Parents to be
Today, I did my first “maternity photoshoot” with my sister Mary, and her husband Mark. We had a lot of fun (and rather a lot of ice cream soda!)
I’ll link to the rest of the shots once they’ve had a chance to look at them.
PaulSeward.com
Photos of Phones and Phonographs (occasionally)
Back from Bungay
Bungay was grand! Quite possibly the best one I’ve been to.
Buttercups, Bubbles, St Peters Mild in bottles, Pewter, Hot Tubs and Saunas in a field, croquet, new tent, Monty on form in the kitchen, MEAT!!!, kittens, Farmer Paul having velvet curtains in the shed… it were ace.
There are more photos of my week in a field here – According to my frame counter, I shot 342 frames 33 made the cut. That’s only a 10% success rate – pretty poor really.
I’ll do a proper write up for r.j at some point, if I get around to it. But for now, I’m going to go curl up with the cat and make the most of my freedom before the real world comes knocking on my door tomorrow morning.
Thoughts on photo competitions
I’ve learned something this week.
It’s that trying to organise a “fun, family friendly, inclusive photo competition” aimed at allowing people who take holiday snaps to join in along side those who shoot with honking great DSLRs – it’s that those with the DSLRs have an astounding capacity to be jerks about it.
The rules of the game started off as:
- Deadline is 1pm Saturday
- Photos must be taken this week, and of the festival (daytrips to the seaside don’t count)
- One entry per person
- No photoshopping
That last rule was put in because not everyone has a laptop with them, let alone the skills or inclination to drive photoshop. It’s essentially an attempt to level the playing field and allow everyone to take part. It’s also been the bane of my week.
It started off as “That’s ok, I use GIMP” – so it was changed to “no post processing” – this was the worst thing I could have done. I’ve spent all week having the same discussions with every bugger who shoots RAW. I’m fed up with them asking “what am I allowed to do when converting raw to jpeg?” I started off trying to answer these questions, “whitebalance is allowed, exposure tweaks aren’t, sharpening and noise removal are not, cropping and straightening is right out” but last night, one shooter in particular (who it turns out, is not even intending to enter) wound me right up.
It started as your average “does converting to jpg count as post processing” progressed through some “cloning should be allowed so I can eliminate dead pixels” and turned into “your rules are completely arbitrary, you should be using the set of rules that my favourite photo competition website uses as they’re clearly much better”
It’s rare that after 10 days of chilling out in a field I get so steamed up about something that I need to take some time out, but I walked off site for two and a bit hours, and walked for 7.5 miles down country lanes in the dark.
It took 2 and a bit hours of stomping along in the dark for me to come to the conclusion that what I’d experienced is a fundamental difference in approach to photography.
For me, a photo is about capturing a moment in time, a subject, a feeling. It’s about composition, timing, and emotion. It’s about what you point the camera at and when you press the button. For some, it’s about the technology, the toys, the gadgets, making each pixel technically perfect, ironing out any percieved imperfection carefully and methodically.
So, the Bungay Photo Competition will be going ahead tonight, we’ve had 6 entries so far and half the site aren’t even awake yet – but if it happens again next year, I’m having nothing to do with it.
Bang2
I killed the ambient this time, and adjusted the lights a bit (snooted them so more of the light goes where I want it and less is wasted, and propped the right hand one up on a bigger pile of books)
I’m out of balloons now though.
Anywho, it’s been fun playing but I should really start thinking about this weeks “decisive moment” photo! :-)
Bang!
So far this evening, I’ve:
- Rebuilt my £2 audio trigger and found some fresh batteries for it
- Taken the above shot
- Spent *far* too much time fixing the wordpress plugin I use to pick an image from my gallery software.
FFS, the gallery software has supported nested sub-albums for at least one major version now – why do I have to re-implement the support for it in the plugin each time I upgrade that to match the new version of the gallery?
This time round, my fix is everso slightly slicker. Perhaps when I submit it back to the maintainer he’ll bother to roll it into the next release.
Now, time to feed the cat, feed me, and possibly take a look at PHP-IDS
Upgrade pains
I’ve just updated my gallery software, it seems to have caused a couple of wobbles with my wordpress integration. If images aren’t displaying for you, hit refresh and they might. If that doesn’t work, try clicking where the image should be.
I’ll fix this as soon as I know what’s going on.
Update: I think I’ve knocked it on the head now.
Creepy Crawley
I shot 97 frames for this weeks Tuesday Challenge, trying to take a closeup photo of an insect/bug/minibeast.
97 frames.
97 sodding frames, and this was the only useful one.
That’s the most work I’ve put into a Tuesday challenge so far this year! I’ve spent more time on this than I did on Paul Atomicus. The problem is, I don’t have a macro lens.
My macro “solution” is an old Chinon 50mm f/1.7 prime and a macro reversing ring. This lets me mount the 50mm lens “backwards” on my camera (The bit that normally faces the subject, now faces the film/sensor) so instead of taking a big scene and making it smaller to fit on something the size of a postage stamp, the lens takes a scene the size of a postage stamp and makes it sodding huge!
I already had the prime (it’s one of the 4 I have for my 35mm slr collection, I really should cull some of those) and the reversing ring cost about tuppence from ebay a year or two ago. I think I paid more for the shipping than I did the ring itself.
This setup is all well and good, and wins all the cheap-as-chips points, but it has a couple of down sides. I lose the ability to control aperture/shutter speed automatically. This isn’t a huge problem, I shot manually back in my film days for long enough that I can cope with that, sunny 16 still seems to work well enough as a starting point.
The big problem is that I lose the ability to focus.
Not autofocus, focus.
For some reason I don’t fully understand (it probably involves physics and lots of maths) when mounted this way round, the focusing ring on the lens no longer makes a blind bit of difference. The only way to focus the shot, is to physically move the camera backwards and forwards.
With moving subjects (such as insects) and a depth of field measured in millimeters, this makes getting a useable shot a bit of a challenge to say the least!
Wet leaves
It’s taken me almost 4 days to post process this shot. That’s 4 days to crop it, S-curve it, and sharpen it. Not doing photo-a-day is making me lazy!