Random Synapses

Tip #2: It’s not the camera, it’s you.

There is no direct relationship between what kind of camera you own and the success of your photos. You could trade a brand spankin’ new Bugatti for state of the art, bleeding edge professional photo equipment, and still get bad photos.

There are famous artists whose outstanding works are studied in art majors, although they never owned anything than a basic film camera with a manual 50mm lens; yet they took brilliant photos with it.

(Actually, one of the stages of a learning photographer is to stick to a single lens for a while and see what he or she can make out of it, to learn to SEE and use what is available.)

Having a piece of high performance technology in your hand helps you make better decisions, but doesn’t do the thinking and seeing for you. Ultimately it’s you who takes the picture and have to get everything right. You are the one who must see something worth photographing, and think about composition and light. The camera just takes the shot.

It really makes no difference if you’ve got a camera phone or the most praised camera of the year if you continue to make the most common mistakes of amateur photographers. Fine, I’ll admit it - that great dSLR camera you had your eyes on will show much sharper and in more vibrant colors your poorly framed and composed, badly timed, wrongly focused shot. Although the outcome may be technologically better, the photo is still crap and not worth displaying even in your own bathroom.

Tip #1: A bigger, better, more expensive camera doesn’t mean you’ll immediately get better pictures; you will actually have to “work” harder to get them!

SLR revolves around the strength in bigger, higher quality lens. dSLR takes this a step further to enhance the result with a large, high-sensitivity and low-noise sensor, and powerful image processing.

A compact camera takes excellent photos with very little effort. When the average amateur photographer moves to a dSLR, they notice a sudden drop in successful photos, caused by the more sensitive optical components. With dSLR, you can get out of focus images much easier, you’ll have a shorter depth of field (objects at a distance from the point of focus are blurred more than with a compact camera), you’ll miss lots of shots because of the extra settings you need to adjust.

In other words, the strength points of the dSLR are far less forgiving with an amateur photographer than a compact camera. The tiniest mistake will show up badly.

If you plan to take photos in “Auto” mode with a dSLR, then this is going to be a very bad investment for you. If you just want to get great photos easily, stick with a compact camera. Its smaller lens and sensor is far more tolerant to mistakes, misfocus, bad light. A compact camera may even accomodate a long zoom.

And don’t fall for the marketing messages claiming a dSLR to be as easy as point-and-shoot. They’re not. By design, they are specialized tools targeting experienced photographers, giving the power of taking an artistic shot back to the human instead of making it a no-brainer click with the help of computer chips.

So, I’ve been fiddling with digital photography for a few years. I’m having a great time with it and love the few memorable shots that I produced.

It’s about time I dedicated this hobby its own section on my blog. And, to get started, every day in the next week you will find here a series of opinions to give beginners some oversight to dSLR photography.

I originally posted these tips on a discussion forum answering exactly the newbie’s question, “which dSLR should I buy?” I broken them down in a logical sequence and made some additions.

Enjoy — catch you again in a few hours!

I’ve got a couple of Dell Latitude C610 laptops with sufficient power in the 1 GHz Pentium III Mobile processor for playing a DivX video full screen. What they are particularily great with is power consumption, running easily for 2.5 to 3 hours on a full charge, and they’ve got room for two batteries each! Obviously, this comes at a cost: the weight.

But one thing drives me bonkers: one came with a 24x CDROM drive, and the other with a flimsy 8x CDRW drive. With the omnipresence of DVDs, these are annoyingly limited for reading and writing optical media.

Option 1: Purchase an external drive. A fair option I actually considered, however it would require a fully functional USB2 or FireWire port. The laptop has only one USB 1.1 port, and the extra CardBus USB2 controller is not very reliable for intensive data transfers.

Option 2: Purchase a DVD-RW drive from Dell. Not only these drives are expensive, but also very difficult to find. Over the years, Dell changed the removable tray format, so there’s no way I could find a brand new DVD-RW drive for the ancient Latitude C600-series laptop model.

Option 3: Purchase a standard slim DVD-RW drive and replace the existing drive in the plastic caddy. I managed to find a Pioneer slim DVD-RW drive for a very reasonable price (30€ give or take) which arrived in the mail today.

It was immediately obvious that the new drive won’t fit. Its front bezel is flat and square, unlike the extruded, rounded-corners bezel of the existing drives. It was also slightly wider, only by one or two millimeters, but enough not to fit through the hole in the caddy. The bezels from the old drives didn’t match the button position, nor did the clips securing them to the drive tray.

I decided that, instead of trimming the excess from the new drive’s plastic bezel, I could file off the caddy to make room for the new drive. This was a fairly easy job and didn’t take more than 10 minutes of carefully filing the plastic, beveling the edges and cleaning everything.

So, here’s the story of modding the Dell Latitude C610 CDROM tray to fit a standard slim DVDROM drive, in pictures.

The original drive in its caddy:

Note the rounded corners of the drive bezel:

New drive on top of the old drive, removed from caddy. See how the original bezel is shorter with two millimeters at the right?

After using a file to make room for the new bezel, this is what the modded caddy looks compared to the original:

Detail on the filed corners - not an extremely pleasant result, but it’s functional:

Mounting the original connector to the new drive:

Mounting the new drive into the modded caddy - perfect fit:

Caddy fully assembled, ready to be inserted back into the laptop. Miniature screwdriver on top was a must have tool for working with the tiny screws.

Any suggestions or comments would be greatly appreciated!

Man, what a nightmare this project has turned into!

I have never seen so many unexpected restarts and problems. I have gone through all the distributions — FreeNAS, ClarkConnect, OpenFiler — and ended up pulling hair with despair. Nothing worked, and the symptoms made no sense at all.

So, filled with hope for putting an end to this journey, I went back to installing Windows. It worked just fine before, so I should be thankful for having a solution, right?

Wrong. Windows was acting up just like the Linux and BSD distributions did. It installed and ran flawlessly. But if I dared turning it off during a weekend out of town, it wouldn’t start up again. It would reboot at some point before the GUI was initialized, then go in safe mode which didn’t work either, and so on. Can you imagine the frustration built up in so many hours of trial-and-error debugging, without getting anywhere?

At this point I am convinced it’s some hardware flaw. After all, this old Dell has lived a rich, long life; it’s time something gave in. Could be graphics mode, could be the interrupt table, power lines, fishy drivers, the need for a display or keyboard, another swollen capacitor… Frankly, I don’t care anymore. It’s been fun, but you gotta know when to draw the line.

So I’m again left without a file server. But not for long: one thing led to another and I ended up buying the core components of a new PC — motherboard, processor, cooler and memory. The new configuration was meant to be a testbed for a video surveillance system; video capture card is very picky about the hardware it runs on and must be tested first. The test was postponed, so I am now the proud owner of a top-knotch motherboard and low-power processor with a monster passive cooler. It’s so much more powerful than the old system, more versatile, and dead quiet — joy to my ears. Old hardware? That’ll be my file server, after the winter holidays.

Now, the question is, should I go back to square one and try out all those distributions, or just throw in Windows and enjoy the afternoon with the lads at the pub?