Fear of Failure and Portrait Lighting for Beginners

If you’ve ever taken a gander through my collection of photos on Flickr, you’ve probably noticed that I don’t shoot many people, and when I do, it’s normally candid photo work. There’s a really simple reason for this: I don’t find portrait work to be particularly easy, and I hate sucking. Still, I’ve been building up my arsenal of lighting equipment (Pocketwizards, a portable Manfrotto lighting stand, a couple strobes, Justin Clamp, a couple umbrellas, etc.), and slowly edging my way towards overcoming my fear of failing miserably. This fear of failure is, apparently, a pretty common problem.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, the co-founder of Magnum Photos, once famously said:

Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.

As you’ve probably noticed by now, I started a photography project on the 1st of the year where I shoot and post one picture every single day until the beginning of 2010. I decided to start off the year by shooting a series of portraits, in part because I want to overcome this fear of failure with lighting and portraiture, and because embracing Cartier-Bresson’s maxim sooner than later means I can stop sucking that much more quickly.

In any case, just blithely setting up some equipment and firing away won’t mean I get better at my craft, so I always jump at the chance to get a good introduction to some aspects of this process that I might not otherwise have known about.

I just found a great series of articles on how even a total moron (e.g. yours truly) can properly light a portrait. The series walks you through everything from the basic theories of light, to equipment, and on to how to properly light and shoot arbitrary portraits. Good stuff.

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Helen

Day 5 of my 365 Project

Helen

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More Info on Aaron Schock

Aaron Schock is the newest—and youngest at 27 years old—member of the incoming Congressional class. It took some work to dig up anything about him.

His campaign website is devoid of anything resembling position statements, and instead contains your average smattering of broad, meaningless platitudes. 

Here’s what I do know about Aaron, now:

  • Aaron will be representing IL-18, a lean-Republican district encompassing Peoria (Cook PVI R+5), with a 90.8% white population, and a 6.5% African-American population, and a completely middle-of-the-road average income (about $42,000, ranking it #222 out of 435 CDs) [Watchdog and Wikipedia]. Still, he cut at least one TV ad pushing very, very hard for the African-American community’s vote [YouTube].
  • Aaron suggested last year that we should sell nuclear weapons to Taiwan if China didn’t go along with our policy on Iran. Here’s the money quote: ”If China continues to be irresponsible about nuclear proliferation in Iran, we should tell them that if they do not care about proliferation — and since they are enablers of it in Iran — that if they don’t change their position, we will sell Pershing nuclear missiles to Taiwan for their defense.”
  • Aaron accepted contributions from your typical array of Republican donor-sources: NRA, Big Oil, credit and banking firms, etc.
  • Aaron voted against a law that would have repealed Illinois’ absolute requirement for parental notification of abortion.
  • Aaron voted against allowing stem cell research while banning human cloning.
  • Aaron received a score of 25 from the Illinois Civil Justice League, a 44 and a 20, respectively, for the Illinois Environmental Council and Illinois League of Conservation Voters, but he did receive an A from the NRA. Astonishingly, he voted in the interests of the AFL-CIO 51% of the time.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Aaron’s website:

The accomplishments of the Republican Majority in Congress since 1994 are astonishing and every American lives a better life today because of those changes made with that historic majority.

via Illinois House Freshman Says He Is Disappointed by Burris - The Caucus Blog - NYTimes.com.

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Quick Notes on Sidwell Friends

Sasha and Malia Obama started attending Sidwell Friends School, a private Quaker K-12 school, today. In case you’re looking for more on Sidwell Friends, here’s some information I put together on the institution.

  • It’s located about four-and-a-half miles from the White House, a 12 minute drive. [Google Maps]
  • It was started 126 years ago, in 1883. [Wikipedia]
  • Previous attendees have included the children of Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon (who was, himself, a Quaker), Bill Clinton, and Al Gore. [Wikipedia]
  • It currently enrolls 1,091 students, with 35 more boys than girls. [Wikipedia]
  • Annual tuition is $28,442 for elementary students, and $29,442 for middle and high school students, plus some additional fees. [Sidwell Friends]
  • The menu beats the crap out of the Sysco-provided lunches I received while I was in school: cheese tortellini and garlic green beans, with a clementine to top it off, anyone? [Sidwell Friends]

via First Day of School for Obama Girls - The Caucus Blog.

