Welcome to the Valley Advocate Podcast, featuring interviews that take us deeper into the people and happenings on the local scene. For more podcasts and a closer look at what's going on in the Valley, visit us at valleyadvocate.com. Hi, this is Dave Eisenstader. I am the editor of the Valley Advocate. This is the Valley Advocate Podcast that we do with Amherst Media. I'm here with Gina Bevers, Arts and Culture Editor. Yes, you are. You're here with Kathy Harrison, who is a local author from Cummington, Massachusetts, and she's the author of Prepping 101. If I have my glasses, I can read that. 40 steps you can take to be prepared for what? For whatever. I was looking at your Valley Advocate and you were talking about the zombie apocalypse. The good news is that if you're prepared for the zombie apocalypse, you're also prepared for your basic power outage. Now if you're prepared for your basic power outage, you're not necessarily prepared for the zombie apocalypse. This is true. We need to figure things out. This is true. I'm sorry. Go ahead. You're not talking about the grand apocalypse of whatever, you're talking about so many things that are happening now, natural disasters, grid failures, things like that. You're talking about the everyday that could happen tomorrow. I am. Even the more personal things, you lose your job. You have a house fire. All of these things are your personal apocalypse. Oh. Okay. Yeah. These are steps you can take to be prepared for that kind of a thing too. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah. So this is in your first book? It is not. It's actually my fifth book. Goodness. Yes. I wrote a book on costume design for kids and I think I sold about 20 copies. My mother bought 19 of them. But it's all good. It was fine. And then I wrote two books about foster care and adoption in Massachusetts. And then I wrote Justin Case, which was my first prepping book. How to be prepared for the, how to be self-sufficient when the unexpected happens. It's a good thing to know the title of your own book. And it was a wonderful book and it has sold very well. But this is a little easier for people who like step by step. This gives you more of a step by step. Yeah. Your intro act, and we should just like hold this up for people who can see from the camera. It's a good book. But like it is, you know, you say in your intro that you never met a list you didn't like, right? So this is like a really, a way to be really organized about being prepared. Yes. I like to be organized. And this gave me an opportunity to do something that was sequential, that's always fun. So was there something that happened to you or that put you on this road to preparedness or is it something that just, that is just something that kind of interests? Good question. So I live in the Hilltowns and right away that puts you in the place where when the power goes out, it's our power. Winter storms happened and for many years we lived at the Bryan Homestead, which is way off in the hinterlands of comington. And one year I had a new baby and he got really sick in the middle of a terrible ice storm. And we managed to get through the night, it was clear in the morning that we needed to get to a hospital. And we couldn't get out, the road was blocked. So my husband was out with chainsaws, he was doing the whole Paul Bunyan thing and he got a tractor and he pulled the trees out of the road and we slipped down. And it occurred to me, he had a gastrointestinal thing and spent the next week in PDICU that all I really needed was some rehydration mixture, which is easy. You can get it in a powder at last just about forever. And I didn't have that simple thing. That was ridiculous. I should have had that on hand. I have it on hand now. I can tell you. Shortly after that, why I say shortly, several years, we had gone to a race. My husband is a triathlete and we'd gone to a race in Schenectady, New York and woke up the morning of the race and we were just under a foot and a half of heavy wet, awful snow. So we knew the race was off, packed up, we were with three other couples and packed up our cars, headed home, got to New York through way and we were there for seven hours. Seven hours is not a really long time. People have been stuck on roads for days. That's a long time. But it feels like a long time and we were really lucky. We weren't prepared because we were smart. We were only prepared because we thought we were going to a picnic. So we had blankets and we had wine and we had good food. It was kind of, we had a really good number one. No, no, no. Well, I was, my husband was, but, but we've had events like that and we lived through ice storms where people around us were without power for weeks, where we were handing out water, where we were, had people come to our house because they needed a shower. And in fact, one of my sons, he and his wife had just had a baby and they lived in East Hampton and they couldn't stay in their home and they not had us to come to, they'd have been in a shelter, which is really my whole point of telling people be prepared is you want to avoid shelters. I consider this our civic duty that if you're capable of being prepared for an emergency, you're one less person that emergency services has to look out for and take care of and feed and make sure that you're warm or you have medical care. It's our responsibility as adults. What do you find the people are kind of the least prepared for? Or what do you, what do you find the people is something that's simple that they can do that they would be a lot more prepared for a lot of things? Most people have no idea where their water comes from and what to do if it doesn't come out of the faucet when they turn. Now, if you have a well, you're in big trouble if the power goes out unless you have a hand pump, which is not a horribly expensive thing to do. And Bruce and I have a water filter with a lot of surface water but almost no surface water in this country is potable, almost can't drink and you should just assume if it's on the surface that you cannot drink it. Right, that's right. So water filter, you can make one that is good for filtering out big stuff but if you want to make sure you're not sick, you need a good water filter. To me that seems like a reasonable place to put a couple of hundred dollars. Yeah, water is super important and yeah and something that could potentially as you're pointing out just not be as stable as you think it is. Absolutely. So how would you express that need or that urgency to say like say if I live in coming to and I totally can get what you're saying, if I'm living in the heart of Springfield or the heart of Hartford, how would you impress upon me that it's important to have this kind of thing because it is a source of, everything is a source of convenience in the city. Even if it's not that convenient, it's so much more convenient. You don't have to take it seriously. If you are absolutely positively convinced that nothing awful is ever going to happen that will take down the grid for several weeks or have a supply disruption that is major, if you're convinced that there will always be plenty of energy. But you have to have a real sense of imagination for that in some ways because I'm only saying that because so many people haven't lived through. I remember the energy crisis in the 70s when people sitting in line and stuff like that. Right? Oh, absolutely. Every other day, you could get four gaps. So, but so many people have never experienced that kind of shortage, that kind of, you know, that there's just not enough. We live here. Even I don't understand that there's not enough beyond a certain point. So what you have is something called a normalcy bias because something has been normal for you forever. It is possible for you to look ahead and say, what is normal for me now? It was actually not normal less than a hundred years ago. Right? It is not normal for most of the rest of the world. To most of the rest of the world, we are the one percent, you, me, you. But that normalcy bias puts us in a bind because then when we're slapped with reality, for instance, let me give you a scenario that's very likely the CDC anticipates a pandemic, a global outbreak of disease. They do not say if it happens. They say when it happens and it is unreasonable to look at our world with people just jetting here, there and everywhere back and forth in planes and airports, teeming with people from all of the planet and hacking and coughing to assume that that's never going to happen because it has not happened in our lifetime. If, however, you were alive in 1918 with the Spanish influence, absolutely, then that killed more people than the war or the war, right? Absolutely. So that one thing, suppose it took out and I don't mean kill, suppose it just made 40 percent of the population too sick to go to work. Who do you think fills those grocery shelves? Who do you think checks your groceries out? Who picks the crops? Who cans the food? Those 40 percent and those are the people are not available. And all of a sudden, normal is not there anymore. Be prepared for the abnormal. I think one of the we were talking before and one of the things that you were saying that you won't find in your book is how to stock up on the latest weaponry and guns and fill your bunker with things that will mow down your neighbors as they try to get your stock. Can you talk about kind of your your like you were talking before about kind of a community based future? And maybe you could talk a little bit about that. Absolutely. So I think that what we're probably looking at the best case scenario for the United States is that we look at contraction, which means you just get a little smaller, you get a little more local. Your food comes from a little closer. And I think in the scenario, I actually don't expect the zombies to come. I don't think I have to shoot anybody. You'll be surprised. I guess I will be normal. It's that normal. I think in this scenario, how am I best served? I am best served if my neighbors are my friends, if they are my extended family. I'm not food secure if my neighbors aren't eating. I actually don't want to kill my next door neighbor over a jar of applesauce to that seems like not the life I want to plan.  We're actually doing this right now. And we have enough space in our land to put in a couple of pigs. So we put in three pigs and we have two other neighbors and they buy food for us. You know, we share the work and we share them and we'll share the pork. I have another neighbor who had a good chicken coop. I didn't have a chicken coop, but I wanted chickens. It makes perfect sense. We have chickens with our neighbor. We buy the food. He does the work. He wants to go away. We can take care of the chickens for a few days. So in this way, we have an interconnectedness that I think is helpful. And if the grid went down, the first thing I would do is call all of my neighbors over and I'd serve a lovely big soup. And I'd say, let's talk about how we're going to address this. What are we going to do to make sure that we're taking care of each other? I belong to the CERT team in comington. It's the community emergency response team. And what we're doing right now is compiling a list of those people in our community who are disabled or very old people who are alone so that we can check on those people if there's an emergency. I don't want to ignore them. This is my extended family. So how, how do we get there? How do we, I mean, how do we get, you know, better acquainted with our neighbors? You have to knock on the door and we are really taught to be to respect people's privacy. You know, you don't want to intrude on people.  