Photo credit: CheetahStand.com

Pretty ingenious – by mounting the Speedlite horizontally like this, it’s able to rotate a full 360 degrees around it’s base, which means that even with the head stuffed inside softbox, the wireless sensor window is left outside and can be positioned to best see a master flash unit’s wireless pulse.

Not so cool?  $63 price tag.  Yeah, I’ve heard it before, we spend thousands on cameras, lenses, and lights – why not drop some “petty cash” on the accessories?  In cases like this, the reason why is simple – as much as I admire the Cheetah unit above, it’s by no means part of the Space Shuttle.  I look at that and the first thought into my head is, “I can build one of those.”

Of course not everybody is a DIY sort of person – but I am.  I enjoy mulling over how to build things like this, and then prowling Lowes and the local hardware store for a couple of hours finding parts.  In fact, that’s how I spent my Monday night.  I came home with a bag full of odd stuff that I’m pretty sure I can merge into a working final product.  Total cost so far?  About $20.  At that rate, I could build one for each of my Speedlites for the cost of a single Cheetah unit.

This is a project that I hope to have tackled by the end of the weekend.  I’ll post the results – either a working DIY flash bracket, or a pile of useless junk.  But I’m pretty sure it will be the former.

Of course, being the geek I am, I couldn’t just look at the photo and go from there.  No, I had to sketch out how I planned to build my own version.  And since sketching is inaccurate and painfully low-tech, I installed Google SketchUp, watched the tutorials, and then used it to design my version of the bracket.

DIY Flash Bracket - Frontal View

DIY Flash Bracket - Overhead View

Hell, I’m impressed by how good it looks rendered like this!  Sure, it’s a bit rough and not quite to scale.  But spend some time using SketchUp and you’ll find (if you’re technically inclined) that it’s addictive.  And the things you can render once you learn some skills are just amazing!

Perhaps I should have been an engineer…

Please note: I’m not bashing the folks at Cheetah here at all.  They came up with a great looking product and are entitled to make a profit on it.  I suspect that most people will be more than happy to buy one if they need it.  Aside from being occasionally cheap, I embark on these DIY missions for fun – that’s all.

And for this one, I did in fact order several of Cheetah’s Slide Lock Cold Shoes, which look very nice, and are quite reasonably priced.

Polaroid PoGo Instant Mobile Printer

The premise is simple, and one that various companies have toyed with over the past few years: how to make a small, inexpensive, mess-free photo printer that photographers can carry with them.  The results have likewise been varied, everything from 4×6 printing ink jets to micro-thermal printers.

The PoGo is the newcomer in the latter line.  It is a micro-sized, inkless, battery-powered printer barely bigger than many P&S cameras.  The whole unit is built around Polaroid’s ZINK paper (stands for Zero Ink), which has dye crystals embedded within it.  The printer spits out 2×3 inch prints that are dry to the touch, water and tear resistant, and sticky-backed (if you peel off the covering).

Best of all, it prints directly from the camera; connect the printer and camera via USB, select the photo on the camera, and print.  Of course, a Pict-Bridge enabled camera is required, but these days that’s pretty much all of them.

Very, very cool.  Certainly on a gadget level, but also on the level of the traveling photog who wants to be able to give out some sort of print on location.  One of the primary complaints against the PoGo is the small photo size; granted, 2×3 inches is quite small – think credit card size – but in my opinion it’s still better than nothing.  And the small size of the unit makes it highly portable.  I’m thinking, stick it in my photo vest pocket, hook the USB to the camera when it’s still around my neck, and print away.

The other complaints are image quality and battery life.  Reviews are mixed, but it seems that less than ideal images result in less than ideal prints (imagine that).  It also seems that the battery is only good for about 10 prints, which does make the whole print-from-my-pocket idea less practical.  Plugged into the wall, however, and all’s well again.

So of course I hit the web and ordered one from Walmart.  $63 shipped, and comes with an extra 80 sheets of ZINK paper for free.  Hopefully it will be here before the weekend!

Lewisburg, PA, for those of you who may not know – and I suspect that’s almost everyone, since goodness knows I’d never heard of the place – is known for it’s “Main Street, USA” status as well as for being the home of Bucknell University.

