Month: September 2007

You want to know what happens when you accidentally leave your iPhone headphones in your pants pocket and wash them?

Well, for about a week they still work just fine. Then after about a week you start noticing some static in the left headphone.

Now this was totally my fault. I’m sure iPhone headphones aren’t meant to go through the the whole wash/dry cycle.

So when I decided to go to the SF Apple store to see about getting them replaced I wasn’t the most optimistic.

So I stepped into the store and immediately I was greeted by an Apple employee right at the door. The store was packed, but there had to be at least 50 employees in green shirts running around helping people. This is in TOTAL contrast to those blue shirt guys at Best Buy, or even worse, those red shirted guys at CompUSA where you can’t find someone to help you if your life depends on it.

Anyways, so even though the store was packed this afternoon, there was a guy available to help me right there at the door.

So I started to explain my headphones problem, with my old headphones in hand, and before I could get 20 seconds into it he stops me politely and says, “hold on, let me see what I can do, I’ll be right back.”

With that he’s gone for about 2 minutes and comes back with a brand new set of headphones and hands them to me. No questions asked. No receipts. No cost to me (I was totally prepared to have to buy a new pair). Just free. Just like that.

Now, I blogged about Apple giving me back $100 earlier today. Which is very cool. But let me tell you. That $100 can’t even touch how good it makes me feel about having an experience like this today at the Apple store.

Want to know why Apple has such diehard Appleheaded fanboys? Well there you go. My new headphones sounded fantastic on BART on the way home by the way. Thanks Apple and I promise not to wash/dry this new pair.

Looks like I’ll be getting $100 store credit from Apple for buying my iPhone early.

Cool! Thanks Apple! I do love the iPhone by the way. It’s still the best phone that I’ve ever used and I’d recommend it to anyone interested.

Looking forward to attending my first SF Photography Meetup tomorrow night at the Palace of Fine Arts in SF. If you can make it out and want to shoot the Palace of Fine Arts, come on out.

What: The San Francisco Photography September Meetup

When: Wednesday, September 5 at 7:00PM

Who: At least 41 Photographers

Where: Palace of Fine Arts
3301 Lyon St
San Francisco CA 94158

More details here.

On Saturday night I shot the Santa Cruz Boardwalk and night shooting amusement park rides is one of my favorite things to do. Long exposure shots of rides can produce some beautiful images and with today’s world of digital photography you can see the results right there as you shoot.

I’ve found most amusement parks, carnivals, fairs, etc. always very receptive to photography. Even with a tripod.

So to get a shot like this, you first need a tripod. You don’t have to have a cable release (you can use the timer on your camera) but a cable release is pretty helpful. In terms of cable releases I just use a fairly cheap but functional one, the Canon Remote Switch RS-80N3.

In terms of tripods I recommend that people don’t cheap out on these. Bad tripods break easily. I personally like the quality of the Manfrottos, but you will pay up for these. In any case, seriously consider a ball head tripod over other types as they are much easier to work with.

The reason why you want to use a cable release or at a minimum the timer setting on your camera is because there is an almost imperceptible amount of movement to the camera when you actually push the shutter with your finger. So even if you don’t have a cable release. Heck, even if you don’t have your tripod and have to position your camera sitting on a fence or railing or table or anything else solid, at minimum use your timer setting to get your shot.

So the key with a shot like this is to not over expose the lights. What this means is that you are going to be shooting in manual mode almost entirely. Typically I’ll want to shoot a lot of my night stuff at 100 ISO. 100 ISO of course doesn’t work at night with hand held shooting. But on a tripod it’s fine. You will also want to bump up the aperture. In terms of the shot above I was shooting at f/11. My exposure time on this shot was one second.

Now typically what I do when I try and get these shots is use the cable release to try all kinds of different times. I’m doing it by touch and feel so I’ll just keep firing a ton of shots off. Half a second, one second, 2 seconds, 10 seconds. After a few shots you get a feel for where the timing is right. Then I’ll shoot maybe 30 shots of the same image to have a wide selection of shots to choose a final exposure from later.

To see some other cool blur photography check out the blur tag sorted by awesomeness on Zooomr!

So that’s kind of the basics on how I get a shot like the one above. Let me know if you have any questions in the comments and I’ll try and answer them.