Family, Photography and other misc news
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.
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
I just found out that its the Mac OS X Operating System’s 10th Birthday today.
Its certainly come a long way. While at work I use Windows, Solaris, Redhat and AIX, at home I stopped using Windows as my primary operating system not long after Windows XP was released.
Working my way through various versions of Linux before finally settling happily on Fedora Linux.
Well that changed when I decided to buy Caroline a Wedding Present of an Apple Powerbook. OS X was just so easy to use, never getting in the way and just letting you get on with the work at hand.
While Apple users may like to claim Mac’s never crash this is not true but they certainly do not crash often, certainly an improvement on Windows, NT4, 2000, XP and 2003.
Through what little I have used Windows 7 it to looks very good now but I think i’ll stick with OS X for a few more years.
Well, really starting to feel much better now.
Last Saturday we took the big GS out for a spin, just a quick hour long trip to get some quilting fabric for Caroline.
It really exhausted me but there was no problems.
Wednesday I was feeling really good, nearly normal in fact so we commuted into work on the bike.
Boy did that feel good. A lovely day, passing all the cage (car) drivers stuck in traffic.
Today was back in the car. Very tired and not up to riding the bike.
Still the doctor did say 6-12 weeks to get over this, we are half way now and I am so much better.
Might just have to plan a weekend motorcycle trip for the summer, that will be something to look forward to.
To all you motorcyclists out there:
Keep it sticky side down.
Posted using iOS WordPress from my Apple iPhone
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.
We are members of both the National Trust and of English Heritage.
Now the National Trust have for some time had an excellent free iOS app for finding places to visit nearby and getting information about them.
Finally English Heritage are also joining the 21st Century (that’s nearly funny) and are releasing their own app, due in April.
Hope it’s free like the National Trust App.
Just a quick note to let you know an update for WordPress for iOS has been released
Using it now to post this. Interface is improved and I look forward to trying it out in anger. The previous version did crash fairly often and once even lost me a post that I had previously posted.
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.
Just a quick note that you can make a donation via Google or Apple’s iTunes.
http://kevinrose.com/blogg/2011/3/14/apples-role-in-japan-during-the-tohoku-earthquake.html
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