RedBubble Art Manager for Windows v1.2.0.0 Released

I've just uploaded a new version of my RedBubble art manager application (this is v1.2.0.0). You can get it from here.

The main change in this release is to enhance the "promote a work" dialog as per Julie Langford's suggestion. Whereas before it simply let you promote with a simple image it now lets you promote with a simple image or one of the various product previews:

The result of something like that being:


Another change is that I've added a command that takes you directly to a work's edit page on RedBubble, something I thought of after reading a comment made by Shelley Heath.

RedBubble Art Manager v1.1.0.0 Released

I've released a quick update to my RedBubble Art Manager application, it can be downloaded from over here.

The main change in this release is to implement an idea suggested by Julie Langford. There's now a command that lets you generate simple "promotion codes" for individual works which can be used elsewhere:

You simply pick the style of code you want (Textile for use on RedBubble itself, BBCode for use on sites that use BBCode and some simple HTML that might be useful in blogs and the like) and the style and size of image you want and then copy the result to your clipboard.

RedBubble Art Manager

Ever since I wrote a ruby script for exporting a list of your art on RedBubble I've been toying with the idea of writing a variation on that theme that might be useful to people who aren't in the habit of getting "down and dirty" on their Windows machines, people who prefer not to install software they don't know about and who don't fancy running command line scripts.

Last week I finally cracked and started work on something:

You can read some more about it over here.

Belton House

Yesterday, given that it was hot and sunny, we decided to spend the day in the grounds of Belton House. I took the Canon PowerShot G9 and the Lomo Lubitel 166B with me.

I managed to run off a small set of photographs with the G9 and also finished off a roll of Fuji Provia 100F in the Lubitel. I'll be sending that off for processing some time today.

Spalding and Flag Fen

This last weekend I managed to get a fair bit of photography done. On Saturday I headed over to Spalding and took some photographs while watching the Spalding Flower Parade. Getting a good position to actually see the parade itself, let alone photograph it, was tricky. As it was I ended up generally photographing everything that was going on around me.

On Sunday I headed down to Flag Fen to see (and photograph) their Romans vs Saxons themed weekend. That was a fantastic day out. The stalls, displays and talks were interesting enough but the show battle towards the end of the day was excellent. If you ever get the chance to get to Flag Fen for such an event, do so, well worth the money.

Fuji Provia 100F Results

I've finally uploaded the results of the first roll of Fuji Provia 100F that I've put through the Lubitel 166B. Overall I'm pleased with the results. Out of the 12 images on the roll only 2 didn't turn out as I'd hoped (and both were down to a metering cock-up on my part, both images show a scene, they just don't show the scene how I wanted it to appear).

The uploaded images are:

Lubitel at Fulletby:

Normanton Church Museum:



Spring Clouds:



Towards Threekingham:



Storm Near Stow:

Over-Processing can be fun

Most of my photography, at least the images that don't get turned into black and white images, end up going on my website more or less as-is. Sure, like most people, I dabble with the curves and sharpen things up a little, that sort of thing; but mostly they remain looking more or less true to what was originally shot.

Not that I'm opposed to lots of post-processing, far from it. Sometimes the results can end up looking very attractive. I think the following might be a case in point (it works for me anyway):

As I type this my friend Tim is scanning the latest film from my Lubitel 166B. He threw a jpeg of the first scan over to me to have a look at (and it looks nice) and I had a quick mess around with it in Photoshop Elements. Not a deliberate attempt to produce something, just an idle play.

And this is what happened:

Click for bigger version
And I quite liked it.

While I wouldn't actually go with the above as the finished product of that shot (it looks nothing like the original and is horribly over-processed), I liked it enough that it was worth a quick upload. Once I've got the scanned tiff file I might even work on a version like this.

The shadow behind the cloud is a really nice detail. I hadn't even noticed that before I over-processed it.

extlogkeywords

On the off chance that it might be useful to someone I've put a copy of extlogkeywords on my website. This is the tool I wrote to generate the data to feed GraphViz and which is central to the production of my clickable search term interconnectedness graph thingy.

