Check out the video below or click this link to view the higher resolution version: 

Have an idea that you don't see here? Let the rest of the class know down in the comments!

1) DO use a metal thread for the tripod mount, have it well supported the the frame of the camera. Kodak! Seriously, if I try to attach one of your cameras onto a tripod, the threads are going to strip. I also had a camera that had the tripod threading mount pop out of the camera because it wasn't properly attached to the frame, this is just ridiculous.

2) DO give the camera to your grandmother and see if she can use it before you finalize the UI...this is directed at you Nikon/Fuji/Olympus...your UI's really suck. Why have a "Menu" "Home" and "*" buttons? What should be under "Home" what should be under "Menu"? There should be a "Menu" that has a easy to understand sub-structure, like "System Settings" for clock, formatting, sounds, ect. and a separate area for mode specific settings.

3) DO give consumers what they need, not what they say they want. Did you give your kid the cookie because it asked or did you give it vegetables to eat? When a consumer says "smaller with more zoom", give it more zoom, but make sure you don't sacrifice image quality for it...Nikon/Olympus, do you hear me? A wafer thin camera cannot physically have a good sized senor and lens with 5-10X optical zoom without sacrificing too much image quality...therefore those cameras should not be produced. You may sell some, but no one that buys one of them will buy a camera made by your brand ever again! (and definitely won't recommend your brand to their friends and family!)

4) DO test to make sure your auto-white balance actually can figure out the difference between daylight and tungsten. Ask Canon for help if you can't figure it out.

5) DO leave digital zoom turned off by default. It's confusing to people. If they need more zoom, tell them to buy one of your more expensive models. Doesn't that sound good to you?

6) DO include GPS. This is a very cool feature that will eventually be standard in all brands. It does drain battery life though, so have it off by default and easily switched on by the user. Please don't make this crippled GPS like what Eye-Fi offers, which requires a WiFi hotspot to know where it is.

7) DO use brushed metal, and/or semi-gloss plastics for the outer shell of the camera. Glossy metal and plastic shows way too many finger prints and looks bad. Glass screens also are easier to clean than plastic screens. Plastics just make it possible for fingerprints to be visible half a mile away.

8) DO offer models that vary in color. If you must offer non-standard colors, don't pick "puke yellow" or "nuclear waste green", show it to 10 random people on the street and if even 1 thinks it looks bad, don't use that color.

9) DO remember that underwater cameras need to give good images out of the water too, that means don't put in folded optics, even if it makes it a little thicker. If you're trying to take pictures underwater, a bigger camera means you don't lose grip and have it sink to the bottom.

10) DO make sure when the average Joe holds your camera they don't cover the lens or the flash with their fingers, if even 2 out of 10 people do...it's back to the drawing board.

1) DON'T keep adding megapixels, the high ISO noise is out of control, compact cameras take worse images now than they did 3-4 years ago. Find something new to get consumers believing is the "Holy Grail" of image quality...like maybe a good lens?

2) DON'T add 20-30 "scene modes" to the camera for marketing purposes. Just make the image quality good and the UI easy to use, and salepeople will sell it for you. No one uses the scene modes...at least not on purpose. If your hunk of plastic has 30 scene modes and the other model has 15...your's is just more unnecessarily cluttered with useless buttons, knobs or menu options.

3) DON'T bother with exposure compensation buttons on $100-200 cameras. Exposure compensation is very useful...but consumers don't know how to use it and Casio...you shouldn't need to use exposure compensation at -.07EV just to get a properly exposed picture. Ask 10 people at Starbucks what exposure compensation is, and they'll tell you it has something to do with celebrities and the tabloids...

4) DO build cameras with better lenses. A faster lens is better than having "6400 ISO"...it might cost a little more but customers won't hate the camera they just bought when they're taking photos of their kid's birthday party. Even with a sensor 6X the square area of the average compact camera, ISO 6400 is a realm still avoided at all costs with pro-DSLRs!

5) DON'T use USB based charging systems! If you're going to have a rechargeable battery, make sure it's an external charger and doesn't use a AC cable, just have the charger plug right into the outlet. Even if consumers say they want to charge the camera directly from the wall...they're wrong. It causes cameras to short out if there is a power surge and they can't charge a battery while they're using their camera to take photos. If they say they want to charge it through their computer...they're wrong! People will loose their USB cable within days, leaving them with no way to charge their camera. A block the size of the camera that holds their battery to charge it will not get lost for months or years! 

6) DON'T make proprietary accessories if you can avoid it. If you must use proprietary cables for cheaper licensing or just after-the sale revenue, make it easy for consumers to find the cables for purchase on your site.

