NOTE – this is a rather CANADA specific entry, but that’s because the retailer in question (NCIX.com) is a Canadian company that offers a service unlike anything I’ve ever seen from another online store. I plan to expand or followup to this article if I find that there are other retailers offering similar services.

PriceCanada is an online price comparison service. They have a similar business model to PriceGrabber, BizRate, NexTag, or any of dozens of other online price comparison tools. The difference that makes them stand out for me is that their pricing is all in Canadian Dollars.

NCIX is a fairly typical online retailer of computers, components, and other high tech electronic gadgets. They have a similar business model to Newegg, Buy.com, Best Buy, or any of dozens of other online retailers. The difference that makes them stand out for me is that they are locate in Canada, they sell using Canadian Dollars, and (most importantly) they have an extremely easy to use price matching service built into their shopping cart system. I recently saved more than 30% on my total order by utilizing this service!

NOTE – NCIX has a USA based store as well (NCIXUS.com); however, at present they don’t allow price matching.

If you are only ordering a single item then you might as well just order it from the lowest price retailer (or from a store that offers free shipping), but if you are buying multiple items then this is definitely a really easy way to get a great price on all of your purchases!

Price matching with NCIX couldn’t be any easier:

1. Find the items you want to purchase at PriceCanada and determine the lowest price.
2. Ensure that the retailer with the lowest price is actually in Canada and has the item in stock. Save the URL to that product page.
3. Find the identical items at NCIX and add them to the shopping cart.
4. When you are finished adding items to the cart, scroll down to the bottom of the shopping cart page and click on the big red “Start a Price Match” button.



5. For each item in the shopping cart enter the lowest competitor price and the URL to the competitor product page.  You can get both of these from PriceCanada.



6. Checkout.

That’s it.  NCIX will verify the prices for each item you are purchasing and, as long as you did your homework correctly, they will send an email reply when they have confirmed the price match.  This process could add a day or two to your order process, especially at busy times of the year like Christmas.

This is easy peasy!  I’ve never seen another online retailer that does this.  Lots of bricks and mortar stores offer price matching, but it’s usually a whole lot harder and much more time consuming.

If you know of any other online retailers that do it please let me know and I will start to maintain a list…

I get asked for recommendations for photography books all the time.  I’ve read over 40 books on various aspects of photography in the last couple of years and I almost always have a good book to suggest (of course lately those books have typically been authored by Kelby or McNally).  A friend recently asked for a recommendation for a book about wildlife photography that he could pass on to someone planning a 5 week trip to Africa.

This is a topic with which I am extremely familiar as I shoot birds and wildlife it all the time.  But I quickly realized that this is one particular photography subject on which I had seen very few books, and for the most part those books that I have read have been entirely unremarkable.  Most of what I know on about making images of wildlife has either been self taught or been learned by applying lessons from other photographic topics to my wildlife photography.  Let’s face it, photography is photography and the basic rules of composition and exposure don’t change if you’re shooting a bride at a wedding or a bear in Alaska.  There may be other obvious similarities as well!

Yet I still wanted to be able to provide some ideas about some books to start with, so I went to Google and Amazon for some ideas.

I quickly found that the vast majority of “Wildlife Photography” books are about pictures of wildlife rather than about photography (a subtle but important distinction).  It immediately become clear to me that the search would have to be expanded to birds, nature, and/or travel photography (and in fact maybe travel photography would be a better subject for someone planning a 5 week long trip anyway…).  Using this expanded criteria I came up with three books to recommend, but they are older books and they may be tough to find new copies of.  Your local library may be your best bet if you want these books:

(NOTE – there may be some newer, better, and badder books available on the subject but I make a point of recommending only books that I have actually read…)

