Fri Mar 05, 2010
Focus on Imaging 2010
From Sunday to next Wednesday at the NEC Birmingham, it's Focus on Imaging 2010. I'll be on Adobe's stand again this year - come up and say hello.
Permalink - Things to do - 2 comments
Wed Mar 03, 2010
So it's not quite dead?
You know those moments of calm near the end of the movie? You can finally relax. Christine the psychopathic car has been fed into the crusher and is just a harmless cube of scrap metal, or the Balrog is tumbling down into the abyss, and the hobbits are safe. While the credits haven't yet begun to roll, you're already thinking about the best way back to the car, maybe so you can nip into Bar Italia or back past that interesting-looking pub you noticed earlier in the evening. Maybe you will be allowed that pint after all? A nice cosy feeling, isn't it? And then, all of a sudden the beast springs back to life. Well, with Apple barely able to give Aperture away at half price, its market share evaporating with the deafening silence about its future, suddenly it's on your tail, growling furiously. Did you spill your popcorn?
I was a bit surprised, certainly by the timing, but only the week before it was released I had been mentally drafting a post asking where - if anywhere - Aperture 3 might go. My guess was that it might look for space upmarket by offering multi-user capability. After all, Aperture and Lightroom users struggle when more than one person needs to work on a shoot. Alternatively I wondered if they might try to break out of the ghetto and attack Adobe on both fronts by going cross-platform. Even to a "Mac user through and through" like Richard Earney, being limited to Mac is a disadvantage for Aperture users. Being the minority program and then only on one platform means the third party ecosystem is always going to be less extensive - fewer learning resources, fewer plug-ins, fewer friends to learn from, but most of all, fewer sales for Apple. So fundamental changes - going multi-user or cross-platform - were how I thought Apple would try to recover all that lost ground, if they thought there was still money in it.
Neither speculation was right. Instead "one more push" seems to be the strategy - pouring effort into matching Lightroom's localised adjustments while bolting on a couple of prominent features from elsewhere.
Stability - take the fanboys' word for it
One thing that is very obvious is that Aperture 3 has been rushed to market and has stability problems. My own experience has not been bad - my single crash occurred 10 minutes after installing the program - but I've heard reports of much worse from Mac-using friends. Even a self-confessed Aperture fanboys such as Scott Bourne is "averaging one total Aperture crash every 90 minutes", as he writes in Very Cool But NOT Ready For Prime Time. Openly admitting his "rooting for Apple and Aperture" bias, Bourne "can’t advise serious photographers to trust Aperture 3.0".
Also see Rob Boyer The Best And The Worst. In the "Lightroomsphere" such guys would be beta testers and would have given the program a tough workover before its release, but it's obvious that hasn't happened. It would no doubt run counter to the company's culture, but maybe Apple also need beta testers who aren't fanboys?
Adjustments - the big catch-up
The big new feature that any photographer will welcome is that Aperture 3 has now got localised adjustment brushes. They seem to work well, neither better nor worse than those in Lightroom 2. Their naming seems more task-oriented, so Aperture has a "soften skin" brush while the Lightroom user can get the same effect by choosing a negative Clarity value or by choosing a brush preset - called "soften skin". So Aperture 3 has caught up - it needed to.
A curious aspect of how Aperture 3 implements local adjustments was brought to my attention by Gilles from Utiliser Lightroom. Aperture creates a hidden TIF file for each local adjustment that you apply to an image. Here I applied two brush adjustments to Billy, skin smoothing around the face, and sharpening just around his eyes, so two of these hidden mask files were built. Amounting to 250kb for just two adjustments to one image, these TIFs could soon add up. But the main reason for mentioning them is that they may also explain why Aperture seems to allow only a single application of each brush adjustment, unlike Lightroom where you can brush on the same adjustment again and again - four or five skin smoothing adjustments on the same wrinkles, for example.
There are lots of other minor tweaks in the adjustment area. Presets mean that gullible Aperture users can now be duped into paying for fake film and other special effects. Black and white is still perfunctory, with no ability to split tone, and there's nothing as intuitive as Lightroom's wonderful targeted adjustment tool (you can't help but feel Apple would have found a catchier name for that) for painting global adjustments while keeping your eyes on the picture.
Old problems remain. Richard Earney also points out Apple's slowness in supporting new cameras, while Gilles tells me that Aperture's new rendering engine only supports 7 camera bodies.
And Aperture still trails badly in simultaneously making identical adjustments to multiple images. It's still stuck in the "lift and stamp" or "copy and paste" days, 5 keystrokes to Lightroom AutoSync's one. So in terms of adjusting your pictures, Aperture 3 has barely caught up in terms of what you can achieve, and lags in efficiency.
Places - yes
Of the other two new features, the GPS feature "Places" is certainly the more polished. Just like 2 or 3 years ago Microsoft added Virtual Earth to Expression Media, essentially Apple have dropped in Google maps and then written some code around it. So it recognises GPS data that's already been added to images and displays them on a map, while also allowing you to drag images onto a map and storing co-ordinates. Unfortunately, while GPS data is written into any files exported from the system, it doesn't let you update the originals' EXIF information. In many ways it's much better to geotag in something like HoudahGeo so your GPS data isn't totally dependent on Aperture but is available to any other program. But overall, I like this feature. I just doubt that it will make anyone move to Aperture - if GPS data is important for your photography, you've probably covered that base long ago.
Faces - right idea, cheap implementation
The third new feature, Faces, has a curious sandy-gravel background which doesn't match Aperture's professional appearance and readily betrays its origin in the consumer-oriented iPhoto given away with every Mac. This background shouldn't even be a preference. That said, there is great value in having a tool dedicated to letting the user record who is in a photo and find photos containing that person. iView/ExMedia recognised this need and provided a People field, and it's a shame that Lightroom provides no other mechanism other than using keywords - not always a good idea. So recording people's names is a plus.
