Crumpler
Posted: Fri 30 December, 2005 Filed under: Photography Leave a comment »Well, despite one of the nastiest websites I’ve seen in a while (so bad I’m not going to even link to it) I’ve just ordered myself a new Crumpler camera bag.
I did get a camera bag along with the new camera for my birthday, but having used it a fair bit, it’s just – well – ungainly. Awkward to get into, a pain in the ass to carry (it’s a bag with a handle, rather than the more helpful straps’n’stuff) and just generally not suited for the stuff I do with cameras. It’s great for use at home, or in the car, but for general walking around it’s not ideal.
So yes, I’ve ordered a new Crumpler bag, bizarrely named (as are all Crumpler bags) the “Formal Lounge”. It’s big enough to hold the camera plus lenses, plus laptop, and still some space for other normal stuff too. It’s going to be interesting, using it and carrying everything around.
A proper review will follow once I’ve used it a while, probably at the end of January, or thereabouts.
Photo progress
Posted: Sat 3 December, 2005 Filed under: 2005 Resolutions, Photography, Thoughts 1 Comment »A very large thank you to the person (he knows who he is) who sent me a monopod for the camera. I’m sure it’s going to come in very useful indeed.
Progress with the new EOS20D has been slow of late – I’m still getting there, but over the last couple of weeks I haven’t really had the opportunity to go out with it and get anything good. I suppose that over time that’s something I need to do more, is make time to go out and take photos. After all, the best learning method is practice, or so people keep telling me.
The monopod will come in handy for a lot of the stuff that I do, I’m sure. I saw one in use at the Euro OSCON in Amsterdam earlier this year, and realised that once I’d got a heavy bit of kit like the EOS20D, it’d almost certainly be something that’d come in handy.
So yes, many thanks again.
Qoop revisited
Posted: Tue 22 November, 2005 Filed under: Customer Services, Geeky, Photography 1 Comment »Having posted some stuff over the weekend about them, I figure it’s pretty impressive that I got a response in the comments yesterday from a representative of Qoop…
D4D et al:
Thanks for checking out QOOP. Right now the only option for the ordering of photos in your books is in the way they were uploaded from Flickr, so that means the way the photos were ordered in your sets, etc. You can, in Flickr, edit the order of your set to be uploaded. We realize this doesn’t provide much flexibility and additional layout options are in the works. We had to start somewhere and we opted for efficiency and convenience first. Both cover and page layouts will have greater design possibilities very soon.
We hope you’ll check us out again!
Hugh
QOOP
Pretty impressive – and, as such, only fair for me to do this and print it up on the front page rather than having to hunt through the comments for it.
Portfolio Printage
Posted: Sat 19 November, 2005 Filed under: Photography, Resolutions 3 Comments »Arse. Remember that post about resolutions? Where I said “I’ve got the portfolio itself, but not done anything with it yet. I’ve also recently found another way of doing it that I haven’t yet experimented with – but I intend to do so before the year’s out.“?
Well, I just tried it out – and failed.
I was quite optimistic when I saw Qoop‘s page, which supposedly made it easy to print a photo-book from your Flickr photos. And yes, in many ways it does make it easy – you can simply select a bundle of photos (either entire sets, or individual frames) to be printed.
But – and, in the context of printing a portfolio-type book this is a bit of a big issue – you can’t organise how they’re going to be laid out. It seems to work from an alphabetical point of view, that the photos are done in order of the alphabetical names of the sets. So really it’s more hassle than it’s worth to come up with something viable.
I’ll keep on looking around, because I do like the idea of a printed book as an alternative method of portfolioing (is that a word?), but I’m also going to have to work on completing that proper ‘folio now as well.
Still, it was worth a try.
Infamy, Infamy
Posted: Tue 15 November, 2005 Filed under: Music, Photography, Reviews(ish), Thoughts 3 Comments »Well, now there’s a turn-up for the books.
The semi-review mainly-rant I wrote last week following the Tracy Chapman concerts has been put up on the Tracy Chapman site, for the day we went. Now that’s kind of scary – a whole new bundle of people who might just link here having read the review/thoughts. Well, unless they were some of the lower primates solipsistically convinced of their own importance above all others. In which case they may be just a tad offended (assuming any form of self-awareness or introspection at all) and leave nasty rude comments here.
Who knows?
And frankly, who cares? *grin*
Now, maybe I can start angling for press credentials, which’ll let me get my Canon past the door-gorillas.
Photo-Manipulation
Posted: Tue 8 November, 2005 Filed under: Photography, Thoughts 2 Comments »Hmm, not often I do this, but in the comments, Wulvern wrote:
Like the photos. Are they ‘as taken’ or did you do any bodging in Photoshop or similar? Am thinking of upgrading from a basic digi camera but the reviews in magazines and at dpreview.com (top site) suggest that the output digital SLRs need ‘working on.’
So – as with previous photos I’ve put online either here at d4d™ or on my pages at Flickr – no, I don’t do a great deal of alteration to my shots if I can help it. I tend to limit myself to cropping the images if necessary, and resizing them. I’ve done some aspects of editing them in some cases, or converting from colour to black&white, but even those are a bit of a rarity.
However, I also probably don’t use the camera to its fullest power, because I tend to shoot photos as JPGs rather than in the RAW format. RAWs take up more room on the card, and need to have an amount of processing done on them on the PC before they can be usable. Quite honestly, that’s beyond my current skills a lot of the time, but also I don’t like knobbing about too much with images. Yes, sure, I could take a RAW image and do any amount of stuff with it – but I know I wouldn’t do so.
I like to keep images as close to their reality as possible. OK, maybe in the future I’ll play with images and saturation levels etc. so that I could come up with images such as this, but at the moment it’s just not my thing. I like to use my own creativity and the power of the camera to produce something like the shot of the log in the waterstream – I don’t want to be sat in Photoshop for hours blurring the bloody things to the correct consistency.
So – to go back to answering the question – no, I don’t mess about with the images. The ones from the weekend have only been altered to rotate some of them through 90°, that’s it. Yeah, some could do with some trimming or cropping, but I haven’t done so yet. As for the images needing processing from a DSLR, yeah, they can do. But it’s up to you – I stick (for now) with JPG images, and don’t need to stuff about the same way I would with a RAW. I could do, but I chose not to. As with most things on SLRs, you can make life pretty much as complicated or simple as you want and/or as your skills let you.
Photies
Posted: Tue 8 November, 2005 Filed under: Photography, Resolutions, Travel 2 Comments »Well, I’m back in the land of the living. And photos have been uploaded to my Flickr page so you can see them there. I’ll probably add more to it later, but for now that little selection will do.
As should be fairly obvious, I’m beginning to get the hang of the new camera. It’s an amazing bit of kit (and no, Andy, all the offers etc. on it don’t mean it’s a crap camera by any stretch!) that I hope will be able to keep pace with my development for a few years at least. There’s still a long way to go at the moment – and I definitely intend to sort out a macro lens early in the new year, along with (possibly) a Lensbaby, which could make for some interesting ideas and creative odds and sods.
I still find an awful lot of my inspiration comes from people like Chromasia, although there’s also a lot of other sources involved. And I’ve got a couple more shots that are going to get submitted to Amateur Photographer in the next couple of months and so on too.
So yes, photographic development (pardon the pun) is progressing, and I’m pleased with the way it’s going. I haven’t done a whole lot of photos this year, but I intend to change that in 2006 again. And I’ve *still* got to put together that portfolio…