I was a bit extravagant on Friday. After much umming and aahing, I treated myself to a new flashgun, and have been playing with it ever since. I have a whole list of justifications for this purchase, which I could only just afford, but nevertheless feel a little guilty about it. Things are still a little up in the air part-time-job-wise, but I’m hoping to have that sorted soon.

Obviously I’m going to experiment and learn how to use it well, but after such an expense I think it’s doubly a duty to know it inside out. I’m keen to get an understanding of its Manual mode, but as it can interface with the camera’s exposure system I’d obviously like to figure that out too - fast-moving events and I’m not going to have time to manually set the power and zoom level. I know what the camera and flash can theoretically do together, but needed specifics.

Unfortunately, the instruction manual is dreadful. It tells me what all the buttons do, but has little information on how the flash deals with the various priority modes on the camera. It’s basic message is: “we’ll handle all the exposure stuff, don’t worry about it”. Which is no good. It continually refers to ‘foreground’ and ‘background’ without giving any indication of how the camera decides which is which. ‘Fill-in flash’ is mentioned as a possibility (and one of the features I most want to use), but how do I ensure the camera is in this mode? What happens when the camera is in aperture priority? This made me realise that I never really understood the small built-in flash as well as I should have, which in turn made me even more determined to make proper use of one that can bounce / swivel / zoom etc.. In search of help, I googled for a site I vaguely remembered.

The Photonotes.org three-part Canon EOS Flash guide turned out to be fantastic. It’s a comprehensive explanation of the various exposure systems, and has answered my every question. For example, the ‘foreground’ is the area around the active focus point, and the background everything else. Perfect.

The only remaining thing is to get it off the camera as I want to work through the Strobist lighting course, which requires an off-camera flash. I’d assumed a hotshoe extension cable would be cheap and easy to find, but I should have researched that more. Options are:

• Cable - Canon’s TTL sync cord. Means I can still use the camera’s exposure system. But £45. For a 60cm cable. So: rubbish.
• Cable - Jessops TTL sync cord. Again I can still get easy exposures. £35, and 1.2m long. Maybe.
• Cable - make your own PC connection. No exposure data so I’d have to do everything on manual, but that’d be good fun. I’d need two hotshoe adapters at £10 each but could then use any length PC cable I want. 5m would do it. Probably come to about £30. Definite possibility.
• Wireless - Canon’s wireless-TTL setup. Transfers exposure data. Needs a £90 trigger and, I think, line of sight. Can’t justify that.
• Wireless - “Pocket Wizards” - beloved of professional photographers, radio rather than optical, apparently 100% reliable, and £300. No exposure data. No chance.
• Wireless - eBay radio triggers memorably described as ‘modified garage door openers’. Not completely reliable, but the new ‘V2’s are apparently Not Bad. No exposure data. But about £20. Possible.

I think I’ll go with the make-your-own connection. I’d want a good few metres, and there’s no way to do that including exposure data, which I can easily live without. The eBay triggers I may upgrade to at some point, once I’ve got some understanding of how off-camera flash works.

As it happened, some extra work unexpectedly turned up and took the edge off the expense. Still going to work hard, though. On the right is one of the first shots I took, of (my sister) Jane, (not actually being tortured) Meg and (due in 4 weeks but apparently already in position) vaguely-baby Guybrush/Bellatrix.

I’d take the one on the left for my car. I’d probably have to add the apostrophe, though.

Inspired by Photojojo’s Project 365, I’m trying to take a photo every day of my 25th year. Here’s how they describe it:

• Imagine being able to look back at any day of your year and recall what you did, who you met, what you learned… (Often we find it hard to remember what we did just yesterday or even last night, let alone a whole year ago!)
• Your year-long photo album will be an amazing way to document your travels and accomplishments, your haircuts and relationships. Time moves surprisingly fast.
• Taking a photo a day will make you a better photographer. Using your camera every day will help you learn its limits. You will get better at composing your shots, you’ll start to care about lighting, and you’ll become more creative with your photography when you’re forced to come up with something new every single day.

