Tag: Leaves

January 29th, 2011 - Lighting techniques with Frank Veronsky

I spent my morning with a number of other photographers learning lighting techniques at Frank Veronsky's carriage house studio in Belle Meade. Frank spend two hours ( maybe more ) teaching us how to make the best of available light and the proper use of reflectors. Frank has been a photographer for over 24 years and is an excellent teacher.

One of the photographers brought his daughters with him. They were gracious and patient, posing for our eager cameras. This is the one I chose as the best of the set of 100 or so. You can see some of the others in my image gallery here.

Natural lighting from the window on subjects right side with reflected light from the white wall to the subject lefts. Hot light from above with most of the leaves closed to focus light onto a narrow strip on the subjects face.

What the ... ?!

When will people learn not to trust this company. Microsoft spent miilions convincing consumers and media devices manufacturers to invest in its technology and then leaves its "customers" holding the bag. The funny things is their technology is called "Play for Sure". Yeah, right!

In other news, concerns over Vista are so "minor" that the US News and World Report had to write about it.

Imagine the training budget for a company like with tens of thousands of employes that must be trained, hundreds of in-house custom apps that must be tested and or rebuilt ( some software consulting firm will be swimming in the dough ), and hundreds of business applications that just do NOT run ( image how costly it will be to upgrade or replace Windows based manufactuing systems ) on Vista. My employers migration plans do not even start until 2010, which is when we expect that all of the current set of PCs would have replaced by "Vista ready" machines.

And the business productivity benefit is suspect.

Oh, and just to make sure we all feel the urgent need to move to Vista, Bill Gates has already started talking about Windows 7 which he expects Microsoft to release "sometime in the next year or so". That's just around the time I expect most people will have "Vista ready" computers. What the ....?!

Any idea on what your employers plans are for Vista? I say "Hasta la vista, Vista!"

Joel on Software

Joel sometime surprises me with his post. I think his ideas on management as expressed here are excellent.

Joel on Software
The Identity Management Method
This item ran on the Joel on Software homepage on Thursday, August 10, 2006

When you’re trying to get a team all working in the same direction, we’ve
seen that Command and Control management and Econ 101 management both fail
pretty badly in high tech, knowledge- oriented teams.

That leaves a technique that I’m going to have to call The Identity Method.
The goal here is to manage by making people identify with the goals
you’re trying to achieve. That’s a lot trickier than the other methods, and it
requires some serious interpersonal skills to pull off. But if you do it
right, it works better than any other method.

The problem with Econ 101 management is that it subverts intrinsic
motivation. The Identity Method is a way to create intrinsic motivation.