After reading Kyle Cassidy’s LiveJournal entry about his camera gear, it made me sharpen my focus on my camera gear, and what I want to do with it. What I have at the moment isn’t too bad, but I am starting to find the limitations of it.

I have kitted myself up on Canon equipment, so it should make the process of improving my stuff pretty straightforward. The lenses from my 400D should copy across to more up-to-date Canon bodies, as will most of the flashes Canon produce now, so I am fortunate I won’t have to legacy anything (yes, I just used the word “legacy” as a verb – deal with it). So this is what I have in mind ….

Canon Lens 50mm EF f/1.8 II – a cheap lens I can get right away, so I can get some of those awesome low depth-of-field shots I love. Probably not so good for sports work, but good for entertainment / portrait work in a studio setting.

Canon Lens EF 70-200mm f/2.8L USM – I already have a 55-200mm f/4.5-5.6, so this one isn’t quite a priority yet (plus it is eleven times as expensive as the other lens!), so I’d only be getting this one to get better light and depth on my images. For the moment, the one I have will do the job, this would be an improvement.

Canon EOS-60D Digital SLR Camera – this is probably the next body upgrade I will be making – I know the 50D has been out for a while and would probably be a heap cheaper, but I figure if this is going to be come my main camera for the next few years, I’ll get the best I can get now and let it age gracefully.

Canon PowerShot G11 Digital Camera – my current PowerShot A530 is still humming a long quite well, but I really love using RAW to work from. So with that in mind, I figure a little point-n-shoot with RAW formatting is more what I am after. Really not important at all, but something to add to the wish list.

In between all of this, I will be trying to build up my own little studio set-up, but with the added complication of not having much space to work in. So it will more than likely be a DIY portable studio set-up, so I can just pick up all the gear, take it somewhere, set up and get going.

I’m playing around with the camera on my iPhone- I know the light isn’t great but still a cool photo.

This comes from Kyle Cassidy’s LiveJournal.  And I think it’s good enough to repost here.  If anything, for myself.

A Reader Writes: I want to be a photographer someday. Any advice?
Yes, lots.
Photography is a mixture of Artistic Ability and Technical Skill — the magic of the mix isn’t written in stone. The world is filled with technically proficient but artistically uninspired photographers, there seem to be a smaller number of artistically gifted but technically unsavvy artists, but they’re out there as well. But the most successful people have a mixture of both — they have an artistic vision, and they posses the technical skills to know how to make that a reality. The technical skills are the easy part, you can learn them from a book — f-stops and shutter speeds and light modifiers, etc. The difficult thing to come up with is an idea.
0) Possibly the most important thing of all: Find creative people and make them part of your world. They don’t have to be photographers. They can be writers, or musicians, or actors or puppet makers. Have a peer group of people who are doing things. They’ll be your inspiration, your facilitators, your idea makers, your artistic partners. Do this for the rest of your life.Artists rarely survive in a vacuum.
1) Get a camera. It doesn’t matter what kind. Eventually you’ll most likely end up with a Digital SLR but in the meantime a point and shoot, your cell phone, a 1946 Brownie Box Camera, all these will work to start out.
2) Study photography — this doesn’t mean go to school for photography, but it means pay attention to photographs tear photos that you like out of magazines and keep them in a scrap book, get photography books from the library, from the bookstore, at yard sales. Learn what types of photography you like. Landscapes? People? Bands? Artificially lit? This will start to provide you with your visual vocabulary — which will be important in figuring out what you want to photograph. Given a camera many new photographers are left baffled as to what they ought to be taking photos of. Subscribe to photography magazines, fashion magazines, travel magazines.
3) Take photos. What is it you’re interested in? Enlist friends. Take trips, set up elaborate hoaxes, copy great works of art, copy not so great works of art.
4) Make a portfolio of your 12 best photos. these can be 4×6 1 hour prints. Every month try and replace at least one of these with a better photo. Do this for the rest of your life.
5) Evaluate your equipment. When you know specifically why what you have can’t do what you want, it’s time to think about upgrading. Do this for the rest of your life.
6) Find someone who will pay you to take photographs. It’s always easier to learn on someone elses dime. It doesn’t matter what the job is — assistant to another photographer, part time local newspaper, photographing houses for a Realtor, etc.
7) Go to school. You can learn a lot more quickly this way. Things like advanced lighting techniques, gallery framing, etc. can be more quickly figured out in an environment like this.
Show your work. It doesn’t have to be in a traditional gallery, it can be in your parents garage, or in your stairwell. Some friends and I used to have an open-air art gallery we called “Show up and Show” where we’d meet along a length of chain link fence, hang out photos up and stand around and talk to passers by.
9) Take lots of photos, throw out the bad ones, only ever show people your best. Do this for the rest of your life.
10) Stay busy. The opposite of busy is bored. Don’t visit that place. Do this for the rest of your life.
Hope this helps.

