Selecting
Posted: Mon 31 July, 2006 Filed under: Domestic, Photography, Thoughts 1 Comment »One interesting thing we did over the weekend was spend some time going through some of the photo files/archives I’ve got from the last three years. The sheer number of photos is really quite scary, and I should perhaps consider killing/deleting some of the older ones.
Or, of course, I could just do a back-up of them, and dump them all to a DVD. That’d be sensible. But no, instead I suspect I’m far more likely to just keep them all on the hard-drive, although I do have a back-up of them on another portable hard-drive too. But it’s interesting to see the way my photography has improved and changed over the years – I’ve been taking photos properly now for about five years, which is pretty scary in itself – and the way things have changed with the use of different cameras and so on too.
As it was, we were going through trying to find the images we wanted to enter in to a competition, so there was quite a critical eye being used, and many fell by the wayside for just not being technically great, or for the lesser offence of just not being “right”. Whatever that means.
Anyway, in the end we narrowed down the list to about 20. Not good, but not bad either – considering that initially we had a list that numbered into the hundreds. So I’ve ended up running those 20 to Photobox, so we can have 6″x4″ copies of all of them, and then narrow it down from there.
Canon
Posted: Sun 23 July, 2006 Filed under: Customer Services, Photography, Weirdness 2 Comments »I knew there was something I hadn’t installed on the new PC, and today it came to me. All the drivers and software for the EOS20D – no drivers, no software, nowt. Ooops.
And just when did I discover this? Yep, when I was trying to move some photos around. Ain’t it always the way?
And then when I looked on the Canon site, it’s got all the bloody updaters and revisions for the software, but has it got the original files? Has it buggery. Cue a mad hunt through the CD Graveyard – really must organise that a bit better at some point – and eventually found the relevant CD.
So now I’ve installed all the original programs etc., and then I have to update them all. It’s fucking bizarre.
Ah well.
Amateur Photographer
Posted: Sat 24 June, 2006 Filed under: Photography, Thoughts 2 Comments »Every year, Amateur Photographer magazine runs a competion called “Amateur Photographer of the Year”, also known as APOY, which has about ten different “rounds” of photo submissions, where people get given a theme, and have to submit photographs that fit in with that theme.
And every month, when they publish the results, I get annoyed.
You see, the competition is for Amateur photographers, which to AP means “Photographers who don’t make their living from photography”. And yes, I agree that that is the true definition of “Amateur”. But when you look at the competition results, well, sometimes you have to wonder.
In the results in the current issue – and believe me, this is a rarity – only one of the top three has been edited to within an inch of its life. I’m not having a dose of sour grapes here, because the winning image for this round is beautiful, and utterly deserves the prize. The third place one is pretty damn stunning too, and so are many of the others in the top 30 that are published. But – and this is where I get annoyed – the second place image isn’t actually a photograph.
Instead, it’s two photographs, skilfully merged in Photoshop. And yes, the merging is bloody superb – it *should* be one photo, and if it was one photo, I’d have no qualms about it being in the top three. But it’s not one photo, it’s a merge – not even a double exposure, or anything using a photographic technique that might take some skill. No, it’s Photoshop.
I can’t help but feel, when it comes to these things, that the prizes should be allocated to photos, and to a person’s skill in spotting that image, framing it, and taking it. That – to me – is what photography is about. I don’t want to see things that have been hacked, altered, merged, composited and beaten to within an inch of their lives, images manipulated in photoshop (or similar). Maybe I’m too much of a purist.
Don’t get me wrong – I use Photoshop myself. But only to do what, if I were using a film camera, I could do in a darkroom. Crops, resizes, blowups, maybe even on occasion some alteration of brightness and contrast. I like my photos to be real, to portray a scene as I’ve seen it (or, technically, as I’ve envisioned it could be, say I’m using a long exposure or something). I don’t want to portray a scene as it should be, or could be.
And when these images win in an Amateur Photographer competition, what kind of message does that send out to photographers, to people who just want to take photos?
Raptors
Posted: Thu 8 June, 2006 Filed under: Domestic, Photography 6 Comments »On the bank holiday weekend, we ended up at the Tring Canal Festival – various reasons, but well, that’s where we ended up.
While we were there, there was a falconry centre that had brought along some of their birds, and I took advantage of it to get some photos of kestrels, owls, and a golden eagle with the benefit of no bars between them and the camera.
As it happens, I’m actually really pleased with some of the results…
Click images to see big versions
Card Reader
Posted: Tue 6 June, 2006 Filed under: Getting Organised, Photography, Travel Leave a comment »Before going off on this week’s holiday, I made sure that I ordered a USB card-reader, so that I can easily copy all the photos from the Digital SLR onto the laptop, rather than using the hellish method offered by Canon for doing so.
I suppose that I should’ve tested it out before going away, but well, that’d take all the fun away from it, wouldn’t it?
Still, more news/reviews/thoughts about it when I get back. I hope it works – I’d hate to have thrown the EOS20D through a window…
Nuclear Nightmares
Posted: Wed 26 April, 2006 Filed under: Photography Leave a comment »A set of photos from Chernobyl, twenty years on. Incredibly sad, and extremely powerful stuff.
Somerset
Posted: Mon 24 April, 2006 Filed under: Animals, Domestic, Photography, Travel Leave a comment »The weekend in Somerset was actually really pleasant – it does make a change for us to just go somewhere and pretty much collapse and die for a couple of days. Of course, we still have an Idiot Hound to knacker, but it’s just good to be doing less than we normally do for a weekend.
The drive down was a pig – the M4 was rigid all the way, and the start of the M5 section involved ten miles of 40mph traffic (well, it would’ve been 40mph maximum, but as it was hardly moving at all for most of that, it was more like 10mph. *sigh*) which slowed us down considerably.
Anyway, once we got down to St Audries Bay, all was well. Hound perked up (she knows the place well, and loves the beach) and so once we’d unloaded the car off we went down to the beach where Hound ran round like a loon for about an hour. Some things never change.
Saturday was a day for knackering Hound, but also for us to mooch around a bit, see some of North Somerset, and just generally have a relaxing day. So it started with another hour on the beach for Hound (from just after 7.15. It’s like having an excitable four-year-old sometimes, I swear), then off up North Hill in Minehead, and another hour-ish of Hound running round the woods while we walked around in a less-manic fashion. Then drove to Tarr Steps, stopping off for lunch in a village called Winsford. Another hour of Hound diving in and out of the river, chasing sticks, while we walked up along the side of the river. Then back to the caravan, with an utterly wiped-out Hound. We’d planned to go back to the beach again in the evening, but she didn’t even stir at the word “Walk”.
So, a quiet evening along with some website fixing, and all was well with the world.
Sunday just involved driving home, and being domestic.
But all in all it was a good weekend, and much needed. Pictures will probably follow, mainly on Flickr again…