But you make that, you make that connection. You make an offering, a goodwill offering. And if so, we have a lot of raspberries. I just invite neighbors to come. I have a swimming pool. I will send out a blanket email and say, hey, the pool's open. Come on over. It's 90 degrees. I want people to feel like my home is connected to them and like I'm part of their family too. And looking at the places within a community that you can make other connections. We've let our institutions fall by the wayside. It's very hard to get people to want to join the Lions Club or the Masons or the Order of the Moose or all the animal orders. And it's hard to get people who want to do community service in terms of joining a volunteer fire department or serving on a planning board. I think you have to step up and do those things. That's how you own your community. You know, there was the Occupy movement several years ago. Our community statement is block you pie. We can't occupy Wall Street, but we can occupy the block we live on. Oh, and so we block you pie. We we use our common spaces. We go to the park and we have the picnics and we hold dances down there. It's a way to connect with our neighbors and we all have something to share. We all have something to offer. Even someone who may look like they don't may have knowledge or information or stories. They could be a wealth of information that you actually use and need. I think it's interesting what you're advocating. This you're kind of advocating a pre-social contraction as opposed to what's what theoretically will happen. Yes. But also it's indirect opposition to this globalization on the road to every day where things are dispersed so immensely. But the but then there's that, you know, by local these campaigns that are happening where people are doing this kind of contraction. It's kind of it's it's interesting.  And one of the places that we are the most vulnerable, so you're talking about city folks, is to a very fragile just in time delivery system. It is said that we have three days worth of food on the shelf in a grocery store. That's actually only true if there's not a run in the grocery store. If there's a run in the grocery store, you probably have three hours. And the last hour you're not going to get much except, I don't know, a can of hairspray or something. You can see that before every storm. Every single storm, I don't understand that tornado in Springfield. I remember that delivery system is so fragile. You have to have computer system that works. If the computer goes down, you don't get anything. You have to have reliable fuel. Well, if the Sauds or the Iranians decide that they're just not happy with us, they can shut that off. It can be something during Katrina. One of the issues in the Gulf is that that took out all those refineries and price of oil spiked way up. And so we are certainly at risk and vulnerable there. But people who are living more in the fringes, people are really poor, they are really at risk.  But if you're living on almost no money, that is not an option you have. So having some food put back is a really good idea. It can be just the little thing that gets you over that hump or learning how to grow anything on your plate and you don't need much space. Sure. If you've got a patio, you can have some container plants. A lot of what we eat, we actually landscape with. I make sure that we landscape with edibles. You see that it's beautiful, but it's also very edible.  Hallyana. Yes, all those that was that was so eye opening for me. So I was asked if I do the Nat Geo doomsday prepper after my first book came out. What is that? So I'm into this. OK, so when Justin Case came out, there was a series on the National Geographic show called Doomsday Preppers and they asked if I would would participate. OK, I I said yes. And no, I didn't know. I had never seen it. I didn't know what I was getting into. It was crazy. And what they really wanted was to make people who prepare look look nuts. In fact, afterwards, after the fact, they didn't like me very much because I wouldn't do any of the things they asked me to do. I wasn't going to act like I was nuts. After the fact, several of us who had participated got together and had a little email group and they had set those people up to look right. And we were better prepared for that because I had done a lot of TV with other books. I knew how this worked. And what I knew is that I didn't have to say yes.  My husband's a beekeeper and they wanted us to put on our bee suits and act like bees had gotten into them and that we were hitting ourselves.  That's not bees in the suit. Is so that you don't get bees in the suit. You don't get bees in the suit. And no, I'm not going to do that.  And he said, well, you know, this is what you signed up for. And I said, oh, I beg your pardon.  And if I signed something, I'm your girl, but I didn't. And I didn't. So, in fact, he called a few months later and said, we're doing a reunion show for people who've done it before. We'd like to, you know, take a look at people, see if they're still doing this. And I said, yeah, no, thank you. And I think they probably called five times in the fifth time.  And they really were not used to hearing no. People assume there's a camera here. Oh, I have to do what they tell me. No, you don't. Anyway, the interesting part for me is that there was a Facebook or not a website for the show and people wrote in comments. And fully half of the comments were about how because we didn't have guns, people were going to, you know, come and steal my applesauce. And one gentleman said, I don't even bother storing food. I've got, you know, this, this and this gun.  Yeah, I don't know what to say to people like this. I just don't get it.  No, it's not what that I don't anticipate that happening. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So. Wait, as you were doing kind of research for for this book, were there a lot of surprises along the way about kind of what, you know, products that you tested out or other other things for being prepared? There were there were some surprises. I bought a plastic liner that's supposed to go in your bathtub. You know, the websites will always say, fill your bathtub at the first sign of a storm. I don't know about the rest of you, but I've never had a bathtub that didn't leak ever in my entire life ever. So I got this, you know, I bought this thing to try out and it fills your bathtub, you fill it with water and it's a lot of water. It's a lovely thing, but it's single use plastic. That is just not reasonable to me. It's expensive. There are many, many easier ways to put away that kind of water. Water is cheap. It's heavy and it's awkward. It's bulky, but it's inexpensive.  So there was that piece. I'm a little concerned often about recommending more stuff. We're we're a world that's kind of overwhelmed with stuff and there's a lot of stuff here. So I'm really looking for those things, not that you buy once and pack away in a closet and never look at, but I'm looking more at the sorts of things that you do anyway. Everybody should have a first aid kit. That just makes sense, right? Make it a little bigger than you might think. Make it a little juicier. Make sure you've got enough not just for you, but for your next door neighbor. And you don't need to buy a first aid kit. You can create one with a tackle box and a trip to CVS. It's you don't need to be buying so much stuff. But I did try a lot of stuff. And there were a few things that I did find remarkably useful. I have a pocket juice, which is an awesome little gizmo that you keep plugged into your wall and when you take it off, you can charge your cell phone seven times. Wow. Well, that's a really useful thing to live out in the hills the way I do.  It's all horrible feeling. I can use my pocket juice and charge my cell phone and call my husband and let him know I'm running late. So some things are really good to have. And some things are sort of no-brainers. Duck tape, oh, my goodness, like store a lot of duck tape. It fixes so many things. Here's something a lot of people don't think about. So one of the first things I recommend is that everybody have a preparedness notebook and in my notebook, I keep the originals of all of my important papers, birth certificates, adoption decrees, copies of all of our immunizations. If you've got pets for my cat, I keep the shot record. In the back, I have a flash drive on that flash drive are my pictures. So if per chance my house burned down, I grab first my children, then I grab the notebook, because also in there are copies of things like my insurance agents number and my Social Security card and all of our medical cards, all of our insurance. These things are critical. If you have to rebuild your life, there you go. Yeah. And that doesn't cost you any money. Yeah. In the bureaucratic world that we live in, it's like those are the things that can really put up some don't you want to know what your credit card number is. If the whole house is gone, including your wallet with your credit card in it, having that number makes your life so much easier.  Yeah. No idea. Right. So before we went on, the advocate did its own little apocalypse survival guide, which we wanted to. So cool. I love this. So how do we do? How do we know? So we actually did really well with the zombies. Well, I like having the zombies included, because as I said, if you're prepared for zombies, you're prepared for everything. And here's the best thing about it. You have to laugh at some of this. But the whole time you're laughing because it's very well written. You're also thinking, huh, I hadn't hadn't actually thought about that. It's true. And and getting people to not think about this in terms of I'm so scared. You don't need to be scared. You just need to be reasonable. You need to be organized and you need to be thoughtful about what the future might hold. And honestly, sitting here right now in this moment, I don't know what next week holds. This is probably the most unsettled I felt in my entire adult life in terms of what's coming. Climate change. We used to talk about, you know, as though it was something that would happen in the future, the numbers thrown around was 2112. Uh, here now today in this country, we're looking at the reality of climate change. And we don't know what that's going to look like. But we can pretty much guess that it is not going to be pretty right. We don't know what our food supply is going to look like. There is a wheat rust. I believe it's called UG-99 that has the potential to decimate our our wheat crop. We did a few really foolish things historically and one of the most foolish is that we took all the diversity out of what we grow, so there are only a few kinds of rice. And there are there's one main for so you're really vulnerable. If there's a virus, you can lose an entire crop of something critical, oats or wheat or corn. That was probably not the smartest thing we ever did. Historically, there were hundreds of varieties of wheat. And if one was vulnerable to drought, well, gee, this other variety wasn't. People still ate. And the other really foolish thing we did was let our food turn into property of corporations. Thank you, Monsanto. So they own the seed and they own and farmers have to pay for that seed. And so historically, they kept their seed, they saved their seed and they could regrow themselves, they were self-sufficient. And that is just not the case right now. So we're really vulnerable when you're counting on corporations to feed you. If they feed you, they own you. And one of the one of the statements you'll hear a lot in this community is that we are nine meals for manarchy. And that's actually true. Most of us can manage for probably three days. You've probably got enough stuff in your house. But you are nine meals from things not being not being fun. All right, well, where where can people get your book? Yeah, I need to get one. So if you don't if you have a local bookstore that's an independent, please ask them to order for you. That's your best bet. You can get it at Barnes & Noble. You can get it on Amazon, any place that's pretty mainstream. Great. Yeah. Well, I got a lot to think about and water to get and a big burky water filter. We've got a big to-do list. Yeah, big to-do list. Well, thank you so much for coming. You're very welcome. This was fun. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening. And don't forget to visit us at ValleyAdvocate.com.


