Say you’re watching TV in the dark with your daughter.  You notice how gosh-darned cute she looks, just sleeping there next to you in her boppy.  You want to take her picture, but realize it’s way too dark to do so.  Using a flash or turning on the lights runs you the risk of waking her up.

What do you do?

Well, first you crank up the ISO to 1600.  Those pics are usually an affront to humanity in the noise department, but the noise reducing function in Lightroom 2 is pretty good.  I imagine Noise Ninja is even better, but I’m too cheap at the moment to find out.

Second, you take your laptop and point the screen at her.  That gives you enough light to take a pic.

Sadly, the light is many colors.  Sure, I could have just loaded a blank white file in Photoshop and used that to project white light onto my girl, but hindsight is 20/20.

Finally, switch the pic to black and white, add a slight vignette to the corners to make it look old-fashiony, and voila!  Instant cuteness!

Eat your heart out, Strobist!

You’ll notice the light is brighter along the bottom of the frame.  That’s where the laptop was.

Who needs an $400 Nikon Speedlite, when you can use a $1100 MacBook?

It’s still Friday for another hour or so. . .

• Coming soon to your TV: Photography Network?  I’ve been watching “Behind the Camera” a lot on the Gallery HD network.  It has some nice stuff in it, and some hacky stuff that’s tough to take seriously.  For starters, don’t call yourself a serious professional photographer if you’re still using the kit lens!  UGH.  It’s also very Canadian.  That doesn’t bother me, but it does stick out every now and again.

• The old “Digital Photography Show” podcast is back!  Now, it’s “Digital Photography Life.”  Their first official podcast is coming soon, with special guest Scott Kelby.

• MetaFilter shows the great Mark Kistler the love.  Back in my artsy fartsy days (when I was about 10 - 12 years old), he was a very important part of my TV life.  To know there are episode of Commander Mark’s show on YouTube is to know sheer joy.

• Don’t forget: NaNoWriMo begins this weekend!  And I’m still not doing it.  It’s true; you’ll always find an excuse to not do something.  And, thus, nothing gets done.  But at least I’m caught up on “The Shield.”

• Spongebob Squarepants, as if drawn by various classic comic strip artists.

Mostly linking these to remind me to look further into them over the weekend:

• Buy Noise Ninja

• Integrate Noise Ninja into Lightroom 2 work flow. It’s times like this that I wish Lightroom allowed for more plug-ins.  ::sigh::

I really need to get back on the ball about posting these. . .

Follow them as they happen at Twitter.com/augiedb

• Adorama has the Canon 70-200 f4 L lens refurb at a decent price. If I sold my current 70-300, I could afford it. So tempting.

• Today’s the second try at a photo shoot for baby’s birth announcement card. Wish me luck.  (We may have gotten something out of it. Not quite what we were going for, but workable.)

• Took a few test shots with new Canon 430 EXII flash. What a difference! I think I’m going to enjoy learning flash photography. 

• Then I’d need to learn off-camera flash. Then two flashes. . . Throw in some reflectors and diffusers. This won’t be cheap, will it?

• People are really impressed with “Poladroid”? I mean, it’s a friggin’ Photoshop filter. Eh. Hardly the best thing ever.

• Ah, now my pre-ordered copy of the Lightroom 2 Adventure book has shipped. This is going to be a very fun weekend, indeed.  (I have it now. Beautiful.  Can’t wait to read through it and pick up new tricks for the application.)

• Now it can be told: How a “National Geographic” story is created.

• Automatic Photo Tagging and Image Search.  Imagine loading your picture into your image catalog program of choice and letting the program set up all the tag for you.  ALIPR attempts just that.  I tested it with a few images (and even a comic book cover or two) and it’s awful.  But I like the concept and hope someday we get there.

• Lightroom 2 suggests tags right now. I’m most looking forward to the release next week of the Lightroom 2 Adventure book.  You can see the cover in the sidebar to the right at the moment.  The first book was my favorite instructional manual for Lightroom. I have high hopes that this one will teach me the new features of the great program.

• The Digital Photography Show is one photography podcast I’ve listened to since I got serious about my photography just over a year ago, and began saving up for a dSLR. Sadly, it’s toast. Its hosts have left the show. Its parent company has refused to air their farewell show and is looking for new hosts.  Clearly, something ugly happened behind the scenes here. The owner of the podcast network and the host of the photography podcast once hosted a podcast together about making the world a better place. Now, it would appear they just aren’t getting along.  Sad, but funny.  There’s likely a lesson in here about the value of owning your creations.  As one whose podcast is basically owned by a larger company, though, I’m hardly the one to make that point.

