Since that day I bought my D70, I have bought and sold several lenses trying to balance convenience with quality.  However, over the last couple of years as I have figured out what kind of pictures I like to shoot, I have found that having every necessary focal length covered isn’t exactly necessary.   And once I sold my 18-200mm back in October of 2010, I haven’t had a zoom in the 24 – 70mm range.  As I stated in this post, I found that having every focal range covered made me a “lazy photographer” – it was really easy to fall back to only shooting snapshots.  After a year of changing up my lens collection, this is what I own currently:

• Tokina 12-24mm f/4
• Nikon 35mm f/1.8G
• Tokina 100mm f/2.8 Macro
• Nikon 70-300mm f/4.5 – 5.6 VR

As you see, there is a pretty big gap between 24mm and 70mm (other than the 35mm prime), which a lot of people would consider the “normal” range.  Because of that, I have to “zoom with my feet” whenever I need to take pictures in the “normal” focal range.  So, after a year of use, I felt it would be time to look back on how this lens collection is working for me.

Everyday use

For the most part, I just use the 35mm around the house.  It works great if I want to capture my daughter or dogs at play.  Since it is a fast lens, it works well even in lower light situations without having to resort to using flash.  I do have to move around more than I would with a zoom, but that it isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  It probably gives me more interesting perspectives, and truth be told I get more options with depth of field with the 35mm than I would with a slower zoom.  If I see a bird or deer in the backyard I want to capture, I just switch to the 70-300mm.  One of the big reasons I switched away from the 18-200mm lens is that it wasn’t quite long enough for some wildlife shots, so I would have needed to switch for some of these shots anyway.  If I want to capture a flower, I switch to the 100mm macro.  Again, this is a specialized use where the normal zoom wouldn’t have gotten exactly what I wanted.

Travel

A lot of people argue that the convenience of a super-zoom like the 18-200mm is perfect for travel.  Again, it makes sense – you can conceivably capture every shot you may want while having the convenience of only needing to pack one lens.  However, I like to go to vacation spots where the landscapes are interesting (national parks and the like), and with that – I like to go wider than 18mm.  For instance, one of my favorite shots from vacation last year was taken at 12mm.  On the converse, I also like to shoot wildlife when possible.  So, there are times I need to go longer than 200mm depending on the park and the animals I am attempting to capture.  Last year’s vacation was a perfect test case for having a different kind of setup.  I left my 12-24mm on the camera most of the time to capture landscapes and street scenes.  When I saw wildlife (like at Cuyahoga Valley National Park), I switched to the 70-300mm.  These two lenses handled most of the pictures I wanted to take during the trip.  I did use the 35mm in some cases, but I found that a wide zoom and telephoto zoom were more interesting lenses for a trip.  Naturally, there are some trips where this setup doesn’t work as well as a setup with a mid-range zoom and a telephoto zoom would.  For example, we are taking a family trip to the beach this year.  I may miss the normal range when trying to get pictures of my daughter playing in the sand or even venturing into the ocean.

Parties and events

This is where my current setup falls short.  For family parties and gatherings the 35mm has worked decently, although because of more people milling about it can be hard to move into a place where the 35mm will work for a particular shot.  Again, the low light capabilities of the lens work great, but I do miss the flexibility that a “normal range” zoom would bring.  For other events, though, my current setup just doesn’t work.  I shot my brother-in-law’s wedding last September, and I rented a mid-range zoom (the 17-55mm) instead of taking a chance in missing a shot.  A couple of weeks later I shot a gig for a couple of my friends’ band, and I borrowed a mid-range zoom that my friend Brent had.  I don’t think my current lens collection works well for a club setup where you would see a local band (a big concert where you need a telephoto lens would be a different case).

Sports

I don’t really shoot sports, other than as a fan at a professional baseball or football game.  I have found that the 70-300mm works ok for the athletes and the game, and the 12-24mm works for stadium and crowd shots.  If I was an official sports photog, I would be closer to the action I would want a faster lens.

As I look back at these scenarios, I do think that I will get a mid-range lens soon.  Although there are many situations where I do not need it, I think that I go to enough family gatherings and other events where the mid-range zoom’s flexibility will be invaluable.  The biggest point I am trying to make by evaluating these scenarios is that you don’t need every focal range covered wherever you go.  If I’m going to a party, I certainly don’t need my 70-300mm.  If I am taking a hike in the woods, the 12-24mm and 70-300mm should suffice nicely (or even just the 12-24mm if I don’t care about wildlife).  I wouldn’t consider my experiment of living without a mid-range zoom a failure, but it does show that there are some situations where it would help greatly (even if not absolutely necessary).  Stay tuned to see if I bite the bullet and grab the coveted 17-55mm, or perhaps even some yet to be announced lens from Nikon.

