Yes, this would have been more helpful BEFORE the 4th of July, but there are fireworks being shot off all the time so you'll have lots of opportunities to hone your technique.

Back in the film days, shooting fireworks was really guesswork. You'd shoot some film, make some notes about exposure settings, get the film processed, finally see the pictures (usually the next day) and then, in conjunction with the scribbled notes, make some conclusions and try to remember what you learned for the next time.

When digital cameras arrived, the exposure controls weren't really up to the job. No f-stop settings and no 'bulb' setting to hold the shutter open. Now with a dSLR, (digital Single Lens Reflex) things are much easier: fast and easy adjustments to the lens angle (zoom), exposure settings (f-stop), and a remote shutter release to open and close the shutter, and of course, the preview to make adjustments on the spot.

Many years ago, I had the good fortune to watch a pro taking pictures of the fireworks on the National Mall in Washington DC. He was using a 4x5 view camera. (I said many years ago...)  but his basic process made sense and was easily adapted to the SLR.

Try to frame up your shot BEFORE it gets dark. If you're in a new location, ask someone who has been for fireworks before about where they set them off, where they will burst, how high, how wide, etc. and then be prepared to make adjustments to your camera angle and/or location after the first shots.

Set your lens wider than you think you'll need. You can always zoom in and/or crop later. I like to include some treeline and foreground elements in my shots, too. I use a 28-70mm zoom, set pretty wide.

You MUST use a tripod. You don't need anything fancy, but the steadier the better. I don't even extend the tripods legs, I sit on the ground and see through the viewfinder and I don't obstruct the view for people around me.

Put the camera on Manual mode.

Set your aperture (f-stop) to f16, as a starting point and then make adjustments as you shoot.

Higher f- stop number = smaller opening = less light = sharper lines.

F-stop set too high = too small of an opening = not enough light = little skinny lines.

Too low = too big of an opening = too much light = over exposed fat white lines.

Set the shutter speed to 'B' or 'bulb'. This setting lets you to open the shutter for as long as you want. I have a remote control that opens and closes the shutter without touching the camera. If a remote is available for your camera, get it. I use it all the time.

If your camera doesn't have a 'bulb' setting, put it at a long setting, like 15 seconds.

When the fireworks start, watch the first shots through the viewfinder to see if you've got them in the frame.

Then before the next shell goes up, open the shutter. A moment or so after the shell bursts, put a dark card (or your hand) in front of the lens (try not to touch the camera) and wait for the next shell. After a shell bursts, the lights start to trail down and drift in the breeze.  If you don't block the lens, you'll get those wiggly lines in your shot.

Watch and listen for the next shell going up, and remove the card (or your hand) just before the shell bursts. Do this for a few shells and then close the shutter.

Look at the image preview and make any adjustments before the next shot.

There's still plenty of guesswork about how many 'bursts' to capture in one exposure, so I am always in pursuit of the perfect shot.

One of our cool new products for this year is the Zi-6 Pocket Video Camera. It's designed for shooting video and even better, it makes getting the results out of the camera and onto the internet, where people can actually see it, really easy. It's not as sophisticated as bigger camcorders but it's much smaller and lighter, which is great, but it's also more subject to vibration and shake and I hate camera shake.



Years ago, I'd did some video work for a school project and to get a more sophisticated look, I borrowed a Steadicam Jr. from a videographer friend. It really works, but it takes practice to use it well and it's too pricey for my budget. Since that time, I've seen several other products come on the market, also excellent and still too expensive for my budget. And then I found the poor man's steadicam which is perfect for my budget. I made one a while ago (mine cost about $16 to build)  and I was pretty pleased with the results, particularly for recording kids sporting events. I could move up and down the sidelines and keep the action in the frame. I may have looked goofy but I don't mind and I like the resulting video. The basic concept is to counter-balance the weight of the camera. I have a typical mini-DV camcorder. It weighs about 20 oz.

After reading some reviews and comments about the Zi-6 and the shakiness of small video cameras in general, I wondered about if my stabilizer would help. The Zi-6  is really tiny, it's dwarfed by the weight of the stabilizer, even without the counterweight. Nonetheless, we thought we'd try it out and see how it went.

