Posts related to Words
23 December 2008 - Who gets the free prints?A few days ago I offered visitors to my blog the chance to win free prints of any of my images. I’m very happy with the response. 27 entries but alas there can only be 2 winners.
So, who wins the free prints? I’m delighted to say that Claire gets the mounted print, and Debbie gets the laminated print. I’ll be in touch later to discuss what photo you want and sort out delivery details. Congratulations to both of you!
(And thank you Mark for helping me pick the winners!)
25 November 2008 - How I backup my photosI could go into some of the horror stories about photos I’ve lost or about how a disk crashed just before I copied the files off, but we’ve all been in that situation where we’ve lost important stuff when a disk decided to go belly up.
This might not be of much use to you if you don’t use Linux but bare with me. Some of the ideas might help keep your photos safe.
I use two Iomega 1TB external drives. They’re USB 2.0 drives so not the fastest things in the world but they do. The RAW files from the Canon 40D are noticeably slower loading obviously but not excessively so. Ironically, I bought a laptop because my desktop machine was so noisy, but the fans in those external drives are almost as noisy as my old computer!
Two external drives, earlier today.
Drive one is where I archive my photos for long term storage. Brand new, hot out of the camera photos are copied to the internal disk on my laptop but that only has 60GB free so I move photos manually every few months to Drive one. This drive is also where I store any other files, my music collection, videos I shoot. Anything really.
Drive two is my backup drive. I use Backuppc to do incremental backups every day. It backs up:
- All my websites through ssh.
- My home directory on my laptop with brand new photos, Thunderbird mail directory, Firefox and everything else.
- I used to backup my Macbook but that took too long over the local WiFi connection so I don’t keep anything irreplaceable on that.
What about backing up my photo archive on Drive one? Instead of Backuppc I use rsync to copy the first drive to the second one every night. This command, placed in /etc/cron.daily/backup (and made executable with chmod a+x backup) will do the trick. It copies any new or modified files from disk one to my backup disk.
rsync -a /media/one/ /media/backup/
I use rsync because it’s simpler than Backuppc and I don’t need incremental backups of the data there. Any photos that are modified are copied to new files anyway, rendering increments useless. Rsync is also available on Mac OS X, and there’s also Unison that runs on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows and does the same job.
Backuppc can be installed from rpm or on Debian based systems using apt-get or aptitude. It’s a Unix based backup solution but can backup systems running many other operating systems such as Windows and Mac OS X. It has a simple to use web gui for administering backups. The only downside is configuration which can be daunting as it requires editing of config files and setting up remote hosts if necessary. On the up side, there’s plenty of documenation and it’s well worth trying if you want an automated system you can trust.
Disk capacity is another issue, but as I store all my files in dated folders my photo archive only grows in one area: the folder for the current year. If I run out of disk space I’ll buy another disk or replace an existing drive with a larger one. I could go down the RAID or LVM route but I don’t want to complicate things. If my current drives last that long, I’ll replace both after 2 years. Disks always break sooner or later.
So how do you backup your photos? If you’ve blogged about it, please leave a link to the post. I’m always trying to improve my own system!
30 September 2008 - Jetman Yves Rossy lands, who is the photographer?Matt reminded my wife that the National Geographic Channel were showing the Jetman documentary last weekend. Yves Rossy flew across the English Channel from France to the UK last week while strapped to a rocket powered wing. I finally got to watch it last night and enjoyed it immensely. It’s a great achievement. Slightly mad perhaps, and very risky, but I have one question though.
Who is this photographer who managed to get snapshots of Yves seconds after he landed? I’d say it’s a compact camera he has in his hand so he’s not a pro, and the commentator was heard to say something like, “close friends are running up to..”
Seconds later, a security guard rushed up and pushed the photographer away and that was the last we saw of him. Was he arrested?
The next scene was a crowd of press photographers, with DSLRs and video cameras pushing around Yves. I bet they’d have given anything to get a close up shot of the Jetman landing..
More details and a video can be found in this Times article.
