These two photographs were taken on Southport beach looking towards the pier at sunset. They were both shot using the D300 & 18-200mm VR lens (I remembered to switch image stabilisation off whilst on the tripod this time!). As far as post-processing is concerned, I've just installed the Mogrify & Photomatix plugins for Lightroom. The former gives you the ability to add frames and has vastly superior watermarking abilities to Lightroom, and as I use Photomatix as a standalone application often the latter plugin means that I can export an HDR series straight from Lightroom into the Photomatix application without having to export the files to Windows first. Both real time savers, and free  _thumb.jpg)
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I've been trying to focus this blog more on the photographic content and fewer articles. Mainly as a result of not enough time, too many other areas vying for my attention, and often by the time I get round to posting a news item, most of the other photography blogs have already beaten me to it. Today though, I'm going to break from that as I've a few new news articles to post. I've just had some photographs in print. Manchester United Supporters Trust have used 9 of the images I shot outside Old Trafford on the night of the Champions League final in May. They've used a selection of these images. Calumet have announced a new service via their website whereby you can order online and collect in-store. Thus saving yourself delivery costs, and waiting around for the delivery van (that never arrives when you need it to). www.calumetphoto.co.uk Magnum have gathered together some "advice" for some of their members for new and aspiring photographers. Quite an interesting read. Thoughts from Martin Parr, Alex Soth and many others. Read it here A new forum has launched for film and darkroom enthusiasts. www.fadu.co.uk already has a great many informed posters detailing thoughts on everything from darkroom process to gear reviews. The Royal Photographic Society has announced a new competition based on Rejlander's "Two ways of life". When this work appeared in Victorian times, the 32 negative "debauched" composite caused a scandal. One of it's few alleged admirers was Queen Victoria herself. The RPS's competition asks entrants to combine and alter images to create a modern interpretation of this masterpiece. www.rps.org
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Went to see my old DJ'ing spar playing out last weekend. He has a residency at a bar in Manchester and still kicks it on a regular basis. I've been invited to do a set over Christmas and I enjoyed myself so much, that I may even have to dig a few ol' tunes from the garage and dust off a record box or two. Anyway back to the matter in hand, these were shot with the D3 and the 18-200 lens with the flash off camera. For the top one, the flash was placed low down to the left of the decks. For the shot below, the flash was held to Marv's right by our good friend Rich. (He made a great light stand!) _thumb.jpg)
Having managed to squeeze a flurry of back-processing and printing a week or so ago, this week time has once again got the better of me.
I have followed on from an idea I picked up from another blog which was to turn one room that you use relatively frequently into a small preview gallery. So I've just taken delivery of a stack load of A4 aluminium frames from Trade Frames and hung them all in my downstairs bathroom. It's not exactly the Tate Modern, but it works for me. In case you're wondering, I've done this for two reasons: As any photographer will tell you, you don't really get to appreciate your work unless you print it. Whether its film or digital, you've really got to make prints and reasonable size prints in order to properly appreciate and critique what you're doing. I also find that once I've got an image printed and I see it every day on the wall, it gives me ideas on how I can improve on the print - be it by a different slightly crop, maybe a little dodging or burning here and there, or possibly a tweak in the toning. I'm also really getting into the Epson R2400 at last, and really loving it. The quality of the black and white prints it produces are really phenomenal, and the colour ain't too bad either. One of these days when I fire up the wet darkroom again, I must make a couple of prints to compare - one wet printed direct from the neg, and one digitally printed on the 2400 from the scanned neg - would be interesting to compare the two.
On a slightly different tack, readers will be aware that I've been struggling with off-site backups and a stream lined method of being able to work on files at home and in the office. To this end, I pocketed a Western digital 400 GB pocket hard drive from PC World earlier this week which I can use to transfer files around and I can also work directly on Lightroom galleries from the drive at home. It remains to be seen just whether the access speeds will be quick enough for Lightroom or whether I'll have to copy data off the drive first, but it looks neat, its small and it holds 400 Gb which should be large enough as a temporary carry around drive for the time being. And as long as it last longer than that crappy 32 Gb memory stick, it'll be worthwhile. It also comes bundled with some auto-syncing software which I am just investigating.
