Disorderly Content

So I'm driving along a backroad near Gilroy this afternoon, enjoying the weather and looking for something to photograph. This particular road's kind of narrow and winding, and there's no place to stop. But the scenery's pretty, with the brown hills and the green trees. I spot a big field with a big hill behind it, and a herd of cows standing around looking photogenic. So I wish for a place to stop, and I find one a couple of hundred feet beyond. I park, grab my camera and walk back up the road, hoping I'll hear any oncoming traffic in time to get out of the way. My luck holds; no oncoming traffic, and the cows are right where I left them.

But not for long. They're on the move, having been disturbed by a loud and clumsy photographer. I get a few pictures before a ridge gets between me and them. And then I head back to my car. I had the wrong lens for the distance, and wanted to get something longer. I swap the lens and then head back down the road a little way, figuring I could at least shoot the flora, what with the fauna having given me the slip.

Except... they hadn't. Quite the opposite, in fact. Because the moment I looked over the barbed wire fence, I discovered where the herd had gone. They'd gathered by the gate in the fence, just across from my parking spot. And they were all looking at me. With interest, or at least as much interest as a cow is capable of showing. I wondered if they were used to someone coming to feed them, and if I'd acted sufficiently farmerlike to fire the synapses in their little bovine brains. But I got a few shots before they lost interest or had another thought. Not that that was all that likely. And I never did get a model release. Are hoof prints legally binding?

Given all the money we/I spend on high quality photographic gear, there's a perverse joy to be found in going low tech. There are Holga fanatics for example, for whom the world looks far better in plastic. Me, I've been lusting after a Lensbaby for a while; it's not remotely something I need, but it sure would be fun! The joy comes in limiting focus in a shot, something tilt-shift lenses make easy.

I've written before about the wonderfulness of tilt-shift for video, and how it makes everything seem like it's in miniature. Now we have a website that lets us simulate the effect on photographs. Just go to TiltShiftMaker.com, upload a photo, move a couple of sliders and see your image transformed! It's amazing!

Now about that Lensbaby. I know I have a credit card around here somewhere...

It's a rare and wonderful thing when you meet someone you've been following for a while (following in a media sort of way, not as a stalker) and discover that they're just the way you hoped they'd be. I had such an experience this weekend, when I attended one of Chris Marquardt's Learning To See photographic workshops. Chris is the host/proprietor of Tips From The Top Floor, a most excellent podcast about (digital) photography. I've been listening to Chris for about three years now, and found him a most excellent combination of skilled photographer and engaging and articulate presenter and teacher. So how much of a pleasure to discover that he's just the same in person. More to the point, his workshop was worth every penny; I learned a lot about composition (the photographic kind, not the ones we had to write in elementary school) and had a fine time in the process.

Anybody who's interested in photography would be well advised to start listening to the show. It's a free download, and well worth the time and the nonexistent expense. As for the workshop, well, four days in Colorado with my camera and a bunch of enthusiastic photographers. What's not to like?

I had another studio photo shoot last night, thanks to my friend and mentor RJ, who has a talent for finding and giving us access to the most amazing models. Anyway, while it was someone else's turn to shoot, the conversation turned inevitably to equipment, by which I mean cameras and lenses. (Why? What did you think I meant?) I mentioned that I'd been lusting after Nikon's new 24-70mm f/2.8 lens, an excellent but very expensive piece of glass that's in rather short supply. And of course I returned home to an email from B&H Photo in New York, telling me that they finally had some in stock. I had my order in before I could consider my decision to spend so much on what will likely be a small incremental improvement to my images. I mean really: how much difference could it make? Then again, how could I hope my head up at our next shoot with an attitude like that?

Yep, boys and their toys. It only gets worse as we get older.

As I may have mentioned here a time or two, I'm an enthusiastic photographer. I'll shoot pretty much anything that will sit still long enough: scenery, buildings, food I pick up at the farmer's market even if I have no idea what to do with it once I'm done taking its picture. About the only subject I don't shoot is (are?) people. To be honest (which I'm sure makes you wonder what I've been doing up to now), people make me nervous. Especially women. Especially pretty women. Who are, by a strange and unfortunate coincidence, the ones most likely to end up on the other side of the camera.

