Please visit my new website at www.michaelmuramoto.com

Although my old website worked well it didn’t let me show large images very well. The solution was to go back to the drawing board and find one that did. My new website now let’s me show images that better fit the newer larger screens. I really like the new presentation that it gives my art and my business.

It is a work in progress (as I’m still adding images to it), but if you have a chance, take a look at the new design. It is best viewed full screen, but the “show in this window” option still works well. Watch my blog on February 24, for a special offer to booking 2009 wedding couples. I hope you enjoy the site, and I look forward to sharing my art with my future wedding clients.

ShareThis Logo - share away!

I sometimes wonder how many people actually read my postings here on the blog and do they ever send an email to a friend to say, “hey, I saw this online and thought you might want to see it…”  Well, another photographer friend, Seshu, sent me a suggestion to check out a WordPress plugin called, ShareThis. It is a great add on that allows people to link your posting to their social networking sites.

At first I was thinking of adding a button to allow people to share my posts on their Twitter page. Of course, there are so many social networking sites out there (for example, Facebook) that not including them would shortchange those users. Fortunately, ShareThis allows you to connect to most of the major social networking sites all through the use of one user interfaced button. How awesome is that?

The way it works is that the user clicks on the rotating icon for the “ShareThis” button (seen at the bottom of each posting.) After doing so, a small window will open and it will include many different social networking sites with checkboxes. The reader selects which one they want to use and then follow the onscreen instructions to share the posting on their personal social networking sites. There is also an option to simply email the post to another user. Cool, eh? I’m hoping that my readers will feel free to leave comments and to share my postings with those who may be interested in them. So my request is to comment and to share away!

Me on PocketWizard

OK, maybe it’s not LOVE, but they seem to like my photos =). I get the honor of having one of my images showcased on PocketWizard’s website. As a photographer, the use of PocketWizards has really enhanced my style and allows me to get images that I wouldn’t normally be able to get. This image was shot with one off-camera flash and one on-board flash. I used PocketWizards to trigger the external flash. The benefit here is that you get subject separation from the background. Without using an external flash, you will have a “flatness” factor in the image. Using an external flash creates a three-dimensional effect that you can see by creating visible texture in the bride’s hair (hi Jamie and Marcus!) and variance in skin lighting. This off-camera light effect offers depth to the image which makes it more pleasant to view.

When shooting wedding photographs, I try to use off-camera flash when it I can, typically during the reception as the lighting there can be kept uniform, meaning that the flash is the main source of light so I can control its effect on the image. Keep an eye out here for more off-camera flash images and tips in the future. Thanks again to PocketWizard for a great product and for using my image.

My old ISP can't find my lab

Yes, I did think about the above title for a couple of minutes before I finally typed it in. Really, it does make sense. I used to use an internet service provider with a company near where I live. For the most part, it was fine. The service only went down a few times in the 1.5 years that I used it. The downloads went fine, although uploads were slow. Even though I wasn’t planning on changing, the whole system went wack a few weeks ago, and I couldn’t connect to many URLs – one being the lab that I use for my custom prints – not good.

After trying for a few weeks to get the problem resolved with no resolution, and no promise of a future solution (this in my mind is crazy – who would stay with no solution in sight?) I decided I needed to look elsewhere.  So, since my brother works for Comcast, I thought it would make sense to try them out. They have a high-speed internet connection and of course cable HDTV.

Now, let me make it clear, I have a very good understanding about network speed and reliability. Reliability is paramount, and speed a close second. My wife on the otherhand, doesn’t really care about the specs, she just knows that when the internet goes down, there’s no Word Scramble to play on Facebook. Ha! Well, she wasn’t happy when our internet went down, and said, “make the switch, and let me know when it’s back up.” So, with the help of my brother, Comcast was slated to be installed along with their expanded cable tv setup.

As soon as Comcast was installed, I wanted to see what the improvements would be regarding speed. WOW. I have to say that the difference was incredible. Here is a sample of the speed test I ran after it was installed:

WOW! That's fast.

This is a huge improvement over my previous ISP, and you can really feel it when you see web pages load faster and see the file size indicators running up so much more quickly. This is great once you connect to the site, but why does it take so long to connect? Hmmm…I’ve dealt with this before a few years ago, but not recently. Can it be that the Domain Name Servers (DNS) are not working well? Are the Comcast DNS servers being too heavily used, or not running on the latest and greatest equipment (of course I do not know, but I felt that it was reasonable to consider this)? Aha! This may be the culprit.

The DNS exists like an internet “yellow pages” so that you can type in yahoo.com or google.com in your browser, and then be directed to their websites without having to know that the real Internet Protocol address is 68.180.206.184 (yahoo.com) or 74.125.19.99 (google.com) This of course makes our lives so much easier and essentially makes the web functional to use. When the DNS servers are not built on a strong or robust system, it takes them a while to figure out that google.com is 68.180.206.184 and hence, “slows down” your internet connection since you have to suffer through this latency.

Just like the yellow-pages, there are other ways to get the number you need from alternate places. The solution, use a high-speed DNS server. In my case, I used another DNS server instead. The difference – amazing. Now, my high-speed internet connection was really that, high-speed.

If you feel that your DNS servers are slow, try out another one. There are many DNS servers that you can try. One of the local businesses here in San Francisco is called OpenDNS who service this problem directly. I have used them in the past and they do deliver on their promise to give you a robust, high-speed DNS server. For home use, their service is free. They also have a diagram on how to setup your home router to use their service.

I gave this recommendation to another photographer friend, and he said that the difference was incredible and felt bad that he’d been using the slow DNS servers up to this point. If you have a slow, high-speed internet service, try it out and let me know what you think.