Random Panderings

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There’s a new video up on Squeeze The Lime, this time it’s Pieter’s turn to shoot. There’s lots of nice tips and the final images look great in the Flickr slideshow.

Quiet, shy, retired. All words used to describe Mick Flannery. His songs are miserable and depressing in the most uplifting way. He’s not much of a talker, but still manages to elicit laughs from the audience with his bare banter. And he’s not afraid to say it like it is, “here’s the most depressing song of the lot of them”. Wonderful gig, even if Chloe (his sound engineer) did turn the lights down on me! Fortunately my new 50mm f1.4 can almost see in the dark.

Mononeil aka Neil McShane has a great article called Shoot Better Landscapes Part 1 over on his Mononeil blog. For those unware, Neil is probably the best B&W landscape photographer in Ireland, and the article is full of great tips for better landscapes in general.

I’ve been asked by a local restaurant if I’d like to do an exhibition. While the prospect is appealing for lots of reasons, vanity included, the practical is a different matter. I have an Epson 3800, so I’m more than happy to print at home. I have however been waiting over 2 months on a large batch of Premium Lustre A3+. I’ve also gone to find the other part that you need for an exhibition: Frames. Some friends run a local gallery and framing service have offered me a good deal on frames, but even at that, it’s still a massive investment, meaning I’d need to sell quite a bit to make it a worthwhile exhibition. So do I or don’t I?
It might be feasible to get a grant for some of it, in which case I most likely will. As to content, I feel it’ll be heavily landscape based, rather than people based, unless I specifically start shooting for exhibition.

Former Confessions of a Photographer video blogger Bert Stephani has a new project. Along with videographer Pieter Van Impe they’ve launched a photo learning website called Squeeze The Lime. LIME stands for Learn, Inspire, Motivate and Experience. Posting wise it’s a mix of audio, text and video, with a lot of good advice thrown in for good measure.

Ages ago I got a free Capture One LE license with a Sandisk card. Actually I got more than one, but I only ever activated one. Anyhow, it did entitle me to a free version of Capture One 4. I did download it when first announced, but I only activated it this evening (even though I’ve used 3.7LE since I downloaded 4).
I went onto the Phase One forums for a look and all I can say is Ouch! I know the Adobe U2U forums can be rough (after all it’s designed to deal with problems), but seeing people with very expensive medium format backs giving out about how bad they feel the system Raw convertor has become is another deal altogether.. Reading about tethering corrupting .CR2 files makes me thankful I’ve stuck to Lightroom! Anyhow, I’m still going to give C1 4 a go if nothing else just for a look.

A lot of the work I do in Photoshop involves brushes. Usually for painting in Layers Masks or Adjustment Layers. 2 simple shortcuts that dramatically speed up brush use are: [ and ] to decrease and increase brush size, and Shift [ and Shift ] to change the Hardness. A final quick shortcut is to use Shift + Alt + P (Shift + Option + P on Mac) to toggle the Airbrush.

My weekend was pretty eventful, at least from a travel point of view. I was booked into the Saturday Strobist seminar in London. Travelling on Saturday itself meant flying from Shannon rather than Galway, so I left the house at 4am for my 6:25am flight. I got in around 5:20 and headed for the gate. Flight was painless fortunately bar the constant Ryanair advertising onboard. Despite the huge queue for tickets, I still made my 8:15 Stansted Express. That meant that I was in time for the 9:30 start. Phew! I should say though that I hadn’t managed to sleep Friday evening, although I did sleep a bit during the day (until 6pm).

The seminar was good fun and educational, but for me it was mostly about reinforcement. That said there were nuggets along the way, making it all worthwhile. We did 4 different practical setups at the end, and I was dragged in as Subject #1. If I get Davids permission, I’ll embed it in the post! The picks from the day are shown here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/strobist/discuss/72157608622721266/72157610761038681/.

One thing we did get to see was the new Orbis Ringflash. It was also one of the lights used on me, so I had a unique look at it, you could say. Obviously it’s a ring, and in this case David had it attached to a flash on a stand for convenience. The fact that you need to hold it would put me off it, vis the Rayflash which connects to an on camera flash. The Orbis is narrower at the top than the bottom and features curved internal channels to bounce the light about. Also at the flash end there is diffusion in the plastic, which then becomes clear with a semi circle boundary. The internal design is so simple that it would be easy to incorporate into DIY design (but far from as pretty).

Later we raffled a California Sunbounce Micro Mini with coin toss. I got down to the last 4. Huy was a deserving winner, especially with his great Hi Key posing! The class ran late, so I had to cancel my original dinner plans (Sorry Martin). I wouldn’t have made it anyhow. I did enjoy the banter after though.

Verdict? Well worth the trip. There are those asking that next time there be an advanced practical class. I’d be well up for that, although in fairness, applying the lessons learned in assignments and jobs should be enough.

In case you haven’t seen this yet, it’s wicked! (One of the commenters says the original footage is from the movie Downfall)