But model photography has always interested me, both as a skill to be mastered and because, well, it's an excuse to spend time looking at pretty women. (Yeah, I'm shallow.) So when I heard mention of a group in the area that puts on monthly mixers for photographers and models I signed up. And then did nothing for months. I even almost went last month, but chickened out at literally the last moment. Which I almost did again this month, but somehow talked myself into walking in the door, paying my ten dollars and seeing what it was all about. And, as with most things that scare me, discovered there really wasn't anything to be afraid of.

In three hours I shot 250 pictures of a dozen different models, experimented with some different settings, took advantage of lighting equipment brought by other attendees, learned a lot and had a fine time doing it. I can't wait to go back and do it again, a little wiser and, knowing me, with even more newly purchased equipment I won't know how to use. Le plus ça change, as the French say.

Update 11/25: It only took a week, but I finally got a few of my better (or less worse) shots up on Flickr. If you're curious, you can see and comment on them in my new ModelMix set.

Oh god, I so want it...

Speaking of photography, as much as I enjoy shooting for all the microstock websites, and especially getting paid when people download my work, it sure would be nice to know just what people are doing with them all. I mean, I've sold something like ten thousand photos over the past two years (correction: actually, it's more than twenty thousand), and I've heard from maybe a dozen purchasers in all that time. That's why an email I received today was such a pleasure.

The message came from somebody in the marketing department of an accounting firm, who wrote to tell me that they've used a bunch of my shots in proposals to clients. It seems some of my shots of lesser known California landmarks go over pretty well with the locals. I wish I could say that was part of some evil scheme (eeeeevillllll!), but I just get tired of the Golden Gate and want something new to shoot. She also wanted to know if I had any plans to photograph a particular Bay Area town. I didn't, I wrote back. But I'm nothing if not flexible. Heck, I should pay her for the suggestion. I won't, mind you. But I should.

Last week at this time I was suffering from a severe bout of cabin fever. I needed to get away, preferably to someplace photogenic. And that's when I remembered the Skunk Train, a scenic railroad into the California redwoods. Perfect, I thought; I can drive up late on Friday, spend Saturday riding the train and taking lots of pictures and drive back Sunday. And so I did, adjusting my schedule to be just across the Golden Gate in time for a fly-by by the new Airbus A380, a plane that makes a 747 look positively dainty. Anyway, after a couple of passes by the Airbus I continued my drive north.

I was on 101 north of Cloverdale, driving along the vineyards and worrying about the overcast skies and a bit of rain, when I spotted the most amazing rainbow I think I'd ever seen. The problem with rainbows is finding the right place to photograph them. You see, if you try to get closer, they generally just fade away. So I watched this one and looked for a convenient place to stop. A quarter mile or so I found one, and was surprised to see that the rainbow was maybe even a little more pronounced. And then I noticed that a half dozen other drivers had the same thought, and were standing along the freeway and enjoying the view. Which I have captured here for you poor people who didn't get to experience the real thing.

My big regret is that my lens wasn't nearly wide enough to capture the whole arc of the rainbow. But what I got wasn't bad at all. And I managed to collect a few other good shots over the weekend, which was nice. As Hannibal Smith liked to say, I love it when a plan comes together.

I've been shooting and submitting photos for sale on microstock websites for more than two years, and I'd like to believe I've learned a few things along the way. One of the big lessons is that useful trumps pretty: a photo a designer can use as part of an ad or a website or whatever is far more important that one that makes you go "ooooohh!". Which is good for me, since it isn't often I produce that kind of shot. I'm becoming a better technical photographer. But art? Not often, and even less often by intent.

I mention all this to show you two data points that tell the story far better than I could. Two photographs, each exceptional in a different way. The first, which you can see here has been voted the best in my portfolio by my peers on iStockphoto. It has been reviewed thirteen times to date, and given a maximum rating by each reviewer. The photo has sold 44 times on this one site, which isn't too bad. But that's over the course of a year, so it's not exactly good either.

Now let's consider the second photo, which you can find here. It's never been reviewed; not a single person who saw it thought it was worthy of praise. And I don't blame them; it is a singularly uninspired image. But here's the thing: this second picture has sold 194 times. And not in a year; no, that's in just five months. Looked at another way, the second photo sells ten times for every sale of the first. Because it's useful, or at least that's what I assume. It sure ain't artistic.

Now all I have to do is figure out how to shoot a few dozen more uninspired images that'll sell as well. Which, come to think of it, is a pretty interesting creative challenge.

