Watchers of the skies

I'm never one for seeing in the New Year - give me Christmas - and I know I've blogged before about London's grim New Year's Day parade. Just as I still get dragooned into staying up for Big Ben, the following morning I always seem to head into town to photograph the parade. Well, less the parade itself and really the participants as they arrive and get ready and when you can get close in and aren't fighting the crowd and the stewards. This year's parade played its usual freezing meteorological joke on the cheerleaders - always from Florida or Texas or other sun belt states, never from the icy wastes of Minnesota or Alaska.

Partly I just go because the roads into town are stunningly quiet, very like that recent BBC series Survivors, and it's a curiously-liberating feeling to walk straight down the middle of central London's usually-murderous streets. I just followed my nose - not least because the Embankment was still perfumed with the previous night's bursting bladders and the occasional splash of fresh vomit. 5 degrees colder and it would have been nicely frozen and nowhere near as strong a reminder of a British New Year....

And then I found the new Battle of Britain memorial, or rather the side of it which I hadn't seen from the road. The last decade or so has seen so many World War II memorials sprouting up round London - one in Whitehall to women in wartime, Bomber Command's got its own one round the corner, and the Aussies have one or more at Hyde Park Corner. I think I'd noticed the Battle of Britain one when I was driving along the Embankment last year, and from the road it's eye-catching - leaping out of the frieze are statues of airmen dashing to their planes. Yet when you're just driving by it's hard not to see it as yet another memorial - as if we have nothing else worthy of commemoration other than every conceivable facet of WW2. And don't forget that up at the top end of Park Lane there's also that memorial to animals in war.

So until yesterday morning, I hadn't thought more about it and was heading past it, towards Cleopatra's needle and the sphinxes. But this time I was on foot and had approached the memorial from the side facing away from the road. This was the other aspect of the Battle of Britain - the Blitz. Terrified Londoners watching the skies, air raid wardens covering their faces, anti-aircraft gunners barking out orders. It's a lovely memorial (by Paul Day).

Is there a moral to this story? Well, not intentionally. But I guess it has to be that even if you are also a New Year partying killjoy, forcing your grumpy self to get out there with your camera is a pretty good way to kick off the year. Happy shooting.

Permalink - My photography -  1 comments

Grim up North

Vertical rain on the Saturday, then a tripod-shaking wind and horizontal rain on the Sunday, my Lake District trip didn't get off to the best of starts. And, as if the days weren't short enough, for the rest of the time undramatic grey clouds and a drab mist didn't make photography any easier until I headed for Manchester on Christmas Eve. I'd still say the glass was half full though - Derwentwater being so high, you find trees which are only interesting because the shore is flooded, the scene changes each day, and elsewhere you can always find more abstract details which you overlook when the weather's more helpful. And there was always the Copper Dragon in the local.

Permalink - My photography -  0 comments

Make love not war?

From the school of beard-killing cigars and empire-building baubels, 'Viagra lure' for Afghan warlords:

America's CIA has found a novel way to gain information from fickle Afghan warlords - supplying sex-enhancing drug Viagra, a US media report says. In one case, a 60-year-old warlord with four wives was given four pills and four days later detailed Taleban movements in return for more.

"Whatever it takes to make friends and influence people," the Post quoted one agent as saying."Whether it's building a school or handing out Viagra."

Sometimes a news story seems too good to be true, yet is also so good you wonder why it's not front page news. In this case it must be post Russell Brand prudery - after all, while a new Toyota truck or ice-dispensing fridge may be a dead giveaway, how will the Taliban expose these collaborators?

Permalink - General -  0 comments

Echoes from canvas

We English is a fascinating blog by photographer Simon Roberts - you may have seen his excellent monograph Motherland depicting post Soviet, pre-muscular Russia.

He's recently been round the London galleries and looking at the Dutch landscape masters:

The work of artists such as Van Ruisdael were executed in a way that also informed my aesthetic gaze. I admire the muted tones of colour, the deceptive flatness of a scene, the way in which individual figures are both dwarfed by and are vital to the landscape around them; even Ruisdael’s preoccupation with local landscape formations, such as dunescapes, must have created for his viewers a sense of recognition and shared regional history. It seems that Ruisdael’s romantic sensibility is successfully assimilated into realistic, recognisable landscapes and this was my intended way of working too.

As well as the Dutch landscape masters cited by Simon, the matchstick-like people in his post on The beauty of Bialobrzeski's Heimnat reminds me of one of my favourites. LS Lowry however also makes me wonder whether We English shouldn't be "we southerners and we Northerners". At least that's how I'd see it, so it should be interesting to his pictures next year.

For me too, paintings as well as photographs have always impacted my photography, whether by a thought flashing through my mind at the point of releasing the shutter, or by a compositional similarity that emerges later on screen. Sometimes these fraternal recognitions seem contrived, as when I see a wintry landscape's echoes of Caspar David Friedrich, though in other cases they arrive involuntarily when I simply don't have time to think - at a re-enactment last May a cavalry attack on a pikeman instantly recalled Uccello's St George and the Dragon. While I don't pretend that the influence of painting on photographers is at all uncommon - for instance see Magnum blog's recent Surfing the archive contest - it is certainly the way I feel I take pictures. To add another twist to a comment in Vermeer'esque lighting or the Munch'ian emotion, "if it's not good enough, you've not had enough dates in the Met or the Tate".

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

The grass is always greener?

