Awesome People Hanging Out Together is a website I like to look at every now and then. This picture of Leonard Bernstein, Glenn Gould, and Igor Stravinsky is especially awesome.

I know I have been lazy about updating this silly little thing. Sorry. BRB!!! Click on the picture to check out more pictures from Erik Johansson.

I have never really listened to Howard Stern before. But I think I like it. Here is an interview done on 3/30/11 with Norm Macdonald. It is really funny. I am actually considering signing up to SirusXM because of this. This interview contains swears.

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A common feature in photo editing software is the automation. Basically you have two choices while editing a picture. You pick the parameters or you have the program do it for you (well you can always edit on top of the automation). The nature of automation is something I often ponder. If I hit that auto button, am I less of genuine photographer? Well, yeah. If you use your camera in full auto mode are you less of a photographer then someone who uses it in manual? Well, yeah. You no longer make decisions for yourself and have the camera make it for you. However there is something to automation that I have been discovering lately (this only pertains to photo editing software. Every time I use my camera in some sort of auto mode, I am disappointed). After I take a photo, I throw it into lightroom and start messing with all the functions in the develop module. I know how I like my pictures; bright, clear, sharp, vivid, blah blah blah. There are times when I’ll edit a photo my usual way and then reset the settings and hit the auto button. Most of the time I like mine better. Sometimes the computer will edit a photo in way I would have never thought to. Here are two examples. The first picture is my edit and the second is lightroom’s.

A little cooler and darker.  I went for a quasi vintage feel and lightroom did the opposite. The moral of the story is sometimes automation can be your friend.

UPDATE: I still like mine better.

In an earlier post I talked about learning Adobe Lightroom 3.   I have finally read through a couple of chapters of this book and I love it.  It is far superior to any set of video tutorials I have seen.   The main problem with  video tutorials is that the instructor can’t possibly explore all aspects of the software. I have watched Lightroom videos from Lynda.com, Froknowsphoto.com, digital-photography-school.com, among others. These guys talk about how they edit their photos, but getting exactly what you want out of them is difficult. Often I won’t know what they are talking about. They’ll say,  “when I pump up the clarity slider it makes this photo really pop!” What the hell does that mean? They use silly words like, “I just boomified this photo by raising the exposure.”  What? That doesn’t teach me anything. On the other hand,  experimenting on your own isn’t always helpful either. I can take a picture and put the vibrance up to 100 then to -100 and I see a difference. But I couldn’t tell you what is actually happening in the photograph.

That is why I love this book so much.  It reads just like a text book.  “Clarity is a midtone contrast adjustment.”  Thank you. Now that makes a lot more sense to me than talking about photos popping. There is no B.S. with this book. A lot of videos have people who take forever to get to the point. You’ll find 10 minute videos with two minutes of information. I hate that crap, I don’t give a shit about your cat, get to the color correction.  Another thing that I like about the book is the fact that referencing it is way easier then any video. It is pretty obvious why. Overall I would highly suggest to anyone trying to learn any adobe product to go get themselves a book instead of relying on videos tutorials. You’ll be much happier I promise.

This is something that happened to me recently. I have an one hour drive to and from work each night.  Two hours in the car five days a week is a lot of time. Talk radio is fine, but for the most part I have my iPod plugged into my car stereo.  I have a 160GB iPod which is way too big for me. At first, I had it completely full of music.  I like to listen to my entire library on random and having so much music on there was not working. See here. So I cut it down quite a bit. After a while, I started getting sick of my new music selection. I just flat out didn’t want to listen to any of it. This was a problem.  I had two hours in my car without anything I wanted to listen to. Screw the radio, I can’t stand it. Here are a few pointers to get yourself interested in your music again.

I decided that I was going to completely clear out my iPod. I erased the entire thing and gave myself only 5GB of space.  I found that this actually worked pretty well. What this does is it forces you to stop listening to everything you own all the time. Absence makes the heart grow fonder.  I would be listening to some Pig Destroyer and think to myself, “Man some Misery Index would be great right now.” Then get all pissed off because I took it off my iPod. But that was the point.  I found myself yearning for music that before I would constantly skip over. Or how about some Cut Copy after listening to Chromeo?  Nope, sorry. Over time I would give myself 5GB more. And then maybe 10GB next.  You get the idea. I found this to be very successful in getting me interested in my music again. Slowly over time the amount of music grows as I desperately need it in my life again.

There are many other ways to listen to music then just your music library. Internet radio is pretty awesome. Pandora.com and last.fm are two of the better options. Another thing you can try is to focus on whole genres of music instead of just artists.  Reggae was a genre that I was completely unfamiliar with and I wanted to learn more about it.  I download reggae podcasts, researched artists, and listen to as much reggae I could that was not Bob Marley.  I discovered that I didn’t get as into it as I thought I would. O’well, I’ll try Klezmer next.

As I get  into photography, I find myself being drawn to portraits more then other types of pictures. I am not talking about candid photography. I am talking about posed portraits.  My good friend Nat has let me photograph him on two separate occasions in this style. I don’t have any lighting equipment and my apartment doesn’t have any natural sunlight so these shoots were done outside.  I would like to take a moment to talk about what I think I did right and what I definitively did wrong.

Shoot #1

Location: Potrero Hill, San Francisco/outside/mid-day/sunny

Equipment: Canon Rebel T2i/EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS Zoom Lens/No Flash

First. This was my first shoot and I broke all the basic rules to shooting portraits, or pictures for that matter. I can probably name 20 things that I will never do again off the top of my head. Lets go over a few.  First off, anyone with half a brain will tell you that I picked one of the worst times to shoot outside.  The sunlight was brutal. I didn’t look for shade either.  The first couple of shots the sun was in the background and the subject was much too dark.  Next, I had him turn around. Looking into direct sunlight while having your picture taken can almost guarantee a ruined shot. Squinted eyes and harsh shadows are not the most attractive features one can have in a photo. So what did I learn? Shoot in the morning or the evening. If I have to do it in the afternoon, look for shade or anywhere out of the sun. See Below.

Second. In the hills of Potrero, there are lovely views of downtown. We decided why not get a couple of pictures with the city in the background? Nat and myself walked to a street corner and set up shop. Here, I messed around with the aperture.  I shot at f3.5 through f18.  In this instance, I discovered that having the city in focus distracted from the portrait instead of enhancing it. It also didn’t help that this was the shot where the subject had to look directly into the sun. What did I learn? For the most part, shoot with a higher aperture to avoid distractions from your subject. Also filling the frame is not a bad idea either. See above pictures.

Shoot #2

Location – Dogpatch, San Francisco/outside/evening/sunny

Equipment: Canon Rebel T2i/EF 50mm f/1.8/No Flash

First. This shoot was better then the first. I stayed away from direct sunlight and stuck to simple backgrounds, for the most part. What did I learn from this shoot?   Auto Focus at high apertures is my worst enemy. For most of the shoot I was shooting at f/1.8.  This gave me a lot of photos where the subjects face is out of focus and something I don’t care about is.  See below. You can clearly see that Nat’s knee is perfectly in focus while his face is out of focus. The second one I decided that I wanted a portrait of that plant instead of Nat. This ruined a lot of pictures that otherwise would have been pretty good photos.

Second.  Blurry photos. There was plenty of light during the shoot. I don’t think I shot slower than 1/125.  I would like to think that 1/125 would be fast enough that long exposure time would not be a problem. Then I thought about the way I was shooting. My camera is set to shoot continuously. It can fire off about ten shots in rapid succession before it stops to process the information. I was going about everything too fast.  I would shoot shot after shot moving around not really paying any attention to what I was actually looking at (I guess 1/125 was too slow). If I fire off enough shots I would get a few that were really good. I think for the most part it ruined more good pictures then the other way around.  I need to chill out, take my time, look and think about what I am doing, and why I am doing it. Next time I am going to force myself to wait at least 5-10 seconds between shots and only one shot at a time. It is good to learn to walk before running. I ran, ate it, and now I have no teeth.

Third.  This was a problem on both shoots. I had no clue how to direct on the subject. I have known this guy for about 20 years so playing that hey I am going to ask you about your hobbies while I take pictures of you game wasn’t going to work. My point is that I would think with a friend like this it would be easy to get the shots I wanted. But I was awkward and basically lost in the shuffle.  If this was a complete stranger I don’t know what would have happened. Probably a lot of voice cracks and questions like, “So…how do you like being an accountant?” I know that this “art of directing” just comes with practice. I need more of it.

Writing all this out helps me realize what I need to improve on.  And hopefully will help anyone else who is interested.  Here are a few of my favorite shots from the second shoot below.

I have more music then I know what to do with.  I like to sit at my computer and listen to my entire library on random, however I find myself skipping anywhere from 10 to 20 tracks before it lands on something I want to listen to. My library is 197GB. I don’t think that accumulating this much music is that crazy, but I have a lot of stuff on there I will never listen to.  I don’t like 80′s glam metal so my four Skid Row albums can go.  Hmmm what else…

…Well I just spent the last 20 minutes going through my music trying to decide what to delete. And here is where the problem lies. I can’t do it. I don’t like Skid Row,  I don’t need numerous punk splits from the early 80s, I don’t need an album of animal sounds, and I probably don’t need 27 albums of the Carter Family from the 1920′s to 50′s.  But when it comes down to it, I want them.  So maybe this will have to happen another day.  Until then here is a lovely piece of classical music.

Taking pictures of things is something I have very recently gotten into.  I got my first camera for Christmas and it is a Canon Rebel t2i. It looks like this.

Over the past two months I have been reading as much as I possibly can on three things: photography, Abode Lightroom, and Adobe Photoshop. I have to admit I don’t really know what the hell I am doing but I figure if I take learning the programs slowly and I go out and shoot a lot, I’ll get there eventually. In the past two months I have shot over 3,000 photos. 500 are worth keeping on my computer, about 200 are worth showing to anyone and even less then that will make it to any kind of internet publication, or my flickr account.  For anyone interested I have a tumblr blog where I post my pictures at http://idlehand.tumblr.com/.  Not all the pictures on there are my own, just most. You’ll see photo updates regularly.  Word up.

So I have been running more and more as I grow older. I tried exercising in gyms but I end up finding a reason never to go. So from now on I wake up and the first thing I do after getting my lazy ass out of bed is to go on a run!! So what music to listen to? I keep my ipod on random and hold it in my hand for the quick song change. Of course there are songs that work and others that don’t. I have my playlist saved from the run I just went on and here are some examples of songs that didn’t work:
Avett Brothers – Ten Thousand Words

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Do Make Say Think – Classic Noodlanding

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Here are some songs that really worked for me:

Gadget – The Anchor

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Unearth – Endless

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In conclusion, when I want to exercise I should listen to Metal. Actually there was a lady gaga and a daft punk song that came on that were really nice to run too. So metal and dance.

My original idea for this blog was to keep it strictly about music. But as I get into other hobbies that are not music related I have put this little project of mine to the wayside. So I figure now I would write and share about anything I want. Screw just keeping it to music cause music sucks anyways. So, how about the weather we have been having lately?