Just a quick note today to let you know that I have updated my Projects Gallery. It now contains the Big Issue project I completed in December and some of the Service Stations series I'm currently working on, as well as the "15 minutes" series. Check it out here:

www.fillfactorphotography.com/Projects/tabid/273/Default.aspx

1. A funny article from Epic Edits - "7 Bad Habits of Digital Photographers". I have to confess that I have done more than one of these more than once....

2. "4 reasons never to delete images...." from a new blog I'm reading called Light Chasers Photography. Read it, digest it and NEVER do it!!

3. "Organize your pictures in 5 easy steps...no kidding!" from Organize Pictures - another new blog I'm following (well new to me anyway). This is one area that I really need to devote some attention to. All my photographs are within 1 folder, and all RAW files are quite well organised within there chronologically (I use Lightroom for more precise organisation), and all Film scans are in another folder (in another Lightroom library). The problem I have is with the plethora of subfolders I have within the main photographs folder, which contain images for print, for various web sites, competition entries. The list goes on and they are in a state of total chaos....

4. "Adobe Photoshop Lightroom vs. Nikon Capture NX". This is a really detailed 3 stage article from Photonovice.net.  When I first got my D70s several years ago it came bundled with a copy of Nikon Capture NX which I began to use only to get increasingly frustrated with its UI, clumsy image organisation and its inability to handle anything other than NEF files. Then I discovered Lightroom and I've never looked back. There are a few things that CaptureNX does that Lightroom doesn't, and if you buy a Nikon camera its FREE!

5. "5 Steps to create precise keywords for tagging your pictures". If you use a keyword based library application or submit to macro/micro sites, then your keywording skills need to be up to scratch. This is quite a good article if you're struggling with this.

Aaagh! Middle lane drivers! Why do these cretins insist on sitting one behind another in the middle lane with no traffic whatsoever in the inside lane? Is it because they're such nervous drivers that they can't face having to pull out of the inside lane to overtake the odd truck? In which case they shouldn't even be on the motorway in the first place. The queues and problems they create incense me, and they're always totally oblivious to the congestion they create! Ok, rant over. I feel better now.....

 

Anyway to the matter in hand. Clawed my way out of my pit at 3am, on the road for half past to try and continue the service stations project. Headed straight up to Lancaster services where I shot 2 rolls of TMax400, and then up to Killington Lake. The light at the Lancaster services wasn't bad just before dawn, and I reckon there should be a least a couple of possible keepers there, but by the time I'd reached Killington Lake, about half 5, the rain had started. I'd checked the forecast the previous night, and there was a faint chance of a half decent dawn, but alas it never happened. To my dismay the services themselves at Killington were closed until 7am, and I just didn't have the time to sit around and wait for the staff to turn up and open the joint. I shot another roll around the car park and the petrol station, though I ended up pushing the TMax400 to around 3200 as it was really grey and dark and I was conscious of having come all this way only to get booted off if the authorities spotted a tripod.

Having schlepped 100 miles up the motorway, I was quite disappointed that I wasn't going to get better shots, but hey, that's the gamble. The journey back was horrendous. The rain and spray was torrential and that combined with the endless stream of middle lane morons made for a real pain in the ass journey which took an hour longer than it should have!

Developed the films and left them hanging to dry whilst I nipped over to college to hand in my final course work to my tutor. He's really keen on getting me to do the degree course. He reckons that there are 3 or 4 of us that really ought to try and get on it, but it's all a question of time and money for me. If somehow I could make some money whilst I slept, I could probably manage it, but as it is I think it may have to wait 12 months and see if my circumstances change. I'd absolutely love to do it as I've still got a lot to learn and I'm sure that it would really push me, which is exactly what I need. We'll see.....

Off topic: Stumbled across this on Robert Wright's Blog

I set off just before dawn on Monday morning to head up the M6 to try and make some more photographs for the Service Stations project, but as I was heading up the M56, the sky suddenly began to turn a deep red. So I figured I'd swing by Manchester on my way. I shot this off the bridge over the Irwell near the Opera House. I timed it pretty well, as no sooner had I half a dozen frames in the bag, the sun appeared on the horizon, and the red glow in the sky disappeared. The latest results from the Service Stations project, being film based, will have to wait to be posted until I get round the developing the film. I don't really have the facility to do any processing at home, film or digital, so they'll have to wait until later on today.