Yes. Yes it does.

Wow, after my last post, I found out that the rotating-posts plug-in doesn’t like posts with big long titles.  It ends up line-feeding the title, and therefore pushes the rest of the box down.  I was wondering “Why don’t my buttons stay in the same place when the posts scroll through?” – this is why.

So here’s my quick hack to truncate the title of the post to fit into the width of the rotating-posts box.  Note that this only truncates the title while it is handled by the rotating-posts plug-in – so when you go to the full article, the full title is still there.

The plug-in gets the title on line 150, so add the following code at line 151:

if (strlen($postTitle)>55)

{

$postTitle=substr($postTitle,0,55).” …”;

}

This checks to see if the title is more than 55 characters – and if it is, cuts the title at that point and adds ” …” to the end of it (to indicate there is more to the title than meets the eye!).  Depending on how much you have modified your theme, you may need to change the numbers there, but I found on my somewhat-customised TwentyTen theme, 55 characters did the job well.

And now the same stuff about me not being a developer or associated with Mark …. for a non-developer, I get through some code, huh?  I guess it’s easier for me to fine-tune someone else’s work ….

As you can see, I have my posts rotating through a box – this helps me keep the site somewhat dynamic (hey it’s something pretty to look at) and it helps me handle the space a little bit more elegantly than just dumping text right through it.  I did this by installing and configuring the rotating-posts plug-in by Mark Inderhees, and it pretty much worked right away.

The only thing I found annoying was that it always needed to have the custom field rp_thumbnail populated – and as I also post (or intend to post, at this early stage) from my iPhone using the WordPress app, I couldn’t populate that field all the time.  So my solution was to set up rotating-posts to use a default image whenever the rp-thumbnail field was blank.  In the end, this was surprisingly easy to do …

1. Create yourself a default image, using whatever dimensions you want to use.  My site uses 90x45px images, Mark’s demo site uses 50x50px …. whatever you want.  This is probably also a good time to work out what you want your “standard” thumbnail size to be.

2. Upload this file to wp-content/uploads/^^ whatever subfolder system you want to use ^^ – my site uses a YYYY/MM format, so I placed the file in 2010/07.  The specific location isn’t really important, but it’s good to follow some kind of standard … plus you know WordPress has access to use images from that directory anyway.

3. Open rotating-posts.php file via the rotating-posts Plug-in Editor, and look for the line of code that says $thumbnailURL[$count] = get_post_custom_values(“rp_thumbnail”);

(By my count, this is line 209.)

4. Add the following text immediately below the line you just found:

(Obviously the path will be different, based on your domain and where you uploaded the file in step 2.)

That’s it!  So if you create a post from anywhere but forget to add the custom field value rp_thumbnail, it will show your default thumbnail from here on in.  I know I used a .png file for this example, but I would think other graphics type (jpg, gif etc) will work if the plug-in supports it.

As per last time, I am not associated with the developer, nor am I a developer myself. I can’t help if you have issues, nor feature requests or anything like that. I just know I was able to make a change to the default behaviour, and I figure others would like to be able to have their own default icon (for whatever reason), so hopefully my experience can help out.