Thingomy.co.uk

Well, it’s been a while since I did a proper update. since the christmas holidays I have had the awesomeness/annoyance of Beltane — again.

some of my results are here:

http://www.thingomy.co.uk/gallery/main.php/v/BFS/Beltane09/

others can be found on gallery.beltane.org

I had a more sucsessfull shoot that i’ve ever had at an event, and am really pleased.

On other matters, I have moved to Liverpool. 2 very good friends of mine (Engel and Rochelle) were moving down, and had spare space, at the same time as my flat lease was running out, so it seemed just as sensible as moving locally. Coupled with better employment prospects, and a fresh start, it’s all good.

there are some pics of the house here

In hind sight, even after a couple of weeks, Edinburgh didn’t really seem to have a lot going for it.

If anyone want’s to come visit, we have a spare bed, give me a buzz — I’m in L25 — Hunts Cross.

There appears to be a bloke in america with the same name as me who has started up a fairly active blog. He seems to have only one topic, and our views differ substantially on it:

http://jrpeterson.vox.com/library/post/right-church-right-time-right-message.html?_c=feed-atom

It’s odd the kind of things you find lingering around on the intermitenets at times.

This weekend was very interesting, I managed to get a ticket to the London Strobist Seminar myself and a mate went down to see what we could learn.

For those unaware, stobism is the idea of creating studio quality lighting using portable camera strobes; it’s about learning their strengths and weaknesses and working with them.

The results were spectacular, I have a lot of information, I don’t fully know how to use it until I’ve practice a great deal though… If anyone is willing to stand in front of a camera while a I blind them for couple of hours taking pics, I would be really grateful of the practice.

There were some really interesting conversations going on about photographers working for free. It turns out there are a great deal of pitfalls to this, some of which I’ve already fallen into, mainly in 3 camps:
taking work away from professional photographers that are already struggling (this can be debated, and I’m still not sure about it);
becoming known as a free photographer, to the point that no one is willing to pay money for anything you do;
issues to do with self confidence and self worth.

I’m in the process of rethinking my stance on this area of photography (money, copyright, terms and conditions etc) to produce a policy that’s workable and sustainable, it’s all really heavy stuff that I wish wasn’t necessary, but sadly it is.

One thing is quite clear though, it’s much better to work for non-monetary value: goods or even better, favours. So if anyone wants a photographer and is willing to repay me in the form of money or anything else that’s useful to me, I’m interested.

The trains on the way down were a bit of a joke, our train was scheduled for 1700, but due to an overhead lines fault was canceled, we only got to bed at 3am (with a 7am start…). I won’t go into details, but it was not fun, I’m just glad we weren’t the poor buggers that had to stand all the way to London.

I have a new flat — it’s on lothain road, Edinburgh.

We are thinking about having a flatwarming, it should be some time soon, we don’t know the details yet though. In the mean time if anyone wants to come visit, give me a buzz.

Atached are photes of 2 of my 4 flatmates:

I have discovered that it is really tricky to photograph a fast moving rodent that doesn’t like flash guns, when there is about 60 watts of non-flashy lihgt available. I hope to get some decent lihgt on the subject and get some much better photos later.

In other news, I have just clocked over my camera’s counter, which means i have taken 10000 photos since February.

For consultation:

I am going to be adding stuff to my blog in the near future. You may not like the quantity of stuff there, but there will be a way to non-destructivly opt out of most of the new bits.

It’s a little difficult to tell how this stuff will come out before I actually impliment it — such is the nature of this technology, you can’t really test changes without making them, or arsing about with it for way too long.

However if all goes to plan I intend on including a whole bunch of web links to interesting stuff I’ve found, this will lead to information overload in the case of some of the readers here.

I have considered the virtues of reducing content to keep viewers interested in everything, but I believe that is bad practice, and reduces creativity. Instead I beieve in alowing users to filter out the noise that is of no interest to them.

If you want a hastle free way of doing this, email me, or comment on this post, and I’ll specifically tell you what you need to do in your case.

At the change over there is a posibility there will be a swamp of anything up to 10ish posts that will come through at once, I will try to avoid this, but if it happens I appologise in advance.

Ideas? sugestions? requests?

If you want some more technical details, or you are on LJ, please read on…

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The stuff that I plan on adding is an import of my del.icio.us links, and my google reader shared items, these consist of mainly interesting news items/ humourous websites that I’ve found online, a more apt description of the content would be “random crap”. My username on both services is thingomy if you want to go for a preemptive poke around, but the character of the feeds will change once I am awear that somone other than me is actually reading them.

Provided (already) is:

Overal RSS feed — all posts;

RSS feed per catagory — these are an arse to find, email me;

RSS feed of comments on each post seperatly;

Email updates of selected catagories on a per user basis — cusomisable here: http://www.thingomy.co.uk/blog/wp-admin/users.php?page=subscribe2/subscribe2.php ;

An option to be emailed of any new comments on a post you have commented on — I think this one works…;

A feed of everything to LJ, (including all of the new stuff when it comes) — this is likelly to be the most problematic issue, as it cannot be tuned per user at my end. If I judge the LJ thing right, It could do with an injection of as much interesting stuff as it can get, so I intend on feeding through everything. I can however see merit in the attitude that it’s a blogging environment, and should not be filled up with other stuff. If I get a significant number of comments, I will look into alternatives. Such solutions as users using filters based on tags may be feesable after further investigation. Opinions?

