Leora, I can not express how heart broken my wife and I are for you and your family. You’ve never met or communicated with me but your support of my wife, Doracy, has meant world to me. Even though I know what it feels like to look into the face of your child and watch them slip away from you I can’t imagine what it must be like to go through that same experience a second time. It would break me permanently for sure, the first time almost did. When I heard the news of Asaf’s passing I cried for hours. I feel like I know you and David from what Doracy has told me about you. When I read that David had spent the morning looking for Micha’s grave it reminded me so vividly of the morning I spent choosing the grave site for my boys. It was the coldest morning of my life.

In the future you will bring your children home, in your arms, healthy and safe. I believe that, I have to. They will grow big and strong. When they do I want your rainbow babies to meet mine. It may not happen till they are adults, because of the distance between us, but they will share a bond that only children with siblings that came before will understand. They will be beautiful and you will cherish them like no other parent will. No other parent will be more deserving. No other parent will take better care of their children.

We will be here for you and David and we will do anything we can for you. I will always consider you family.

Russell

P.S. tell your high risk OB that you will be getting a cerclage. I firmly believe it helped us get through our second pregnancy with twins. Sadly the only indicator doctors have that a cerclage is indicated is that a family has lost a pregnancy the same we did a year ago and the way you just did. I’m so frustrated with the world medical community for their lack of study in this area. It breaks my heart.

Not all photography tools have to be expensive. Sometimes a simple piece of craft foam with some Velcro can be the most useful thing in your bag.

A number of people have asked me to elaborate on one of the pictures I posted to my 365 this year.  Its one of the most simple tools I keep in my camera bag and one of the most useful.

It’s just a bit of black foam that can be found at any craft store or art supplies place with some Velcro strips around the edges.  In general photography terms it’s a flag, or some object you use to block light.  Either from hitting your subject or from entering the camera directly.

This used to be a tool I’d only bring out from time to time when I had a specific problem to solve.  Thanks to a tip from Brian Mullins this tool has found its way onto my on camera flash when I’m forced to use it.

Lets start with a demonstration. First lets take a look at what we get when we do use on camera flash or a hot shoe flash pointed straight forward.

Direct Flash

You can see that the exposure is acceptable and everything is lit. Problem is the light is very flat and not very flattering. Besides it looks like every other flash photo out there and who wants that. To fix it without using an off camera flash we can try a few things. Lets start by bouncing our light off of the wall to my left.

Bounce Flash

That’s a bit better.  Now the light has direction giving the face some shape and its a bit softer as well.  Overall much better, but it’s still a bit hot for my taste and you’ll notice if you look closely two catch lights.  The main one from the wall and a smaller one from the flash head.  This means there is still some direct light falling on the subject.  Lets try using our flag on the side of the flash closest to the subject.

Flagged Bounce Flash

Now all the light is coming from the wall we bounced our light off of and none of it is coming directly from the flash head.  The light is soft and doesn’t have any of the hot spots we were having problems with earlier.  The effect is subtle but makes for a better and more flattering shot in my opinion.

Bonzer in the kiddie Pool

Originally uploaded by rharrison

Something on a happy note:
One of my favorite applications using the flickr API is Photojojo’s PhotoTimeCapsule. It’s a simple app that just sends me an email twice a month with the most interesting photos I uploaded a year ago. Today I found a picture of a very happy puppy in my Inbox. How could you not see that and smile?

.

I just wanted everyone to know how much my wife, my family, and I appreciate Jimmy. Sadly we met him because he volunteers for an organization called Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep. Something I feel he probably doesn’t tell others because his personal modesty won’t let him. Everyone in my family who was there commented on how wonderful the photographer was who came to help us through the most painful moment of our lives. In the most difficult of circumstances he was able to give us images to remember our boys that make me smile because they convey our love for them even at the same time they show our pain from loosing them. His compassion, respect, artistic ability, and warm heart have inspired me to pursue my passion for photography. I only hope that someday I’ll be at a point where I’m able to help another family in the same way Jimmy helped us.

I’ve included a video after the jump that will tell you more about NILMDTS and what they do. You will cry when you watch it, but it is very, very touching and conveys the importance of their work.

Update:

Some other posts about NILMDTS:

• What Constitutes the Ultimate Photograph?- Going Pro 2010
• Marketing Essentials International » Guest Post: Charity, Something to Fill Your Heart With by Aurora Onorato
• Marketing Essentials International » What Really Is The Ultimate Image?
• Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep. « Iris Cheung Photography Blog:

A lego reconstruction of the famous 1932 photograph "Lunch atop a skyscraper" taken by Charles Ebbets.

