It's wonderful that Canon, Nikon, and some other lens manufacturers make lenses that eliminate some of the camera shake by optical stabilization techniques. Nikon calls this "VR" (vibration reduction). They are able to compensate for approximately "2 to 3" stops of camera shake. That is to say, if you could normally shoot a crisp handheld image at 1/250th of a second, with VR you could probably shoot a crisp handheld image (with the lens's help) at 1/60th or 1/30th.

This of course depends on perfect conditions, and a fairly steady hand (or camera support), and all other things being equal.

What VR (vibration reduction... or IS -- image stabilization) capabilities from lens manufacturers does not make clear is that these technological improvements will make no difference whatsoever to any blurriness in your images that is caused by movement of the SUBJECT itself.

VR (or IS) only compensates for some of the camera/lens movement. But if the subject is moving, enough to blur an image within 1/60th of a second, then a faster shutter speed is needed. Whether or not a VR or IS lens is being used.

VR (or IS) and its advantage is best thought in terms of the lense / focal length and the steadiness of the camera, rather than having to do with anything about the subject itself.

If you're using a long lense (200-500mm range for example) and would ordinarily be at risk for camera-shake at a slower shutter speed, VR is nice and it helps alleviate the need to use a tripod.

A good rule of thumb for shutter speed, when shooting handheld, is the inverse of the focal length. So shooting at 300mm it's good to shoot at least 1/300th of a second (or 1/500th would be the next stop up). With VR (IS) you might get away with a couple stops slower than this (1/125 or even 1/60).

Great for the lens techology. But if your subject is moving and needs a faster shutter speed than this, don't be fooled by magic of a VR lens. It doesn't do any magic when the subject is moving.

The best combination is a fast (wide aperture) lens with VR. So when you really need a faster aperture for a moving subject, you can get it. And in all cases, the VR (IS) capability of the lens mitigates any handheld camera shake that the photographer might introduce.

Tineye is a pretty interesting technology. You upload an image (presumably, for example, a photograph of your own) and Tineye searches its ever-growing index of all the images it can find on the internet, and detects copies of your image as well as derivative versions.

More after the jump...

I've probably heard this from someone else and don't know who said it first. I just want to reiterate and reenforce this...

As a photographer, you're only as good as your next image.

You (I) can have a bunch of images that were made in the past - a long time ago or a few minutes ago. A few or thousands. And those images might be poor, mediocre, or great. Whatever value, they might even be meaningful for a very long time to some audience somewhere; or just to the photographer.

But if it ends there, it stays there. No resting on laurels.

As artists we're only as good as the next statement we will make, the next regenerative act, the impulse to create one more thing, the drive to explore further, the process of digging some simmering thing out of the pot one more time and bringing it to fruition.

Or the process of refining something we've already done to be even better.

This is not about being good-enough or better-than (nor not-as-good-as). It's about pursuing our own best, which is a forward-looking concept rather than a historical measure of some past accomplishment.

Instead of "here's what I've done," which is fine to recognize and celebrate, we should always have a mind toward "here's what I will do next."

These plants are amazing. Huge leaves the size of a 14" pizza. (In the future, which is now, size will be measured by pizza.)

There is a beautiful texture in the "veins and arteries" (pardon the complex biological terminology) in these honkin sized leaves. They emerge as a spear and eventually unfurl to full size. More leaves are on their way.

These photographs are backlit at an angle with a bare Nikon strobe, to provide some relief and shadow that shows the leaf texture.

There are only seven things a person needs to know about photography.

Or, maybe there are seventy seven.

Or, maybe both statements are true.

Here are seven essential things:

• exposure
• focus
• timing
• composition
• light
• color
• interest

Master these seven things and a person can make good or even great photographs.

But for those who want to go the extra mile, here are seventy more* things:

You can spend several hundred or several thousand dollar$ on a quality lens for an SLR camera.

What are these lenses comprised of? Several groups of high quality, finely ground, shaped, clustered, coated and engineered GLASS, which orchestrate to bring an external image into perfect focus on the "film plane" (or sensor) in the camera.

That's what lenses are. The best lenses are crystal clear, free of distortion from corner to corner. The bigger the lens aperture, the more light passes through, therefore the "faster" the lens. The better the glass, coating, optical engineering, etc... the better the lens. And the more expen$ive, understandably.

However, if you buy a Nikon lens, it will only work on a Nikon camera. Same for a Canon, Pentax, Sony, etc.

What's the main difference between the best Canon glass and the best Nikon glass? The physical mount, the part that attaches the lens to the camera. It's trivial, but that is the main difference! (There are also electrical contacts that enable the lens and camera to talk to each other about exposure, focus, etc.)

If a photographer has $10,000 invested in Canon lenses, they can't use them on a Nikon body, and vice versa.