Incidentally, I read about a new image search engine which is in private beta at the moment. TinEye enables you to find your photos in use online, attempting to "do for images what Google does for text". The service offers various services which leverage Idee Inc's image recognition technology which finds images in use in print as well as online. Their clients include Getty Images, Jupiter Images, Masterfile and SuperStock from the stock photography market as well as Adobe Systems, Associated Press and Digg. TinEye is the latest application of their technology and one which has massive and broad potential application. Although TinEye’s database contains ‘only’ 500 million images at this time, I was able to find a few examples of my microstock photos in use. It’s able to match partial and altered images. Searches can be made by uploading the image you wish to match, or pasting the address of an online image. TinEye then matches the image with those in its database. I've managed to get signed up, and test the service which is really quite impressive. There's also a very handy Firefox plugin. Check it out for yourselves here: http://tineye.com

I have provided MUST with some of the images shot on Wednesday night to display on their site. They can been seen here:

https://www.joinmust.org/moscow/samplattspics.php

After the rollercoaster ride that was the Champions League final last night, I finally managed to drag myself into the office about 11 this morning, with a very sore head! I shot quite a chunk of images last night, see attached. I've tried sending some to a few newspapers, and plan to send to a few more later, but I'm feeling a little overwhelmed today!

This afternoon however, I made it to Mid-Cheshire College for a talk by renowned landscape photographer John Davies. John has been photographing the British landscape for over 30 years and many of his images are particularly well known, such as the Agecroft power station in Salford.  From his website:

"John Davies is one of today's most outstanding British photographers, he became famous through his research on the English industrial landscape, observed in vast and detailed views...

His talk was really interesting and it was a pleasure to listen to him talk about his images and what drives him. He also provided quite an insight into how he started as a photographer and how he promotes and publicises himself. Well worth the trip!

No blog entry today I'm afraid. I'm far too giddy about the football tonight and I'm off shortly to hit the boozer with several hundred other United supporters.
C'mon the Reds!

I've been reading some really great articles on portrait photography lately, and I thought I'd share them here.

First up, Atlanta based editorial music photographer, Zack Arias has published a superb series of articles on using seamless white backgrounds for studio based portrait shots. Zack goes into great detail not only describing what materials to use and how to set them up, but he also goes into the minutiae of lighting and a whole host of difference scenarios and set ups. A really well written series of articles, and if like me you're thinking of getting into portrait photography and you want a perfect white background a la Richard Avedon, then this is where to go.

Secondly, Philip Greenspun, who is the Editor in Chief over at photo.net has written a very informative article on how to get the best out of your portraits. Like Zack's article, it is quite long and goes into quite a bit of detail on lenses and depth of field. Read it here.

Finally here's a well written article on "Upselling for Portrait Photographers". If like me, you're not really sure what this is all about, its quite simple. The theory is charge your clients a small or reduced fee, and then offer them additional, related products that the client hadn't considered when he or she made the booking. This can be anything from Photoshopping out wrinkles and spots to providing CDs containing high resolution from the shoot to providing large glossy framed prints.

I've finally got round the processing some more of the film I shot in Menorca, though I've still got 1 roll of Delta 3200 to dev and process which hopefully I'll get round to doing today. These are shot using Kodak T-Max 400 and developed in T-Max developer. I've got a backlog of processing to do on other stuff, so brief on the text today.....

A 4am start on Sunday saw me in Manchester city centre shooting some new images for the Manchester Calendar. I was slightly later than planned due to too many Carlsbergs the night before, so I missed a gorgeous red sky at dawn, but I'm quite pleased with the images I did manage to get. I reckon there are about 8 or 9 new images that I can add to the 2 or 3 I got the other day.

I was also hoping to get some shots of the runners at the Great North Run which was to start at 10am. But as I had covered several miles by the time, my foot which I fractured on holiday (see earlier post) was beginning to give me some serious jip. I thought I'd move my car a bit closer and just jump out with the DSLR and a couple of lenses in a smaller bag. That was until I actually started trying to drive through Manchester. As a result of road after road being closed off, I ended up on the outskirts of the city centre trying to get back in again. All in all it was a disaster. Even when I did manage to sneak through a few roadblocks and back roads, every last parking space had been taken. With hindsight (Hah) I should have stayed exactly where I was and just taken my time hobbling over to the nearest point on the route. But ho hum - I'll be better prepared next time!!

I read a whole stack of other blogs and assorted RSS feeds, so every now and then I thought I'd publish a short list of those I have found most interesting, or that I think would be relevant to other photographers.

1. Those guys over at the Digital Photography School have compiled a really useful on blog building titled: "10 things to consider when building your rockin' photoblog". It's a follow up to their enlightening article "Why you should consider setting up a photoblog" which was one of the reasons that I set up this blog. Check it out here

2. "10 ways to make Google love your photography site" from photocritic.org is a particularly insightful article detailing the how's and why's to get Google to index your photography site. One of the points I am toying with implementing are html galleries. I totally understand that Google just doesn't like flash, but for me it serves a purpose, and I much prefer the look and feel that can be obtained using flash "out of the box" so to speak. Though I guess what I really need to do is to spend some time creating a DHTML / CSS series of galleries, though I'm afraid that this is one for a rainy day! Click here to read the article

3. Photoproneur.com have compiled an excellent article on how to make some money from holiday snaps - Here it is.

4. Dan Heller has provided an invaluable insight on new legislation pending in the US. If you are not a US based photographer, then you may think that this of no consequence to you - think again! If your stuff is on the Internet, its worth a read. The article is here.