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Picasa for Mac Available

Pick it up from the Google Picasa website. Looks exactly like the Windows version. Blech.

via Twitter / Steve Rubel: You can get Picasa here….

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Skytap named one of Network World’s ‘10 Startups to Watch in 09′

An appropriate Skytap package might cost considerably more than EC2, Bass says, but could eliminate a company’s need to buy a bunch of servers for testing a large-scale application deployment.

Nice plug!

via 10 start-ups to watch in ‘09 - Network World.

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Norm Coleman is a Big Sore Loser, and Other Observations

The election panel’s stamp of approval is unlikely to bring an end to the contest. A lawyer for the Coleman campaign, Fritz Knaak, issued a statement today calling the court’s ruling “disappointing and disheartening” and vowed to challenge the outcome of the recount.

via Minnesota Board Certifies Franken Win - The Caucus Blog - NYTimes.com.

Update: Live from Minneapolis, it’s…umm…Monday evening! (apologies to both SNL and TPM)

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My nephew is ludicrously adorable

My eight month old nephew, Addison, is ludicrously adorable. See the pictures below for indisputable proof (and click for larger sizes).

Addison

Addison

Addison

Addison

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Fit to Print

Day 4 of my 365 Project.

Fit to Print

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Steve Gillmor is Unintelligible

Update: Steve Gillmor cracks me up.

God, I love Steve Gillmor. Steve just wrote an article about how much Feedburner sucks now that Google bought them, and how FriendFeed might end up eating Google’s lunch in this area. Unfortunately, Steve writes these insanely long, nonsensical articles with one good idea thrown in randomly somewhere in the mix, while puffing the whole thing up with with pseudo-technical gobbledegook.

There is no reason why RSS can’t be an effective protocol at the realtime layer, and FriendFeed’s growing arsenal of features is both a roadmap and a toolkit for the transition.

Wow! Let’s deconstruct this Steve Gillmor article in a little more detail.

The Resplendent Lede - Steve starts off with a grandiose, meaningless prognostication. 

There’s going to be a moment in the near future where FriendFeed needs to deliver realtime search over IM.

This makes me feel like I’m in an episode of 24, and Jack Bauer just barked at me to send the nuclear detonation codes to his Palm III, or something.

The Creamy, Meaningless Center - Steve takes a sharp detour somewhere off into the weeds, producing run-on sentences that seem sagely at first, but leave you fundamentally unsatisfied. Soon, you realize that you were just exposed to the equivalent of 45 seconds of textual Olestra. 

The ROI on managing a Twitter Follow community produces reasonable economies of scale for only a very few. The Scobles must maintain their clouds regardless of the effort expended, while the up and comers are getting squeezed on FriendFeed by noisier folks willing to marginalize the threads with noise. People like Tim O’Reilly apparently avoid the comments and likes, and as a result the domain itself.

The Unexpected Detour - You’ve just zigged in order to catch up with Steve, but wait, he just zagged! Wow!

With its purchase of FeedBurner and recent rolloever (sic.) of FeedBurner URLs to its own domain, Google has experienced some significant latency in syncing new posts to its dominant RSS feeds…[Most] posts I’ve published in the last several weeks have averaged over two hours before they propagate to the RSS audience of Google Reader, FriendFeed, Twitter, and beyond.

The Buzzword-Packed Conclusion - Steve needs to bring this nightmarish beast in for a landing, regardless of whether its wheels are up or down.

[We] will continue to model our Twitter cloud in FriendFeed constructs, make do with a lack of filtering tools to constrain the friend-of-a-friend overspill, and look to other players (Microsoft in particular) to compete directly with Feedburner at the RSS routing layer. There is no reason why RSS can’t be an effective protocol at the realtime layer, and FriendFeed’s growing arsenal of features is both a roadmap and a toolkit for the transition.

via The Realtime Ping Server  by Steve Gillmor.

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