Hi there, I'm Sandy Alnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and today we're going to do a little study on saturation and contrast. So I'm going to be using some new stamps from Girdis Steiner, and this is a guest video, so the blog post will be over on her blog, and there's a link to it online as well as in the description down below. I'm setting up the scene first by placing all the masks down in a pile in the arrangement that I want them from back to front, and using those masks then to get the placement for each of my images. Since I knew I was going to be actually making a couple of these, I just cut the masks out first in order to set it up, and then it allows me to stamp the frontmost one, leave the other masks on the other sheet of paper, replace it, put those stamps down, and just keep working from front to back. You may not be able to do the second row if you have them tucked too close together, so you kind of need to make sure that you have room for both stamps, or I'll stamp them in separate stampings, one behind another, and then finally little Vienna in the background. Doesn't that look just like her, my little pup? So then I peel off all of the wonderful masks, and I'm ready to go. Now I'm going to make two cards, so all I did was put the markers, at least the ones that were still out in a pile and take a picture of them. This is what I think I used. There could have been some more colors because I used a lot. And I'm not going to put all the colors on the screen because I'm just going to talk through it. There's just too many markers, and sometimes too many markers is just too many markers. I'm airbrushing a daytime and a nighttime sky. The daytime one uses a really saturated blue at first, that light blue, and I went over it with a BV, I think this is a BV29 potentially, so that I would dull it down a little bit because it's a cloudy sky, because it's daytime and it's snowing, and I need some clouds in the sky because it's not going to snow if it's perfectly clear. The other one is going to be layers and layers of darker blues and bluish-purple kind of colors, and I decided to even go in with a really dark gray to make it a super nighttime, but I didn't want it to be all black. So I'm letting it be a little bit on the, I guess, splotchy side so it looks like clouds, and just layering a blue over the top to make sure that it feels like blue when it's all done. But it's just going to feel like a cloudy sky back there. And I'll use one of the colors to fix the outlines because sometimes the mask will lift up or I didn't place it down right or that sort of thing. You can just kind of touch up around those areas. The one on the right is going to be saturated colors and the one on the left is going to be desaturated because at night you don't have a lot of light on things and you get a lot of grayed out colors. So the little white parts of the picture on the right are I think a B12 and then it's a B45 over on the left. The second digit in Copic Markers is the one that tells you it's a saturated color or desaturated. Lower numbers are more saturated, higher numbers are more desaturated. And I thought I'd show you that red on the left is a saturated color. It looks garish on that one. And you'll see what I mean when I go over that with a desaturated color. It's more suitable for daytime to have a bright red like that. In a nighttime scene you wouldn't really see that kind of a super bright red. And yes, there are some places that I missed. I will go back and catch those later. So don't stress out about it. This is R89, which is much more suitable to a nighttime scene.  It'll still look like they're wearing red hats when I'm all done, but it's at least much darker and richer and more desaturated.  It's going to be much lighter during the daytime. So I'm going to use a much lighter color. Same thing with each one of the dogs. So I'm going to kind of put down the base colors just to show you the comparison for how you might decide to transfer these colors from a daytime to a nighttime scene. And it doesn't mean that you'd have to use any of these colors. That's one of the reasons that I didn't put the colors on the screen. You can use whatever colors you want to use for your dogs. You can even make the multi-color dogs all different kinds of fun things. But you're going to use richer and more desaturated colors. So look at the markers that you have. The second digit on them is often a more desaturated color.  He's an E77, I think, on the right hand side because he's a desaturated dog. So it doesn't mean you can use desaturated colors in a daytime scene. But I'm going to take that same color, make the muzzle of the other dog with the E77, and then go in with the E79 to do the darker portions. So I'll go even darker than the little guy on the right hand side.  So adding my markings to my dog, Vienna, they're on both of them, adding a little bit of gray into her. And now for the shading on a nighttime card. This is, I believe, a number six gray. You can use any one of the grays to just go over the image and look how it just makes it look like the critters are now in the dark. When you add just a wash of gray over everything, and I'm going over that already desaturated blue with more gray and leaving some bare highlights on the tops of each of the surfaces, tops of the hats, tops of the furry brims on the hats, tops of their ears and their noses and things. On the right hand side, I'm going to need more shading. I'm going to need to do more of the dark, medium and light tones in a daytime scene because you can see more, it's more lit up. So you're going to see a lot more of that transition from dark to light because you have more range of color in a nighttime scene. You don't have a lot of range. You get some dark to light and that's what's going to make the image appear at all. But you get much more of that in a daytime scene. So you end up doing a lot more blending, a lot more transition from your dark to your light colors. So if you don't like to blend, you might want to consider doing some nighttime scenes. And they work great for Christmas cards because at Christmas time, you can always make it outside and snowy for lots of the images that we have in our stamp collections. And I know for a lot of people, it's crunch time. You guys are out there working hard in November on finishing up your Christmas cards so you can get them out in the mail. And sometimes it's going to be easier to put a wash of color over the images and then put that quick wash of gray over top and then throw some snow on it. And all will be well. Everybody will think you're an amazing colorist just because of that. Now look at the difference in the saturation on the snow on the left and right. You can definitely see a big difference and I use some light colors to blend them but desaturated at nighttime and much brighter colors work better for the daytime. And then, of course, you want snow all over everything in the front of the animals as well as in the sky behind them. To quickly finish off my cards, I stamp the sentiments on the top of each scene and emboss them in white on the nighttime scene and just stamp them in black onto the daytime scene. And I hope you have enjoyed this and learned a little something from it. If you'd like to get more information on the stamps or the colors or anything, go over to the Girdis Steiner blog and check it out over there. And I will see you again very soon, of course, with another video. We're still cranking on Christmas cards for most of November. And I will see you very soon. Thanks. Have a great day.


