Month: August 2013

For my birthday this year I bought myself some more camera equipment. Specifically a Canon 600 EX-RT Speedlite, the Canon ST-E3-RT radio transmitter that goes with it, and some various accoutrements. ((Rechargeable batteries, rechargeable battery recharger, light stand, light stand flash/umbrella/gimbal hanger-on-thingy.)) This begins my descent into the special hell that is known as flash photography.

I have been an ardent supporter of the “never use your on-camera flash” school of thought. The only time you should do that is if you want a flat, blown-out snap of your friends at a bar. Otherwise, using your on-camera flash is the best way to ruin a good photo.

The important phrase in there is “on-camera”. Using an off-camera flash opens up new realms of photography and also requires me to do something that I’ve resisted for a long time: study.

I’m an amateur photographer; I make no bones about that. While I occasionally serve up what could be considered a good photo, I do that through quantity rather than quality. Thank god for digital photography. However, this flash thing I just bought was purchased so I could do studio-esque photography. This means that no matter how many shots I take, if the lighting sucks, it sucks and that’s it.

I have a lot to learn.

For example: Bad Lighting #1 ((Note that I’m going to be concentrating on what’s wrong with these pictures, not what’s right. My wife and son are, of course, beautiful and wonderful. These photos will be part of an important life collection. They are, however, also part of an important photographic lighting lesson.))

First off, there’s Griffin’s pose with his “back, foul beast!” warding gesture, but with a timer, it’s hard to fix that. ((Don’t bug me about the condition of the backdrop. Sometimes you have to make do, and this is cheap and ironing was too much for my back yesterday.)) Then there is that horrible shadow on the backdrop. The fill lighting on the left side of our faces is not filled enough, and of course there’s me stealing the key light from Jenn.

Bad Lighting #2

Then there’s this one. I picked this as the front page image of the blog post I made yesterday, but honestly it’s one of the worse ones that I displayed. It made the cut because it’s the only one where Griffin’s face could be seen and he wasn’t warding off his demon parents.  There’s the sharp shadow of Griffin’s head on Jenn. There’s again the lack of a good fill light in the shadows on my face. There’s the little key-light spot that showing up on my right cheek. For some reason there weren’t any good defining shadows on Jenn’s face which makes it look flat compared to mine and Griffin’s. Etc.

I could go on, but I won’t. This isn’t a tutorial.

There are a number of great websites out there that give you tips and hints (here’s one). A Google search is all you need to get started. Or, I should say, all I need to get started. I will probably follow the old “see a good picture, then try to duplicate it” style of photography until I understand what I’m doing with the flash. I still haven’t gotten all the way through the manual yet.

You can see some of the other setup or experimental shots I took recently in my flickr set related to flash. If nothing else, this will show how I’m improving (or not!) over time.

Oh. One other thing. If you’re paying attention, you’ll note that I bought just one Canon 600 EX-RT flash. I would love to have two (or three or four) but the budget isn’t set up for that. Instead, I’m using two 150 watt clamp lights along with Alzo 27 Watt daylight-balanced light bulbs. In order to get enough fill light, without adding significantly to the exposure time, I may need to add another couple more. The nice thing about the clamp lights is that they’re easy to move around. The bad thing is that you have to jury-rig a stand for them, and the clamps don’t hold position very well. Despite the image at the link, I ended up up clamping them to the edges of an empty cardboard box and shifting that around.

Griffin, Jenn and I played with my camera equipment today.

A long time ago I bought one of the first versions of Dragon Naturally Speaking. Or whatever it was called at the time. This was 1997. I remember trying it out and being frustrated by the fact I had to train it to understand my speech. Fast forward to 2010 when I got my first android device and started using voice to text conversion. I was always a little disappointed with the way Google’s conversion worked but it worked well enough for what I was using it to do. Then I replaced my android device with an iPhone 4S with Siri. I instantly fell in love with the Siri voice recognition, even though it occasionally has major meltdowns. Its ability to understand natural speech is wonderful and helps me take down notes and thoughts which I then front to other task managers.

I understand Dragon NaturallySpeaking works exceptionally well nowadays. I know there are full-time authors who use it exclusively to write their books. David Weber is an example of this. With Griffin in the house, I find much less time to sit down and draft blog posts. I do not have two hands free even when he’s sitting there next to me just being a squirmy baby. As everyone keeps telling me, having a baby changes everything. Including, I guess, how I’m going to write on my blog.

Unfortunately, using voice recognition is going to introduce a competency problem.

I’ve never had the opportunity, or occasion, to do a lot of dictation like you see in old movies with the boss dictating letters to the secretary. I have grown up in a situation where all of my first drafts are done with a word processor, and the final draft is done by modifying that draft using cut and paste and other tools that came about with the advent of the computer. I have learned through experience how to draft a document by thinking and typing; by editing sentences on the fly and by cutting and pasting as necessary. Moving whole paragraphs around is something I’m used to. I’m not used to stream-of-consciousness composing from beginning to end.

I realize that the dictation/voice recognition element is merely the first step in composing a document, with editing and rewriting to follow, I still find it a bit intimidating to try. For example, about half of this posting was done through dictation to Siri. You may be able to tell which half. I certainly can. Siri, while a good voice translator, does not allow for the long-winded sentences that I like to use. You have to stop occasionally so Siri can do the translation. The PC-based systems don’t have that problem, but there’s a usability issue: I’m not on my PC very much anymore. It’s a hassle to open it and boot up merely to do a blog posting. A PC-based voice recognition software would be useful to me if I were writing longer documents, but knowing myself, I think I’ll probably be doing a lot of Siri-dictation in the near future.