15 September 2008 - The Curves ToolThe curves tool is a very basic tool that can be used to improve photos with a few clicks of the mouse. It is used to change the brightness and contrast of an image. It can also modify the separate Red, Green and Blue channels of an image too. The Curves Tool has a histogram to represent the shadow, midtone and highlight detail in the image. In the GIMP, you access it by right clicking on an image and go to Colors->Curves.
This is the second article in my GIMP for Photographers series, but as usual, all of this applies to Photoshop, or any other image application with a Curves Tool. The first tutorial was on The Levels Tool, and worth a read if you missed it!
Here’s an image I shot at the Lord Mayor’s Picnic in Fitzgerald’s Park a few months ago, and the Curve Tool below it. Notice the histogram? The photo is fairly well exposed, but some highlights are “clipped”, as the histogram hits right hand side without sloping off.
Brightening Curve
It’s easy to brighten an image. Just drag points on the line up.
Darkening Curve
Now, let’s darken the image by dragging points down.
Contrast Curve
A classic use of the Curves Tool is to increase contrast in an image. You do this by darkening the shadows, and brightening the highlights. The curve looks sort of like an “S” when you do this. Don’t go overboard on this though, because it’s easy to lose detail in either direction.
If for some reason your image has too much contrast, a quick inverted S curve will solve that problem,
Wacky Colours
You can select any of the Red, Green and Blue channels and do strange things to your photos. Here’s what happens when you play with the Red Channel.
And here’s what happens when you change multiple colour channels in different ways.
Colour Picker
After you have opened the Curves Tool, click anywhere in the image. Notice how a vertical line goes up and down the histogram/line? That vertical line is the colour of the pixel where you clicked. That can be useful if you’re trying to modify a particular part of a photo. This is what you get when you click on the black coat on the left of the image above.
Yes, yes, boo hoo, oh woe is me, my Canon 40D arrived on the day the new Canon 50D was announced. If only I had waited, my photos would be so much better with the Canon 50D.
Yeah right. I’ve already stated before that the equipment behind the camera is the most important part of image making. Sure, the camera does matter, but DSLRs are getting to the stage PCs got to a few years ago. Upgrading doesn’t significantly change the game. I’ll upgrade again in maybe 3 years. No rush.
The Canon 50D looks sweet though. 15MP sensor, better ISO, better LCD. Nice upgrade. Roland has linked to a few of the sites previewing or discussing the Canon 50D. The Rob Galbraith page is probably the most readable, but the DPReview preview has a neat comparison table to compare the Canon 50D with the Canon 40D.
DIGIC 4 processor Canon’s next-generation, 14-bit DIGIC 4 processor see its debut in the 50D, and it offers both more functionality and about 30% faster processing speed than the DIGIC III processor in the 40D….
The two cameras’ dimensions, body style and control positions are also the same (though the 50D is fractionally lighter). In a nutshell, the 50D appears to be a 40D with a higher-resolution sensor, revamped image processing, faster CompactFlash write speeds, HDMI video out and a crisp new rear LCD.
Love this pic of the motherboard with the DIGIC 4 processor!
I’m surprised I haven’t blogged about The GIMP FX Foundary before. It’s a huge collection of GIMP plugins that have been updated to work with the latest GIMP.
All the plugins were already available in the GIMP Plugin registry or elsewhere but not all of them survived the changes to Scheme in the latest versions of GIMP. I downloaded these plugins ages ago and recently grabbed the updated tarball with over 100 plugins. You’ll see the results of those plugins over the next few weeks as I play around with settings and effects.
I could go on and on about it, but why bother? It’s a small download and free so why not grab the zip file yourself?
16 June 2008 - Spencer Tunick photoshoot in Blarney Co. Cork, IrelandAs luck would have it, one of the more famous or perhaps notorious photographers of our time, Spencer Tunick, is shooting in Blarney, where I live, tomorrow morning.
Update on Jun 8th, 2009 – I’ve justed posted a small gallery of Spencer Tunick photos as his website is down.
