Photography technique: flash compensation.

Flash compensation is a feature that can be found on some digital cameras that allows you to control the power of the camera's flash unit (check here for more details).

When using a fill flash (check this) to lighten up a dark foreground subject compared to a bright background, flash compensation may be of utter importance.

Below are two photos I have taken of a subject placed in a relatively bright background.

I was using a Nikon D60 with the following settings kept the same across the two shots:

• focal length: 135 mm
• f-stop: 6
• shutter speed: 1/80 sec
• 400 ISO, Matrix metering, auto WB

I also used fill flash. Should I have not used fill flash, the foreground subject would have come out way too dark.

In figure 1 I did not use any flash compensation. Notice how some areas of the subject are washed out (overexposed): bottom right corner of each box and the center spot of the blue box.

Figure 2 was taken with a flash compensation of -1.3 EV. Notice how the washed out areas have diminished.

I hope this proves useful.

figure 1: fill flash with 0.0 flash compensation.

figure 2: fill flash with -1.3 flash compensation.

Third Normal Form refresher

Database normalization refresher for myself:

First Normal Form (1NF): no repeating groups of elements.

Second Normal Form (2NF): each column must depend on the entire key (in other words, no partial dependencies on a concatenated key).

Third Normal Form (3NF): each column must depend directly on the key (in other words, no dependencies on non-key attributes).

Website design and logo video tutorials.

While in my day to day work my window to the computer world is the unix shell, I decided to tackle during some of my free time a more creative aspect of computer usage: websites design and development.

Technologies, tools and approaches in this field are numerous; Therefore the uninitiated soul like mine could easily get lost in this sea of information.

However, I quickly came to the conclusion that the best workflow to follow in designing a website is through the Adobe Creative Suite set of tools i.e. Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver.

After extensively searching through the net, I fell on the following website how.todesginyour.com.

The guy has a set of video tutorials that go through each of every step of:

  - designing a website in Photoshop.

  - Slicing the design for the Web.

  - Importing in Dreamweaver and coding it in HTML and CSS.

The videos cost around 50$/30€ but they are worth it. I am currently going through these videos and I have come a long way in understanding how to design an build a website.

Who knows maybe I will, one day, use this knowledge to earn money :)