New stuff

Just refreshed the site with a few new pictures - the new gallery is again all new stuff, as it should be, while the wedding gallery includes newer work as well as some old favourites.

Both galleries are Flash-based and use the excellent SlideShowPro. I'm using the SSP for Lightroom web engine purely to generate the content, the jpegs and the xml file with all the filenames and captions. But they're displayed via my own Flash movie which is based on an SSP for Flash component. This approach means I can quickly create new galleries to add to existing pages, while the power of ActionScript lets me show extra information like the gallery's name and description. As my long-threatened Flash-based site uses the same SSP galleries, the transition - if it ever happens - should be painless....

Permalink - My photography -  0 comments

A true story

I was going to reply to Sean's comments on filenaming conventions in this Lightroom forum thread:

Nothing wrong with using yymmdd-camera sequence, lots of people do.

I generally just use Custom Name_YYMMDD_3 dig Seq (or 4 for larger shoots)

It's not a pedantic point either - I'll assume his "generally" using a filenaming convention was a slip of the tongue - but I'm more interested in the two conventions he contrasts.

Either method satisfies the basic principle of no two pictures sharing the same file name, and I happen to follow something similar to the first - YYMMDD_A081234.nef where the "1234" came from the camera-generated "DCS_1234.nef". The additional letter is "A" or "B" and allows for the chance of two camera bodies shooting a DCS_1234.nef on the same day. Yet I often wish I'd gone Sean's way from the start as it results in a shorter unique file ID and gives you the possibility to check you've not accidentally deleted any items - in accountancy (eek) we used to call this a "sequential continuity" control. However, Lightroom users who renumber the files in this way have a problem if their hard drive crashes. Here's a true story....

A couple of weeks back, a friend/client had a hard drive crash. He shoots 6-900 pictures a day, 4-5 days a week, and had just lost 2-3 weeks' worth of client pictures. But his Lightroom catalogue was safely backed up, and he restored the originals Lightroom had backed up as part of its import process. Sounds wonderful? Well, not quite.

The problem was that after editing down each shoot to around 300 pictures, he renames them YYMMDD-0001.cr2 through YYMMDD-0300.cr2. His newly-restored Lightroom catalogue was looking for those file names, but his restored originals still had the original camera-generated names like KLKJ1244.cr2.

Now in my case, my filenaming convention is repeatable and I could have renamed the restored originals - DCS_1234.nef would again become YYMMDD_A081234.nef. LR would then have had no trouble remarrying its thumbnails to the renamed backup files, and the whole job would have taken a few minutes (I'd have done it in Bridge or in a new, temporary Lightroom catalogue).

But in his case, he had deleted hundreds of rejects before he had renamed the keepers. To reconnect Lightroom's thumbnails to the originals, he would have needed to examine each thumbnail in turn, allow for tiny variations between frames (he uses two Canon 1D Mk III tripod mounted-bodies), and then rename the original file so it matched the new 001-300 name in Lightroom. For one or two images that might be acceptable - but for thousands?

This is clearly a downfall of Lightroom's backup upon import feature - as a minimum it needs a corresponding feature that switches its thumbnails back to the original file names. As it stands, with this unrepeatable filenaming convention you need to back up the images again immediately after renaming them. In my friend's case, he happened to know someone who knew the original filename was stored in Lightroom's catalogue and who could also write the SQL to restore it and overwrite the current filenames....

Permalink - Lightroom -  8 comments

Cold places

Bruce Percy's colour landscape work is rather lovely, and I'm sure I've seen his Iceland pictures somewhere before. He's got a blog with an excellent podcast on a Patagonia trip, and I do also like his attitude:

I doubt that most people could tell what equipment was used to create any of the images on my own site. Sure some would have a good idea if the image was:

1. digital (lack of grain)
2. film (grain)
3. medium format (tonality)
4. large format (smoother tonality)

But that’s just the technical aspect of photography. Photography is about the ‘art’ or ’soul’. The technical side is valid, but only as a means to an end. Having a super duper mega expensive camera is not going to make you a better photographer. I know that in my work, my style has not changed when I’ve changed to different camera’s.[sic]

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

Silver Efex Pro

Doing a lot of black and white, I thought I'd give Nik's Silver Efex Pro Aperture plug-in a quick trial. I'll be mischievous and say that like other so-called Aperture plug-ins, it's better described as a strap-on - it's an external editor that's launched from Aperture and which sends it a rendered tiff file. But the "integration" is smooth enough - you select some images in Aperture, choose the menu command Images>Edit With, and they're opened in the Silver Efex Pro's modal window.

Presets are down the left, a set of adjustment panels are down the right, and you can set up a Before/After comparison - all rather Lightroom-style. Adjustments mimic the effect of coloured lens filters, the colour sensitivity of well-known b&w film stocks, and control the level of grain. You also have dodging and burning via Nik's U-point, and various toning or split-toning effects. Overall, Silver Efex worked well enough, and I particularly liked how you can vary not just the grain size but also its softness (I always liked high acutance developers like Rodinal for the gritty look).

I do have doubts about how some credulous users are bound to imitate the supposed typical T-Max or HP5 tonality rather than focussing on making the image look its best - what I call presetitis in Lightroomspeak. As far as I can see, while there's a split Before/After view, there's no equivalent of how Lightroom lets you send the image's current state over into the Before area at any point - something I find really handy for gauging progress. I'm also not too keen on the idea that your adjustments don't apply to all the selected images and that you'd either have to repeat your adjustments on each picture, or save them as a preset and then go through applying the preset to each image in turn.

