Every few weeks I like to run down to a local camera shop near downtown called Competitive Cameras. This shop is a bit different from your local Ritz or Wolfe Camera. This is a professional’s shop. Lenses that cost several thousands of dollars which are typically order only can be found stacked 5 deep behind the counter. At this place you don’t ask rookie questions about cameras, you walk up to the counter and make an order. If they don’t have it, it’s probably not made.

What was interesting was that we had a mix of people all at different levels in their photographic life. One of the guys, probably my age, what just getting started and wanted to shoot better pictures of his kids with his Canon 60D. The other one was a video editor by day but shot professionally in his off time with a Canon 7D, a Canon 5DMKII, and enough in lenses to put a down payment on a house. He shot mostly high school and college sports but also kids and families. The lady at the counter was taking on her first paid job and was buying or borrowing what she could. Here I was, kind of in the middle of them all. Not a pro but not a beginer. I think they’re calling us “Prosumers” now.

We talked for nearly 40 minutes about wide angle lenses, the 5DMkIII from Canon that just came out, and the pure hell it is to shoot a wedding (this will be a future blog I’m sure) trying to give her as much advice as possible.

It was then that I realized that photographers, regardless of skill, gear, or what you shoot just enjoy being in the company of each other and talking shop. I’ve had this talk with thousands of people online but this was the first time that an online photography forum happened right in front of me.

We all left and went our seperate ways and wished the young woman luck on her wedding work this weekend. We left without really even exchanging emails or contact information, just a hand shake and a “I’m Leif and you are?” ”Nice to meet you.”

A small preface to this post: I’m not writing this from the viewpoint of “this is how it should be done because I just came off the mountain, camera in one hand, the greatest photo ever shot in another.” I’m simply writing this to help my friends and family understand their camera a little better to help them with their creative process. I want to see you take amazing pictures of just regular events from your lives.

With that disclaimer out of the way for the internet haters, welcome back. So you’ve got a new DSLR camera and you’re ready to venture out into the land of photography. You’ve snapped some pictures of your kids and some flowers at the house but so far your pictures have been lacking something. Don’t get me wrong, they’re still the best pictures you’ve ever taken but hopefully, through this blog, we can bring your skill level up.  I want to share what I’ve learned over the last few years along with some amazing resources that I continously draw from to make better captures.

I’ve been dabbling in photography since my highschool days of the late ninties when we were working in darkrooms with film. (I miss you Canon AE-1) With the invention of “digital” things have changed. While it saddens me that you may never get to know the pungent smell of a darkroom and the anticipation of hours/days/weeks worth of work appearing right before your eyes, I take comfort in knowing that through technology, photography is more accessible. We can now immediately see what our end result will be by “chimping” the back of the camera. What is chimping you say? You know that moment when you capture one of those amazing shots that even surprises you? You see the picture of  a water balloon exploding in your son’s face with the water almost frozen. You call anyone within earshot over to your camera.

Many chimp noises were heard when this shot was captured. I look at it now and think that the framing is wrong, perspective is wrong, head isn't in a clean spot. I've been ruined.

Friends, family, strangers all with amazed looks of curiousity let out an involuntary ”OOHHH” or “AHHH” much like our primate friends. That’s chimping. It’s taking your camera and immediately looking at the shot or showing it off to people around you like monkeys that just discovered something new in their environment.

So in the next few days/weeks/months we’re going to be covering your camera. This is the loose idea I have for topics. If something comes up along the way or you want to know something that I don’t have listed, please feel free to comment.

• Introduction (what you’re reading now)
• Getting to know you(r camera) - My challenge to you
• Understanding exposure – Basics
• Why “Auto” takes safe pictures
• Learning aperture values and when to adjust them
• Learning shutter speeds and when to adjust them
• ISO – what it does and why should you care
• Understanding exposure – Putting it all together
• White Balance
• Shooting in RAW vs JPG – An epic battle of pixels
• Composition basics and changing your perspective
• How to choose your lenses
• Why your in-camera flash sucks
• Off camera lighting
• Light modifiers 101
• Post processing (we may go with a few posts here)
• …and anything I can think of along the way!

I’m covering DSLR primarily and will be talking mostly in “Canon-ese” since I shoot the Canon 7D but I know our Micro Four-Thirds, Point and Shoots, or other brands will get something out of this too.

So grab your camera and follow along. I could care less what you’re shooting so long as your shooting as much as possible and that you’re getting better with each shutter release.

Much has changed in the life of Leif and with that a new site is needed.

Look forward to more ramblings, more gadgets, sharepoint, SQL, & server stuff as well as a new photography section.

Give me maybe… 2-3 days and then we’ll have updates every few days.

kthxbye!