• Somewhat photography-related: XKCD brings the Google Maps humor!

(A) Ohmigod! Earthquake!

(B) Wednesday on Wall Street.

(C) My wife is still having contractions.

This post is, no doubt, a violation of HIPPA somehow. .

• Whatever happened to Jennifer Capriati? The story is a year old now, but it’s the best I could find.
• The problem with radical compression on CDs in the music industry has hit a new low now:  the new Metallica album sounds better in Guitar Hero than on CD, due to compression issues.
• Typography can be funny, too.
• What’s the difference between film and digital photography?  Here’s one test that shows you. Interesting.
• If modern video games were made for the Atari 2600, here’s what the box art would look like.

Nikon’s new D90 digital SLR camera has a new mode: movies. Now you can shoot movies on your SLR.  The crazy cool thing about it is that the movies are being shot with your SLR lens, so new lenses mean wildly new effects.  Check out Nikon’s demo movie for samples.

I don’t know where I read it, but there is one catch: You can’t shoot more than five minutes at a time because the camera heats up so much.  It’s not like you were going to film a full movie on this, anyway.

If my kid were already out of her mommy’s tummy — and if we put her on her stomach (tho she’s too young for extended tummy time) — and laid her in the doorway of her bedroom — this is pretty much what she’d see, assuming a wide open aperture for her eyes in the golden hour of light. ;-)

• The Smurfs movie is making progress. It’s going to be a mix of live action and CGI animation, though, which worries us all.  “Alvin and the Chipmunks,” anyone?  ::sigh::

• What do you get when two Broadway musicals combine forces?  Mark Evanier linked to a video for “Avenue Jew” that made me laugh out loud.  Beware: It’s not for the kiddies, as you might imagine. You have seen “Avenue Q,” right?  Brilliant.

• The details for the next Mac OS X version are scarce, but exciting.  It might not have new features, but a leaner kernel with better handling of processes for dual-core processor chips and an easy way for developers to send processes to the GPU for handling?  Brilliant!

• Canon has a new ultra-low-end dSLR coming in July.  Too late for me, but it might bring more people into the fold.  The price isn’t in dollars, though, so don’t ask for a translation from me.

• Beautiful pics of the earth, taken from the Space Shuttle.

• And the Earth and moon, as seen from Mars!

I wish he was standing another six inches to the right to separate him out from that metal bit on the side of the barn, but I like him, overall.

Honestly, the scenery around the penguin wasn’t much to write home about.  He really looks better in black and white.  I should play with the color contrast a little more on this, though.  It doesn’t have quite enough contrast.

This pic was taken through a wire fence.  You can make out the hazy straight lines if you see a big enough version of the pic.

You lose a lot of the fine fur detail in this smaller version of the pic. As always, click through to see more:

This pic was taken through a glass wall. Thankfully, it was clean enough that I could put the camera right up to it and not get blurs in the final pic.

Yesterday’s pic, I should note, was shot through a fence, but you didn’t notice the wire in the shot, did you?  The trick is to open up your aperture as wide as possible.  They’ll fuzz out to nothing, so long as your auto focus doesn’t lock onto them.  THAT’s the trickiest part.
There’s another trick to help take pics through fences without seeing the fence that I’ll have to go over next. . .

I’m sorry to admit it, but I’m not entirely sure what animal this is. A moose? Let this be a lesson to all of us — when shooting at a zoo, snap a pic of the sign before shooting the animal. This way, you’ll keep everything straight.

I love those fuzzy-looking antlers.

I also wish this section of the blog were designed to be a little wider, because these pics are a bit too small. Please do click through to see the full-size version of these images. The colors on the parrot from yesterday pop out much better that way.

With American Idol now over and me still watching the finale in bits and pieces, I need something to fill up the lost inches of screen space on this blog.

This week, it’s a special photography themed week. I visited the Turtle Back Zoo in West Orange, NJ over the weekend. Each day, I’ll post a new pic, starting with:

I’m not going to sit here and debate zoo practices. I see those arguments come up in photography magazines and on-line forums anytime a pic from a zoo shows up. I’m just here to share pics. That said, this parrot looked pretty ticked off, and eyed everyone suspiciously.

On the other hand, it’s a parrot. Perhaps I’m over-anthropomorphizing him. (Or her.)

Perhaps I should have just done a pirate joke here.  Arrrrr….