What with my photography hobby, I'm always looking for interesting places to shoot pictures, especially shots that are otherwise hard to get. I've found some great spots around San Francisco Airport where I can catch the jets leaving and arriving; a 300 mm lens and a digital SLR with a 1.6 crop factor (smaller than 35 mm film sensor = 1.6 multiplier on the lens) can give me shots like this, assuming I can find the right place to stand. But I haven't been able to get much closer locally.

But last week I was in San Diego for work. And when I picked up my rental car, I couldn't help noticing the jets flying directly overhead on their way to the runway. And not that far overhead at that; the approach takes them awfully close to the eight story parking garage behind Dollar's rental lot. So on my way back to the airport to fly home, I took advantage of the wait for the shuttle to snap a few shots of the incoming jets. Which look quite a bit closer than I get at SFO. And which are even closer than that: the jet at right is one of those small regional numbers (the 747 above is somewhat bigger). Oh, and the lens was a mere 200 mm. And no, I didn't crop the shot; it's exactly the size it was in my viewfinder. Like I said: close.

I have a little vacation trip coming up in a couple of months. That means pictures, and lots of them. So my meagre 4GB memory card just isn't gonna cut it. After all, how am I supposed to last three weeks in Australia and New Zealand on 750 or so pictures?

That'll be enough with the snickering, thank you very much. But anyway, you see my dilemma. Which is why I've been stopping by the memory section at my local Fry's every couple of weeks, wondering when prices on 8GB Compact Flash cards will take a nosedive. I'd already seen them drop from $160 to $130, where they'd stabilized. So you can imagine my surprise to see that they had one brand on sale for just $79.99!

Of course, there's always the question of availability. So I had the salescritter check stock. And the first thing that came up was a card for $159.99, minus a $70 rebate. No thanks, thinks I. But no, that was the wrong card. Plugging in the right part number got me the $80 card, which the computer claimed was in stock. Still, you can't believe computers. (At least not their computers.) So a call to the cage confirmed that there were indeed cards available for sale.

So now my quest for memory has ended. I figure that between my 8GB card and my 4GB, I have room for over 2000 photos. That should just about do it.

One of the annoying aspects of shooting with a digital SLR, as compared both to point & shoot cameras and those film SLRs of fond memory, is the need to, and the impossibility of, keeping the camera's sensor clean. The problem comes from what makes an SLR so good: the ability to replace lenses. But changing lenses means exposing the camera's sensor to the elements, even if only for a moment. And that means all kinds of evil stuff: dust, rain, even little plasticy bits that can break free from the camera's innards after a little too much rough handling. Which leads, inevitably, to crud on the sensor that a dry cleaning won't get off.

(If you're wondering why film SLRs don't have the same problem, it's because the sensor -- the film -- gets pushed through the camera and brushes against something that cleans it. Besides, each frame of film only gets used once, so any junk becomes irrelevant with the next press of the shutter.)

Anyway, I knew it was time to investigate a wet process cleaning when I saw these dark streaks on some of my airplane-in-flight pictures. The streaks weren't a problem if the thing I was focusing on was relatively close. But at the distant range of my 300mm lens they were becoming steadily more obvious, and steadily harder to clone away in Photoshop. So off I went to Keeble to see what they recommended for a cleaning solution (pun fully intended).

What I got was a surprise. The last time I'd asked about cleaning, they told me they didn't do that kind of work, that I'd have to buy a kit and do it myself. But some time between then and now they'd had a change of heart, presumably deciding the risk of their doing damage was low (the reason given for not cleaning customers' sensors before) and the chance for income wasn't. So I gave them my precious(ssss), and waited an agonizing two days for the verdict. Which was positive: my camera had cleaned up just fine (wish the same could be said for me) and was ready for pickup. Now I just needed a chance to get out and try it out.

Which is what I did today, first heading up by San Francisco Airport to catch the planes coming in to land, then over to a public garden in Palo Alto to see if spring had yet... ummm... sprung. Which it had, or at least enough for me to try out my new macro lens. And thence home, to see if my pictures were well and truly streak free. To make a long story short (yeah, I know: too late), they were. And are. And I'm gonna revise my lens changing technique in an attempt to keep them that way as long as I can. Two days without a camera's just not right!

Okay, I have this little addiction problem. It seems I'm a photo junkie; if I don't get out to shoot something - anything - at least every couple of days, I get really antsy and start climbing the walls. It's been a couple of weeks, so you can only imagine how bad I am right now.

