Thingomy.co.uk

I’m trying to do some tidying up on my gallery, but I need some help.

If anyone has any old (or new) links to anything in my gallery, could they please tell me about them, so that I can check that what I’m doing won’t break them.

I know that there are several link scemes in existance for my gallery (due to a few changes I have made since it went up) and I need at least one link in each format in order to test everything.

Please let me know if you have anything that may be able to help me.

… when you are taking a walk in a park, look up and notice the jpeg artifacts in the clouds

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 just signed up for a 1 day seminar in London next month on photographic lighting — more details after the event.

I have also solved (i think) my geotagging problems for once and for all — unless some small details stops me.

(If you don’t know what a geotag is, you can stop reading now btw)

The tool that does it is found here: http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/

It’s a lightroom plugin, stores the data with the images as they are being developed, and without undue stress adds the data to all jpeg exports. it’s not fully polished yet, but it has few enough wrinkles that it seems to be up to the job.

The same bloke that does it also does a flickr upload plugin that seems to work really well. There are other goodies in there too.

Unfortunatly I have yet to find a solution that I can get working that will export to ftp, the irony being that the functionality is already in lightroom only I can get it to not upload a bunch of html stuff with the images.

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/