It's not terribly good ruby code, it could do with some tidying up. Also, because I hacked up a quick-and-dirty apache log parser, it probably won't even work for your logs (I should probably hunt down a good and flexible ruby library for that, there's got to be one out there). Still, if anyone wants a play/hack, it's there for the taking.

More ruby, graphviz and weblogs

Things have progressed a little further with my initial play with GraphViz. I noticed that it can produce SVG output and that the input format permits links to be associated with nodes. This meant it would be easy enough to produce a graph, with links, that could relate back to searches made on my site.

I decided to keep things simple and just deal with my photography so, after a little bit of extra scripting later, my site has a clickable search term interconnectedness graph thingy.

No sofas, slimy things with legs, horses, monks (electric or otherwise) or stoned poets were harmed during the writing of this code.

ruby, graphviz and weblogs

For the past few days I've been following Tim's messing about with some Haskell weblog analysis code and I've been meaning to have a play myself.

Some time ago I knocked up a little ruby script to extract the search terms from my weblogs. It never did anything clever and probably didn't do anything as near as clever as some of the things I could download but, well, you know what it's like when you want to hack up something yourself.

So, last night, I got around to extending it so that it would emit different types of reports. One that I added was a type of graph output (similar to Tim's) and, once I had that, I kept thinking that doing something graphical with the data would be the next fun option.

A quick search on the net and I stumbled on GraphViz. I then had a quick read up on the DOT language and I then extended my utility so that it would emit the graph data in DOT format. It took a little bit of messing about but, finally, I had something that worked.

The result looks like this. That's a subset of my web logs (if I throw too much at GraphViz's neato command I run out of memory!) and it only shows individual words that have appeared more than once. The numbers in brackets are the count of the number of times the word appears in the data. The lines, obviously, show how the words are related to each other as found in search query strings.

There's no surprise that the graph seems to cluster around Clipper and mutt.

I'm not sure that any of this tells me anything useful, but it is a different way of looking at what searches result in hits on my site.

Near Ewerby

On Saturday I had an hour or so to kill before needing to be in Sleaford so I took a little drive around some of the back roads east of the town and ended up just outside Ewerby. I happened to have the EOS 400D with me and shot a very small set of images of the landscape just outside Ewerby.



Pylons are such a photographic cliché, but they're also hard to resist. ;)

The Wrong Lens

Yesterday evening was quite a nice evening, mostly clear sky with some interesting clouds hanging around. So, because of this, I decided to head out with the Lubitel like I'd done a couple of nights earlier. During that previous run out I'd seen a shot I thought might work with the Tamron AF 55-200 and the EOS 400D so I took the 400D's kit lens off and put the Tamron on.

Because I don't have any sort of lens bag (yet) I did what I'd normally do: I put the kit lens in the Tamron box. I then grabbed the Lubitel, the tripod and the 400D and headed out.

I managed to use up the last couple of shots on the roll in the Lubitel (and it's now in the post, on its way to be processed and scanned by my friendly Scottish landscape photographer) and also took a couple of shots of a developing storm using the 400D. At that point I was wishing I'd left the kit lens on so I could get a wider angle, but I just about managed at 55mm.

I then drove to just outside Pointon to have a go at the shot I'd seen a couple of days before (a long shot of St. Andrew's Church). Having tried that, and got another shot of another developing storm, I started to head home.

Part of the way back I noticed another storm that was doing really well, nice anvil shape on top and everything. It was at this point I found myself wishing that I hadn't left the 400D's kit lens at home. A nice wide-angle shot of the storm above the fens would have been perfect, but there was no way I was going to manage it with the Tamron.

So, lesson for next time: either take both lenses out with me, even if I am just "popping around the corner", or at least take the PowerShot G9 as a backup.

All Photographers Are Terrorists

The growing problems with amateur photography in the UK, and the conflicts with people in uniform (normally PCSOs or private security, it seems), is pretty well documented, but each extra example I see annoys me further.