It's a combination of factors that's been keeping me from being out and about. Factor #1 is the weather, which has been foggy, hazy and now just plain wet. #2 was a mild case of the flu I had a week ago. I managed to discharge my work obligations - barely - but had no energy left for photography, assuming I could have found something I wanted to shoot. And then work intruded in a big way: factor #3. I was in New York all last week for our annual sales kickoff. Photogenic place, New York. Except: not if you don't get out of the hotel. Which we mostly didn't, aside from the group dinners every night. And those involved walking a few blocks in frigid winds to a too-small restaurant and a meal (and a fair amount of alcohol) that took most of the night. Get a few hours of sleep and repeat.

So not a lot of opportunity for pictures. In fact, the only pics I managed to take in five days were out my window to the office building across the street. You didn't expect me to go cold turkey, did you?

Nikon makes much of their Creative Lighting System, where each individual flash unit -- excuse me -- speedlight communicates with others to balance out the exposure and get things right. Intelligence is a good thing in a flash, right? Suddenly I'm not so sure. And I'm less sanguine about keeping my SB600 and SB800 in the same bag...

If you're really old (like me), you may remember a commercial that asked the unanswerable question, "How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop?" The question is unanswerable, we are told, because nobody can get there without biting into the pop. I mention this because I came oh so close to getting the answer to another unanswerable question: "How many photos can I store on a 4GB memory card?" Which may not seem unanswerable; after all, doesn't the camera give me a running total of its capacity? It does, and it doesn't, at least if you use JPEG for your images (as I do). The problem is that JPEG compression requires more or less room depending on the complexity of each image; a solid blue surface takes up very little room, while a photo of a field of grass takes a lot. Watch your camera's counter as you take each picture; notice how often the count fails to change.

Anyway, thanks to my Farscape convention and the week I spent touring the Southwest in my new (hybrid) car, I thought I'd finally get an answer. Guess I didn't take enough pictures, 'cause by the time I got home I still hadn't filled the card. Got close, though; my card has 750 full resolution, minimum compression images, with room (so the camera says) for 78 more. Which is a lot more than the 449 images the camera claims when the card is empty. Guess I'll have to take even more pictures the next time I'm out and about.

In my illustrious career in tech, I've sometimes been called upon to provide support to customers. We all have our self-inflicted wound stories, those of us who minister to the technologically challenged. And we have phrases to describe such problems that occur through no fault of the people who built the product. Cockpit was one I learned in my first job; it referred to a cockpit error, or when the plane flies into the ground because of something the pilot did. My personal favorite is the obscure acronym PEBCAK, which means the same thing. Translation: Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard. In other words, the user did it.

This isn't a tech support story, although it could be if I'd tried to call tech support to complain about my problem. What problem? Why, the fact that my photos from this weekend came out all yellow. It seems that I took a long drive out to Gold Country on Saturday, both to enjoy the blue sky and sunshine and to give my new and expensive Nikon D200 another workout. I ended up at the American River, just down the road from Auburn, California. It was a pretty spot for some picture taking, so that's just what I did.

Flash forward a few hours to my return home. I loaded my pictures onto my brand new Mac Mini, and was horrified to see a whole lot of yellow among the green. Something must be wrong with the camera; I certainly don't remember things being that yellow!

One aspect of the D200 that has been keeping me busy reading is the multiplicity of adjustments it provides. I've been trying to understand all the settings, and have been combining recommendations from a bunch of different sources in hope of getting the best results. Now I think that was part of my problem; I went back to simple and reset everything until I can experiment with each setting and find the best value. Some of the color adjustments I'd tried might explain a little extra yellow in my pictures. But I was having trouble explaining such a large color shift, especially since other parts of the picture looked pretty good to me.

So today I went out shooting again. Not to Gold Country; I didn't want to go that far. Instead I headed south to San Juan Bautista, to take some shots around the Mission. And along the way I noticed something I should have remembered: there are a hell of a lot of wildflowers out there. The hills are turning from green to more earth tones, as the end of the rain starts to dry out the vegetation. And there are yellow flowers all over, which I saw but didn't remark upon on my Saturday run. Turns out I was only half right; some of that yellow was those settings I'd tried, but the rest was just nature being, well, natural. Gotta pay more attention. As Yogi Berra once said, "You can observe a lot by just watching."

