy with the picture, and uploaded a full-quality version if you click through to gallery 🙂

(full-quality from our little pocked sized camera, the SLR didn’t get to come on my hunting trip)

-Jordan

Web Work

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Wow, you blink and another week goes by.

So, what happened this week?

Heather’s parents came to visit. The occasion was the Huskers playing against Iowa State University. We only managed to obtain two tickets, as it turns out Husker fans suck up all the tickets far quicker than our planning could account for. That may have been ok though, as much as it pains me to say it, Heather is not a football fan. She would not have her moneys worth out of a ticket.

The game was… intense to put it gently, but in the end, the Huskers won it, if only by the smallest of margins.

Sunday afternoon Heather had the opportunity to take family pictures for a coworker. She was on cloud nine for hours, both during the actual picture taking, and the culling and cleanup stages on the pictures.

I would love to show off some of her work, but I don’t know that it is really proper to be throwing up pictures of other peoples kids here.

In less dramatic news, I played around with PHP and javascript to produce these. They are really rough, but I have grand plans for doing a super stripped down version of a gallery, after the program “Gallery” messed up my picture links. We shall see how long that motivation holds out 🙂

Up next week:

Nebraska Deer Season, and  The “Cake Boss” visits Des Moines. I will let you guess as to who is attending what event.

-Jordan

A Payoff

Posted on by Jordan

As many of you know, Heather and I ended up being rather enthusiastic fans of Dave Ramsey program.

A sort of honesty-check moment came back in January, when we wanted to purchase a new camera. Rather than just boot the budget out for a month and buy the camera we started setting aside some money each month.

This past weekend we finally hit the threshold of “enough saved” plus “feeling like we might actually take advantage of the improved features” and decided to buy.

Heather and I are now the proud owners of a Canon Rebel Ti.

I hit the research fairly hard for a few days beforehand, and if your interested, dpreview is an amazing resource. What I found was, in short: It is really hard to go wrong, and really easy to get overwhelmed by information and choices.

I ended up aggressively steering Heather towards this camera primarily because the photography club we joined is made of largely of Canon fans. I figured there would be more people able to help explain the camera, and some of it’s features. We haven’t really figured out how to learn something together yet, so I am trying to leave as many options open for each of us to figure stuff out as possible.

My expectation was, that given the release of the Rebel T2i we would be able to find the Ti fairly cheap. Online it seems everyone else had the same idea, and I wasn’t finding much in the way of a deal. Saturday we made a trip over to the local photography shop with the idea that we should probably hold the camera a few times before we jumped in with both feet. Not only did we like the camera, but they had a rather attractive instant-rebate + second lens deal, making them more attractive than Amazon. The idea of having the rest of the weekend to play with the camera wasn’t too shabby ether 🙂

Having played with the camera for a day or two now, I cannot say enough good things about it. The only bad thing is it is so easy to squeeze off picture after picture (up to three a second!) we managed to create a huge pile of pictures that so far haven’t been sorted through.

The other downside is, as much as we thought we were starting understand photography better, it takes about two seconds to drown in menu options that we don’t understand. The wonderful counterpoint to that is simply that we don’t have to care, throwing the camera into “auto-mode” and shooting turns out better results than we probably deserve to be getting.

I feel a little bad not posing a picture of one of us, but we kind of looked like bums all weekend (or at least the times we had the camera in tow), so you will have to be content with a picture of my other weekend project:

I am rather proud of that too 🙂

-Jordan

Camera Hacking

Posted on by Jordan

I feel a little silly calling this hacking.

Somebody did some really amazing work on the tool I used, but lets be honest all I did was copy a file.

This is really just a step in the path to a fancy camera, but after the photography club I remembered an old Lifehacker post about some software that you could run on some Cannon cameras to do some more advanced things.

What kinds of things?

Well for one, club members were extolling the virtues of “shooting in RAW” instead of JPG. The second reason is getting access to an on-screen histogram.

Why would I want these things? Well, honestly I don’t know first hand, but from what I have read, RAW saves a lot of extra data beyond what is visible. This means you can bring out dark or light parts of a picture in photo shop later. Basically it lets your pictures behave more like film in a developing room. The histogram does most of what having a light meeter would do apparently. (The next step is to read a lot more about how to use the tool, now that I know it works)

Some links:

The Lifehacker Post

The CHDK Wiki (probably more helpful)

I started off following the Lifehacker guide, and was having some problems because the buttons they were telling me to push weren’t working. Then I realized that instructions for the exact model of camera I was using were written up in the section for the Cannon SD800. Using those instructions, I was rather quickly able to get my camera setup with this little program.

I should explain the most amazing part, these changes are 100% in software, and only act in volatile memory, meaning I can always stick in a clean memory card, turn the camera on, and have it be just like it was before I started this process. In the mean time, I now have access to about 500 menu options, about four of which I understand right now.

Learning is fun though right? 🙂

-Jordan