Category: Photography

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Ryedale Folk Museum

Today we had a trip across the North Yorkshire Moors and spent several hours at the Ryedale Folk Museum.

William Hayes’s (1871-1940) Photographic Studio has been moved there. It’s the oldest daylight lit studio surviving. His studio still has his large format camera with 7.5 inch portrait lens and his dark room is also there.

The studio was set up in 1902 in Monkgate, York, and moved to Hutton-le-Hole in 1911.

In many ways its not much different todays studios, a selection of cloth backgrounds, props, but instead of flash, a side wall of glass and a glass ceiling.

The Museum opened in 1964, and the original exhibits comprised of the private collections of Wilfred Crossland, Raymond Hayes and Bertram Frank.

 

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Evening Meal

If you are ever near Lastingham, try the Blacksmiths Arms, good beer and fine food.

 

Game terrine starter, belly pork, black pudding and a bottle of fine red wine. Glad I was not having to drive.

 

If you are ever in the area do pop in to the church.  St Mary’s has a wonderful crypt well worth a visit.

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a long weekend of photography

We have decided to have a long weekend of photography.

We will be spending Friday to Monday in North Yorkshire and we will be visiting as many local National Trust and English Heritage properties as we can.

For you gear heads we will be packing just two Digital SLR’s with a Nikkor 12-24mm f/4 DX on one and a 24-70mm f/2.8 on the other.  We will also be packing our Medium Format Kit (Hassleblad) and a good heavy tripod.

I’ll be blogging when I can using WordPress for iOS using the iPhone, but due to the very rural nature of the area’s we will be stopping in, Wi-Fi and even a mobile phone signal for voice, never mind data, will be extremely limited, so i’ll be updating these posts during the following week and uploading more photographs.

Friday consisted of a trip to Nunnington Hall, a rather fine country house, with lots of willing Peacocks all trying to impress.

I had a Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 on the camera but a long lens was fortunately not necessary as the birds were extremely tame. In fact one Peahen walked up so close I thought she was going to peck the lens.

This weekend will also be the time I’ll be testing GPS4Cam. A piece of iOS software for the iPhone which Chris Bennett uses and has reviewed on his site.

I’ll possibly not get round to posting many photographs until Monday so I’ll update these posts then.

Posted using WordPress for iOS

Updated

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HDR – Love & Hate

Many photographers have a Love & Hate relationship with HDR, I like it when its used with a degree of subtlety but even I have sometimes gone over the top when I feel the image suits it.

Interestingly the general public tend to like HDR more then photographers.

This is about as over the top as I go, but felt the image suited it.

If your interested in HDR check out the website stuckincustoms.com, some very dramatic examples and tutorials.

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Standards – a quick rant

When it comes to standards and companies not following them, I could have a good old rant about many top companies, computer and software companies being the worse.

The other day a photographer friend of mine was demonstrating his new photo editing software.

While key wording and adding other important metadata, we wondered where it was writing this data.

As I suspected, it was using a sidecar file to accompany the jpg’s and raw’s.

What really rilled me was instead of using an xmp sidecar file (an open standard developed by Adobe) which many other software programs can read, not just Adobe Lightroom or Camera Raw, it uses it’s own proprietary format.

Why!  Lock in, thats why, but the worry is, will the companies own future software support their own proprietary formats, past history suggests not.

From Wikipedia:
XMP sidecar files. For file formats that have no internal support for XMP data, the data is stored in separate .xmp files with the same base file name. Many photo cataloging applications have support for this file format.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Metadata_Platform

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Macro – Early Spring Flowers

Well last week I did say I was going to photograph the Daffodils. Well the blooms were not yet open but this weekend they were so, with the trusty Nikon D200, 100mm f/2.8 macro lens and the macro flash gear I spent some time trying to get some good shots.

Near the back door next to our poor dead bay leaf trees that have been killed by the hard winter were a likely bunch of Daffodils.

Setting up the tripod, nearly as low as it would go, I composed on the open flower.  I wanted a black background so I laid a black cloth behind.

The cloth together with a fairly high shutter speed to under-expose the background, this made the background a nice black.

 

With only one Daffodil in bloom, I then switched over to the bush that had lots of yellow flowers.

Once again I employed the black cloth and a high shutter speed to underexpose the background.

My attention was then next drawn to the bush next door which seemed to have an inordinate number of lady birds on it.

 

 

 

With so few flowers to chose from my last flower to photograph was the crocuses, a rather pretty purple.

A pleasant afternoon shooting.  Nothing to dramatic but good practice.

The lighting was nothing special just front lit via the macro flash.  Later in the month when we have more blooms to choose from I will definitely try something a little more challenging.

A few cut flowers, cut glass crystal vase and some studio lighting is in order

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Elinchrom IOS App

During my recent research into studio flash equipment, I came across an announcement by Elinchrom.  They are planning to release an app to control your Elinchrom Flash heads.

No real details yet but another posible reason for a photographer to have an iPad around.

Oh and don’t forget, iPad2 released today; at least in America. Oh well just have to wait.  Still tempted.

Decisions, decisions:

iPad2 or GF1; We will just have to see.

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Micro Four Thirds – another look

Well today I had another look at the Micro Four Thirds range.

I am still looking for that perfect travel camera, small pocketable and with high quality large sensor and interchangable lens.

I had a close look again at the Panasonic GF-1.  Not the GF-2 as I don’t feel thats as good ergonomically.

I am still very tempted but the lack of decent wide angles, still puts me off.  Its the x2 crop factor, I feel wide angle does not really start until you get to 24mm, and on micro four thirds thats 12mm.

There is currently not much to choose from in that range and what there is is very expensive.

Still I going to have to decided soon or if I do want a GF-1, it may have to be a second hand model as they are going fast.

 

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The UK NEC Focus on Imaging Show

While I have managed to get to the Lincoln Photography show twice now in the last three years it has been some time since I managed to visit some of the bigger shows.

This weekend the Focus on Imaging show starts.  I was hoping to get but due to my current ill health once again I will miss it.

If it is anything like the last time I managed to visit, it was a great day out and a chance to try out the latest equipment.

If you manage to get there have a great day out.

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Apple’s iPad update – iPad2 and ios 4.3

Well as expected Apple announced their iPad update, the new iPad2.  I am sure the Apple haters will trash it and the Apple lovers announce its the best update since sliced white bread.

For me these devices are more about what you can do with them and that means the applications.

As a Hassleblad medium format camera user, I received an email from them today, announcing there new iPad app which basically allows remote control and viewing of the taken image from your Hassleblad on the iPad.

With apps like this, a great 9.7 inch display, then not only does it make a great device for showing photos to clients but a productive and creative device too.

Looks good. Will I get one.  Don’t know, there are still a couple of apps I would like to see, are you listening Adobe and Elinchrom!

Update: New iTunes available now to support the new features.