Mike Stimpson has clearly put a great deal of thought into how some of the most famous photographs were shot.  So much that he’s recreated them using LEGOs!  He even included links to how he setup each shot which is a fun way to learn a little about lighting as well.  Just plain fun!

A Lego recreation of Robert Capa's 1944 photograph taken during the D-Day landings on Omaha beach during World War II.

See more and the Originals on flickr, via A Photo Editor

frisbee-09 Before / After
© Russell Harrison

I’ve been pretty amused by the buzz about the new “Content Aware Crop” feature in PhotoShop. It never occurred to me that it wouldn’t have that feature because I’ve used Open Source tools to do the same thing for years.

The bench really distracted from the composition of this image so I simply used the Resynthesizer plug-in for GIMP to remove it.

• Free select tool to “lasso” the bench.
• Filters -> Enhance -> Smart Remove Selection.
• Done

I’ve been working on my photography quite a bit this year and feel like my images have progressed dramatically from what I’ve learned. I’m finding I enjoy doing portraits and have done a few shoots recently for friends and family. I hope you enjoy them.

They are an example of what can be achieved with only Open Source software. To achieve the same results using proprietary solutions would require spending well more than $1000 on software alone. Instead these and more are available in the standard Fedora repositories. All I had to do was click on “System -> Administration -> Add/Remove Software” and look through the “Graphics” packages. It couldn’t be any easier!

I use digiKam to manage my photos and to do basic post processing. UFRaw is my tool of choice for developing the RAW files directly from my camera, and GIMP more than handles my advanced processing needs. Generating ICC profiles for both my monitor and camera using GNOME Color Manager has really improved the quality of my final images. The difference is subtle but critical for getting a quality product.

Thanks again to all the communities maintaining and continually improving these tools. I’m continually excited by your work!

judy-black-35-bw
© Russell Harrison

barb-black-18-bw
© Russell Harrison

Heather
©Russell Harrison

rebecca-05
© Russell Harrison

matt-heather_m-15
© Russell Harrison

Their Funeral

We are going to lay our boys to rest near my family in Virginia.  There will be a grave side service 4:00PM Tuesday January 19th at Hebron Baptist Church in Appomattox, Virginia. GPS navigation systems and mapping websites aren’t very reliable in Appomattox County so be sure and get directions from the church website.

For people wishing to attend from out-of-town our wonderful friends at Rockcliffe Farm Retreat & Lodge near our home have graciously offered any of the rooms they haven’t already rented out to people attending the funeral no charge.

How You Can Help

I honestly don’t know what help we should ask for.  Our family has all been here over the weekend and taking wonderful care of us but after we come home on Wednesday or Thursday we won’t have them here and from what I’ve been told that’s when things will get really hard.  The women in our neighborhood have offered to coordinate meals for anyone interested in making one so we don’t end up with 18 suppers all at once and then none for the upcoming days.  I will give you their contact information if that’s something that interest you.  I can confidently say that Doracy will need to see some friendly faces in the coming weeks and I’m thinking that the people stopping by will be just as important as the food itself.

The hospital gave us a wonderfully done pamphlet “Family and Friends: How You Can Help When a Baby Dies” which I recommend everyone read.  I will support my loved ones slightly differently through any loss they may have in the future because of it.  The most important part being on what not to do.  I have made some of those mistakes in the past because I didn’t know what the right thing to say was.

Some Links

• Hebron Baptist Church, ( Google Maps )
• Rockcliffe Farm Retreat & Lodge
• Family and Friends: How You Can Help When a Baby Dies

The red light from the setting sun over my right shoulder almost makes it look like the trees have already started changing colors. I shot this in RAW format using my old Canon Digital Rebel and then tonemapped it using the excellent qtpfsgui tool.

A friend of mine recently took a trip to Dubai where he apparently ran across this gigantic Christmas tree in the mall.  He took a series of pictures I assume to show off both its grand size and its mad fiber optic color changing skills.

The set just screamed to me that it needed to be stitched together as a panorama, both do see the whole thing at once and just to see what Hugin would do with the color changes.  I assume the entire tree changes colors at once so the different levels just show the passage of time between the frames.

Its not up to my normal standards for panoramas but considering there’s no way he had this sort of thing in mind when he took the originals I think it turned out pretty well.  Especially for only a few minutes of work.