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It’s been a while since I’ve updated this — and a lot has been going on.

The first of the 2 camping trips was … interesting.

It was a little badly organised form the start — they decided on a venue 2 days before leaving, hired a minibus and arainged for another car to go and 5 people to go on a train. I was on the train, and I was told what time to be at the station. Only when I got to the station did I ifnd out that the venue (knockongoroch farm) was a little outside Aire — IE the middle of fricken nowhere.

We were to be picked up by said minibus at the station.

After changing trains in glasgow, we got to Aire station at about 2200, black dark, pouring with rain. We got a phone call:

“ah sorry guys you’ll have ot catch a taxi … the car broke down, and the minibus is upside down in a river”

10 minutes later realisation set in that this infact was not a prank, and it was actually real.

We found a taxi rank, and persuided a taxi driver it was worthwhile. £40 he said, fair enough, it’s a bit of a tight situation we’re in, and there are 5 of us.

We drove for a long time, then pulled up at the end of a road “It’s a bit rough, so I won’t go up, but it’s a couple of hundred yards up there round the corner” he said.

So (2300 now BTW) we walked round the corner and found a bunch of houses, no camp site, so we scratched out heads for a bit, called the folks at the camp who told us to look for a wooden bridge… the hell? We also heard from the folks in the car, they were in a tow truck heading * towards * the camp site — nutters.

We eventually went ot a house, and knocked on the door, a very nice lady came to the door and siad “knockenwhere? … oh there… you’re a long way from there… … that’s about 16 miles…” she game us tea, and offered for us to camp in the garden over night. slight problem, we had a 3 man tent, and 5 people.

As near as I could work out, the back wheel of the minibus had missed a bridge after a corner, and went over sideways, noone was significantly hurt, unless you consider a £750 insurance excess hurt.

The people in the car spent 6 hours in the middle of the night walking in the “200 yard” road to the camp site, with no torch. They arrived at 5AM.

From there it improves very little, but that’s most of the noteworthy stuff. I had always used the polacy of having a plan B, but will be taking it more seriusly form now on.

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The second camping trip was much more boring, involving lots of water, and a fire that wouldn’t burn.

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Beltane happened eventually It was very wet — we lost significant quantities of kit to water damage, all of mine was ok, but it wasn’t good.

The rain caused significant issues with actually filming too, rain spots, foged and rained up glasses/viewfinders were a running theme, many shots were lost due to this.

Due to the above distractions a lack of time practicing before hand and some bad decisions, my results were moderate at best, 24ish “good” images, only one of which I’m really proud of. see here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/thingomy/sets/72157604867745859/

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I’ve been suckered into shooting some marathon/walk thing up the west highland way — it also involves the middle of nowhere, running theem here eh? It should be good, but if I do the bit I think I will be doing, it’s going to involve a 13 mile walk with camera gear, and camping gear for 2 nights, I’m not sure whether I’m up to it, but I’m willing to give it a stab.

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Final point, and the reaosn I started this somewhat long post — I assembled a panoramic from NZ.

It’s taken from the top of Sky Tower Auckland:

This along with some other stuff I;ve done recently has shown me that I have lost all of my photoshop abilites.

A couple of years ago I switched from Paintshop Pro to Photoshop, on the understanding that Photoshop was better, in doing this switch, I lost all of my PSP abilities, and never actually gained any with Photoshop. I havent used any of these skills since then so have been lacking in practice.

I am now unable to do simple tasks like correct white balance, or deforming a selection. That is without a vast quantity of arsing around, googling, frustrating experiments, and very sub standard results. The worst bit is, I normally can’t remember which tools exist for a given job, and even then I don’t understand why it didn’t do what I wanted it to do the first time, and when it does work it seem to be a complete unexplainable accedent; so I’m not even learning while working.

The panoramic above was built using 84 images of 2.5MP each. I was only able to get the software I use (Hugin) to do part of the job, so it’s really rough, with hard image borders everywhere. with any kind of luck I can perfect the technequedo some more interesting stuff with it in future.

Well, BT are of illigitimate parentage.

Long story short, the flat had internet, but they decided to randomly issue a disconnection notice to the isp due to some account changes.

This apparently takes ti$calli 2 site vistits and 4 weeks to resolve — also illigitamate.

So we have no internet — asside from the borrowed wireless that we currently have…

In other matters, we have resolved the furniture, and the heating at least sort of. It now looks like a real flat. People are more than welcome to come visit. I’m assuming that there is a desire amoung some edinburgers to socialise in the near future owing to the recent terminus of the examination period?

I am planning to go to Shetland at some point soon for a visit, does anyone have any requests or sugestions over dates? The trip will include time outwith the period 1st-14th april, and will likelly be about 10 days. I’m thinking tat I will add an excusion to aberdeenshire to the trip.

I now have a flat — there are some issues that have not yet been sorted out — like the minor detail of furniture … and heating… but I’m working on that.

On other matters — does anyone want a brand new netgear b/g wifi adsl modem router, it’s going for £30, I need to know before Saturday though. the model is DG834G v3.

Oh, and i’m going to germany this weekend to CeBit, more details when i get back.

Congratulations to the pair that are about to get married. You know who you are.

I really do wish I was there, but as you know it’s a little infeesable given my current travel plans, I still wish you all the best for the future.