Walter Hutchens’ Blog

This week was my first week “off” on my semester-long leave. I am enjoying being home with Henry, taking advantage of Whitworth’s surprisingly generous family leave policy.

Not having to teach has given me time to play at my photography hobby and dabble with some other new stuff. I just learned how to embed a Picasa web gallery slideshow into a blog post. Pretty neat, huh?

Produced these using Picasa, WordPress and the WordPress plugin Postcasa. All free!

Took the shots with a Nikon D80. That, alas, is not free, but it’s been a better use of money than, oh, every stock I own!

The Nikon D80 is an SLR—a single lens reflex camera, meaning, practically, a big camera that lets you change lenses, not a little pocket digicam. Because it is a digital camera, it’s sometimes called a D-SLR.

Pocket digital cameras are great. I try to keep one with me most of the time. But to take really good pictures of children, you want an SLR or DSLR. That’s because children squirm. They usually hate to pose (or are much cuter when they aren’t posed). A slow camera that needs seconds to start and seconds to recover between shots is going to leave you saying, “Oh, that was soooo cute! Do it again!” They won’t. Plus trying to freeze them interrupts the flow of play. Why obstruct the next cute thing to try capture the last cute thing? It probably won’t work anyway. SLRs are fast and take better quality images.

Of course, one can take lousy pictures with an SLR (I routinely do that!), and one can sometimes get great pictures with a pocket camera. But I’ve found with an SLR the odds are better I’ll get something I’ll treasure.

I took the pics in the sets above using a 50 mm “prime” (fixed focal length) lens. Cost about $130, which is much cheaper than the camera I wanted to buy yet probably does much more for my pictures.

A few more words about these tools . . .

The SLR name used to confuse me. Why, I wondered, are cameras that can use multiple lenses called single lens reflex cameras? Later, I came to understand: think about an old timey camera held at waist-level, which people (in my mind, mostly journalists) used by looking down into a viewfinder. That gives you an, ahem, image of a twin lens camera—one lens for seeing what you want to shoot, one lens that actually takes the picture. In an SLR, the viewing lens and the shooting lens are collapsed into one. When you press the shutter, a mirror flips out of the way, allowing that light to strike the film or sensor. Single lens.

I have never owned a film SLR. Don’t want one. But I have adored owning digital SLRs.

I also adore Picasa. I’ve used it through all three versions. I have tried iPhoto and Aperture and Adobe’s Lightbox, but Picasa—which is free—just suits me better. It provides a workflow that I find faster, more intuitive and simpler (yet suitable for nearly everything I need) compared to those alternatives. I am delighted they finally have a Mac version. Version 3 now has a blemish retouching tool. The prior version lacked that and was one reasons I used to need other software for some editing. I only wish Picasa would let me sharpen more subtly. In the PC version it’s no longer just a blunt on/off, but still you can’t sharpen only say around a subject’s eyes while leaving the skin softer—that’s often annoying. But overall I just love it.

Until recently I had not used Picasa’s web albums feature much, preferring to export albums and then just ftp them to my own domains. But for various reason I am softening on my stance that I want my photos on my domain, not some third-party photo sharing site. First, it takes fewer clicks to share pics via Picasa’s web albums. With a crying baby on one’s arm, this becomes important! Also, the albums I host on my own domains don’t allow commenting, which I now realize is a cool feature. Third, the templates I like best use Flash which doesn’t work on my iPhone, so I can’t see (or show others) most of what I create with the device I have with me most of the time. (The templates I’ve used most commonly are from the Future of Memories). Fourth, it has gradually dawned on me that the sense of security and control I get over my images by using my own domains is a mirage. I mean, I rent space on a shared server! In LA! The box is not under my physical control. The chance that Google or Flickr will lose or harm my data is probably less than the chance Southern Calif. will have an earthquake, civil unrest or some other catastrophic problem. Even if, God forbid, something did happen, I have hard drive archives (Of course, I realize the loss of my snapshots would be among the least consequential effects imaginable of such a tragedy, but I’m just saying, why do I think my photos are safer on some random server in LA than in the Google cloud? Doesn’t make sense . . .) Finally, while I do keep my daughter’s web page password protected, my son’s is not. If the stuff is out there anyway, there’s no reason to avoid letting Picasa host it (and if I ever do want to try to keep everything sealed behind password protection, Picasa’s web albums do offer some security features).

Just found the Postcasa plugin today. The new version of WordPress let me install it without even leaving my browser (no downloading & uploading via ftp). Postcasa seems to work quite well. There are several other Picasa plugins for WordPress, but I haven’t tried any others yet. Some of them just seem to put a Picasa web-hosted photo in a post. Others create an index of all one’s Picasa web albums, which seems more useful.

Taking pictures of a newborn is fun. I have been pleased with the results from my new lens, which I got in lieu buying a Nikon D700 that I am still lusting after. I was thinking I might upgrade my D80 (which I had already upgraded from a D70s, my first SLR). The D700 is full-frame 35 mm equivalent (no digital crop factor because of a smaller sensor). That means it would be much better for wide angle landscapes. The low light performance is also much better than my D80′s. But, alas, the D700 is nearly $3,000. If I got one, I would inevitably also want a new zoom lens; my 18-200 mm VR lens (which I really like) would not take advantage of the full frame (it’s a Nikon DX lens, made for the smaller sensors). But getting that new camera and a lens or two for it would easily cost $5,000. I, ah, don’t have that lying around (and if we did, Maggie would rightly insist we save it for Henry’s college education, not spend on Daddy’s tech addiction). I was lamenting all this at a store, test driving a D700, and a clever salesperson said maybe I would enjoy a new lens rather than a new camera. He sold me a $130 Nikon 50 mm lens, and I love it! It is razor sharp, at least compared to my 18-200 mm zooom or the 18-70 mm kit lens that came with my camera, and is great for portraits like the stuff I’ve been taking. Ohhhhhh . . . so this is what’s good about a prime lens and why people care about low f-stops! Got it.