Market Street, Lewisburg, PA

I love traveling to places like this, little towns that time seems to have passed by, at least partially.  Visiting Lewisburg certainly wasn’t like stepping back in time, with classic Fords and poodle skirts down the street, but it was historically quaint and very charming.  Mostly it was clean and quiet, which are two qualities that I always appreciate.

Despite the fun of these trips, they are always a source of some conflict, however.  The conflict being which camera to bring?  On one hand these are usually social trips, Mandy and I going to explore and spend time together, so lugging a full bag of gear would be a distraction.  On the other hand, it’s good odds that I’ll see something worth shooting, and I want to end up with usable photos.

On this trip the ability to travel light won, and I took only the little Powershot – which ended up being the right choice, since there were in face several scenes I ended up shooting, but overall the DSLR would have been overkill.  The important thing is, the photos I came home with are perfectly usable.  Shooting with the P&S requires extra attention, settings need to be just right, care taken on exposures, histograms studied.  There’s no RAW adjustments to fall back on, no real latitude for recovery.

Fortunately the shots I really cared about came out well, although I’ll freely admit that it took me about a dozen frames to get into the groove of shooting successfully.  I don’t know that I’ll ever make prints of any of these images, although I certainly could if the mood struck.  But the point is that I had the camera with me and was able to record some memories.

Campus Theater in Lewisburg

The one change I have made recently is in metering modes; I used to throw all my cameras on Spot Metering and leave them there, and as such I got pretty good at picking a metering point, grabbing a quick exposure reading, then recomposing and shooting.  But I’m reading McNally’s Hotshoe Diaries over again, and Joe recommends matrix (evaluative in Canon lingo) metering, so I’m giving it a try.

Believe it or not, it does have a noticeable effect on exposures and I’ve had to make some adjustments.  But it seems to be working well, and for most subjects it’s a perfectly valid way to go (although there are still circumstances when switching to the spot meter will save your butt).

Bucknell University chapel

Our final stop was nearby Bucknell University, where we were stopping to see the senior show put on by one of Mandy’s friends.  Finding Bucknell was easy, but finding our way around the campus wasn’t – the place is huge!  We finally found a campus map posted in the admissions lot; we hopped out to check it out, and I caused a bit of consternation when I wandered right past the map to capture the last of the sunset light on this chapel.  The campus has a very New England feel to it and being the university photographer there must be a delight – the place just oozes photogenic.  I’d love to be able to make some images there.

(For the record, once the light was past (aka in the dark) I went back and read the map and got us where we needed to be.)

New to my bag is the Cokin P-series Blue/Yellow Polarizer.  It’s the (much!) cheaper version of the Sing-Ray Blue/Gold polarizer that you hear landscape photogs talking about a lot.  According to the reviews the Cokin isn’t as nice and suffers from softness, but frankly for $40 vs. $200+ for the competition, I’m okay with applying a bit of Unsharp Mask in post.

Blue/Yellow Polarizer in action

This is what you get when you play around with a blue/yellow polarizer; an option between a blue and yellow color shift as you rotate the filter.  It’s a great tool for accentuating colors in your landscape; punch up the golds during sunrise/sunset, punch up the blues during twilight.  You can also create some pretty funky looks without much effort (aka on accident):

Like this one, for example, where I got the polarizer somewhere between the two extremes, which resulted in a muted effect and a sky that looks, to me at least, like some funky overcast preceding an impending storm.  Yet at the same time, the shadows clearly show some direct sunlight, throwing long, hard shadows.  Strange.  A little creepy.  But I like it.

The trick to the blue/yellow polarizer is this; unlike a regular circular polarizer, where what-you-see-is-what-you-get, the blue/yellow gives you something entirely different.  Sure, when you’re shooting and have the viewfinder to your eye, you can see the effect of the polarizer in action, and you trip the shutter when you’ve got the effect you like.

That’s just not what the camera records.  Because of the way camera white balance works, the image you’ve created looks like this:

Unaltered blue/gold variants.

The shot on the left is polarized yellow, while the shot on the right is polarized blue.  Both look pretty much like crap, with strange purple shadows and oddly flat color shifts.  The trick to making these shots work is twofold: first, set a manual WB on camera when you shoot [if you leave it on Auto WB, it's going to try and correct for the polarizer color, which will A) defeat the entire point, and B) fail.]  The second bit comes into play in post, and this is one of those cases where if you shoot JPEG, you’re screwed.