Unfortunately, apart from the gravel, what makes Faces seem such a trivial feature is that it is strapped up to facial recognition. As far as I can tell, you have to let Aperture go through trying to detect faces - you can't just say "there's Charlie the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel", tag those images and move on. But I did like how it auto-completes names by referring to your Mac's address book or Mail (not sure which, but it's looking up something from wholly outside Aperture).
That said, the recognition works well enough, so once I had added Billy Bragg's name to one photo, it detected him in 7 of the 8 other frames from that day. However, typing in his name would have been a lot faster. Equally, while I also liked how it displayed other faces that it had detected, this to-do list was less helpful when a set of pictures showed a crowd and therefore lots of in-focus faces. It also managed to suggest that someone I identified in a wedding picture was also in a picture of a horse - so there's a lot of hit or miss here.
So while recording names is a worthwhile addition, the facial recognition is more of a distraction as well as a processing hog. It also blinds the unwary user to how Aperture's data about people is only available so long as you continue using Aperture - not good from a DAM perspective.
Metadata - what ever happened to never touching your raw files?
Aperture 3 has made it easier to switch by greatly improving how it reads metadata that you've entered in other programs. It was always odd that it couldn't read sidecar XMP files, yet was always able to write them when you exported duplicates of your originals. So the XMP capability was present, but a lack of coherent thinking meant it was easier to abandon the program and take your keywords and other data with you. Aperture 3 has corrected this imbalance, so you can read keywords and other metadata from sidecar files.
Another interesting detail is that it looks like Apple have gained access to camera makers' proprietary file information. This certainly has benefits - I like View > Show Focus Points. But the surprise is they have also used this information to write IPTC metadata directly back into the raw files. That's a brave decision, and let's hope Nikon SDK is more reliable than it used to be and no longer a great way to corrupt your pictures. It's also quite a big volte face - remember how Aperture once promised to leave your raw files untouched?Also see David Rieck's important article issues with how Apple Aperture 3 writes metadata, to which I linked yesterday. It shows major weaknesses in how Aperture preserves metadata that's already in your pictures - when it writes back metadata entered in Aperture, that existing metadata can be lost.
A similar problem affects star ratings that have been applied in other programs - Aperture 3 fails to read them. Moving to Aperture would mean doing them all again. For a while there was a support note indicating this failure is in fact a design decision because ratings and labels aren't part of XMP 1.0. But when you think about it, that's very weak. Aperture is finally reading sidecars so that users can bring in existing metadata that has been created in third party applications, so it should be allowing for the "non-standard" ways that are widely used. It's a bit like me refusing to read a post because the author can't spell or clearly can't use apostrophes properly. The fact is, in the real world, just like folk don't know their "it's" from their "its", ratings and labels are stored in a non-standard way. Fair enough for Apple to write those fields in the standard manner, but it's lame for them not to read them and then try to cover their nakedness by hiding behind a specification. I'd bet it's actually an excuse they've found after the event - had they looked into the problem beforehand, or had more robust beta testers, they'd have made Aperture read ratings data at least.
In each case, the underlying fault is hiding behind a narrow interpretation of standards and a too-limited view of what to do where there are inconsistencies in how the standards have changed over time. This is a tricky area - one wouldn't expect anyone to get it right first time - but let's not pretend there isn't a nasty problem.
The end
And my conclusion? It's a bit like you think you've finally got someone out of your life, you've got some beer in, and you were happily moving on. But then your errant lover shows up on your door, says she/he has cleaned up her/his ways and has a couple of new features, a cheap boob/moob job. Not really enough to turn back the clock....
Wed Feb 24, 2010
What has Aperture done to my x@%king metadata?
I'll be posting some of my own thoughts on Aperture 3 soon, maybe tomorrow. But I just noticed David Riecks has some issues with how Apple Aperture 3 writes metadata and I recommend you read his article very carefully indeed:
Apple has made some significant changes to how Aperture handles metadata with this latest release. However, the ways in which this has been done should be of great concern to professional photographers that work with other programs, or hand off their metadata-rich files to others who need to be able to access the full range of that information.
You shouldn't be concerned if you use Aperture 3 on your own Mac, don't typically use embedded metadata, and don't share your images with others, or work with other programs such as Adobe Photoshop. Even if you do use metadata to describe your images, and only need to find them on your local computer, you should be fine.
You should be concerned if you use Aperture to write metadata to files you use with other programs, share with others or share on the Internet. For example if you do additional work in Photoshop or Lightroom, and then archive your images using other programs, you need to understand what is happening, or risk having some or all of your metadata disappear.
Good DAM practices aren't just about only ever using any one program, or placing all your trust in one company, even Apple.
Fri Feb 19, 2010
PHP to display tweets
For a few months I've been using Twitter. While some of my tweets there have no aspiration to be anything more than twitter, a kind of instant messaging without people seeing you're there. But others are thoughts that would once have been destined to become blog posts, but expressed on Twitter they never develop further and remain forever limited to 140 characters. So it would make some sense to include them here.
Parsing Twitter's RSS feed was a waste of time - items disappeared after you'd read them - but yesterday I looked into the Twitter API and then followed a link to Ashley Ford's excellent example of using the Twitter API. While Ashley showed how to access tweets of people you follow, it was easy enough to adapt it to follow one's own and add it to my blog. Here's my modified source code.
You need to know a tiny bit of PHP, but all you need to do is change the $login. Then save the file with a php extension, and add include('tweets.php'); to your existing PHP page.