It's also $200.... I'm not sure if that's for a cross-platform licence or one that includes the Photoshop plug-in too. I suspect not. $200?

Also see comments at AUPN and Inside Aperture.

Permalink - Aperture -  0 comments

Reverse geocoding with iView or xMedia (updatad)

I'd overlooked Felix Andrew's article Geotagging with Microsoft Expression Media 2 but spotted it yesterday while checking out what's happening at Microsoft's Pro Photo Summit - wish I'd gone over again but have too much happening this month.

There wasn't anything new for me in the article, though I was amused one of Felix's examples uses leafy Dulwich, not by coincidence either. But what caught my eye was a link lurking down at the bottom of the article to learn how to install a custom GPS script. Wondering what that GPS script might be, I came across a handy little Windows script that automatically updates geotagged images with country and city information from geonames.org. The script missed out the states and location fields, but with a quick bit of hacking here's my version - Country State City Location from GPS.

The script's Windows-only, but creating a Mac variant shouldn't be too tough. Makes you wonder why Microsoft didn't include more such goodies in the Expression Media 2 release.

Update 24 July
I've updated the script to handle geonames.org's slightly inconsistent country / state / city / location hierarchy a bit more elegantly

Permalink - GPS -  3 comments

Ted Leeming

Ted Leeming has a lovely set of in-camera blurred landscapes:

The landscape. What appears solid and unchanging is in reality a story of movement and evolution. Nothing remains constant. This planet and all upon it is in a state of continuous transition, both seasonally and over the eons of time. By looking at the present we are also subconsciously reading the story of a past almost as long as the history of the earth. This body of work studies the elements at play that have formed the Inner Sense of the landscape as we know it.

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

First ladies

Political leaders' partners do have a pretty raw deal. If they're talented or outgoing personalities in their own right, like Hillary or Cherie, or Bill too, they get pilloried whenever they do express their own opinions - which are of no relevance anyway as no-one elected them. Alternatively, like Laura Bush, Norma Major, and whoever Gordon Brown's married to, they're forced to act as if we're still in the era long before women ever had careers or independent lives. And today's ultimate decorative first lady, Carla Bruni, seems to be forced to follow the latter route - though she's had a couple of careers long before she met Sarko.

But Mrs Ahmedinejad has clearly got it all worked out. Here's one presidential spouse who's doing her best not to overshadow her husband or be exploited for her looks - no hand in hand photo-ops in Petra or at the Pyramids. If it is her in there, that is.

Permalink - General -  0 comments

HoudahGeo

After my recent post on the Windows-limited Geosetter, I thought I'd take a look at the Mac-limited HoudahGeo which Richard mentioned in his comment on that post. I'd first heard about it in Lightroom designer Eric Scouten's post Geocoding Your Photos with Lightroom and HoudahGeo. It's certainly not as well-featured as Geosetter, and nor for all the hoo-haa on Houdah's site about Mac design principles is it any more elegant - except for one interesting aspect:

What this screenshot shows is one of the ways you can select images for applying GPS coordinates. It's a sort of File Open dialog box, but it's the inclusion of Lightroom catalogues that really caught my eye.

Unlike iDVD or other Apple applications which apparently, almost magically, use the Mac operating system to display the contents of iPhoto or Aperture libraries, it looks like HoudahGeo gets the images' locations directly from Lightroom's SQL databases and then displays their embedded thumbnails. While it would be nice to see the Lightroom-adjusted previews (which Marc Rochkind's LRViewer can do), that's not a must-have requirement. It also makes you think too, that either iLife integration via the OS is a little more mechanical than they make it sound, or thoughtful designers can readily replicate it, regardless of operating system.

Permalink - GPS -  2 comments

Big city walking

True story. Yesterday was indeed a lovely day, warm and sunny but with a fresh breeze, one of those Sundays when it is actually a pleasure to walk around central London. Next-to-no traffic coming into town, I'd shown off the new Beardymobile and picked up my friend Adrian from his office - I'm sure he does so little during the week he ends up working Sundays - and then we'd enjoyed a dim sum at Joy King Lau and caught up on our recent travels. Afterwards I felt like a walk, so instead of heading directly back to the car I'd marched up to Oxford Street, turned into Regent Street, and then hurtled down to Bond Street.

As I write this, the location has suddenly brought to mind the opening pages of Virginia Woolf's wonderful Mrs Dalloway - "I love walking in London", said Mrs Dalloway, "Really, it's better than walking in the country." I imagine her progress was much more stately and ladylike than mine - my normal walking style is a tourist-scattering power yomp - but yesterday afternoon I had exactly that sort of dreamy good-to-be-alive bounce in my metropolitan step.

Still, I was moving at quite a speed, and soon in Old Bond Street I spotted a smallish Indian guy meandering slowly in my path. Smartly-dressed, wearing a blazer, he could easily have been a chauffeur killing time. He didn't get in my way, though. Rather like on the autobahn when you see the fast-approaching headlights of BMWs and Mercs coming up behind you, he'd soon pulled over to one side and I had continued without breaking pace. As I'd passed I had heard him saying what sounded like "you're a lucky man", but nowadays you are so used to people apparently talking to themselves in the street that you probably wouldn't give a second thought if they had a Babelfish rather than a Bluetooth device in their ear. Maybe he was just talking to himself - I didn't turn to look.

The next one was crossing the road at the time and though I wasn't sure he it was directed at me, he certainly did say "you're a lucky man". It was a bit like a film from a scene - either I was about to be called upon to give Maria Sharapove the kiss of life or a grand piano was about to drop ironically on my head. He was also Indian. Some Hindu holy day perhaps, where you have to give out good wishes? The thought of checking Wikipedia when I got home had barely been chased out by the thought it was probably a scam - they were probably selling cheap suits or carpets - when it happened a third time. This one was stood right in front of me, cheerful too, and looking right at me as he blocked the pavement. My car was 30 yards away. Fuck 'em.