Rob Boyer's All Things Photography blog includes Aperture tips and has also ventured into the dangerous waters of direct Aperture versus Lightroom comparisons. While overall Rob's about as fair and balanced in advocating Aperture as I am in preferring Lightroom, some judgements fall in Lightroom's favour. For instance, see his comparison of Aperture and Lightroom keywording:

[In Aperture] you can do crazy stuff like running scripts that smash the entire hierarchy into each of your images based on the specific keywords but that sort of defeats the purpose. Lightroom on the other hand will export the entire hierarchy for each specific keyword, but wait there's more, for each and every keyword Lightroom let's [sic] you specify whether or not to include the parent keywords and... whether to export it at all.

...Score a big win for Adobe Lightroom 2 versus Apple Aperture 2 when it comes to keyword functionality.

While I think his conclusion is right in this case, it shows a couple of dangers of such comparisons.

One is that it's easy to have misconceptions about how people actually use "the other" program's better features. Lightroom's keywording is so very flexible that a lot of people are led to abuse its power, exploiting the feature to add keywords which do not describe the image. So I've heard plenty of cases of people including workflow-related keywords like "not done", "developed", "final", or including stock agency names as not-to-export keywords. Worse still is when they're encouraged to exploit Lightroom's keywording in this way without always understanding that it is a workaround for proper database and cataloguing features. While the keyword-abusive approach can certainly be made to work, sooner or later someone forgets to tick that do-not-export box, there's a need to exchange metadata with another app, or the export flag is misread by a bug in a new version's upgrade process. Suddenly you've got private keywords, custom metadata, getting into files exported from the system, and your filters and smart collections are picking up items with "workflow keywords" when they're supposed to target proper, descriptive keywords. Isn't any workaround always destined to be a dead end?

Rob's post is also a great example of the dangers of considering a single feature in isolation, because while Lightroom's keywording may well be better than Aperture's, the feature's flexibility allows Adobe to get away with failing - unlike Aperture - to include a proper custom field feature, which is where custom metadata really belongs.

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  11 comments

Excess (British?) baggage

I don't know the ins-and-outs of listening to BBC radio outside the UK, but BBC Radio 4's Excess Baggage Dec 27th visits a postcard fair with Martin Parr.

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

Best of the best

There are lots of "best of" lists at this time of year, but for me one of the best is Big Picture's best 100 photos of the year - parts 1, 2, 3.

Some such as a suicide bomber's foot are so gruesome they're only visible if you click a link, while others such as the Peking Olympics are probably familiar. I just love this angelic image of a diver.

Permalink - Photo links -  1 comments

Lakeland Noir?

Landscape photographer Nick Green (also here) has the good fortune to live in the Lake District but backs it up with what seems a detailed knowledge of the region's more obscure corners. Everything's from Wherethefuckisthatdale, and while there is an Ullswater boathouse, I don't think there's one photograph of Ashness Bridge, Keswick landing stages, or Derwentwater's jetties (though that may be because his Northern Fells gallery isn't working). Two dogs provide even more excuse to get outdoors with the camera and are ready-made props, so maybe there should be a new saying, "photographing two dogs with the same stone". It's usually one near Helton Fell, wherever that may be.

It's too easy to make the Lake District look green and pretty, but Nick's style is darker - even his sunsets are set against brooding, stormy skies. Particularly interesting is his use, unusual for landscape photography, of off-camera flash. At first you think he's been lucky to catch a shaft of light which has fallen on the fence post, rocks or sign in the foreground, or else it's as if the gate or wall is lit by car headlights to create a more furtive appearance. "Lakeland Noir"?

A nice touch is his new Lakes Photographer's Toolkit.

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

Keeping CS4 Help local

One thing I dislike about Flash CS4 - and in CS4 apps generally - is how ActionScript's Help is launched in a web page, LiveDocs. Apart from the time loading the page, LiveDocs generally has few comments of any value, and it's not much good when you're not online.

As I'll be in the Lakes from Saturday and might want to fine tune the Flash site from Hell, I thought there must be some way to download the Help. Turns out there it's even easier than that:

...You can also access the local copy by telling Flash to "keep you offline":

Go to Window > Extensions > Connections. In the panel that pops up, click the arrow at the top-right and select "Offline options". From there you can check the box for "Keep me offline". It will then always default to using the offline help. However, it may also prevent you from using any other panels which call out to the internet, such as Kuler.

Via a comment here

Permalink - Computing tips -  2 comments

Unplugged

Launching a Flash site has always been a background project - it's not as if I'm unhappy with the current site - and it's pretty easy to find a reason to keep it in the garage and keep tinkering away. Learning ActionScript3 was the latest reason for such delay, but I've convinced myself it was probably the right move. Just like that Iraqi reporter didn't target Dumbo Bush with old sandals but chose his latest genuine Timberlands, it would feel a shame to launch an ActionScript 2 version. Even now, when I feel I've cracked ActionScript 3, I'm sure I'll find other reasons for delay - that light at the end of the tunnel could always be a fast-approaching train.

Still, intense beavering-away does sometimes deliver fruits ready for public display. I already had some Flash-based galleries on this site, all based on SlideShowPro and ActionScript 2. They were all powered by Director, SlideShowPro's online content management system, and adding new images was a simple matter of running a Lightroom export and choosing which album to target.

I had a couple of less-edifying but more-visual reasons for switching these to ActionScript 3. A big one was that with a single line of ActionScript 3 you can make a Flash movie colour managed - see John Nack's post (for this to be visible, the visitor has to be using a colour-managed browser and the Flash Player 10).

