Bret Edge

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 12:36:54 GMT

Must be coming from England, and the North West in particular, and today being wet and cold (where did summer go this year?), but I could look all day at Bret Edge's colour pictures of Utah's canyons and deserts - and my favourite would still be a b&w on a wet and stormy day. Wouldn't envy him living in Utah, either. Well, maybe now and then.

I kid you not

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:04:00 GMT

Asian elephant cured of heroin addiction
'Cremated' father turns up on TV - probably while the family was watching Ashes to Ashes
Servant kept in cupboard
Gingerfest and

Rust never sleeps

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 08:25:05 GMT
It's great Google have released this Chrome browser on Windows, if only to wind up Mac and Linux users. I did download it, like its home page feature, and love their comic way of launching it, but I don't know how anyone can get excited by another bloody browser, especially one designed for the developer's advertizing revenue. Until there is an equivalent to the Firefox Adblock extension, Chrome's simply not for me (I only upgraded to IE7 a couple of weeks back). But until then, at least there's the...

Oliver's Army

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 18:49:38 GMT
Today's the 350th anniversary of the death of Oliver Cromwell and over at the historian Edward Vallance's blog is a great guide to the various Cromwell-related events happening around the country and puts the question Just how evil was...

Coming home

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 13:16:42 GMT
Well, on Saturday I was pretty chuffed to get an Italian edition of my Advanced B&W book and joked about how "for English readers, the first one who asks me to do the same for the Russian or Dutch editions will get a virtual whack around the ears." What I didn't imagine was that two days later DHL would arrive with a bundle of Polish, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, and Korean! The Polish is best, published under the National Geographic imprint and making it look like I'm one of theirs.... Just kidding. One great thing about writing is that every so often something like this pops up, you come across a review, or you might get a nice email from a reader who has really got what you were trying to convey. And I've said...

My not quite famous enough 5 - #4

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 11:26:08 GMT
I'm not that keen on Lightroom 2's new Filter Panel, as I said here. When I do use it, it's usually because I want to temporarily filter the visible items down by key such as rating or sometimes by masters or virtual copies - ie by one of the old Lightroom 1.4 filters. Display the Filter panel for this purpose and you lose a very prominent chunk of screen space, where your pictures belong. Then you'll eyeball which iTunes-style columns are already visible, perhaps wait while Lightroom starts chugging through populating and counting them up. Clear whatever filter is already present (not an issue for me as I never use the Panel) and then click "Attributes" to...

Pubblicato in italiano

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 10:06:46 GMT
Normalmente, non sento niente quando uno dei i miei libri e tradutto - al massimo, ci sara due o tre email di un lettore ollandese o tedesco. Questo mi piace, ma stamattina ho ricevuto una copia di "Il digitale in bianco e nero", il mio "Advanced Digital Black and White" in italiano. E per qualcuno che parla l'italiano, era un piacere particolare! In questo caso, ho scritto 20% del libro a Tropea in Calabria, e ci sono tanti foto del paese li. Fortunamente, non ho fatto la traduzione! And for English readers, the first one who asks me to do the same for the Russian or Dutch editions will get a virtual whack around the ears.

Lightroom web galleries from the ground up

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 07:37:35 GMT
One reason why I still use iView rather than switching completely to Lightroom is because I prefer its HTML web gallery templates. iView takes about a third of Lightroom's time to output a big contact sheet style web gallery of say 100-300 pictures because it uses my DNG files' embedded previews, while Lightroom seems to insist on re-rendering the raw files when you're previewing the gallery in Web, again each time you change an output setting, and then again when it actually starts generating them. A second reason is because I can edit iView's HTML-based templates much more easily. Going back to Lightroom 1.0, the original XML and XSLT templates appealed to the geek in me, but I always felt they were misguided, a developer's solution which demanded a far higher level of skill than even the IT-minded photographer was likely to possess. While you can inch up the HTML learning curve, tweaking templates in small yet rewarding steps, XML and XSLT customization require much...

Plug-ins (Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy)

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 09:03:13 GMT
It's easy to see real positives in Aperture's announcement of plug-in architecture. Taking advantage of existing third party tools can quickly flesh out its features, while positioning it at the centre of a viable "ecosystem". Meanwhile third party developers can be working on fully-integrated solutions. On the other hand, it's a long way short of the original concept of the one ring to rule them all, and might even be seen as defining limits on what's going to appear in the core product. In any case, even if that fear's untrue, it seems pretty obvious that people don't really want to pay for a range of plug-ins for essential tasks like noise reduction or lens distortion - they will do so, but reluctantly, as a distress purchase. Then there's the hassle each time the host or the plug-in upgrades, or the palaver of tracking down licence numbers when you get a new computer (I'd love to know how many Mac users actually use the automated transfer processes). And when...

My not quite famous enough 5 - #3

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 10:25:53 GMT
The third feature in this little list is something which I won't swear is new, but which if it was there in version 1 is something I never noticed and can't get working now - autocomplete drop down lists. Previously Lightroom remembered whatever you'd entered in the Metadata panel, and would then autocomplete your entry the next time you started off typing something similar in the same box. That could be both helpful and an irritant, especially when a few of the most recent entries began similarly. Still, I liked the feature. What LR2 does is take the 12 most-recent entries and displays them in a list when you click the field's name. So here I clicked Title and LR shows me the most recent entries in that field, and it's the same for most...

the nutter behind the camera

Bret Edge

I kid you not

Rust never sleeps

Oliver's Army

Coming home

My not quite famous enough 5 - #4

Pubblicato in italiano

Lightroom web galleries from the ground up

Plug-ins (Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy)

My not quite famous enough 5 - #3