John Beardsworth Blog

Focus on Imaging 2010

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:01:52 GMT

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.

So it's not quite dead?

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 10:01:49 GMT

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...

What has Aperture done to my x@%king metadata?

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 18:30:54 GMT

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...

PHP to display tweets

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 12:25:30 GMT

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...

Web site sick

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 23:23:55 GMT

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....

Ukraine certainly has got talent

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 17:42:04 GMT

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.

Downtown Tehran?

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 18:42:21 GMT

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...

Their own bloody fault

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:27:56 GMT

One year I'm going to have to photograph the Tough Guy Challenge where 5,000 men and women sign a disclaimer saying "It's my own bloody fault for being here". Here the competitors are crawling on their bellies through icy mud beneath barbed wire in Wolverhampton. Also see Mike King.

McCullin in Manchester

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:48:08 GMT

You do get quite a sense of Don McCullin from this slideshow. Surely he's the least gung-ho war photographer you can imagine, but since there's also a picture of his Nikon with an AK47 bullet hole, it may simply be luck that explains why he's still around at 75. 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!

5 quickies

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 08:28:32 GMT