Keep in mind that this is with no practice and very little prep. We did 4 short clips here in the office.

First we tried without the stabilizer and moving quickly.

This is while walking backwards as fast as possible. It's pretty rough. You can see rapid small shaking with each footstep. Yes, that's Jenny riding a scooter.

Now, same path, but with the stabilizer attached.

It's still a bit rough, but much better than before. It doesn't make me seasick.

We tried slowing down next. No stabilizer.

There's not as much shake as the fast movement, but there's a steady up and down movement with each step. They felt so goofy walking down the hall like this.

Now with the stabilizer at a comfortable pace for walking backward.

Again, it's better than before. It's not as stable as I can do with the larger camcorder but it works. I am sure that with practice I could get even better.

(YouTube compresses these videos quite a bit... if you would like to see them at higher quality, go right to YouTube and click "watch in high quality" under each video Video 1, Video 2, Video 3, Video 4)

Using a stabilizer is sort of contrary to the idea of the Zi-6. The device is small and light and I've made it big and clunky. But I consider this test a success and I am inspired to make a smaller, lighter and more 'portable' stabilizer and give that try. Stay tuned.

If you've got a small video capture device and you've tried any stabilization techniques, let's hear about it!

Anyone whose read my previous posts probably knows that I have a tendency to go a little overboard with projects. I do my research and I bring as much as I can to whatever it is that I am doing. Carving pumpkins is no exception. 

As a kid, I grew up with the typical kitchen knife pumpkins, simple triangles for features and a candle inside. When I got a bit older and started carving pumpkins for myself, I discovered the little sawblade kits sold in craft stores.


Sorry, not a great pic. 2003 efforts.

Much more detail was possible but it was still a pretty crude tool. Easily broken and severely impacted by the thickness and size of the pumpkin. I wanted more control, and the amazing examples I'd seen on television just fueled the fire.

2004. Still cutting through the entire wall, but more delicate lines.

In the last few years, I've really stepped up my approach.
My first big jump was using the computer and printer to prepare designs and transfer them to the pumpkin. Less winging it.

2005. I think I was really busy at the time...

2006. These are my first examples using electric drill and Forstner bits.

Next step was using powertools. Jigsaw to cut the top (or bottom) off in seconds. Electric drill and cutting bits. And best of all, the flexible shaft for more delicate work.

 

Last years efforts. Using all sorts of tools... the peace sign pumpkin had dozens of tiny flowers all the around. The surface of that pumpkin was hard as rock.  

Amongst the things I've discovered along the way:

Not all pumpkins are the same. Thicker, thinner, softer, harder, some transmit light very well, others are amazing dense and opaque.

When you cut holes in the wall of the pumpkin, candles work well enough. When you just carve into the surface and there's little or no airflow, candles won't work. My solution: simple bulb holder and new compact fluorescent bulbs. Tons of light and almost no heat.


These babies really pump out the light.

Last year, in addition to Halloween, I did a few for a wedding reception.

The groom is a serious Buffalo sports fan...

So what's in store for this year?  Sadly, I am behind schedule so I don't have anything to show you right now,  but I have 3 carved designs in the works for my kids and something more dramatic (involving sound and flammable materials) that should be the talk of my neighborhood!

If you are looking for some pumpkin carving inspiration, the Kodak Tips & Projects Center has downloadable carving templates.

At this point, I don't think we can call them experiments anymore. Unless you've been living in a cave for the last two years, you should already know what happens when you drop a Mentos mint candy into a bottle of soda.  Nonetheless, it seems we never tire of seeing it.

The theme of a recent birthday party at our house was Science Experiments. On the list of activities were making slime, experimenting with cornstarch and water, experimenting with milk and food coloring, tiedying t-shirts, and the grand finale of Diet Coke and Mentos. The task of setting this last part up was mine. Oh, happy day, I love this sort of stuff.

Do a search for mentos and diet coke on YouTube and you'll find dozens of examples. Save yourself the time, they all pale in comparison to the masters from Eepybird. Beyond videos, there are many websites that include pictures and instructions of varying level of detail about how to do your own demonstration. There are even several products on the market now expressly designed to drop candy into soda bottles and direct the resulting fountain.

