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Category: Tech Diary

August 25, 2024

Consider Adding in Blur when Editing your Photos

Where once you could only find your background blur when you snapped a photo, now you have the luxury to create and position it later when you edit the image. I did that with this photo I took in New Orleans.

Unwanted blur in my photography was always my kryptonite. Getting a clean freeze of any motion drove my creative process. Finding background blur (what the pros call ‘bokeh’) was always a ‘nice to have’ upgrade.

But when Apple added ‘portrait photo’ mode to its iPhone cameras, that commoditized bokeh to the point where anyone could easily create background blur. It’s a nifty software trick that generates a narrower focus point on just the subject in your photo’s foreground.

And this type of software muscle can help you control the focus point in your photos even further. In fact, it gives you an amazing amount of creative control after you’ve snapped your photos.

It’s also a tool for me to fix or hide a problem in plain sight within a photo. Here are a few examples.

Blur Out the Background

My family and I were taking a walk at Calf Pasture Beach in Norwalk recently, and we passed by this tandem bicycle. Something about it appealed to me. So, I pulled out my iPhone and got the shot. It wasn’t in portrait mode. So, my iPhone couldn’t quickly blur out all the people in the background. But it was easy to do that in post using Adobe Lightroom.

Blur Out the Foreground

I didn’t like the person swimming in the foreground of this shot, because I want the viewer to focus on all the people fishing on the jetty. So, I simply adjusted the focus towards the background.

Blur Out an Unwanted Element in the Middle

I snapped this shot while on vacation near Orient, NY. I found the two turkeys crossing the road right in front of a car. (Silly turkeys!) I love the moment, but I didn’t like the license plate detail being so prominent. Sure, there are ways to mask it, but the plate would never look totally natural. Here, I avoided the problem entirely by simply narrowing the photo’s focus point and blurring the entire car.

Direct your Viewer’s Attention

If you’re not just trying to fix a problem, you can be free to get creative and add in some blur to help define what’s most important in the shot.

I liked adding blur to the background of this shot to help you focus more on this tiny rowboat heading out into the enormous ocean.

How to Adjust the Focus Point in your Photos
I add in my photo blur using Adobe Lightroom’s appropriately named ‘Lens Blur’ feature. I prefer using the ‘Cat Eye’ Bokeh setting. Then, you simply use the ‘Focus Range’ slider to adjust. (Note: You don’t have to be working with a ‘portrait’ photo.)

You can also adjust the focus point of an iPhone’s portrait photo. In the Photos app, go into edit mode. Then, simply tap on the subject you want to focus on. (Note: You don’t get the same kind of control as Adobe Lightroom offers.)

Use Blur to Give your Photos more Clarity
Don’t fear the blur. Use it!

Whether you want to add more creative flair to your photography or minimize an annoying element, generating some targeted blur can be just the solution you need.

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August 18, 2024

Don’t Miss this Important Part of an Effective Work Email

How well you write an email is only half the equation. If you rush it, you may miss this path to success.

The commute-to-work model is a shattered construct. Many of us corporate folks now stay home and remotely dance to our own beat with more flexible schedules. With remote work, the workday can be redesigned into countless versions of our 24 x 7 existence.

That’s flexibility. That’s freedom. That’s evolution!

Are You Awake?
But your unique schedule can fall outside of normal business hours and may not always align with your colleagues. If you need to communicate, what are you supposed to do?

You’re certainly not going to call them and wake them up. (And who makes phone calls anymore?)

We all know the standard solution is an email. When your recipients are back online, they’ll read it then. What’s the problem?

The Road to a ‘Perfect’ Connection
Once upon a time, our species chained itself to clunky desktop computers in the office. If you walked away, you were disconnected from the collective. Then, laptops showed up, and suddenly you could be connected from different locations. Eventually, work email made it to mobile devices, and you were entirely free to work from anywhere there was a cell signal.

Staying connected couldn’t be easier.

I often like to refer to the evil Borg characters on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” They had bad skin, and they weren’t friendly. But their hive-mind collective kept them constantly updated and in-the-know. It was the ultimate connection. Nobody was left out, and everyone was on the same page.

It was the perfect workplace utopia. And of course, the ultimate nightmare for the human race.