Not as a writer; that's happened a bunch of times, although not recently. No, this time it's as a photographer, courtesy of my stock photo efforts. Way back in November I got an email from a gentleman at Carus Publishing to tell me that a photograph I took of Coober Pedy in South Australia was going to be used in an article in Cricket Magazine, a publication for 9 to 14 year olds. Even better, he offered me some copies of the magazine to show off to friends. Anyway, minutes ago I received a visit from UPS. The sender was unfamiliar, and I was no better off when I opened the envelope. But a skim through the pages found my photograph and the whole thing came flooding back.

Thrilling, isn't it? I have a credit in the magazine and everything! Can National Geographic be far behind? (Yes. Yes it can.)

I don't mean my particular work sucks, so if anybody at my present employer should happen to read this, I'm not talking about you. Unless you think I am, in which case it's quite possible you're right. But you're not, so don't go telling anybody I said otherwise.

No, I'm talking about the concept in general, and the way it interferes with all the important things like blogging and catching movies and going out shooting. I refer not to the Dick Cheney lawyer-winging style of shooting, of which I'm not a big fan (if it moves under its own power, I won't shoot it), but instead of the photographic kind of shooting. Suddenly, being back among the employed means I have to make the most of weekends. Which is what I was doing today out at Baylands Nature Preserve, shooting all sorts of migratory birds, along with some of the airplanes taking off from and landing at Palo Alto Airport. Which they were doing in reverse today (the planes, not the birds), I assume because of the winds. At least that's why big airports reverse the direction of their runways, and I assume little ones have the same issues.

Anyway, this was a first chance to try out the 70-300mm lens I just bought. Which did a pretty good job, although a little more magnification would have been nice. My partner in today's photography has a 100-400mm lens, a monster that probably outweighs my lens by a factor of three. I'll be interested to see her results.

I feel pretty good about mine; I got a bunch of new shots to send to the stock photo sites. Took a while to figure out just what kinds of birds I was shooting. Thank goodness for the web-based wizard at WhatBird. They only let me down regarding the sample at right. Anybody want to take a guess? Kind of hard to try to sell a picture when you can't tell people what it's a picture of.

Last night I finally got around to something I've been planning for a while: taking pictures of the holiday light displays around my neighborhood. I had a few different purposes in mind. First, I wanted to feed my stock photo portfolio. Seasonal images seem to do very well, like the candy corn shots I did just in time for Halloween. And I hear Christmas is a big deal among the Goyim, so maybe if I get something good I can sell a few.

A second reason is that I hadn't shot much of anything recently, at least not since the photographic orgy that was my annual Farscape convention. I needed to get myself motivated again. And third is that I've done very little night shooting over the years. I find the best way to assess my skills is to try something and see how badly I fail at it. And unlike model photography, where there's someone to see me screw things up, shooting people's front lawns at night seemed a safe environment in which to test my ineptitude. Well, safe until you consider cars cruising along that may or may not see me before it's too late. Which, not to eliminate the suspense, didn't happen. Well, they did cruise. But they didn't miss me. Or rather, they saw me and avoided any untoward incidents.

Anyway, I found lots of impressive displays within a short drive of here, including one short street where everybody seemed determined to outdo everybody else. And I determined quickly that my tripod sucks (time to upgrade!), that I had the wrong lens with me (my 24-120mm VR would have been a better choice) and that I might as well set the ISO up to the max if I have any hope at all of getting anything. Don't worry about noise; that Photoshop plugin you bought a few months ago will do a pretty good job of cleaning it up.

I got a few good shots, a couple of which are up on my Flickr account. And I expect I'll be out again tonight, armed with the right tools this time. But I have to laugh at the coincidence (at least I assume it's a coincidence) of an emailed ad I just received from Ritz Camera. Among the attempts to sell me P&S cameras and memory cards and the like was a particularly timely article. Its title? How To Take Great Photos of Holiday Lights. Which, unless I'm deluding myself, suggests I know more about the subject than I thought.

Boing Boing has a link to an amazing optical illusion at Ian Rowland's website. It's a pair of pictures of one angry and one calm individual. But what's really cool about the pictures is that if you get far enough away, the angry picture becomes calm and the calm one becomes angry. Go take a look; you too will be impressed!

(I'd have included the pictures here, but Mr. Rowland credits a paper from the University of Glasgow that claims copyright ownership. So if they disappear from his site you can find them at cvcl.mit.edu/gallery.htm.)