Let’s use a common use case as an example – retrieving recent photos.  First of all, you will need a Flickr API key.  They are free and easy to get, I have had a non-commercial key one for the past 5 years simply for doing code experiments on my own.  You do have to “apply” for a key, but the non-commercial keys are established almost immediately as I recall.

Once you have your key, you are ready to go!  Keep in mind, this example assumes that you have some public photos in your photostream.  If you do not, you can still retrieve photos from the public, but I found a photo gallery hosted on your own website is more interesting if it is your own photos.  Also, this example assumes that you have included jQuery into your page.  I like to reference the version out on googleapis.  With that setup, making a client-side call to grab recent photos is pretty straightforward.  Create your URI against the Flickr rest service, make the call with one of the jQuery AJAX methods (getJSON in this example), and process the JSON results.  Please note that you will need to provide your own API key and user ID to actually use this example code.

var flickrEndpoint = 'http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?format=json&jsoncallback=?';

function loadRecentPhotos() {
    var flickrApiKey = 'Your Flickr API Key';
    var userId = 'Your Flickr UserID';
    var count = 12;
    var method = 'flickr.people.getPublicPhotos';
    var uri = flickrEndpoint + '&method=' + method
        + '&api_key=' + flickrApiKey
        + '&user_id=' + flickrUserId
        + '&per_page=' + count;

    $.getJSON(uri,
        function (data) {
            populateThumbnails(data.photos, containerId);
        }
    );
}

function populateThumbnails(photos) {
    var photosListHtml = '<ul>';

    $.each(photos.photo, function (i, photo) {
        var element = '<li><a rel="group-'
        + containerId + '" href="'
        + getMedium640PhotoUrl(photo) + '" title="'
        + photo.title + '"><img src="'
        + getSquarePhotoUrl(photo) + '" /></a></li>';
        photosListHtml += element;
    });

    photosListHtml += '</ul>';

    $('#recentPhotos').append(photosListHtml);
    $(".thumb").colorbox();
}

function getMedium640PhotoUrl(photo) {
    return 'http://farm' + photo.farm + '.static.flickr.com/'
    + photo.server + '/' + photo.id + '_' + photo.secret + '_z.jpg';
}

The populateThumbnails call simply takes the JSON results from the flickr.people.getPublicPhotos call, creates an unordered list, and puts the results into the recentPhotos container (<div id=”recentPhotos”>).  Following this same pattern, one could easily grab photosets, photos for a particular photoset, or any other application. For a live example of this use of the Flickr API, you can look at the footer or the photos section of this website.  I did create a small plugin in WordPress so that the photo gallery was integrated with the site, but all of the calls to the Flickr API are on the client-side.  Look soon for a full-featured example outside the context of this blog.

• HTML5 is Here and the Web Will Never Be the Same (Brandon Satrom and Clark Sell).  This was a half-day hands-on session where we explored some of the new semantic tags of HTML5, new CSS3 features, and some JavaScript libraries to help implement new features on old browsers.  Brandon and Clark both did a great job of making this an informative and fun pre-compiler.  This presentation helped spur me implement some of the HTML5 markup in my blog’s theme.
• Once Upon a Time in Clojureland: Learning Clojure with a Fairy Tale (Carin Meier).  I had very little knowledge of Clojure, or any other functional language when I walked into the room.  Carin did an excellent job of introducing us newbies to Clojure with a very clever and easy to understand presentation.  Once the session concluded, I felt myself wanting more time to work with the language and to learn it better.  I’m not exactly certain how I will use it for my day job, but it doesn’t matter – I still want to expand my horizons and learn more about the language.
• Hands-On Responsive and Adaptive Web Design (Ben Callahan).  Although some techniques on HTML and CSS were covered in this session, I appreciated the user-centered approach in the presentation most.  I am not by far a user experience expert, but I really do enjoy a good user experience presentation.  Ben’s talk really emphasized how important it is for a website to be flexible amongst different displays and browsers.  And with more and more people using smartphones and tablets, the ability for the display to adapt to smaller screens in a pleasing way cannot be overlooked.

I attended several other very good sessions, mostly in .NET.  But, after 10 years of mostly living in the .NET world, I think I got a little more out of the sessions that brought me out of my usual domain.  That’s one thing I really enjoyed about Codemash – there were a LOT of different backgrounds present.  Some of the best open source .NET projects have been inspired by other frameworks (how many have been ported from Java?), so a Microsoft-centered developer can certainly gain a fresh perspective with a conversation with a Java or Ruby developer.  I also carpooled to Sandusky with a coworker who has been doing a lot of iOS development lately, that gave a great perspective on developing for mobile platforms.

