Well, once again the holiday season brings an extra measure of business to our family with two of our children celebrating birthdays during the month of December. Our youngest celebrated her first birthday on Sunday, so it was an even more special occasion than the traditional birthday party, and our son turned four today. We had the combined party for their friends last week and had 50 (yes, you read right: 50) guests at the house, and this week we did the individual parties and family gifts for them.

A new thing this year is that I am going to try to get a good birthday portrait of them myself instead of spending the money to have it done. I got one of my son yesterday that I am very pleased with, and while I have yet to get one of my daughter, I thought I would at least share one from her birthday so those who know us can see how much she has grown.
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Those of you who either know me or have ready my previous photography blog entries know that I have recently purchased a very nice DSLR camera. After using this camera for about three weeks, I began noticing some issues that were somewhat disconcerting. I realized that from time to time, I would fire up the camera, frame my shot, focus and listen to the camera and lens make a strange clicking and whirring sound, almost as if the gears of the body and lens weren’t focusing properly. Then, when I would shoot the picture, the camera would error out on me (yes, I mean actually blank out the user display panel with -Err- and screech at me), and I would have to shut everything down, remount the battery to get things to fully reset and fire it back up again.

After this type of treatment, things would usually go back into place and work for a while, so I didn’t think much of the issue, but when you spend this much on a tool, you don’t want to have to “make do” with it. So, when a friend informed me that another retail store had the exact same camera kit I had purchased with an added 75-200mm lens and a bag to boot for only $100 more, I saw my signal to return the one that was having a few issues and try again. Since I was still well within my 60 day return time, I simply took the kit back to the store and purchased the nicer kit from the other store, and boy, am I ever glad that I did.
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So, I’ve been struggling with getting my laptop (a custom Dell Inspiron 9400) to read my new SDHC card that I picked up for my camera. It’s nothing fancy: just a 4GB SanDisk card. During my fitful attempts and multiple reboots, I seemed to recall a friend having the same issue with her computer reading her new card as well. I thought that surely since she was using an older reader and I had a fairly new integrated reader that I wouldn’t run into the same issue. After spending a good bit of time researching and looking for firmware updates for my reader, I began to get hints that it may not be the reader itself at all, but rather it was good ol’ Microsoft Windows XP Pro rearing it’s incompatibility head again.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of MS, and I don’t know what I would do without them, but when my system doesn’t support what seems to be a common thing, I get a bit testy. Thankfully, though, this story has an ending — and a solution — that was both complete and easy. If you follow this link, you will find a Microsoft hotfix just waiting to be installed. Apparently, typical card readers simply care about the physical size of the card and rely on the OS to interpret the file structure and formatting of the data, so I suppose it makes sense that the OS has to be upgraded in order to read the larger cards.

Hope this fix will help a few others out there as well!

Those of you who have known me for a while are also aware that I have had an interest in photography for some time. My dad sparked the interest in me as a child, and I have never really had the capacity to pursue anything in that field. I have expressed some interest in really pursuing some photography in order to get some nice shots of the kids since they have been coming along, and last week, my wife surprised me with an early Christmas present: a brand new Nikon D90 DSLR with a Nikkor 18-105mm zoom lens. Needless to say, in the last 5 days, I have spent a good bit of time behind it, and of the 350+ pictures I have already taken, I have come up with a small collection of images of which I am very proud. Read more