PigPog

I stuck a few photos of our flat on Flickr when we first moved in, and I’ve just been notified that one of them is being used by a site campaigning against climate change on behalf of the German government. The second photo on that page is the storage heater in our spare room.

I use Creative Commons licenses for my stuff, which lets it be used in ways like this, but it’s always nice when someone lets me know when they’re using it.

OK, so it’s not usually me posting about Slimming World, but I was the photographer for this event in Plymouth.  I’ll put together a bit more of a post about it later, but if you want to see the photos from the event, they’re on Flickr.

I recently tried out Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom – an excellent RAW editor.  There are a couple of problems with it, though.  For one, it’s quite expensive.  If you’re a pro, and you need the best, you probably won’t care too much about that – it’s worth the money.  When you’re an amateur, though, you have to decide how much it’s worth spending on your hobby.  In either case, £200 spent on software is £200 you can’t put towards your next camera or lens.

The other problem is that I want to just point an app at my folder full of photos, and…  well, that’s it.  With Lightroom, I had to import each set of photos after adding them, which took quite a while.  Any changes, renamed folders, etc., it didn’t just find them – I had to import again, and delete old stuff.  Yes, there’s an option to get it to just sync all changes, but it had to be left overnight.  At least.  It seemed to be built around the idea of having one catalog file for each little set of photos you take.  That probably suits the way a lot of professionals work, but it doesn’t suit me.  I like to be able to search all of my images at once, and sometimes I just take one or two photos in a day, and don’t want to have to create a new catalog and run an import routine just to see how they turned out.

I think I’ll be sticking with Picasa for most of the basics now, with The GIMP for the more advanced editing. Lightroom is very impressive, but it just doesn’t suit me.

I wrote a while ago about trying out Photoshelter to sell my photography. I’d have to admit that the results haven’t been good. I’ve had a few views, but no actual sales. Unfortunately for them, it sounds like my experience isn’t so unusual – they’re closing down the Collection (their stock photography site). According to their post about it, the market is just too dominated by Getty, and sales were never high enough to make the idea work.

It’s a shame – it would be good to think someone could fill in the mid-ground between the really expensive stuff Getty do and the cheap low-end microstock, which pays photographers so little it barely seems to be worth it.

• Photoshelter’s Announcement

A couple of great sets of photos of London and Tokyo at night, taken from the air. All perfectly SFW, as you’d expect, but much of the rest of the site is quite NSFW.

• London
• Tokyo

Following a link from an ad on The Show, I had a look around PhotoShelter on Friday, and decided to apply.

I submitted ten images, but didn’t actually regenerate them to match their requirements. After reading their standards later, they should have been saved with AdobeRGB, not sRGB, should have been output at a higher JPEG quality level, shouldn’t have been sharpened, and shouldn’t have had their colours played with as much as I did.

So, I’m quite pleased that they accepted three of the images, which can now be bought for use as stock photos. If you want to see what got accepted, here’s my photo page. I’ve submitted a few more now, so hopefully some of those will join the initial three soon.

Submitting the images wasn’t too difficult – very similar to uploading to Flickr. For generating images with the right settings, I’ve made a new export profile in LightRoom, and I’m creating second versions of some images so I can do more colour tweaking and add vignettes for the copes that I’ll put on Flickr, while keeping the ones for PhotoShelter a bit cleaner.

Why PhotoShelter rather than one of the many microstock sites? A few reasons:

• Most microstock sites I’ve looked at have very precise standards for submitted photos, with many wanting really huge files. That’s extra time and effort to produce the files, and extra time to upload each one.
• Very small payouts. They are geared up for selling images as many times as they can, but the payment per sale is usually only a few cents.
• Most will only accept ‘perfect’ images, with very little style to them.

I’d end up spending a lot of time and effort doing the sort of photography I don’t really enjoy, with relatively little reward.

PhotoShelter seems to have a chance of more payout, though that remains unknown until one or more of my photos actually sells, but they accept images of they type I actually enjoy taking.

It’s actually the table where we had our breakfast/lunch today, at the Canal Tea Gardens. Although I did try converting one to black and white in the camera, this one was taken as colour, with my new Canon G9, then converted to monochrome later in Adobe Lightroom.

Sometimes, it’s surprising where the best photos come from – it isn’t always a journey to anywhere exotic. Here are a couple more shots of the same table:

Yesterday evening, we attended An Evening with Andy Rouse at the Stroud Theatre in Street. No, not in a street – a town called Street. It’s a whimsical name for a town, but the South West is rich in natural whimsy.

