Thingomy.co.uk

I have gotten a temp job doing exactly what I was doing 2 years ago, for disability services — sitting in a dungeon at uni installing software onto computers, it should last a couple of weeks, and will be reasonably fun in the process.

This last weekend I went to London to visit my good friend Heliomass (and a few others in the process) many interesting things were seen including Kew Gardens (all 300 acres there of) and the main point of the trip: Station X.

Station X, AKA Bletchly park is an extremely interesting place, known for it’s WW2 code breaking efforts. It held some of the foremost mathematical geniuses of it’s time, and was so significant it housed some operations only declassified in 2002. Many believe the efforts there turned the war, or at the least shortened it by up to 18 months.

It was the birth (and death) place of Colossus, the worlds first electronic programable computer, which was (depending on who you ask) either 1 or 4 decades or more ahead of it’s time, and has been rebuilt from photos over the last 15 years, I have seen it running in full working order.

project homepage

Photos:

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.

In response to the blog post entitled: How do I Make a Decision which Digital Camera to Buy? on digital-photography-school.com I post the following.

This is a vast area to cover, and can’t be covered in a single comment. I spent about 2 weeks working 10hours+ per day over the Christmas holidays 18 months ago purely doing research into what route to take when upgrading to a DSLR from a compact, and found out a great deal. If doing it again, I’d have sat down with someone and gotten a good grasp for more of the basics of the theory of things and the techniques involved first. The vast research is mandatory if you are to be even vaguely successfully however, the following 3 items are the gotchas that are not immediately apparent:

1) This was more relevant in the film days, and has been diluted in the digital age, but the principal still applies. When the shutter is open and the photo is being taken, the only thing between the sensor and the outside world is the lens, the lens forms the image — therefor it’s the most important element of the whole setup. If buying a DSLR, make sure that you budget at least as much for lenses as you do for the camera — and also budget for getting more lenses in the months/years later as your skills grow. I currently have 9 lenses, 4 of which have been totally superseded.

2) Lens reviews are fantastic — there are many online, and the online stuff is orders of magnitude better than magazine stuff. However a lens is reviewed against it’s competitors. For similar lenses, a $200 kit lens that is reviewed “great” is much worse than a $600 lens that’s reviewed “ok”. I fell foul of this one, and bought a cheap tele zoom that turned out to be a complete disappointment.

3) This is the killer, brand loyalty — it’s rife in the SLR scene because it’s so proprietary accessory based (see above for my 9 lenses) — you have to pick a system and stick with it (or spent obsurd amounts of money changing systems). Ask virtually any photographer and they will tell you thier system is better than all the others, infact this is not true (however hard they try to persuade you) every system has it’s advantages and disadvantages, but most of the major systems are very close overall. Shop around and don’t be pressured into one camp by anyone.

One final tip — don’t overlook the second hand market for lenses — in can be a minefield for the uninformed, but a goldmine for the informed — become informed and reap the benefits of 20 year old glass that’s as good as new, at quarter the price.

I’ve managed to get myself roped into doing lighting for a film making project — it’s a competition to make a film entirely in 48 hours — and involves people taking shifts and work 48 hours straight.

We had a long (13 hours long) day of filming that only ended soon after the light died (then we moved onto car headlights…)

We have someone in our midsts that is a masters student at Edinburgh uni, so managed to gain access to some of their studios — mac G5s with lots toys — few of which work …

This is going to be a long weekend

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.

Having been doing a considerable amount of web browsing recently, I thought I would share some of the good bits:

Cream of tiger soup (lolcats):
http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/03/28/funny-pictures-stir-carefully/

Wiring nightmares — round up of some of the most interesting wiring form around the world, this really is an education:
http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2007/03/really-bad-wiring-jobs_20.html

Garfield minus garfield — some bloke takes Garfield cartoons and photoshops out the garfield in them — the results are variable, but they are very random:
Garfield minus garfield

Timelapse photography with a DSLR — the results really are worth watching, even although it’s a little clumbsy to download:
http://digital-photography-school.com/blog/how-i-made-a-time-lapse-movie-with-my-dslr/

I’m getting a little behind on things with the Blog as i have much do do currently.

I took a quick trip to Germany to see CeBit 2008 this is a large electronics Expo, handling everything from hardware, software, photocopiers, software, security systems, online services, basic components etc.

I spent 2 and a half days there.

the intel stand was insane — it was a building to it’s self, and they had some really impressive lights, mac2000s to be precise

TMobile wasn’t much better, it’s difficult to see just how big this really is, the puprple screens are full colour, ever changing visualisations of music from a live singer who is behind me. the screens loop al the way round the front part of the stand.