My name is Steve. How y'all doing? Thanks for coming. I appreciate you being here. How many We're not in my video presentation yesterday. Okay, so a bunch So I have to do that one slide over sorry to the rest of you. I'm Steve. I am from Charlotte, North Carolina I've got a small marketing firm in Charlotte, North Carolina. We do video. We do Photography, but the thing that we've been doing the most most recently is is we're pretty heavy on WordPress design development and Cybersecurity is really really becoming the major crux of our business, but I love love love video and I love love love photography And I'm honored and excited. I actually didn't get a whole lot of sleep last night because I was I was I was excited about this talk So hopefully a I won't fall asleep in the middle of it and be hopefully you'll find it interesting. So Quick a little ditty about me if I can get this thing to work. Oh, yeah, turn it on on Okay Looks like we're gonna go old school on this Yep. All right, so I did the corporate thing for 13 years I started off in finance and I didn't like it So I built a database that took care of all the finance stuff for the company and Got the attention of the IT department and I weaseled my way into the IT department and I never looked back So that's kind of how I ended up in the IT side of things My wife got a really good job in Charlotte back in 2004 Something like that and I dabbled in real estate for a little while and decided that I wanted to go into marketing full-time So I started my own little little bit. It started with video and photography Little outfit called amazing video tours and I was the first one in Charlotte doing professional videography and professional photography within the real estate industry So added website design a couple years later One of my realtor clients asked me to build a website for and I was absolutely terrified and then I got in WordPress 2.4.1 I think is right around the time that I got in for those of you who understand that vernacular so Real estate is kind of my thing.  That's the Steadycam I do a lot of Steadycam stuff. I was again I was one of the very very first people to do Steadycam and walk through videos not only in Charlotte But but I used to go to video conferences and stuff like that There was a time when there were less than five of us in the whole country that do it And now there's thousands and thousands of people that do it. So I'm gonna get into the drone stuff also a very very early adopter of the drone stuff I was doing drone stuff before drone was actually even a word And you know, they were flying drones in Australia long before we kind of caught on here in the United States And I've got a few Australian friends who helped me get up and running with drones before they were even available in stores here so and I've had the Real nice opportunity. I've worked with commercials. I've worked with music videos and I've actually been a part of Cast and crew and a couple of movies. So When I started an amazing video tours, I was 80% video 20% web I'm gonna be 50 next year and carrying those big heavy cameras for 16 hours a day in the hot sun Started to get kind of old I know I won't be able to carry that into my 50s and 60s But I know that I could sit and write code and develop Websites for as long as I need to so I've really transitioned my business a lot more towards the website design development and cybersecurity end and Y'all those of you who were in my video thing know about my little passion for YouTube So there's some examples. This is why I get paid. This is how I feed my kids Basically real estate and architectural photography. I've been doing it for years and years and years You know, I don't like talking about me, but I I Have had the fortune of this I have had my images on covers and magazines and stuff like that So it's it's been a really good ride. I love love love photography my first paid gig ever I was 12 and I had a friend who was aspiring to be in a band he was probably 14 15 and actually ended up doing promos for his band and That that there are a couple people from the band actually made it made it pretty big So it was it was exciting to have an opportunity to get a paid gig as a 12 year old as a photographer So my my passion for photography started very very young I've done a lot of product photography over the years Obviously a faucet company in a fan company this was for a carpenter and Charlotte and He did beautiful work But he didn't have any clients because nobody he would had no way of showing off his his work And he told me that this is he put this image on his website And now he's got more work than he knows what to do with just based on this one image. So That's what I love. I love building marketing tools that help other companies make a lot of money And it's wonderful to get a call from somebody and say hey I made a lot of money because of the tool that you made for me. Okay, I Have the fortune I've been very fortunate to travel and you know do some stuff for golf courses And then there's the aerial stuff, which is an incredible passion of mine Like I said I've been flying longer than probably the vast majority of anybody who Flies drones and I'll kind of take you down my little bit of path But that's a that's actually a 2.2 million dollar house And if you notice the photo quality of this house compared to the next picture The first one was from a helicopter that the owner of the house actually paid us to go up in a helicopter and Shoot the house from a helicopter. That's why so that other one was taken with a professional DSLR This is taken with the GoPro from one of my drones Still passing quality still pretty darn nice picture, but not nearly as nice as is the last one I've done a lot of commercial stuff, too. This is a BMX track in place called Rock Hill, South Carolina they wanted me to do some stuff for them and Any NASCAR fans? We're in Alabama and there's no NASCAR fans. What about Talladega? All right. All right. Well the that house right there is Kurt Busch's house And then the house two doors down is his brother Kyle Busch and rumor has it that Dell Earnhardt Has a house in the neighborhood, too but they wouldn't tell me where he lived because they know how much of an Earnhardt fan I am and They just knew it would probably not be a good idea and then this is a another place It's actually a different lake outside of Charlotte and that big house right there is well The biggest one is the CEO of Bank of America Charlotte and then the one right next to him supposedly is Tony Stewart of NASCAR fame as well. So that was here's another shot that was taken from the helicopter I figured while I was in the air for the one I might as well take a few more too So my evolution of flight and I'm gonna I'm gonna make this quick But I just kind of want to take you down a little path as a photographer and a videographer even back in 2005 I was dying to put a camera on something that flew ever since I got the bug from being in that helicopter that one night I was like I've got to figure this out and then this little company called GoPro came out with the GoPro 1 I was like yes, and This helicopter doesn't exist anymore. This camera doesn't exist anymore. I have no idea where they are It flew away Never found it. I never found it. So I was depressed and I met some people from Australia online on YouTube and stuff like that and I started getting into this whole It's called a quadcopter. It's it's essentially it's a helicopter with four propellers You know now we call them drones, which I still hate that term, but this is my first drone This was the beginning of my first drone. I was like I said, I was building them a long long before This is back in the day when you had to program them yourself so This the first one I ever built Took me 13 months to build it took me 13 seconds to crash it The Wright brothers flew 11 seconds. I got them beat. All right, so that was number one I progressed to this one and then at some point I had a nice stable of drones that were nice and reliable and that's basically the one with the Six rotors is the one where I got the vast majority of those those images from the sky This is Lake Wiley, South Carolina This is my friend Jim Jim has over 2,000 professional dives This is Jim diving for one of my four thousand dollar drones at the bottom of South Lake Wiley Never found the drone 4,000 bucks So I think back to Mickey's talk about the peaks and valleys of business. Well, that was certainly a valley Excuse me. Yeah, the valley two days later I get a call from a guy who's going to be doing a film for Sony Pictures and They need some aerial stuff and Sony was going to help buy a drone for me and I got this monster and I flew that sucker. I flew it once I Being fully insured by Sony Pictures to fly it. I flew it once. I was a nervous wreck But we did what we did for the movie and we got it We got it done and ended up actually Sony basically let me have the drone I ended up selling it because I was afraid to fly it But it was awesome when I was flying it. That's about ten thousand dollars up in the air at once So that's why it just got got got big I have had good fortune. I've gotten a chance to work with a lot of models over the years as well So, you know models are more fun than architecture and a lot less than fun and then architecture for the obvious reasons They're a lot harder to work with but the professional ones are great to work with and the little redhead in the middle That's my daughter. You're gonna see her a lot in this in this presentation The reason why I'm showing you all these pictures is because My goal for you is by the time that we're done here today And I got a big sure I'm staying tracking on time How am I doing on time because I just can't Am I doing on time? All right My goal for you is that There's no picture or no image up here, you know, obviously aside from the aerial stuff I want you to be able to walk out of here with the knowledge of how to take a lot of these shots So I'm gonna share a lot of images with you and I want to whet your appetite I want I want I want to get you excited about photography and I'm gonna teach you how to do it Okay, so that's kind of our structure So I have a theme my theme is capture the moment and You probably knew this was coming Can I capture the moment with my cell phone or do I need a DSLR or even a even a beginning level? DSLR to capture a lot of these images and I'm gonna let you decide. Okay Here's image number one You go to see the Harlem Globetrotters You know the inevitable pale of confetti is coming You just don't realize that it's gonna happen to three rows behind you Would I have captured this image with my cell phone? I might have But I knew that with my DSLR. I Knew I wasn't going to miss the moment. Okay, so I Probably would have caught the image here with my cell phone. It probably wouldn't have been nearly as memorable. Okay So in my opinion right now, it's it's DS DLSR DSLR one cell phone zero Okay, no NASCAR fans in the room. I'm sorry.  