Secondly, I liked the look of SlideShowPro's new ThumbGrid component. It's a $24 add-on to the SlideShowPro Flash component, replacing the built-in navigation, and it is only for ActionScript 3. See how it works here.

The only regret about not launching the fabled Flash site has been its stubbornly-constipating effect on putting new pictures online. So for an example of ActionScript 3 + colour management + ThumbGrid, see the mostly-new American Civil War gallery.

Permalink - My photography -  4 comments

If you're looking for reasons to use Bridge....

Let's say you have a bunch of raw files adjusted with Adobe Camera Raw, and you want to make a load of JPEGs. It's not a novel nor a difficult task - Lightroom's export function is designed for the job, or if you're using Bridge you might reach for the Image Processor which runs the files through Photoshop. Another Bridge-based solution would be to open all the raw files in Adobe Camera Raw, select them all and hit the Save button.

In each case, your poor computer is having to create the JPEGs by processing all that raw image data. But because it is doing so, you can at least be sure that the JPEG output does reflect all your Camera Raw adjustments.

But it is not quick, and it is a pain when Lightroom or Bridge has already done the hard work of updating thumbnails and previews (particularly when you think that Lightroom now updates Bridge's Camera Raw cache).

A new option is Bridge Export to JPEG (it's called BridgeExportToJpegCS4), a script by Adobe's David Franzen which he has significantly extended for Bridge CS4, adding presets, metadata and colour profile options. Its beauty is that, rather than reprocessing the raw images, the script uses the previews which Bridge has already rendered and stored in its cache. So, if you already have updated thumbnails and previews, it's light years quicker than the other options.

Permalink - Photoshop -  0 comments

Humpty dumpty

How bloody annoying. Yesterday, rather than renew my annual hosting agreement, I was switching to another package. While staying with the same host, their more modern platform costs less, and has better email handling and PHP5, which I "need" to play with SlideShowPro's API. The cunningly-devised plan was to get all the html, images, email settings, and databases working on the new platform before switching off the old one.

Unfortunately someone misunderstood the words "IMPORTANT - REFER TO XYZ (the guy at the host who handles the account) DO NOT SWITCH THE DNS SETTINGS UNTIL CUSTOMER REQUESTS". OK, I was as long-winded and ambiguous as ever, and most of all I was foolish enough to enter those words in a box called "Special instructions". Naturally enough, they were completely and enthusiastically ignored, and just an hour after signing up I had lost access to my old web space and had a 24-48 hour wait before the new web space would go live.

Not by luck, I had absolutely everything, including the mySQL databases, backed up to my PC. It will take a while to upload everything, but I've already hooked up the database-driven stuff like the blog and most of the pictures. I am lucky that I can handle it all myself. Yet thinking back to the recent Digital Railroad fiasco, can say the same about your online property?

Normal service will be resumed....

Permalink - This site -  0 comments

Trojan horses

Not long ago I almost linked to Micah Walter's Inside Aperture article Seeing RED. He's now doing more video and is having problems managing the new file types:

What would save my day would be Aperture. If only Aperture supported AVCHD (and many of the other tapeless formats) I could import my AVCHD card just like I do with my DSLR. It could import any stills from my HD camera, as well as all of my native clips. It could allow me to preview my clips, maybe even set in and out markers and I could select a batch of clips and still frames to send off to Final Cut Pro for production. Final Cut could be responsible for converting the clips to QuickTime format (or not) and everything would just be in one place in an Aperture project.

Can't recall why I didn't link to it - probably because he is explicitly talking about "proper" digital video - but now it's worth comparing with Sean MacCormack's post Video and Lightroom:

In these days of convergence, where 2 of the newest DSLRS offer HD video recording capabilities (albeit basic), and almost every compact has some kind of video mode, I'd like to see Lightroom support Video. At minimum, I'd like it to import the video with my images. Preferably, I'd like to be able to playback the video and perhaps add basic metadata (copyright, keywords etc). I have no expectations of being able to edit video, or even work on colour, brightness etc. I just want to have my video managed with my images.

What we're seeing is the start of a battle for the soul of Aperture and Lightroom. Yes, I know that sounds almost as ludicrously-hyped as the Strictly Come Dancing judge saying John "the dancing pig" Sergeant had made the show a laughing stock, but both Aperture and Lightroom users fall into two distinct camps over this issue. On the one side are those who only see the Aperture and Lightroom as Photoshop substitutes for the DSLR era. And on the other are photographers who need a tool for photographers - which need not be limited to photographs.

I have negligible interest in video - photography's decisive moment satisfies me much more than video's hoovering-up process - but I've always been very much in the latter camp. As part of photography-centred projects and tasks, I might have PDFs such as contact sheets or layouts, Word documents such as correspondence or invoices, sound clips to include in the DVD of a wedding shoot, while it's crazy that Lightroom can send to Photoshop HDR merging yet be unwilling to manage the 32 bit output files.

I'm very much a believer in database-powered applications for managing picture collections, so the solution isn't Bridge, much-improved though it is, as it remains a Windows Explorer or Finder with knobs on, which can only ever tell you where files happen to be now, not where they should be. So I've always wanted Lightroom to be an iView with raw processing, not a narrowly-pretty face for Adobe Camera Raw.

I'm not sure if proper video and the convergence issue are a pair of Trojan horses (these are the days of Boris says teach yobs Latin and Greek and Obama's classical oratory) or perhaps they are twin battering rams? Either way, wheel them up, now please.