Anyway, that's it for the time being. Time to get back on the M6 again. I'll just leave you with this - Martin Bailey over at MBP is running another of his fantastic workshops in Japan in February next year. Check out the details here - http://www.mbpworkshops.com/ . If there were 13 months in the year and my little ones were just that little bit older, I'd be there. Last year's workshop looked a real corker - much fun was had by all and some of the work they produced was outstanding.
Just been catching up with some of my feeds and came across another blinder from Zoriah. "There are things that U.S. soldiers are allowed to talk about with the press and others they are not. One of the things they are not allowed to voice is their political opinion, especially if it goes against their commander in chief. In the privacy of latrine stalls on military bases in Iraq and Kuwait, however, it is quite a different story." - Check them out here
Myself and some of the other guys I was recently at night school with spent a couple of hours wandering around Piccadilly and the Northern Quarter the other weekend. I won't flannel you with excuses, save to say that my head really wasn't quite in the place I needed it to be to do this, but I reckon I got some half decent shots nonetheless. These are 2 of my faves. The rest are on Flickr. 
 Finally managed to get some processing done at last. Thought I'd plough through a couple of dusk and dawn shoots I did in Accrington last month. Shot with D300 and used Nik's fantastic Silver Efex Pro. 
I've been reading quite a lot lately on other blogs, Scott Kelby's and Epic Edits are two that spring to mind, about the do's and dont's of backing up photographs. This particular topic has caught my attention once again as I've been having problems of my own in this area lately. The secondary drive on my primary pc which has around 200Gb's of RAW files and scanned negs, is rapidly running out of space. My offsite backup plan has also gone out of the window. So not only am I worryingly low on disk space, I'm also not getting duplicates of my files off site anymore (at least not very easily).
Previously I was using Retrospect 7 to make a duplicate of all these files over a VPN connection to a device that I have stored in the spare room at home. This made sure that I had an identical duplicate of all my RAW files, negs and Lightroom catalogs should anything untoward ever occur at my office. The problem that appears to have arisen in this area, is that the VPN has been getting dropped with increasing regularlity resulting in the backups failing. The system does automatically recover and start over again, but as a result I am often using over my 50Gb broadband monthly bandwidth allowance - and they just love sending me invoices for it!
So I now have two problems - I am running out of space at the office and I no longer have a regular off-site backup system. I think that I can immediately address the problem of disk space by clearing out a lot of superfluous images. When I come back from a shoot and post-process, I delete all the real rubbish - out of focus, camera shake, flash didn't fire etc, but I generally keep the rest and I think that I could probably free up several Gigs by going through a rating process and deleting the images that I know I will never come back to. Looking to the future, I also need to add additional storage space. The options for this are to buy a new external drive, which will probably get me another 500Gb, but with no redundancy, or alternatively I could bite the bullet and buy a Drobo. Though I have yet to price up a firewire Drobo and the necessary drives to populate. This would mean that I could keep copies of everything, but would free up enough space.
Unfortutantely I'm no stranger to hard drive failures as I've had more than 1 catastrophic data loss in the past so I've been through the pain of the irretreavable loss of important data.The biggest headscratcher for me at the moment, is the off-site situation. The the existing off-site regime works well for backing up webservers and exchange mailboxes etc, but the bandwidth required for photographs is the killer. Since the issue of excessive bandwidth came to a head and I had to temporaily pause the off-site copying of the photographs, I've been reduced to transporting them from site to site on a 32Gb memory stick - which is far from ideal - I'm a big fan of automation. Another problem that I have is that I can't always get into the office to work on images, so I often work on them on a laptop at home. So ideally, what I need is a two-way synchronous back up off-site system that will look for changes and copy files in the appropriate direction!
Since drafting this post yesterday, I've had a little time to investigate Drobos. (If you've not heard of this marvellous invention - check it out here). For one of the 2nd generation units populated with 4 x 1TB Western Digital Green drives which would give me 2.7TB worth of storage space (The rest is required as overhead for fault tolerance), would come to about £700. Which ain't all that cheap, and I'd need 2....Hmmmm...
