Its been nearly 2 months and I finally got around to posting about how the vegas wedding went. In all honesty, the wedding was super quick. I guess that is just the way they do them out there in Sin City. I didn’t actually get to shoot the wedding because they already had a photographer with their package, but I did do before and after photos as well as the reception. I think the photos turned out quite nicely considering this was my first wedding with my Nikon D80.
The bride had told my wife (they work together) that she hated the photos from the photographer that came with her package. I was now scared of what she was going to think of the ones I took. I sent a CD of my photos with my wife to work and when the bride saw the photos, she was relieved to say the least. This, in-turn, gave me some relief. The bride was so excited and couldn’t wait to get her book.
Why don’t you all go check out some of the photos from the wedding and let me know what you think. I would love to hear some of your opinions 
Anyone code in PHP out there. Well if so, here is a helpful hint. Ever need to find a string in an another string? Uh, or maybe find a variable in a string? If you don’t, someone sure does, well take me for instance, I do this often. Its quite simple. You use the strstr() function like so:
$string_to_find = “Patrick”;
$string_to_look_in = “Hello Patrick, what is your name?”;
if(strstr($string_to_look_in,$string_to_find)) {
echo “AHA, found it.”;
} else {
echo “hmmm… yeah, just doesn’t seem to be here right now.”;
}
Hope this was helpful to someone.
This weekend I am photographing a wedding in Sin City. The wedding is going to take place at Caesar’s Palace. This will be my first wedding with my new Nikon D80 and the SB-800 flash that I used in the previous post I did about Dark Background portraits. I will be posting the photos of this event shortly after I return so be sure to check back for the highlights and see how it went. I also have done a couple other weddings in the last month and will be posting those as well, so stay tuned as I get those posted along with the settings I used and some tips so you can photograph weddings of your own.
I’ve always wanted to do a shot of a persons profile with a dark background. I’m sure their are a bunch of ways to do this, but I figured out one way that I really liked. I recently purchased a Nikon D80 Digital SLR camera, and I love it. A few days later I found that my Canon 580ex flash didn’t really work well with the camera so I purchased a Nikon SB-800. The Nikon flash blows away the Canon and it is about $200 cheaper. Anyhow, before I explain how I set this shot up I would like to let you know if you didn’t already that the Nikon Creative Lighting System is spectacular. The D80 has a featured called Advanced Wireless Lighting. The SB-800 flash supports this feature excellently. What it allows you to do is use the built in flash on the D80 as a commander and the SB-800 as the slave. So the D80 can trigger the SB-800. I used this feature in the shot I’m showing you here.
What I did was I had my friend get a nice big lung full of hookah smoke and then blow it out gradually. I then had my wife hold the SB-800 behind his head so that I could not see it through the D80’s viewfinder. I set the D80 and SB-800 up in wireless mode. I then gave my camera a faster shutter speed of 1/200. This faster shutter speed allowed me to capture the smoke in a still form rather than getting motion blur on it. I set my iso to 200 and my aperture to f/5. This gave me a crisp picture. I set the exposure compensation on the D80’s flash down 2 stops and set it on the SB-800 up 2 stops. This caused the background to not show up as much from the D80’s flash and the SB-800 helped emphasize the smoke and the lines of my friends profile. I zoomed in a little with my nikkor 18mm-135mm lens and then composed the shot. I was now ready to set my focus and take the shot.
When I took the shot, the SB-800 was trigger by the D80’s on camera flash and as you can see the image came out remarkably. Now don’t get me wrong, I had tons of trial and error shots to get the effect that I wanted. After all is said and done, I think this shot came out beautifully, and just the way I had expected and predicted it to.
Go ahead and take some shots like this one and leave them in the comments for me, I would love to see what you all come up with.
Technorati Tags: photography
So I just started using Windows Vista about 2 weeks ago, and I must say, its got a few differences from XP but not much. I do like it better than XP and I haven’t had any problems at all (or none I can think of). For the average windows user, Vista may seem much different and a little overwhelming, but all of your old features are there, and some new. If you’re thinking about upgrading I would recommend it, but only if you have a new computer. If you don’t you won’t get all of the goodies like aero which is the new interface which looks like glass. If you use a mac and you are thinking about switching over, shame on you.
Anyways, my friend posted some Vista tips over on his blog which really helped me out. You can view them by clicking here: Vista Tips.
Well, there is my 2 cents on Vista, more to come as I continue to use Vista more.
I really didn’t write much or spend that much time writing any blogs before I decided to take a month off, but, I did it anyways. PHATO Productions Blog is back up and in action so, sorry about the lack of posts, and be sure to keep checking back as I praise, bash, and review the technology industry.
So, your a neat freak and you want a clean desktop on your mac. Well, there are two ways you can do this. Since I’m a neat freak (only on my computer), I used the first method I’m going to mention of hiding all my drives on my desktop.
The first method is to hide all of your drives on your desktop. The way you do this is by going to your desktop or the finder, then clicking going to Finder>Preferences located in the context menu at the top right of your screen. In the General tab, uncheck the first 3 items - Hard Disks; CDs, DVDs, and iPods; and Connected servers. Now you might ask yourself, How do I go about accessing these items if they aren’t on my desktop. Well, 2 simple ways. 1) Go to your finder and they will show up in the left pane, or 2) use Quicksilver (my preferred method).
The second method is to download a little program called desktopple by FoggyNoggin Software. It is donationware so if you like, be sure to donate to the programmers who work hard on this excellent little software. This software will install a little icon in your system tray located at the top right of your screen. Just click the icon and choose Hide Desktop from the drop-down, its that simple.
Like I said, I prefer the first method, but if you want a simpler, more controllable approach, use method two.
Technorati Tags: applications, mac, tips
Just wanted to throw out a advertisement for some friends of mine. Here is the email I was sent earlier today:
If there is one place you want to be this Saturday is at the RVX Treme Aganza here at RVX Dublin!
Please see attachment for our event guide and list of attractions.
I hope to see all of you here. Yes, we are giving away a brand new $10,000 Jet Ski on the Day!
If you are in the San Francisco area, go check this out. I’ve attached the attachment that was in the email. Wish I was up their so I could go check it out. If you go, let me know how it went in the comments.
I’ve been messing around with searching using Quicksilver, and man am I amazed. Any site you can search (google, yahoo, newzbin, etc…) you can setup a quick search using Quicksilver and your default browser. My default browser is Firefox and the search I’ll show you is for my site since google is already searchable by default with Quicksilver.
First off, make sure you have the Web Search Module plugin installed. This is what allows you to do these quick easy searches.
Next, go to your browser and navigate to a search engine or the site you would like to search. I’m going to PHATO Productions Blog (hey, thats mine).
Now do a search in the search field and submit that search.
Notice the url after you submit the search. Your gonna want to copy that url.
Now create a bookmark. In my case the bookmark url is going to be http://www.phatoproductions.com/blog/index.php?s=mac&sbutt=Go. I’m not going to keep the whole url though, I’m going to replace the search query (mac) with three stars (***). When we use Quicksilver the 3 stars will allow us to put our search query in there.
After you have created your bookmark, goto Quicksilver preferences and refresh your bookmarks for your default browser, just in case Quicksilver hasn’t done that yet.
Now invoke Quicksilver and type in the name of your bookmark.
Tab over twice and type in a search and then hit enter.
The search should open up your browser with the site you are searching with the search query, notice the url.
Thats it. Quick, easy, simple… And now your searches will be the same way once you have them all setup. I hope this helps you out, and if it is redundant, I’m sorry, but this tip would have helped me yesterday, hehe.
Technorati Tags: applications, mac, Quicksilver, tips, tutorials
Merlin Mann posted some useful smart mailboxes in Mac’s Mail.app, and I thought these were very interesting, especially the one where he separates his emails by location. I have some of my own smart mailboxes setup and he covers a few of them such as recently viewed and recently sent. I also have address book groups setup for friends, business, etc… and I have smart folders setup for these different groups. I also have rules setup and one of these rules keeps my inbox clean. I like a not so clutter inbox so I setup a rule to archive emails that are 1 day old.
Rules and smart mailboxes are an excellent way to keep your emails organized. So be sure to check out Merlin Mann’s post and try setting up your own smart mailboxes and rules.
Technorati Tags: applications, mac, tips
