Sometimes location is not very important at all in photography. For a lot of portrait photography for instance, the main ingredients are nice light and interesting colours in the background. With the lens opened right up, the background disappears in a lovely blur of colour and bokeh, and so any park or beach or even back yard can be a great location.
But at other times, location is everything. Try taking great surfing shots in the outback for instance 
Or if your thing is gritty modern street photography, you won’t have much joy if you are stuck in a regional area or the ‘burbs. Smaller, regional places are just lacking in the variety a big city can offer. In such places, it’s a lot harder to think of what to shoot. I have been wanting to get out just to shoot for fun, but I’ve been finding it hard. What am I supposed to shoot? I know it is a cop out, and that any good photographer worth his salt will just get out there and find something interesting. I’m talking more about the preconceptions we have of places, preconceptions which heavily influence motivation. Why we cop out, and how we change the way we think…
Take me - I’m mostly interested in portraiture. Without someone specific to shoot, my thoughts tend to drift to art photography. And then I stall, as art photography generally takes a lot of planning, forethought and consideration. A budget does’t hurt either! I also like urban photography, but where I live is beautiful, yet somehow strangely bland. So too much of the time, the camera sits in the corner, waiting for me to figure out what to shoot.
I can see I need a new strategy. Some way to break my preconceptions and go out find interesting things to shoot. Any ideas?
Vista has not had good press since its release. And I can see why. Despite the eye candy Aero interface, it’s what’s under the bonnet that counts, and a lot of reviews certainly point to deficiencies in Vista when compared to its immediate predecessor, XP. I ran XP Professional from the start and at least from SP2, it was a really good, stable OS. Maybe it’s worth remembering that. XP had loads of blue screens of death before the first service pack, that’s for sure, and it wasn’t until SP2 that it became a really stable, first class OS.
Anyway, I think Vista has lots of improvements in lots of areas, but I also have my pet hates. The almost non stop UAC requests drive me crazy, and I was annoyed at first that some of my older programs wouldn’t run correctly on it. But worst of all was my experience with the Security Centre, and it’s really that I wanted to talk about.
Continue reading ‘Windows Vista and the need for patience’
For those who have never heard of The Blue Nile, I can only encourage you to go and listen to their music. They are a three piece band from Glasgow with a penchant for taking their time to make records. In the 27 years since they formed, they have released only 4 albums. They formed in 1981, and released their debut album, A Walk Across The Rooftops in 1983. It’s an interesting blend of acoustic and synthetic sounds, with the end result sounding like beautifully crafted 80’s pop, firmly entrenched at the high end of that market. It was not a huge commercial success, but it received much critical acclaim. ‘Tinseltown in the Rain’ is the absolute classic from this album, and it was clear that this was a band to watch.
Continue reading ‘The Blue Nile’
In March 1987, Canon produced the first EF series lens. In November, they followed up with the industry’s first Ultrasonic Motor powered lens - the EF 300mm f/2.8L USM. Then in September 1989 came the EF 50mm f/1.0L USM. Yes, that right, f/1.0.
Now it has reached the incredible milestone of producing over 40 million of these EF lenses. And the rate of production has accelerated wildy in the last ten years due to the digital boom. Canon produced its 10 millionth lens in August 1995, it hit 20 million at the start of 2001, and 30 millionth in January 2006. Now just over 2 years later, they have hit 40 million. At this rate 50 million will be reached before the end of 2009.
It’s hard to image there are 40 million EF lenses around. Even taking into account the various manners of death a lens can encounter, there’d have to be still 35 or so million still around somewhere… Staggering.
Anyway, congratulations Canon! I have supported the cause with 3, soon to be 5 of your EF lenses, and I find them to be quite lovely. Even Canon’s cheapest most plastic lens, the current 50mm f/1.8, is a lovely little lens that takes fabulous portraits. Now Canon has 64 lenses in its EF line, from ultra wide angle through to super-telephoto models, zooms and primes, and even special tilt-shift lenses that distort the image perspective. It’s a real testament to a tuned in company who keeps improving their products in line with and even above customer expectations.
Is America really as prudish as it sometimes appears to be? It’s really hard for me to tell. Particularly as I’ve never been there. Judging a country solely on their cultural exports is clearly fraught with danger. I mean, I have seen American films from every degree of separation of morality’s compass. From ‘Wild at Heart’ to ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’. So that tells me nothing. I have read that over half of all Americans would not vote for an atheist president, yet some of the smartest, wittiest , most liberal people I have ever heard speak come from the USA. Hmmm, it makes it hard to generalise doesn’t it.
So I’m at a loss what to think about the recent Miley “Hannah Montana” Cyrus scandal. On the one hand I get the feeling that it’s a cynical but very successful manipulation of the media, from everyone involved, including Vanity Fair, Disney Channel, Miley’s own management and possibly even the photographer, Annie Leibovitz. This explanation sits best with me, because the alternative is simply too weird to comprehend.
Continue reading ‘Is America really that prudish?’
Net neutrality is on the agenda. BIG TIME!