This is not right, and it's not necessary. It's a huge waste of money on many fronts. 3rd party lens makers like Sigma and Tamron (who also make very good lenses) have to make identical lenses with different mounts for these different cameras. Stores have to stock all these lenses separately. Ultimately, of course, no one besides us customers pay for the extra cost of this.

How would we like it if some appliances we buy would not plug into the common electrical outlets in our homes? "Oh, you have to live in a YELLOW home, or on the ODD side of the street, or on the EAST side of town, to use THOSE appliances."

Seriously? Yes, this is what camera companies are doing. Historical reasons? Understandable. Today? No excuse.

So here's my request: Nikon! Canon! Please... get your heads together and move to a universal mount with your new cameras. All it takes is your willingness to do the right thing and willingness to make the engineering decision. I'm 95% confident (but what do I know) that there's probably a way for prior lenses to be made compatible with the new universal mount bodies, maybe with a minor effect on focal length.

You'd be doing us all a favor. You might even sell more lenses! Right now, though you both make excellent lenses, you don't directly compete with each other for lens quality, because your lenses are compatible only with the dedicated-mount camera bodies. That's the wrong thing to do.

Universal mount is the right thing to do. Will you do it?

It's hard to select from 120 images of colorful fireworks. Eeny Meeny Miny? Each one is unique. There's mostly luck involved in capturing these. Most of the variables are unknown when you begin a 10-20 second exposure just before the sky lights up each time. It's fun to see what you get. Here are 10 of them.

Nine more after the jump...

Saturday was a pretty nice day in Madison, and at Warner Park we caught a little of the Blues Picnic in the Park. Not a huge turnout, but good music, and the kids did a set, it was blue.

Here are a few more images...

This is a thought provoking video of photojournalist James Nachtwey's speech at the TED conference about the power of photography to propagate awareness, and in the best cases influence people to respond appropriately.

It's worth watching it for 20 minutes and then watching it again. (The BMW commercial at the end is beautiful but totally irrelevant. But we do live in a world of "sponsors" even if they are irrelevant at times.)

I shot some 150 images like this one. These flood waters are so devastating, but at the same time are also capable of beautiful textures.

Hm. Capable of beauty and also desctruction. Kinda like people.

The heavy rains from June 12, following heavy rains just a week earlier, were too much for Wisconsin. There was a lot of rural and urban flooding, and many roads were affected. It took over 4 hours to travel what would usually be an hour and a half, due to road closures.

I love Flickr slideshows. I search for interesting topics in Flickr and let the slideshow run on "fast" speed while I'm treadmilling.

(As a side note, there often can be a low "signal to noise" ratio on Flickr, depending on the group of images or your search criteria. I have a low tolerance, if I start seeing too much noise I try another group or new search right away.)

Using a mouse while on a treadmill is tedious at best. I kept thinking while watching slideshows that there must be some keyboard shortcuts but I was too lazy (while exercising mind you!) to look them up. So I just tried some, and they worked. Here's what I found.

It's a blast to shoot the Madison Marathon, and I was able to do so for a little while this morning. There's a whole range of intensity, joy, focus, stamina, exhaustion, community, and even some people just plain having fun. What's curious to me is how a few people somehow make it look relatively effortless.

Here are some portraits I took for a recent Flashes of Hope Madison session. This is a really cool organization and I am glad to have the opportunity to volunteer - basically it brings together volunteer photographers, printers, coordinators, and stylists to make photographic portraits of children (and their families) who are going through an intense health crisis, often with some form of cancer. These were taken at UW Children's Hospital in Madison, WI.

Many of these kids and their families have so much resilience and courage. It seems that God created us with an ability to rise to certain challenges, at least this is one way to interpret things and it's what I believe. It is striking to experience a little slice of the joy a human life can have in the midst of serious health struggles.

This is cool. With Nikon/Canon/etc. speedlights which utilize this particular NEC processor, you can (very slowly, and at your own peril, and leaving your warranty at home) use a power on/off sequence to boost the watt-second power of the speedlight from about 60ws to 8-10 times that power. How do you know when you pushed it too far? The smell of melted plastic. Oh, and don't look into the light.

Here's the strobist post and Flickr page.

Not that I think I'd use this much, but in specific scenarios, and when there's enough time to painstakingly charge up the strobe(s), this is an interesting option for the toolbox. Bigger strobes of course can generate this amount of light easily, it's just amazing that you can coax these little strobes to do something like this.

It's great to start off the first day of April with news like this. This is going to be a good month.

We had several inches of snow today on Good Friday, and I happened by a cemetery. It was still snowing, and I saw the snow clinging a little to the side of the headstones and crosses as I drove by. I had my camera and a few minutes, did two U-turns, got my car plastered by a snowplow, made these few images.

Here are a few more images from the cemetery...