Note: This is part 1 of a 5-part tutorial series for beginners. Articles are as follows:

Part I: Shooting In Manual Mode: Intro
Part II: Shooting In Manual Mode: ISO
Part III: Shooting In Manual Mode: Shutter Speed / Exposure Time
Part IV: Shooting In Manual Mode: Aperture
Part V: Shooting In Manual Mode: Conclusion (Exposure Triangle)

I had a longtime fear of mastering my own songs. What is commonly referred to as "audio mastering" usually involves only a few subtle changes to the final recorded version of a song. These are things like evening out the amounts of bass and treble with the rest of the frequencies, making sure the volumes are consistent throughout your songs, and lowering the levels of some problem frequencies like noise and hiss. If something is properly mastered, it will sound good in laptop speakers and expensive studio monitors alike. To a guy like me, this was always daunting and intimidating until I actually sat down and attempted to teach myself. Just like with most things in life, it was only intimidating because people who are "in the know" want it to be intimidating. If everyone realized that most mastering technicians are just following a few rules to make all songs sound alike, then those guys would no longer be able to charge a thousand bucks to master an album. Of course there are a lot of people who actually stand out from the rest... people who are very good at it and deserve to get paid for what they do.

Many things in life are like that--shrouded in mystery for no good reason. Photography is no exception; it is made out to be something that's very difficult to do without the aid of your camera's built-in shooting modes. People who know how to take photos without the "assistance" of their camera's auto/priority modes are partly responsible for keeping it shrouded in mystery. I have no problem coming out and saying that taking photos in Full Manual mode is very easy and it can be reduced to three variables: aperture, ISO (film speed), and exposure time. Together, these are commonly referred to as the exposure triangle. And each of those variables all has to do with "brightness" of an image. Unless lighting conditions are absolutely ideal, then you have to make sacrifices to get your pictures looking the way you want. There are certainly other things that separate some photographers from the pack. Style, attention to detail, and lighting are all very important and have nothing to do with your camera or camera settings.

Too much emphasis is placed on the camera that a photographer owns. If you take good pictures, people say "you must have a very nice camera." Photographers do not like this at all--the idea being that the camera is responsible for the pictures and not the person taking them. Imagine eating dinner at someone's house and saying "That was a delicious meal. You must have a very nice oven." Or telling a painter "What a nice painting; you must have very nice brushes." At that point you are transferring the compliment away from the cook/artist and crediting the tools they used to make the meal/painting. A camera is just that: a tool. No camera automatically takes beautiful pictures. If you play the piano very well, people don't say that you were just playing on a nice piano; they are inclined to give the instrumentalist 100% of the credit. People realize that it takes a lot of time, practice, and effort to play an instrument well or make a masterful painting. This emphasis on someone's camera leads to an unnecessary mystique about people's cameras and the way they go about shooting images. It's just like anything else: it takes patience, knowledge, and experience to do it well.

Most people who know how to shoot in Manual mode keep their camera parked on the M. This isn't because you can take better pictures with Manual mode; it's just because it allows you more control and knowledge of the situation. If you don't quite have enough light, then you will quickly find out in Manual mode, whereas using one of your camera's shooting modes will oftentimes give you a false sense that your camera is taking good photos.

Checking back through this blog's archives, I see that Stephen slept through the night from the age of 3 or 4 months, with very few exceptions. Henry is now seven and a half months old, and he never sleeps through the night, with very few exceptions. He completely sucks at sleeping and napping. It's terrible. We sort of knew how spoiled we were with Stephen, but we couldn't really comprehend it because we had never experienced the other side of it for ourselves. Well, now we know what it's like to be the parent of a mortal, less-than-angelic child in regards to sleep. It's terrible. Who wants to wake up every single night for the better part of a year? What's the point of that? When does it stop?

In addition to that, Henry is generally terrible at napping. At Henry's current age, Stephen was sleeping ten hours a night and taking two naps a day totaling 3-5 hours. Henry maybe takes 2 hours of naps in a day. One positive is that I can synchronize Henry with Stephen's once-a-day nap schedule and get some time to myself in the middle of the day (12-2pm maybe). Recently I use this time to make an attempt at napping myself, which is completely wasteful and stupid of me.