Update - 5-6 comments were lost during my web site changeover. They were both pro and against.

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  0 comments

Likely suspects?

Just heard this on BBC Radio 5 and couldn't let it go unreported - these knockers will knock you out...:

Kampala - Uganda's police warned male bar-goers to keep their noses clean after a probe found a gang of robbers had been using women with chloroform smeared on their chests to knock their victims unconscious. "They apply this chemical to their chest. We have found victims in an unconscious state," said Criminal Investigations Directorate (CID) spokesperson Fred Enanga.

No doubt this is one crime which the police are enthusiastic to look into.

Permalink - General -  0 comments

For Our Ears Only

Tack Sharp might turn out to be one of the more interesting photography-related podcasts with the always worthwhile and restless James Duncan Davidson (who went from Aperture to Lightroom and has now added a D700 to his Canon gear) being joined by Dan Benjamin who's a new name to me but who also also uses a D700. And in the first edition, they do mention the D700 once or twice....

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

Customizing Bridge CS4's Metadata panel

A week or two ago I posted an example here of a custom panel for Bridge CS4's File Info dialog (in fact I just updated that post after finding an Adobe error relating to where to install custom panels on Mac). But it's worth saying that as well as using the much-improved Bridge, if you want to display custom metadata in the File Info dialog it means... displaying the File Info dialog - And that's a touch tedious when you just want to check one custom field's value and when Bridge's main window already has a perfectly good Metadata panel.

So in that post's only comment I wasn't too surprised when "some guy" asked if it was possible to make it show custom metadata. While I answered no, I was pretty sure that wasn't the case, and it turned out to be as easy as copying the properties.xml file from my existing File Info panel, and dropping it in a new folder called "custom":
- on PC: "C:\Document and Settings\\Application Data\Adobe\XMP\Custom File Info Panels\2.0\custom"
-on Mac: "/Users//ApplicationData/Adobe/XMP/Custom File Info Panels/2.0/custom"

The nice thing about this is that you can easily group metadata from various sources, so in my panel there's a grouping of fields from Expression Media's namespace and some from Lightroom/Bridge. You can easily mix ACR or GPS or IPTC or EXIF into this alphabet soup - it's only XML as the Groaning OAPs would put it. The panel is now included in my CS4 File Info panel for Expression Media metadata.

I have to reflect though. While it's good to be able to display any XMP-based metadata in Bridge, should one really have to know XML to do so? I could ask exactly the same of Lightroom 2 too, because custom metadata fields are still only available if you're prepared to put on your wellies and wade around in Lua. As a result, Adobe users jump through hoops adding to their keywords all sorts of information which really should stay private. By contrast, for ages Extensis Portfolio has let normal users set up custom fields and read/write to XMP namespaces, and even the XMP-allergic Aperture has offered custom fields them since day 1 (see Ian Wood's post here). In short, why do Adobe assume Joe the Ever So Slightly Pointy-headed Photographer won't set up and exploit custom metadata fields?

Permalink - Photo management -  1 comments

Topless

Oxford University Press has announced its 2008 Word of the Year, though I don't get how the worthy "hypermiling" was chosen instead of another finalist, the wonderful "topless meeting"....

.... for a meeting where no-one can have open laptops, and where blackberries and phones are banned. I remember a meeting last year at which every one of the 12-15 participants, or at least attendees, hid behind a laptop screen and a year and a half, and a full software version later, I still struggle to see what was actually achieved.

Via

Permalink - General -  0 comments

So that's what's up there

Just doing a little research for my next trip to the Lake District (at Christmas), I came across Martin Lawrence's site which has lots of images from the area. He generously includes notes on where pictures were taken and how to reach the locations, and his photographic locations around Keswick gave me a couple of ideas. This view is a short walk from a gateway I must have driven past dozens of times and wondered where it led.

That's one Christmas walk sorted.

Permalink - Photo links -  3 comments

Teleology, the word for today

Was down in Chichester on Thursday to see my re-enactment pictures in the son et lumiere celebration of the cathedral's 900th anniversary. Visually, it was a lot more impressive than this handheld ISO6400 snap, and 9 centuries of history were well-packed into a couple of hours without ever falling into the lazy "kings and queens" school of pop history. I would have expected to have been more interested in the medieval and early modern aspects, or simply the cathedral's architectural history, but what really caught my attention was the story of Bishop George Bell who spoke up throughout the second world war against carpet bombing of German cities:

"... to condemn the infliction of reprisals, or the bombing of civilian populations, by the military forces of its own nation. It should set itself against the propaganda of lies and hatred. It should be ready to encourage the resumption of friendly relations with the enemy nation. It should set its face against any war of extermination or enslavement, and any measures directly aimed to destroy the morale of a population.

That was written in 1939, long before Hamburg, Dresden and Berlin, but he expressed his views consistently throughout the war. Most interestingly, he did so publicly, and I would have included later quotes, particularly his 1944 House of Lords speech if I'd been able to find its complete text (still looking). I have always been drawn to the other paths history could have taken (collateral damage from learning the horrid word "teleological" when I was in my late teens) and the dissenting view, yet like most people I still tend to think of the second world war through the Churchillian telling and the drive to 1945. You forget, or at least dismiss as fascist sympathizers those who had argued at various times for peace talks, while those like Bell who took a more pacifist line are brushed into obscurity by modern furores over Bomber Harris statues. That doesn't mean I think he was right, but it's interesting to know prominent members of the establishment spoke out. History's always more messy than you might think.

