Carl Hutzler’s Blog

I never used a softbox until very recently. I just found that a white “shoot through” umbrella worked fairly well and I could never bring myself to spend the $200 or so on a real softbox. But a good friend of mine up in Baltimore donated one to the Carl Hutzler cause. So I have been playing with it.

Softboxes are just a big shoot through umbrella really. But they have a nice benefit in that the back side (usually facing the camera) is not open. This feature means that a softbox prevents a lot of light spill which might normally fall onto the lens and reduces contrast in your image (it can also provide really cool lens ghosting too!). I guess a gobo (go between) which shaded the camera’s lens from the umbrella would work just as well. But the softbox is “all in one” and its easy to move around once it’s set-up (you don’t have to move the light and then the gobo.

And since the inside of a softbox is a silvery reflective material, it likely means you get 25% or so more light onto your subject which is a nice benefit for my small battery powered hot shoe flashes. Oh, I should mention that my softbox is about 2.5 x 4 feet in size and it is powered by a single Nikon SB-25 on 1/4 to 1/8 power. No 600 watt second monsters here :-)

My softbox is also a lot larger in terms of surface area than my small shoot through umbrellas. This provides a larger light source which means softer shadows as well as the ability to light a larger subject. I plan to use this last benefit to do a full body shot tomorrow.

In addition to the softbox at camera right and slightly above the subject, I have two other light sources. One is a big piece of foam core placed just below the camera leaning against the camera tripod and pointing up a bit to fill in the deep, dark circles under my eyes. It does a very nice job of this. I should mention that this reflector is not just reflecting the light from the softbox as it’s not really enough light coming from there…nor the right angle. Instead, I have another SB-25 down low at my feet pointed at the foam core at about 1/8th or 1/16th power. It really does a nice job filling my face. You can also see the reflection of the board in my eyes down low (in addition to the large reflection from the softbox higher up). I think the lower reflection gives a “sadder” look. Not that I was trying for that, but might be something to remember for the next subject.

The last light I have is up high on camera left (directly off the subject’s right side). It is a bare SB-25 pointed mostly down at about 1/32nd power. It provides some hair light and separation from the black background. Otherwise my dark brown hair would just blend in with the background which is not desirable in this shot. It also provides a specular highlight off my forehead which gives a little form and contrast to the shape of my face and some shadows under my neck. I think that soft light alone is just not interesting enough which is what this one small light adds…interest.

Heh :-)

Just stumbled on this myself though it is not like I am the only one who knows how to do it. But I think it is useful and cool and thought I’d post about it. Basically if you run Mac OS X (10.4 or later I think), you can hold down the Apple/Command key and actually rearrange icons in your menu bar like this (notice the battery charge indicator):

Cool and useful.

We got rid of our home phone (landline) about 4 years ago now. We just decided the cell phones were more convenient and if we applied the cost of the landline towards the cell phone bill, we could make everything work out.

Anyway, now that I am self-employed and doing some technical support for my clients, I find one issue with the cell phone. Several times a month I need to talk to a technical support, sales, or customer service department. This can use up cell minutes quickly as they are usually during prime time and usually last 30 or more minutes.

A neat solution to this issue is SKYPE. What I learned recently is that even without a SKYPE-OUT account, you can make FREE! 1-800 (or other toll free 1-888 or 1-877, etc) calls. I don’t know why this is, but it is free. Since most of these calls are toll free numbers, using SKYPE means I don’t have to worry about eating away my minutes.

I also have a “pay as you go” SKYPE-OUT account which I use to pay for non-toll free calls. Some tech support is not a free call and SKYPE-OUT is very inexpensive at 4 cents for the call connection and just 2 cents per minute. Compared to my overage per minute fee on my cell (likely around 35-40 cents/min), this is attractive.

Of course you can also just do SKYPE PRO and get unlimited calls and no connection fee per call for just $3 a month. That is likely a good choice. But for now, I am just experimenting with the pay as I go plan.

Lastly….I also have a Phone as a Modem (PAM) plan with Sprint for an extra $40 a month. I use it to get on the Internet whenever I need to. But I also find that it is a very good connection for doing SKYPE as well. Even an older 1xRTT connection is plenty fast enough for SKYPE which only needs about 3-4 KBps. So I sometimes even use that instead of my minutes. Someday they may make some sort of network device that has SKYPE for calls….someday. I wonder if the software engineers can ever figure out how to do it. Must be hard ;-)

Wanted to add one more thing to the story on how to do off-site backups using RSYNC. Once you get the set-up running you may find that some of your back-ups run into the day time hours. This can interfere with the speed of your Internet access as the back-up will typically use 99% of the uplink pipe at your house. (Don’t worry about your friend’s house as their download link will hardly be affected by the traffic since downlinks are usually 5-10x faster).

If you uplink is saturated with RSYNC traffic, it will be difficult to get your mail, browse the web or related things. I mean these things will still work, but they will have a lot of latency. Even if you are just trying to DOWNload a file, it will be slow as the file transfer does require a small amount of uplink capacity for ACKs and similar traffic.

So we need a way to allow the rest of the machines on the internal network to have full use of the uplink path while still allowing the RSYNC backups to happen. We could just constrict the RSYNC traffic to a small percentage of the uplink path but it is actually just as easy to dynamically allow other hosts to use what they need, when they need it. In this way the other hosts have a priority over the rsync traffic. So when the other hosts are idle, rsync goes as fast as it can. But when I want to do some work, rsync takes a back seat to my traffic.

Luckily doing this with a DD-WRT flashed router is fairly simply. You go into the NAT/QOS tab and the QOS sub-tab and do all the settings in that area. Basically you have to tell the router what your uplink and downlink speeds are in the first place….what does your broadband company cap you at. For me, it is 1.5Mbps (bits per second) uplink and I think 8Mbps downlink. Check here for your speed if you don’t know it. You will want to enter about 90-95% of the max numbers.

Anyway, after you program these figures (as Kbps so divide by 1000), you move on to the other areas. The first thing I did was configure a new protocol called RSYNC on TCP port 873. I prioritized this as BULK which is the lowest priority. Then I added in a number of common protocols we use in the house which are pre-configured in the DD-WRT software. I made all of these the highest priority which is EXEMPT. I went one step further and fully exempted the MAC Address of my primary work machine from all traffic shaping (just in case I forgot a specific protocol).

After hitting apply, any NEW TCP connections will have the traffic shaping applied to them. Be aware that if you are doing this WHILE an RSYNC backup is ongoing, the changes you make will NOT affect the current TCP connection.

Below is a graph which shows the RSYNC backup traffic running at a max of about 1.66 Mbps. The dips in traffic are due to an FTP upload that I started and stopped and started again. Basically the FTP gets priority over the rsync when it needs it.

Below are my configs in DD-WRT (click for larger)