I mentioned some time ago that I’d
got myself an Epson
R2400 stylus printer which uses the 8 point Ultrachrome cartridge system
and will reportedly produce outstanding quality monochrome prints up to A3 in
size on high quality acid free fibre paper. I could get great results on the
standard Epson Matt Fibre paper, but it was a tad flimsy for my liking and I
heard great reports about the Harman
Matt Fibre which is 320gsm.
Some time later, having wasted nearly an
entire box of this expensive paper getting rubbish to mediocre results
slavishly following the detailed instructions that came with the paper and on
Epson’s website, I decided to throw Harman’s instructions on set up
and configuration away, and apply a little intuitiveness, and lo’ and
behold I’ve managed to make 2 outstanding black and white prints on my
last 2 sheets of paper! I’ll definitely be getting some more of this
paper for prints as I’m really quite impressed by the result, though it
ain’t cheap!
Back to the printer, the downside is
it’s ink usage. I’ve made maybe 50 prints and I’m nearly out
of ink. Also when you change the different blacks in order to print on gloss or
matt paper, the printer seems to go through a particularly lengthy routine
which seems to waste undue quantities of ink. A full set of cartridges retails
with Epson for about £100! I think I’ll be investigating one of those
bottle feed systems….
Even though I'm from over the pond, you'd pretty much have to have your head completely in the clouds as a photographer to have missed all the hulabaloo about the pending Orphan Works Act stateside. As I Understand it the act has been killed of, but only temporarily as it is likely to be re-presented, if not in a slightly different format. Although this obviously doesn't affect me directly, in this inter-connected non-stop data flow high tech age, aren't all us photographers worldwide potentially affected by this? If a US based magazine for example prints one of my images that somehow electronically appeared in their hands and claim that they fulfilled "a fair and reasonable effort" in trying to track down the photographer, but don't actually get my permission to print, how does this affect me?
Well hello there blogosphere. It’s been a while! I’m
just back from a 2 week family vacation to Mallorca. As roaming data charges
are so prohibitively expensive in Europe, and I wanted to spend some quality time
with my kids, there was no blogging to be done.
I also currently have VERY restricted internet access at the
site I’m currently working at and I’m out of the house for 12 hours
a day, spending 2 hours a day in the car, so I need to find a alternate method
of blogging. Those 2 hours a day spend tearing up and down the motorway are the
valuable hours that I would have spent blogging and twittering. I’ve
bought myself a Freedom
bluetooth keyboard to use with my HTC Touch Cruise, and I had planned on
using Darren Johnstone’s Travelling
Blogger. However after lots of configuration, tweaking and head scratching
it looks like the DasBlog system that I
use needed a third party component (costing $400!) to work, so I canned that
idea off. I’ve now managed to get MailToBlog working with DasBlog and can
send emails to my blog straight from my phone, and it’ll parse them and
whack them straight into the blog!
So I can now sit outside, have a fag and blog away… I’m
happy and back on it!
And instead of tearing up the motorway at 100mph every day,
I can slow down a bit and use an old dictaphone to compose posts whilst I’m
driving and type them up at a later date.
So back to the holidays… As I was saying, I’ve
just spent 2 weeks staying in a villa just outside the old town of Pollenca in
Mallorca. The town consists of 2-3 storey buildings carved up by a maze of
extremely narrow streets. The problem I found shooting in this environment is
that making photographs during the traditional morning “golden hour”
is pretty much a non-starter as its long after the sun has broken the horizon
that it starts to filter down these narrow streets and any kind of shadows
start to appear.
Towards the end of the holiday we visited the town of Soller
which is very similar to Pollenca in its make up. The weather on the day we
visited was fine, but unfortunately as the entire family was in tow, there weren’t
many opportunities to shoot. So I made the decision to return early the next
morning only for it to rain pretty much non-stop. As I’d travelled for an
hour to get there, I decided to shoot anyway. I figured that most photographers
who shoot this island probably only get to see it when the sun is shining and
there were a few interesting options presented by the wet streets, brickwork,
umbrellas etc.
I’ve yet to process the results, and as usual I still
have a backlog of stuff to process, but rest assured the results will appear as
and when.
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