I Was 50 yards from these guys with probably just a thousand people between me and them And I had the I was fortunate enough to get to go down on the track while they were doing driver introductions and Capture this shot with my DSLR what I have caught this one with my cell phone. No way They were way way way too far away, but I was able to capture this I'm gonna teach you how to do all this stuff is is the point keep that in mind So DSR to cell phone zero The big win That little redhead right there is my baby They won the regional championship in basketball. I love these girls that brings oh These girls are just I love these girls my daughter's been playing basketball with these girls since she was four years old They're like they're all like daughters to me. This is taken from the stands What I have captured that moment with my cell phone heck no So DSLR three cell phone zero the big yawn That's my boy Tyson right there. I Probably Might have caught that one for my cell phone, but I don't think it would have come out as good So I think the DSLR is still winning I mean we could throw this one at the cell at the cell phone if you want to but I Still think that I wouldn't have been able to capture this image not nearly as well with my cell phone as my DSLR So here's a shot with my DSLR and the caption obviously reads don't just take a snapshot. There is Nothing memorable about this picture. That's my girl right there with the ball and she did make the shot But who cares? It's such a crappy shot. It's just like I see all the moms of the dads And I don't mean to offend you if you are one of these moms or dads that some of them have iPads at a basketball game I'm gonna tell you something about basketball indoor basketball and Dance recitals and stuff like that. Those are the hardest things to photograph Because you need the most photography skills to do indoor Action type stuff. I'm gonna teach you how to do it. I'm gonna teach you how to get there But this is never gonna suffice. I would never be I would never show this off to somebody. Okay So don't just take a snapshot Capture the emotion This coach again Coach my daughter all through middle school. I love this man. He was so good to those girls He taught them so much and this picture captures You can look at him and you can tell where he is in the moment He was he was cheering his team on, you know, they were down by four There was a few minutes left in the game and he he's got you that was a very you got this moment And I love this picture because I I have so much admiration for him and it captures the moment It's not just a snapshot Once again DSLR. I was probably 50 feet from him when I took that shot Alana she's terrified because she's got to go to the line with one second left to win the game Absolutely terrified. I Was so high up in the stands. There's no way in the world I would have captured this shot without a DSLR. So I don't know what the score is but I think you get my point is worth Carrying around a bigger camera to capture these moments because these moments are They're so fleeting. I mean the girls were 13 or 14 here.  Although I got I got a lot more my kids I think that's why I like this one so much is because I got my kids in it I want to teach you how to do some really cool special effects If you take a filter from any any camera and you put it kind of at a book end You get kind of a heart. That's kind of a cool thing So this is kind of my intro into creating special effects once again I'm rambling on and on and on here, but I want to let your appetite because I'm gonna teach you how to do all this stuff Anybody ever seen this before? I Don't recommend you do it unless you're in South Carolina at the beach because it is kind of dangerous But essentially what you do is you put a piece of steel wool in a whisk You set the camera up from a distance and I'm gonna teach you how to do that And you put the whisk on a string you do this and you turn And it captures it's called a spark orb or something like that has a name I don't know what the name is, but I'm gonna teach you how to take a shot like this It's just for fun I just I love photography and these are just some of the fun things that you could do not necessarily with your cell phone But with a real decent camera. I call this one fun with flashlights Boys love this one just if you have like a 12 year old There is another picture the boys were going like this so that you could see kind of the waves coming out of their mouth But I won't show you the other picture where they turned around and showed me their Heinz And demanded that I take the same exact picture that way And then the chair I'm gonna teach you how I did the chair shot just more fun And how to be every kid's hero by teaching them how to do all these little tricks Now man This one was it just happened to be the Amazon or whoever it was came to the door the door was just open a little bit and there was if you can see in The background just a little crack of light I told my daughter to just sit in the crack of light and she jumped in there and ended up being one of my favorite pictures that I've ever taken Just kind of happenstance once again DSLR DSLRs allow you to take images with the shallow depth of field and what a shallow depth of field means is your Primary subject is nice and in focus and you get that blurry hazy background Okay, because when we take when we take images We're telling a story and when you take a snapshot and everything in the entire photo is in focus You it's a it's hard to call attention to what the primary image is So I'm gonna talk about depth of field if you look very carefully at the piano picture The foregrounds blurry the middle ground is in sharp focus and the background is blurry. That's even a More reduced up the field. I'm gonna teach you how to do this. Okay? Whoops back it up back it up This is playing with shutter speed what I did here was I essentially Set the camera to have the shutter open for a long period of time while cars went whizzing by to capture their tail lights I'm gonna teach you how to do this and there's my girl again. This is called panning Basically what I did was I set the camera She's on one of those carnival rides that just goes around and around in a circle So what I did was I followed her with the camera and followed her and followed her and then click the camera as I continue to follow She's an ultra sharp focus, but nothing else in the image is focused giving us, you know Obviously motion and she's what I want you to look at the rest of it is just you know icing on the cake I'm gonna teach you how to do that and then I'm gonna get a little bit of Photoshop fun This might be kind of stretching it a little bit, but there's a concept called multiplicity This is my daughter and her best friend and my daughter and her best friend and my daughter and her best friend and my daughter and her best friend And in the picture is my daughter and her best friend. It's called multiplicity just More fun Photoshop tricks and when I'm in the happiness lounge some of these Photoshop things I can I can teach you about there, but they kind of be on this gop of what I'm trying to talk about here Another one the kids love karate my daughter went all the way I got a black belt my son Well, he's another story. I love him to death, but he's not exactly the Finisher like my daughter is But they got their their red belt it goes red brown black So my daughter got her red and my my son got his orange on the same day and because belts are so important in karate I used Photoshop to basically bring out the color of the belts But think everything else black and white and this is another one of my favorite images that I've ever taken so And I was gonna try to do a Jimmy Stewart impersonation, but I'm just gonna spare you of that But you know, you know, you want the moon Mary? Well, why don't I throw a lasso around it and bring it in to you? That's what this is more Photoshop fun. Okay, the moon is not that big Here is if you look closely in the lens My son is taking a picture of me and that's the picture of me And I'm taking a picture of my son which I photoshopped him in the image inside the camera Just more fun or Photoshop fun Okay, you tired you tired yet. Oh, and then my puppy It's called a pop-up picture another Photoshop trick Fun with cameras. Okay, lots and lots and lots of fun And then of course a lot of people don't realize this but time-lapse is not video sped up It's actually images taken every increment say five seconds ten seconds thirty seconds. What have you? And then all meshed together is what makes for a good time-lapse a lot of people don't realize that Okay You're tired of the the demo now. You want you want to learn some stuff? All right, let's get on a let's get on to learning some stuff I'm gonna hit you with some very very bare-boned basics.   The cars are there.  I basically just turned him 40 or 90 degrees to where we would have a better background and my my my thought for you here is keep it You know be cognizant of what's behind whatever you're trying to take a picture of because In about three seconds, we were able to get much better background than the cars and all the other nonsense Okay, just just by repivoting him. Okay, so pay attention to your background. It'll make for a better image Where is the Sun? I think this came up yesterday. Somebody asked me about the Sun well When the Sun is beating down on your subject, it's gonna cause these crazy Shadows and not look not make for a very, you know nice photo I turned the boy like this Where the Sun was at his side and it made for a much much nicer image So kind of be cognizant of where the Sun is in the sky because the Sun is your light source And as you're gonna find out by the time we get done with all this nonsense Light is your best friend when it comes to good photography Okay, all I did was turn him that was it So this is an example of hey, can you take a picture of us and the person took a picture of us?  That's why a near and dear friend of mine who Actually works for one of the NASCAR teams and and got me down Real close to where I could take a lot of these nice cool NASCAR pictures But after he took the picture I handed the camera to somebody else and I said hey Can you take a picture of us and although the background isn't all that great? We were kind of limited within the confines of where we're at least I got a good a decent picture of me and my buddy and both of these were taken with cell phones by the way Okay, but my point here is where's the Sun if the Sun is behind your subject and you're shooting into the Sun You're never gonna have a good picture The Sun is to the side of the subject or behind you as you're taking an image. You're gonna have a much better picture All right audience participation time. What is wrong with this picture? Okay, yeah, we got some shadows, but there's a bigger problem that I want to convey to you We cut his feet off So from a photography standpoint, you never want to cut off the appendages, okay? If you're taking a picture of an individual you can you can cut them above the knee Okay, but don't cut them below the knee and and don't cut their appendages off because it just makes for a Not very good picture, but you're right.  