When you import the RAW file into Adobe Camera Raw, press the I key to get the WB eyedropper tool, then click a neutral spot on the image; in the images above, I clicked the snow.  Bam!  The white balance shifts to correct itself and you’ve now got an image that looks like what you saw through the lens when shooting:

Corrected yellow polarization

Corrected blue polarization.

You can see now how using either the blue or yellow will pick up and amplify those colors in the scene.  You can also see how easy it is for the effect to come out looking overdone, as in the second corrected example, where the sky is a shade of blue rarely if ever seen on this planet.  This is definitely a neat filter to have in the bag, and I’ve seen photos where using a blue/yellow polarizer took an otherwise “nice” shot and kicked it up to the level of “amazing” shot.  But it’s a filter that needs to be used sparingly, with a light touch.

In my own use, at least until I feel more comfortable with it, I think that I’ll be making a regular exposure of any scene that I really like before slipping the blue/yellow on, just to be sure that I’ve got a fall-back in case the b/y goes overboard.

Here’s one last shot of that same tree, which I find myself shooting every time I’m up at Fords – this is still with the b/y, but with the effect dialed down somewhere between the two extremes.  The result is a sort of artificial twilight color.  I like it.  It was a fun morning to go out and play, and I feel like it helped bring the cabin fever back into check, at least a little.

It was my first time buying from KEH and I’m pleased to say that the experience was a good one, and I’ll likely use them again in the future.  KEH appears to be an excellent source for used lenses, although their user reviews are a little spotty – the jist of it seems to be that internet orders take second place to phone orders, so sometimes net orders lose out and folks get annoyed.  (Frankly, if you know that going into the deal, I’m not sure what right you have to get annoyed.)

Anyway, I wasn’t really looking to buy this lens – I was poking around KEH just to see what they had, actually looking more at prime lenses when I stumbled across this one.  I’d never even heard of a 70-210mm f/4, so I had to Google it, and what I found was promising.  I’ve had my eye on the new 70-200 f/4 IS lens for a while now, but I just can’t get past the $1200 price tag.  The fact that the old 70-210mm was only $200 sealed the deal – for $1k in savings, I can live without IS.

Unfortunately my order processed just in time to ship out during one of this year’s snowstorms, and it spent 48 additional hours sitting in a UPS facility in GA because of snowstorms.  So I wasn’t able to test it out at this past weekend’s event, but I do have it in time for an upcoming portrait workshop, which will be its real trial by fire.  But given some informal, around the house testing, here’s what I’ve concluded:

First off, unlike its new cousins, the 70-210mm is a small lens.  Even fully zoomed, its overall length is less than that of the new models, and since it has neither internal focusing or zooming, the overall weight is much less.  The front element takes a 58mm filter, which seems radically small.  For me, this is a big deal – I owned a 70-200mm f/2.8 a while back and although it was a good lens, it was simply too big and too heavy for me to use much; the small size of the old 70-210mm, coupled with the constant f/4, means that I’m much more likely to stick it in my bag when I head out.

The lens is a push/pull style zoom, which isn’t a feature I’m thrilled about, but then beggars can’t be choosers.  And unlike other push/pull zooms, which often have a reputation for being dust vacuums, this one seems to work very well, with nearly no detectable sucking or blowing of air when in use.

I am somewhat saddened to report that it is not super-sharp when wide open.  The whole point of having an f/4 is to use it wide open, but I think that some stopping down will be required, or at the very least, some sharpening in post.  This is a little disappointing, but then I remember what I paid, and I feel better about it.  The good news is that at f/5.6, things are sharp, and by f/8 they are quite sharp.

It’s also noticeably soft past about 200mm.  At full zoom and f/4, the result is disappointing – for portraits you can almost call it “beauty soft” and make it work, but for anything else you’ll need to stop down or hit the Unsharp Mask in post.  I’m fully confident in the lens’ ability to take great photos, but the trick is learning its quirks first.

200mm @ f/4 appears somewhat soft, but works for portraits

Despite the lack of USM focus, the AF is still quite snappy.  It didn’t seem to hunt in low light and overall was quite responsive.  This was a pleasant surprise, since many of the reviews I read for this lens criticized it for having slow focus.  (But also based on those reviews, I have to conclude that many of the reviewers were themselves L-lens snobs who simply don’t like any lens without a red ring on it.)