Being in IT is a funny job. I often get told I don’t have the personality of an “IT guy” whatever that means. I don’t know if those words are synonumous with “mouth breathing basement dweller” but I see myself more as the personable sales type than the nerdy tech-monkey that I get to play on TV (in my head). 

Along with this basement dweller persona, you also get a very different attitude. Much like “Nick Burns – Your Company’s Computer Guy” from SNL, the IT guy is usually the gatekeeper of what goes and doesn’t go in an organization. No youtube at work… his fault. No bandwidth for Final Four… his fault. Facebook… his fault, but his terminal will definitly work, for testing of course. 

It’s easy to fall into this trap as well as an admin too. I’ve caught myself doing it several times. On one side we have users who we percieve as troublesome kids that keep putting their fingers in electrical sockets (so tape up all the electrical sockets) and on the other side, we need to progress as organization to be more profitable and effecient. What I’m getting at is our users are sometimes limited by our ourselves, the IT department. 

This realization came to me a few months ago while listening to some podcasts and reading a book called Drive. What I’ve finally come up with is this… I want to work on the cool stuff. The things that challenge me as a professional and as a person. Locking down ports and traffic, checking productivity monitors, and figuring out a way to lock the cookies on the top shelf is not the best, or most fun, use of my time. I want to end everyday asking and answering “yes” to “was I better today than I was yesterday?” To me that means did I empower more people to do more things with IT or was I a hinderence today?

I would actually argue that if you find yourself spending too much time setting up controls, your company is not hiring the right kind of people. A company today needs to be a playground filled with the right kind of kids that are encouraged to explore. Set up the fences (expectations) and let them go. You will be pleasantly surprised to find what they can do when you hire the right people with the right motivators.

I have ran across some difficult software in my life… teaching myself photoshop & SQL, learning autoCAD at a previous job, or even working with the Crestron proprietary automation software for my home. These are all “Elmo Learns to Read” compared to Blackberry’s latest bastard, BES 5.0.

In a world where most every other mobile device manufacturer has adopted activesync, making most admin’s life easier, Blackberry in their infinite wisdom has stuck with their own method of connecting to RIM devices.

Now I know what you’re saying, activesync can’t do what BES can, and you are right. You can’t lock down the camera, you can’t “brick” the device (wipe yes, but brick, no), you can’t scale your own policy to have the phone to do exactly what you need it to do. But for a non-government, non-research corporation like the one I work for, these features are useless. If it’s not easy to use and easy to administer, people aren’t going to use it. It’s no wonder RIM is losing marketshare to both apple and google-enabled phones at a dramatic rate.

So in our environment of 40 users, I have seen RIM devices fall from 15 total users back in 2008 to 5 in 2010 and now 4 as of this week. The majority of our employees favor both Apple and Android devices and from an administration perspective, make my life much easier. With Exchange 2010 I can manage my wireless users and their company data from the Exchange System Manager (ESM) much like we could with BES 4.x. With the move to Win2008 and Exchange 2010 I had to move our BES to the new 5.0 interface. This has been hell to say the least. In what takes 5 minutes to setup an activesync policy it took nearly 14 hours, 4 installs, and several calls to RIM to setup BES 5.0. This is without getting into the usual steps of BESAdmin Policy Permissions as much of that migrated forward from the previous Exchange2003/BES 4.x environment.

By no means am I a fanboy either. I personally use an iPhone 4 but it’s not God’s phone by any means either. I’m impressed the most the latest Android based phones and love the EVO and the Galaxy S. I advocate what is easy for the user to use, reliably works, and can be folded into our network with ease.

At the end of all of it, I have declared our office a non-RIM zone. We will continue to support our few RIM users remaining but we will no longer add any additional or replacement devices until RIM makes their products easier to use from both the user and the administrator side. Goodbye syncing issues, goodbye resending service books, goodbye goofy ‘sendas’ permissions, goodbye having to wipe a device to re-setup enterprise activation, and finally goodbye terrible trackball devices.

Image courtesy of zazzle

In the last 60 days life has gone crazy. Work has taken up almost all of my time which happens occasionally as it’s very ‘peaks and valleys’ at the office. Between punch out and punch in we’ve had my son’s second birthday, I’ve spoke at two conventions (ironically one of them was about Web 2.0 and how important it is to blog regularly), and when possible, spending time at home with my understanding and very patient wife. I’ve lost 29 lbs (partially to dieting but probably more-so to working an insane amount of hours night and day) since September 30th, the lowest I’ve weighed since my junior year in college.

To say things have gotten busy is an understatement. Almost every personal project I have worked on or blogged about here has been put on hold, and for that I do apologize for those who regularly read here. Home theater hasn’t been used in 6 weeks let alone worked on. Crestron home automation project benched. Xbox hasn’t been turned on in almost 2 months.

Projects are getting wrapped up, deadlines are getting met, things are getting finished, and an end is in sight. I worked a 23 hour stint on Wednesday through Thanksgiving morning wiping out a ton of todo’s off my list.

I’m not sure why I’m posting this. Maybe this answers the question of why I’ve been such a recluse, both in person to the few friends and family that I keep close and to the one’s that see me online, on facebook, or across the dozen or so message boards.

I’ve discussed this before but we’re HEAVY Sharepoint users at work as it’s an excellent way to store content that you just can’t find a place for in your other systems. We use Datasheet/lists like crazy to keep up with business that has been closed/not close and what company we wrote the business with, premium, revenue, etc. It’s great because it just functions like a large excel sheet that everyone can access. (funny I used the word access)

An issue I first discussed with MOSS/Sharepoint was the Datasheet view was very dependent upon which version of Office (2003-2010) you had installed. Office 2003 Professional… great. Office 2003 Basic… not so fast sport! The end user is greeted with this lovely message, “The list cannot be displayed in Datasheet view for one of more of the following reasons…”

It turns out that the Professional versions of Office 2003, 2007, and 2010 (the versions with Access) installed a section called “Sharepoint Components” that made Datasheet view actually work correctly. You could do a workaround buy installing any version without Access first and then pop in a copy of Professional and do a custom install and choosing to JUST install the “Sharepoint Components” but not Access. I was evaluating Office 2010 for our staff recently and I didn’t have this option since I did not have any media. It turns out that Microsoft either heard our pleas (none of our staff uses Access so why buy the full version when we just need what comes on Basic/Standard) or gave us something that fixes the issue anyway. You can download and install the “2007 Office System Driver: Data Connectivity Components” that will allow Datasheet to work regardless of what version of Office 2003, 2007 or 2010 you have installed. In fact, I’m almost positive that this would work if you didn’t have Office installed at all but I haven’t confirmed if that works or not.

I really hope one day that Microsoft will include the necessary components as an install trigger from MOSS/Sharepoint so when a user tries to view the Datasheet list for the first time, they’re prompted with an option to install the components right then and there.

I recently upgraded our mail server at work from a Windows 2003 box running Exchange 2003 to a 64-bit Windows 2008 box running Exchange 2010. There were some things that were extremely well documented both online and an e-book I bought called Exchange Server 2010 Unleashed but there are a few issues that I think you just needed to “figure out.”

I started this migration with the intention that it was going to be a slow process spanning several weeks. I would migrate something over like Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, and finally the mailstore all while waiting a few days after each feature/role was moved looking for any issues that may come up. Microsoft calls this type of migration where the organization has both an Exchange 2003/2007 box and an Exchange 2010 box at the same time “coexistance.”

This was my first time doing an exchange migration in a production environment and I had already ran a small sandbox lab to try to work out the kinks that typically come up during a migration of this size. Our organization, an insurance agency, isn’t huge (~45 mailboxes) but does present some specific issues in that users are pretty much given free roam in regards to email box size. Due to the possibility of an errors & omissions claim (saying we didn’t get an email to change a policy and it never gets done, claim happens, no coverage) it’s difficult to stop sending or receiving email when a user’s email box gets to a certain size. It really is not surprising to have a user with a 8GB email box with 40,000-50,000 emails. I knew this might be an issue in the migration but was glad to see that exchange could natively move these mailboxes with a local move request in the Exchange Management Shell (EMC).

Here are a few other surprises (some good, some bad) that I learned along the way:

• Office Functionality – Our office uses a mix of Office 2003 and Office 2007, but primarily Office 2003 at 90% of the desks. The number one thing that I wish I would have known was that with Office 2003 users get greeted with the occassional error message of “Unknown Error” when deleting several items at repeatedly one after the other (“delete” “delete” “delete”). Other issues were that deleted items would take over a minute to disappear from the inbox, would take over a minute to send and a few other “quirks” in regards to timing with the server. From all the research I had done this occurs because the way outlook connects to Microsoft Exchange significantly from Office 2003 to Office 2007/2010 for users that are “always connected” meaning they’re not in cached mode. Office/Exchange 2003 connected using UDP and polling where as Office/Exchange 2010 started using just async. Office 2007 supports all connection methods across Exchange 2003/2007/2010. Even when the account is setup as always connected, the server only connects with each Outlook 2003 client every 60 seconds by default. This can be changed via registry hack that can be found here.
• Public Folders – Public folders were initially dropped back in Exchange 2007 but were reintroduced with Exchange 2007 SP1. Exchange 2010 came out of the box supporting public folders but the word from Microsoft is that they have a 10 year shelf life left. Users are expected to run a sharepoint site (which we do but not for public contacts) in conjunction with your Exchange environment. Our public data store wasn’t huge by any means but it was absolutely critical to keep the work flow going at each desk. The issue I ran into specifically is that we were using a smart host on our SMTP virtual connector to let our ISP do the reverse DNS for us. When ever you enable public folder replication, where the folders are going to sync up across two servers, our old 2003 server was trying to sync the public folder information through the smart host, not the server that was sitting under it. Simply removing the smart host (and calling our ISP to set reverse DNS) solved the issue for us.
• Default e-mail address policies - This is one of those things that you just think would come over correctly or at least would be defaulted to disabled. Exchange 2010 comes with a default email address policy already setup and enabled. As you move users over their reply email address is going to change to whatever that policy states. We use a first.last@ naming convention and the default policy states firstinitiallastname@ convention. I had this naming convention setup as an alias already for most of our users but 6 slipped through and it took me about a few hours to figure it out. Users were getting new emails but not reply emails because the reply was an address that had not been configured as an email for that user.
• Journaling – We had journaling turned on in our previous exchange environment, where basically all outbound and inbound email get bcc’d to an exchange mailbox that gets backed up monthly to a .pst, but the migration process did not see this and left journaling turned off. You can simply turn it back on by creating a journal rule in EMC found under “Organization Configuration” and “Hub Transport.”
• Calendar Permissions – What a bear this was. None of the existing calendar permissions came over during migration and everything had to be reconfigured. We have two groups, “management” and “users.” Management has ownership permissions for everyone and users have read free/busy for everyone. We had to set this with some simple powershell commands that I found on a blog here. I really should have spent the time to make this into a script but I ended up just running a the same powershell commands over and over with different combination of users and identities.
• Blackberry Enterprise Server - This surprised me the most of all… our BES server continued to work regardless if the user was on the Exchange 2003 or the Exchange 2010 box as long as there is a send connector setup in the organization configuration and hub transport . I really expected BES to stop sending once I moved a user but I can confirm that it works (at least with version 4.x). I still need to install version 5.0 on the new server to fully decommission the old server.
• Faxmaker - We’re heavy fax users as an industry. It drives me nuts. We have a ton of commercial clients and companies that still prefer fax over email so the 2,000 dollars in PCI fax cards will not come over to my new Dell R710 server as the only slots I have are all PCI-e. This is more of a server buying issue and I should have known this going in but the lesson was learned. Surprisingly like blackberry, faxmaker continues to work for all of our users even though they’re not located on the same physical machine as the faxmaker program. I’m really looking for recommendations on a software based fax system that can be used both here and for our users on VPN

Well that’s it for now… I will write some new blogs if I find anything else out that isn’t working well for us or I discover some shortcuts to save time doing tasks. I do want to give a special thanks to entity known as “Vertigo” out on the internets for giving me some support over IM as I bumped into issues. There is no way I could have done this as successfully without his help.

Overall I’m extremely impressed with Exchange 2010 and the EMC and powershell are EXCELLENT tools versus the old Server Manager snap-in we used in Exchange 2003. Good luck with your migration and please post a reply if you ran into any issues during your migration!

…at least according to me.

I don’t know what this particular disorder is classified as but anytime I am in the midst of a project and Tiffany asks, “how long/much longer will this take” my response is always, “20 minutes!” A lie… possibly. But I sleep better at night thinking it’s a misinterpretation of what 20 minutes really means. 20 minutes to me is a vague representation of time. Sure it’s precise, as we’re talking about EXACTLY 20 minutes, but it’s also just long enough that she can get wrapped up into something else and forget entirely about the time limit. It’s also just short enough that she’s most likely to say “ok” without much further thought.

How long to finish my Home Theater that I’ve been working on for 18 months… “20 minutes.”

How long to mow our yard (4/10ths an acre)… “20 more minutes.”

How long am I going to be on an unexpected phone call from one of my execs… “20 minutes.”

Reboot a server… Well, you get the point.

I don’t know if continuing this game is some sub-conscious impulse now or if I just enjoy watching her eye’s roll at my inevitable, unoriginal response. It’s almost become our little joke that I tend to find way funnier. Then again the only thing we ever fight about is the dreaded questions of “what’s for dinner?”

…at least according to me. Morgan you are an asshole

I don’t know what disorder it’s classified as but anytime I am in the midst of a project and Tiffany asks, “how long/much longer will this take” my response is always, “20 minutes!”

How long to finish my Home Theater that I’ve been working on for 18 months… “20 minutes.”

How long to mow our yard (4/10ths an acre)… “20 more minutes.”

How long am I going to be on an unexpected phone call from one of my execs… “20 minutes.”

Reboot a server… Well, you get the point.

I don’t know if continuing this game is some sub-conscious impulse now or if I just enjoy watching her eye’s roll at my inevitable, unoriginal response. It’s almost become our little joke that I tend to find way funnier.

Really what I think it comes down to is a serious case of tunnel vision when it comes to projects. Time, money