Permalink - My photography -  0 comments

A Lightroom podcast

A quick pointer to Image Doctors podcast for November 13th which is on Lightroom 2.0 and is essentially a 45 minute interview with Tom Hogarty, Lightroom's Product Manager.

You can see one of the presenter's Yosemite pictures here - most aren't as artificial-looking as this one though.

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  4 comments

Old jokes

Next time you hear a joke you think you've heard before, he's the ultimate in recycled humour:

An ancestor of Monty Python's famous Dead Parrot comedy sketch has been found in a joke book dating back to Greece in the 4th Century.

Philogelos: The Laugh Addict, which has been translated from Greek manuscripts, contains a joke where a man complains that a slave he was sold had died.

"When he was with me, he never did any such thing!" is the reply.

Big Picture has a great series of pictures of US soldiers in action in Afghanistan and the one of a howitzer shell exiting the barrel would be worth a link on its own. I just wonder, though, whether this photo isn't proof that the Pentagon has a joke so deadly it can kill....

Permalink - General -  1 comments

Frank Grisdale

Following a few links from William Neill's blog, looking for examples of in-camera blurs, Frank Grisdale has the kind of northern English surname that I just had to click, even if he is somewhere in N America. Once I'd silenced the music, I then found how to stop the pictures advancing automatically - too much like a moving walkway rushing you through a major art exhibition. And then I could enjoy the pictures at my own pace.

They're an intriguing selection of soft painterly effects, many sharing an earthy or autumnal palette. Some seem to have camera blur or soft focus, while others look like they're been distressed or sandwiched with various textures. Lovely stuff - and his aim is to reach his artistic peak around the age of 90.

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

ProShow and Lightroom

I've had ProShow Producer for a year and intended to use it to prepare a multimedia slide show of a wedding I recently shot at Cliveden. And just in the nick of time, there's now a ProShow Plug-in for Lightroom. It's another export plug-in - these things are beginning to pile up, aren't they?

As Proshow is still Windows-only, surprisingly, here's a screenshot so Mac users know roughly what the plug-in does (I often hear Mac converts who miss ProShow). You set a range of ProShow parameters such as transition style, and titles, captions and copyright information from the catalogue's metadata. Lightroom then generates JPEGs, and starts up ProShow with the slideshow built. You can then add other features and edit the show before burning it to DVD, Blu-ray, Flash, YouTube, iPod, Blackberry....

It seems pretty neat. As I'd like to do something fancy for the wedding, I'll be giving it a severe test over the next week or so.

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  1 comments

CS4 feature? Or bug?

On a related subject, there's a very important gotcha in Bridge/Photoshop CS4's File Info dialog.

Essentially, within File Info, ACR settings are no longer protected, and appending or replacing metadata can also erase or replace existing ACR settings. It happens when you use File Info's Import button to select a metadata template, and the user is not specifically warned that this will happen - the first sign can be when your adjusted thumbnails start to update with new ACR settings.

For details of how the dialog is designed to work, see Gunar Penikis. Fortunately, in Bridge's main window, the Append and Replace Metadata menu commands work as before and do respect existing ACR settings.

I find it hard to see this as a feature, and I've no doubt it will catch out some people. Then again, when was the last time you used File Info in Photoshop, or even in Bridge, to apply metadata? And, for all its big improvements in CS4, when was the last time you used Bridge?

Permalink - Photoshop -  2 comments

CS4 File Info panels

One annoyance of Photoshop/Bridge CS4 is that it won't read any existing custom File Info panels. These let File Info display XMP metadata from other applications such as iView or Expression Media, and they were written in a text file format which was reasonably easy to create and edit. In CS4 though, the panels are Flash-based and at first glance it looks like you would need to buy Flex Builder for the job. Uh-oh, not another solution for developers who need paying, rather than users who know what they need and might hack their way there?

I don't really have the energy or interest to learn Flex, certainly not ahead of current efforts to learn ActionScript 3 for my Flash site, Lua for some Lightroom ideas, or ahead of getting my beauty sleep (I don't need too much of that). But look at Gunar Penikis's last paragraph here:

Hey guys relax. CS4 does not support reading CS3 panels - the reason for this is that the old format is pretty crufty and the energy would be better spent on building a really flexible UI. So we chose Flex (Flash) to base the panels on. The SDK is available at: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/xmp/

Note that you don't have to buy Flex Builder but it does make life easier.

Most importantly there is a sample in the SDK call "Generic Panel". This is a panel designed specifically to read an external XML file of properties and display them - similar to the way the old File Info worked. Since it is XML based you can use your favourite freeware XML editor to build your panel with. The XML format is pretty simple, especially if you are used to the old panel layout language.

Adobe have been very smart with this Generic Panel. It's a compiled SWF file, so you don't need Flash or Flex, and you just have to know your way around XMP namespaces and be happy editing XML. It's not a lot more than copying namespaces and field names from File Info's Advanced panel, and pasting them into the properties.xml file using an XML editor such as something like MS XML Notepad:



In the above example I'm calling Expression Media's namespace, and then defining a File Info text box which displays the Catalog Sets metadata. If you're familiar with this type of thing, it's pretty easy stuff, and you'll just need the File Info SDK at the bottom of this page.

I've put online my CS4 File Info panel for Expression Media metadata (donationware). And here it is, showing a panel which combines metadata which one would typically add in Lightroom, such as the keywords, and Expression Media metadata such as the Catalog Sets or custom fields.