Mon Feb 15, 2010
Web site sick
Sometime on Sunday evening, Valentine's Day, my site seems to have been hacked. Some rogue code had been inserted into every single PHP file, even those in the site's darkest corners. With the site being so compromised, there was no alternative to removing everything and then building up again from scratch. Normal service gradually being resumed....
Hard to be certain what's to blame. It could be "random" or someone gaining access by brute force, but I suspect it's not a coincidence that I'd recently been installed WordPress on my web space. In fact, at 21:40 my logs show a hit on a WordPress file - which coincides with the modification time on my corrupted PHP files.
Clearing out all existing files and uploading everything again is obviously a pain in the backside, but it's not necessarily a bad thing. After being online in various guises for nearly 13 years, there must be countless bits and bobs lying around, old animated gif files and early PHP experiments. Indeed, part of the reason for investigating WordPress was to help tidy up the site. Well, it has certainly helped do that!
Some WordPress links:
Ukraine certainly has got talent
You may be glad to know I never watch programmes like the X-factor, So you think you can Dance.... Britain's Got Talent. And while I did read that book about Ukrainian tractors, I certainly never watch Ukraine's Got Talent which is where this amazing performance originates.
The girl narrates her country's experience of the 1941-45 war by drawing and redrawing pictures on a light table covered with sand.
Such simple technology yet so utterly amazing.
Sun Feb 07, 2010
Downtown Tehran?
No, Park Lane, central London, just this afternoon. I'd only planned a quick visit to Speakers Corner to snap Billy Bragg's tax protest against the bankers, but either the vagaries of the Islamic calendar or the street closure scheduling gods of Westminster Council had determined that British Shiites could commemorate the Imam Hussein's martyrdom by inflicting Sunday lunchtime gridlock on central London. As a ban-the-burka atheist, any other religious group doing this would have incurred my scorn and impatience (you can't imagine Dawkins and co stopping the traffic, can you?). But twice before I've found myself near this Ashura march, and each time I'd found this alien, very solemn event was surprisingly welcoming to me and my camera.
Sadly today the cold weather meant the men kept on their shirts while beating their breasts, and they certainly aren't allowed to use their chains and knives on themselves. So, while I got a few shots of the women and children, I'm sad to report that the self-flagellation wasn't as photogenic as I'd hoped.
Permalink - My photography - 0 comments
Wed Feb 03, 2010
Their own bloody fault
Also see Mike King.
Permalink - Photo links - 0 comments
McCullin in Manchester
So Manchester's Imperial War Museum North is putting on a retrospective (6 February to 13 June 2010) and while I've seen his work a few times, there's always a picture that is new to you - like this one - or that triggers a new emotion or understanding. Hopefully I'll be able to sneak off to the show when I'm up North in a few weeks - assuming the snow doesn't return and we can finally have our family Christmas!
Permalink - Photo links - 1 comments
Fri Jan 29, 2010
5 quickies
- Supermarket tells Welsh shoppers to wear clothes and shoes
- Birmingham parking ticket machine speaks German
- clever AIDS short film
- iRant - Adolf and the iPad
- Driver fined for blowing himself in "nose to tail" traffic
Sun Jan 24, 2010
Not a Kiev then?
What makes a photograph valuable? The photograph above shows the white stone walls and towers of the Kremlin in Tobolsk, a town that is known as one of the final homes of Russia's last tsar and his family during the time of the 1917 Russian Revolution. It's a nice enough picture, but is it worth more than one million pounds?
That's the price Mikhail Zingarevich, a board member at Ilim Group, paid for it at a charity auction in St Petersburg. The proceeds will go to buy furniture for World War II veterans receiving long-promised apartments, equipment for a children's hospital and a new kitchen for an alcohol rehabilitation centre.
But why is this picture worth so much? Well, because it was taken by the Russian president Dmitry Medvedev who is a keen photographer.
Apparently he's a
It's hardly in the Iris Robinson or Tiger Woods class of surprising hobbies of the rich and famous, but (unlike his ratty-looking running mate) you've got to wonder if he's the kind of guy who'll stick radioactive isotopes in your sushi .
Permalink - Photo links - 5 comments
Sat Jan 23, 2010
Cheese! The protest cry of our generation?
That's partly what seemed strange about today's Mass Gathering in defence of street photography in Trafalgar Square. "Mass" seems hype, though in photographers' terms a few hundreds, maybe a thousand (2,000 says the Guardian) snappers on one side of the square would certainly qualify as a decent turnout (see Amateur Photographer). And it was certainly more of a "gathering" than a demo, with none of the pushing and barging of the media "pap" stereotype. Cameras were held aloft at the sound of "cheese!" and everyone seemed perfectly at ease providing a photo opportunity for others. This bloke grinned back at me afterwards and just said "fill your boots". All in all, it was entertaining enough to have attracted a few camera crews and to get on Sky News, BBC Radio 4 and the BBC's London news page. Won't bring down any walls, but a very British protest. We're fed up.
Other snaps here.
Permalink - Tripodophobia - 1 comments
Wed Jan 20, 2010
The King is in the altogether?
Wildlife photographer Andy Rouse nested doubts about the now-disqualified winner of the wildlife photograph(er) of the year and writes about them here:
When I first saw the image I was amazed. To my knowledge no image has even been taken like this of the Iberian Wolf. It is an incredibly rare and shy animal, avoiding human contact at all costs and highly suspicious due to years of persecution in its homeland....
My suspicions kept nagging at me. Thinking I was alone and that to raise my head above the parapet would get it shot off, I kept quiet. I heard that the photographer explained everything at the Wild Photos conference and so naturally, like everyone else, I believed him.