Permalink - General -  4 comments

Result

Had a surprising couple of days. Imagine you go along to a trade show, and just wander up to see if you knew anyone on the Adobe stand - a gentle bit of networking, nothing more. You ask why they're showing Lightroom 1 rather than 2's public beta, but apparently they weren't even showing version 1 - the speaker hadn't shown up and no-one on the stand knew the software. Then the Adobe guy starts to say if you do want to learn Lightroom.... Well, you respond, actually I.... Ooh - and 5 minutes later you're miked up and doing an impromptu presentation and Q&A.

Well, that's what happened on Thursday at the Digital Photo and Imaging Show at the Design Centre, Islington. I was there as a regular visitor and was then meeting a friend for a pint. I'd enjoyed a Hasselblad presentation and was fascinated by the H3D MultiShot which moves the sensor after each exposure. My initial thought was of those 19th century cameras which moved the lens or film back so that 4 pictures could be exposed onto a single sheet negative, but obviously that wasn't the concept. Moving the sensor 1 pixel at a time, right, down, left, then back up, an image is built up of 4 exposures - with each pixel recording red, green and blue values, rather than the standard RGGB mosaic. Its main application is in archival work, such as in the Vatican library, but I also wondered how far it is away from the mainstream where many current digital SLRs have mechanisms to shake the sensor for dust cleaning. Anyway, that was just a thought. I then stayed in my front row seat for Colin Prior's talk, and I can't remember what was next but that was when I thought I'd do my innocent bit of networking.

Unknown to me, the seminar area had been full for the earlier LR slot and there had been a "mini riot" or "mass exodus" when Adobe announced a PS Elements demo instead. I'll confess my presentation skills are rusty and date from my financial IT days, but I do "know my stuff", and no sooner had I disentangled myself from the cabling than the conference organizers were asking what I was doing on Friday. So yesterday, after three Lightroom presentations and Q&A's, each an hour long and unscripted apart from 20 bullet points scribbled on a notepad, I deserved a pint or two - and it was fun too.

Permalink - Lightroom -  5 comments

The generic photographer

Another surprise yesterday - I bumped into the photographer Richard Baker at the DPI Show. What's odd about that? Well, it is unusual if you live round the corner and you're used to bumping into eachother in Sainsbury's or in the street.

Richard's best-known for his great series on the Red Arrows, Britain's Royal Air Force Aerobatic team. Thankfully, we're not talking "aviation porn", but there's a more ironic approach and this picture seems typical of his best shots where the crowd is his subject and the aircraft are incidental. But until I looked up his site again this morning I didn't know he has been writing such a great blog England's Pleasant Pastures. From his visit to Olympic Land:

It doesn’t bode well. A clearly disturbed young man is carrying old orange Sainburys bags and deliberately barges into an elderly gent as he crosses the road outside Stratford station. The first edition of The Standard yaps: “Flasher judge shows court his briefs!” and the pensioner wobbles but stays upright. I help him to gather his balance and thoughts.

I am in Olympic pastures, the land of hope and sport, of pomp and circumstance. In five year’s time, thousands of destructive carbon footprints will tramp across the landscaped dreams of Lord Sebastian Coe and the Rt. Hon Tessa Jowell MP - the High Priest and Priestess of the XXX London Olympiad. Today, the IOC have arrived in town for three days of hard hats and canapés.

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

Creep

Brilliant piece of Flash animation here:

Creep is a music video of Radiohead's 'Creep' song. It took 3 months to create and contains over one million key frames. I know this because I counted them. I counted them because I made the animation and delivered every one of those mewling baby key frames.

Creep was created as an extension to a series of shorts called 'Low Morale' which I began to develop during a well-paid, comfortable yet soul-destroying job as a senior designer in a multimedia agency. The countless days spent in the run down converted office, churning out banal multimedia and animation for faceless, lifeless, clueless blue chips had taken their toll on my soul. Creep became my creative escape tunnel.

Via Gordophoto

Permalink - General -  0 comments

John Gravett

I've been waiting a while to make this post, but finally John Gravett has finally uploaded photos to his personal site. John's the photographic half of Lakeland Photographic Holidays and I spent a happy half hour playing spot-the-location. I didn’t do too badly - though I knew some from the 2 or 3 excellent weeks I've spent at LPH - but I wish he'd included details of where he’d shot some of the others!

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

Just because you can, it doesn't mean you should

Firefox 3 is out and it has colour management. Disabled by default, it's pretty easy to switch on, as this this Lightroom news post explains. But it's a bit like encouraging someone to drive without saying they should pay attention to other road users. While you can do it, the real question is should you?

Where I take issue is with the comment "Your Lightroom [I'd add - or other programs'] galleries and exports will now look better online." Sure, your galleries will indeed look better on your own screen, but that really isn't the point of the web, is it? It's how the pictures look on the visitors' screen that matters. Until you can be sure that a significant-enough proportion of your visitors is using colour managed browsers *, you're misleading yourself if you evaluate your site's appearance in your colour managed Firefox.



* As far as I can see in my own site logs, there's no way of seeing if a Firefox 3 browser is colour managed

Permalink - Lightroom -  6 comments

Nice and big

Recently I've felt my Pipex/Tiscali ADSL problems are making this blog like a Bridget Jones weightwatching diary or like King Charles I marking his children's height by notches on his silver walking stick. Diary entry June 22nd 2008 - 768kb on an 8Mb line. Must reboot router. Pull out cable.

