macdiggs.com

I'm really getting into photography lately, and finally got myself another accessory, which many people consider one of a must-have things - an external flash.

The one I got is Canon Speedlite 430EX II, and I have also got an Off-camera Shoe Cord (OC-3E) for situations when having flash mounted on top of the camera is not very good (think outside photos where you don't have any walls to bounce off, and still want to have some non-flat-looking images).

So that's how flash module looks mounted on the camera. The camera suddenly became pretty heavy :) But yeah, that's the price you have to pay.. Near the camera is the off-camera shoe cord.

Having knowing near nothing about flashes, how they work and how once is supposed to shoot with them, I found a very good article describing how speedlites actually work. You should definitely give it a try at this link.

And as it was said in one of flash training videos I have (one from Blue Crane studio - google it up) - I moved out to make my first set batteries go dead over some flash testing. I share some of my findings below. So even if you don't have an external flash, these images will probably help you in making decision of wether you should get one :)

External flashes are basically your portable suns, you can point them at target directly, you can make the light bounce of walls and ceilings, you can fight with very bright backgrounds and still take great photos with shallow depth of field, by using hi-speed sync, and much more! I go into bouncing and hi-speed think with this blog entry. So let have a look at sample photos, with some short comments where applicable.

(more…)

I've been working rather alot with ActionScript lately (both my main job, and also some side projects), learning ins and outs of ActionScript 3, which is great, but differs a great deal from ActionScript 2.. Still alot of ground to cover in order to get fluent with all the quirks (or, may be, features) of the language.

One problem I faced was that I had a need to mute and un-mute a video played inside the FLVPlayback container, programmatically from ActionScript 3.0.

I spent like may be half an hour searching for answers on google and in Flash debugger (man.. will they ever add variables watch there?..). Anyways, the solution to mute and unmute is pretty straightforward. You just have to send the FLVPLayback's mute button a mouse click event. No need to juggle with setting volume to zero and stuff like that..

I also keep the state of mute/unmute in a variable (it was faster to do it this way, rather than research one more topic ;). So here's how you mute (in case your FLVPlayback instance is called flvbox):

Define isMuted var somewhere in the code:

var isMuted:Boolean = false;

And now the real thing:

if (!isMuted) {
MovieClip(flvbox.muteButton).on_mc.dispatchEvent(new MouseEvent(MouseEvent.CLICK));
isMuted = true;
}

and here's how you unmute:

if (isMuted) {
MovieClip(flvbox.muteButton).off_mc.dispatchEvent(new MouseEvent(MouseEvent.CLICK));
isMuted = false;
}

That's it! I guess one can get status of a video being on mute or not, but I'll leave it to you :)

PS: You can have a look at this code in action (well.. sorta..) at one of our company's homepages (the middle-top video thingy): http://www.mj-dvd.jp (warning! Japanese content :)