I watched the videos, read the instructions, looked at the products and made my plan. I would not be investing any money beyond the actual soda and candy. The rest would from everyday household objects and ingenuity.

Materials:

(3) 2 liter bottles of diet coke
(5) 16oz. bottles of diet coke
44 mint mentos (8 for each 2 liter bottle, 4 for each 16oz bottle)
16 large paper clips (to hold the mentos and the 'triggers')
string for pulling the 'triggers'
cardboard box for holding bottles
dirt or sand to pack around bottles to hold them in place

Tools:

Drill and assorted sizes of drillbits
Wire clippers
Pliers
Trowel

The whole process didn't take long. I did most of the work the day before the party. I gathered up some extra bottle caps to prepare the 'triggers' so that I could leave the soda bottles unopened until just before setting off the display.

Step 1: Straighten out 1 paper clip per bottle of soda. Put small bend at end.

Step 2: Drill a small hole (1/16") through all of mentos. This is tedious and somewhat sticky work. I tried doing a few at a time but it didn't work well.

Step 3. Thread mentos onto prepared paper clips.  More mentos means bigger reaction, but only to a point, and you have to suspend the mentos above the soda inside the top of the bottle. I decided that 4 for the small bottles and 8 for the large bottles would be enough and not require removing too much soda.

Step 4. Drill holes in bottle caps. I used various sizes bits and drilled multiple holes in some of the caps. Tiny holes= long-lasting spray. Large holes= short-lived fountain.
Step 5. Make triggers. 1 per bottle. Straighten out 1 bend of  a paper clip, tie about 18" of string to clip.

Step 6. Trim and bend open end of wires holding mentos to make small loops. Make the end as short as possible so the mentos are tucked up into caps as much as possible. Leave the bend open enough to fit end of paper clip through but make sure the wire fits easily through hole in bottle cap.

Step 7. Assemble. Put looped end of wires through caps, put straightened ends of 'triggers' through bend of wire to retain mentos in bottle cap.

All of the work thus far can be done well in advance of the display.
The steps from here should be done just before 'launch'.

Step 8. Prepare soda bottles.  Open them up, pour out just enough soda to allow mentos to be inserted without touching soda. Replace caps on bottles.

DO NOT 'ARM THE DEVICE" yet.

Place bottles in cardboard box. Pack in dirt or sand to hold them in place.
Optional: drill holes in bottles above soda to divert spray outward. I did three holes in a few of the bottles. Make sure the spray from these holes will not hit side of box or other bottles. I added a few inches of dirt to the box to ensure the holes were above the edge of the box.

Step. 9. Place bottles in location for launch. Do this before loading the mentos. Consider trajectory and distance. I left about a 20 ft. radius but you decide...

Step 10. ARM THE DEVICE. Double check that the triggers are secure, remove caps from bottles and screw on mentos-loaded caps. Arrange trigger strings for orderly sequence or just gather them all together.

MAKE SURE THE VIDEO CAMERA IS RUNNING AT THIS POINT.

Pull the triggers, step away and revel in the glory of a soda fountain.

In hindsight, the one thing I would note is that the 16 oz bottles didn't provide much  enough 'oomph' and weren't worth the effort. I'd just go with 2 liter bottles next time.

WARNING: LONG POST AHEAD

It may be because I am such a geek, but the whole idea of organizing and tagging my photos is a big area of concern for me. I've actually found myself awake in the middle of the night, thinking through the pros and cons of various issues associated with my photo archives. Yes, you should pity me.

In my defense, you should know that these things might just become really important to you someday when you've piled up a few thousand images on your hard drive and you're trying to remember where that certain special one is. You'll remember this post and say 'Wow, he was right, I should have listened to him. He was really ahead of his time." Well, maybe you won't, but this is really a valuable aspect of digital photography and worth putting some time and effort in now, before the task gets really out of hand.

But consider yourself warned: This may be a long journey.

In order to begin, you need to develop strategies for organizing and naming your files and folders and then for assigning keywords to the actual images. Once you've started using particular conventions, changing them will be difficult and time consuming, so thinking about them up front is a good idea. As a matter of efficiency, you will also want to ensure that you only 'touch' each image once, and that you automate and batch process as much of the work as possible.