Given that I also own a Chromebook, I am interested in a web-based application that would allow me to do voice-to-text conversion. This would allow me the “Hey, I need to write this down NOW!” ability that turning on my PC does not. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like there are any available that have the features that Dragon does ((There are services like TalkTyper, which works very well, but I’m distrustful of a service I’m not paying for. I would also want the feature that I’m working within whatever wordsmithing application I’m using, rather than a third party website that I then have to copy/paste.)). The Google voice recognition seems to be only for Google searches. So looks like I’ll be using Siri, or nothing. Or, it may be this is all unnecessary rambling as Griffin may change his habits to allow for more writing time for me. We’ll see.

As I mentioned last week, I am transitioning from my old job to a new one. I start the Tuesday after Labor day, which is five short days from now. For the time being, I’m staying home, spending time with Jenn and with Griffin. I’m doing some prep-work for the new job, but mostly that involves catching up on professional literature and getting my mind in the zone to be off and running as soon as Tuesday rolls around.

What is the new job? I’m not telling yet. I’ll let you know on Tuesday. There’s no particular reason for the secrecy other than I like my suspensefulness. I will say that it’s a step up in responsibility, doing the same transportation stuff that I’ve been doing. The office is in Midtown Atlanta, about a block from the High Museum, which will be convenient as Jenn and I are members and I can walk over to enjoy Art at lunch.

The new office location is a shorter commute than driving to Norcross every day, which will make me much happier. I’ll spend (approximately) 2.5 fewer hours in the car per week. I can also use transit to commute which I’m unreasonably delighted about. I don’t think I’ll be using transit regularly, but it’s available if I need it. In my previous office location, I couldn’t get there from here without a car no matter what the situation.

As I said, the job starts next Tuesday. One of the coincidentally nice things about Griffin arriving when he did is he caused us to not attend Dragon Con this year. Instead of the full Dragon Con experience which involves very little sleep and a lot of energy and stimulation leading to an exhausted Bill the week after, we’ll be doing normal weekend things and I’ll be well-rested for my first day of work. We plan to go down to the Con on Sunday evening, but that’s just one night, not the whole enchilada.

Until Tuesday, though, I’m just chillin’ with my peeps, enjoying the time spend with my family and learning how to take care of the little bundle of joy and poop that is Griffin.

Like several of our friends have done, we’ll be taking pictures of Griffin over time in order to display a sense of growth. In order to scale him, we have the wonderful cuddly monkey that Jess gifted to him.

The monkey does an excellent job taking care of Griffin while we’re not watching.

More images of three-week old Griffin at the Flickr set.

Today is my last day at Moreland Altobelli. I started back in April of 2009 and it’s been an adventure and then some.

I was the project manager of the first-in-Georgia, award-winning Ashford Dunwoody Diverging Diamond Interchange; I conducted a number of traffic studies that led to other important projects being constructed; I built signals and recommended safety improvements; I worked with good people and did good things here for the state of Georgia. I learned, and did, a lot of things while I was here.

But, now it’s time to move on. I’m going to spend a couple weeks at home with the Griffin and Jennifer, and then start my new job on Septmber 3rd. It’s a brand new adventure, on top of the brand new adventure we already started this month. 2013 is an exciting year!

Yesterday, on a whim, I checked out the Wikipedia article on Unicode. I have seen the terms “UTF-8” and “UTF-16” and “Unicode” for years but I didn’t have much idea what all that meant.

This tweet emerged from my reading:

I just skimmed the Wikipedia article for Unicode and came to the realization that I KNOW NOTHING. http://t.co/QVVhgenaHP

— Bill Ruhsam (@bruhsam) August 19, 2013

Seriously. Wow. Check out the article and see if you agree. I’ll wait.

It’s both humbling and exciting to realize how little you know about some things. Things that have been outside your realm of learning or experience. I read this statement from the article…

Unicode, in intent, encodes the underlying characters—graphemes and grapheme-like units—rather than the variant glyphs (renderings) for such characters. In the case of Chinese characters, this sometimes leads to controversies over distinguishing the underlying character from its variant glyphs (see Han unification).

…and realized that if I could understand what those words mean when all put together, I’d have a much better understanding of a topic, because while all those words are English, I had no idea what that sentence means.

Learning is fun. Everybody should skim Wikipedia occasionally.

Griffin came home from the hospital yesterday. We had the first day and night at home. The day was easy, the night was less so, simply because we’d spent three days getting used to taking care of him at the hospital with all the equipment, chairs, tables, etc. that were there. Now we have to learn to do the same things at home with our own chairs, tables, beds, etc. It’s a learning experience.

Still, the little guy is doing well and continues to be a tiny little cute bug.

If you’ve been following my Twitter stream, or looking at Flickr, or receiving texted images over the last few days, you will have met the birthing team. Of most importance, of course, is Jenn and Griffin, and I had some small role in helping out, but let me introduce you to Jessica Stansel and Jacob Hollis. Literally, I don’t think we could have done this without them. They were both there to help out with Jenn during labor, assist with fetch and carry tasks, hold hands, stay with Jenn while I was in the NICU with Griffin, hold Griffin while Jenn and I rested, fetched food, assisted in hand-feeding, basically doing everything that would have been extremely difficult for two people, especially one who has a bad back. We love these guys and we’re privileged to have them by our side to help out.

There are more images loaded up at the Griffin Ruhsam Flickr set. Here are a sample.

As always, updates are most easily found at my Twitter stream.