This'll probably sound strange to anybody who lives outside California, but a couple of days ago I took a look out the window and was absolutely thrilled to see clouds in the sky. I'm reminded of a story about Howard Hughes and the making of Hell's Angels. The movie's about an RAF squadron in World War I. And Howard Hughes, who directed the film, would get in a plane to look for good clouds. Because he knew he needed that contrasty backdrop to make his flying footage interesting.

And so it is with me and my stock photo efforts. I have a favorite spot at the entrance to Baylands Nature Preserve in Palo Alto. It's right by the end of the municipal airport's runway. And I can stand on the trail and get some nice shots of the planes as they come in for landings. But that damn perfect blue sky! The shots are so boring! They need some texture make the picture interesting. Which is why I was so pleased to see those clouds. In about fifteen minutes I had a couple of dozen great shots for my stock collection.

So, much as I'll miss the sunny days when the rains start for real, I'm very happy to see a little gray in the sky. And why not? I'm getting pretty gray myself!

Yeah, I know he never said it. And Rick didn't say "Play it again, Sam" either. But that's beside the point. What follows is a bit of deduction that would have Holmes sneering into his meerschaum. But I'm pretty proud; it isn't often I get the chance to show off my reasoning ability, elementary or otherwise.

As I've mentioned before, I'm totally obsessed with my participation in various microstock photography sites, checking my customer download counts the way I used to monitor accesses to my website. Anyway, things are slow at the moment, what with it being Sunday, and a long holiday weekend at that. So I was more than a little surprised to note that one site was showing three more downloads than the last time I'd checked. That may not sound like much (okay, it really isn't much), but it's pretty exciting stuff under the circumstances.

Now we get to the detective part. Who could be downloading images on a Sunday evening? Can't be Europe; it's the middle of the night over there. And things have been quiet in the US of A, download-wise. Then I noticed that the images in question have something in common; they're all of scenes around Coober Pedy, in the South Australian outback. That fits with the timing; when it's Sunday night in California it's noonish Monday in the outback. I guess one of the locals needed some photos for a project he or she is working on. Glad I could help, although I sure wish I could see the results.

Oh, and if you're curious, you can find the pictures in question here, here and here.

Update 09/13: It happened again! A week after those Oz downloads, I suddenly saw a bunch of downloads on another microstock site. This time all the shots were from my 2003 trip to New Zealand. And this time it kept going for a while; by the time the numbers stopped changing I had fourteen more downloads, including a couple of pictures no one had picked before. Gee, another ten thousand or so and I'll have that trip paid for!

I've been listening to a lot of podcasts lately. In part that's thanks to iTunes 4.9, which makes finding and downloading episodes pretty much effortless. (There is still the occasional glitch, which explains the pretty much part of that last sentence.) And it's also true that I did some traveling the past couple of weeks, which gave me a lot of time to listen. Anyway, one of the podcasts I've been enjoying is called Tips From The Top Floor. The subject is digital photography and the 'casts are full of photographic advice. Not about equipment, aside from suggestions that we get a beanbag to stabilize a camera for long exposure. No, this is more fundamental, and would apply equally well to almost any kind of camera. Even film, if that's your thing.

Anyway, a lot of the very good advice concerns finding interesting subjects. Which connected up with my current obsession of shooting everything in sight for the stock photography websites where I'm trying to sell my work. And it occurs to me that these sites are an excellent way to expand your photographic horizons. What I'm learning is that as I discover the kind of pictures somebody else might want to buy, I'm having to adjust my own inclinations about what to photograph. And even when I shoot the kind of landscapes I've always loved, my approach to framing the shot is changing to accomodate the different uses someone might find for the result.

So here's my little piece of advice if you're a photographer who'd enjoy a new challenge: sign up for one (or more) of the stock photo sites, upload some of your best stuff and see what happens. Here's a list of the major sites, in the order of my own success with them:

• ShutterStock
• iStockphoto
• Dreamstime
• BigStockPhoto
• Can Stock Photo

In the spirit of full disclosure, I get some benefit if you sign up using one of the links above and sell any pictures. Which is one of those win/win situations I've heard so much about.

As I've mentioned before, I'm spending a lot of time taking pictures and uploading them to stock photography websites in hopes of making huge piles of cash. Over time I've been getting a better idea of what might sell, like these huge satellite dishes we have scattered among the government contractors here in Silicon Valley. Problem is that most of the dishes I've found are in hard to photograph locations, what with freeway overpasses, roads without shoulders, chain link fences and the like keeping me from getting a clear shot. It's kind of amazing how little on-street parking there is around here, especially when it comes to office parks.

