Apologies for the current irregular posting schedule. I knew that life was gonna get pretty hectic when this new webdev contract kicked in, but I don't think I quite realised how busy I'd be. But I never seem to get enough done! Anyway I'm in the process of fine tuning details of a project I'm going to get started on in the next fortnight or so, but more of that later this week.... I'm also about to start on a new workbook, basically a photographic "stream of consciousness". I'm going to include workings / thoughts for the projects I'll be working on, and also some notes of the more relevant information that I come across on the web or in books, or from exhibitions. I've learnt a lot from doing the last one, and have a much better idea how to improve on my technique. I think that this can be an invaluable tool for any artist and its a great way of consolidating your thoughts and ideas.
In the meantime, a few links for you.

1) Joe McNally is writing a new book due out in December titled "The Hot Shoe Diaries, Creative Applications of Small Flash". "Basically, it will be an irreverent brain dump of my whole history using small flash, back from when I first got my hands on flash powder to the SB-900. There will be sections on buttons and dials, batteries, flash attachments, light shaping tools from gaffer tape to umbrellas, and sketches" ... sounds like it'll be a useful resource and undoubtedly a right riveting read. - Read more about it here

2) Photopreneur have done an interesting article, "Put your Picture on the Cover of a Lonely Planet Travel Guide". The goal is obvious, but the methods are more interesting. The service the article is trying to promote uses geo-tagging (which I've yet to get into) and was released into beta last year. Pikeo is a "photography site for people on the move" and is currently running a competition in conjunction with Lonely Planet with some cool prizes on offer. Read more here

3) Scott Kelby's guest blogger last week was David duChemin who contributed a great motivational article about what he would say if he could have a heart to heart with a 14 year old version of himself just at the time he was getting into photography. It's a great article - read it here.

4) On the topic of project ideas, Thomas Hawk has written in detail about his $2 Portraits -  a great idea if ever I head one - check it out here

5) Finally, if you occasionally read articles on sites like Strobist, but often struggle with some of the jargon (What's the difference between a snoot and a gobo??) , then Beyond MegaPixels have compiled a list of the most popularly used terms and what exactly they are - check it out here. 

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I've added the shots from the wedding that I did a couple of weeks back to my gallery - check them out here.

Brian Auer over at Epic Edits is running a pretty cool competition - "The $50  film camera". Yep you guessed it - it's a film themed and you gotta shoot it with a camera that cost less than $50 (or about £25). They've managed to get Ilford and Lomography involved  with the prizes. The deadline is the 12th September, so get shooting - it sounds like fun. For more details, go here.

On a slightly different topic, my backup regime. I use EMC's Retrospect to run a nightly batch job to automatically duplicate images that I download from a CF card or scan negs onto my pc to an external USB drive. Every other day, I use Retrospect to copy the latest changes to the USB drive over a VPN to an external drive attached to a pc at home. It's all been working fine for months, but lately my office ADSL connection has been getting attacked which causes the router to drop the connection and the backup job to fail. The result is that the data gets copied over the Internet all over again, but they've been failing repeatedly so I've just had a bill from my ISP for exceeding my 50GB a month limit! I got an email warning last month, but an invoice this month. Fair enough I guess, so I've stopped the job that copies the data over the VPN and ordered a 32GB USB flash drive from Dabs and will have to copy the data manually for the time being until the attacks die down. The problem that I have now is managing changes. New files are easy enough to manage, but if I make changes to a bunch of sidecar files in Lightroom how do I reconcile the differences with the offsite storage? Any ideas????

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Well here it is, another week. Back to the grind and all that. Too much drinking and not enough shooting over the weekend I'm afraid, so little in the way of new photographs to post. I do however have a few competition links for you.

1) Travel Photographer of the Year 2008 - www.tpoty.com
Open to pros and amateurs alike. Closing date is 9th September, and there are 3 categories - Life, Call of the Wild and Joy of Travel. There are stacks of prizes including a Linhof Technorama panoramic camera.

2) Take a View 2008 - www.take-a-view.co.uk
Charlie Waite's landscape competition has a total prize fund of £20,000 and winning images will feature as part of an exhibition at the National Theatre.

3) International Garden Photographer of the Year 2009 - www.igpoty.com
Details are still being finalised, but the closing date is 31st Jan 2009. There are seven categories and the entry fee is £10 for 4 photographs.

4) Curry's "Our Lives" competition - www.currysourlives.co.uk has a first prize of a £10,000 holiday at stake and closes for entries at the end of this month. Winners to be announced on 16th August.

5) The Nikon Photo Contest International 2008 - 2009 - http://imaging.nikon.com/products/imaging/activity/npci/npci2008-2009/overview.htm
Entries to be submitted between 1st Sept and 30th November. "

"At the heart of the image" is not only the brand statement of Nikon Imaging Company, but it is also the theme for the 32nd contest, in which entries are invited in two categories. The first category is free subject and the second is entitled "My Planet," and entries to each category are accepted as prints sent by conventional mail or as JPEG images sent via the Internet. With this theme and these categories, we look forward to receiving expressive images from around the world that are true to people's emotions."

6) The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2008 - http://www.npg.org.uk/photoprize closes for online registration in 6 days. Submissions should be received by post between the 21st & 25th July. £12,000 and a rather prestigious award are at stake - so get your entries in!!

Finally, on You Tube there are a series of bizarre videos by a student from California who puts a D3 through a series of "tests" such as microwaving the camera for a minute, dropping it from a second floor balcony and covering it in a range of foods and then washing them by pouring jugs of water over it. Quite why anyone would to do this is beyond me, but impressively the camera comes through all these apparently completely unscathed! Check them out here:

• Nikon D3 Overload Test
• Nikon D3 Drop Test
• Nikon D3 Scratch Test

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