At least this speed is just about usable for online radio, the BBC iPlayer, VNC connections, or Skype - well, one at a time - and for another site I reckon I'll start visiting every day. While I use their RSS feeds to keep an eye on big photojournalism sites such as Magnum or Reuters, their pictures are decently-sized for the old web. The Big Picture shows them nice and big, and like many good things it started as a personal project of its designer.

This shot is from a series on the fascinating mud volcano in Indonesia which was set off by gas company drilling. And though the screw-up's on a much smaller scale, I'm sure there must be a parallel here - if only Tiscali had kept their hands off my Pipex connection.....

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

Lost tribes

There's an article here on Edward Sheriff Curtis's photography of American Indians:

During those 30 years (twice the time he had originally planned for the project), Curtis visited more than 80 tribes, from the Apache to the Zuñi, and earned the personal support of the president, Theodore Roosevelt. He worked 15-hour days for months at a time, spent more than $1.5 million of his benefactor JP Morgan's money, was shot at four times, disowned by his brother, divorced by his wife, and went bankrupt. On returning from one prolonged trip into Eskimo territory he was thrown into jail for failure to make alimony payments.

Sounds quite an obsession. For many more of his photographs, go to The Curtis Collection.

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

Black and white

See the slideshow at When Images Galvanized the Nation:

If ever social change was propelled by photographs, it was during the civil rights movement. Burning buses and raised batons, snarling police dogs and blasting hoses, the young black girl in bobby socks and gingham trailed by a group of sneering white girls as she tried to enter high school — the images spurred a national reckoning in a way that words could not.

Behind the pictures are stories of smashed equipment and journalists beaten, of activists drawn south by images, of amateurs who picked up cameras for the first time.

And sometimes we think we have it tough with security guards or busybodies.

Permalink - Tripodophobia -  1 comments

Geosetter

For a while I've been playing around with GPS and geotagging. Without a real need, I've been happy just nibbling at it from various directions but for some reason in Italy I seemed to find time to try a bit of everything.

I've a little Garmin GPS unit that connects directly to the camera. After the wedding in Positano, I had time to look around the Amalfi coast and found a lovely location called Fiordo di Furore. Unfortunately the "fiordo" in its name means it's a deep cove that's well-sheltered from passing satellites. My other main location was Paestum with its Greek temples. Being in the midst of a mosquito-infested swamp (you should see my legs) it was much easier to gain a GPS signal and all should have been perfect for recording the coordinates directly into the image. But - and probably because it's a very basic unit - the signal kept dropping. I really couldn't be bothered checking the little GPS indicator on the camera each time I wanted to take a shot, and after a while I just disconnected it. So as usual I was left with a mixture of a few geotagged and many more untagged images.

Sure, I know I could always leave the GPS unit on as I wander around (and carry extra batteries), or I could capture various waypoints or whatever they're called. With something to connect the GPS to the computer, I could download the tracklog, and use something like ImageIngester to merge the log data into the NEFs or DNGs. I'm sure this process would work, but it seems more trouble than it's worth. So last week I hacked a tracklog in TextEdit, using the data recorded on a few Paestum frames, and applied it with ImageIngester. That worked, but satisfied my curiosity rather too easily.

What else have I tried? Well, over the weekend I also wrote a script for Bridge but found Adobe protects the EXIF fields - sensibly enough. I could have modified it to post coordinates to existing IPTC fields, but I don't really agree in principle with hijacking and abusing fields. Another alternative was to modify the script to write GPS data to my own private tags until such time as there's an agreed place for manual GPS entries, when I could probably copy the data over. But for now only Bridge, Photoshop, and Extensis Portfolio would have been able to read those tags - not Lightroom, Aperture, iView etc. And any of these methods would mean entering the GPS data manually. That was also the downfall of making yet another doomed effort at understanding the very thorough documentation behind Exiftool.

This seems so typical of my efforts with geotagging. I don't find it worthwhile enough to record GPS automatically, or at least consistently, but adding the information afterwards, which should work better for me, has also seemed too half baked (Expression Media 2's dragging and dropping onto a Virtual Earth map, which seemed so promising, is more a developer's ugly proof of concept than a polished feature fit for release) or too Heath Robinson like Exiftool. But it was after I got home yesterday when I was trying to make sense of Exiftool that I noticed a link to a program that a few people have recommended - Geosetter.

Whoo. It's rather good:

• A Google Earth window helps you identify where pictures were taken, and a button then applies the GPS coordinates to the image screenshot here.
• A particularly well-done feature is that you can choose by individual file type how Geosetter writes the information, so for raw files you can choose to write into the image itself or into a sidecar file, as I prefer, while for DNG I chose to write the data directly into the file.
• The other feature I really liked was Geosetter's ability to get the location information from Google and fill in the IPTC fields, and it's possible to copy those fields into the keywords too.

That done, you can drag images into Lightroom to initiate its import process or use Library's Metadata > Read Metadata from File to update existing images.

But I feel I've only scratched the surface of what looks like a really good program - and all the more reason to install Windows on my Mac laptop.

Read more...

Permalink - GPS -  9 comments

Ciao - a presto

Like a lot of photographers, when I'm planning a trip, I always browse a few sites to get some idea of the possibilities and QT Luong has a great range of locations.

This shot caught my eye when I was looking through his latest pictures. It's of Yosemite, which sad to say isn't where I happen to be going, but he also has shots of Positano and the Amalfi coast, and of Paestum.