Are We Ever Entirely Offline?
I must admit… in another universe, there’s a version of me who is Borg. That’s because I often feel the pull of what I call the ‘email siren song.’

  • Do I have my work email on my iPhone? Of course.
  • Will my emails also show up on my Apple Watch? Yup.
  • If I’m wearing my AirPods, does Siri whisper my updates to me? Uh huh.

Maybe I’m already partially Borg. My technological enhancements are simply more elegant (courtesy of Apple).

I know I’m not unique. There are many who are also Borg-leaning… always connected… quick to respond to an email no matter where or when they are.

Happily, there are still plenty of humans playing by more reasonable rules set by our circadian rhythms. These ‘rebels’ in our ever-increasing ‘Matrix’ society are savvy, and they do just fine setting reasonable limits. (It’s working smarter… not harder… right?)

Email Siren Song
Don’t worry. I’m not truly Borg. And I don’t aspire to be a controlling alpha Borg queen. (I don’t typically communicate with my collective after normal business hours.)

And though I’m aware of inbound communications (unless I’m sleeping) I usually won’t respond. Unless there’s a fire raging, I don’t reach out.

But yes, I still listen to the email siren song.

Disclaimers may not Matter
Sometimes, I see an email late at night. At the bottom, there’s a disclaimer that admits the sender is working outside of normal business hours and doesn’t expect others to respond until the sun has risen.

But it’s too late. I’ve read the email. And if there are multiple recipients, the discussion may then start to move forward, regardless of the sender’s disclaimer.

Navigating these complexities can be hard. There are no easy answers. But here’s a great way to minimize the problem:

Schedule your After-Hours Emails to Deliver the Next Day
If you need to catch up on email at night, do the work, but delay when your email goes out.

If it’s not urgent, I recommend you simply hit that ‘delay’ email tab and schedule your emails to ‘send’ the next business morning.

I highly recommend it.

Put your Smartphone to Sleep!
Unfortunately, not everyone follows this best practice. So, you may need to protect yourself from overnight emails while you’re snoring. And to do that, schedule your phone to go to sleep along with you.

Even if your phone is set to silent mode, its ‘buzzing’ can wake you up in the middle of the night.

That’s happened to me on more than a few occasions. I finally went into my iPhone’s settings to really shut it down while I was getting some shut-eye.

Your Emails are Ambassadors
Every touch point in your life contributes to who you are and how you are seen. It’s part of your personal brand.

You should consider that each email you send is an ambassador that represents you and your brand.

How well you write your emails is certainly important, but when they show up can have an even greater impact… and not always in a good way.

Often, successful communication is about timing. Always ask yourself this question: “When will your email be most effective?”

So be mindful to the when.

Don’t rush it.

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August 11, 2024

Our Computers aren’t Built to Handle so Many Videos and Photos

It’s really simple to create media with our smartphones, and we’ve all become home filmmakers. But it’s becoming increasingly hard to store all the media files. If you’re not worried that you’ll eventually run out of SSD storage space in your Mac, think again. Here’s what you can do about it. (And it won’t take up a lot of desk space.)

A year back, I upgraded from my older 4TB iMac to my new 2TB Mac Studio. My decision to go with only 50% of the internal storage was based on Apple’s more expensive internal SSD drive pricing. (My old iMac had a larger, but slower, spinning hard drive, which is no longer part of the line up.)

I always thought that Apple would forever offer increased internal storage without charging more. (Aren’t we all needing more storage as we document our lives with photos and videos?)

But once Apple moved from HDD spinning drives to next-generation SSD drives, that equation imploded.

  • An Apple Studio with a 4TB SSD costs $1,200 more!
  • You can’t even buy an iMac today with more than 2TB of storage. And that will set you back $600-$800.

Something’s very wrong. We’ve got less to work with and paying more for it.

Still, pricing aside, I successfully deluded myself that didn’t actually need 4TB. (Ha!)

Better Digital Housekeeping?
Sure, I had filled up my old iMac’s 4TB drive, but I told myself that maintaining and transferring all that content from computer to computer was unreasonable. I didn’t need all of it within my internal drive. instead, I would offload much of it to external drives and my G-Technology RAID for long-term storage.