Anyway, I'd left my car in a hotel parking lot and wandered down the street for a closer look at one reasonably accessible dish. Crossing the street for a better look, I found the only way to shoot it without having lightrail power lines in the way was to wander into a facility parking lot. It was a quiet Saturday morning, so I didn't expect to be bothered. But as I was emerging from the lot after taking a couple of photos, I saw a Sunnyvale police cruiser on the other side of the street. And as I waited to cross, he made a U-turn almost in front of me. I wondered how much grief I was in for, what with having been on private government-contractor property and looking vaguely suspicious. But he had no interest in me at all; he finished his turn and went on his way.

Okay, not much of a story. The buildup was okay, but the punchline needs work.

I've been doing a bunch of shooting lately with my Nikon D70. And yesterday I noticed something upsetting: a little blemish in the upper left corner of all my pictures. At first I thought it was on the lens, until I tried a couple of shots with my other lens and discovered the same little blot in the same spot.

Distressing to say the least. Fixing the pictures was no problem; Photoshop Elements has a healing brush that zapped the blot in no time. I wasn't looking forward to sending the camera to Nikon for a professional cleaning. But after trying the blower bulb that worked a couple of weeks ago with no success, I prepared myself to be SLR-less for a few weeks.

Today I stopped at Keeble & Shuchat, the Palo Alto camera store where the Nikon and I first became acquainted. I wanted to know how to send the camera back. They, however, had a better solution. A Canadian company had just come out with a brush for cleaning sensors. A dry brush; you just blast the brush with compressed air and then brush away the dust. The brush is expensive, a little more than the cost of a professional cleaning. (Which is about what my dentist charges for a cleaning, so you know what I'm talking about.) But it's easy and safe. And best of all, it works! I'm now splotch-free.

The company is called Visible Dust; the product is Sensor Brush^TM. If you have a digital SLR you'll need one sooner or later.

I was up in Marin and Napa on Sunday; Marin for a barbecue in honor of a Scaper friend who's in transit from Alaska to San Diego (talk about your change of scene!) and Napa because I had a little time and couldn't resist stopping at Domaine Carneros for some champagne. It was about as perfect a day as I can remember; on the drive back through San Francisco that evening I saw plenty of spots I'll want to revisit and photograph. That got me thinking, always a dangerous proposition. Since I'm looking for photo ops, what about the zoo? I've never been to the San Francisco Zoo, so why not now? And so I set off yesterday morning.

According to the weather doohickey (that's the technical term) on my menu bar, San Francisco was chilly but sunny when I left a little after nine. Lesson #1: the weather doohickey lies like a politician. In fact, SF was anything but sunny. There was even the lightest mist during the day. And to make matters even less interesting, a shocking number of the zoo's enclosures are closed for maintenance. Between the renovations and the cool weather, my photo expedition was less than successful. But at least the penguins were out and about. And a few other animals were awake and cooperative. Guess I'll have to come back when things are livelier.

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about my visit to eBay Live! I mentioned that I saw a few products for photographing small objects. And I was pretty excited about the possibilities. In fact, I ordered one such package the moment I got home that evening. Said package arrived a few days later. And I have to say I'm disappointed.

The product in question is called Photo Studio In A Box and is available for $100 from Ritz Camera. It consists of a light box with translucent fabric walls, a reversible backdrop, a pair of spotlights and a camera stand. In theory, you can position the object to be protographed, the camera and the lights exactly where you want them and take precise, well lit images for eBay listings or whatever.

So much for the theory. The reality has been a lot of frustration and results that are mediocre at best. For one thing, the lights are okay for augmenting the light you need on your subject; but they're wholly inadequate as primary light sources. For another, the camera stand is a pain to adjust precisely; I was always aiming either too high or too low.

And then there's the backdrop, which offers a choice of dark blue on one side and medium gray on the other; what I really want is a white backdrop I can eliminate from the final shot. And the weave of the fabric shows up in macro images, making editing it out even more challenging.

I should have known. It's like getting stuff from Bazooka bubble gum or the back of comics when I was a kid; nothing's ever as good as the description. The one consolation is that I now know what it'll take to produce proper results. Now all I have to do is pay for it.

