I recently upgraded my laptop to Windows 7. I had been wanting to get a new 7200 rpm hard drive and decided to wait until Windows 7 was available. I’ve been running Windows 7 for a few weeks now and I thought I’d share what I like.

Background

Let me give some background first. I was one of those that skipped Windows Vista. Windows XP was working just fine for me and I never took the trouble to upgrade. With all the bad press it didn’t seem entirely necessary. So why Windows 7? Partly because Windows XP has been around a long time. To get my laptop to work the way I wanted would have required a reinstall of XP to clean up all the bloat that has accumulated over the last 2.5 years. Since I was getting a new hard drive and Windows 7 was getting good reviews I thought this would be a good time to try it out.

The Taskbar

First, the Taskbar. That’s the thing at the bottom of the screen that gives you access to your currently running programs. With Windows 7 they have given you the ability to “pin” your most frequently used programs permanently onto the Taskbar. What’s interesting is I have been working this way in Windows XP forever. I created my own “toolbar” in XP and placed links to my most frequently used programs in it. The toolbar sat on the left side of my screen always available for me to start a program when I needed it without having to go to the Start menu and find it.

With Windows 7 they have taken the concept a bit further. To differentiate a program that is running from one that isn’t they box in the icon. The currently active window is highlighted as well. If an open program has more than one window, or more than one instance of the program running, the Taskbar indicates this by showing a second page behind the icon in the Taskbar.

When you hover your mouse over an icon of a running program, Windows pops up a little preview window of the program. If there are multiple windows it shows them all. You can click on any one to go directly to it. This makes finding the window you want fairly easy. I hardly ever Alt+Tab to switch windows any more. You can even close a window using the ‘x’ in the little preview.

Favorites in Explorer

I can’t tell you how happy I am that they included Favorites in an Explorer window. This saves so much time it’s not even funny. I am constantly bringing up Explorer windows and going to the same directories over and over. Now I can do it with one click after bringing up a window.

Now if I could find a way to move the “Computer” selection to the top of the list I would be in heaven. Why? Because I have a long list of Favorites, when I open an Explorer window it defaults to the “Computer” selection. If my Explorer window is small it means I have to scroll up to find all my Favorites. If the “Computer” selection was at the top, my Favorites would be right below them and mostly visible all the time.

Searching and Indexing

With Windows XP I used Google Desktop to index and search my hard drive contents. I can say that I am pretty happy with the way Windows 7 handles searching and indexing, but I did have to customize how it works by default to get it to work the way I expected.

Most of my files are not in the standard “My Documents”, “My Videos”, “My Whatever” directories. To get them indexed is easy enough. Open an Explorer window (Start menu then click on Computer), right click on the directory you want indexed and select “Include in library” and then select the Library you want. Easy enough. After the files are indexed I can search them.

To search for something all you have to do is click on the Start button and start typing. If you have a Windows key on your keyboard you can just press it and start typing. Results will be displayed directly above the text as you type.

The problem I encountered is that by default indexing only looks at file properties for some file types. This would be things like file name and other limited information. What I want is for indexing to look at the entire contents of my files so I can search for any part of the file.

Here’s how to make sure file contents are searched.

• Open Control Panel and make sure you have the “View by” set to” Large Icons”
• Find “Indexing Options” and click on it
• Click on the “Advanced” button then on the “File Types” tab
• Find each file extension and make sure the “Index Properties and File Contents” is selected

Yes, this must be done for each file type. Thankfully most of the common ones are already properly selected. It’s the oddball file types that have to be changed. For me it was PHP.

One confusing point. Bring up an Explorer window and select “Tools” then “Folder Options” and then click on the “Search” tab. The default selection for “What to search” is “In indexed locations, search file names and contents. In non-indexed locations, search file names only.” To me this sounds like I shouldn’t have to go through the previous steps. It appears that the settings in “File Types” overrides the folder options.

Pen Input

I use a Wacom tablet when editing in PhotoShop. Windows 7 recognized this as a tablet interface and provides pen-input capabilities including handwriting recognition. I played around with the handwriting recognition and found it to be very accurate. Even with a mix of cursive writing it was able convert my terrible handwriting into the proper text. I wrote the last two sentences using handwriting recognition.

While this isn’t something I would choose to use on my desktop, there are a number of convertible PC’s available that allow pen based input. For someone who needs to wander around with a computer and still be able to input information it would be a viable option.

The Other Things

Are there things I don’t like about Windows 7? Sure. The Alt+Tab behavior now shows thumbnail previews of the applications. The problem is a thumbnail of a web page and a thumbnail of Outlook appear pretty similar at a small size. Throw in a couple of Word documents and everything looks the same. If the program icons were a bit bigger along with the thumbnails it might be more useful.