Well, football is back, which means I have self-imposed sleep deprivation a couple nights a week. It also means I drink a lot more beer, like a good American. Stupid. I was doing so well, too.

I think I'm going to attempt to not drink any soda--diet or otherwise--for the entirety of 2012. Soda is about as useless as the NFL, so I don't know why this should be hard. I've done well with my 2011 goal, which was to not use any tobacco product of any kind. This included bumming single cigarettes off people or using Steve's snus. I've stuck to it 100%, so it will most likely become permanent. I remember my parents having a conversation with each other when I was younger that New Years resolutions are pointless because one can make positive changes to their lives any day of the year. I have often repeated this cynical notion for most of my life, but I eventually realized that it doesn't really make sense. You can buy your wife a dozen roses any day of the year too, but you do it on Valentine's Day because it is the day that you show your love for someone. There are certain days to do certain things; we can't all do everything on every day. Anything that prompts you to do something beneficial for yourself is, well, a good thing, obviously. I had a couple other ideas of things to do for 2012 but none come to mind at the moment. How about not impregnating my wife? We'll save that for 2013, hopefully. That's a good goal.

Recently I've come to see the importance of abstaining from things. I don't think we should have everything that we want simply because we can. It's important to have rules to live by--things to make us stop and think about the things that we are doing. I made a conscious effort to take six months off from making music in order to get my motivation back. I still have over two months left on that, and I've done somewhat well. I haven't opened Buzz (software) in any of this time. I've done some other things to ensure that I don't get completely out of practice. I used some stretching software to slow some earsauce songs down by a factor of 5-10 times. I took my favorites from that project and am putting together a sort of "aside" album of free music. I should be done with that this weekend.

Anyway, that's enough stream-of-conscious rambling for now. I just figured I needed some text on here to break up the constant barrage of pictures and videos.

Joel Roberts Poinsett. A lifelong American diplomat, secretary of war under Martin Van Buren. While ambassador to Mexico, he brought the first poinsettia back to the United States.

Patrick Hooligan. A notorious hoodlum who lived in London in the mid-1800s. His name became a generic term for "troublemaker."

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. An Austrian novelist. His books reflected his sexual disorder, a craving which was later dubbed masochism.

Charles Mason/Jeremiah Dixon. English surveyors. In the 1760s, they were called in to settle a boundary dispute between two prominent colonial families--the Penns of Pennsylvania and the Calverts of Maryland. A hundred years later, the line they laid out became the North/South border.

Arnold Reuben. A New York deli owner in the 1940s and '50s. He put corned beef, sauerkraut, and Russian dressing on a piece of rye bread and named the whole thing after himself--the Reuben sandwich.

Sir Benjamin Hall. the "chief commissioner of works" for the British government in the 1850s, when the tower clock on the Houses of Parliament got its largest bell. Newspapers of the time dubbed it "Big Ben," after Hall.

Pierre Magnol. A French professor of botany in the 1600s. Gave us the flower name magnolia.

Alessandro Volta A celebrated Italian physicist. His experiments with electricity in the late 1700s led to the invention of the dry-cell battery. The volt was named after him.

Belinda Blurb. A model portrayed on a book jacket by American illustrator Gelett Burgess. She inspired the common term for a publisher's comments on a book cover.

Samuel A. Maverick. Texas cattle baron in the mid-1800s. Had so many unbranded stray calves that they became known as mavericks. Eventually, the term came to include independent-minded people as well. Also Sarah Palin's favorite person.

Franz Anton Mesmer. An Austrian physician who popularized outrageous medical theorieis on animal magnetism in Paris in the 1780s. He mesmerized the public.

Guy Fawkes. English political agitator who tried to blow up Parliament in 1605, but was caught and executed. The British began celebrating November 5 as Guy Fawkes Day, burning effigies of "the old Guy." Since the effigies were dressed in old clothes, the term guy came to mean bum. In America during Colonial times, its meaning was broadened to mean any male.