UPDATE:
On PC, put the panel in C:\Document and Settings\username\Application Data\Adobe\XMP\Custom File Info Panels\2.0\panels.
On Mac, put the panel into the Mac's Library/ApplicationData/Adobe/XMP/Custom File Info Panels/2.0/panels/, not in the user's Library area /Users/username/ApplicationData.... There's a bug somewhere - in the panel, in Bridge, or in the documentation.

One last thought is that Flash/Flex does enable much fancier and more powerful panels. I can imagine it's possible, for example, to access the Google Maps API and display a map inside the Bridge or Photoshop File Info panel (update: yes we can). Whether anyone will take advantage of this change, only time will tell.

Permalink - Photoshop -  3 comments

Yes he did

At first it was I'll come to bed at 1, then 2, and by 3 the insomniac in me had kicked in and come what may I was staying up for the result and Obama's speech. I'd just forget about sleep and roll straight on to breakfast. As much as great oratory has its elements of guff, for better or worse it's the great orators who you know at the time are destined to go down in history. Blair caught the moment in 1997, as had the dreadful Margaret Thatcher, Reagan too, but you don't recall a word of Bush's acceptance speech, Brown's or Major's either, do you? But this speech (worth reading as well) was bound to be one of those moments you always remember.

Shame McCain wasn't as civilized throughout the campaign as in his concession speech ? all his "fight fight" stuff only seemed to make him look even more like a get-your-ball-off-my-lawn angry grandpa, while all his "I know how to (fill in blanks)" only made you wonder why the old bloke didn't just help everyone out and say exactly where Bin Laden's hiding or how to fix the world economy.

Anyway, finally went to bed at 6 and woke up at 9 - might make this evening a write off! Watching much of the night flicking over to Fox somehow reminds me of John Terry and his Moscow tears - what a year, Obama wins the presidency and United do a league and European Cup double. Not very conciliatory, I know, but that's footy.

Permalink - General -  10 comments

Reds and blues

There's been so much multi-channel 24 hour news coverage of today's US elections that I'm almost surprised we in the 51st state aren't voting too. One thing that worries me is the long lines outside polling stations. I can't remember ever queuing to vote in one of our elections, even those which seemed momentous like Blair-Major in 1997. So why so many reports of 4 hour waits? Is that considered normal over there, and is it merely a case people being so determined to make their votes count this year? Or are there simply not enough voting places in certain parts of town? And why should that be? Certainly it would seem one heck of a deterrent. Let's hope it's just enthusiasm - at least this time there are two candidates both intellectually up to the job.

The worst bits seem to have been exclusively Palin-related. While one hears about Biden gaffes, you can dismiss them as coming from a VP candidate, but I've always thought that Palin made McCain look aging and more vulnerable. That's much scarier when - regardless of my not agreeing with her conservative Christian anti-abortion politics - it's pretty obvious she knows far too little about world affairs to be that close to power. Add to that the tenuous, at best, linking of Obama to 1960s terrorism, and the shameful insinuations that some parts of America are un-American. Let's hope for a Dante-esque punishment for her sins and that Father Time puts a few pounds on her hips and makes her look like a proper pitbull.

By contrast the highpoints for me have been McCain dealing with the woman who objected to Obama as an Arab, and the charity dinner. Apart from showing the two candidates' had a good measure of mutual respect, isn't humour - rather than the soporific play-safe presidential debates - a much cleverer way to make a political point?

And from a purely graphical point of view, another highpoint has got to be the Obama logo? Sun rise over the ploughed fields or stars and stripes. Stand up and take a bow, Sol Sender.

So vote - whichever way, but hopefully for Obama.

Permalink - General -  4 comments

Percentage shares

Tom Hogarty updates the what pros use for raw file conversion comparison. Both Lightroom and Aperture increase their share, Lightroom leaping 50% on 2007 and Aperture a respectable 36%. Among Mac users only, Aperture's share is static though, indicating the overall increase is due to people shifting to the Mac.

Of course, using one of the newer generation tools doesn't mean you don't use Photoshop as well, and there's only a small drop there. These stats, though don't reflect how much people are using each application, and wouldn't it be interesting if one could gather similar stats which reflected time spent working with each program, or even the numbers or proportion of images? You'd have to expect Photoshop usage would be impacted much more. So, just after the release of CS4, I'm sure a lot of people are wondering CS4: What's in it for Photographers?.

One CS4 feature I really like is content aware scaling. It's a thing of genius, letting you squeeze an image into a layout, squashing the image areas with less detail and yet protecting those where there is important detail. I've slightly overdone this example, but you can see how the car is barely affected by compressing the image into a more square format. The feature's very easy to use, and perhaps some would find it hard to imagine when they would use it, but for others it's going to be a very popular feature indeed.

The picture's from Sunday's London Brighton Veteran Car Run. Taken at 7am on a dark, wet November morning, it was shot on the Nikon D700, handheld, and with the ISO set to Auto. In this case, ISO 1800 gave me 1/200 second at f7.1 - I've plenty of usable images at ISO 3200 too.

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  4 comments

Why iView, still?