Most people might not run into this, but I have a couple of programs that were created without the proper Publisher information in them. When I run them they always bring up a dialog asking if I want to allow the program to run. I’ve even set the program to run as an Administrator and it still gives me the dialog. To get rid of it would mean turning my security down to a level I’m not comfortable with, so I put up with it, hoping a future version will get the proper Publisher info.

The only other issue is what you have to upgrade to work with Windows 7. For me it was Adobe Acrobat Professional. I needed to upgrade anyway so it wasn’t a big deal. I also found that I misplaced the CD for my camera. So I have to order another from the manufacturer. Still hoping I find it tucked away somewhere.

Conclusion

Am I happy I moved to Windows 7? Yes. Have I moved all my other computers to Windows 7? No. Not yet. It is a daunting task to reinstall everything which I have to do when upgrading from Windows XP. When I do I will most likely buy a new hard drive for Windows 7. I’ll keep the Windows XP hard drive to copy my data files and act as a backup until I’m sure I’ve got each machine where it needs to be.

Is Windows 7 everything it’s claimed to be? Only time will tell. From some of the reviews I’ve read it’s not necessarily faster on the same machine, but it does give a little better battery life for laptops when they are unplugged. I do like the new features and so far it’s been very stable.

Miscellaneous windows 7

You are going to be seeing a lot of this wine bottle for a little while. I wanted to do a “simple” studio shot for my portfolio, and I’ve decided to turn it into a long term project. Unfortunately that means I don’t get to drink the wine anytime soon.

The Project

My idea is to get shots of the same wine bottle in three different environments and chronicle the details of each shoot.

In this post I’ll be detailing the “simple” studio shot. In future posts the wine bottle will be making appearances outside, and at an as-yet-to-be-determined inside location.

The “simple” studio shot

Of course nothing is ever simple when you want things done right, and so it goes with the studio shot of the wine bottle.

I want the shot for my portfolio showing the wine bottle on a pure white background. Most sellers of wine (my target audience) would want their bottles shot in a similar fashion for web and advertising use.

I started out with a card table (happened to have a black top), covered with a thick sheet of glass. I put up a white backdrop behind the table with a flash under the table pointed at the backdrop. I added barndoors to the strobe under the table to control the light better.

To camera left I put up a strobe with a stripbox. The stripbox was positioned so it went from just under the table to above the bottle. I knew I would need some fill on the right side of the bottle (camera right) so I put up a white bounce panel.

That first shot turned out OK. Then I realized the ‘RA’ in the label was reflective. To give the letters their best quality in the shot I needed to add white bounce cards so the gold would show up properly. The cards are shown in the diagram above. They make a big difference.

Since I was going to be cutting the wine bottle out of the background and turning it all white in Photoshop I could have left it and been done. What I didn’t like about the photo is the background isn’t quite white enough everywhere, and the table is darker than I wanted.

To get the table brighter I added a piece of white foam core between the table and the glass. For the background I turned to a large softbox. I took the strobe from the floor and put it on a stand and switched the barn doors for a large softbox. Then I put the softbox at the end of the table pointed directly at the camera. This would give me a nice even white background. Here’s what this setup looks like.

Much nicer. The background is now an even bright white, easy to remove with Photoshop if desired. The table is a nice clean even surface and brighter than before. Now the only thing left that I wanted to fix is on the shoulder of the bottle.

Notice how the white from the background shows itself just below the neck of the bottle. Upon closer inspection both sides of the bottle all the way down had a thin strip of white. If you have ever tried to select a white background that bleeds a bit onto your subject it makes for a time consuming process. Best to remove the white reflections from the bottle.

To remove the reflections I had to add two black panels behind and to the sides of the bottle. You can see them in the shot below and in the lighting diagram.

Which brings us back to the first image again. From setting up all the equipment until the final image was taken was approximately 2 hours. The final bottle image has the table removed and replaced with pure white, and a bit of color correction for the label and a little tweaking for the Red and RA portions of the label.

Lighting diagrams created using the tools at The Online Lighting Diagram Creator.

Digital Photography, Recent Work Set Design Diagram, Wine, Wine Bottle Project

A recent assignment had me shooting in downtown Bellevue in the middle of the day to get the exterior shot you see below. The day was absolutely perfect. Just look at those clouds. See anything glaringly wrong with the picture? Maybe the huge semi-truck parked in the lower right?

I waited around as long as I could, but the truck didn’t leave. Drat. I considered using Photoshop to recreate the area where the truck was. That would take some time. I considered outsourcing to a professional retoucher. That would be more money.

