Hartsord's Random Stabs in the Dark

090117_25-Edit-Edit , originally uploaded by Hartsord . This is one of my recent photos. It was taken in one of our Parish's conference rooms, and I like it because it shows how easily you can set up a shoot if you know some basics. First of all, the background is a plain, cream colored wall. I was able to darken it a bit by keeping my main light quite close to the subject (about 2-3 ft in front), and the background about 10 feet behind her. The room was lit by fluorescent lights (which is generally not good), so I reduced its effect by shooting at 1/200th of a second (which affects continuous light, but not the light from a flash). My first set up actually had the subject about 15 ft away from the wall, but I found the background a little too dark; to fix this, I moved everything about 5 feet back towards the wall. In addition, my initial set up (Vivitar 285HV through 36" umbrella cam left, Sigma EF500 DG Super with snoot camera right for the hair light) also created hars...

Tauren Shaman , originally uploaded by Hartsord . I don't have much opportunity to go on model shoots, so I've taken to shooting models of a different sort. This is a 9" or so model of a Tauren Shaman from Warcraft. I was able to get it on sale at the Alabang Town Center, for about P1000. I really love the detail on this model. For this shot, I used my Sigma 24-70/2.8 EX DG Macro lens. The model is placed on a sheet of black felt paper held in my DIY lightbox. Lit with a Vivitar 285HV with a DIY grid on the right, and a Sigma EF500 DG Super on the left. One technique that I picked up from Strobist.com is to put a CTO gel on a flash to simulate tungsten lighting, and balance it with the tungsten setting on the camera. CTO gelled flashes will come out correctly, as with the right flash in this shot, but other flashes will turn out bluish, as with the left flash in this case, which only had a 1/4 CTO gel on it.

Gen 09 , originally uploaded by Hartsord . Hi there! I finally discovered how to set up Flickr to link with my blog. Maybe this will help me jumpstart my blogging. This photo is a test of my new Sigma 70mm/2.8 EX DG macro lens, and a practice of my Strobist technique. The figure is Gen, from Street Fighter, and it's a highly articulated figure (see the double-joints?), with replaceable hands and head. I really like that it's double-jointed, so I tried to duplicate some Tai-chi stances, especially with the replacement hands. Lesson: it's really hard to balance these things. The background is a piece of red felt paper stuck with blu-tack on my wall, and the whole thing is lit with a Sigma EF500 DG Super flash on the right side, and a Vivitar 285HV flash on the left. Well, you can look forward to more posts from me now! Edit: By the way, I'm now a moderator of PiPho ( http://www.pinoyphotography.org/ ), I now have a Canon EOS 40D, and most of my photos are now on Flickr ...

One thing I've been getting interested in lately is photography. I have an Olympus C-50zoom, which is a little 5 megapixel "point-and-shoot" camera, and I recently joined a local online photography group ( PinoyPhotography.org ), so I can practice and get feedback on my pictures. (You can check out my pictures at online at http://hartsord.photo.net.ph/ ) The problem that I have with pinoyphotography.org is that while almost everybody there has a lot of passion for photography, most of them have passions (and pockets) big enough to drive them to get digital slr cameras. While I do enjoy photography, my passion is not yet enough to make me get a dslr with my budget. I'll continue to hone my skills with my p&s for now. Which brings me to the question: how much camera do you really need? Nowadays, the rage is to have cellphones with cameras, and I consider myself a bit of a stubborn dinosaur because I still stick with my trusty Nokia 6100 (no camera) - I don't ne...

Happy New Year everybody!   I haven’t been able to post here in quite a while, as I’ve been pretty busy.  I’ll try to get a few more blogs in here in there.   As for new developments, I’m trying to get into photography now, so we’ll see what happens with that.   Until then, see ya!

Lean Manufacturing is what I do. That’s what puts the food on my table, and that’s what everyone at work looks to me for. I also happen to find it very interesting and fulfilling, so it’s a great job for me. Funny thing is that most people have no idea what I’m talking about when I say that I’m into Lean Manufacturing. The semi-technical definition I use for Lean Manufacturing is “a continuous improvement philosophy that focuses on the relentless identification and elimination of waste.” No, I’m not talking about garbage disposal, what I’m talking about is waste in a process: “Thoughtless or unnecessary expenditure, consumption, etc.” according to my little desktop dictionary. “So what’s so fancy about that?” you might ask. Nothing much, really, except that most people have difficulty actually seeing the waste in a system. About half of the work of someone doing lean is actually seeing waste for what it is, and the Lean way without waste can almost seem counterproductive; for example, ...

Hi there! Welcome to the second post in Hartsord’s Random Stabs in the Dark. For this post I thought that I’d write a little about the service that allows me to present this article to you: Blogger . I have always been a big fan of the service that Google gives. In virtually every way, they have given their users the best service that they can, starting off by giving an honest (for the most part) web searching engine that tries to come up with the most relevant sites to a search query in a logical manner. They have also kept the service as clean and as straightforward as possible (as evidenced by their main page ), yet have expanded their suite of services considerably . Among the tools added to the Google family is Blogger. Apparently, this used to be Blogspot, but the old service seems to be transitioning over to Blogger. The basic Blogspot URL (http://www.blogspot.com/) now redirects over to Blogger, but the blogs themselves are still on the Blogspot domain, as evidenced by the URL...