I was asked recently for a few reasons why I still use Expression Media (I still call it iView) rather than depending entirely on Lightroom, so in descending order, here goes:

• By far the biggest reason is to manage in a single place all files related to photographic projects. For me, like very many photographers, that isn't just photos, but might easily include sound clips from wedding shoots, PDF contact sheets, the odd ProShow presentation, as well as any correspondence. Ideally Lightroom should control all these file types, but it doesn't, yet.
• iView's very much faster generating large numbers of JPEGs for emailing or for making a web gallery of a whole shoot. This is because it uses the Lightroom-adjusted preview in the DNG, while Lightroom needlessly reprocesses the raw data.
• I depend on custom fields for recording who's featured in my re-enactment pictures and finding them quickly, and for grouping frames shot for stitching or HDR. While the LR2 SDK does now let you add custom fields, it's too new and undeveloped, and you can't read/write the metadata to/from images. iView does this, so any TIF made from a DNG automatically inherits the original's custom metadata, making it easy to marry up a stitched panorama to the component frames, for example.
• I greatly prefer the flexibility of iView's low tech HTML templates to Lightroom's Lua-based ones.
• iView has scripting using widely-known languages which I can quickly use to copy IPTC location information over to keywords, for example, or to search and replace within captions (eg for typos). It gives me the flexibility to write a simple script in a text editor, or in a well-established development and debugging tool such as Microsoft's VB editors or Apple's Script Editor. Lightroom's comparatively-obscure Lua is an inhuman programmer's language wrapped in layers of nested functions, has little documentation written for non-programmers, gives indecipherable error messages, has no development tool more helpful than a text editor - and in any case has restricted access to metadata. For me, end user access to scripting is one badge which makes a program a professional tool, and it should be present from day 1.
• Using beta versions of Lightroom, and testing them more brutally than may be wise, I want a rock solid DAM base.

There is a huge value in one application combining file management, adjustment, and output. I'm a big user of LR2's smart collections which can automatically group new pictures meeting a wide range of criteria. Migrating to a wholly Flash-based web site, I'm using Lightroom's SlideShowPro export. And maybe the SDK may offer a way forward for my custom metadata. Even though I'm unsure what I want to do about types of files which Lightroom can't import, the balance is certainly shifting and I'm relying more on LR as months go by.

Permalink - Photo management -  11 comments

Stefano Unterthiner

Stefano Unterthiner is an Italian woldlife photographer (his own web site here) whose almost-human image of a macaque won the animal portraits prize in Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2008:

The monkey earned his nickname "trouble-maker", Stefano explained, because it was more interested in the photographer than being photographed.

After spending weeks following the monkeys in the Indonesian island's Tangkoko National Park, Stefano found that their search for food took them to the coastal edge of the park's forest. While most of the primates were busy foraging among the rocks for fallen fruits and nuts, one young adult took an interest in Stefano's activities.

"He would leap at me and kick off my back like a trampoline," he recalled. "It was part play, part confrontation, part attention-seeking, part curiosity."

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

Nevada Wier

Brilliant is a nicely produced Adobe video showcase - slick is the word - and one episode features photographer Nevada Wier.

Her own site has lots of her work throughout Asia, mainly portraits, though this one from Burma is easily my favourite. Her blog's here and explains what's partly behind her success:

I personally think I do very well as a travel photographer because I can eat anything and never get stomach problems ? and I can hold quite a few drinks. I can also sleep anywhere, on any surface. And, I do not have a very good sense of smell, but I like to think I have a good sense of humor.

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

On the bendy buses

These bendy bus ads are just the sort of thing I like about England:

Bendy-buses with the slogan "There's probably no God" could soon be running on the streets of London.

The atheist posters are the idea of the British Humanist Association (BHA) and have been supported by prominent atheist Professor Richard Dawkins. The BHA planned only to raise ?5,500, which was to be matched by Professor Dawkins, but it has now raised more than ?36,000 of its own accord.

It aims to have two sets of 30 buses carrying the signs for four weeks. The complete slogan reads: "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."

By coincidence, I was at the supermarket this morning, the big Sainsbury's in Vauxhall, and next to me at the scan-your-own check out was a tall Muslim woman. Covered from head-to-toe, like a big black tent, she had just a slit for the eyes. For what it's worth, which isn't much, I find such dress disgusting, obscene, but Sainsbury's checkout didn't seem the place to educate her, if I even cared that much. In any case, she had (another) problem - the check out process is initiated by pressing a touch screen, which didn't seem to work. The check out girl replied "take your glove off", perfectly sensible advice, and I could have easily reached over and pressed the screen on her behalf. But if someone wants to make life harder for themselves.... So instead the woman moved away and joined the line at a "traditional" check out. One day, I hope, she'll get on the bendy bus.

Permalink - General -  11 comments

Metadata from Lightroom to InDesign

I recently saw a wedding book some friends had created using Photobox. They wouldn't claim to be computer-savvy, but they'd done a great job and were able to give copies to close family. It should be just that easy, shouldn't it, and I am more than a little frustrated that Lightroom still doesn't have a book layout tool. No doubt it will come, even if only via an Export plug-in.

Anyway, putting together a book of my Sealed Knot pictures earlier this year in InDesign, one big irritant was displaying text next to the pictures. I couldn't bring myself to retype or cut and paste the captions, knowing the images contained the metadata added in iView, Lightroom or Photoshop, and I don't think it was my inexperience with InDesign. As it was, I got distracted, but next time I have a crack at it, here's an InDesign script which pulls XMP metadata from an image and places it below the picture. Now I wonder if that could be launched from an Export plug-in....

Also a little link to Gunar Penikis's blog and a post on the new XMP SDK. There seems to be more scripting access to XMP, and also the latest way to customize the File Info panels.

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  2 comments

If you're not in London, you're not close enough?