Luckily this was during the string of really nice weather we had in August and the next day was going to be nice too. So I returned to the same spot the next day at the same time. Yeah, no big truck this time. But the day wasn’t as nice.

I tried setting up in the exact same spot, with the tripod extended to it’s full height and used the same lens. Unfortunately it’s nearly impossible to get it framed exactly the same. Thankfully it was close enough. I brought the two images into Photoshop, adjusted the second days image to match closely to the first. Then taking out the truck was a breeze.

Digital Photography, Recent Work Bellevue, exterior, photoshop

I shot the houseboat below for a client recently and a couple of images stood out during the shoot that are interesting in a photographic sense.

The first is this fun exterior with the Aurora bridge. Nothing technically challenging with this, but I like the way the bridge overhead and reflected below frame the house nicely. Shot with a 24-70 lens at 24mm with a circular polarizer to help out the blue sky.

Photography is "Problem Solving 101"

The second shot artistically is less interesting but there is more problem solving going on than first meets the eye.

First: I’m on a houseboat. Houseboats float and move with the waves. Which means I need to keep a fairly high shutter speed. Not too much of a problem since the scene if already very bright.

Second: I’m trying to shoot a “deck” which in reality is a “dock”. It’s floating too and much less stable than the house. See above.

Third: The contrast, or dynamic range, between the shadow area and the full sun area is too large for my camera to capture in one exposure.

Solutions

There are several ways this could be approached.

1) Use several images with different exposures and blend them together in Photoshop later. That would work fine but takes too long for this particular job. The movement of the dock and boats between frames might make this a bit tricky.

2) Use several images with different exposures and blend them automatically using an HDR or Enfusion program. That would normally be a good option, but again the potential movement of dock and boats would cause ghosting or copies of elements. Shutter speeds could increase too much trying to get a proper exposure for the shadow are and motion blur could occur.

3) Use a graduated neutral density filter and place it over the full-sun portion of the frame to bring the exposure for the two areas closer together. This works best when the shadow line is nice and straight and the shadow line in this picture isn’t straight. Also I don’t have a graduated ND filter in my kit right now.

4) Wait. I actually did wait to get the shot, but I couldn’t wait as long as I needed. Waiting is a good option and would have produced a nice result when the sun was setting or behind the nearby hill, but no time for that.

5) Use fill-flash. Since I bring my hot-shoe flashes to real estate shoots I had them available. For this sunny day it took two flashes on full power to bring the shadow area up to a relatively decent level so it still looks like shadow, but doesn’t look like a large black area.

Manage the light

Most photography is about managing the differences between the shadow and highlight areas of a scene to bring them closer together so the camera can capture the scene as our eyes see it. While there are a multitude of ways to accomplish that, it always comes down to what works best for the given situation and the effect you are trying to produce.

Digital Photography, Recent Work, Residential Real Estate bridge, fill flash, houseboat, reflection, troubleshooting

I was a substitute at a BNI meeting the other day. One of the members, Tony Meier, was going on vacation and asked if I could represent him at the meeting. I was looking forward to the meeting since I had been a member of the group for two years and had not been able to attend for quite a while.

I got to the meeting early and saw quite a few familiar faces. It was fun catching up with the members who were in the group when I left. I also met some of the new members.

The commercials

As part of the meeting each attendee stands up and gives a 30 second commercial about their business. I was prepared to give a commercial for Tony and one for myself. I had done it many times before during the two years I was an active member.

What I wasn’t prepared for was how nervous I became as my turn got closer. The butterflies in the stomach started churning and I could feel my pulse in my stomach.

Butterflies are a bad thing

After this relatively short period of absence from the group my comfort level had changed dramatically. Standing up and speaking in front of a crowd has never been my strong point. When I first joined the group and had to stand up and do my commercial I was very nervous. Those nerves lasted a while until I got to know the group and had some practice with my commercial. By the time I left the group I was much more comfortable giving my commercial even to groups I was attending for the first time.

I’ve continued attending other networking functions since leaving the group, but few of them require giving a commercial of any length. When I returned to the BNI group I didn’t think I would be so nervous during the commercials.

Keep up on it

In reality most things require regular practice to not lose a comfort level or “edge” whether it’s a sport, cooking, photography, or public speaking. The more you do something, the easier it becomes. You learn to work through the issues and the tough challenges and they become part of your experience. Stop doing something for a while and those experiences fade and you have to relearn them. They may not take as long to learn the second time around, but you are bound to make a few of the same mistakes along the way.

While I still feel comfortable at the other networking events I attend, I obviously need to get out a little more and exercise the public speaking role. It’s not the funnest thing I can think of, but becoming more comfortable speaking to people can have big benefits when trying to run a small business.

Miscellaneous bni, commercial, speaking, speech