1. Moose Peterson’s Guide to Wildlife Photography: Conventional and Digital Techniques – Although it’s getting a little long in the tooth (it was published in 2003) the basic techniques presented haven’t changed in many years and this book is still very useful.  Unfortunately this book is very Nikon centric and some people find it difficult to get past that if they shoot a different brand of camera.  I can generally apply the same principles to any camera so it doesn’t really bother me.  Moose Peterson is widely considered to be the Dean of wildlife photography and his blog may be even more useful than this book.
2. The Art of Bird Photography: The Complete Guide to Professional Field Techniques – Also published in 2003, and also somewhat dated, this book by Arthur Morris is the go-to book for anyone that wants to get into bird photography.  Again the principles can easily be applied to any other photographic subject and much of the information is timeless.  Artie (as he likes to be called) is widely considered to be the Dean of bird photography and he has a lot of information to share.  Although this book went out of print years ago, Morris recently aquired the publishing rights and reprinted it himself. It is now available from his online store at his Birds as Art website.  While you’re there consider checking out his blog and his email newsletter.  They both contain lots of extremely valuable information.
3. John Shaw’s Nature Photography Field Guide - Another oldie (from 2001), but it’s still a goodie.  This book has far less to do with wildlife photography and is much more about nature and landscape, but there is still good stuff.  And if you’re on a trip it’s not going to be all about animals anyway.  The major weakness here is the almost complete lack of information from the digital age.  It’s an easy read though and it has some really great stuff inside…

I’ve got a bonus pick for you that’s more about vision and creativity in photography than it is about any specific genre of photography, and it is definitely not a technical “how-to” kind of book.  It gets lumped into the Travel Photography category because that’s the author’s specialty, but it could easily be included in many other categories as well.

“Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision” by David duChemin

 I couldn’t include it in my original list because I haven’t finished reading it yet.  In fact I’ve only read the first couple of chapters, but it is shaping up to be an excellent read AND it’s getting more rave reviews from the photography community than pretty well any other book I’ve seen published.  This book is deifnitely worth checking out if you are planning a trip, or even if you want some help pushing your photography to the next level.

NOTE – on the surface this post is about sport, but that’s really not the focus at all.  Please stick with me and let me know what you think…

I’m in the middle of watching a rerun of the UFC 101 and I can’t help but think that these guys are insane.  While that’s probably obvious to many of us that would never dream of getting ourselves into that kind of situation, I’m not referring to the most obvious case to prove my point…

I’ve watched the first two bouts so far and in both case the losing fighters obviously came in with a fight strategy or a mental map on how they wanted to see the fight go.  And in both cases the fight went completely the other way, yet the fighters kept going with their original strategy.  The result, after a series of take downs in both fights, was the being awarded an easy decision that any judge would give them simply for being the perceived aggressor.

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
– often attributed to Albert Einstein

In the first fight I might concede that the fighter didn’t have much control over his fate and he simply got overpowered.  But he also didn’t try to do anything different and he allowed the judges to make the easy decision.  He needed to try to do something different to really show the judges that he deserved to win.  But he didn’t.

In the second fight the loser, a man that many might describe as the better fighter, came in with a strategy that it would be a stand-up fight and he fought tooth and nail to keep himself from being taken to the ground.  Except that he was taken to the ground repeatedly.  He didn’t sustain a lot of damage, but he was on the bottom and therefore was the perceived loser. He even had an opportunity about half-way through the final round to take the upper position and potentially inflict some damage on his opponent.  Instead of taking that advantage, he stood up.  And then got taken down again.

Both fighters lost because they didn’t change their strategies even after repeatedly being shown that they weren’t working.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for repeating things until you can’t learn any more.  Many of the major advances of our civilization have come about from people trying things over and over until they got it right.  But sometimes you only have so much time to change course, and if you act too slowly then you lose it all.

These fighters were both insane by the most common of definitions.  But of course many we know it was true because they were in the fight in the first place!

What can you learn from this that you can apply to your day to day life??

I find it very odd that I’m ranting about a Microsoft Windows XP issue. I rarely use XP anymore and when I do it generally just works. You don’t want to get me going about Vista (especially when it comes to “User Account Control”; I have a long post coming about that but I can’t finish it because I get too irritated every time I sit down to write it!), but I’m usually pretty happy with XP…

I have one XP machine remaining in my house. It’s a desktop machine that sits in the back corner of my basement and mostly acts as my file server. It wouldn’t be my first choice of machine for that purpose, but I’ve had it for years and it still works, so I leave it there. I’ve been using it as my iTunes server for a long time and so it was an obvious choice to use as the primary connection to my new Media Player as well (see my recent review of the Popcorn Hour PCH-A110).

