Recently in the "Photography" category...

I think this is it - the Canon Vixia HF10.

I’ve been looking for an HD camcorder to replace my trusty, and seven year old, Canon Elura 2 and this looks like the right one.

Any thoughts?

I hate flashes. I really do. I hate the antiseptic feel; the hard shadows; the unnatural light. You’ll never see me use a flash.

Of course, this is because I have no idea how to use a flash properly.

I think I’ve popped the little built in flash on my D200 about three times and hated every single moment of it. As a result I think I’ve got very good at hand holding the camera - sometimes up to half a second. The stabilization in my primary lens doesn’t hurt either (neither does my 80mm 1.8f lens).

But I think I might be missing out.

I need to learn how to use a flash properly.

To this end, I’ve been reading Strobist a lot recently and man are there some great photographs there. And of course it all looks very geeky and fun.

Check out more of the photographer’s work - isn’t it astounding?

I think I’ve been too much of a no-flash snob.

So to set things straight I think I’ll start with one of these; a few of these; and maybe a few things from here.

Hmmm. My birthday is just around the corner…

The New York Times has a gripping presentation by John Moore (Getty Images) of his photographs taken before, during and after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

I’ve finally finished with the photos from Steve and Rachel’s wedding. You can find them on Flickr.

During the wedding, Julian was also wandering around with a camera and captured this one of me! Nice shot, little dude.

Today we had the honour of attending the wedding of our long time friends, Steve and Rachel. What a wonderful time! Much merriment was had by all and I sincerely wish them the best that life can give in their future lives together.

Also, a few months ago they asked me if I would take the photos of their wedding. Talk about nerve-wracking! ‘Twas a good job I picked up that extra 4GB CF card as I ended up shooting over 500 frames…

It’s going to take me a while to delete all the rubbish and make the rest look halfway decent, but I know that some friends will be wanting to see some right now, so here’s a few rushed shots…

More on Flickr in a couple of days…

Update: The photos are now up on Flickr.

What a great way to start the week. Andy Summers was at Google in NYC this morning to talk about his new book I’ll Be Watching You - Inside The Police 1980-83 and his photography. We video conferenced into the talk.

This was a double treat for me - first, I’m a huge fan of Andy Summers the guitarist and second, I had no idea that he was such a great photographer.

Wow.

The talk was very amusing too - with lots of small anecdotes about life on the road.

Anyhow, just one more great thing about working at Google :-)

The talk should be up on YouTube later - I’ll update this post when it’s available.

Update: The video is now available.

When browsing my most popular photos on flickr, this one brought a tear to my eye. Again.

To all of Julian’s wonderful teachers - Thank you.

I was just playing around with a new slideshow creator, Animoto. I imported my photos from Gnomedex 7.0 and it came up with this:

Rock! This completely takes the ideas that other products such as Microsoft’s Photo Story 3 have run with and raises the bar through the roof.

Animoto is an interesting product, from an interesting group of people:

Animoto Productions is a bunch of techies and film/tv producers who decided to lock themselves in a room together and nerd out.

Their first release is Animoto, a web application that automatically generates professionally produced videos using patent-pending technology and high-end motion design. Each video is a fully customized orchestration of user-selected images and music. Produced on a widescreen format, Animoto videos have the visual energy of a music video and the emotional impact of a movie trailer.

The heart of Animoto is its newly developed Cinematic Artificial Intelligence technology that thinks like an actual director and editor. It analyzes and combines user-selected images and music with the same sophisticated post-production skills & techniques that are used in television and film.

Despite the buzzword and PR heavy description, it looks like they’re onto something. Man, they even have a press kit!

Our host…

Err, wow.

“Chang Cheng”, by Penelope Loom

Sometimes browsing interesting photos on Flickr gives me goosebumps.

Since somebody asked…

1. Copy photos from camera to a temporary folder on my MacBook Pro.
2. Import photos from the tmp folder into organized directory structure in Adobe Lightroom, e.g. /photos/2007/2007-05/2007-05-25-Zoo/RAW - renaming the files in the process as 2007-05-25-Zoo-001.jpg, etc…
3. Cull and process photos in Lightroom.
4. Export the surviving photos as full resolution sRGB to, for example, /photos/2007/2007-05/2007-05-25-Zoo/Processed.
5. Upload the processed photographs to Flickr - tag, title, permissions and licenses as appropriate.
6. Copy the whole /photos/2007/2007-05/2007-05-25-Zoo directory to my NAS.
7. Resync the NAS to an offsite server as a final backup.
8. Finally delete the photos from my camera once everything is backed up multiple ways.

