Back in October last year I used Blurb to produce a book based on the content of my photoblog. Having been very pleased with how it turned out I decided to do one every time the blog contained enough material. A couple of weeks back I had enough material to produce a second book. Here it is:
Back in May this year I finally cracked and joined the ranks of people who use "smart phones". For a while I was seriously thinking about going for an Apple iPhone (especially after seeing Elizabeth Gordon's early shots with CameraBag) but, in the end, I was tempted by Android and got myself a HTC Magic.
One of the first things I did after I got it, following the lead of Elizabeth Gordon and James Beston, was to get a posterous account. At first I used it as a place to post ad-hoc photos but, pretty soon, I started to treat it as a more (insert hand-waving here) "serious" photoblog.
It's been running for a few months now and I'm rather happy with the content. So much so that I've decided to let it have its own domain: www.seen-by.me.uk.
Also, recently, I finally cracked and won an ongoing battle I've been having with Blurb's Booksmart (the battle is all my own making — I just don't "get" that software) and made a book of the blog: seen by davep v1.1:
For a long time now I've wanted to have a go at creating a video slide show. While I did have a quick dabble with Animoto a while back, and while it was fun, it wasn't quite what I had in mind.
I've wanted to be able to take a piece of music, ideally an instrumental, and try and weave my images around it. To this end I've spent some time, over the months, looking for instrumental tracks that I love and which are also licenced in a way that would permit using them as the backing of such a video. That was the really important part, that I was legally permitted to use the music.
And then, last week, one of my favourite singer/songwriters released a couple of instrumental versions of her songs via her newsletter. She also said that anyone was permitted to use the music in other works as long as full and proper credit is given.
One of the tracks was the instrumental of I'm Yours. I *had* to do something with that. And so, last Saturday night, I fired up Windows Movie Maker and started having a dabble.
This is the result:
Yesterday I finished uploading the results of the first film through my Zero Image 2000. I'm very impressed with what I've got out of it on a first go.
Thanks to the processing and scanning skills of my friendly Scottish landscape photographer I have the results of the most recent film from my Holga 120GN online:
Last night I finished processing and uploading images from the latest roll of film through my Holga 120GN. The photographs were taken around Sleaford and Grantham:
Following on from yesterday's set of images, I've now finished processing and uploading the results from the second roll of Fuji Provia 400X through the Holga 120GN:
I've just finished processing and uploading images taken on the first roll of Fuji Provia 400X that I've put through the Holga 120GN. On the whole the results are okay. Some of the shots were a little over-exposed (I've "rescued" them with a little extreme and "Holgaesque" post-processing) but that's to be expected if you head out in bright sunlight with ISO 400 film (even at f/13). Those with a keen eye will note that there's only 11 images in the sets that follow rather than 12. One of them is a family photo so doesn't go on the site.
Last night I took the EOS 400D and the Holga 120GN out for a walk up the road to Birthorpe and back. Along the way I managed to capture some fairly dramatic skies. You can see the 400D results over here — you'll have to wait for the Holga results, obviously. :-)
I mentioned last week that, while shooting around Belton House the other weekend, I'd also taken along my Holga 120GN.
One trip to my friendly Scottish landscape photographer later and I have Holga at Belton House.
It started a week or two ago. Over on twitter I saw Elizabeth Gordon reply to something written by Kevin Day about how he was going to have an article about his photography in his local paper. I added Kevin to my follow list and, later on, caught the pointer to a photograph of the article.
I got to thinking that this was a good idea — local newspapers doing features on local photographers and/or artists in general — and half seriously mentioned it to @GranthamJournal. I got a reply of "yes" (which surprised and delighted me) and "let's do you first" (which surprised and horrified me, in a good way).
Fast forward to today and this is what I find in the paper:
Some photography happened this last weekend. First off, on Saturday, I found myself sat waiting in a car park in Grantham and I had my PowerShot G9 with me so more shots for my Life in a Car Park series happened:
Last weekend was a long weekend here in the UK and, as normally happens on a bank holiday weekend, the weather was pretty awful (yes, mostly sunny week with rain most of the weekend). However, despite the lousy weather, I did manage to get some photography done:
This evening I was processing some photographs I'd taken with my Canon EOS 400D earlier today and, while doing so, I noticed for the first time that it appeared to have a rather prominent red stuck pixel. I looked back through some of my earlier (although still pretty recent) photographs and could see it there too, although it did appear to be fainter.
Assuming that it was just "one of those things" (it's not like it's something that isn't easily fixed in Photoshop) I didn't think too much of it for a while but then I got curious and did a little bit of searching on Google. In doing so I found this page. Given that there was nothing to lose I decided to give it a go. Here's what I did:
This morning, during my first "coffee in the office", I was reading my various RSS feeds and found this item on the Google Blog. Thinking that it sounded kind of interesting I went and had a look and realised that it would be dead simple to implement on my photography pages.
With less than an hour's work (a lot less really, it took longer to set the colours than it did to sort out the code on my site) I had a social networking, rating and commenting system added to my site. The only minor issue that slowed me down a little was the fact that the rate/comment gadget, when set to "per page" scope, doesn't appear to take URL parameters into account when deciding that something is a "page" (in my case this meant that a comment left on one photograph was left on every photograph on my site). Because of that I had to switch to the ID scope system and add a little bit of PHP to generate a unique ID per page.
See here for my main photography membership page and here for an example of a page with the ability to rate and comment.
I guess the main reason I really like this shot is that it reminds me so much of my photograph Communication.