William Russell Frisbie. American pie maker. Founded the Frisbie Pie Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1871. In the early 1900s, students from Yale--located up the road in New Haven, Connecticut--found they could flip the Frisbie pie tins like flying saucers.

Madam de Pompadour. Mistress of King Louis XV of France in the mid 1700s. Popularized the hairstyle that reappeared, in modified form, on the heads of Elvis and James Dean.

I try not to live my life in fear. Different people would have you be afraid of different things. Nancy Grace wants you to be afraid of anyone who may ever come in contact with your children in any way. Dr. Oz wants you to be afraid of apple juice and energy drinks. Hank Williams Jr. wants you to be afraid of our democratically-elected president. Jenny McCarthy wants you to be afraid of vaccinations. Alex Jones wants you to be afraid of.... well, everything. That list could go on and on, as you well know. Some people literally think that everyone is trying to hack their Wi-Fi network, kidnap their children, and riddle any car with bullets as soon as someone shows disapproval of their driving. That's fine (I suppose), but it's also fine if I choose to ignore those people and live my life.

The problem is that this thinking affects me even if I choose not to buy into it. Being a thirty-something-white-male puts me in the category of "strangers that people avoid." For instance, I can't offer to help a middle school kid carry something heavy into their house. I can't offer to give a couple of women a jump if their car won't start unless there are 30 witnesses present. Women love to say that chivalry is dead, but what has really happened is that any man who offers to help a woman is "creepy" and any man who even speaks to a child he doesn't know is a "pervert." The result is that my only option is to sit by and let people suffer unless the person in need is a man similar to me in both age and stature.

But it's different when dealing with your children. Now I have to try to strike a balance between choosing not to live in fear and being a "bad parent." [If you ever wonder what it takes to be a bad parent, just think of all the things that made someone a good parent 30 years ago.] Even 15-20 years ago, most parents did not know where their kids were for a few hours a day. In the summer, I would get on my bike and I'd be gone. No cell phones. No GPS. No chip implanted in my skull. You can't do that anymore. There is a very specific chain of custody with your children that is arranged with cell phones, background checks, and bodyguards.

Clearly I jest... but to what extent? Bill Burr jokes that "anything they're doing to your dog now, they're going to be doing to you in ten years." This is a reference to the tracking microchip implanted in most dogs. Is too much safety really a bad thing? Is there such a thing as too much safety?

[Without getting too much into politics,] I for one would rather err on the side of freedom than on the side of safety. I don't fear terrorists as much as I fear having my phone tapped by my own government. I value the freedom I had as a child. I could venture deep into the woods across the street from my parents' house, far from the eyes of any authority. And what did I do with this freedom? I caught crayfish in the stream. I cleared out bike trails with a baseball bat and a rake. I climbed up the bank of the river, grabbing on to exposed roots, pretending it was a massive cliff.

This is why I'm looking for a house with a significant amount of land. I want my children to experience some of that freedom that is oh-so-hard to come by these days. I want to be able to send my kids outside to play without it being a death sentence of boredom and drudgery in a fenced-in area the size of a tennis court. Due to a nearly-collapsed housing market, it appears that my wife and I can afford our dream home at the age of thirty. For this we are grateful.

Maybe I'm projecting my desires onto my children. They will probably care little about how I grew up, just as when I was young I cared little about how my parents grew up. But it's worth a shot, and it's hard to have a love of the outdoors when you hardly have any room to breathe.

Life is good, and I have nothing but thanks for this opportunity. [I am, on the other hand, already upset by the rapid-fire emails from the realtor and my wife reading the stats out loud all night of every house within 100 miles.]

Last week was really rough. Henry is suffering from either sickness, teething, growing pains, or all of the above. A few nights he barely slept. Stephen seems to be sick too. For a couple days he couldn't get to sleep very well at all because of his stuffy nose. Lots of baby tylenol and children's benadryl has been administered in this house recently.