Even though Codemash was a wonderful experience for me, I think I could have had an even better experience if I had done a few things differently.

• I generally didn’t pay too much attention to the open spaces.  I think a couple of the sessions would have been better spent working with other developers on actual code or practicing something I had learned.  Yes, most of the sessions were good and well-presented, just a couple of them were not interesting or relevant to me.
• I also should have attended a couple of the craftsmanship specific sessions.  I tended to stick to language or framework-specific sessions, while missing out on some talks or coding that would have helped in creating better software.  This included some of the TDD talks and some of the Katas.
• This post would not be complete without an area of improvement from the photography perspective.  Although I did take some decent snapshots of the speakers, I needed to take more photos of the entire experience.  Admittedly, I felt constrained at times since I still don’t have a mid-range zoom, I had to switch lenses too often to get to the wide to normal range.  The 70-300mm lens did quite well on capturing the speakers up close, but anything else required switching to a lens that may not have been a good choice. But, other than that lousy excuse, I don’t think I was very creative in my photographic choices.  I should have moved around a bit more and captured more of the happenings outside of the sessions.

If I had to pick out one theme from Codemash that really stuck with me (other than bacon), it would be passion.  Passion for the technology, passion for learning, passion for creating great software.  At a conference like Codemash, passion is a theme that was echoed over and over no matter whom you talked to.  And I have to admit that this conference did ignite my passion for software development and reminded me why I love it.  Even if I haven’t been able to play around programming as much as I would have liked, at least I feel a bit more invigorated.  Feeling inspired to learn is alone worth the price of admission!

I definitely hope to attend Codemash next year, and if I address a couple of those areas of improvement I think I will get even more out of the conference.  Attendance seems to grow every year, so I need to make sure I have a quick trigger finger again to claim my spot!  Until next year, Codemash, goodbye and thanks for all of the bacon!

My “photo week” will last from Sunday – Saturday, and I will probably be uploading the weekly picture on Saturdays (perhaps sooner if I have a sure winner).  Conveniently, January 1 fell on a Sunday this year, so my first week was January 1 – 7.  Just like last year, I will be posting the pictures on Facebook and Flickr.  I have very few contacts on both sites, so I should only be “flooding” one or two people with the pictures.  If you are following along at home and aren’t a Facebook friend, you can see the project in progress here.

1. Create a “day in the life” through photography
2. Improve my photography skills.

I truly believe I have accomplished both goals, at least on some level. Let’s take a look at them in deeper detail.

Create a “day in the life” through photography

I didn’t necessarily do this to the letter.  After all, a photograph from every day activities could have been quite dull.  Maybe a skilled photographer could have made everyday photos interesting, but I don’t exactly fit the bill.  What I did do, however, is capture some of the more significant events of the year – birthdays, outings with friends, seasonal parties, etc.  I felt that was more important than yet another photo of something from work or what exciting dish we had for dinner (Yes!  Tacos!).  When I look back through the 365 photos from the 2011 project, I will be able to see the important happenings of the year.  And I’ll also probably be able to tell the days when time was limited and I just took a random snapshot from around the house.

Improve my photography skills

This was a more subjective goal, as it wasn’t always obvious what I may have been trying to accomplish with a particular photo.  However, I did work on various photographic skills – depth of field, out of focus blur (bokeh), “freezing” action with shutter speed, composition / rule of thirds, and post processing.  I don’t know if my abilities in any of these areas increased greatly, but I do feel I did make some improvements.  I also refined my workflow with the purchase of Adobe Lightroom back in the spring, this purchase made the decision to shoot in the raw instead of direct to jpeg much easier.  For everything here, the ol’ saying is true – practice makes perfect.  Even if a particular photo didn’t really work for what I was trying to accomplish, at least I got out and shot more.  That is one of the basic tenets of getting better at almost anything – just get out and do it!

The problem with a photo of the day

As I stated in my 6 month retrospective, subjects did not always come easy to me.  There are days when I would get home after a long day’s work where I just didn’t get a chance to take an interesting photo.  Sure, I would be able to take crowd-pleasing photos of my daughter (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but it did lead to less variety in my subjects.  I know that a lot of the photos were pretty dull, and it may have even seemed that I was “mailing it in” for the day.  And sadly, I have to admit I did do just that on occasion (on second thought maybe it’s sadder that some of my photos that I thought about and took real effort were uninteresting).  I think that may be the area of biggest improvement should I ever do this again – creativity with the subject matter.  It is certainly easier to pick something interesting to photograph while on vacation.  It’s a completely different matter on a cold and dark late November day.