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

4-6-0

Jonathan Wilson writes a thought-provoking article - at least if you're into footy - on the history of tactics and the end of forward thinking:

Five years ago, at the coaching conference he hosts in Rio de Janeiro, Carlos Alberto Parreira made a prediction that left the room stunned. Discussing how tactics might evolve, the coach who had led Brazil to victory in the 1994 World Cup, suggested that the formation of the future might be 4-6-0.

I wonder if I'd find it so convincing an argument if centre-forwardless Man United had lost out to Drogba-led Chelski? Necessity after all is the mother of invention.

Permalink - General -  3 comments

Scarred

Not sure when this was recorded - I suspect some time ago - but this interview with Don McCullin is worth a listen:

Somebody said, that a very famous war photographer - an American - said it to him many years ago. He said, 'I'm going to be the next Don McCullin.' And quite honestly, he's welcome to be where I was, he can't be me; but anybody's welcome to those laurels; they're rather kind of worn out and faded, those laurels; they've gone.

It's actually one of the more cheerful McCullin interviews I've heard.

Via

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

Dangerous snappers?

Bruce Schneier asks Are photographers really a threat?:

Except that it's nonsense. The 9/11 terrorists didn't photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn't photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn't photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid. Photographs aren't being found amongst the papers of Palestinian suicide bombers. The IRA wasn't known for its photography. Even those manufactured terrorist plots that the US government likes to talk about -- the Ft. Dix terrorists, the JFK airport bombers, the Miami 7, the Lackawanna 6 -- no photography.

I like a good rant! And I might add, we all know Osama and the 7/7 monsters did video....

Also see How to Shoot (Photographs) Like A Terrorist.

Permalink - Tripodophobia -  1 comments

What's the buzz?

For years they've been saying web-based office applications like word processing and spreadsheets are not far from becoming mainstream. Since they own Flash, Adobe look in a pretty good position to make this reality and the bundling together in Acrobat.com looks like an interesting effort. You've got Buzzword, a Web-based word processor, ConnectNow conferencing for up to three people, a PDF creator, and file sharing with 5GB of storage. Read more here:

What is clear is that Adobe hasn't been sitting idly by watching as services move to the cloud. This launch of a hosted suites of services, not to mention this huge shift with Acrobat 9, now a web-powered tool, shows the company's focus on combining the best of web office tools with their current set of products.

Even with all these new, integrated products and services, you still get the sense that these are all tools meant to enhance the Acrobat experience as opposed to an attempt to compete with traditional business software like Microsoft Office. If anything, their word processor seems like more of a way to begin the task of PDF creation - especially with the service's handy "convert to PDF feature" - than it is an attempt to be a Microsoft Word competitor.

All styled in a very Lightroom-like black. And with such a cute time-out screen.

Permalink - General -  3 comments

Life on Mars?

Curious about what sort of camera gear Nasa are using to photograph Mars? Well it's called the Robotic Arm Camera:

The RAC is a box-shaped imager with a double Gauss lens system, commonly found in many 35 mm cameras, and a charged-coupled device similar to those found on many consumer digital cameras. Two lighting assemblies provide illumination of the target area. The upper assembly contains 36 blue, 18 green, and 18 red lamps and the lower assembly contains 16 blue, 8 green, and 8 red lamps. The RAC has two motors: one sets the lens focus from 11 mm to infinity and the other opens and closes a transparent dust cover. The instrument's magnification is 1:1 at closest focus, providing image resolutions of 23 microns per pixel.

The pictures are here - and if you look closely, I'm pretty sure you can see where John Terry's penalty landed (couldn't resist).

Permalink - Photo links -  3 comments

Print Lightroom ratings as stars

It's always been an irritant that while Lightroom makes it easy to print contact sheets, it can only print the rating as a numeral, not as stars.

My own use of the DNG format means I go over to iView and can print adjusted thumbnails with starred ratings, but that's no use if you keep your pictures in raw format or don't have iView, and last week a pro friend asked me once too often to explain the workaround I'd devised for him a while back. It wasn't exactly complicated - generate jpeg files from Lightroom, get them in iView, and print the contact sheet from there. But when you're shooting 6-900 a day, 4-5 days a week, and processing them all yourself, you can only remember so many tricks and other things inevitably slip. There had to be an easier way.

During our conversation I came up with a Bridge-Lightroom solution which allows Lightroom (1 or 2) to print ratings as stars. I call it "pseudo ratings" because it converts the rating to asterisks and puts them into another field which you don't use (I chose the IPTC subject code) but which Lightroom can print. The main work is done by a Bridge script, but the zip file also contains my Lightroom print template (it inserts a line return under the filename).

It is still a workaround but is a lot more efficient - and even if I can't get Adobe to update LR2's Print so the workaround's unnecessary, I have something even better bubbling for LR2....

Read more...

Permalink - Lightroom -  2 comments

What becomes of the broken-hearted?

Don't know if John Terry's tears have dried up yet, but today, 5 days on, the drains are overflowing in this part of south London and there are puddles everywhere. Could be rain, I suppose. Anyway, Rod Liddle's always a good read and is another paid-up member of the schadenfruede school of football:

Ah, it was a great game, for all the good reasons that the serious commentators and pundits extolled....

I found myself slightly favouring Manchester United, but only in the sense that if there was a nuclear war between Saudi Arabia and Syria, I would slightly favour the plucky lads from Damascus. Not much in it, frankly.

But great though it was, it was made greater still by those things that decent, sententious people will insist marred the game. The spite, the scuffles, the misplaced hubris, Drogba’s endless sulky, pouting walk to the dressing room. Anelka’s insouciance. And then the blubbing.