Simple really :-)

So I took some photos of the band Breadline, a local blues band, just over a year ago when they were performing at a local bar.

Nice guys, great music.

I offered to email them with links to the photos, which I did, and they asked if they could use the photos with appropriate attribution, which I was more than happy to agree to.

Now look at their site, compared to the photos that I took.

There’s no link from the pictures to my source images and, to add insult to injury, absolutely no attribution at all. Anywhere.

Update: I’m blind. I’m named as a source for the photos at the bottom of the page, but a link sure would be nice… Ooops!

Via Boing Boing, we find a link to a government poster…

Man, does this smack of 1984, Brazil, V for Vendetta, etc…

[Photo by Numlock]

At the beginning of a little walk with Julian yesterday at the Seattle Arboretum, we stumbled upon two teddy bears getting intimate in a trash can…

A nice set of photography tips for the upcoming festivities from Digital Photography School:

14. Watch Your Aperture

I quite often shoot in Aperture Priority mode on a day like Christmas and am constantly changing the aperture depending upon my subject. For example when taking shots of a Christmas decoration on the tree I’ll select a large aperture (a small number like f/2.8) so as to throw the background out of focus, but on a shot taken from the end of the table of everyone sitting down eating I’ll choose a small aperture (like f/8 to f/11) so as to have a larger depth of field and keep everyone in focus.

[Tip’O’Hat to Lifehacker for the link.]

Hadley suggested that I enter a photograph that I took of her daughter into Shutterfly’s Seasonal Reflections contest.

So with full permission, I of course obliged :-)

Please follow this link to vote for the photograph…

In the “why didn’t I think of that” department, here’s a neat trick to ensure that your wonderful architecture/landscape/etc… photograph is free of pesky people.

It’s basically the inverse of the cloning trick.

[Tip-O-Hat to Lifehacker for the link.]

A friend of mine, Kevin Kennedy, captured this photo of me at the previously mentioned holiday party. Kevin is a D70 guy… He’ll upgrade soon :-)

Love it.

On Sunday morning I picked up my Christmas present to myself, the Nikon 85mm f/1.8D AF Nikkor.

I love the 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 G ED-IF AF-S VR DX Zoom-Nikkor (wheee!) lens that I’ve been using with my Nikon D200 since I purchased it at the beginning of the year, but with it’s fastest f/3.5 aperture setting, it can be a tad too slow for the kids in an indoor setting. As someone who hates using flash, this can be a bit of a problem - I’ve got pretty good at hand holding for up to a half a second…

Plus I really love a narrow depth of field.

The new lens delivers on all fronts.

It’s very fast, letting in a bunch more light at f/1.8 and 85mm than my other lens can do at f/3.5 and 18mm and the large aperture can generate a very narrow depth of field.

Also, it’s a prime lens, no zoom, which forces you to compose by using your feet…

Anyhow, I took it too our friend Deb’s holiday party this weekend for some practice, with some great (IMHO) results. It did pretty well with the daughter and her yoghurt fun too…

I like it. Recommended.

As of today you can download a free thirty day trial of Apple’s Aperture, it’s photo management software. As a beta tester for Adobe LightRoom, I’ve been wanting to see how Aperture compares, but haven’t wanted to shell out the serious bucks that they’re asking for it.

Now I’m a happy camper.

Well, almost.

Apple are pulling something really sneaky, and almost unpleasant here. On the sign up form, you fill in the usual info and click a button to have them send you a serial number. It also has the usual checkbox saying something along the lines of “Please spam me with random announcements, offers, etc…”

Of course, everyone unchecks that box. But if you uncheck it in this instance you are not allowed to proceed with the request for a serial number. You get a dialog saying “Before you submit your request, please check the permission checkbox allowing Apple to send you the requested information.”

Bah! So to get the trial, you have to agree to being spammed.

Well, I’m on Apple’s spam list already, so I just checked and clicked away…