5. Another interesting article from DPS titled: "Microstock for Digital Photography Students - Make money from your photography." See it here. The article was originally written by Lee Torrens who writes a particularly insightful blog over at the Microstock Diaries. Essentially he's a "hobbyist photographer" who has successfully managed to make several hundred dollars a month from putting his images on Microstock sites to supplement his main income as a web developer. His blog is well worth a read.

Made an early morning trip into Manchester this morning to try and get some more shots for the calendar as it'll soon be time to get flogging them. Unfortunately most of the opportunities that presented themselves seemed to work best in portrait format, which doesn't work for the calendar - they have to be landscape for the layout. I've also started submitting to iStockPhoto in the last 24 hours so we'll see what my rejection rate is ;-).....

The first thing I've found is that this beta version doesn't support the upgrading of previous version's databases, which is a bit of a bummer for testing purposes really as it means creating a whole new catalog and I'm unlikely to properly put it through its paces if I can't work on an existing catalog.

The dual monitor action is really cool and super useful. You can have your main window showing a grid view for example, and the secondary monitor showing the Loupe or Survey views - very handy. Fullscreen, 1:1 & 3:1 views are available at one click of the mouse.

The organisation of the Library module has been much improved. There is now a "Smart Collection" feature which automatically updates collections with matching criteria such as star-ratings, keywords or other metadata, and

A very nifty Retouch tool has appeared within the Develop module which allows you to adjust Brightness, Saturation, Exposure etc with the use of a brush.

In fact the list of improvements just goes on and on. All in all I'm quite impressed and I hope that everything I've seen stays in the final release, which I believe is due out around Autumn.

If you want more info on the changes, I've found this blog post by Uwe Steinmueller here: http://www.outbackphoto.com/CONTENT_2007_01/ section_workflow_basics/20080402_LR20Beta/index.html which contains loads more details and screenshots

Thanks to Scott Kelby's blog, I've just seen that Lightroom Beta 2 is out now for download (I know he posted it 2 weeks ago, but I'm still catching up....). Get it here - http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom/. I'm really pleased to see that they've incorporated dual monitor support into this version. Here's hoping they keep it in for the final release. I'm downloading it as I type so I'll post details of any further useful additions / alterations as / if I find any worth noting.....

I've been doing some further work on my M6 service stations project over the last couple of days. Now that I've submitted most of my A-level stuff I've got a bit more time to play with so I've been pursuing this again. I had wanted to capture the emptiness and the lonesomeness of the service stations at night, but the sunrise got the better of me. I was out the door for just after 3 and headed down to Stafford services, but by the time I got there (about 3:45am), the light was already changing. Once I'd got there I also realised that these particular services are not really what I was looking for anyway - they're far too leafy and "pleasant", so I opted to work my way up the Northbound carriageway and visited Keele, Sandbach (where I got turfed off), Knutsford (where both these shots were taken), Lymm truck stop, and Charnock Richards. All in all it was a relatively successful trip. The light once the sun had appeared was fantastic so I just kept shooting eventually calling it a day about 8am. I'm glad I did as the image above and the one below I'm really pleased with.Even though the light wasn't what I had planned for, I have still managed to capture the feeling I was looking for. I got around half a dozen keepers but I'll save posting the rest until the body of work has more depth.

Waves crashing onto the shore in S'Algar, Menorca photographed by Fabrizio Filippini

Whilst we were in Menorca the weather turned for the worse towards the end of the week (only to be expected in early May I guess). I took these rather dramatic shots just round the coast from where we were staying in a little place called S'Algar. The scale of the development around this area of coastline in Menorca is quite amazing. There are new blocks of flats / holiday apartments, offices and rather swish holiday homes springing up all over the place though it does look like the authorities have a handle on it at the moment, and its not too in your face. Interesting to see what the place is like in 10 years time. One cockney dude we got chatting too had lived there for over 20 years, and he said that he reckoned the number of tourists to this area had been on the decline for the last 10 years or so. It's only his opinion and as this was my first trip to the island its hard to say whether he's right or not, but there are certainly plenty of new properties being built.

Waves crashing onto the shore in S'Algar, Menorca photographed by Fabrizio Filippini

Still to process most of these, but thought I'd whack this one and a couple of others up here. This was taken at the port of Mahon and the liner is one of Thomson's (or TUI's). It looked vile, and you wouldn't get me on there for all the tea in China. We took a glass bottomed boat trip for an