Adobe ACE exam: why do it?

Posted on April 19, 2011 by bjohns

I was reading John Nack’s blog the other day and discovered the Adobe ACE program (Adobe Certified Expert) which is where you go to a testing center and take a multiple choice exam about a specific Adobe product.  If you pass you get to call yourself an “Adobe ACE” in that product, including using the Adobe name (and logo?) to promote yourself.  This theoretically shows people you know what you’re talking about and gives you a little more credibility in dinner party arguments over software.  :-)   I immediately thought about taking the Lightroom exam, figuring I could probably pass it without too much trouble.

I can see a certification like this being important for a lot of people trying to get entry level jobs in the content creation world.   Let’s say you’re graduating from school and you use Photoshop all the time and you want to get a job in the graphic arts industry.   For $150 you could take this test, put the Adobe name on your resume, and hope that makes you stand out above the crowd a little bit.   I don’t know much about the graphic arts industry but that sounds plausible.   I assume that anyone with more experience would already have a portfolio or a reputation and this wouldn’t be very useful though.

But I’m not looking for a job as a graphic designer.  The main reason I would want to do it would be to lend myself credibility for consulting/contract jobs as well as teaching/lecturing/training opportunities.   So I started looking into it, with the eye towards taking the test in the next week or two.

First off, the exam costs $150 and there’s no refund if you don’t pass, so there’s some incentive to not just go into it cold.   You get to say you’re an official “Adobe Certified Expert”.  But then it’s up to you.

What’s really missing is some form of registry for Adobe ACEs.   I got really excited when I saw a link to the “Adobe Certified Expert Community“.  I thought this would be the place to see the community of ACEs, find one in your area, look at profiles, figure out who to hire.  But no, that’s not what it is.  It seems like Adobe would want to push this huge collection of people who are passionate about their products.  Having something like that would be good for both Adobe and the people who are free evangelists for their products.

So if Adobe is leaving the marketing to the ACEs themselves, let’s see how that’s working out.   If you google “Adobe Lightroom ACE” the first four hits are Adobe’s own links to the test.   The next link is a blog entry from 2008 from a guy saying he passed.  The next links are for test prep materials.   What’s missing is people advertising their services and mentioning their ACE certification.  A search for “Adobe Lightroom ACE near San Jose” turns up nobody advertising their services as an Adobe ACE.

So, where’s the evidence that anyone has actually ever taken this exam?   Why isn’t Adobe pushing this?  Has anyone ever tried to use this certification to get a job?

And most importantly,  should I pay $150 for this?

Posted in tools | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Suffer for my art

Posted on April 13, 2011 by bjohns

This weekend makes twice in the last year I’ve been painfully bitten by bugs while doing photography.

I was first bitten by a wasp last summer wile standing on a beach at Lake Tahoe at 11:00 pm. What kind of wasp bites people in the middle of the night? The resulting picture is here:

Tahoe Stars

Stars and Milky Way at Lake Tahoe

Then just this past Sunday while I was lying on my belly in a field I picked up a tick that burrowed into my torso. I was only on my belly for one photo so I’m pretty sure I know exactly which picture I was taking when I picked this guy up:

The Tick

The tick that bit me

That picture was taken after expert extraction by my lovely wife.  Her comment was “are you going to pass out now?”  (I didn’t)   I find it ironic that I was on a field trip for a class on shooting macro photography when I picked this up, giving me the perfect opportunity to take a picture of something very small!   The picture above is really just a snapshot taken quickly in the kitchen – not a lot of setup involved.   It’s not exactly professional quality, but I wasn’t really in my right frame of mind at the time.

The picture I was taking while lying on his home is here:

Yellow Flower

Yellow Flower

Also not really top-rate but I’m including it here for completeness’ sake.   I guess this is all the more reason to spend $200 and pick up the Canon angle view finder attachment – because sometimes kneeing is way better than lying down on your belly…

Posted in Uncategorized, shoot reports | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Replaced the GPS

Posted on April 11, 2011 by bjohns

My friend Philip commented in the post I made about losing my GPS that I should just get another Garmin Legend HCx, since they have gotten more affordable.  I looked at the newer Oregon/Dakota models but I ended up taking Philip’s advice and just getting another one of the exact same thing I had before.