It was particularly worrisome because this was the weekend we were supposed to take both of the boys for a night in a hotel in the Baltimore area with my family. It was absurd now much stuff we had to pack for one night in a hotel. Clothes, bathing suits, two playpens, tons of diapers, special swim diapers, pillows, blankets, stuffed animals, medicine, the baby monitor, white noise generator, baby cereal, the pump, some extra milk, and I'm sure I'm forgetting a few things. Everything ended up going very well. We went swimming with both of the boys in an indoor pool. The rooms were very nice and the drive was just over an hour each way from the Youngs' house. The boys slept in our hotel room; Stephen slept from 8pm-6am and Henry slept from 10pm-6am. Between 8-10pm we looked up vacation homes (for 2012) in my parents' hotel room while everyone took turns entertaining an overtired Henry.

We woke up on Sunday morning at 6am, took showers, and packed the car. We had a good complimentary breakfast at the hotel and hung out a little more. Everyone had to leave to board the cruise ship between noon and 1pm, but we left at 11am to head back to the Youngs'. We watched the Redskins put together a[n ugly] win and headed home with the dogs. Henry went to sleep at 7pm which meant he got up at 4:30 this morning. Grr..

We switched Stephen's crib to a day bed and he loves it. He never gets out of the bed until you open his bedroom door, even if he is awake for a while. We kept him caged (cribbed) as long as we could, but he was beginning to escape the crib when I put him in there for a timeout. There would be a huge thud and then he would open his door two seconds later and leave his bedroom, so we figured we had to stop that before he injured himself. I switched the lock around on his door and now I just lock him in his room for a few minutes for a timeout. It's not a real timeout but it sure does improve his mood!

Stephen loves to take pictures. We don't let him use my camera yet (not for another ten years hehe), but he loves to use Jaime's and he understands how it works. He even calls your name before he takes the picture to get you to look at the camera. If you disable the flash, it can entertain him for a long time in a restaurant to take 45 pictures of everyone at the table.

I know I keep saying this, but Henry is about three seconds from crawling. He can sit up in the high chair now and he eats a pretty good-sized dinner most nights. He's tried carrots, applesauce, peas, and rice crackers.

Henry went to his six month wellness exam today. He is now off the charts in height and at the 95th percentile for weight. He is catching up to his brother in height and weight (and his brother is 22 months older than him). After we finish this case of diapers, we are just going to move him up to the size of diapers Stephen is wearing. So we'll have a 7 month old and a 30 month old wearing the same size of diapers.

Age: 6 months, 2 weeks
Length: 29 inches
Weight: 20lbs, 13oz
Head Circum: 17 inches

Related charts, graphs, etc.

Stephen's six-month checkup stats.

• The first "permanent photograph" was taken in 1826 by a French Inventor named Nicéphore Niépce, but Thomas Wedgwood took photographs in 1802--possibly sooner.
• The first issue of Rolling Stone had a cover date of November 9, 1967 and featured a cover photo of John Lennon.
• A termite colony can only live as long as its queen. The queen can live up to 30 years and lay more than 2,000 eggs a day during her peak.
• The first prototype of the zipper went public at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.
• If an Orangutan belches directly at you, it's a warning to stay out of its territory.
• The world record pumpkin was grown in 2010. It weighed 1,810.5 lbs.
• When Elvis Presley died, his estate was worth $10mil. Today it is valued over $250mil with annual revenues of $45mil.
• Some species of tarantula can go 2.5 years without food.
• "Wheel of Fortune" earns over $100mil most years.
• Pirates (and other seafaring men of old) wore earrings made of precious metals because they believed that it enhanced their vision. This is now thought to be a "poor man's acupuncture" brought to the West via oriental trade routes.
• The first contact lens was glass-blown by F.E. Muller in 1887. Contact lenses remained glass-blown until the 1930's when Plexiglas was invented.
• The first flight attendants were on United Airlines in 1930. Being a registered nurse was a strict requirement for the job.
• According to the FDA, the average American eats 1,500 lbs. of food per year.
• Newborn Kangaroo Joeys are as big as a jellybean.
• The flu was described by Hippocrates in 412 B.C.