It’s no great secret now, even Ray D’Arcy revealed the location on his radio programme this morning. He’ll be revealing a lot more in a few hours time.. Anyway, it all happens very early in the morning, at a time when most sensible people will be snuggled up in bed and that probably includes me. If I do feel the urge to visit Blarney Castle at dawn I’m sure all I’ll photograph will be groups of dazed and tired volunteers stumbling from buses, full clothed. I have no desire to shoot any naked skin.
Spencer – if you’re reading this, I’d love to go to shoot a portrait of yourself, and perhaps grab an autograph!
There are lots of people looking for Spencer Tunick’s Blarney photoshoot!
Monotone is a pretty cool photoblog theme for WordPress that’s been around for a few months now. Unfortunately it was only available on WordPress.com, and through the Automattic Subversion repository as reported by Jeff on Weblog Tools Collection.
Noel Jackson, the author of the theme, recently revealed that Monotone is now available as a .zip download on the Monotone demo page above. Now it’s easier for self hosted WordPress blogs to try it!
What’s so great about Monotone? It displays a large image in each post like Pixelpost and other photoblog themes, but it does it in a neat way. WordPress allows the blog author to upload and attach images to their posts. It’s then up to the author to insert the image into the post and tidy up the html. Monotone takes this one step further. There’s no need to insert the image into the post at all. The theme takes the first attachment and displays it at the top of the post, with the post content below.
I’d love to use it, but unfortunately I have several years worth of posts that would need to be modified because I used Flickr to host my images until recently. Then I used my own site, but inserted the right html into each post, so they’d all have to be modified unless I hacked the theme to ignore old posts.
RSS feeds display the image too, although I discovered that the feed for the demo site includes some huge images. Probably just an oversight when Noel was uploading images.
Judging by Noel’s comment here, it probably isn’t completely straight forward to install. You probably need the GD library and a hefty server with enough RAM to load and manipulate your images. Anyone tried it? Use my theme tester plugin if you want to test it on your blog without upsetting your visitors!
11 June 2008 - The state of street photography in the UKScary. I blogged previously about photographer’s rights in Irelnd but it appears that UK Police are ignorant of those rights which are similar to Ireland’s. I have never been stopped by Gardai (the Irish Police Force) taking photos on the street, but in the UK it seems to be a growing problem for photographers. Have you ever been stopped shooting photographs in a public place?
Make sure to read Photographer’s Rights from DIgital Rights Ireland to find out more about your rights as a street photographer in Ireland. If you travel you should always be aware of local laws as they’re liable to change in every jurisdiction. (via dslrblog.com)
29 May 2008 - Irish Photographers dot orgIrish Photographers are a busy lot. There are a good few photobloggers in this country publishing photos either daily or almost daily and they’re producing some amazing stuff! Unfortunately it’s sometimes hard to find them because photoblogs don’t always lend themselves well to search engine analysis. That’s where Irish Photographers.org comes in.
Irish Photographers.org will aggregate the content from some of Ireland’s best photoblogs (the others haven’t signed up yet!) and make it easy to discover new talent. I’m quite excited by this project and the enthusiastic reaction from other photobloggers has been great!
So far there are 10 blogs contributing to the site, but that number was limited to my contacts on Twitter and by my own limited spare time to work on this. If you’d like to have your site added, go to the About page, read through the short list of guidelines and fill in the form.
The site isn’t perfect by any means, the theme could do with a bit of tweaking. It needs a favicon and a web 2.0 button would be great. Anyone want to volunteer?
PS. Don’t forget the Doneraile photowalk on June 8th! There will also be a photowalk in Dublin this weekend. If you’re not a member of Facebook, here are the details:
A photomeet at the Dublin Maritime Festival. We can meet at the Harbour Master (link below) at 1pm.
Event: June photomeet. “photomeet greatfunaltogether”
What: Festival
When: Sunday, June 1 at 1:00pm
Where: Dublin Docklands
Redmum is organising this photowalk. Just in case you’re wondering why her blog isn’t included on Irish Photographers.org, it’s for technical reasons; blogger doesn’t offer per-category feeds unfortunately. She’s working on a solution so hopefully she’ll be contributing soon!
PPS. Cork City Marathon is on June 2nd. I hope to be there. Leave a comment if you think you will too!