The Popcorn Hour is a network connected device with an internal hard drive that mounts as a network share. It was a piece of cake to get it connected to my home network, and I was transferring files onto it within a few minutes of opening the box. It was just that easy.

Until the XP machine needed a reboot after a Windows update. That’s when XP started to annoy me. It turns out that Windows XP Home is designed not to save passwords for mapped network drives. You can connect to a drive by giving it the password when you map it, but it doesn’t keep the password after a reboot…  Every other version of XP, NT, or Vista has this capability, but XP home does not.

I had to come up with a workaround to get the machine to “remember” the password.

1. create a new file in the startup folder with a .cmd extension. I called mine connect.pch.
2. open the file in a text editor (notepad is fine)
3. add the following line of code to the file:

NET USE U: \ComputerNameShareName password user:UserName

Where U: is the desired drive letter

This file is a Windows Command File which will execute every time windows boots up.  Essentially I have created a program that will remap my drive every time the computer reboots.  It’s kludgy and it’s ugly, but it’s simple and it works.

It should be easier than this.

I finally got around to finishing “The Hot Shoe Diaries: Big Light from Small Flashes” by Joe McNally and I wanted to share a few of my thoughts about it.

I’ve actually had this book for a long time now and I’ve been reading it gradually, one or two sections at a time. My life has been crazy busy and I simply didnt’ have enough time to sit down and read it straight through. But I wanted to (it’s that good)!

It’s not exactly a continuation of his first book, “The Moment It Clicks: Photography secrets from one of the world’s top shooters“, but it’s written in a very similar style. If you liked the first one you will definitely like this one as well.

The Moment it Clicks was more about the backstory behind each image while The Hot Shoe Diaries is about the thought process involved in creating each image. Where Moment present a single image on each two-page spread and included some descriptive text about the people involved or the location used, Hot Shoe is broken down into short chapters about different lighting techniques. Each technique is presented over 2-3 pages and usually uses 2-3 images showing how the scene looked before and after the lighting was completed. Sometimes there are a couple of different images from each shoot instead. For almost every technique McNally includes a lighting diagram (typically a rough sketch on a used napkin, see the Napkin Notebook) showing where each light and modifier were positioned relative to the subject and the photographer. This is essential information for anyone that really wants to understand how the image was created.

On the surface this book is a technical manual by a Nikon shooter using Nikon Speedlites. But it’s really so much more than that. It really is an attempt to show some of the thought processes required to make some of the iconic images that Joe has produced over the years. It’s about thinking through the requirements of the image rather than simply about the gear involved, and that makes it extremely powerful. Because thinking can be used over and over again no matter what gear is used.

The fact is that the Canon and Nikon lighting systems both have very similar capabilities. Some of the gear from the smaller manufacturers does too. As long as you can understand what techniques are involved, it really doesn’t matter what gear you have. It is a relatively trivial thing to translate “Speedlight with i-TTL and CLS” (Nikon) to “Speedlite and e-TTL” (Canon). And you can always use your old Vivitar flashes in manual mode to accomplish the same effect (maybe it won’t be quite so easy, but it works). You can head over to Lighting 101 by the Strobist to learn more about that.

Joe’s witty and slightly self-deprecating writing style is extremely easy to read (check out his blog if you don’t already read it), and he has this way of spinning some of the most amazing tidbits of life knowledge together into a web with his intended subject. It’s very easy to get lost in what you’re reading and to only truly coem to understand what you learned upon later reflection. Sometimes the best parts of this book aren’t even anything photographic; there are lots of life lessons and tidbits on how to work with people buried amongst Joe’s inner thoughts on how the world works.

I really loved The Moment it Clicks and I was very happy to discover that The Hot Shoe Diaries lived up to that promise. I highly recommend this book for anyone that wants to quickly make their photography better.