2008 in Review

Last year at this time, I wrote three big posts on the preceding year.

This year, I'm going to write a little bit less.

The main topic early this year was hardware, especially the Sigma 600mm, and included some Reviews. Heck, this isn't a hardware blog, but it sure looks like one sometimes because I like hardware. I also explored RAW software to replace my aging RawShooter and settled on Bibble Pro.

My main subjects were the usual birds and insects with a little baseball thrown in.

Near the end of the year my main focus was microstock and I even set up a little studio in the garage. Of course, then I got distracted by my PhD and microstock was mostly forgotten. It didn't help that the future return was very low for the effort put in.

Which brings me up to now. I'm still hard at work finishing my dissertation and so that is the main blog I've been updating. For the future? Well, once I defend in February I'll have some more time to do photography.

I have plans for a new website which I am very excited about but I've promised myself I'll wait until I defend before I set anything up. Let's just say if you like cheap used hardware, you should like what I have in mind.

This Is Not A Hardware Blog...

... even though it is beginning to look like one.

There are three reasons I've been posting more about hardware lately.

First, I've gone on a hardware binge (although $200 worth of hardware isn't much money-wise). And as usual, when I buy camera lenses and flash modifiers, camera lenses and flash modifiers are on my mind, and what's on my mind ends up here.

Second, it is simply a matter of giving readers what they want. Only two people responded to my post to see who was reading (thanks ruacatlover2 and Aiden!). I know other people read it (including relatives) but not everyone likes to comment; I'm ok with that. Lately my search hits have been increasing and have become three-quarters of traffic. The most popular pages in search are hardware-related (especially the one where I mention the Lambency Flash Diffuser), so I've been ok with posting more about hardware. Hopefully I'll get back to some photo related posts.

And finally, it's been raining almost every day for the last few weeks. It's really hard to get out and shoot (which is what I've been dying to do with the new Sigma 600mm) when it is constantly pouring. That's ok though, I know I'll get six months of uninterrupted sun this summer.


So, that's what's been on my mind lately.

I'm planning on getting the FD/EOS converter post up in the next few days (I had to make another light box for quick product shots because my previous box died in the move -- the new one is bigger and better, I think).

Sadly, I'm still waiting for the Lambency Flash Diffuser from DealExtreme. They aren't kidding when they say 14 day delivery time -- I ordered Jan 7th, it left DealEx on Jan 14th, and it left Hong Kong on the 24th (three days ago????). Needless to say, don't order anything from them if you want it fast (by fast, I mean within a month).

I'm also waiting for a used Canon 100mm F/4 Macro (FD mount). That was supposed to be shipped on Tuesday via priority mail from Colorado, so I'm quite surprised it hasn't arrived yet. Hopefully it will show up today.

2007 in Review: Sound Off!

Ok, so we've reviewed the first year of Please Excuse Me... for both statistics and content.

Now is the time to see who's reading and what you want to hear. So, if you are a regular reader or just stumbled on the site today, if you are a family member, friend, or a photography fanatic in another country, please leave me a comment. You can be anonymous if you like, I don't mind. I just want to get an idea of who is reading and what my audience is interested in.

So, to that end, let me know if there's anything about the site you like, if there's anything you hate, and if there's anything you'd like to see more of. If you have a photography blog similar to this one, leave a link, I'll check it out.

I'm really looking forward to seeing who's reading the blog. From my stats, it looks like there might be 30 or so regular readers, but it's really hard to tell the specifics. Any feedback I get will be greatly appreciated!

Thanks for reading!

2007 in Review: A Brief Overview

[This is the second in a series of three posts reviewing the past year of Please Excuse Me While I Clean My Lens. The first is here.]

It took a while, but I finally completed my relabeling task. Turns out it required a lot more time and thought that I expected. Throughout the post below, I've linked specific posts and groups of posts corresponding to the major topics of this blog. If you are new to the blog, this post is a great way to catch up on the topics that interest you.

Also, all posts labeled with about relate to the purpose of this blog -- check them out if you are trying to get acquainted with the site.

So without further ado, let me give you a brief review of the first year of this blog.

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The blog began on January 1st, 2007 as a Photo-a-Day blog; my goal was to post a photo each and every day for a year. I had just received a Canon Digital Rebel XT for Christmas and I was wildly taking pictures of everything around me. Some of the photos were quite good, but in general, most of them weren't since I was just starting. For instance, check out the difference between my images from January '07 and my images from December '07. Quantity was the best part of the Photo-a-Day task -- it forced me to take a ton of pictures and process them.