If you've already got a collection of digital images, you've got an immediate decision to make: Are you going to ignore all the existing files and just start with today's pictures, or take that journey back in time? I found that starting back at the beginning was a good thing as allowed me to slowly test things out and adjust my process before getting in too far. On the flipside, going back to the beginning adds a lot of work. Confession: I am not even close to finishing with this effort, I try to tackle a few old folders every week, along with tagging all new images coming in. This way, I am gradually reducing the backlog without adding anything to it.

The next step is understanding how your photo files are organized on your computer. The software program that you use to transfer your pictures may determine how the pictures are currently stored. Some programs (KODAK EASYSHARE Software included) put your files into folders named for the date the images were transferred to the computer and/or added to the image collection and then it creates virtual 'albums' within the software application based on the date the pictures were actually taken (which it gets from the files themselves, more about that later).  This approach is okay if you're committed to that particular software application, but it can present a challenge if you want to change to another program later, and it can make finding a specific image on the harddrive difficult. Keep in mind that if you added a large group of images into your collection all at once, they'll be in different albums, but  they may all end up in one folder on the harddrive. You also need to be careful when moving or deleting the originals and creating mismatches between what's actually on your computer and what the software thinks is there.

Instead of letting the computer do all of this work for me, I prefer to transfer and organize my files into folders myself. I have a single Pictures folder, with separate folders inside for each year. Within each of those 'year' folders, I have the folders that actually contain the images. These folders are named by month and date and the overall topic of the images, or just by the topic if the pictures were taken on multiple dates spanning months. So, the pictures from a one day event (like a birthday party) are in  a folder named '08_28_bday', and all of the soccer game photos form the entire summer are in one folder named 'soccer'. If I think there are too many files in any of those folders, I create subfolders named by dates, i.e.: within 'soccer' I have '06_24_game1' and '06_30_game2', etc. When viewed in the file manager, the numbered folders automatically display in chronological order and the named folders display alphabetically below the numbered folders.

The next consideration is the actual names of the files. As you take pictures, the image files are automatically given names by the camera, different cameras use different conventions but typically it's something like DCS_###.jpg, where the ### will be numbers starting with 001, 002, etc. If the camera's numbering system ever gets reset, the next time you take pictures, you'll have duplicate file names. If these images stay in separate folders on the computer, there's no problem, but if you try to put these files into the same folder (as I mentioned above for multi-day events, etc),  you've got trouble. Another consideration is that that camera's filename doesn't tell us anything about the image. Last, but not least, renaming each file one-by-one would be incredibly time-consuming and confusing.

I did some reading on filenaming strategies and settled on this structure:

Date (YYYYMMDD)_topic (short identifier)_### (3 digit number starting at 001).format (usually .jpg)


 
Using this method, the first file within the previously mentioned folder of birthday pictures would be: 20080728_bday_001.jpg. The files automatically display in chronological order, and the date and topic in the name will help me immediately identify something about the images. I use a batch renaming tool to do this work immediately after transferring the images to the computer. I try to keep the topic part of the names short but still meaningful.

The filenames are helpful for organizing, but the tagging is really the powerful tool for sorting and finding images later. Next post,  Ill go on to tagging....

Readers of my previous posts will know that I am something of a split personality when it comes to cameras. I am an admitted ad-am but I am also a huge fan of point 'n' shoot cameras. While my dSLR is a sophisticated device, it doesn't have many of the cool features my little point 'n' shoot has. One of my favorite features is the video capture. It doesn't replace my trusty camcorder, but it's really fun for shooting little video snippets, the kind of stuff we love to watch on youTube. One of the other great benefits of the point 'n' shoot is the small size and the resulting versatility. I keep my M753 with me all the time. Last, but certainly not least, my M753 cost a whole lot less than my dSLR. While I don't just throw money around (though my wife might disagree with that), I don't feel the need to baby my camera. It gets tossed around and used in circumstances where I wouldn't risk my dSLR.

A trip to the local amusement park is a perfect example. As we waited for our first ride on the rollercoaster, I positioned my daughter and her friend in line to be behind me, in the first seat of the second car. As we started out, I did a really fast test and then started recording as we reached the top of the hill...