ISPs are already making decisions in their daily practices that completely go against the principle of net neutrality. For a couple of years now they have been throttling torrent and other P2P traffic. And I can almost understand their point of view. Internet piracy is rampant, and the amount of traffic from P2P apps must be very large indeed and overloading their networks. But ISPs generally charge people for a fixed amount of data per month, and why should they interfere in how we as use that data? Why do they think they have a right to control our use of the Internet. It’s not really their job is it…
The basis principle of net neutrality is that ‘Internet users should be in control of what content they view and what applications they use on the Internet.’ It’s the one thing that makes the Internet free. We can choose our own content. It’s the only antidote to the corporatisation of the Internet. And it’s a free choice. As it is, Surfer A can hang out at MSN, Facebook and eBay, while surfer B can visit torrent sites, alternative media sites and blogs. If someone wants to expose themselves to corporate sites and mass advertising, well go for it. Personally I’m more interested in what Joe Blog has to say, as opposed to what the corporate world is trying to sell me, but that’s my perogative and freedom.
Continue reading ‘Net Neutrality’
If you haven’t seen him on your television yet, you ain’t watching.
The Ruddster, a.ka. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, has been on a whirlwind world tour, meeting every leader that will shake his hand. This is his first major overseas trip as Prime Minister, and he has a lot of re-positioning to do after a decade of John Howard’s brand of global engagement.
Labor has only been in power in Australia for just over 100 days or so, so it’s still very early days yet, but the signs are good. The Liberals are reduced to complaining about everything they can, and looking the fools for it. The most ridiculous one this week was them complaining about the salute to George Bush, which earned The Ruddster a rebuke from the Libs from not being prime ministerial enough. Get real guys. You really will have to do a little better…
He’s looking good in my eyes. He’s eloquent, intelligent, very ready to engage, diplomatic, realistic and visionary. OK, maybe he’s not the most exciting Prime Minister I have ever seen, but after having lived through a decade of John Howard, I’d prefer intelligent and visionary over exciting anyday.
His deputy, Julia Gillard, looks frighteningly capable. Maybe she will, in about ten years, become Australia’s first female Prime Minister. We just have to give the Ruddster three terms first. I’m sure he’ll hand over then…
Hmm. was it all a dream? No, my blog is looking weird, it’s not a dream. It all started with a very strange email I got the other day from someone going by the title Anonymous Security Specialist. There was no reply email path, and it looked like spam, but after reading it, it had me unsure. Normally I am very good with spam and that sort of thing, but I couldn’t see the payoff in this one. Basically it was an email warning me that my version of Wordpress (then 2.3) was vulnerable to some sort of SQL blind fishing attack and that he could tell my blog was already compromised, and was linking to some very dubious websites etc… I had a look and couldn’t see any sign of this but after a look on google and a rational think through, I decided to upgrade the blog anyway, since this was something I had been planning for a long while. So, upgrade to Wordpres 2.5. Don’t follow the short guide on the wordpress site. It sucks! Do your homework. This is a good place to start. Anyway, I backed up my database and did the upgrade, and of course there were problems. Something to do it seems with my choice of template. Which brings me to K2. I uninstalled it and the blog came good, but now I’m having trouble with reinstalling it. The header won’t load and there are lots of small issues. I’ll get there. But what is most strange to me is this. After my blog was upgraded, but BEFORE the front page would work, I got an email saying I’d had a comment at the blog. I quickly looked and posted at the end of a post called Upgrade or Die (which has to do with cameras, not blogs, but nonetheless) there was a short comment which simply said, “well done, dude.” Was this the mysterious security consultant again? Or was this instead a nasty hacker who tricked me into upgrading, and waited all the while to grab control and do something dastardly? As I know nothing about hacking, I’ll have to hope it was the ASS (almost a suitable acronym). At the end of the day I have upgraded my blog. I still need to fix it, but I suppose that forces me to learn a little more about bloody wordpress…. Oh, and if anyone knows of a better template that looks really cool and has similar functionality to K2, I’d love a tip.
Joomla is a CMS (Content Management System) that I’ve known about for over a year but never really explored. Until the weekend. I downloaded the latest version (1.5) and within an hour or so had installed all the neccesary components for an offline installation and got my first web site up and running. Cool. Configuring the design seems to be the part that’s not straight forward, but I’m sure I’ll get my head around it in time. I love the basic idea, although coming from a guy whose first introduction to web design was hand coding a html document, this is taking things a long way from home. But productivity is king, and this collection of technologies (Joomla, MySQL, Php etc) serves up one amazing little database driven website in a hurry. AND it’s open source!
It’s not for absolute amateurs, but for anyone with a grounding in web design, wanting to take the next step, this is likely to be it. Check it out!
In the last two days I have discovered more cool web sites than I have in the previous six months. If you haven’t already stumbled upon it, stumble upon is a great way to discover new sites. I am a regular net user, and I spend a lot of time trawling the web, but it’s easy to get bogged down in habit and routine. Stumble Upon breaks the habit, and throws you out into the universe to discover sites that fit with your specified interests. User rankings also strengthen the system. Of course you also get sent to some sites that are less than amazing, but with a few hours of stumbling, you’ll have enough interesting sites bookmarked to spend the next month looking at. Truly inspiring stuff.
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