For those who don’t already know, Andy Rouse is a wildlife photographer who has won many awards, and taken an amazing number of truly great photos. He’s also known for his humour and love of West Ham (for non-Brits – that’s a football club, not a type of meat).

We had a great time. Before the show even started Andy was running around meeting people and joking with them, and selling books and calendars. I jumped in early to pick up a copy of his latest book, Understanding RAW Photography, getting it signed, and taking the chance to hand him a Moo card.

The show itself was great – a whole series of stories and anecdotes, all built around a huge number of slides. It was just like going to a friend’s holiday slideshow, except your friend is very funny, and he spent his holidays with a bunch of gorillas, penguins and bears, with a little help from the Royal Navy. We saw penguins surfing and skiing, bears catching salmon, and a very violent capercaillie attacking Andy.

We learned a few new things, too. If you’re a male osprey, bring sticks to the nest, not moss. Moss won’t get you laid. If you’re in the arctic, don’t bang on the toilet door to scare whoever’s in there for a laugh. They may well have a gun in one hand and a frozen turd in the other. Kingfishers are very speedy things. Oh, and West Ham are, apparently, excellent.

If you have an interest in wildlife, or photography in general, I’d certainly recommend seeing one of Andy’s talks if you get the chance. He’ll be touring again next year, and you can find out about shows in advance from his blog.

I Should Blog More

I should blog more. That’s hardly an original start to a blog post, especially one on a long-neglected blog, but there you go.

I’m using Emacs for much of my day-to-day stuff at the moment, working in PlannerMode. I never use the ‘Schedule’ section (I use Google Calendar), so I’ve changed it to ‘Blog’ instead, with the idea of tapping a blog post into it during the day, then posting at the end of the day. If you’re reading this, it worked. Once.

So, what’s been happening recently? We’re still enjoying Devon. My calculator obsession seems to have faded somewhat, leaving me quite settled with the HP 12C financial calculator. There are far more powerful things around, but they’re sitting unused in a drawer. The 12C just does the basics really nicely.

I’m left with my current obsessions being pens, notebooks and Emacs.

Pens

I have bought a few new pens recently:

A Sheaffer Tucky Vacuum-Fil set. I bought these on eBay, at a surprisingly good price. They work perfectly, and the vacuum-fil mechanism works smoothly, giving a good fill. They date back to somewhere between 1943 and 1949, so they’re doing well to still be going and in such good condition.

A few cheapies from an antiques shop in Sidmouth. I pop into antique shops from time to time, but I’ve never before actually found any fountain pens. This time, there was a little box full on the counter, £3 each. I grabbed an unknown lever filler, in full working order, a Sheaffer No Nonsense cartridge pen, a four-colour ballpoint, and a Conway Stewart No 116.

The Conway Stewart is the most interesting of the bunch – not a fountain pen as we know them now, but an ‘Ink Pencil’. The nib is like the nib in a real technical pen, like a Rotring Isograph. It’s a metal tube with a wire in the middle. The wire is pushed up by the paper, and moves a weighted seal to stop the ink from flowing. It has cleaned up quite nicely, but needs a new sac. I’ve ordered a set of sacs from Ian at Cathedral Pens, so I should be able to get it fixed up when they arrive.

I’ve also finally bought something from Andy’s Pens – a Sheaffer Clipper Snorkel, and a (reasonably) matching pencil. It’s a very nice looking pen, with a good smooth fine nib.

Photography

I’ve been taking plenty of photos recently, but not getting around to processing them and uploading them. I’ve been catching up on that a lot today – lots of new pics in my Flickr Photostream – you can just start at this one and keep clicking on the next in the photostream to go through them, if you like.

Some of the best ones to finish this up on, then I shall wallow in the bath for a long time before it’s Top Gear time…

Maybe if this idea works out, I’ll post again in less than a month.

Maybe.

We had our usual walk by the canal today, and I did a bit more playing with monochrome when we returned. I took this photo of grass for the pattern and contrast, so it was a prime candidate for black and white:

The last part of our journey is by street, and this chimney pot caught my eye – an H in the sky:

I used The GIMP’s Chanel Mixer to change the image to monochrome, then added colour to turn it to something resembling sepia:

The H-shaped pot itself looks better in the sepia version, but I think the brickwork looks a bit unreal. Maybe it would have been better with only parts converted?