He's all look like a mouse So keep that in mind when you're taking pictures of children don't stand over them and shoot them So another quick example of that. I'm standing up. I'm six foot one the boy was jumping off of the thing I love making my kids jump off of stuff It tries my mother-in-law and my wife crazy, but my kids have tons and tons of pictures of them in flight That's me standing up But when I sat down on the ground it makes him look like yeah, he's a superhero And if you know anything about it, I guess he was probably around nine or ten here nine or ten year old boys Love to look like superheroes How are we doing so far Good All right, so what's wrong with this one? Yeah, you ever seen somebody take a picture like this That's what you're gonna end up with Don't take a picture like this Bring it straight And you'll have a straight-looking kid Okay, like I said some of these are pretty dull, but yet at the same time I see people do these things every single day Okay, this one's pretty obvious Yeah Focuses the issue here. Okay, what's wrong cut his appendages off? I Learned this in 1984. There's a picture of of now. I'm gonna date myself here the US The women's gymnastics team and the men's gymnastics team did awesome at the LA Olympics There was a picture of Mitch Gaylord on the rings and they cut his Hands off so you couldn't tell it was it was on the front page of the LA Times You couldn't see what he was doing It was the dumbest thing in the world that I've always thought don't cut the appendages off of people because you you have no context of What they're doing so here he was accomplishing this great feat, you know holding himself up in the rings You couldn't even tell it was pathetic and it made the front page If you're wondering about the transitions I teach kids So and they love all the crazy transitions. I know that it's not so great for adults, but it is what it is So there's the boy again. He's standing right smack dab in the middle of the image So I'm gonna ask you does that look nicer Or does it look nicer with him a little bit offset where you can see the background a little bit? Okay, there is a rule of composition. It is rule number one in any photography composition book called the rule of thirds You do just this one thing you change this one thing in your photography people aren't gonna know why your pictures are better They're just gonna Feel like they're better This is called the rule of thirds and it's a tic-tac-toe board So cut your image into a tic-tac-toe board and put your primary image somewhere where it's intersect Intersecting with two lines and you'll have a much nicer image. Okay, that's called the rule of thirds. I think this one's pretty obvious We've all seen over exposed and under exposed pictures We're gonna talk about settings so that you don't make this mistake and you end up with a much better image Okay Put your seatbelts on this is where it gets hard Have I talked to you guys in that at least being interested in in in trying to use a better camera than your than your Cell phones. Okay, so let's take it one step further. I don't care what camera you get I don't care what it's an icon or a cannon or a Sony or a Panasonic or whatever DSLRs now are cheap You don't need one like I use every single day because you you don't do I you're not out in 120 degrees Sweating all over it and all that kind of stuff on some days and some days I'm out in 14 degree weather, you know and the things icing up. You don't need anything like that That's a professional camera is built for the rigors of that type of abuse But you can still get a nice DSLR nowadays for $3.99 and if you really want to be Cost-conscious buy one on eBay for half that people buy cameras. They don't use them and they sell them They're like boats and used cars. You can get a really nice camera on eBay Barely used for really really cheap price Probably surprised you so let's get out of easy mode And as you know one of these dials is a cannon the other one's a Nikon I actually own both and I forgot which one's which I think the Nikon is on the right You've got auto which is the green mode P which is program mode. Okay, which is basically green mode that you can override. We're gonna skip that and A is aperture priority You set the aperture The camera does everything else S is for shutter speed you set the shutter speed the camera does everything else and then M is manual you set everything And we're gonna tackle each of them individually We're gonna start with aperture priority mode because this is the funnest place to start Okay, I highly recommend you start an aperture priority mode on your journey to take better images Because you're gonna pick the aperture and the camera is gonna do the rest of the work for you So we're gonna take baby steps here now Aperture is one of the most Crazy hard to understand concepts in all photography and I think this is what turns most people off So I'm gonna give you the example that helped me get it finally get it after I don't know three or four years of taking pictures I don't think I understood aperture. I started at age 12. I don't think I got this until I was around 16 or 17 When you're asleep at night You wake up in the middle of the night and you open your eyes you can pretty much see what's going on in the room, right? Because your pupil is huge, right? You stumble to the bathroom you flip on that light and you're like wow, right because your pupil is huge You have to wait for your pupil to undialate to be able to digest that light Aperture in your camera works the exact same way Aperture means the camera's pupil is either huge why? to let tons of light in or Really really really small Because you're at a baseball game in the middle of the day and you don't necessarily need to let all that light in okay? So when your camera goes Opens and shuts when the shutter opens and shuts it does two things it well It does one thing it lets light in but the amount of light that it lets in is determined by two factors how much how big is the pupil and How long is that shutter open and shut we're gonna talk about the pupil first But just know that that's the two things that that's the only two things that happen when that shutter opens and closes That shutter can open and shut as fast as one eight thousandth of a second which I can't clap that fast And it can stay open as long as you want it to it could stay open for 30 minutes if you wanted it to okay We'll get to shutter priority in a second. Let's let's digest aperture priority big pupil lots of light Little pupil less light And here is the most confusing thing about cameras is for whatever reason and I don't know the reason The numbers are backwards. It doesn't make any sense and this throws so many people off When it's open huge It's a little number and when it's open just a teeny bit It's a really really big number and I don't know why that is I don't care just If you once you get your head around the fact that 1.8 is really really big And 22 is really really really small You'll be able to start understanding the f-stop or the aperture on your camera settings. Okay The other thing is I have halves and doubles F1.8 it doesn't look like it but f1.8 Let's in twice as much light as f2.8 which lets in twice as much light as a four twice twice twice twice twice okay Conversely if you go the other way it doubles each time Okay, so apertures are halves and doubles and that's I guess where those numbers come from But if you can wrap around your head around the fact that the small number is is the big aperture You'll be well on your way to understanding aperture priority and being able to use a mode on your on your DSLR Everybody get that I explain it right Okay Low light. What kind of aperture do you think I used on this one? First of all, I was not supposed to have a DSLR to rock concert Right. Oh Okay, that was a 2.8 lens. Okay. There's a 2.8 lens Here's another cool thing remember earlier. I was talking about that soft background Okay, aperture mode Determines depth of field. That's how much of the image is going to be in focus And I have a little trick for you to remember this Big aperture big aperture small number. I know it doesn't make sense But a big aperture of 2.8. This is the way I remembered it when I was a kid Whatever I'm focusing on About 2.8 feet in front of them and 2.8 feet behind them is going to be in focus Okay, whereas if I bet f22 Or this in this example f16 You see how all the hats are in focus at f16 So the focus is on the hat in the front, but you can still see that all the other ones are in focus so If you want a real shallow depth of field 2.8 is kind of an easy number to remember because you just think about your subject probably 2.8 feet in front of them 2.8 feet behind them is going to be in focus. Okay, and you get that nice portrait Feel with the milky background and everything like that You were showing me pictures on your phone about with the flower and you didn't know how you were getting that That's all aperture priority She was showing me pictures of flowers on her phone and they were beautiful portraits where the flowers were were in sharp in Sharp focus, but the stuff in the background was was all blurred and I told her I promised her at that today I was going to teach her how that was done. So that's aperture. Okay Okay, pop quiz The Grand Canyon is this f22 or is this f2? Yes, you're listening Yes, absolutely. I can't think of anything larger than the Grand Canyon take a picture of five minutes Okay, okay, so five minutes and then 15 after that. Okay. Yeah, we're good Okay, there she is again. Sorry f22 or f2 Okay Everybody understand aperture priority Now here's the cool thing Go home you put your camera in aperture priority and the camera's gonna still make the decision about the shutter speed for you So you can play an aperture priority and not worry about the shutter speed yet, which is really really cool Like I said baby steps I'm teaching you what took me years and years and years and years to figure out and and you probably remember those film days I Would take like a roll of 12 and get them back a week later and not remember what I was never disciplined enough to write down I knew I should my father was like you should write them down write them down I never did it took me years to figure it out. I really didn't figure things out until digital came out But shutter priority mode now we're talking about how long is that shutter open? Okay? Okay? When you take cityscapes, I recommend you do a few things Do it in winter when the air is cold and dense and crystal clear.  