I’ve got to give props to KEH for their rating: the lens was listed in EX+ condition, and while I forget the exact description that equates to on their scale, the jist of it is that the lens would be about 90% of new.  I looked it over carefully before using it – there isn’t a mark on it.  It actually amazes me how a 21 year old lens can be in like new condition.

The only thing that really annoyed me was the fact that KEH shipped the lens without any caps; I had to dish an extra $20 to get a set of caps from B&H.  After a great deal of Google searching, I managed to find out which lens  hood went with the lens, and I’m going to try and find one on eBay.

As always, the 70-200 range is very useful, and I’m one again equipped for it at very low cost.  Will I keep this lens forever?  It’d hard to say.  I win the lottery, I’ll probably get a new IS version.  But in the meantime, I think this will work out very well.

The 7D was the first Canon DLSR to include a Speedlite commander mode in its built-in flash, a feature that captured my attention very quickly.  For years now, Nikon users have has commander capabilities built into their DSLRs, SB-800 Speedlights, and dedicated commander units.  Canon shooters, on the other hand, have had…well, very little.

Very little, that is, if you’re looking for TTL control.  If you’re shooting Strobist-style, with manual flash settings, then any “dumb” radio triggers will work (although all units except the Canon 580EX lack PC ports, so you’re left at the mercy of hotshoe adapters).  So long as you don’t mind running from flash to flash to change the output, this works okay.

But for TTL flash, there were exactly two options: the antiquated ST-E2 Speedlite Transmitter, or a 550EX/580EX flash hotshoe-mounted in master mode.  The ST-E2 only shoots forward along the lens axis and only triggers groups A & B; if you want to use group C, you’re out of luck.  That leaves a 550/580EX, and personally I’ve always found the idea of using a $500+ 580EX on-camera as a master unit incredibly annoying; it’s large and somewhat unwieldy, and it seems like a very poor utilization of an expensive flash.

Canon ST-E2 Speedlite Transmitter

The 7D stood to correct this with a built-in master capability; suddenly your Canon Speedlites can be controlled from the camera’s menu system.  Set your groups, ratios, manual output – no more running between flashes, it’s a whole new level of control in the camera, where it should be.

Problem is, it doesn’t work very well.  Consider the physics: the 7D’s flash measures 1″x.25″ in size.  That’s a hugely unimpressive .25 square inches total.  And because of the pop-up mechanism, the flash head will only face forward; there’s no bounce or swivel.  It’s underpowered, tiny, and restricted – puny is the word that comes to mind.

After having used it in a range of situations, I’ve become disenchanted – while it was a good idea, and a noble try at matching the Nikon system, I have to say that it is ultimately of little use.  If your Speedlites are in front of the camera, with no obstruction between them and the built-in flash, then it’ll work pretty darn well.  But start adding in any variables – the sort of variables and setups that you’ll actually find in the real world – and the whole thing falls apart.

Half way through my last studio shoot, with half the Speedlites failing to fire simply because of their physical placement, I broke down and threw the 580EX on the hotshoe and flipped it to master mode.

Whoa.

Instant change.  Immediate improvement.  Suddenly I’m blasting commands out of a flash with a 2.75″x1.5″ emitter (that’s 4.125 square inches).  An emitter that can be tilted and swiveled around a complete hemisphere, with enough power to bounce it off a ceiling.  Where before I was working in a corner with only partial success, I was able to blanket an entire room with command signals.

Overlay of Canon 7D built-in flash vs. 580EX Speedlite flash.

Sadly, there’s just no way around it.  For dependable communication coverage and command capabilities, you need a master-capable Speedlight on-camera.  The built-in mode is more gimmick than useful tool, and frankly I believe that it should be relegated to the Rebel series, as it’s more likely to fit the needs of a hobbyist/advanced amateur with a single off-camera Speedlite than it is a professional with a full setup.

What Canon needs is a whole new unit.  There are faint rumors of a new Canon Speedlite coming soon.  My guess is that it will be a unit designed to challenge Nikon’s SB-900 (which is a very impressive Speedlight).  It will certainly retain a master mode, and will likely interface its menus with the newest EOS cameras.  But in my opinion, this is still a stopgap measure.

