The Unreal Me

In the first post in this journal I mentioned that I had some longer term aims for the aaronkoolen.com domain and I’m pleased to finally say that step one has been complete – a simple menu system and media gallery to provide a small showcase for my photo and video hobbies.

My idea was to use AJAX but I wasn’t feeling inspired to learn it until some part-time PHP development work cropped up which started to look like it was heading that direction anyway. Therefore I took the opportunity to educate myself early, using my own site as a learning project.

Now I’ve quite enjoyed learning ‘The AJAX way’ but I have to say that I have not enjoyed Internet Explorer in any way shape or form. I would often get the next part of the site up and running on Firefox and Safari without any problems, only to test it on IE and have the whole thing fall apart. Not only that, but there seems to be handy debugging tools for Safari and Firefox but nothing for IE. It really is an awful browser and I did toy with the idea of not allowing IE people to visit my site, but I capitulated to the will of the devil in the end.

Overall I’m quite pleased with the way the gallery is working. It supports categories and is driven dynamically by the files on the server (no database content required) and also contains video where I have placed up some of the short films I’ve done over the years. It uses calls to PHP code to retrieve the list of files (the PHP also generates thumbnails if they aren’t there) and then the Javascript does the job of displaying the selected item.

Next is to populate it with my favourite images in each category. The Music and Outside categories I’m happy with so far, but not the People and Animal ones, I need to shoot more. But for now it will do.

Click aaronkoolen.com or hit the tab at the top.

Uncategorized Web Development

No I’m not talking about making sure your images are sharp, I’m talking about concentration and looking for good photos as you walk around the place with your camera. You don’t do photowalks? Well start, now. Going on a photowalk is a quick and easy way to keep your brain thinking about photography and taking photographs. You might not be able to set up a session with some family members to learn some new techniques but you sure as hell can grab your camera, walk around the block and take some pictures.

What a masterpiece

So, now you’re in agreement you need to do them I will say that I used to struggle every time I went out. When I first got my camera it was great to just wander around taking pictures of stuff I came across. I’d get home look through them and find the odd one or two that I liked – mission accomplished. BUT, as I started to get better at photography, or should I say, as I started to care more about the quality of my photos, I started to find photowalks would get me depressed. I would walk around the place taking photos, get them back home and realise 99% of them were awful – it was like I was a tourist just taking pictures of everything I came across. It got to the point I didn’t want to bother any more. Then my wife had a suggestion that got me thinking. “Why not theme your photowalks” she said. “Hmm” I said, “You are very smart.”.

Once she said that, I had a moment of clarity and began to realise that my mind was being overloaded with too many options every time I went out. There were people, cars, building, trees, birds, buses, shops, you name it it’s there. What you see is effectively a wide angle shot of a street or town, full of myriad items and details all cluttering the image and cluttering your mind. My unskilled photographer back-brain would see “something” in this wide angle shot and my arms would reflexively lift my camera, and take the shot. This “something” was often not a particularly photogenic thing, nor well composed nor lit but my it was all my beginner’s intuition could manage.

Is this 41?

So with this new found clarity I decided to go out and try it. The first theme that I though I would try was “letterboxes”. My thinking was that they have great variety of colour and shapes, and often have good textures as far as the metal or woodwork goes. I picked the streets of Ponsonby/Herne Bay as my area as they have a lot of older villas and bungalows and my wife and I walked for about an hour taking photos of letterboxes, patting cute cats and going into open homes that we knew we couldn’t afford.

I won’t go over the actual photos in this post (there’s something about them I want to cover separately) but I will say I found the whole process reinvigorating. I knew that as I walked around I didn’t have to bother about anything else happening apart from the letterboxes. I would pass one, look at it from various angles, check out it’s properties, the light and look for what part of it I wanted to shoot (Whole, or segment). It got my brain concentrating on the important techniques of taking a good photo and not being overloaded with the thought that there’s “too much to shoot”.

The end results weren’t gallery hanging material (maybe toilet hanging at a pinch) but I definitely got better results than I would have if I was random shooting. Theming your photowalks is a total winner in my books. Try it sometime.

Super friendly cat that came to greet us on our photowalk

Uncategorized Photography

A few weeks ago I discovered an amazing blog called “Strobist“. The aim of the blog is to teach you how to light your photographs using a portable off camera flash unit (As opposed to a studio flash). The philosophy is that your on camera look-ma-everythings-glowing flash is awful, but if we take it off camera and diffuse it, snoot it, bounce it and myriad of other things, we can get some truly great light for our photos. On top of that, it’s small and runs off batteries so we can easily take it out with us.

I read through their tutorials and found myself getting more and more excited at what a simple, one flash, portable system could achieve and I wanted to try out the techniques on the site. Of course before I could do that I actually needed to have a flash and once I had that I had to have something to trigger it. The first step was a visit to Auckland Camera Centre to get the flash. Thankfully I pretty much knew what I want because the service was awful and I will likely never return, but I forked out my $500, grabbed my flash and left.