I went to a store and played with the newer Colorado and Dakota models and came to the conclusion that they weren’t really improvements over the eTrex line.

The eTrex line is proven as a good tool.  Sure, they’re not perfect but they’re pretty good.   The only real complaints I have are the screen is dark without the backlight on and the joystick sticks up too far and keeps moving around when I put it in a pocket.   Other than that, it’s pretty much fine.

The newer models show quite a bit of “improvement” from the “slickness” department.  The main change is the touch screen and the new “friendly” UI.   You know how there’ Lego blocks, and then there’s Duplo for the younger kids?  The eTrex User Interface is Lego and the Dakota is Duplo.   The touchscreen is very “eh…”.   I have an iphone so I know what touchscreens are supposed to be like.   This is not responsive or accurate like that.  I have no idea what would happen if you were wearing gloves.

Then there’s the new and improved larger, bulkier size.   And the crappier battery life.

Wait – It costs more too?

You see where I’m going with this…   I hope they never discontinue the eTrex.   You should buy one.  (as long as it accepts a micrSD card for recording tracks to.)

Posted in tools | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Attending Macro/Food/Close-up photo class this weekend

Posted on April 6, 2011 by bjohns

I’m looking forward to attending a photo workshop at Keeble and Shuchat this weekend about close-ups, macro, food, flowers, etc.   The workshop will be led by a guy named Dave Henry, who I haven’t met before.   It’s sponsored by Canon and there will be a lot of Canon gear there to borrow but I’m hoping the content will be mostly brand-agnostic.

More info is available in this PDF here: http://www.kspphoto.com/files/macro_henry.pdf

You can see other classes that Keeble and Schuchat hosts here:  http://www.kspphoto.com/photo_classes.html

Anyone else planning to attend?

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Transferring blog archives, and Dubai

Posted on March 11, 2011 by bjohns

Migrating archives from old blog

Things are moving along well with the blog here at Brian Johns Photography World Headquarters.   One month in and I’m pretty happy with the new WordPress setup.  It beats the hell out of the old custom pile of code…

I’m making slow progress on transferring old blog entries from the old system into WordPress though.   The old system was totally proprietary and all I have from it is a mysql dump file, so I’m entering the blog entries into WordPress one at a time.   I’m taking the time to edit here and there, as well as add some pictures.   I’m transferring articles in some approximate priority order.  The articles I feel are most important have been moved.

I find the media library in WordPress to be a bit slow to use.  I was embedding links to Flickr and Photoshelter in the past but I’m trying to get away from that and become more self-reliant.   That means exporting pictures from Lightroom to my hard drive, uploading to WordPress, and then placing the picture in the posts.   I wonder if there’s a WordPress plugin for Lightroom…

Dubai

I was thinking of going to Gulf Photo Plus in Dubai this week to catch lectures by Joey Lawrence and a few other great photogs.  Unfortunately the cost of the conference has really gone up so I didn’t end up making it.   There are various other plans for international photography brewing though, so stay tuned for more on that front.

Posted in administrivia | 3 Comments

Lost Garmin GPS

Posted on February 5, 2011 by bjohns

I seem to have lost my beloved Garmin eTrex HCx, which I use for geotagging, as well as driving directions and other useful things.   I love geotagging so much that I’m going to have to replace it.   I’ve got a Garmin fitness watch with a GPS (the Forerunner 305) and I can extract .gpx files from it in a pinch, so I’m not totally out of luck.   But I see a new Dakota 20 in my future soon.

Keep in mind that if you’re going to do geotagging with photos after the fact, you need a GPX (or similar) file.   The easiest way to get a GPX file that I know of is to use a Garmin GPS with a microSD card.   There’s a mostly-hidden feature you can enable that just writes .gpx files to the microSD card whenever the unit is on.   These files are invisible to the unit’s UI and aren’t related to the “path” memory, and can’t be erased via the UI.   The unit just silently creates a track of everywhere it goes, and then you can copy this file to your computer later.