I just wanted to remind all the flickr users that took pictures at FUDCon last week that we started a flickr group durring FUDCon 9.  It would be nice to keep that pool going so if you have some pictures you can add to the pool from any FUDCon past or pressent please do.  Those of us that couldn’t make it this time would love to see what everyone was up to.

First geek to identify where they’ve seen this picture before wins! © Russell Harrison

Update: No Google searches, its cheating.

Here they are broken down by survey language and finally all of the responses together.

Lets start with Barack Obama, who’s breaking all kinds of fund raising records.

A donate button and a store link. Seems reasonable, especially considering campaigns these days live and die on fund raising.

On to John McCain:

McCain adds a “Contribute” button to his site. Again seems appropriate, especially considering he has his party’s nomination locked up. He won’t need serious cash for a few months now.

Then there’s Hillary Clinton‘s site:

Wow, it seems that 75% of the first screen you see on her site is dedicated to ways to send her money.  This is totally unscientific but I do think it says something about what’s important to them.  You make the call.

Dear Lazy Web,
We have a bunch of internal blogs at work, or we will soon. Problem is that we have many different ways for people to blog. We’re working on an official solution but there are other ways to blog. For example, some of the wiki’s have blog like features, some groups have set up their own servers, and many of the “collaboration” products out there have similar features. It would be really nice to allow people to post in the solution they like best, yet still have a central location for people to see what’s going on in our “blogosphere” so to speak.

A traditional aggregation solution like planet or Feedjack isn’t going to work because they won’t scale to the number of feeds we’d need to track. After a certain number of feeds are configured in the system its going to spend almost as much time (if not more) crawling the feeds as it would displaying them. Especially when you consider most of those feeds won’t have been updated, crawling all of them each time isn’t very efficient. Its become very clear that a solution more like Technorati is the direction we’d want to go. By only indexing sites when they “ping” it to tell it they have been updated the content can remain up to date without wasting time crawling pages that haven’t been updated.

I’m somewhat surprised that I wasn’t able to just find something to accomplish this task very quickly. It seems like it should already exist and a simple search over a freshmeat should have turned up several options.. I think I’m looking for the wrong things though because I haven’t found anything yet that does what I’d like it to. So dear lazy web what should I be looking for instead? I know it must be out there…

My wife’s work computer has Windows Vista installed on it. Mainly because the board didn’t want to be “going backwards”, and Vista is shiny or something. This morning it was helpful enough to move her clock for her automatically for daylight savings time. Something any modern OS should do. Problem is it moved her clock forward two hours instead of the customary one. Now it keeps telling her that she doesn’t have permission to change the time to fix it. Yep they certainty aren’t moving backwards.

Microsoft Windows Vista moving the world forward! One extra hour at a time!

I’ve been doing a bunch of research at work lately, and even though I’m only posting it on internal wiki pages I wanted to make sure I was doing things correctly. I’d hate for something like this to happen to me. Whenever I need to learn how to do something properly I go look at what the “pros” are doing. So when I asked myself “What is the correct way to cite sources on a wiki page?” I went straight to the biggest wiki in the world. I knew they’d most likely have already tackled this question, and already had a policy to address it. I wasn’t disappointed.

The first thing I found was a new link in the toolbox section of the left column.  Its been there for years, I just hadn’t noticed it before. “Wikipedia – Cite this page” which takes me to a page that I guarantee will save many a school student’s paper grade. At the very top is a disclaimer warning that tertiary sources, such as encyclopedia articles and Wikipedia pages, aren’t considered as acceptable sources by most teachers. The Bibliographic details of the article are listed next. zotero detects these and imports them with a single click. Finally, ready for cutting and pasting, is the proper formating of the bibliography entry of the article for eight of the major style guides, BibTeX, and LaTeX. Now that’s helpful!

Oh, by the way, I did find what I was looking for. There’s extensive information on the proper way to cite sources. There’s a beginners guide, citation templates, examples, and much more. While there isn’t a set standard it apears the most popular method is to use APA style entries in the contents of footnotes.

Wikipedia gets better and better on every visit! Its an excellent research tool as a jumping off point, and I learn so much every time. Just be very carful to stay on topic or this might happen.

I mean all I did was change a few color values but I can still say “I made this.” Thanks Rahul for pointing me to the font packages I needed so the text would render properly. Here’s my svg for anyone who wants to try some other colors.