Now I had a nice flash but the only way to use it was to sit it in my camera hotshoe. While this flash is much better than the built in one on my Canon 300d, it was still facing straight ahead and could burn retinas in an instant while simultaneously lighting everyone in the room in that bright, flat light that most people’s grandmas are bathed in at family gatherings. So I needed to get it off my camera which meant I needed something to trigger it. One option is to use a PC cord which joins the camera to the flash but I was more interested in a wireless solution for ease of use and flexibility, not to mention avoidance of tripping over it and destroying my gear and my body in one foul swoop.

One option was to go with a defacto set of PocketWizards but those things are EXPENSIVE (US$3-400 for a set) and just not something my bank balance could handle. So again Strobist came to the rescue when I started spotting people talking about these Cactus V2 systems from a Hong Kong supplier called GadgetInfinity. They didn’t seem as reliable in their firing, and their operation distances were small but they were cheap. At US$32.95 + US$5 shipping for the V2s (The one that works with the 430EX II) they were about as good as I was going to be able to afford.

So I placed my order and within about a week they turned up.

Cactus V2s Box

I was pleasantly surprised to find the box was reasonably well made and it was packed well in a padded bag. On opening I found all the pieces where they should be with the flash stand underneath the plastic tray that held all the main pieces. 

Inside the Cactus V2s box

The system itself is plastic and reasonably well made. Not anywhere near the level of pro gear, but it’s also pretty solid for the most part with the one concern being the metal hotshoe bracket on the bottom of the receiver. It looks a little flimsy and I can imagine that a knock of the flash while on this receiver might pull the metal bracket away from the plastic body. I will allay this fear at a later date when I start getting into modding the unit as many others have done to increase the range and reliability of the system.

Pulling out the pieces I put in the battery, set it all up, and fired a test shot by pressing the ‘test’ button on top of the transmitter (That’s the piece on the right in the photo above). Nothing happened. I checked the channels were matched between receiver and transmittter, as the system can be set to 1 of 4 possible channels, but still no go. So I grabbed the small manual, flicked to the Troubleshooting section and looked at the “Flash does not fire” section. The first solution in that section simultaneously made me happy and embarrassed. It read: “Ensure the plastic covering on the battery is removed”.

With that out of the way, I tried again and the test firing worked – excellent! Unfortunately I had to leave everything there so I have yet to have a good session with the unit and my newly purchased diffusion umbrella, so for now I’ll leave you with a picture of the stand and setup and return later with some actual photos and experiences with the unit.

Cactus V2s Setup

Uncategorized Photography, Strobist

Last Sunday, November 2nd I completed my first ever 1/2 marathon event in the 2008 Auckland Marathon and I am chuffed. A year or so ago I wouldn’t have thought I’d be running a 5K race let alone a 21.09Kms 1/2 marathon! Actually, to be honest I wouldn’t have thought I’d have run around the block.

In one of my training runs leading up to the event, I had ran what I thought at the time was 22Km in 2 hours 10 minutes so I thought if I could nail 2 hours for 1Km less, I’d be pretty happy. As it was, on race day I found out the training run was only 21Ks just like the 1/2 marathon, so when I finished and my time was 1 Hour 53 Minutes I was blown away. I chopped 17 minutes off my time – groovy!

Most of the race I felt pretty good (Except for going up the hills. I know now I need LOTS more hill training) but I did however find it damn tough for the last 5K’s and my pace dropped off a bit. Up until that point I had been going along at around 5:15/Km, but finished at 5:36/Km. I was also quite surprised at how off-putting it was missing a distance marker; I didn’t know exactly how long I had to go and whether I should up my pace for the end. That and people were starting to pass me regularly which is a little depressing. My instinct is to put on the gas so as not to be passed, but of course you run the risk of running out of fuel and collapsing in a heap, with jelly for legs.

But in the end I crossed the line, wobbled a bit, made it out the exit gate and met up with other runner friends for a good hearty lunch at Mexicalli.

Sorry I don’t have any photos, my wife was trying to get some with my SLR and she’s not used to it, so all the ones of me are blurry and too tiny.

Uncategorized Running

Hello again everyone!

Finally I have managed to get my new domain (aaronkoolen.com) up and running and have set-up a new, fresh WordPress journal. The domain will actually be a portal to various types of content related to the work I do. There will be photographs, short films and of course, this journal.

Now, because one of the aims of my new domain is to be a showcase for some of the things I’m involved in, I thought it best to scrap the old blog and start it again with a different style. That doesn’t mean it won’t be personal, or that it won’t be as random as my old blog, it’s just that the presentation of the journal will be different.

There’s been a few developments over the last couple of weeks which I’ll endeavour to catch up on and the visual theme will undergo some changes as well, so be sure to check back regularly. I also need to migrate some of the content from the old blog into this journal. In the meantime, you can stick this in your RSS reader, it won’t be going anywhere.

Catchya

Uncategorized