While I appreciate that any recorded report is going to be a little one-sided you really do start to wonder what the hell is going on when you read something like this and see the accompanying video:

Out with the Lomo Lubitel 166B

I can tell that we're well into spring now. I can finish work, do the things that need to be done once work is finished, and still have time to get out and about before the Sun has set.

Yesterday evening I took a drive out with the Lomo Lubitel 166B with a view to finishing off the Fuji film I've currently got in it (the same film that has the shots of Normanton Church Museum). I only managed to get two shots off before the Sun set (I guess that's what happens if you just take a drive and see what you can find — although I did manage to find a couple of locations that I might shoot at another time) but, at one location, I did take a shot of the Lubitel "in action":

Click for bigger version

Well, I say "in action", that was after I'd taken a shot. You can tell that by the fact that I'd put the lens cap back on and I totally forgot to remove it for this shot. D'oh!

Flag Fen and Rutland Water

Last Saturday we took a drive down to Flag Fen. As always I took my camera with me and took some photographs. It's a pretty impressive place and, if you're in driving distance, and have an interest in history and/or archaeology, pretty fascinating too. Well worth a visit if only to see the recreated roundhouses.

After we were done there we went for a bit of a drive around then then took a detour to Rutland Water to have tea. By then the weather had started to deteriorate but it did make for a pretty impressive sight over the water.

I also had my Lomo Lubitel 166B with me and managed to run off a couple of shots of Normanton Church Museum — it'll be interesting to see how they come out once I finish the film (this is the first colour film I've put through the Lubitel).

Photographs by nearest place

Carrying on with my messing about with my ruby code and with the data available from geonames.org, I've now added a new page to my main photography site: a list of all albums broken down by the nearest centre of population.

RedBubble works on a Google Map

Yet another simple application of the photography querying code I recently wrote:

The querying tool that I wrote knows which items on my main site are also on RedBubble. This means that it's one simple query to emit a KML file that would show all of those works on a Google Map. The code looks something like this:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'photography'
include Photography

...KML header/document start emitted here...

# For each photograph that is on RedBubble...
Albums.new.load.images.select {|i| i.for_sale? }.each {|i|
  ...KML Placemark emitted here...
}

...end of KML document emitted here...

Nice and simple.

The resulting file can then be fed to Google Maps, Google Earth or Virtual Earth. It can also be used to create an embedded map.

ruby, geonames and photography

Recently I've been working on some ruby code that serves up the photography content of my website as a ruby object (no, it's not available for download anywhere, it wouldn't be any use to anyone else). The point behind it is that it lets me query my photographs in all sorts of different ways (especially handy when working in irb as it means I've got a kind of REPL for working with my photographs) and also makes it easy to write programs that generate useful data.

Last night I got to thinking that it would be interesting to use this code to try and "reverse geocode" the ICBM address that every album has so that I could display the nearest centre of population to the album.

After a bit of searching on the net I found GeoNames. A handy enough site itself but even more handy because it has an API and a list of client libraries that are available. Handily there's a library for ruby.

A little bit of hacking later and I had this:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'geonames'
require 'photography'

include Photography
include Geonames

# Get place names for all the icbm locations
Albums.new.load.collect {|album|
  [ album.latitude, album.longitude ]
}.uniq.each {|icbm|
  near = WebService.find_nearby_place_name( icbm[ 0 ], icbm[ 1 ] )
  puts( "#{icbm[ 0 ]}\t" +
        "#{icbm[ 1 ]}\t" +
        "#{near[ 0 ].name}\t" +
        "#{near[ 0 ].country_name}\t" +
        "#{near[ 0 ].distance}" )
}

Put simply: it gets a list of the unique locations that I've recorded and runs through them getting the nearest known location. I then use the resulting data on my site to display the name of the nearest location to where the album is from.

It isn't perfect. For example, most of the photographs I've shot in and around Billingborough end up being shown as being near Horbling (the next village north of here, and somewhat smaller than Billingborough). Still, it's a start.

Currently I've got the text linking to a search on nearby.org.uk. Via that there's some fascinating (for varying values of fascinating) links to further searches that can be done based on location.