7) DON'T advertise a brand name lens like Schneider or Carl Zeiss if they're not actually manufacturing the lens for you and simply designed it for you or if you're just licensing the name, that's being disingenuous to the end user who thinks that the name Carl Zeiss means something, when the lens is manufactured in Tawain by another OEM. I'm not saying that the lens is bad, just that BMW doesn't buy Hyundai's and slap the BMW logo on it and say they make it.

8) DON'T include a large detailed manual. A quick-start guide is sufficient and an interactive computer based guide will help consumers a lot more than a 300 page book they'll never read.

9) DON'T use touch screens unless you have buttons as well. They're small cameras that are easy to drop, a consumer shouldn't have to use one of their hands to tap the screen. If you must put a touch screen in, make sure the grip is big enough so the user doesn't knock it out of their hand. Sony? Nikon? Bueller?

10) DON'T falsely advertise resolutions. If you're going to advertise HD video. Have it record HD video, not up-rezed SD wide screen. Don't interpolate 12 megapixels from an 8MP sensor. This goes to not only every camcorder manufacturer, but all the brands that advertise on QVC and the shopping channel selling "14 megapixel" cameras for $79.99.

Think of something I missed or disagree? Let the rest of the class know in the comments!

The circular polarizer on the bottom allows your autofocus camera to still autofocus and meter somewhat accurately because a circular polarizer is made of two layers, the top which polarizes the light and then the bottom layer that scatters the light a bit to allow your phase detection autofocus sensor to work properly.

I ordered myself a linear polarizer and gave it a good field test and it works great with one little caveat. If you stop the light down all the way as far as you can with this setup, there is a significant color shift to the blue spectrum. This effect is only seen if stopped down to 8 or 9 stops, which is rarely needed. I told a friend of mine about this issue and he's trying to come up with a solution that eliminates this color shift, but until then give it a go if you need to do some long exposures.

Here's some of my favorites from the two times I went down to Great Falls National Park this week. Most of these exposures were between 6 and 15 seconds long, which is what causes the normally rough looking water to look so creamy and smooth. None of these images have touched Photoshop, just some basic curves and white balance adjustment in Lightroom. If you want to do this yourself and already have a nice circular polarizer, all you'll need is a cheap linear polarizer and you're good to go!

The full rez gallery and other photos are at www.noahhayes.net/greatfalls

This shows you how rough this water looked without the long exposures! This was without the Variable ND filter. These guys kept climbing up the hill and riding the rapids down. Maybe I should get an underwater enclosure for my D3 and try it sometime?

Also we stumbled upon a little snake that was nice enough (or scared enough) to actually let me swap out my telephoto for a 105 VR Macro to get up close and personal (about 5 inches away from the front of my lens!)

The Variable ND array of B+W (my favorite) filters. Taken with iPhone 3GS

Little off camera flash for an environmental portrait of a new photog

This is a 15 second exposure, to make most of the crowd "disappear"

News Crew reporting on the Holocaust Museum shootings that day

Unfortunately the day we went was the day the shooting happened in the Holocaust Museum

Unfortunately all I had on me to take set-up shots with was my iPhone...not exactly the best quality at 10PM with little to no good light! As you can see, I was using three speedlites: two SB800 flashes and one SB900. Two were triggered using Pocketwizards and the other triggered by SU-4 mode on the SB800. All the flashes had different powers of CTO (Color Temperature Orange) gels and the camera was set on Tungsten white balance. This gives a nice gradient of different shades of normal to cool tones, which work well for glossy metal.

When taking pictures on shiny metal objects (like cars and bikes) make sure to place your flash where you won't get a direct reflection...except maybe on chrome accents

I've been a pure Mac user for 3 years. I haven't owned a PC since I made the switch, deciding to jump in head first, buying two Mac's over a 6th month period. Every PC I've ever owned was built by me, with parts I selected, and I'm somewhat of a picky guy when it comes to technology. The reason I bring this up, is for the first time in my life I've bought a pre-built PC! I just picked up a HP Mini 1000 netbook, and I can assure you that even though it came preloaded with Windows XP, I knew before I even swiped my credit card, that I had absolutely no interest in using a 8-year old operating system on such a nice little peice of hardware. My plans are to install OS X on this Mini sometime in the course of the next two weeks, however I decided since this is my first new PC in almost half a decade that I should get my feet wet again with Windows. Now just because it has been a long long time since I've used a PC at home or for photo/video work, doesn't mean I've let myself get rusty, I use Windows XP and Windows Vista every day. Vista is great now that Service Pack One was released a few months back, but I use it enough that it wouldn't be all that interesting to me to use at home and on the go.