Apologies for the mangled German, but it just seemed appropriate. As I mentioned yesterday, I've been enjoying my first eBay Live! conference. Enough that I decided to go back today, first to take a tour of eBay's campus and second to attend a session on legal and tax issues for small businesses. Not that I'm planning to be such a business; I was sort of curious. And it was a fascinating talk for a bunch of reasons: good presenter, complex subject, fluid state of law. He even brought up the dreaded PATRIOT Act, which has let states discover imported items they can dun you for, including usurous interest charges.

But I digress. The campus tour was kind of ridiculous: a stop at the company store, which isn't as big as the one they had on the exhibit floor; a visit to the cafeteria, which wasn't actually operating; a video on eBay's history, which doesn't need any comment. I saw more than this when I interviewed here a couple of years ago. Oh, and a chance to be photographed in front of the eBay sign. Which I'm told will get you in trouble with Security any other day; they don't let people take any pictures of any part of the campus. So why make the exception now? Or why make an issue of it the rest of the time? It's this kind of inconsistent enforcement that makes the engineer in me want to argue, ya know?

After almost seventeen years in Silicon Valley, I finally decided to pay a visit to a local landmark. The Winchester Mystery House is right in the neighborhood; I've probably passed it a hundred times on my way to the local mall or one of the better movie theaters in the area. But I was in the mood to photograph something new. So today was going to be the day.

This entry isn't about the Mystery House, which is interesting as a historic oddity but not for much else. (The furniture is all replacement, since Sarah Winchester's will gave the original stuff away. And there aren't many contemporary photographs, so they don't know all that much about what used to be there. But I digress.) No, it's about a little photographic incident. Somewhere in my picture-taking, something got added: an unpleasant little blotch right around twelve o'clock. I didn't notice it until after the main tour, while I was waiting for a behind the scenes tour to begin. And an examination of the lens and filter didn't reveal anything. So I gave up on the idea of taking any more pictures that day and faced the sad prospect that my beautiful digital SLR was going to need professional help.

But first I wanted to know where the problem lay. So I tried swapping lenses, to verify that it was the camera and not the lens that had developed the tumor. (It was.) Then I found the Mirror Lock-Up option, which pops the mirror out of the way so I can see the image sensor. And there it was: a big dark splotch of something. Well, big in terms of the sensor; it was probably less than a millimeter in diameter.

Now what to do? I didn't want to risk damaging the sensor. The smart solution was to send the camera back to Nikon, pay $50 and wait a couple of weeks (or longer) to get it back. But, not being that smart, I decided to make one attempt on my own.

Doing a little research on the web, I found a page that described various techniques for cleaning dust off a sensor. It advised me to abandon my first thought: compressed air. That offered too much risk of permanent damage. And it didn't have any suggestions that looked good for dust, although my splotch is a lot bigger and perhaps more tractable than that.

Remembering the advice I'd received at a Nikon seminar I'd attended a few months ago, I went to my local drug emporium in search of the suggested tool. But no luck; the only such implements they had were already loaded, if you know what I mean. So it was off to Fry's, source of answers to all the world's problems. Where I found a six dollar squeeze blower that was actually intended for photographic use. A couple of puffs later, my sensor is unblemished and I'm back in business, image-wise.

As for the Mystery House, I may stop back to wander their gardens and get a few pictures of the outside of the building. Fortunately, they don't charge for that.

You have to love this one. According to a piece in the San Diego Union-Tribune, the photo lab at Walmart.com is refusing to print digital images if they look insufficiently amateurish. They're so concerned with any potential for copyright violation that they will reject photos on the grounds that they look like a professional might have taken them.

Beyond the incredible stupidity of telling customers they don't suck enough to shop at Walmart, this should give pause to anybody who believes that draconian copyright laws aren't a danger. Why worry?, the argument goes. After all, no one would try to abuse a law just because they can. But here we have an example of prior restraint and the chilling effect it can have on our rights to do what we like with our own property. To quote from the article:

"We can't release the pictures to you without a copyright release form signed by the photographer," the clerk replied, according to Helmick.

The clerk said the photos looked like a professional had taken them, Helmick said. And no matter how much Helmick protested that she, an amateur, had snapped the shots of her son, she said the clerk wouldn't budge.

Helmick didn't have a copyright release with her, so she offered to write a note stating that she had taken the photos. She said Wal-Mart refused even that.

Talk about guilty until proven innocent. The mind boggles.