And that's probably enough red propaganda for a while....

Permalink - General -  0 comments

London to Brighton

Down in Brighton yesterday (it's the annual festival), and during the afternoon we wandered round a few artists' houses, one of which was of a photographer Kit Fordham.

He does some lovely black and white and has currently got a show of his project on orthodox religion in the Slavic world. My favourite was one of his few colour pictures but I also very much liked this one - Brighton's such a wonderful subject for photography.

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

Cowboys

NT Times has an article on Robb Kendrick's tintype photographs of cowboys:

Mr. Kendrick estimates conservatively that he has covered more than 40,000 miles of often lonesome road in his pickup and visited more than 60 ranches, towing a trailer that he uses as a darkroom. The most recent version of this mobile darkroom, specially made for him by a Mennonite company in Indiana, is as high-tech as his wooden cameras are primitive; it has an iPod docking station, climate control and stainless steel countertops.

“When I’m doing tintypes, everything has to be driving, not flying — all the stuff for the developing is fairly flammable,” said Mr. Kendrick, who began to learn tintype techniques in 1999, after years of photographing cowboys with more conventional cameras and no toxic vats of potassium cyanide. “Fortunately for me I love driving,” he said, pausing before adding, “Thank God for satellite radio.”

Kendrick's own site has even more interesting pictures (I say "even more" perhaps because the noun "cowboy" has a less-positive connotation to us Brits). The site itself is nicely designed to reflect the content's historical leanings.

Via John Nack.

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

Expression Media 2

Dams are useful for holding back rivers of tears, but Robert Edwards' DAM Workflow Newletter (subscribe here takes a clear-eyed look this month at DNG 1.2 and Expression Media 2. There are hard-hitting but perfectly fair criticisms of the latter:

When Microsoft bought iView they were behind the eight ball because of who they are perceived to be. If it was an Adobe acquisition I imagine users might rejoice. Microsoft needs to work doubly hard to win loyalty amongst creatives. While unfair it is a fact. Releasing an update and telling patient users it is primarily a bug fix but pony up US$99 anyway is one thing. But when that update has bugs that prevent people using it is another thing altogether. One plus publicised by Microsoft for iView users is the large backroom of quality assurance engineers. So, where were they? This all gives ammunition to the Microsoft cynics.

I've stayed quiet about Expression Media 2 because I'm one of those who can't use it yet who expects a lot more of Microsoft. A service pack really can't come soon enough.

But don't these coincidences keep flowing? In 2006 I was speaking to a photographer's conference on iView at the very moment the embargo was lifted and I could announce the acquisition. Now where was that conference held? Oh yes, at Old Trafford.

Permalink - Photo management -  4 comments

It never rains but it pours

While drafting that last post, I almost wrote that whoever designed the Samsung ad was "no Tony Kaye" and I was thinking of one of Kaye's best pieces - the wonderful Dunlop tyres ad shown here.

As chance would have it, the Venus in Furs lyrics seem strangely appropriate to you know who:

"I am tired, I am weary.
I could sleep for a thousand years.
A thousand dreams that would awake me.
Different colors made of tears".

Permalink - General -  0 comments

Design that performs

You've got to love the recent Samsung ad campaign tied into their sponsorship of Chelski FC. It's utterly-unimaginative corporate guff and fully merits this ad site's deadpan description:

Four footballers in suits are shuffling about behind a television set in a photographer's studio, until the woman taking the photographs tosses a football at them. They respond by going into skilful action with the ball, and the new Samsung Series 6 is introduced as 'design that performs'.

Music - Unknown
Title - Unknown
Film Location - Unknown
Creative - Unknown

Creative - Unknown. Yes, that just about sums it up. But somehow I don't think this campaign's going to be with us for much longer, at least not with Anelka and Terry and the strapline "design that performs".

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A less triumphalist post

OK, I still haven't stopped grinning, but in today's Times Simon Barnes wrote a wonderful piece (safe even for Scousers) on the Lesson of John Terry's penalty misadventure:

There's many a slip twixt cup and lip and many a slip twixt boot and grass, as John Terry has to accept. I am no great lover of the penalty shoot-out, but if you have sufficient cruelty in your make-up - in other words, if you are an average human being - you cannot fail to find a hideous but fascinating revelation of character every time football stops being football and starts being Russian roulette.

The way of the shoot-out is to seek out not heroes but fools. More than any other device in sport, the shoot-out seeks only to belittle and diminish. There were three penalty misses at the end of the Champions League final between Manchester United and Chelsea and all three were deeply instructive of the hopes and illusions we had built about the penalty-takers.

Sports writing at its very best?

Also see the NY Times's match photos.

Permalink - General -  1 comments

A totally vicarious triumphalist post

Yes! And such fun driving home across south London with my United scarf flapping from the car window. My big memory of last night? Introducing my mate’s teenage daughter to the word “schadenfreude” as we laughed at John Terry’s tears. From childhood Man United fan who instead went on to being the captain and "the heart and soul of Chelsea" as ITV's commentator called him just as he walked up to take what would have been the decisive penalty. And then blubbing endlessly on the telly. Much as I do feel sympathy for Frank Lampard and for Avram Grant, we don't take prisoners.

Henry Winter:

United followers will observe that there was something fitting in Sir Bobby Charlton, that powerful testament to United's survival after Munich, leading the heirs to Sir Matt Busby's great tradition up to collect the European Cup. Terry and his vanquished team-mates were led up by [my words: the slimy and traitorous] chief executive, Peter Kenyon.

