Unfortunately this is the post that everyone should ignore. It’s a list of my current photography gear, and also a list of things that I want to get in the future. Basically for my purposes just so that I can remember how much I’ve spent, and how much I’m potentially going to spend (it doesn’t bear thinking about).
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Continue reading “Photography Gear”…
10:29 pm | Posted in Photography | 4 Comments » | Show comments »
There was some discussion on Sayonara’s blog some time ago about the merits of processing RAW photos using Aperture vs. Lightroom. At the time, having looked at the early beta, I wasn’t impressed with the layout nor tools available. Generally I thought organisation was very clumsy, and it was a bit too clunky for my liking.
Adobe released the final version of Lightroom a few days ago and I’ve been trying it out.
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Continue reading “Adobe Lightroom 1.0″…
9:38 pm | Posted in Photography | 2 Comments » | Show comments »
Well after much blood, sweat and tears, I finally finished my project. In total, it was 33 pages long (including references), so not an unsubstantial amount of work! After it’s all gone through the system, been marked and I’ve got my marks back, I plan on posting a copy on here. But I want to ensure it goes without a hitch first.
Anyway, that was finished about 2 weeks ago. I took a week off which was quite nice, in which I’ve bought many things, most of which are yet to be delivered.
They include a 160gb laptop hard-drive (for the bargin price of £75 with free shipping, thanks to eBuyer); 512MB of SODIMM RAM for my laptop; an excellent 2gb SanDisk Extreme III CompactFlash card; the Canon RC-1 Remote (from eBay, only £11); a 10/100 ethernet switch and a CompactFlash reader.
Unfortunately this spending spree was started by me looking at the Canon 100-400mm f/4-5.6L which, at ~£1000 is a little out of my budget at the moment. However, something had to fill the void, so…
Anyway, revision’s started now. First up is Asymptotic Methods, and it’s going reasonably well at the moment. My plan is to start early and finish early, leaving time for TV and other assorted good things. Hurrah.
As part of my really nice Christmas haul, I was lucky enough to get the full box DVD set of Planet Earth. For anybody that mildly likes nature documentaries, or just appreciates absolutely spectacular camera work and production - go and buy this right now. I mean right now.
I don’t often appeal to the political correctness brigade, but to all of you out there who don’t believe in saying “Merry Christmas”, I hope you had a really nice holiday.
I was extremely happy to receive a lot more than was expected this year, and because so many people have now asked me what I got, inevitably lots and lots gets missed out. So if you’re interested, have a look at my present list!
To be honest, there’s an awful lot to keep me occupied and this just isn’t a good thing. I haven’t really done any work at all, but there is a plan now that some things are out of the way. Whether that plan actually succeeds or not is yet to be discovered, but we shall see!
About three months after I bought my 350D, Canon announced that they were just about to release the 400D. I was a little bitter about the whole deal. Yesterday on my way home, I popped into the Bullring Apple Store to see the toys and drool everywhere, and was rather surprised to see a 400D sitting there on the side hooked up to one of the demo models. I couldn’t resist playing with it to find out what I’d missed out on.
Well - finally - I’ve found the sort of software that I’ve been pining for the past two months. Basically, I wanted the ability to post normally, but also post photoblog style images every so often, and I’d pretty much given up all hope of finding anything to suit this.
However, whilst I was browsing the WordPress Codex yesterday, I found a brilliant plugin - Yet Another Photoblog - by Johannes Jarolim. It ties together everything that I want - automatic thumbnail generation, a simple interface, EXIF parsing, and allows me to write a little comment about the photos that I’m taking.
So, last night, with the aid of the amazing A List Apart tutorial on creating CSS drop-shadows, I got the image displaying nicely, and then added Litebox 1.0 to get a nice image display. The next step is to get the EXIF information displaying the way I want it. But for the time being, I’m going to let this go. I hope you all like it - please leave a comment and let me know what you think!
Well, obviously somebody out there is actually reading these entries, as there’s been a few questions as to how I manage my workflow with RAW photos.
My grand plan outlined in the previous entry never really materialized for reasons of time. However, I do have a fairly stable workflow set up now with my RAW photos, so I thought I’d at least try to document that here, in case anybody else was interested in the slightest.
Well, it’s been a fun weekend; basically involved quite a lot of drinking and alcohol-related goodness on Friday night, followed by a trip to the Kenilworth fireworks festival yesterday evening with Mark, Alan, Vicky and Tom. Somehow, they convinced me to resurrect my old Facebook account and actually do something with it. I will be posting the photos on there, probably within the next couple of days if I can actually get around to it.
I’ve been to a couple of fireworks festivals, and this was pretty much a standard one. I do love fireworks, so it’s all good. Again, I took my camera, but to be honest, most of the pictures haven’t turned out to be very good, since I didn’t have a tripod and hence was trying to get good 3-4 second exposures hand-held; clearly this was not going to happen. Also gutting was that, for some reason, my camera decided it didn’t want to take any pictures just as we got to the best bit. I have no clue what happened at all there.
There was a lot of people there - they say about 15,000 or something silly. The actual event is held on a big, big field which is conveniently sloped, so everybody has a great view. I’ve promised myself that I’m also going to get around to posting a load of photos on here - honest!
For now though, it’s dinner time.
Hello again! If you’re visiting this page, then you may be wondering “what the hell happened to this place?”
I was sitting down, working on the website code when all of a sudden, I realised that I really, really didn’t want to be doing this any more. “What,” I wonderered to myself, “is the point of having a blog if nothing gets done but fiddling with the code for hours upon end?” So I set out looking for well-established blogging packages that would allow for the maximum amount of customization, as well as being relatively easy to set up and use on a daily basis. Eventually, I settled upon WordPress.
As an initial package, WordPress isn’t mind-blowingly amazing. It’s very slick, but the feature set isn’t particularly wonderful. Then I looked at the WordPress Codex, and immediately found a plethora of different plugins, extensions and all sorts of other lovelyness. I even coded a couple of little extensions myself for the fun of it, as I wasn’t entirely satisfied with LatexRender for my mathematics posts. I’m also using the Super Archives plugin for the live archives (they still need quite a bit of work). The amount of customization one can achieve is really quite staggering.
Importing the posts was actually relatively trivial. Of course, I have (or rather had) two separate sources for my blog posts; Warwick Blogs and my own backend. Warwick Blogs allows export via Movable Type. I did run into a problem with some stray tabs messing around the import engine, but after that all was good. I knocked up an exporter for my news entries and after an hour of fiddling the content was in place.
The theme I’m using has obviously been re-styled. I’m still not totally happy with it, but for the time being I simply can’t be bothered messing around with it any more. It’s based off of the original Kubric theme which comes with WordPress 2. It took a little while to get used to because of the different files used for the theme, but I think that it’s turned out okay.
There’s still a lot of work to do. As you can see, the majority of my posts are still un-tagged. So there’s the matter of leafing through all of those - something I’m not particularly looking forward to. Besides this, I also want to get working on some kind of photographic blogging thing (no, I’m not sure what that means either) and that means I have the joy of organising my photos!
7:19 pm | Posted in Computing, Photography, Web Development | 1 Comment » | Show comment »