Like anyone, I've been impressed with previous years' winners of the wildlife photograph(er) of the year, but 2009's winning wolf had left me cold.
I'm not pretending to have any ability whatsoever to identify that such a picture was a fake - though now its description as "a model wolf" makes me wonder why no-one outed it for not looking as anorexic as its counterparts on the catwalk. But the reason I never linked to it when it won the award was that aspects other than its authenticity provided doubts that nagged away at my appreciation of the picture. I just thought - oh someone's set up a remote flash and triggered it with a motion sensor. And for me, that seemed a sufficiently big hole in the King's couture. What do you think?
Permalink - Photo links - 1 comments
Mon Jan 18, 2010
Act of God?
But when he starts saying Haiti's death toll is the result of Roman Catholics having built their homes on a geological fault....
Permalink - My photography - 0 comments
Sat Jan 16, 2010
If your face fits
Did you see the mocked up shots of what Bin Laden might look like now? Well, it seems the FBI's cutting edge technology was cutting and pasting with Photoshop:
A Spanish politician has said he was shocked to find out the FBI had used his photo for a digitally-altered image showing how Osama Bin Laden might look. Gaspar Llamazares said he would no longer feel safe travelling to the US after his hair and parts of his face appeared on a most-wanted poster.
He said the use of a real person for the mocked-up image was "shameless". The FBI admitted a forensic artist had obtained certain facial features "from a photograph he found on the internet".
Like 8 year old Mikey Hicks, whose name seems to have got him on a watch list, you've got to think poor Mr Llamazares isn't going to enjoy travel from now on. Makes you feel so safe, doesn't it?
Also see the TSA Logo Contest.
Plug-in to evolution
Mark Wilson has just released a Lightroom plug-in Nature Data LR which, at first glance, is about adding to your Library a group of nature-related custom fields:
The fields provide a formal and structured approach to organising your images of natural subjects such as birds and mammals.
The plug-in adds a new metadata panel to the library module, a new dialog to manage the additonal data and an export action to add the data to keywords on exported images.
The plug-in also allows you to create dynamic collections of your photos based on families of species.
I wonder if there's a parallel with geotagging software. What I mean is that I usually can't be bothered to attach my GPS device to my camera, but I'm happy enough dragging the images onto a map when I get home. Equally, if I did get into shooting wildlife, I'd need some help recognising species, something like a dialog displaying whatever characteristics might distinguish a bit-titted wotsit from a striped wotsit, or a male from a female. Maybe that could be pulled from some online reference source, or each creature's record might have hyperlinks?
But wait, there's something else worth noticing:
Naturdata LR makes use of Phil Harvey's excellent ExifTool.
In other words, it's a plug-in with custom metadata and an export feature. This is the aspect of this plug-in that I find particularly intriguing. For one thing it's reassuring that someone other than Jeffrey Friedl has got Exiftool and Lightroom working together - and I hope it shames me into playing with this. But more interesting is what he's doing with it - taking his custom fields and writing them as keywords through the export dialog. As I've written before, just because a program provides hierarchical keywords, it doesn't mean you have to use them, even for something as hierarchical as species..
Thu Jan 14, 2010
Search & replace, append, transfer - a beefy update
I've just uploaded version 1.0.6.7 of my Lightroom plug-in Search & replace, Append, Transfer which includes some big changes:
- It should work in the LR3 beta (but remember, the beta is not meant for real work)
- Instead of the long drop down lists for choosing fields, there are now dialog boxes
- The new menu item "Library>Plug-in extras>Parse and audit" reviews your metadata entry
- 16 custom fields, plus fields for Event and People like in iView/Expression Media
- An optional module converts certain iView/Expression Media metadata fields to LR
- Documentation is both beefier and prettier
Parse and audit runs through your pictures, checking whether you've completed the title, caption, how many keywords each image has.
A bolshy track record?
Please meet Stompie, the Russian T34 tank that's apparently spent the last decade guarding this triangle of waste ground in deepest Bermondsey. If you're unfamiliar with south London's more proletarian underbelly, these 30 tons of ex-Red Army muscle lurk just 5 minutes' trundle from Tower Bridge and all those bonus-wielding bankers over in the City of London. Providing you're not too worried about the traffic, you could be in front of the gates of Buckingham Palace in 15.
Let's be clear - armoured fighting vehicles are not a common sight in central London. The Scorpion light tank that used to live near the Brixton Tescos is long gone and is now probably the pride and weekend joy of some historical re-enactor (or latter day George Bowling from Orwell's lower Binfield). Certainly until the morning I was drafting this blog post, I hadn't the faintest idea of the T34's existence, and I was simply thinking of expressing a banal resentment of the last few weeks' snow. While most parts of this sceptred isle have enjoyed and endure repeat doses of Siberian chill, of the four snow falls that have "hit" south London only last week’s and yesterday's was at all significant – if a paltry 3-4" counts as such. We seem to expect snow to provide a discrete, suburban experience no more tiresome than nipping into the supermarket or ordering from Amazon, briefly meeting our needs but having no inconvenient after-effects. But this year, the snow has kept returning, hanging around like a guest that was welcome at Christmas, but remains around in mid-January. Each time it has mostly turned to slush and ice, thawing and freezing, and was soon stained the vomit-brown colour of gritting salt. Until yesterday when there was finally a decent-sized, gone-the-next-day, photogenic dump, I've just felt frustrated by it. Was it really too lousy to photograph, or was I just too lazy? Yes, I know, "it's behaving like snow, get over it".