As always happens nowadays, lots of Photoshoppery is going round (some beauties here), so showing I can put my skills to good use, here's a little suggestion for Chelski's club shop:

Permalink - General -  5 comments

Aperture versus Lightroom

Ian Wood ( here too) has written an interesting and lengthy Aperture versus Lightroom 2 beta comparison.

He admits "Obviously I'm pretty biased towards Aperture (contributing to an Aperture blog, writing Aperture-related software, top-rated poster on the Apple discussion forum, posting on pretty well every Aperture-related forum on the net etc.), but I like to think I can put together a reasonably balanced list of pros and cons. The comments on those pros and cons, on the other hand, will be strictly personal... ;-)"

Fair enough - both in terms of sufficient knowledge and admitting up front to being an Aperture enthusiast. It's therefore hardly surprising that the choice of language supposedly describes the opposition's strengths yet carries a barb (it all reminds me of hearing Bill O'Reilly on Fox commend Kerry not for being more eloquent than Bush but as "more glib"). So I don't think I would have spun Lightroom's clear advantage in non-destructive local adjustments quite as "assuming you're happy using beta software and a warning that rendering of your images will probably change when the final version comes out." Probably? Maybe. Significantly? Well, in a few cases and for even fewer people. And once we're comparing released products? Then the caveat will be completely irrelevant and Lightroom's local adjustment advantage will be even clearer.

Let's look at another Lightroom advantage: "Cross-platform. This may be vital to you, it may have no effect whatsoever." There you go again. Let's rephrase this - one might say you're not forced to buy a Mac to use Lightroom, or you could say it as Aperture won't work on non-Mac computers. Cross-platform running doesn't sound so minor any more, does it? While anyone with any sense doesn't routinely move current work between platforms (I do so all the time), Ian's also looking "years down the line", and it really should be a big concern that the program you use to manage your archive is limited to one platform. Now, with a bit of thought you can reassure yourself that Aperture does allow you an appropriate exit strategy, but failure to run on both the major operating systems is not something that should be dismissed so lightly.

Again, is it really an advantage that Aperture has editing plug-ins? Of course, no-one's against plug-ins and the name harks back to a warm misty time before most of us used Photoshop and when, according to accepted wisdom, plug-ins helped Photoshop rise to its lofty position. Perhaps they did, but we're not in such a virgin wasteland any longer. Would you really pay $250 for Nik's Viveza for local adjustments, when Lightroom has it in the box? Isn't the existence of plug-ins bound to stunt development of similar features within Aperture? Short term gain, long term $pain?

"Bigger marketshare" is a Lightroom advantage, "but nobody seems to know by how much." Well, the last figures I saw indicated that, even when we gerrymander and only let shiny white Mac users in the voting booth, 2:1 were opting for Lightroom, while forum posts on pro-oriented sites show a much higher ratio. Share is, to some extent, irrelevant anyway - all you need is a sufficiently large support/learning ecosystem - but it's weak minded to dismiss it on the basis of ignorance of the balance. You're already finding many more learning resources for Lightroom and once Adobe addresses the wider market place you're going to find an awful lot more third party solutions for a cross platform application that has a bigger share of the whole market.

I do agree with some of the points. For example, custom fields should have been in Lightroom from day 1 and still aren't in the LR2 beta, LR2's smart collections remain more limited than Aperture, needlessly so, and Aperture has more flexible print layout and book output. I would also like Lightroom to allow scripting, though I disagree about its importance in a class of software whose raison d'etre is to process images in volume and eliminate much of the need for scripting and other ways of automating. Some other pros and cons are more or less irrelevant - eg what's the value of a full screen mode when you're covering it up with a tools palette? - or so down to personal taste that they have no value. And of course, the old modal canard is there and as off beam as usual - I do actually prefer Aperture's pre 2007 Microsoft Office style interface, but rename Lightroom's modules something like task-dedicated workspaces and you're putting a wholly different spin on the design, aren't you?

But more seriously, so much so that the comparison is unbalanced, is that Ian has made a big mistake in leaving out at least one Lightroom feature - Auto Sync mode. Some like me work in this mode almost all the time because you can select any number of images and then make an adjustment that applies to all selected pictures at once. In Aperture - and correct me if I am wrong - an adjustment only applies to the current image and you're then forced you to do a lift and stamp to apply that change to the others. You can work much faster with Lightroom's Auto Sync than you ever can with Aperture's lift and stamp two step.

Another big omission is adjustment presets. Ian rightly points out that you can apply these upon import in Lightroom, but the much more powerful application is that each Lightroom preset can contain adjust multiple parameters, while Aperture presets are still limited to just a single parameter. Again, you can get your work done much faster in Lightroom.

Ian also downplays another big disadvantage of Aperture. "Organisation within Aperture is mostly 'virtual' - it's not reflected in the Finder. Whether this is a con and never a pro I’ll leave you to decide for yourself." Now that's what I call a cop out. Of course, you can import your files into Aperture so that your projects mimic your folder structure, but after the point of import there's no guarantee that the catalogue and your drive structure remain in sync - this basic control goes up in smoke the moment you move a folder in Finder or move a project in Aperture. This leaves you wholly dependent on Apple's backup and on staying with Aperture. By comparison, Lightroom shows both the physical folders and virtual hierarchical structures (which are multipurpose too). While displaying the folders does lead some Lightroom users down the dead end of trying to use their folder structure to describe their pictures (eg wildlife/animals/big cats/), it also allows you to apply proper long term DAM principles of using your folder structure for a robust backup that's agnostic of platform and cataloguing software.