Okay, so for night photography. I'm a big advocate to bring a buddy So this picture was actually six months in the making me and my buddy in terms of you know Getting permission from our lives to be able to go out on a Tuesday night in February You know and do this it it was a long time coming together, but it's it's one of my favorite pictures that I've ever taken Shutter priority mode. We wanted the shutter open for a long period of time Because as the cars drove by that's what created the streaks of light now the camera's sitting still on a tripod Not moving at all and that's why the city the city in the background is still sharply in focus. Okay, I Don't remember what the settings were on this one, but I think it's on the next slide. All right, so yeah a minute now To my non-nascar fans in the room when the cars are on pit row They're still going 55 60 miles per hour, so they're still moving pretty good So this picture del juniors car. He was doing about 55 at the time I need a really fast shutter speed like 1 350th of a second to be able to capture that and still make it nice and clear you guys get the difference Okay All right quiz Is this a fast or a slow shutter speed? Fast anybody want to guess say again? Good good guess One one four thousand so that's how that's how much shutter speed you need to be able to capture a bullet going through a pumpkin. I Didn't take that by the way, so faster slow Slow if you look closely you can see kind of a ghostly image of me What I did was I took a little penlight flashlight. I stood by the chair I made sure that I continued to move so that I wouldn't be in the picture And I just kind of lighted around the chair is all I did. I showed my son this picture He and his buddies were doing it for weeks after that. I Couldn't get my cameras back Okay, so fun with kids. I tell you what So yeah 30 full seconds on that one you guys have all seen the water pictures, right? One one thousandth of a fountain is boring Now I'm not a big fan of one one thousandth at all But you've probably seen the waterfall waterfall pictures where the water looks nice and creamy. Okay, that's a longer shutter speed That's one fifteenth of a second Okay, and speaking of waterfalls. Here's the exact look at one eight hundredth of a second That's not going in any magazine anywhere All right, but you slow it down to a third of a second or even one full second you get that nice creamy Thing now remember these are all taken on tripods. You can't hand hold this or you're gonna have a mess Okay, but set that shutter speed one second and your Crappy snapshot turns into something that that might end up in a magazine someday. Okay shutter speed Cool thing about shutter speed you put your camera in the s mode To play with shutter speed and it'll set the aperture for you So you can practice s mode. It'll take care of the a mode and vice versa for you Okay, and we talked about this one. I promise you I was gonna tell you how to do this Okay, you follow the subject and I didn't get this right on the very first one I played with it. I played with different shutter speeds and stuff like that and I decided 160th was the way to go Now that's what turned out the best picture. Okay. We learning Who's asleep? Nobody's asleep. Yes. Nobody's asleep. All right manual mode This is where you make all the decisions and I'm gonna tell you right now indoor sports Is a big deal. Here's the situation Alana's going up for the layup I needed her in crisp focus But yet I also wanted to stop her motion, right? If you look at number three number three is out of focus She's a head.  I want you looking at number 12. Okay, that's the difference between a really nice shot And and a snapshot because with a snapshot everything's going to be super in focus It's probably going to be a little bit blurry. You're not going to know what to look at. Okay So you guys get how I did this aperture priority Actually I take that back manual mode. I probably had her at probably f4 And a very very fast shutter speed to stop the motion. Okay All right, let's play. How is this shot? Some of y'all at a f stop anybody 2.8 how about a shutter speed? In order to freeze motion you need a shutter speed of 250 250th or faster So if you're doing your kids sports and stuff like that and you want to freeze motion to 250 250th of a second or faster so this one very shallowed up the field And a very fast shutter speed Does that make sense? Am I getting 3d out because I know this is this is not easy and this is why most people are not photographers because this isn't easy But I try to describe it in a way that that it does make it easy Am I am I is it working? Okay This is a little harder because it's more of a middle of the road thing So I'll just kind of give you the answers middle depth of field and moderate shutter speed. Okay I like to take pictures of houses at night and let that shutter just sit open because you get that When you bathe the house in light and then you just let all that light come out If if if I had used the much faster shutter speed, it would look like just kind of a regular boring picture Okay guesses With the buddy same buddy same night good call. Who said that? Very good. I like that. Yes, definitely with the buddy this Dave this is at cpcc's parking lot Uh, yeah, this picture was a pain to take because there was no traffic that night I mean just zero so I was out there sitting there waiting. It's obviously f 22, but that thing was open for five minutes so to capture that little traffic and uh Normally charles got a lot more traffic than that, but uh, yeah, I had to be patient for that one. Okay Sometimes you got to wait out the shot All right white balance. I was talking white balance. Where is he? He's not in here. Okay White balance is this weird color cast that you get on some of your imaging You don't know why and the reason for that is because the white balance isn't set on your camera correctly. Okay cameras see in in in a color cast called Kelvin and that's the color temperature And that's why these little icons. They actually they actually are important Um, the gentleman who was taking pictures of the vent earlier today had his white balance on auto And he was taking pictures out there where nothing but fluorescent lights and his pictures were coming out. Guess how Yeah, exactly Because it wasn't set right the auto mode works great for iso most of the time But this is a very very very fluorescent environment And when I switched him over to fluorescent his his uh, the color accuracy on his pictures, uh, were beautiful Okay, so you can get away with is excuse me A white balance being in in auto mode most of the time But if you're seeing weird casts either yellow or purple Try making that switch. Okay, you don't you don't have to think about all this stuff all the time We're starting to get really really into the weeds in terms of of advanced features and the the most In the weeds furthest furthest one down is this concept of iso Which if you guys remember from the film days film used to come in like 100 200 400 That's just basically light sensitivity Okay, and all I'm going to tell you about iso is you can cheat if you're out in the bright sun Take your iso down you can use auto mode and it'll get it right most of the time um But if it's not getting it right or if you're trying to take a picture of your kid Dance recital or something like that and even with the you've got it stopped down to the biggest aperture You can get and you're trying to work with the fastest shutter speed that you can work with If it's still not working for you, you can cheat it And jack the iso up because that will add artificial light to your image The problem is it'll add fuzz to your image too Okay, so depending on how much fuzz you're willing to deal with in your image if you're just sending it You know to on the internet or something like that You could probably get it all the way up to about 3200 without too too much fuzz But if it's something that you want to blow up to one of those Things that you put on the wall. You probably want to keep it lower than 800. Okay Okay, how much uh, is that mean i'm done 15 minutes before the next well, guess what that's the last. Okay lenses You guys probably all know what 80 to 200 means, right? That's 18 millimeters is is like real wide, okay Like if you can see at the 300 millimeters you see the little red barn that little red barn is actually in millimeter, okay, so this is where we're going from telephoto or from telephoto to wide angle And you can buy lenses that are 18 to 300 That will do all your one-stop shopping now the lens is going to be this big But you only have to buy one lens there's there is a downside to this, okay So that's called focal length everybody get focal length when people buy lenses They're pretty in tune with what focal length means But what in the heck is going on here We got a Nikon afs dx nicore 80 to 200 yada yada yada blah blah blah for 596 and something that looks extremely similar for $2,300 Because of the amount of light that it lets in Okay, when you use this lens And you stop it down you want you're doing basketball, right? So you want as much light as possible you stop that sucker down to 3.5 And then you take you twist the barrel to make it go to 200 because you want to get real tight in on on the kit or whatever You're going to notice that your 3.5 just became 5.6 Do you remember the slide about doubles and halves? Okay, if you're at 200 millimeters on this lens trying to take a picture of your kid going for the layout At 200 millimeters you're at 5.6 on aperture, right? Which means you're not letting as much light in You need a blurry picture That sucker over there is a constant 2.8 all the way through Doesn't matter where you're at. You could be at 200 millimeters. It's at 2.8. Remember halves and doubles So i'll get the math wrong here but 2.8 if you go from 5.6 To 4 to 3.5 To 2.8 and that Haves each time. What is that 1 16th as much light? I don't know what the math is somebody in here probably knows It's it's half half half half Four halves, so I don't know what that ends up being But it's a heck of a lot less light And that's why that lens is a heck of a lot more expensive make sense And super heavy good call on that one. Yeah, all right The need for speed And we just kind of talked about that. I'm going to give you an example if you saw the pictures of me at the at the track I actually had those two lenses This is the best I could do With the $500 lens now these cars my my desk car friends These cars are now on the front stretch. They're doing 180 miles per hour This is from the same position with the other lens crystal clear. They don't even look like they're moving Okay So that's what $2,300 gets you and that's what the $600 lens gets you Okay, and I'm sorry about that. My recommendation is just to have your kids do outside sports Because if they get in a basketball and dance, oh man, you're going to be in deep for lenses if you want to take some good pictures, right? All right, so we're almost done I think So freezing the action in near darkness um That kid's mom Offered me $500 for this image. I gave it to her because I'm not in the business of I was going to use the r-word I just I gave it to her and she was forever and she's got it blown up She's so proud of that picture of her boy Because nobody else was capturing images that night. I was probably like 30 rows back I had my 80 to 200 on full on 200 Okay, it was on 2.8. And I think I was at probably around 250th of a second I was the only one in the audience that caught a decent picture of her son that night and she was forever grateful Okay, she's also the owner of the studio. So uh So it was it was really cool to be able to do that for somebody else And crop factor you guys if you've ever gone camera shopping one thing that really really confuses people is this whole concept of crop factor Cheaper cameras and I don't mean to say cheap I just mean the less expensive cameras are going to have something called a crop factor. They're going to crop out Some of what a old school 35 millimeter camera used to uh, uh, 35 millimeter film is is very wide It it captures quite a lot. Okay, but the the sensors Excuse me on some of the on the cheaper cameras. They just don't capture as much to me Just use your zoom. It's not that big of a deal. I I would not I would not encourage you guys to go out and buy full frame cameras because full frame cameras are super super expensive That's 1200 and up. I want to encourage you guys to go out And buy entry-level DSLRs Throw in an a mode and start taking pictures of your kids or grandkids or whatever Because I got to tell you it is so rewarding Um, I've told some of you this between my mom and my stepdad I'm the youngest of seven There are no pictures