A while ago, I wrote a post where I said that using Skype for interviews was a bad idea. I still stand by the premise of that piece - that Skype-to-Skype connections should not be used in most situations - but a few things have happened in the last few months to change my mind about the blanket statement "Skype is bad for recording interviews."

I was speaking with an artist manager colleague of mine the other day. This esteemed colleague has represented the likes of Alanis Morissette, LeAnn Rimes, and Collective Soul among many others. He's a sharp guy. We were discussing how historically, recording artists frequently lost the rights to their master sound recordings (known as "masters") when they signed recording contracts with...

I ordered some bare-root dahlias from Swan Island Dahlias, and planted them in the late spring. This is a photo, taken at f/64 for maximum depth-of-field in sunlight in my garden, of one of the first serious flowers from these dahlia plants. The aperture, f/64, is one of the smallest available lens apertures and therefore provides the greatest depth-of-field. How...

We're currently wrapping up a review of a high-resolution digital audio recorder for O'Reilly Digital Media. This handheld marvel records in Super Audio CD (SACD) format, and our reviewer has been gobsmacked by the audio quality. UPDATE: Here's the review. The Korg MR-1 records at 64 times the CD sampling rate, using 1-bit converters. Because SACD burners exist only in...

How do you work with landscapes that show an extravagant dynamic range? I was down by the Bay photographing sunset. It was clear to me that the scene had great dynamic range, from the blown-out highlights in the clouds to the deep shadows in the rocks along the shoreline. My normal approach to this situation is a kind of ad-hoc...

In a world that is saturated with color, there is something about the elegant simplicity of black-and-white imagery that gets right to the heart of things. The removal of color allows our eyes and minds to focus on subtleties of shadow and shape in a way that's different from our everyday visual experience. Creating a beautiful black-and-white image can be...

This is cool: Simply adding &loop=1 to a YouTube <embed> tag makes the video loop forever. Check it out with this short clip of a Pong-playing watch from Make magazine. (Be sure to click the small play button below the video, not the big one in the center.) Despite just writing an article on hacking embedded videos, I never thought...

I originally got this cool Iris ensata 'Azuma-kagami' as a bare root plant from White Flower Farms, planted it in my garden, and forgot about it. Yesterday, we saw this flower. It struck me as surpassingly beautiful, and I photographed it yesterday and today in-studio. For this shot, I photographed the Iris ensata 'Azuma-kagami' (I do like how the name...

I'm sitting at the event in Denver today which is the last stop on our West Coast leg. The events have all been really fantastic and there are some great developers out there looking to build on Adobe AIR. But it's also been fun for us as a team to do this trip. We've all gotten to know each other...

I spent most of the morning recently photographing water drops on a single pink Gerbera daisy in my garden. This was engrossing, fun, and satisfying. As I worked, I realized the task required a great deal of patience. But not much fortitude: my garden was my model, I did not have to shlepp my equipment very far, and I literally...