A day in the Lincolnshire Wolds

Last Sunday was the first day of really nice warm and sunny weather we've had since, well, since forever (okay, slight exaggeration, but only a week earlier we had snow on the ground). So, given that the forecast looked pretty good for the whole day we decided to ignore all the stuff that needed doing around the house and, instead, we took a drive up into the Lincolnshire Wolds.

Of course, I took a camera or two (I took the Canon EOS 400D and the Lomo Lubitel 166B — I got through ½ a film with the latter so no images from that just yet).

I ended up taking a handful of images in Horncastle and later on in the afternoon, after we'd had some lunch, we ended up near the village of Fulletby.

It was a pretty nice day out and it convinced me that I really need to get up to the Wolds more often.

Lincolnshire Links

It's almost six months since I started using RedBubble and, in that time, I've slowly been sorting out my other photography pages so that they link into it.

Initially I had my main site linking in (including links from individual images like this) and then, just recently, I created a front end called Photography by Dave Pearson.

The one site that was missing out on this was Lincolnshire Photography. While I did have a set of links to my prints of Lincolnshire this was nothing more than a pointer to a specific tag on my RedBubble account. What I was missing was links from the individually available works.

Now I've done this. The site will display a list of prints of Lincolnshire and each individual work that is available also has a direct link to the RedBubble page for that work (like this for example).

More Lubitel Photographs

I've just recently received the results of the latest film I put through my Lomo Lubitel 166B. Once again they've come out pretty good (and once again thanks go to Tim Haynes for processing and scanning the film).

The images from the film include:

• A star trail of the area around the constellation Taurus.
• A view of two trees in a park near me.
• A view from a bridge on the outskirts of Billingborough.
• Two views of a bridge on a public footpath in a field just outside Billingborough.
• Six views around the park in Billingborough.

Now that I've got the hang of the camera I think it's time to try some colour. I've ordered a couple of rolls of Fuji Provia 100F. I'll be interesting to see what I get out of that.

New Site (and a RedBubble hack)

A few days ago I knocked up a quick ruby script for exporting a list of my photographic works on RedBubble. This was, to some degree, a solution looking for a problem.

One "problem" I was toying with was to do something with a domain I recently acquired. Yesterday evening I knocked up some quick and dirty php code and had the start of working site up and running. The site is, obviously, based around an exported list of works from RedBubble and, in essence, is simply a front end of sorts for my RedBubble account.

It still needs some work, it'll probably be an ongoing project but, for now, here's the first version of Photography by Dave Pearson.

A RedBubble Collaboration

I've been with RedBubble for a few months now and, so far, it's been a good experience. Much as I suspected, it's turned out to be far more useful than Photobox.

One of the things that happens a fair bit there is that people will work together on collaborative projects. It's not something I've really looked into myself (although a friend and myself have knocked a couple of ideas about but haven't had the chance to do anything yet) but I've always been intrigued by the idea.

About a week ago Lloyd Harvey commented on my photograph Beyond the Trees, saying that it reminded him of one of the early scenes of H. G. Wells' book The War of the Worlds. He then went on to express a desire to take the image and turn it into what he was seeing.

Click on image for bigger version
Given my interest in doing some sort of collaboration, and being a big fan of the book (I read it many times as a child and own quite a few copies), I was intrigued by the idea. So, a couple of BubbleMails later we had a plan.

Lloyd delivered the result to me yesterday:


Click on image for bigger version
I think he's done a great job (and I do like the idea of a tripod getting ready to take on Billingborough) and the bulk of the credit goes to Lloyd: I just took a photograph, he did a lot of work creating the tripod and then processing the final result.

Have a look at his page for the image for details on how he created the work. And be sure to have a look at his website too.

UK Earthquake

Last night I got to experience a relatively rare event: an earthquake in the UK.

This is only the second one I've ever knowingly experienced (and, coincidently, both events have happened while I've been living in Lincolnshire).

I was woken up, just before 0100 UT, and noticed a roaring and rattling noise and then I realised that the bed was shaking too. Given that we live on a route used by large lorries my first thought was that it was a large lorry going past. I then realised it was much stronger (and stranger) than that and came to the conclusion that it was an earthquake. Also, by UK standards, it felt pretty strong.