As the year comes to a close, I’ve gone back and forth on whether or not I want to continue to do a “photo a day”.  I’ve really enjoyed the project overall, even though there were days it felt more like a burden than a fun little project.  I cannot deny that it has increased my interest in photography as a hobby, and I certainly want to continue to evolve my skills and practice different techniques.  And most of all, I want to continue to develop my photographic eye – after all, I don’t want to simply take snapshots all of the time.  I want to capture interesting and compelling images, even if they are only interesting and compelling to me!

So, with all of that being said, I am going to try a different project for 2012.  I have decided I am going to do a “Project 52″ – a photo per week, starting the week of January 1.  I’m sure that my contacts / friends on Flickr and Facebook will be relieved that they no longer will be subjected to a photo from me everyday, but I will still get to pester them once a week.  I am not going to necessarily try to capture a “day in the life” as much with a 52 week project.  I mostly want to continue to work on technique, and mostly I want each image to be at least somewhat interesting and elevated beyond a mere snapshot.  So, here’s to another year, and more photographic fun in 2012!

Now that we’ve been free of pay TV for 6 months, we hardly feel like we’ve missed anything at all.  We mostly watch Netflix (streaming and DVD’s) and a few shows over the air. For our over the air viewing pleasure, I bought a Terk HDTV Indoor antenna.  It seems like a pretty good antenna, and has worked mostly well for the UHF channels.  Our lone VHF channels is CBS, and unfortunately it doesn’t seem to come in well.  Luckily we are able to get a couple unencrypted channels through the cable since we still have RoadRunner, so we are able to get by for the few times we watch CBS.  And, if worst comes to worst, there are online options for viewing our shows online after the original air-date.  Perhaps our television viewing isn’t as “smooth” and seamless as it was when we had pay TV, but the savings make it overwhelmingly worth it.

• I am getting better with the technical aspect of photography. I am learning my camera much better than I ever did prior to this project, and am learning to utilize aperture and shutter speed in useful ways. Sure, it helps that I have a nice new D7000 to learn and to play with, but I was finally starting to get out of my comfort zone with the D70 in the month I was using it for this project.
• I think about photography every day. Of course that is a result of needing a picture everyday, but I think this will help in developing my “photographic eye”. On that same note, there are times this project is a burden. Using my D7000 and taking pictures in the “raw” means that I need to download pictures everyday, process them through Lightroom, and upload them. Sure, I could upload them less frequently, but I try to keep in the spirit of the project by not only taking pictures everyday, but uploading them everyday as well.
• In my opinion my actual photos are improving. Not all of the are good, of course, but at least I can see improvement if I look at the entire project – or at least improvement over pictures I took last year. Again, the D7000 helps, but I like to think that my technique is getting better.
• My composition skills are a work in progress. Admittedly, I am not a very creative person. I am very much a “left-brained” kind of person, which means I have to work harder to approach photography in a more artistic manner. A truly great artist can turn some mundane subjects into something a bit more interesting than I do right now. I do think that I am getting better in seeing the creative side of photography, but it doesn’t come easy for me.
• My subjects haven’t always been interesting. I try to pick something interesting to photography every day, and in that same turn I have tried not to repeat a subject too often. However, this has been difficult for me. I suppose part of it is because I don’t have much time for photography every day (particularly during the work week). Sometimes because of a lack of time, I just take a random picture of something just to get my photo in for the day… and that comes out a bit on the dull side. Luckily I feel this hasn’t been as much of an issue with the longer days of spring and summer, although I still repeat subjects more than I would like.
• I really should get a macro lens. I have found that I enjoy close-up photography of things in nature – birds, butterflies, flowers, etc, and frankly I don’t have a lens that brings out the details of these subjects.

Those are the big points that came to mind as I look back at the project so far. I am quite happy with some of the pictures I’ve taken, so I’ve looked back and decided to pick my favorite photo of each month. Not everyone will agree, but it is a subjective choice:

Overall, I have enjoyed the project so far. I haven’t taken a lot of “great” photos, but I am quite happy with some of the photos I have taken.  I just need to continue to work on technique and trying to be a bit more creative with some of the subjects.

And… my Mitsubishi Eclipse is now history (well, for me anyway).  Tuesday evening, Vanessa and I walked into Jeff Wyler Eastgate Mazda and bought a new Mazda5.

