the nutter behind the camera

Souvenirs

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 16:35:12 GMT

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.

Sound and light - and free tickets20

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 12:49:06 GMT

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...

A couple of Lightroom pointers

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 12:58:44 GMT

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...

Patrick Ward

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 10:29:57 GMT

In the post on the Borrowdale Fell Run, I linked to Patrick Ward's photo which inspired my pictures. He obviously deserves his own link as his site contains so many excellent pictures from a 40+ year career. I particularly enjoyed his Essentially English gallery, even though his definition of English strikes me as too Southern and...

Borrowdale Fell Run (replacement)

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 10:15:35 GMT

This replaces the earlier rushed post on the Borrowdale fell run. As an aside, "fell" is the local Norwegian-derived word for the Lake District's hills, and like the word "dale" reveals the region's settlement history. Anyway, it was a 12 mile round trip into Keswick - meaning kaese or cheese farm - where I could get groceries and then pick up email over a coffee and cake at the super Cafe Bar 26. Although Sunday's annual Borrowdale Shepherd's Meet had been cancelled, I knew the fell run was still happening. A book I'd been given last Christmas contained...

Miss Aniela

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 08:30:28 GMT

Miss Aniela has a pretty wonderful collection of self portraits at her main site and also at Flickr.

All I need for a self portrait is one spark of inspiration: a beam of light, an interesting garment, a few appealing kinks in my hair after it's been in bunches. I might spy myself in the mirror across the room and have a voyeuristic urge to...

Beyond the Jaws of Borrowdale

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 07:34:04 GMT

And after that rant on hierarchical keywords, my Nikon D700 and I are disappearing to the said Lake District for a week or so. A Sealed Knot re-enactment at Chirk Castle in N Wales is vaguely on the way, so tomorrow will be its first proper outing. I did some some test shots from ISO 400 up to 25600 and felt the picture held together at least as far as 4000, so I'm going to whack the ISO up and see the results. I don't feel the loss of the 1.6x crop factor will be too big a worry, and it's easily outweighed by my 17-35mm becoming spectacularly wideangle again. That will obviously be great with close action and then with the Lake District landscape. The other nice detail I've already noticed is the Virtual Horizon, like a spirit level on the LCD panel. I had planned to get to Sunday's annual Borrowdale Shepherds Meet which is held in the village where I stay. I'm sure I would have...

A rant about hierarchical keywords

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 07:27:46 GMT

It's not specifically a Lightroom thing, and I say the same about Aperture and Expression Media 2. And I am a bit out on a limb here in holding these opinions, but I find hierarchical keywords to be an utter pain, and keep getting into a mess with them. No matter how much I try, I always end up with the child keywords also appearing again at root level, eg when I re-import an exported file. Or the same child keyword will find itself in more than one hierarchy, usually because I've changed the hierarchy at some point and done Save As in Photoshop, or changed it on my laptop and then brought files over to the main PC. The trouble is that I think we�re trying to make HKs do two things, boost keyword data entry, and speed up finding your pictures. Deep down I�m not convinced data entry belongs with what is essentially a reporting function. So I've gone back to a flat structure, and make keyword entry as efficient as I can by having many more keywords sets and metadata presets...

Microsoft Pro Photo Tools v2

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 06:23:27 GMT

Microsoft Pro Photo Tools v2 includes:

Support for reading & writing XMP side car metadata enabling interoperability with Adobe products.
Viewing actual RAW images, in addition to thumbnails
Conversion of RAW files to JPEG, TIFF, and HD Photo using �As Shot� camera settings.
The ability to resize RAW images.
Support for 64-bit Windows
Support for geotagging international locales
Improved functionality for geotagging images.

I do like what this team keeps producing - I just wish they'd put it all together in a single product that makes everyone take notice.

Mileage varies

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 16:10:35 GMT

Ben Long reviews Silver Efex Pro and correctly points out one of its best features

The Black and White adjustment in Photoshop is very good because it allows you to make changes to specific color values in your image. The problem is that if you tell it to darken the blue tones in an image, every blue tone will be altered. Silver Efex scores over Photoshop�s built-in Black and White [JB: or Lightroom or Aperture] because it can alter tone and contrast of specific areas, based on color, but constrain the alteration using an automatically created mask. You could achieve the same effects in Photoshop using multiple Black and White adjustment layers, each configured differently and constrained using hand-built...