The following is a very odd contraption that seemed to be linked to an exercise bike with utterings of oxygen flow control and olfactory sense triggering. the contraption it’s self was more interesting — it was a pair of projectors, an arbitrarily curved screen, a bunch of software to seamlessly connect the images from the projectors, and a Canon 350d being used to automatically calibrate them:

Some really sodding scary survielence kit — with the stuff below (and a few added extras) it’s possible to wire a buildings cctv, a map of the building, and a bunch of computers together to give a location and biometric face recognition of every person in the building in real time, open doors automatically, detect mood from expressions, etc. The other wibbly toy is a scanning laser range finder, which is an idea I had years ago.

A company that had developed some safety equipment for use in mechanical systems, designed ot provide interlocks/warnings if straying outside a set of parameters had spent a huge deal of time developing a demo that involved a real (presumably off the shelf) model digger, with a joypad controling it. The joypad had 2 2d analog sticks, but the complete muppets had gotten the control system wrong. They had gone to all the trouble of developing the system, but were using a nonstandard control layout, I was most disappointed.

The photography hall was good — sigma was there in force, with one of every lens currenlty in production form them, including the slightly obscene 200-500 f2.8 (with 2x tc) that’s a 400d mounted on it. I had a go on that one.

There was also a bloke taking portrates with an almost as obscene medium format job, and the largest umbrella i’ve ever seen. I took the opportunity to practice my flash stealing techniques.

some other random stuff seen there — the last one is of to billboards, they have wheels, and move around randomly, I’m sure someone abducted R2D2.

A slight excursion was had to Hamburg for a day, this was the results. it was a good chance to practice using my new 16-80 lens:

Well I arrived.

The flight was about normal for an intercontinental, I did however see some really cool scenery vaugly in the himalas reageon.

The day before I flew from hong kong I noticed that there was a slight descrpancy in some of the paperwork, suffice to say the traval agent screwed up and forgot to issue a paper ticket for the flight. It was an utter fluke that I spotted the issue, and i would certainly not be here if I hadent. The phone bill over that one will be interesting…

ooh — i have a new camera:) if you want more detail, bring ear plugs, and say the word camera within 30 feet of me … put the earplugs in when you get bored.

So anywy, more later.

After a fairly considerable amount a galivanting around all over the place, including :

kiwi bus to Kiakoura;
seal swimming;
the train and ferry to wellington;
kiwi bus to toupo;
intercity to Gisborne;
road trip to Rotorua;
2 nights in a very comfy tent.

I’m now gettign ready to leave the country. I take the Kiwi bus to Aukland tomorrow, and fly soon after.

I am very happy, I have gotten what I have come here for, and still have stuff for next trip. I’m now ready to get on with stuff at home.

For the record, the seal swimming was fantastic, it involved 2 piece 7mm wetsuits, and snorkels. i was a couple of meters from a seal a number of times, and got a good look them loads of times.

Very few photos recently, I’m taking time to chill and see people, and there has been little of photogenicity of late.

I am very intregued to see that sony have relieced a couple of more cameras with some really interesting technology in them. I will be watching this space with baited breath. Even more interesting to me is the fact they have also mentioned that they will be reliecing a new flash gun, it’s goign to be very interesting when it comes out.

I rapidly left Queenstown knowning I would be back a few days later.

I was booked onto another excursion around the Invercargill, Duneden area. Varius things went wrong including the weather; some people I was with; and my primary camera lens breaking so I spent most of the trip pissed off damp, cold and uninterested.

We were told that one of the places we visited (I believe invercargill, but I may be mistaken) was described by one famous musician that visited the area as “the arsehole of the world” and I can see why, I’m sure it’s wonderfull in good weather when one is happy, but I have to agree with him.

The following are the highlights:

Sea Lyons, trying to work out who’s boss:

A fairly basic farm tour involving sheep sheering which as far as I’m concerned is a chore, so I stuck to photography.

some random scenery and other stuff seen along the way.

Note that the Cadburies tour sucked goats — it lasted 45 minutes, and could have been done in about 5, they didn’t even bother showing us the factory.

So anyway, this took me up to Te Anou — nice place, lots of souvenir shops. Notably however it had no shops capable of replairing camera bits.

For those interested in the tech bits: my 17-70 zoom (35mm equivelent: 25-105) developed an issue of it’s zoom ring jaming randomly and making rattling noises when shaken. To avoid any further damage and incase picture sharpness was being affected by loose optics it has been retired to the bottom of my bag untill I do a warantee return from home. My second widest lens is a 30/1.4 (35mm eqiv: 45mm) this is not very wide … bummer.

For those less technically inclined, I can still take photos, but not of really big things… like mountains or fjords or cliffs; all of which I know I would encounter the next day in abundence.