I'll apologize for another posting about an exhibition in London - I'd still hate anyone to think I'm a Londoner after 25 years here - but London's Barbican has a big Robert Capa exhibition accompanied by pictures by Gerda Taro, "artistic responses" (eek) to Iraq & Afghanistan, and a series of films on war photography. It runs until the end of January, and for me it's a must-see, maybe more than once.

I'm always quoting Capa's "if it's not good enough" line (while pointing out he eventually got too close to a landmine) and in the Guardian there's a wide-ranging discussion - everything from Roger Fenton to Abu Ghraib, large format to camera phones - of technical accuracy versus being there:

John Moore won a 2007 World Press Photo award for his picture of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Moore was in the jostling crowd. As soon as he heard the gun, just as the suicide bomber detonated himself, he held up his camera and hit autowind, shooting blind. The prizewinning image is a swirl of blurred figures and exploded light. Capa said that if your pictures weren't good enough, that's because you weren't close enough. Get this close to the epicentre of history and your pictures are bound to look pretty bad, as if they're being blown apart. The irrefutable truth of the image - I was there - overrides all aesthetic and technical concerns.

Even when I'm playing at being a war photographer at my re-enactments, there's a constant tension between one's technical pride and the need to capture the action, and I'm sure it's true with most other fast moving action. In moments of calm, or afterwards when I see the image isn't sharp, I'm cursing myself for not having adjusted the ISO or aperture and shutter speed. Yet in the heat of the moment, there's no choice to be made between tweaking the exposure settings and getting close to the action, composing, shooting - these are all you have time to think about, if you're even thinking. And is there anything wrong with that?

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

Strange (and missing) words

Over at the Aperture Users Network (anyone seen the word Professional recently?) John Omvik does a lengthy comparison of Aperture 2.1 vs Lightroom 2.0 - Different Approaches to Local Image Corrections:

So Which Method is Best?

Both methods offer advantages and disadvantages for local corrections. After working with both I have to say that I am very impressed with the speed and flexibility the Adobe solution offers. I like the open plug-in concept from Apple, but feel that the implementation leaves much to be desired, especially as it relates to the rest of the non-destructive workflow.

My ideal solution would be a plug-in architecture that would allow for 3rd party plug-ins to be integrated in the processing pipeline offering the extensibility of Aperture with the speed and non-destructive functionality of Lightroom.

Pravda extolling the virtues of capitalism? But these are days when the Russkies are oil rich capitalists and the Yanks are merrily nationalizing the banking system....

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  1 comments

Amit Pasricha

Amit Pasricha is an Indian photographer who currently has an exhibition in London.

His own web site is a bit gimmicky but covers a very varied range of Indian subjects. I found his panoramas particularly interesting, and there are lots of standard Indian themes like religion and poverty, but also look at his Dance Worx set.

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

Strong coffee?

Lavazza's 2009 calendar web site gives the coffee drinker a great insight into La Vita Italiana.

One of Annie Leibowitz's big budget shoots, there's the subtle allusion of the she-wolf in the Colosseum, some babe in the Trevi fountain, a quick grope on the Ponte Umberto I, and a naked blonde adorning your spaghetti. As well as the photos, check out the backstage area.

And I thought the Stadio dei Marmi was overblown.

Permalink - Photo links -  5 comments

Souvenirs

Michael Hughes has done a great series of kitsch souvenirs held in front of world landmarks.

Perhaps ironically, I'll link to his Flickr account rather than his own web site - I simply couldn't be bothered reading his inept bio page as it's a JPEG of tiny text.

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

Sound and light - and free tickets20

If you're near Chichester, the Cathedral's 900th anniversary is being celebrated next month with a son et lumiere, and the Norman and English Civil War segments are my photographs:

A landmark event for a landmark year. Twelve performances of a spectacular son et lumi?re, A Story Set in Stone, using state of the art audiovisual technology. The voices of Patricia Routledge, June Whitfield, Michael Jayston and Nickolas Grace will tell the story of the Cathedral's 900 years.

Surround sound and lasers will project the Cathedral's story onto its very own architecture. An epic journey through 900 years of history, including the Romans, the Normans, the Reformation, the Civil War, 20th Century Wars, and ending up in the present day. Especially written for the Cathedral by the famous writer Simon Brett.

Projection onto the side of a 900 year old cathedral should be pretty amazing to see, and apart from the glory and a double page ad, I'm going to get more free tickets than I can use.... Anyone within range of Chichester on Thursday 19th November?

Permalink - My photography -  2 comments

A couple of Lightroom pointers

Lightroom 2 lets you send a panorama's component frames directly to Photoshop, but they're sent full size. Unless you really want a massive full size stitch, that slows down Photoshop's panorama processing. Instead, Martin Evening has done a video showing a method which gets round this. Initially Lightroom sends the files to Photoshop as layers of a single document. You resize this document to the size you want, and then run the panorama stitching on the smaller file.

While Martin emphasizes its value for matching processing time to your intended output size, the technique should be most valuable when you're simply proofing a panorama. After all, sometimes you need to test with a different panorama rendering method, or in other cases the panorama just doesn't turn out as well as you had hoped. This technique means you can simply reduce the image size, maybe even the bit depth, and can always Undo and try an alternative rendering method.

The second tip is equally ingenious and a far more intelligent use of Develop Presets than all those canned looks that some people love to collect. If you are experimenting with LR2's alternative Camera Profiles, Sean McCormack suggests "you want to preview them to see what suits. Well, changing them in Camera Calibration will let you see them, but it's a bit tedious. The obvious answer is much easier than you might expect: Create a batch of Presets!" Read more

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  0 comments