Post processing

I just found a few more pictures in my archives from earlier this year and posted them in my flickr account, so they can surely be called post processed - about six months post! This cheetah was taken at the Cheetah Rock exhibit at Whipsnade Wild Animal Park (Zoo) when the glass was still immaculately clean. I've been back since and whilst it's still quite clean I think they should start to issue the animals with buckets, squeegees and ladders just to let everyone get this kind of result.

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The great migration

What would a good photographer do right now?

The line above can be found in the Authors@Google talk given by Joe McNally, it's well worth sitting through the hour and ten minutes of stories, though that quote comes in around the hour mark. Joe's approach, I'll do my reshoot now.
You can find the talk here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Av6gCq_awQ

The photo industry has been hit with some strange things this last few weeks - movies coming to digital SLR cameras for one. But tomorrow morning the 2008 edition of photokina opens in the German city of Cologne. The movers, shakers, camera makers and image takers converge for an absolute gear head and imaging extravaganza. You have to big up a show that's so big it takes two years for the industry to recover enough energy to put it on again. It's been few short years since the first digital cameras that the public could buy were shown in photokina, this year Canon's booth in hall 3 will be surely packed with the faithful wanting to touch the EOS 5D Mark II. Is this the start of the great migration to hybrid camera devices? Certainly it's looking like a change is coming and with it the need to build new learning. We don't all need to be video editors, but already many of the press photographers are being asked to 'shoot some video for the website' alongside their still images. Will Adobe suprise and delight with a new CS4 that handles video and still in one application? Will Vincent Laforet or Canon get to show us the video that half the photoworld seems to be talking about?

Tomorrow we'll have the answers.

To close i'll go back to the Joe McNally talk and mention the other thoughts Joe has on The great migration; the transfer of photo techniques and knowledge from the front of the brain to the back ofthe brain. Making aperture and shutter speed settings second nature rather than something that has to be studied or left to the camera is one of the keys to great pictures. Do you know how to instinctively use the key controls of your camera - at least shutter speed, apertute, ISO speed and focus are vital if you want to take control of the pictures.

Thanks to Joe I can now go back and read some more of his book The moment it clicks. I think watching Joe talk for an hour is a good way to prepare for reading.

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Is this a turning point in photo history?

Today Canon has announced the new - long awaited - EOS 5D Mark II. Sure it's got pixels, big displays and all the other things, but it also does video; full HD 1080P video at 30fps. So as many stills photographers are posting on the forums that they don't want video, and it's nothing for them; I'm in the group that thinks video is part of the changing face of photography and publishing that's happening in our lifetimes. Many newspapers are struggling or closing, people turn to the web for the latest news or have it fed to them via many methods. In the past they got the news when it hit the mat at breakfast time as a morning paper. The smart papers already have been developing the stories and their online presence and with online comes the option for moving pictures. I also read the bit of the specifications for the EOS 5D Mark II that says 640 x 480 pixels video is also available - nice and web, youtube, streaming friendly.

Just how many professional reportage photographers and journalists will be thinking; Now I don't need two cameras.

With the ability to publish yourself on the web via blogs and the like, then the ability to shoot video of how you do something, or video of what you do is ever more important. Nikon got Chase Jarvis to shoot for their D90 launch, and he makes some cool video for the photographing masses. Strobist, PocketWizard, Bert Stephani and many others all put video online that their readers lap up. I think video as a feature of SLR cameras is part of the industry change in photography and imaging.

You may disagree, and if that's the case then ISO 25,600 does seem like a hell of a feature for shooting in dark caves.

On the downside 21MP images does make for rapid consumption of hard drive space, processing performance and memory cards.

UPDATE: Here's what I'm talking about, Digital SLR User TV have a hands on posted to youtube, in the future they could have shot this with the EOS 5D Mark II.

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Short term memory glitch - photos found

Isn't it amazing, I'm now wading through a serious amount of pictures from August and that means lots of processing as I shoot RAW unless I pick up a camera that's set to JPEG by mistake. As I file my pictures by shoot date when importing the images to the computer I get folders like 2008-08 and 2008-07 in a 2008 master folder. Just a few days ago I clicked in to the 2008-07 folder instead of the 2008-08 one, and I found some more pictures I hadn't looked at almost since I'd shot them - I told you August was mad. What I found was a real nice selection of shots from my trip to Finland and the colours are also Finnish, blue skies and white sails.

My computer system is also struggling under the photo onslaught. The backup system for my pictures has been upgraded again, a new 500GB drive was called for as a backup to the Netgear ReadyNAS. I'm looking for a new monitor as a thunder fly seems to have crawled in to my monitor and died between the top surface of the screen and the LCD panel beneath. I now have a little black speck on my display always and no amount of photoshop is going to move it. Monitor wise I've been pointed to the Hazro 24inch model by a friend, and now I am struggling to find a way to resist.


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Too much cake is bad for your mental health

Damn you blogger, you send me down some crazy blogs of note diversions sometimes. Cake Wrecks; I had to click that, and what did I find...

You've got to see this, and make sure you have sound.

Kind of fits with my current selection of iTunes shuffling music They Might Be Giants and the eponymous They Might Be Giants track from the Flood album.

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A day at the zoo

A week ago today I took the last opportunity for a day out with the family in school summer holidays. Deciding to travel with a light set of camera kit I opted for an EOS 450D and 70-200mm f/4L IS lens. It was quite refreshing not to have a camera bag to carry; SD cards easily fit in my pockets. It was a great day out the weather was a bit overcast, but warm enough to be t-shirt and shorts. I've been to this zoo many times, and have seen most of the exhibits but the kids were keen as ever.

One thing about Whipsnade is they exercise their elephants by taking them for a daily walk around the park, it's quite a surprise to be walking or driving round and find a line of five or six elephants walking along the roadside towards you. On this trip we had gone towards the penguins when we saw that the elephants were out for their walk just nearby, so penguins forgotten we went to check on the elephants. There were five elephants the littlest an eight month old baby and the biggest being it's mother pictured above. It's quite amazing the size range the little 8 month old one just about waist height on the keepers, the big ones had to be dissuaded from taking the bigger branches out of the trees. However this is a special thing since it's my childrens first time to be so close to an elephant, barely 3 metres in front of them and nothing but air between them. They were enthralled and we simply watched and took some pictures for over 20 minutes while the elephants did some pruning of the trees and pushed some fallen logs around. There's something special about these gentle giants, and being close to them is something I always enjoy in a zoo or in the wilds of Kenya.

Sometimes the little monkeys need their picture taken too... this little statue is outside the monkey house and I know from past visits it's a good spot for some pictures with the kids. Three wise monkeys style has been done in a previous trip, here I went for monkey attitude and added a bit of post processing in photoshop. It's using a tip I picked up from Matt Haines who added it in the comments on this basketball players shoot that was on the strobist blog.

I'm a bit backlogged with photos right now, still working on the ones from my summer holiday, some wedding shots, the rest of the zoo trip and a night out shooting in a shopping center with the local camera club. Photoshop and DPP are going to be busy.


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