Of course, people like Ian or me can spin every feature each way we want, but we do agree on one thing - "The best advice, I find, is to download both the trial versions and set aside a solid block of time to test them heavily, making sure to watch as many tutorial videos as possible." That is the only way to decide.

Permalink - Lightroom -  21 comments

Data migration blues

As the blog postings may indicate, I'm no longer reliant on wifi connections at the local library or in the pub (which I'm missing so much that its proximity to the barber's has not been irrelevant to thoughts of getting a haircut this week).

But that's not to say my ADSL connection is back to normal. After my complaint got Pipex's high level support team interested, I got online again but with a connection speed that soon drifted down from a stately 288kb to an almost unusable 160kb. At least this team gets things done, and a few more "lift and shifts" at the exchange increased the connection speed to 660-700 kb at best, even if it is again down around the 512kb right now.

As far as I can tell, what's at the root of the problem is that Pipex were bought by Tiscali last year and they recently migrated their supposedly-captive customers off British Telecom equipment and onto Tiscali servers in the same building. Apart from possible hardware issues, Tiscali also seem to have a reputation for aggressive bandwidth management.

The changeover seems to have had another effect though - in migrating the data on us Pipex "Solo 1000" customers, they've forgotten that Pipex had upgraded us from a 1mb signal to 2mb. My suspicion was aroused when one of the BT line engineers said it looked like they were sending me a 1mb signal. So I raised this issue with Pipex earlier this week but I wasn't sure - annoyingly, I'd kept an earlier email that had ugraded my original 512mb account to 1mb, but not Pipex's email which announced the change to 2mb. I just had a vague memory of being pleasantly surprised that it had been done at no charge. Luckily, I found this post where a couple of customers mention the upgrade. What's more, their monthly charges correspond to the penny with what I'm paying. So when I speak to Pipex/Tiscali tomorrow....

I guess it shows me a couple of things. Even if the service provider's email announcements are just balls of fluff, it's still worth keeping them. Don't just remember the screw ups, document the kind offers and upgrades, just in case they forget. And secondly, I shouldn't have been so complacent - my monthly bill is now well above the market rate. So when I speak to Pipex/Tiscali tomorrow....

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New DNG specification

Adobe have released a new specification for the DNG format - see Lightroom product manager Tom Hogarty's post. Not sure I see support for multiple versions of images, but the most interesting details are a couple of hints about where this file format is allowing us to go:

• For those into profiling their cameras (of whom I'm not one). the specification now allows for custom camera profiles
• A metadata tag to validate image data is a good step forward from a DAM perspective. Over time, you change computers and drives, operating systems too, and might even store your pictures "in the cloud" one day, and systems like Lightroom shouldn't just help you add metadata and adjust your images, but should aspire to helping you look after your picture archive and verify its integrity.

There's also a somewhat-perfunctory release of a DNG Codec. It's only for Vista and won't install on Windows XP. It makes you wonder if Adobe would release something only for Mac's current Leopard operating system and not for the only-recently replaced Tiger? Obviously this codec has not been a top priority for Adobe but perhaps releasing it in such a fashion doesn't send out a good message for Adobe's Windows-using customers. Of course, it may just be that I'm a touch paranoid.

Permalink - Digital photography -  2 comments

Body of work

The Independent has an article and selection (look for pop up gallery) of Joachim Ladefoged's underexposed (pun intended) Scandinavian bodybuilders:

For me, personally, these people are all strangely photogenic. Bodybuilding is like theatre in many ways. The tan – which they use to cast shadows across their muscles, so they can be picked out easily on stage – makes them look haunting, or like they are from another planet. This is the case with the women especially, whose fake breasts are, funnily enough, the only way you can tell them apart from the men.

There's plenty to enjoy on Ladefoged's own site - see his series on Albanians.

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Guess where

Not sure where I found this link, but I like Pep Ventosa's collective snapshots so much that his description of the work has escaped being included in my artist's statements:

Each of these works is a composite of up to one hundred snapshots of the same subject matter, taken by me or others, layered or sandwiched together to build a brand new image. Combining these common shapshots, I look for some visual substance, some illusory underlying reality that takes us to a new visual experience.

Permalink - Photo links -  1 comments

Competition

It's not a secret that I find Lightroom the best application for reviewing, adjusting and applying initial metadata - I'd pretty well finished processing last weekend's 2,100+ raw files by Wednesday morning. Equally obviously, it's not the only program that aspires to manage and process large numbers of pictures. I'm immediately referring to the Mac-limited Aperture, but it's interesting to see others moving into this database+processing arena. There are hints of a SmartFlow from Microsoft, and Robert Edwards pointed out some of the features that are going to be in Bibble 5. Click one screen grab and you'll see the cataloguing system, click the other and there's local adjustment within the application (ie not via some pixel rendering plugin or Photoshop).

I can't shake off the feeling that right now there's no Manchester United that wins the DAM+P market with style - man, yesterday was so tense - but just a bunch of functional Chelseas (without the kleptocratic funding of course). Eventually a winner will emerge, but let's hope that there's plenty of competition between at least four teams.

Permalink - Photo management -  5 comments

Colour

Mike Johnston writes a thought-provoking article Color Junkies on the innate superiority of black and white:

Did you know that all those austere white stone buildings that have lasted from ancient Rome and ancient Greece weren't really white? Scholars think that, in their time, they were painted all sort of lurid colors. People love color.

[So] when you get a photograph you think might be a keeper, go into Photoshop and convert it to black and white.... This'll tell you something important. Because if it's not a picture in black and white, chances are pretty good that it's also not a picture in color, either.

Here's another picture from last weekend - and yes it's in colour. It works better in b&w too, though.

Permalink - Photo links -  2 comments