I return to what I said before – using a $500 Speedlite solely as a commander, adding little or no actual light to a scene, is like buying a BMW and using it only to run for groceries.  A flash with the power of a 580EX is meant to be used to light a scene!

Canon needs to go back to the drawing board and design a brand new commander unit, one that will bury the pathetic ST-E2 and give professional photographers a real option when it comes to commanding their Speedlites, which they’d then be free to use off-camera as lights.  This new unit would need tilt/swivel capability, and whether it uses visible or IR light pulses would depend on the engineers, but it should be designed to throw an aimable, powerful command pulse, with no option whatsoever for actually adding light to the exposure.

Let us use our commanders to command and our Speedlites to light!

Today was the day that I embraced social media as a professional photographer!

(Proof, for the doubters, is in the image below:)

I’m now on Twitter (bpennphoto) and have a new Facebook Fan Page, and I’ve registered for more sites this morning than I can keep track of.  There’s Twitter, then the one that lets you load photos to Twitter, then the one that lets you manage all your social media from one portal – that’s HootSuite, which is actually very cool.  (Although I’d pay real money to see the HootSuite owl eat the Twitter bird.)

I even put together my own custom Twitter background image, which I’m rather proud of.

But more than just signing up and winging this, I’m taking instruction from Mandy; she works with this stuff every day and has become quite the guru.  It’s actually at her urging that I’ve finally done all this, and I have to give her due credit.

When social media first began to appear in daily life, I have to admit that I dismissed it.  Part of me simply considered it a fad that would pass (remember Pogs?) and to a great deal I simply didn’t understand why it was relevant.  I supported the classic argument of “why does the world care what I’m doing at any given moment?”

It took a good deal of time and an increasing exposure to all of it, through Mandy, for me to begin to understand what the point really was.  There are certainly people who use Twitter and Facebook to post about their daily lives, activities, etc, and nobody cares.  But there are many people who have figure this out and are using it to drive massive amounts of information.

As Mandy keeps saying, it’s all about forming “real connections with people.”  They call it networking for a reason – because the goal is to meet others with common interests and passions and exchange information with them.  ”Meaningful conversations” is another of her sayings that I happen to agree with.

The opportunity for that kind of networking excites me.  I genuinely want to connect with other photographers, models, artists, etc., I want to spread my own reputation and attract some more business.  I’d like to see that people are reading this blog and I’d like to engage those people in meaningful conversations.  (Basically I’d like to know that I’m not just on here talking to myself…)

So if you keep up with what I post, or even if you just drift in from time to time, I invite you to connect with me in these forums across the internet.  Feel free to ask questions and leave comments.  Help me engage!

18" and counting

So in an attempt to keep myself from climbing the walls, here are 10 ideas for photo-related things to do on a slow/snow day:

1. Keyword and backup your files. Yes, it’s enough to make you want to shovel the walk again instead, but it has to get done.  Better to do it on a snow day than waiting until a sunny weekend when you could be out actually making photos.

2. Submit to photo stock sites. Whatever your feelings on micro vs. macro stock, the fact is that most of us have a lot of good photos sitting around on hard drives that could be earning us money, even if it is just a quarter per download.  Hey, if it’s just sitting there anyway, you might as well be making something off it – think of it like interest on a bank account; it’s not much, but it’s better than nothing.

3. Join Model Mayhem. Alright, so perhaps you don’t actually have any photos to load to a stock site.  Model Mayhem is a good place to start, where you can connect with models and other photographers.  Unlike your roommate, who hides when you pull out your camera, folks on Model Mayhem actually want to have their picture taken.  Gaining some solid contacts there will make it much easier to go out and shoot a photo like this:

Got models?

4. Harass your roommate. On the off-chance that your roommate isn’t sick of you using them as a model, you can always try to recruit them into working with you.  I’ve got that great idea that waiting until after sunset and heading out into the snow could look really cool; use a single off-camera Speedlite to light the subject and drag the shutter to let the background fill in.  Of course, it will be much gentler on everybody if the snow has stopped falling for this.

5. Setup Google Reader. If you haven’t played with Google Reader, then you’re missing out.  I only got mine setup a couple of weeks ago – I say “setup” like it’s hard or something, but it isn’t – and I already love it.  You just plug in the feed links to your favorite blogs and Reader keeps an eye on them, collecting new posts and displaying them all in one place.  It makes it easier to keep track of the dozen or so sites that I watch, and instead of surfing all over the net I can read it all on one page.