I ended up posting a photo almost every day for a little under three months. During that time I took a lot of pictures, but some of the main themes were Stanford, places I visited, nature, and art in the area. It was during this time that I also discovered DPChallenge and Strobist, two amazing resources that pushed my photographic technique ahead by leaps and bounds. Eventually, though, posting a picture every day was too much of a chore and I burned out. So, at the end of March, I decided a new direction was needed.

The new direction was a focus on quality over quantity of posts. Instead of a post every day, I wanted to get a post up every few days but make the posts more useful. Over the next month I posted about what I cared about, including a new welcome post, camera hardware (a common theme in the blog), and whatever else I could think of. I also started the Quick Tip series (short, focused advice I wish I knew when I started photography) and the Anatomy of a Photo series (more in-depth descriptions of how certain images came to be).

The newfound freedom to break out of a photo each post each day let me explore other interests related to photography, including running a blog (and exploring various resources like Google Adsense for monetizing it), writing reviews, doing DIY projects, and linking things I find interesting.

I also decided to take a crack at starting a small location portrait photography business and wrote up a business plan in late May. Over the summer I completed a number of portraits of friends but realized it wasn't really the way for me to go at this time. First, there are a number of legal and financial issues that'd be difficult to overcome; the main one being that I'd stand to make a lot less money than I can make with my SAT tutoring job for the same amount of time invested. Second, while I enjoyed it, I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as I thought I would. And finally, we moved off of Stanford campus.

During early summer I was also heavily involved with making DPChallenge images for the DPL. We ended up squeaking into the playoffs, but lost to the eventual winner. The experience was great and really helped me to define my interest in macro photography (especially flowers and insects).

By the end of the summer, I was quite burned out, and the post output declined during August and September. In October I came back to photography with renewed interest, and produced a lot of posts until the end of the year. I've also found, more recently, that I'm really interested in bird photography.

Currently, I'm going through another slow period, although I have some posts planned for the near future, including a few more DIY projects. Stay tuned!

2007 in Review: Statistics

Happy 1st Birthday!

Today is the first birthday of this blog, started exactly one year ago on January 1st, 2007. In honor of the milestone I'm going to post a series of entries relating to where the blog has been, what is contained in the blog, and where it is going. A large part of that will be to reorganize (or, maybe I should say, organize for the first time) a lot of the labeling.

For now, I thought I'd kick off the 2007 in Review series by posting some statistics from 2007. Of course, since I've only been using Google Analytics since April, all of my web stats only reflect the past six months.

• Days Active: 365
  
• Total Posts: 200
• Total Comments: 30 (about 12 are mine)
  
• Total Visits (6 mos): 5,437
• Total Pageviews (6 mos): 8,423
• Posts including the word Stanford: 22
• Percent of Traffic from Search/Referrals/Direct: 56.15% / 37.15% / 6.69%
• Percent of Traffic from Strobist: 25.92%
  
• Posts mentioning Strobist: 28 (that's it?)
• DPC Challenges entered: 35
• Hours spent posting, inspecting stats, etc: uncountable
• Money earned through Google Adsense: If I told you, I'd have to kill you (ballpark is a meal at McDonalds)
• Value of what I've learned: priceless
  

While I'm at it, how about the ten most popular pages:

1. Tamron Reviews: 17-50mm f/2.8 vs 19-35mm f/3.5-4.5
2. $9 DIY Ring Light
3. Squint-Reduction: Cross-light with the Sun
4. Review: Nikon SB-20
5. Review: Tamron AF 70-300mm F/4-5.6 LD Macro
6. DIY Macro Ring Flash #1: Introduction
7. How To Test Autofocus
8. Anatomy of a Photo: Lens for eBay
9. Review: Reversed Nikkor-H 50mm F/2
10. Keeping Count

Obviously, people like to read about camera hardware.

Keep an eye out for my next 2007 in Review post summarizing what's gone on in the blog over the past year. It may take a day or two though because I want to reorganize the labels to simplify navigation.

Brief Glossary of Photography Terms

Some of the material on this site may use terms that are unfamiliar to those new to photography lingo. The glossary below may help, I'll keep it updated as I see terms that should be on this page. For more detail, follow the Wikipedia links or check out one of these more comprehesive glossaries:

• DPReview's Glossary
• About.com's Photography Glossary

BRIEF GLOSSARY OF TERMS:

• 100% Crop: This means the image is shown pixel per pixel on your monitor. A 200% crop means each image pixel takes four pixels (two horizontal, two vertical) on your screen.
• Chromatic Aberration: a lens problem where different colors of light bend travel through the lens slightly differently and cause purple or cyan halos around edges of high contrast. Mostly a problem for cheaper lenses.
• Composition: The placement or arrangement of the elements of a photo. Composition is really hard to define, but it is essential a measure of how interesting the picture is, on the whole. Often, composition is more of a function of the shapes, colors, and intensity of an image than the subject itself. While composition is relatively subjective, most people will often agree if an image is well-composed or not.
  
• DSLR (or dSLR): SLR camera which uses a digital microchip sensor instead of film.
• Film Speed: The sensitivity of film to light, where lower values are less sensitive, require longer exposure times, yet have less grain (noise). Typically measured in terms of ISO, such as 100 ISO is a pretty slow daylight film with small grain (low noise). A 400 ISO film is useful indoors because it requires 1/4 of the light to generate an exposure, but has more grain. Digital cameras also use the ISO linear scale to electronically control the tradeoff between sensitivity and noise of the imaging chip.
  
• Focal length: An optical specification (usually in millimeters) of a lens reflecting how much of the scene the lens can render on the sensor. For 35mm cameras, 50mm is a normal lens (approximating the eye), 35mm or less is a wide-angle lens, and 80mm or more is a telephoto lens. On digital cameras with a sensor smaller than 35mm size (such as the Digital Rebel series, 20D, and 30D) you need to adjust the true focal length to get the 35mm equivalent. For most Canon cameras with smaller sensors, this multiplier is 1.6.
• Glass: Slang, meaning lenses and optical equipment.
• Grey-market: Something (usually electronic equipment) bought overseas and then shipped to the USA. Usually identical to the USA version but the manufacturer won't honor the USA warranty for a grey-market item.
• ISO: See film speed.
  
• Saturation: The purity of a color. For instance, a bright, pure red is highly saturated while a pastel red has low saturation.
• Shutter Speed: The amount of time the film (or digital sensor) is exposed to light from the scene. Typically measured in fractions of a second.
  
• SLR: Single-Lens Reflex. A type of camera which uses a single lens for both the viewfinder and taking the pictures, so what you see is what you get (mostly). The reflex refers to the use of a moving mirror to allow dual use of the lens.
• Soft: When referring to an image, it means the image is not sharp and out of focus. When referring to lenses, soft means the lens produces unsharp images even when focused well.
• Vignetting: a lens problem where the corners of the image are darker than the center.
• Wide-open: A maximum-size aperture setting (for the 50mm f/1.8, an aperature of f/1.8 is wide open).

Welcome To 'Please Excuse Me..."

This is the new 'starting' page for this blog -- read on to learn about who I am and what this blog is about.

Executive summary:
This blog is aimed at financially-impaired amateur photographers shooting using digital SLRs. I focus on:

• Acquiring useful hardware on a budget
• Combining acquired equipment with cheap do-it-yourself solutions
• Technique (including the lessons I've learned)
• My personal progression as a photographer
  

About Me:
I am a graduate student studying Computer Science (focusing on robotics) at Stanford University. I am a husband, father of two, an SAT tutor/teacher with Revolution Prep, and an amateur photographer. My overall goal is to become a better photographer and eventually get to a point where I can make a little money on the side from photography if I choose to.

My main photographic interests are nature and people, especially macro photography and portrait photography. But I like to try a little bit of everything.

Oh, and I shoot Canon. But this blog is far from Canon-centric.

About This Blog (and some history):
Back in January, I started this a photo-a-day blog named Stanford Photo-A-Day. The primary goals were to get me to shoot more often and publish pictures, both of which happened. What I didn't foresee was my life getting more busy from my second job and eventually posts degenerated into a picture with a sentence or two saying something like "this is a tree". So, after almost three months, I abandoned posting a photo each day.

The nice thing about the PAD experiment was I really did take a lot of pictures and there was (is?) a definite progression as my skills in taking the pictures and processing them got better. For that reason, I am leaving the archives up, but don't be surprised to see similar pictures on successive days as I was scraping the picture barrel.

Since I started, I realized that there really is a niche on the web for information on cheap entry-level camera gear. Most informational photography sites on the web are from professionals, so they really have no need for a $100 lens. Yet, if you try to get into this hobby on a budget, you'll probably only have $1,000 to spend (if you are lucky) and you'll need to fill your equipment needs with $100 lenses and used e-bay accessories. To make my selections I've often had to spend hours searching in Google, old forum posts, and cobbling the information I need together from a number of sources before I send $30 out for the item I want.

I think putting a lot of that information in one place could be really useful for some new photographers with limited funds. That is my goal.

I must admit the biggest influence for the retasking of this blog has been David Hobby's Strobist. Until I saw Strobist, I didn't realize how a simple blog structure could be such a great resource for a novice (many blogs are... well... scattered). But, rather than being quite as focused as Strobist, I'm going to let other parts of my photography leak into the blog (and some parts of my life). I'd like to continue to document my learning curve and the lessons I've learned along the way.

For now, the name of the blog is Please Excuse Me While I Clean My Lens, but I actually don't like it very much. Over the next few weeks I'm going to figure out a better name that fits the subject of the blog a bit better. For historical reasons, I've left the url as http://stanfordphoto.blogspot.com but I may change that in the future as well (please don't sue me stanfordphoto.com!).

Navigating this Blog
Borrowing from Mr. Hobby, I'm going to bend the usual blog conventions and edit previous posts to reflect up to date information when necessary (such as this post).

The best place to start is the site navigation links at the upper right of the page. It includes links to each of the series of posts, including Articles (essays using my photographs to illustrate), Quick Tips (simple ideas that have helped me make better pictures), Reviews (both hardware and software that I use), and the Anatomy of a Photo series (where I break down the process that went into a given photo).

At the right I've also provided links to the sites which I have found most useful or visit every day.

Finally, feel free to look through the archives... if you dare!

[Useless disclaimer thingy: The opinions expressed on this blog are mine alone and don't reflect opinions, policies, or anything related to Stanford, Revolution Prep, or my wife. If I say something stupid, blame me, not them. Oh, and I don't hold any trademarks of anything on this page. But I do hold the copyrights on my original pictures on this blog.]


Update: If you are still interested, the next post you should read is the brief overview of 2007. It includes handy links to all of my most popular tabs and is an easy way to hone in on your interests.

Also, I'd love to get feedback on what you like and don't like about the site and the 2007 in Review: Sound Off! post is a great place to do it. Thanks!

A New Direction

Until two days ago, I had posted on 86 (almost) consecutive days. But guess what I decided...

Quality is more important than quantity.

Lately it has been harder and harder to get pictures up every day without putting up pictures that don't really serve a point. More of an issue is that I find I just can't put much time into each post, so they end up being more of a 'this is a picture of Dora taken for a DPChallenge contest' (such as below, which I didn't bother to post a few days ago). Lets be honest, just showing pictures is not that interesting. Telling a story is.


And while I'm not really trying to get lots of readers, I have a picture repository on my computer, and if I just simply wanted to share them with people, I'd use a Flickr account (note to self, get Flickr account).

So this is what I decided -- this is no longer a photo-a-day blog, more of a photo every 2-3 days type blog. Actually, more to the point, I'd like to actually get posts than mean something up, which many times will take more than one picture. So, yeah, I'll keep updating, but I'm going to slow down and do fewer, better posts.

So, hopefully in the next few days, I'll change the appropriate headings to fit this new direction. I've also been meaning to put 'best-of' links in the side-bar and do some labeling.

Welcome to Stanford Photo-a-Day!

Welcome to the Photo-a-Day blog based in and around Stanford University, CA.

Who am I? My name is Sean and I am an 8th(!) year graduate student at Stanford, married with two children, who has decided to pursue photography as a hobby.

What is Stanford Photo-a-Day (SPAD)? SPAD is something I've decided to put together as an experiment. Really it is just a blogged collection of my better pictures, many which relate to Stanford life. You'll see photos of buildings, people, and life in and around Stanford University with the goal of posting a new photo each day. Some days I might write for pages about one thing or another, some days you'll just get a photo.

Why am I doing it? Photography is my newest hobby in a line of many hobbies (which I pursue intently for a year or two until I get bored). Personally, I love seeing photos in Bloglines every morning, so I thought it would be a fun way to force myself to take, critique, and publish photos if I set this site up and attempted to post a new photo chosen from my favorites each day. It will also keep me consistently shooting pictures even after the initial thrill of our new camera has worn off.

Isn't this just going to be a bunch of pictures of your kids? Probably, if my wife hadn't made me promise to keep pictures of her and the kids off the internet. That's probably a good thing, because I'll need to work harder to find good pictures to post here (and to approach strangers to get portraits).

Are you really going to post a photo each day? Good question... I have no idea if I'll be able to keep it up. Turns out Blogger doesn't allow you to set a time to automatically publish posts, which I was really hoping for so I could queue up a bunch of days at a time and have them published each night at midnight. My goal is to post every day in 2007 -- realistically though, I might not make it that long..

Is it all going to be pictures of Stanford? No. Stanford has a lot to offer a photographer (beautiful gardens, architecture, wide range of people) but I'm not going to restrict myself to Stanford. If I go on a trip, you'll see some pics here.
Also, I generally have an eye for the strange, so I'd prefer to post pictures that the average visitor to Stanford won't see. Rest assured, all pictures will be something that I'm not ashamed to show to my parents or my kids.