What rescued the post was writing a line asking whether the Inuit reserve any of their reputed 60+ words for snow to describe a fall that doesn't seem worth photographing. A small mental leap took me to a former seal skin works that I know of in Bermondsey, and I suspect that if I'd used Google as normal I would have linked to the Alaska Building and moved on. Instead I forgot (age, eyesight, cold) I was in Google maps and noticed the proximity of Stompie. My photographic year seems to have begun on a more documentary trajectory - a combination of being stuck in London and a new 50mm f1.4 - so within minutes I was in the Beardymobile and heading of down to the Old Kent Road.
The story behind the T34 turns out to be a lot more interesting than the photo. The most plausible explanation seems to be that its presence owes little to pent-up revolutionary justice (sadly) and more to a planning dispute a property developer had with his local and - if it doesn't sound too Jeremy Clarkson - no doubt well-meaning Liberal council. Given the tank's location on Mandela Way, its name can only refer to a victim of Winnie Mandela's thugs, and its owner seems to have also been in the news for fighting his son's expulsion from school - after 400 offences. Since the T34 had apparently been a 7th birthday present for his son, Marlborough School - its name shared with Britain's greatest general - should consider itself fortunate Stompie remained in Bermondsey.
Permalink - My photography - 0 comments
Wed Jan 13, 2010
More Aladdin Sane
I'll also point you to his web site which I failed to find last year. If you're into 60s-70s portraiture and fashion you'll find the likes of Bowie, Blondie, Schwarzenegger, or Terrence Stamp (right). All the young dudes, even Harold Wilson.
Update: Enjoyed that Duffy programme. It did leave me wondering why he really gave it up and what he's been doing in the interim. Maybe he made so much from ads that he's spent 30 years drinking and smoking? But well worth watching on the iPlayer.
Permalink - Photo links - 1 comments
Tue Jan 05, 2010
Great cable
Terry White shows how to shoot tethered into Lightroom. It's not perfect, not by a long means, but far from difficult. Wish I could think of a better pun though - vince cable?
pMachines to Wordpress
Yesterday one of the web sites I maintain had a big problem - lots of ugly PHP error messages about "eregi is deprecated" and we were locked out of the control panel, pMachines, that manages the site's content. On the other hand, the hosting company was excellent, their reply being so quick that I initially thought it was a duplicate acknowledgement of my support request, and they didn't pull the "what have you changed?" or "we don't support user applications" tricks. They had changed the server over to PHP5 and had switched off PHP4 support. pMachines is no longer updated, so I bit the bullet and spent all day migrating everything to WordPress, copying the content and building a custom page template. And of course, just as I was ready to show off my labours, one of the site's users discovered the original site was working properly again - the host had restored support for PHP4. Yes, I know, setting up Wordpress was a learning experience. "Bugger"!
In fairness, my eagerness to make the changeover was because I was looking for a test bed. While I use pMachines to run this blog, and it is reliable-enough, it does show its age. Character encoding is messy and pasted material regularly screws up one RSS reader or another, posts can't be in more than one category, and it's a stretch when one (mis)uses pMachines to manage parts of a site other than the blog. So I've been looking at alternatives.
I'm a little wary of WordPress after a friend used it to set up a blog which was then hacked, compromising his forum - and I'm the one who maintains that. pMachine is old and too small a target for hackers. WordPress though....
But yesterday's experience was much more encouraging. The site isn't really a continuing blog, and WordPress's Pages feature worked well as a basic content management system for a collection of independent pages - we're not even using its blog features. Especially nice was cutting the original site's page contents from a browser window and pasting them into WordPress's page entry form which nicely picked up all the formatting. This made light work of converting the site's 21 pages.
Whether it will be so easy to convert this site is another matter. However, the links from migrating from pmachine to wordpress look helpful and certain principles of data migration always remain. When you want to get data into a new system - whether it's masses of financial or business data or simply Lightroom keyword - you begin by exporting dummy data from the new system because you can usually be sure it'll import it properly. Then see if you can get your existing data into that format. Never start from what you have - start from where you want to be.
Permalink - Computing tips - 3 comments
Sun Jan 03, 2010
Hebridean overture
The Old Man of Storr is a too-common location, though thankfully it's not a scene you can shoot from the car park (I remember the thick mud almost swallowed my boots as I climbed up through the forest). But there are clever treatments of Staffa (the grass on the basalt columns) and of less-accessible locations like St Kilda (love the birds). No doubt I'm not the only one who has spent a night sleeping in his car near Callanish but Jim's story of Vigil at the Stones: Frame 9,068 makes me wish I'd stayed up all night:
You don't see me in the picture because I am hiding behind the stones. Even when I was running through the frame I wasn't in any one place long enough to register in the picture.
Hey, it sounds like I knew what I was doing when explained that way! But I didn't know this process to begin with. I did the picture over and over. I layered each new step on as I figured out what could be done and how to do it. I made a lot of mistakes. Shining the light for too long on one area results in a hot spot that doesn't look right. I made the mistake many times.
Permalink - Photo links - 4 comments
Thu Dec 31, 2009
Christmas travel "blurs"
Christmas was not what we'd carefully planned. Shortly after leaving London on Christmas Eve, the Beardymobile heard that snow was falling up North and decided it didn't fancy the journey to Manchester. Something called the air mass meter was cutting out the fuel, and the RAC call out service couldn't fix it, so the head ruled the heart and the Beardy family Christmas was rudely rescheduled to mid January. Norad have been warned.
The Christmas Day routine is to leave the turkey (and veggie alternative) in the oven, and pack a Europhile mix of smoked salmon butties, Champagne and stollen. We'll then head off into the Peak District, Lyme Park, or up Castle Crag if we're in the Lakes. Everyone's out walking and wishing you Merry Christmas. A walk through central London is an entirely unseasonal experience - not even the most furtive whisper or festive glance from anyone we passed in Regents Park. Humbug city's solitary concession to Christmas was that everywhere was closed - no bad thing - and it was only when we finally reached Oxford Street that we found a place for lunch.
But, miserable London apart, the long walk and the nice long lunch meant this alternative Christmas Day turned out surprisingly well. It was dark by the time we left, and I spent a while waving my camera at the lights in St Christopher's Place. Like with many images of this type, it's not a question of blinding panning the camera but of developing a pattern. With some I moved the camera with a gentle N shaped motion, while with others it was a soft U, but here I moved from left to right and then stopped - which is why there's the trail, and then the stronger edge on the right of each patch of colour. The white "scratches" are the traces of a lattice of tiny white lights behind the main decorations. If I'm wanting an unconventional image for next year's Christmas card, this has to be the one. After all, isn't St Christopher the patron saint of travellers?
Happy New Year, Britain, World, wherever you are.
Permalink - My photography - 2 comments
My plug-ins and Lightroom 3 beta
I've not been in a great rush to update my plug-ins for the Lightroom 3 beta - the beta's not for real work, and changes to the SDK coding environment don't appear until much closer to the final release date. But in the past few days I have updated three plug-ins which didn't work in the beta because they used SDK features which Adobe are changing in LR3:
Big Note works in LR3, while I'll soon be making an announcement about how to buy Search Replace Transfer.
Screen shot tools - a Configurator panel
When creating blog posts or writing other material that requires screenshots, I go through a predictable series of steps. On Windows I'll hit PrintScreen or on Mac I'll use Cmd Ctrl Shift 3 (or 4) to place the screen's contents onto the clipboard. Then in Photoshop I'll create a new file and paste in the clipboard - that's the Paste New File button, a script.
Then I'll use various selection tools or the Crop tool to select around the important detail - hence the second row of buttons.
You get the idea - the panel works from top to bottom. Having selected around the detail, I invert the selection, and copy the detail into its own layer. To crop the image down to what I want to keep, I'd right click the layer and Select Pixels, then crop to that selection. At that point I might resize the image, or use Smart Transform to squeeze it into a defined size while keeping important detail. Finally I might sharpen it, and then save for web.
All those tasks are brought together in this panel for Photoshop CS4
. I could use fewer buttons - so I could use a keyboard shortcut for Select > Inverse - but the panel makes it a mouse-driven process. To install it, double click the MXP file and follow the instructions in Adobe's Extension Manager, restart Photoshop, and it's available under Window > Extensions.
Wed Dec 23, 2009
Football 5
- Jonathan Wilson asks How will football tactics develop over the next decade? I do hope Santa brings his Inverting the Pyramid.
- David Conn writes on football finance and governance The noughties: a decade when football's rulers ducked responsibility
- Dirty Tackle reports that Darius Vassell isn't keen that goat slaughtered at training (not a reference to other ex City stalwart Shaun Goater)
- The Spoiler's photo gallery where sport meets porn is hilarious. The link is directly to my favourite.
- 100 Great Football Photos of the Decade part 1 and part 2. Not sure if JT is there, but this is easily my favourite.
Fri Dec 18, 2009
Rome: rise and fall?
Adobe Rome is a technology demo of an Air application that combines features from multiple Creative Suite applications like Flash, Photoshop, Fireworks and Dreamweaver in a single desktop or web app. Every time I see one of these, it reminds me of Mac apps I saw c 1989 or Microsoft Office's c1995 fumblings with OLE. But one day.....
Via John Nack
Thu Dec 17, 2009
Winter bites
In case you've missed some recent news
- Welsh man has sex with rottweiler
- Newcastle woman guilty of noisy sex
- Yorkshire man flashes veterans' parade
- Police question wedding photographer under terrorism laws
- Tiger named Athlete of the Decade
Sat Dec 12, 2009
Small protests
When I arrived at the Gherkin at 11am yesterday I was stopped by a security guard as I walked around the side of the building. When he told me I had strayed on to private land, I returned to the pavement, but declined his repeated requests to show him the images on my camera.
Back on the pavement, a second security guard informed me that under "anti-terrorism" I was permitted to photograph or film the top end of the building, but the lower half, which included the reception area, fire exits and security cameras, was off-bounds.
And so the boys in blue were summoned.... I don't doubt the Guardian's report for one second, but in the interests of balance, last weekend I was taking photos of the very same building, and I didn't get stopped. It was a nice morning and I was in no hurry, took the pictures I wanted, and then wandered on, and I didn't sense the security guards' bovine eyes on my back. As an overweight middle-aged white bloke, beardless in all but surname, standing around and looking intently at my surroundings, and carrying a dangerously-big camera, surely I should have generated suspicion? I could have been a nice big tick mark on the day's quota of successful anti-terrorist action....
It's the inconsistency, the random stupidity that really irritates. Why the hell should I have been going for a lawful Sunday morning stroll expecting a confrontation with brain dead security or box ticking cops who don't know the law they're so eager to enforce? January 23rd's demo can't come soon enough.
Update: this week's successful counter-terrorist swoops:
Permalink - Tripodophobia - 3 comments
Fri Dec 04, 2009
Joe Cornish talks about Peter Dombrovskis
Couldn't find many Dombrovskis pictures online, but see this post which contains the Franklin River gorge shot, which does indeed look glorious.
Permalink - Photo links - 21 comments
Wed Dec 02, 2009
The style council
The "Sape" began when Congo was a French colony. Many Congolese people were fascinated with French elegance and decided to imitate the French look, a style which was further developed during the transition to independence. In the seventies and the eighties, many Congolese immigrants went to France and coming back to Brazzaville brought "the cult of elegance" . The "Sape" is an art and the real gentleman have to know the concept of gentleness and good manners related to the inherent moral code of the individual.
They look like Mods to me.
Permalink - Photo links - 0 comments
Thu Nov 26, 2009
Tough love...
If you've ever used iView or Extensis Portfolio, or countless other non-Adobe programs, you will have learnt long ago that Photoshop's Maximize Compatibility dialog box did what it said on the tin - it maximised the PSD or TIF file's compatibility with other programs. Or rather, what you would probably have learnt is that if you unticked this setting, you would be saving disc space at the cost of making other programs struggle to display the PSD or TIF file. Short term gain, long term pain?
This is as true of Lightroom as it is of third party programs - after all, Adobe engineers have far better things to do than cater for self-inflicted pain. The remedy is to resave those files compatibly - see Laura Shoe's post for an efficient way to do this.
Mon Nov 23, 2009
SlideShowpro Director 1.4.1
SlideShowpro Director 1.4.1 has been released and has watermarking:
Director 1.4.1 includes new support for built-in watermarking, allowing you to upload an image (transparent PNGs work best) to use as a watermark, then Director composites that image on your original content when it creates the optimized copy for your slideshows. You can define as many different watermarks as you like, and change what watermark is applied on a per-album basis. You can also control the positioning of the watermark and its opacity when composited with the image.
Now all I want is that it doesn't strip metadata (there's a hack).
Believe the hype
It is a stitched image with a difference, cutting open a grand Paris residence and showing its unbelievable collection of Renaissance masterpieces.
More of his hyperphotos here. You could spend quite a lot of time gawping at these....
Permalink - Photo links - 0 comments
Sat Nov 21, 2009
Cool Kenna
Via Bruce Percy.
Permalink - Photo links - 2 comments
Lightroom's 10 strongest points
Over at Lightroom forums someone asked what people think are the 10 strongest points of Lightroom? While my initial reaction was a Keanesque "you've got eyes, haven't you, what do you think?", it's actually not a bad question and nicely follows up my post from the other day. After all, for all the moaning about things I don't think are right, I do use Lightroom for positive reasons.
So in descending order, my ten favourites:
- Adjusting and managing raw files in a single program - we easily forget how radical Aperture was....
- Bringing together in one place pictures from multiple drives, whether they're online or offline
- Auto Sync mode for adjusting multiple images simultaneously
- Targeted adjustment tool for black and white, and for colour correction - elegant
- Local adjustment brush and gradient tool - beautifully done
- Smart Collections - could do much better though
- How collections quietly store the last Print, Web or Slideshow settings applied to them
- Print - though not Web, not Slideshow
- Use of templates for saving frequently-used settings
- Keyboard shortcuts
Fri Nov 20, 2009
Alamy and Lightroom
There's a apocryphal story that you can be waiting forever for a London bus, probably while it's raining, and just as you've given up and started walking home, two or three will turn up at once. Well at the end of a very enjoyable evening at Richmond and Twickenham Photographic Society, someone asked me about Lightroom keywords and Alamy's requirements. It's a good question, somewhat off the beaten track, but I had come across the problem before. But then this morning my publisher forwarded an email asking exactly the same thing:
The problem I have is that when I assign keywords to my image files, Lightroom rearranges them from the priority order I put them in, to alphabetical order, which is useless. Alamy stock library wants the keywords in order of relevance otherwise images will not get noticed however good they are. ie. flower, yellow, daisy, chain. In alphabetical order your image would come up in a search for "chain daisy" which could be a very different image to a daisy flower - if you see what I mean!
I'd be pleased if anyone corrects me, but as far as I know there is no decent answer. Lightroom will write the keywords into the export file in alphabetical order, and there's no built-in way to change this. With a plug-in, I think it would be possible to use a custom field to record keywords in order of relevance, and then write them to the files upon export. Even then, it won't be as slick as other export plug-ins because I hear Alamy don't accept FTP, and I suspect that partly explains why no-one has come up with a solution. But you never know - one may turn up.
Update - thanks Nic for pointing out Jim Keir's Alamy plug-in.
Thu Nov 19, 2009
10 Things I Wish I Could Tell A Slightly Less New Lightroom User
Until you know
what you're doing
- and even then,
think twice (at least)
Scott's post was actually inspired by another article, recent Aperture refugee Scott Bourne's 10 Things I Wish I Could Tell Every New Lightroom User which was mainly a run through of learning resources.
As I was preparing a "Lightroom not Photoshop" talk this evening for Richmond and Twickenham Photographic Society, I thought a top 10 would be a useful exercise for me too. So.... hello, I'm Scott - well, actually John - and here are 10 Things I Wish I Could Tell A Slightly Less New Lightroom User:
- Until you know what you're doing, use a single catalogue. And even then, think twice - remember that more than one catalogue means breaking up control of your picture collection. Three additional thoughts come out of this. Tens of thousands of pictures is not a lot in database terms. Secondly, optimise your catalogue regularly but remember Lightroom stresses the parts of your computer system that other programs don't reach and something other than the number of pictures could be to blame for any slowdowns. Lastly, don't worry about having all your eggs in one basket - cover your backside by backing up your catalogue and your images.
- Unless you really know what you're doing, never use Explorer or Finder for moving or renaming files that are catalogued in Lightroom. Apart from affecting your image backup/recovery plan, moving files in Explorer or Finder is a bit like the local bookstore's overnight cleaners getting high and spending their time moving books to different shelves. How would you, or Lightroom, know where anything is? Ignore this warning and you'll be spending a lot of time telling Lightroom where you've moved your files. On the other hand, it will be a good learning experience.
- Put your effort into learning to use smart collections, not into building dumb collections or into the filter panel. This is why Scott K's point 10 - that you can cut down on keywords if you use collections - is such a leaky vessel. As well as keywords travelling with your files if you ever leave Lightroom, adding keywords means smart collections become an even more effective way to find and organise your pictures.
- Switch on Develop's Auto Sync mode. This makes every slider movement or other adjustment affect all the images you've selected and is the most efficient way to work. Efficiency isn't for its own sake though - the less time it takes you to get the whole shoot up to scratch, the more time is left for making the winners really stand out. Don't worry if you sometimes forget AutoSync is switched on and you've adjusted the wrong images - you soon learn.
- Never pay a penny for a Develop preset. If you've collected more than a few presets, you're relying on others' judgement about their pictures, not on your own eyes and creative instincts. Photographers are hunters, not sheep.
- Use the targeted adjustment tool for colour adjustments or black and white conversion. Keep your eyes on what the picture looks like - not on the sliders.
- Learn a new keyboard shortcut every day. Keyboard shortcuts are the fast track to seeing Lightroom's modules as simply "compulsory workspaces".
- Wherever you drag a slider or click a button, try holding down the Alt/Option key. In many cases something useful will happen - you'll see clipped colours in Develop, nest complex smart collections criteria, use the number pad with the Keyword sets....
- If you're using more than one computer or other imaging programs, think twice before you adopt a hierarchical keywording system. Keyword spellings, cases, and hierarchies can easily diverge on different computers, or your third party programs won't understand the hierarchy and will return the images to Lightroom with flattened keywords. Keeping keywords and hierarchies in sync takes discipline which you may not have. Just because you can create hierarchies doesn't mean you have to do so.
- Be consistent with your metadata. Keywords are terms that describe a picture, not aspects of your workflow. Ratings are for your long-term evaluation of a picture's quality, flags for temporary pick/reject decisions, and labels for whatever makes sense to you at the time.
Photoshop is singular,
Lightroom is plural ™
Wed Nov 18, 2009
Five distractions
- Garrin the Scottish Pairlament Wark for You - public information, Trainspotting-style
- James May does Scalextric on BBC iPlayer - this was wonderful
- Aussie enjoys getting lost - exactly why I won't have a sat nav
- Noisy sex woman loses appeal bid - ooh
- Liverpool FC's official web site asks "what it would feel like to lift the Premier League Trophy?" - NB competition ends Dec 11th
Mon Nov 09, 2009
A wall without end
Surely Russia's greatest leader?
I was working in Helsinki that month, my first trip up there, and also my first encounter with real, live Russians. The hotel was a standard 4 star city centre ("keskusta" in Finnish) place and as well as us European and American business types, usually in ones and twos, there were these groups of Russian men. What really surprised me was how exactly they fitted our Cold War stereotype of Communist party or union apparatchiks. Always moving together, as if of one mind, curiously these men were all of a similar size, 5 or 6 inches shorter than me, all in similarly-cut plasticky suits, uncomfortably-knotted ties, non-leather shoes and briefcases - not even a fake Western brand logo. Each morning in the restaurant (Finnish: "ravintola") they would fall upon the breakfast bar with a last-meal-before-the-gulag gusto, and the elevators were filled with the smell of their tobacco and above with the smell of their armpits.... These Russians seemed a totally different species from Maria Sharapova or my friend Irina.
[Update - in the light of a comment, I have made bold the word "these". In this post I only refer to my first hand experience of the Russian party or union groups I encountered in that hotel, and did not say all Russians or all those stuck behind the Iron Curtain used to smell.]
I'm not digging up these memories to poke fun at Russians. Quite the contrary, I've always been fascinated by Russian history and by its wonderful literature, and in fact I was already planning to use my following Helsinki trip as an opportunity to visit Leningrad (it was a blinding weekend too). It was these particular Russians' complete otherness and their conformity to Russophobic propaganda that proved so memorable, that hotel making tangible and bringing alive the capitalist-communist division of Europe that had endured from long before I was born.
Nowadays it sometimes seems hard to remember that while 9/11 and 7/7 introduced a certain level of fear to metropolitan daily life, it's puny and random by comparison with the threat of nuclear annihilation that had hung over the 70s and 80s. Theoretically MAD and peace may have been the two sides of deterrence's coin, but I recall many earnest conversations about our chances of reaching the Millennium, and on my bookshelf is a copy of General Sir John Hackett's "The Third World War". It's a "best selling future history" which I think began with national / ethnic uprisings in the Soviet Union and soon had T72s on their merry way to the Rhine. It's only in hindsight that we know it would be Trabbies that would chugging down the autobahn, and that the Russian empire would, by and large, break up without bloodshed.
As usual, the Big Picture has a great set
of pictures of the event
But back to pre-Nokia, pre-Timotei, deep-frozen Helsinki (it was minus 20C and dropping fast). We're back in the dark ages when hotel TV didn't automatically carry BBC, CNN, NDTV, Al Jazeera, France 24.... The choice was Finnish or Swedish, Estonian or Russian. While my Finnish was certainly better in those days, in fact 50% better than it is now, that only meant I could only count up to 3. Fortunately Finnish TV was subtitled for the country's Swedish minority and, so long as the words were similar to German ones, I could learn what was happening in the world.
Armed with the knowledge of what did happen, it's easy to forget other ways in which the events in Berlin could have gone. Why not a repetition of Prague or Budapest? After all, we were only months after the Tiannanmen Square massacre. So a sort of morbid curiosity led me to watch the Russian and Estonian coverage and see what "they" were being shown. At first in my room, and later in the hotel bar with the Russians themselves, it wasn't the negative story I expected. We were all seeing the same pictures that the Finnish and Swedish channels were showing - happy faces.
And so the dominoes fall in Berlin. Happy 20th Mauerfallstag!
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