I got up and had a quick wander around the house to check everything was fine and I then noticed that my ADSL connection had gone down. I got that going again and then went and checked on the USGS earthquake website and, sure enough, there it was.

Currently they're placing the epicentre somewhere north east of Lincoln, not too far from Market Rasen.

The British Geological Survey put it at a 5.2 and give the epicentre a slightly different location (just north of Market Rasen whereas the USGS map places it south of there). They've got PDF file of all the main details.

The European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre also have some information about it.

Describe my photography

This morning I added a few more pointless stats (along with some more pointless graphs) to the photography section of my site. For no good reason at all I thought it would be interesting to see the most common month, day of week and hour of the day.

And then I realised that, using the most common item in each table, I could sum up my photography:

Apparently you're most likely to find me using my Canon EOS 400D on a Saturday in August, between 14:00 and 14:59, to shoot in landscape orientation at 1/200, f/8.0, ISO 100 with a focal length of 55mm. I won't be using the flash, I'll be using matrix metering and the exposure will be done in program (auto) mode.

Chances are I'll be taking that photograph somewhere in Lincolnshire, probably in Billingborough.

Oddly enough I don't think I've actually taken that photograph yet... ;-)

First outing with the Tamron AF 55-200mm

Earlier on today, what with it actually being a nice day for a change, I took a brief walk around the village and took the Canon EOS 400D plus the Tamron AF 55-200mm. Other than a couple of test shots to make sure it worked when I got it I've not had the chance to give it a go yet.

I'm pretty happy with the results. It took a little bit of getting used to, what with me not being used to using such long focal lengths on the 400D (not to mention the fact that I'm sure the zoom works in the opposite direction of the kit lens that came with the 400D — I must check that), but overall it was a joy to use.

More Geeking Out With Exif

Back in May last year I knocked up some code to generate some (pointless) stats taken from the Exif data of my photographs.

The other day I found the Google charts API and got to thinking that it might be (pointless) fun to knock something up that used it to generate some charts from the stats. A little bit of PHP hacking later and I've now got a page of totally pointless charts to go along with the totally pointless graphs.

Tamron AF 55-200mm is Here

Well that was quick! Ordered Friday, turned up Monday:

Just over a year to double the lens collection for the EOS 400D.

Tamron AF 55-200mm f4.5-5.6 Di II LD

Having got some money as xmas gifts I decided to spend it on something for the Canon EOS 400D. At first I wasn't sure what but then I saw an advert or two in Amateur Photographer where the price of the Tamron AF 55-200mm f4.5-5.6 Di II LD had come down quite a bit.

I read a review or two (especially this one) and, from what I can gather, it's a reasonable lens. Given that I'm currently working with the 400D's kit lens it couldn't be any worse (the kit lens isn't terrible, but I'm starting to notice why some people don't like it) and from what I've read it's slightly better. And, obviously, the nice thing about the Tamron is that it starts where the kit lens leaves off in terms of focal length.

I found one on Amazon.co.uk so I've gone ahead and ordered it.

The main problem I had when trying to decide was the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II. It would, of course, have served a different purpose from the Tamron and, from everything I've read, it's a very nice bit of kit. But, for now anyway, I think I'll go for range of focal lengths rather than kit that has a "specific" purpose.

Next time, perhaps...

A collection of sorts

For no real obvious reason I've added a simple over view of my photography gear to the photography section of my site.

At the moment it's just a brief list/overview of my cameras (I don't even have a picture of each one — something I need to put right). When I get more time I'll probably document some of the accessories I've got and use.

Photography Custom Search

I've been using Google's custom search facility for quite some time now. I've got a custom search for all my sites, for my astronomy sites and also for my weather sites.

However, for some odd reason, all this year I've been missing the obvious handy one: a custom search for my photography. Included in this new custom search are my main photography pages, my Lincolnshire photography site, my Flickr site and my RedBubble site.

Seems to work pretty well too.