6. Clean your gear. This is another of those all-too-often neglected tasks, but face it, your gear gets dirty.  Body oils all over the camera, smudges and water drops on the lens elements, that filter that you dropped in the mud last month and have ignored since…  Get out the lens paper & cleaning fluid and give the glass a once over.  Check all the lens and body contacts.  And use a damp, clean T-shirt to rub down the camera body and clear off any grime.

7. Record the snowstorm. This may seem like a Captain Obvious idea, but it’s surprising the number of people who will go out to dig out their cars, end up commenting on how lovely the world really is with all that snow blanketed across it, but never actually shoot a photo.  Why?  Get your snow gear back on, take the kids and the dog, and go back outside and play!  Take pictures of the playing!  It’s okay if some of them are snapshots – the point is to preserve the memory, and not every album photo has to be a perfectly-crafted work of art.  It’s okay to just have fun!

8. Give your palm tree a bath. Okay, so this isn’t strictly a photo-oriented idea, but nobody likes a dirty palm tree.  And it kind of gets the whole tropical island theme going.  After it’s clean you can get out a few limes, crack the Cruzan, and put on your Buffett albums.  If you can’t actually be in the Caribbean, you can at least party like you are!

As I got closer I could see that the shape was wrong for mallards.  For a few moments I even thought that perhaps they were just rocks sitting in the ice.  When I finally got up to Frederick’s area I finally saw what they really were – muskrats!

Muskrat family hanging out on the ice

I’ve seen muskrats swimming around before, but I’ve seen one out of the water for any length of time, much less a whole family of them.  It was hard to tell just what they were doing – looked kind of like they were eating, and from time to time they’d hop in and swim around a bit, dive under the ice.  They must have a den nearby, and despite the cold and the snow they appeared to be having a swell time.

The photos aren’t the best – they were taken with the Powershot SX120 IS, which I’m determining to have more flaws than I realized when I first began using it (it’s zoom performance is not so impressive after all).  Between pushing it to its maximum zoom, shooting a scene that suffers from back-lighting, and dealing with increasing snowfall, it was more than the Powershot could really handle.  (If I knew I was going to encounter critters, I might have brought the 7D+Sigma combo, although I wasn’t really keen on trudging through drifts with it.)

There’s a lot of Photoshop work at play to get the photos to a point where I was even willing to post them.  They all required a Shadows/Highlights adjustment, significant cropping, and a strong application of High-Pass sharpening.

Look close at the center muskrat - you can see his little hands!

Regardless, I’m thrilled to have seen the little guys!  They were a great surprise, and it just goes to show that it pays to bring a camera with you, even when you don’t think you’ll need it.

Far more often than not, shooting in natural (ambient) light seems to be synonymous with shooting in low light – at least in my own experience.  I end up at parties, birthdays, family gatherings, nights out, whatever the occasion, and the result seems to be the same; some room with more shadow than light.  The trick, then, is to make the most out of whatever natural light you can get.

This is our typical “natural light” scene – late evening birthday party, overhead room lights off, some others still on in the background.  At this point, the only thing we’ve got going for us is candle light, and unless your subject is celebrating becoming an octogenarian, candle light is worth about squat.

Unless you have a fast prime.  In which case a modest dozen-or-so candles, mixed with f/2.2 & ISO 800 at 1/40th net a photo that’s not only usable, but actually quite nice.  There’s enough ambient in the background to provide separation, there’s plenty of light on his face, and although the cake has washed out quite a bit, it’s still recognizable, as are individual candles.

The exposure settings are fairly modest and non-too hard to handle, but the trick that really makes the image work came in post (although it could have been done in-camera, if my brain had been thinking about something other than cake).  Even with the Tungstun white-balance setting, candle light is very warm.  But import the image into Adobe Camera Raw, click the WB adjustment dropper, and click that nice white frosting on the side of the cake, and viola – perfect white balance.

Yes, it does remove that warm, cheery glow of the candlelight, but in this instance I think it gives the photo a unique quality, making it more about the subject than about the occasion.

So the next time you’re stuck in some dark cave trying to get a few good shots, try leaving the zoom lens and Speedlite at home, and go wide & prime.  Work the ambient, instead of beating it over the head with a strobe.