The only downsides seem to be cost and size/weight.   The cost is steep: about $300 for the unit.   I’ve seen GPS units way cheaper than this but it all boils down to convenience here.   The constant-logging to the GPX file is a really esoteric piece of functionality that not many people are probably interested in.   It’s hard to shop around for that feature since most people don’t even know that feature exists.   Garmin doesn’t even advertize that feature of their own product!

As for size/weight, I’m ambivalent about this point.  Part of me thinks the units is just small enough and part of me is still annoyed that I have to add 6 more ounces and fill one more pocket.   Part of the weight and size comes from the fact that it uses 2 AA batteries and I think that’s a Really Good Thing.  As I’ve said before, I love standards like AA batteries.  Sure, portable electronic devices can be made smaller by using integrated, proprietary battery systems.  (Look at Apple’s laptops, which are getting smaller and smaller, partially due to the decision to drop replaceable batteries.)

But I really like AA batteries because in a pinch you can find them anywhere.   You can buy AA batteries in the middle of the jungle in Vietnam.  (I know, I’ve been there.)  I’ve stepped out of a wedding reception for 2 minutes to walk across the street and buy a pack of AA batteries at a liquor store before.  For these reasons, I’m willing to accept the slightly larger weight and form factor of the Garmin GPS, since I know I can grab spare power anywhere.

In conclusion, I’ll probably be picking up a new GPS soon.  If so, I’ll let you know how it works out.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl Wrap-up

Posted on January 27, 2011 by bjohns
Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl 2011

Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl 2011

I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I was going to shoot the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl on January 9th, and indeed I did.   I’ll spare you the blow-by-blow details but I want to give a quick summary about how it went and remind myself of a few things for next year.

I had a great time.   The traffic was light, the bowl was a sellout, the crowds were good, and it was a good game.  I got some nice shots and I didn’t get hurt.  One fun thing about a football game at AT&T Park is the photo work area is the Ginats’ dug-out. Let me rephrase that: the World Champion Giants’ dugout.

What more could I ask for?

Well, I guess I could ask for the PAC-10 being able to field enough bowl-eligible teams to fill all of their bowl slots.  It would have been nice to have a PAC-10 team there, but I guess you can’t have everything you want.

The Gear

I took a little bit more gear than I have in the past, including a 500mm f/4.0 lens that I was renting from local nature photographer Joe Decker.  Here’s a  shot of the camera gear I took:

gear bag for Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl

my gear bag for Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl

As you can see, there’s a lot of stuff there.  I took 3 bodies and 6 lenses this time.  The larger pack on the right is the ThinkTank Airport International which I absolutely love.  The 500/4.0 just barely fits in there.   Next to it is the 70-200/2.8.   There’s a 1-Ds mk III (Yes, that’s the slower, larger sensor model instead of  the faster 1-D made for sports.)  There’s a 5-D mkII and a 24-70 in there too.

In the middle is an old Tamrac backpack of some sort.  I almost never use it while shooting anymore but it’s good for carrying gear around in. That bag holds the 300/4.0 lens, a 40-D body, a 17-40/4.0 wide-angle zoom, a 15mm fisheye, some lens hoods which I never seem to use, my compact flash wallet, etc.

To the far left is my ThinkTank modular belt system, which is what I actually wear when I’m shooting the game.  On top is the monopod which is permanently attached to to 500mm lens during the game.

Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl 2011I took 3 bodies but really only used the 1-Ds mkIII for about 95% of the shots.  Once you use the great focus system on the body you never want to go back to the old 9 point focus system on the other cameras.  There’s enough time between plays in football to switch between lenses based on how far away the action of the next play will be, so I just kept switching lenses and always using the 1-D.

The 500mm lens was the longest I’ve used for shooting football before.  It’s a pretty long lens and it really pulls in the action from far away.  Also, due to the narrow angle of view and shallow depth of field, the long telephoto really isolates the action a lot better.  A well framed photo taken with the 500 looks a lot nicer than a heavy crop from a narrower lens.  There’s a trick to using a lens that long but when it works, it really looks nice.

The Results

Gametime Lens Selection

Gametime Lens Selection

Lightroom has a nice metadata browser that makes it easy to get some informal stats about collections of images.  I ended up with 136 photos of action during the game.  The screengrab on the left shows the lenses I used to take those images.  Although the 500 is the “sexiest” (and most expensive) lens I had it ended up not being the most used, producing around 15% of my “keeper” images.  The good old 70-200 turned out to be the most useful (producing more than 50% of my keepers), followed by the wonderful 300/4.0.

You can see a much larger collection of about 50 images from the game on my flickr page.

The question of Naming…

Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl 2011

Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl 2011

Finally, I’d like to ask one last question.   To what year do we attribute bowl games played in January?  Is this the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl 2010?  Or how about the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl 2011?  Sure, it happened in 2011 but it’s the bowl game attached to the 2010 season.   Back when it was the Emerald Bowl and it happened in late December there was no problem.  I checked my photo passes from previous years and sure enough – they all have the year in them.  This year’s official bowl title is simply “The Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl”.  No year specified, so maybe they don’t even know what to call it.   What’s it going to be called next year?

One last thing…

Those of you who follow my blog know I’ve always had a thing for a good fisheye shot.  Ever since I started shooting at AT&T Park I’ve had a vision of a wide shot that included the whole stadium with a view of the field, the scoreboard, the bay behind, etc.   Now that I’m rockin’ the full-frame camera and the fisheye lens, I could go ahead and get it.   There wasn’t that great of a sunset that night, but here it is:

Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl 2011

A wide view of the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl 2011

That’s probably it for sports until next year!

Posted in football, shoot reports, sports, tools | Leave a comment

A look back at 2010

Posted on January 4, 2011 by bjohns

2010 has come and gone and it was a pretty good year, both personally and professionally (both the day job and the photography business.)   Here are some of the highlights:

  • My folder for 2010 weighs in at 235 GB.  That includes all the raw files I’ve chosen to keep plus all the photoshop versions.  That number is up from 195 GB in 2009, 145 GB in 2008, and 120 GB in 2007.   There’s a trend here…I’m being a little more selective about when I press the shutter and throwing away more bad photos, but the files are getting larger.   Luckily I revamped my photo editing workstation with a two-way RAID stripe for speed and got a better backup solution, so I’m able to deal with the surge of data pretty well.
  • I did some aerial photography this year, including some formation flying and shooting from a helicopter in Hawaii with no doors.   I love flying and I love photography so combining the two is great.
  • I did a nice location shoot and some product stills for Osocalis Distillery.  They’re based out of a cozy little barn in the Santa Cruz mountains and they make small batches of brandy.  It was a real challenge to try to find angles to accentuate the atmosphere of the small space and make it really look like the craft distillery that it is.   Their website is still under construction but you can friend them on Facebook to keep up to date on them.
  • I had fun shooting the Maverick’s surf contest.   I was almost not going to go to this, due to the lack of information and having never been out there before.  I finally decided (at 5:00 am) to go for it and it turned out to be a good decision.   It’s hard to stand in one place for 8 hours straight but in the end there were some great performances by some talented surfers and some monumentally bad planning on shore by some people who apparently know very little about how the ocean works.

    There are three ways to shoot an offshore surfing contest:  from land, from a boat near the surfers, and from a helicopter.   I think I did pretty well for shooting from land, (which means shooting through about a half mile of haze and sea spray) but there’s nothing that’s going to blow up to poster size art.  Next time I’ll try a boat or a helicopter.

  • I moved my blog to WordPress.  I finally gave up on maintaining the home-built blog solution I was working on and switched to WordPress.  I’m pretty happy so far and I’ve migrated more than half of the old posts to the new system.

    The main challenge I have now is to get a good gallery system working so I can show some more photos here.   I’ve had a couple plugins recommended to me but I haven’t had a chance to play with them yet.  (NextGen Gallery and Lightbox2)

  • I had a couple trips to Florida to shoot some private parties and one convention.  At the convention I was really the digital tech and “second shooter” instead of being the primary photographer.   This was a good trip for me and it let me concentrate on the workflow and keeping the main shooter working at a fast pace, while dealing with a huge volume of incoming images, making prints, etc.  Situations like this remind me that photography can be a team effort and when the team works well the results can be great.

    I did manage to get some photography in, notably of some rescued animals from Busch Wildlife Sanctuary.   I also worked on my travel skills and accumulated a bunch more mileage on United.

  • No football games in 2010.  :-(   I missed the whole season and Cal Poly had another “rebuilding” year.  I’ll be shooting the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl next weekend though, so that’ll be fun.
  • No good lava shots from our trip to Hawaii this year.  :-(   The volcano was relatively active during our visit this year but there was no active ocean entry which makes for a great photos, and I couldn’t quite make my schedule line up with a guy who was going to go out on the lava with me for a night time lava shoot.   We’ll be back to Hawaii though, so there’s still hope.
  • On a personal note, my daughter was born this year.   I couldn’t be more thrilled about being a parent and I look forward to everything the next couple decades will bring on this front.   Being a parent will probably make it harder to jet off around the world for photography but I’m betting it’ll be a net-win overall…  ;-)

2011 is off to a great start so far and there are a lot of possibilities:

  • There’s the aforementioned football game next weekend.
  • I’m thinking about a big trip to Dubai in March to Gulf Photo Plus, but we’ll see if that pans out.  It’s a part of the world I’ve never been to and it would be a huge cultural win to go see.  It’s a lot of time away from the new baby though, and not the cheapest place to visit.
  • I’d like to do second editions of some or all of the three books I’ve done.  As time goes on my eye gets better, I accumulate more images, and technology gets better.   I think Blurb is still printing with the Indigo 5000′s, but I haven’t had a chance to try their PDF submissions yet, which should yield much sharper text than I got before.

That’s all that comes to mind right now.

Posted in Uncategorized, shoot reports | 2 Comments

Shooting the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl

Posted on December 28, 2010 by bjohns

I’ll be shooting the Kraft Fight Hunger bowl next weekend at AT&T Park.   This was formerly known as the Emerald Bowl but the sponsorship has changed from Emerald Nuts to Kraft foods.   I’ve shot the Emerald bowl a couple times before but I missed it last year in order to go freeze my butt of in Montana for the holidays.  :-)

The game is the afternoon of Sunday January 9th, and will feature Boston College and the Nevada, perhaps best know as the team that beat Boise State at the end of the regular season.  Normally there’s a PAC-10 team in this bowl but there weren’t enough bowl eligible teams in the PAC-10 this year.

The venue is AT&T Park again, the home of the World Series Champion SF Giants.   (The photo work area is the Giants’ dugout, which is kind of cool.)   It’s sort of a weird venue for football, but it works.  In fact, this will be Cal’s home field for the next season as Memorial Stadium is closed for remodeling for the next year.   Getting there is really easy and there’s plenty else to do around there, since it’s downtown San Francisco.

I’ll be stepping up the gear this year, bringing two full-frame cameras and both longer (500mm) and wider (15mm fisheye) glass than before.  I’m looking forward to a great game and making some great images this year.  Let me know if you’re going to be attending.

Posted in football, sports | 1 Comment

Moved to WordPress

Posted on December 17, 2010 by bjohns

Well, I’ve finally gone and done it.  The old hand-made blog and website code needed to be put down.   I’ve moved to WordPress and so far it looks very promising.  It was clear that the old system wasn’t very flexible and wasn’t able to represent my world of photography in the professional manner I have envisioned.   The old system was a great experiment in hand-crafting HTML and php using Dreamweaver but the time for that experiment to end has come.

I’m especially looking forward to more flexibility for editing posts, which should make it easier for me to create content for you.

I’ll be working over the next week or so to import all the old content from the last couple years into this system and playing with the layout.  The only thing I’m not sure about being able to port over is the old RSS feed.   That means that people who were relying on RSS to get updates to my blog will probably never know there’s a new site and will just think I’ve stopped writing.  Hopefully they’ll check in here at the main site and re-bookmark the feed.

Welcome to the new and improved Brian Johns Photography!

Posted in administrivia | Tagged | 1 Comment