So what is a guy to do that wants to play around with Windows again, but doesn't want to use XP or Vista? They install Windows 7 Ultimate! For the 98.9% of the world who is not familiar with Windows 7, it is the upcoming operating system from Microsoft that will be replacing Vista as early as this upcoming Fall. I was able to get a beta copy of the OS, and had heard good things from some other people I know who had played around for a while with it, and wanted to give it a whirl. Even though the OS is a beta (meaning the 2nd stage of testing) right now, and it will be months or even a whole year before it is actually launched as YOUR new operating system, it is amazingly stable.

This netbook I picked up is running a low power processor that is the equivilant of a dual-core Intel processor from 2-3 years ago and once I upgraded the RAM to 2GB (up from 1GB), this little ultraportable is absolutely flying through all the tasks I expect to use it for (including typing up this blog post)! This is even more impressive to me because the version of Windows 7 I'm running is the Ultimate version, which is in Vista is a version that would usually slow a device like this to a crawl. On a brand new machine running Vista Ultimate, your computer might be using close to 1GB of memory when it is idling, which is fine these days since most new machines will have 3-8GB depending on the system. Right now my new little toy is running two active windows and it is only using 670MB!!! This isn't yet to the efficiency of resources in OSX (Apple's operating system), but it's really impressive. Microsoft could probably launch Windows 7 next week and it would have fewer issues than Vista did at launch. I'll keep you all updated if something drastic changes in stability or speed, but I will be removing Windows 7 sometime next week or the week following.

My end use for this little netbook will be for several purposes:

1) Use to download photos to as an additional form of backup on-site

2) Carry with me far more frequently than my Macbook Pro in order to 'take care of business' wherever I need to

3) Use as a portable blogging machine...maybe it will allow me to keep updating on a more regular basis

4) Sratch an itch I had about hacking PC hardware to run OSX!

So why not just take my Macbook Pro (a much more powerful machine)?:

1) I need to write a whole post about back-up...it's a huge passion of mine. The HP Mini 1000 I have uses a SSD (solid state drive) which means it is essentially a big memory card, which means that it is not succesptible to loss of data caused by vibration, which means if I drop this netbook, the hard-drive doesn't shatter and nothing is lost (except maybe I have to buy a new screen). This is a tertiary backup to memory cards, in case a memory card gets corrupted when downloading onto my main editing machine.

2) My Macbook Pro might as well be screwed down to my desk...it doesn't move more than 3-4 times a year. It's relatively small and powerful, but I just don't want to unplug all the hard-drives, external displays, printers and other peripharals every time I need to go somewhere. It also doesn't fit well into my Boda bag...

3) This goes hand-in hand with #2...if I have it with me, I get to work on blogs whenever I have free time. As much as I love my iPhone, typing a full blog post would not be fun on it...plus I wouldn't be able to upload photos from my D3 via my iPhone (well I could, but it would be more work...a lot more work)

4) I've been toying with the idea of building a Hackintosh for a few months now, and just couldn't decide if I was just trying to give myself a new project (like I had a lot of free time anyway?) or if I genuinely could use 4 separate computers simultaneously...it was the later, and since my platform of choice is OSX and all of my software that I use for my business runs on OSX...I needed to either buy a Macbook Air (which is still too big to be useful to me) or I needed to buy a PC and make it into what I need. I'll post an update once I've finished turning this into an HP Mini Mac, and used it for a couple days, but I will not be posting step-by step intrucions, because I have no interest in getting a cease-and-desist request from Apple legal asking me to remove those portions of my post. (I will be installing a copy of Leopard that I LEGALLY purchased, as you should do if you choose to make your own Hackintosh)

Follow-up: I'm sure someone out there will want to see setup shots of the lighting for this, so here you go.

That's a Rayflash on the right (SB-800) shooting into a Wescott umbrella, with the SB-800 on the left just straight shooting into the umbrella. I put the diffuser on top of the chair because I was getting some shadows from the top of it. I used CLS for this instead of Pocketwizards. (Both flashes were triggered using a SB-900). Want to do your own high-key photos, but don't have (or want to buy) umbrellas? No problem. Just get your self some foam like this and it does a great job of diffusing the light. These foam blocks came with a hard drive I bought, and is being held on by a peice of gaffers tape. (Also one of the images above in the post was taken with the foam instead of an umbrella! Can you guess which (it's not the same as the setup shot)?

This dog (I'm told) is a Carin/Yorkie mix, but to me looks like the love child of Toto from the Wizard of Oz and a sewer rat. It's sweet as can be and playful as a dog can get, but it is STRANGE looking! LOL!

My lil' sis

Video Summary of the Two Days: