Well. It’s been a month since I posted. I did mention that I’m posting photos daily over at http://lostconcepts.aminus3.com, so if you’re not looking over there, you’re missing out on about 40 photos at this stage.

On the news front, I’ve just launched LRB Exhibition, a new plugin for Lightroom that creates websites for photographers. I also discovered that I could create a basic shop page on E-Junkie, my download delivery provider, so I set one up.

Last weekend, I made the trip to Cong/Clonbur woods to recce locations for shoots, and for potential landscape photos. While it was a bleak day I still made some nice discoveries.

Next weekend, I’m a little tied up as I have the first of 3 Saturdays doing a beginners course in makeup. I know it’s an odd enough choice, but I think it’ll really help with Beauty photography, something I love doing.

I’m prepping for a talk on Lightroom at the Phototraining4U stand at Focus on Imaging in Birmingham next month. It’ll be a talk on Lightroom 3 Beta.

I’m also onto Chapter 5 of my book on creating web gallery plugins for Lightroom.

That’s the short of it anyway.

The F-Stop Academy are doing a series of courses on cinematography in Dublin on the 5th and 6th of September. I’ve book in for the afternoon course on the 5th: DSLR cinematography. I’ve been enjoying all the output from Philip Bloom and Den Lennie, so I’m really looking forward to this. While I have some ongoing projects using 5DII video, and I have been doing a lot of lynda.com training (which is excellent BTW!), I still want to get some face time learning.

I love seminars and seeing the work of good photographers. The SWPP certainly promotes education and I’m all for more of it. While I only shoot a handful of weddings, I still like to see what people are up to. A fashion edge, with strong compositional lines and form are the hallmark of a David Beckstead photo. I thoroughly enjoyed today, despite getting only 2 hours sleep last night in order to travel to Dublin for the seminar. It’s now 24 hours since that sleep started, so you can imagine I’m pretty tired now. On that note, I’ll leave you with a link to David’s website.

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.