You just have to love a six-month-old. Henry is a real champ. We never need his car seat anymore (except in the car, of course). We can plop him right in the stroller and he loves it. He looks around until he inevitably falls asleep, at which point we recline the stroller. That massive double stroller is very nicely designed, and it doesn't weigh so much without the car seat in it.

We went to Sweetwater on Sunday night with Jaime's parents, and Stephen literally ate until he puked.... at the table. He had a good amount of lobster bisque, a lot of spinach & artichoke dip, and of course, more french fries than he could handle. The puking at the table thing was pretty unfortunate, but my wife's fast action stopped it from being a complete disaster. He was embarrassed and afraid that it would happen again, but everything ended up being fine.

Yesterday I took both of the boys and both of the dogs on a regular-length walk (30mins) by myself at 5pm. Stephen walked for the last half by himself. I've taken everyone for plenty of walks by myself, and Stephen has walked the last half by himself plenty of times, but we've never combined the two. I was a bit nervous to let him free without Jaime around, but of course he was just fine. He runs ahead a little and waits to cross the street. He started sniffing the grass a lot yesterday and saying "dog." He thinks he's pretty funny.

Stephen has his letters down pat. He definitely knows them all, though he can't say a handful of them (anything with the 'ck' sound is out, as are H, C, W, and S). Everywhere we go, he reads the letters off of street signs, menus, pretty much anything that has letters.

Okay, I can finally put all this talk of my band's album to rest, and for that I am sure you are all thankful. For well over a year now, I've been incessantly mentioning "the album" and all the work that's going into it at every different stage. Well, now we've taken it as far as we can. The CD itself (hard copy) is for sale many places online and it can be special-ordered in over 2,500 real (as in "brick-and-mortar") record stores. The .MP3 digital download version can be purchased at iTunes, CD Baby, Amazon MP3, Bandcamp, and pretty much anywhere that legally sells music online. It has also been added to most of the streaming music sites (Napster, Rhapsody) as part of their database.

A lot of these .MP3 vendors set their own prices, and not surprisingly, iTunes is the most expensive at ten dollars. The only places that we had direct input in setting up the sales are Bandcamp and CD Baby, and those are each $6 to download the album. If someone downloads the album, we make about five bucks, but if someone buys a CD for almost twice as much, we make a dollar. That's kind of a shame.

If you just want to listen to the album for free without downloading it, that's fine too. It's still available for free listening at Bandcamp. Additionally, if you would like a physical CD (hard copy) for less than $10, just get in touch with me about making a deal. I have a stock of these in my basement, and my cost was much less than $10.

Typically there are at least a hundred people involved in making a record, and we did everything with just the two of us. We wrote, recorded, and produced all the songs. We commissioned the artwork. We made the website. We ordered and stocked the CDs. We set up every detail of the online sales. Thanks to everyone who helped us along the way: this includes people who bought the first incarnation of the album a couple years back, people who contributed artwork for very little pay, and everyone who has given us encouraging words about our music for the past five years. The money we made from selling the first version of the album (released under the title "innovation avenue" and featuring many different songs/mixes than this one) went entirely towards the making/ordering of these CDs and setting up the online sales. We are now broke, but with feelings of accomplishment and satisfaction. Thanks again, everyone.

ps--Another good way to help us is to leave a review on iTunes!

It's already been over a week since I posted. Where did that time go? My brother was here for three and a half days. Other than that, I've just been hanging out watching tennis. Henry is horrible at napping. Nap time is when I usually have some time to work on my site.

Henry is six months old today. This is the milestone I've been waiting for. And right on schedule, he's been a lot of fun for the past week and a half. He smiles and laughs at absolutely everything. If you hold his hands, he can stand on his own power for a long time, maybe five minutes. He doesn't seem to have any interest in crawling though. Fine by me.

We just got a call that we can't take Henry to the doctor this Friday because our doctor is out on an emergency. Fortunately we already know that he's a big, healthy boy.

August 26, 2011