of me as a kid Because I'm just that tons of pictures of my older sisters and brothers But squat and I made I made a commitment to myself many many many years ago that my kids were going to have Pictures of bounds and we've got a yearbook. That's probably this thick every single year great pictures of my kids And I love it and it's a great great great thing so Obviously all of this applies to your work. It applies to your blogs. It applies to helping your clients But where I was coming from on this whole thing is it's also an awesome awesome awesome hobby For great great great memories from you your family your friends your kids and you'll become very popular um One more rule of thumb Don't be afraid to take crappy pictures. I'm going to let you in on a little secret For every 100 photos I take I show other people 10 of them and they think I'm awesome They don't see the 90 that are crappy Okay Yeah, forget that but you don't have to share your crappy pictures with people Anytime I take I take pictures of the team and all the girls are at my house. Let me see the pictures No, no, no, no, I got I got I got a photoshop them Now I'm just picking out the ones that I like the most Okay, so don't be afraid to take a gazillion pictures and not show the bad ones to people That's it questions Yes, sir I like those little booths the question was product photos You know a little white booths that you could buy on ebay or amazon dirt cheap And the other thing is a ring light You know i'm talking about uh, if you ever watch csi when they take the pictures of you know the close ups They use that ring light that goes around the barrel that gives a lot of really really nice light to products Okay, yes, ma'am Any entry-level dslr can do that you put it on There's a there's there's also a b mode called bulb Where you can actually sit there and hold that shutter open hold it open hold it open for as long as you want to And i'll give you one more little because you brought that picture up One of the other things that I did when I took that picture when there were no cars or nothing really interesting Was happening I put a baseball cap over the barrel of of the thing so that it was capturing no data at that time And if you want really really really cool firework shots Do the same thing in between the firework just just set that sucker to bulb or whatever and just hold that shutter open And anytime, you know, there's a pause in the fireworks put a little put a baseball cap in front of the thing As soon as you hear that pop of the of the thing going off pull the baseball cap away And and when the image when you go to look at the image It's going to have you know three minutes worth of fireworks and people are going to be like Whoa, that must have been the coolest fireworks show ever. No, no, it's just three minutes worth of fireworks. So Who else yes, ma'am It I probably said it wrong because I'm dyslexic, but it's a dslr It's it stands for digital single lens reflex throw it in a mode and just have a ball Who else yes, ma'am? Yeah, I do. It's not exactly the cheapest, but I am a huge fan of light room.  So with these dslr's you have an option of shooting either jpegs, which we all know jpegs Or shooting something called raw raw basically It's a much it's a huge file size for every single image that you take But it's an uncompressed image So when you pop it in a photoshop or you pop it in the lightroom you have so much data that you can work with You can fix messed up white balance You can fix a lot of bad bad issues in an image Yes, sir I do for sports Your camera will have you know cannons Are awesome. I mean when micons are awesome too, but cannons Will have a a a setting on that dial There are settings somewhere you could either do single shot Sing or multi slow and multi fast So I I don't use it a lot But yeah, I mean you just sit there and put your hammer on it and the canons will go 11 frames per second They'll just go You know and icons aren't as fast as cannons So does that answer your question? Okay. He was this question was about burst mode You hear uh, you go to a uh a professional sports event Especially like a somewhere quiet like a basketball game and you hear all the cameras go You know, that's that's the guys, you know, it's that whole one in ten rule He's he's gonna take a picture of the person doing the layup and he's going to pick the best one If you know that that he that he wants and he's not going to show his friends the rest Who else Thank you all very much. I know you have a choice of where to be and I appreciate that y'all decided hanging out with me Thank you


Hi, I'm Tom Wolf. I understand that Senate Bill 3, the terrible anti-choice bill that's making its way through the Senate is now in floor discussion. I just want to repeat, if it gets to my desk, I am going to veto that bill. We cannot go backwards on the rights of women to make their own health decisions and this bill would be just a disaster. I will veto it.


فسألوا أهل الذكري إن كنتم لا تعلم أقول مستعينة بالله الحمد لله رب العالمين والصلاة والسلام على أشرف الأنبياء والمرسلين سيدنا ونبينا محمد وعلى آله وصحبه ومن تبيعهم بحسان إلى يوم الدين أما بعد أولاً يجب أن نعرف أن خنزير which is the pig is نجس العين نجس العين يعني أنه يجب أن يكون فرصة فيه وفي نفسه والفرصة من the pig cannot be removed from it it cannot be removed from it it is consistent it is with the pig and this is the إتفاق of أهل العلم the scholars are in unanimous agreement because Allah تعالى تباركه سنلي آية صورة الأنعام آية 145 أقول لا أجد فيما أحيا إلي محرما على طاعم يطعمه إلا أن يكون ميتة أو دمم مسفوحا أو لحم خنزير فإنه رجس الله يفتحه أنه رجس يفتحه يفتحه لحم خنزير لحم خنزير is نعبس إذا كنا نعرف أن إذا كانت فرصة فيه لم نستطيع أن نسلوطه لم نستطيع أن نسلوطه لذا أننا لم نستطيع أن نسلوطه ولكن the scholars have two views or they have a disagreement amongst themselves whether that it will become pure if it will become pure if it is tanned if it's tanned will it become pure and the suburb of the khilaf the reason why this disagreement occurred between the scholars is because of the عموم النصوص الوأريدة the hadith which came which is very general this hadith is what brought the disagreement and the hadith is the hadith of the messenger صلى الله عليه وسلم in which he said the messenger صلى الله عليه وسلم he said in the hadith that hadith Imam al-Tirmidhe narrated it Imam al-Nasai r.a narrated it Imam al-Nasai r.a narrated it on the authority of who Abdullah ibn Abbas the messenger صلى الله عليه وسلم he said in the hadith عليه الصلاة والسلام he said any dead animal any so the hadith says any any dead because it's a yuma a yuma any ihabin any animal which died skin that is tanned it has been made pure so some of the scholars took from the hadith because the prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم he made it general it is what it is general Imam al-Tirmidhe r.a in his Sunan وعيسة ترميد r.a the Sunni who brought that hadith in his Sunan he said he said he said it's a sound hadith sound and authentic hadith and this hadith implementing it is the view of the majority of the scholars قالوا they said في جلود الميتتي إذا دوبغت فقط طهرة they said if the skin of a dead animal dies its skin can be tanned and it can be used ترميد r.a they said but but he said اي yuma ihabin دوبغة فقط طهرة except the dog and the what and the pig and they use this hadith as an evidence so this from this hadith some of the scholars they said it's not general such as he said it's not general ترميد r.a is the same he said it's not general it's specific and some scholars they said it is general the hadith seems to be general sorry the hadith seems to be specific and it's specific to the animal that was permissible to be eaten while it was alive and that this tanning is attached to it's attached to the eating of the animal previously and the evidence for that is the hadith of the messenger صلى الله عليه وسلم which إمام النساء narrated in his that the messenger صلى الله عليه وسلم he said to a person who had the hand the messenger صلى الله عليه وسلم he said to her he said to the woman فإن دباغه ذكاتوها the tanning of the animal is the slaughtering of it the tanning of the skin is the slaughtering of it so the prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم say as though he is trying to say عليه الصلاة والسلام that the debaq is the only animal that can be done the debaq too which can be tan is an animal in its original essence has to be what it has to be an animal which is an original essence can be slaughtered a pig cannot be slaughtered it cannot be eaten so wearing shoes and clothes and bags that are made out of skins of pigs the نجاسة it never purifies even if it's tan in any way of form or shape in any way or chemicals that are added to it doesn't matter it can never change it because it is نجاسة العين and الله تبارك وتعالى ordered the believers to be upon purity الله says وثيابكة فطاهر النفوث صورة آية in صورة المدثر and your garments purified whilst wearing that you are not pure والله أعلى وأعلم وصلى الله وسلم على سيدنا ونبينا محمد وعلى ألي وصحبه واخر دعوانا أنا الحمد لله رب العالم


My name is Arta Kwam and I am an elementary reading teacher in Wichita, Kansas. In this lesson, I am going to show you how I would teach rhyming, recognizing rhyming words for early childhood students. After the students have learned about the parts of words, onset and rhyme, I would want to teach them to recognize when they hear rhyming words. In practicing this skill, I would review with students that rhyming words are words that end in the same sounds. That way, it is fresh in their minds. Then I would explain our objective for the day. Today, students, we are going to be listening for words that end with the same sounds. These are called rhyming words. What are they called? The students repeat. Rhyming words. I would then ask them to use a gesture to show me if the words rhyme or not. Students, today, I want you to use a thumbs up to show me when the words rhyme and a thumbs down to show me when they do not rhyme. And I want you to put your thumbs up or thumbs down on your heart like this. Then I would start saying some pairs of words that I have selected ahead of time. I will then ask the students to repeat the words and then show me a gesture to whether they rhyme or not. Let's try one. I would say, cat, hat. The students repeat. Cat. Then I ask, do they rhyme? Show me. And all of the students would give a thumbs up if they think the words rhyme. I would then look at the silent signals they have given me. I would make sure that they are showing their gestures on their heart. That way they are using their own minds and not copying from others. Yes, they rhyme. They end with the same sounds. Cat. I would continue with the list of words. I would say, grill, hill. The students would repeat. Grill, hill. Do they rhyme? Show me. Yes, they do. Thank you for showing me a thumbs up. Dog. Stop. The students repeat. Dog. Stop. Do they rhyme? No, they do not rhyme. These words do not end with the same sounds. I would continue to practice this way until when I look out, almost every child is showing me the correct gesture, the majority of the time. To add some excitement and fun, I would have them do different kinds of gestures. We might do stand up if they rhyme, sit down if they do not, or hands up if they rhyme, hands on the ground if they do not rhyme. So that is how I teach recognizing rhyming words to early childhood students.