The Mazda5 is officially a van, but it is smaller and drives more like a car than any other van in the US today (at least from what I could tell).  And that was a big drawing point for us.  We wanted something bigger without being an SUV, and we didn’t want one of the not-so-mini vans offered by most other manufacturers.  My father in law Mike had set the precedent a couple of years ago when he had bought a 2009 Mazda5.  We noticed how roomy it was in the inside despite not looking that big from the outside.  Add that to the fact that the car is capable of getting up to 30 miles per gallon (depending on driving habits and other factors), and it sounded like a winner.

The buying process was actually quite easy – probably the easiest I have ever had it when buying a car.  I started off the process by submitting an inquiry through Edmunds.com, who sent it off to the participating Mazda dealers.  We did specify a few features that we wanted, but overall I had left it fairly open so that we could be flexible with what the dealers would offer.  Within a couple of days, I had quotes from each dealer.  The one tricky thing we had with the Mazda5 was that there weren’t a whole lot to choose from locally.  This car is manufactured in Japan, and as a result of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, there aren’t a whole lot of them for distribution.  Fortunately, Mazda’s website keeps pretty good tabs on inventory for each of their dealers, so we were able to see if each dealer offered the car in a color we would like and with features we wanted.  In the end, Jeff Wyler offered us the best quote, and had the added bonus of being the closest to our house.  Based on price alone, some of the dealers did offer what I felt were fair prices.  And if they had all of the features we wanted and didn’t require longer drives, we may have considered them more.  But overall, the entire experience of communicating through email and phone with Wyler’s internet sales associate made it feel like going into the dealership was the final formality.  Sure, it helped that we were almost certain of what car we wanted, but the internet sales process went quite well.  Admittedly, we did not get our first choice for color; but when we came to see the only vehicle on Wyler’s lot that fit our ideal criteria, we found that the color (Metropolitan Gray) actually looked pretty good.

As for the car – I love it!  Yeah, it is a car aimed at parents, and certainly isn’t as sleek and sexy as the Eclipse was.  It does have a “fun to drive” factor that many other vans / family trucksters do not have, and I love some of the tech features the car includes.  Sure, nothing in it is “cutting edge”, but features that used to be only in luxury cars have trickled down to the masses and their vehicles such as the Mazda5.  So far, my favorite thing to play with has been the Bluetooth integration – and it hasn’t been because of the ability to make hands-free phone calls.  I have loved being able to use Bluetooth to play the music on my iPhone, now I have even more ways to avoid the crappy terrestrial radio stations!   To soften the blow from moving to a convertible to a hard top, we opted to get the moonroof / audio package (which helped even more to restrict the cars available with the local dealers).

As time goes by I will find out more about what I like and don’t like about the car.  After two days, though, it gets and “A+”.  More pictures can be found here.

Outside of moving to WordPress, I’ve also switched hosts.  My old host was Webhost4life (WH4L), whom I was happy with for the most part until last year.  Then, they had a change of ownership and the process of moving accounts to their new system was an utter disaster.  Most of the people I knew who were customers left the host in droves.  Once those initial hiccups were worked through, the host has recovered moderately well.  However, the entire thing left a bitter taste in my mouth.  But that’s not the entire reason I’m leaving.  I tried running a WordPress site with on a 3rd level domain with WH4L, but frankly performance was awful.  Sure, I was running it on IIS 7, but my personal experience shows that WordPress works quite well on IIS 7.  My guess is it was the way the shared hosting instance was setup for PHP and/or WordPress.  My .NET sites performed decently, but if I was going to run with WordPress the performance left a lot to be desired.  Sure, I could work with them some more, but I came to realize that the value was no longer there.  With a move to WordPress, I no longer needed to run ASP.net on my personal site, so I could find better value with the myriad Linux hosts out there.  Thanks to Ryan Cromwell, I was introduced to Webfaction.  I haven’t been with them long, but so far I am impressed!  Performance of my site has been better than it ever was at WH4L!  I haven’t needed support yet, but at least they pay attention to their twitter account (unlike WH4L).  The control panel isn’t quite as powerful as the one at WH4L, but I have been able to get most of what I needed so far.  Seems I also have a shell account, in case I need to hack around Linux for some things I may need.  That will be a trip down memory lane – it’s been years since done anything in Linux.  But, it will be good for me – as much as I enjoy Windows (take that, Mac fanboys!), I don’t want to stagnate and be oblivious to the *nix operating systems.  I’ll revisit my experience in a month (I’m on the month to month plan right now), but for now I’m a happy customer!