I brainwashed myself that the new 2TB SSD in my Mac Studio should be more than enough once I performed some long-overdue digital housekeeping.

That was just wishful thinking.

Face the Inevitable
Sure, I’ve done some media management, but my goal of a 50% reduction was unobtainable. Within a year, my 2TB internal drive was bursting at the seams. (And we all know that Macs aren’t built to allow you to later upgrade internal storage.)

And Apple hasn’t helped any by continuing to improve its iPhone’s capabilities to generate RAW photos and advanced video codecs (including ProRes files). All this means larger media files.

We’re all filmmakers now with the critical need to house our content libraries somewhere. What did they think was going to happen when we moved these huge files over to our Macs?

iCloud Storage?
Sure, I could export terabytes of my media into Apple’s iCloud ecosystem. But come on… that’s not really a good value proposition.

  • 2TB costs $9.99/month
  • 6TB is $29.99/month

Let’s do the math:
I would have to go with the 6TB plan, which comes out to $360/year. While that is surprisingly competitive with external hard drive pricing, across multiple years… it gets too expensive.

Certainly, $360 x multiple years is more than the one-time cost of buying a companion external drive. I know physical drives won’t last forever, and you’re supposed to upgrade them every few years. So perhaps a future iCloud storage plan could be a reasonable solution… if the pricing comes down.

SSD Drives
But what is today’s answer when your internal drive gets filled up?

Well, that’s simple: You’ve got to buy an external drive and plug it in. (I know I didn’t have to tell you that.)

The real question is what kind of drive?

To match the speed of your internal drive, you’ll want to buy a similar technology. If you’ve got an internal SSD, you should look at getting an external SSD.

So, that’s what I did.

Video Editing
Another question is what you want to do with the drive.

My most demanding task is editing my family videos and personal creative projects, which are all shot in 4K. Many of my video files are generated by my iPhone 15 Pro Max.

Plus, I’ve got:

So, perhaps my video editing needs are more advanced than the average user.

4TB OWC Express 1M2 SSD
All this said, I decided to go with a fast NVMe M.2 SSD. And I wanted to take advantage of the Thunderbolt 4 interface my Mac Studio offers. While there are many Thunderbolt 3 drives on the market, only OWC appears to offer a USB4 drive (same as Thunderbolt 4).

Now, some of you will immediately question my need for such a fast drive, and others will point out that thunderbolt 3 drives are fast enough for my media workflow. I know.

But this is a dizzying choice. So, I figured it’s best to go with a little more oomph than not enough.

So, I landed on the bus-powered 4TB OWC Express 1M2 SSD. (It’s an enclosure with the 4TB NVMe prepopulated.)
This Express 1M2 is blazing-fast, boasting 3200MB/s. It gets positive reviews, it’s compact and so far… it’s working great for me.

The Price for Performance and Peace of Mind
No, it’s not exactly cheap. (Remember, SSD technology is pricy.)

Yes, I could have saved more and bought a less expensive NVMe separately and popped it in an empty OWC 1M2 enclosure. But… I’m a baby.

Really, I just want this thing to work out of the box. Sure, plenty of you may chide me for being so ‘tech-timid.’ But hey… I’m not ‘Mr. At Home with IT.’ I know my limits. I’m not building my drives. I’ll buy them pre-built, thank you very much.

I just want some peace of mind. (Sure, I back up my files, but that’s also a complex equation.)

So, yes, I’m willing to pay a little more.

Build a Big Enough Home for your Files
Let’s review:

  • I bought a new Mac that had 50% of the internal storage of my old Mac
  • I inevitably ran out of space
  • A year later, I spent more money to buy a companion OWC drive for my Mac
  • I plugged it into my Mac Studio via a Thunderbolt 4 port, and I’m back in business

Yes, my story has a happy ending, but I’m not that happy.

Sure, maybe I have more media storage needs than the average bear, but not by that much.

I think today’s new computers simply need more internal storage. The fact that Apple sells its base-level computers with only a 256GB SSD is absolutely silly. (I could choose a stronger word.)

The lesson here is over the years, you’re going to need a bigger hard drive for your computer. And you’re going to pay for it one way or another.

So, plan for the future.

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