I thought it sounded like fun, so I started on my birthday - May 19th. I confess to not blogging it for a while in case my memory was too appalling to keep up, but it’s going well as of 2nd August. I’ve had a couple of close calls in which I forgot, but happened to have taken something anyway. Hence the peas. Anyway, I’ll try my best, and should I ever fail will replace the image with Mork, shown right. Hopefully you’ll only see Mork this once.

The sidebar will always display the latest image from the Flickr set, which I’ll update as often as possible.

Beginning with the likely scenario of Bucky O’Hare vs. Captain Hook:

All made using a sonic screwdriver. It’s something to do Better if you rope somebody into helping, and actually have some drawing ability - then you can get fantastic results like this, and this.

I’ve had some luck with my floods pictures from the weekend. BBC Coventry used a few of them this morning, and Yahoo News contacted me to express an interest. A shot of the dancing couple¹ hit #23 in the daily Flickr Interestingness, which I’m very happy about - I’ve never broken the top 200 before! It’s turning up in Explore and everything . I wish I’d been a bit faster with the geotagging, though - they were clearly looking for shots for the Flickr Blog today…

1. who’ve contacted me and are very nice people indeed [↩]

One of my photos made it onto BBC News! Yay

Original page here. I’m #2. Also check out #6, which was 2m away from me and I didn’t know.

So yesterday’s plan to stay in all day reading Harry Potter didn’t go as planned. Stratford had a little rain overnight:

Here’s a before/after of the basin:

which is pretty bad, but further downstream it was crazy:

Not being one of the people who has to clear up, I found it very interesting. Plenty of kids, and some families, were having a great time splashing through the water on the main street, and the residents walking from their houses in wellies seemed in good spirits. These lads asked if I’d take their picture:

I emailed them a copy, although the initial address bounced back and I guessed at a correction, so hopefully they received it…I was also impressed by and jealous of this couple:

A passing child asked its mother why this was happening. The mother replied that it’s the kind of thing that happens after people have had too much to drink. Which might be true, although I prefer to think they were just having fun, but nevertheless they could actually dance. The cha-cha, unless I was mistaken. A salsa, I’m told. Isn’t that lovely? It was the best thing I saw all day

The BBC and various other organisations were filming, and there were crowds everywhere. I saw a canoeist set sail from the bandstand in the centre of town and finish a mile or so downriver.

Today the waters had receded from the main street, but parts of the basin and most of the far side of the river was still pretty bad:

and they were pumping out the Swan Theatre. My uncle lived here for ten(?) years and said he’d never seen the theatre flooded. I bet nobody thought it’d happen in July. Thankfully the waters didn’t quite make it to the Courtyard Theatre, so the RSC hasn’t had to close down completely¹. It hasn’t rained in the past 36hours that I’ve noticed, so hopefully the worst is over. The entire set of pics is here.

1. the main RST is closed until 2010; the Swan Theatre is in the same building, hence the flooding [↩]

I’ve been doing some freelance photoshopping work this week. Just your basic stuff - extracting objects from their backgrounds - but I always enjoy image editing and it’s been a good refresher course in various techniques. I learnt Photoshop years ago using a dodgy copy, but as I don’t use pirated software any more I’ve been trying The GIMP.

The GIMP is an open-source, freeware image-editing program that, while not as powerful as the newer versions of Photoshop, supports reasonably advanced features such as paths, channels etc.. It’s powerful, but the learning curve is steep. A major roadblock is the interface: designed for Linux and ported to Windows, every panel is a separate window, and it’s confusing as hell at first glance. A project called GIMPShop attempts to adapt the GIMP into the Photoshop interface, but it’s only partially successful and tends to lag behind the latest GIMP releases, so I prefer to stick with the ‘official’ release. The lack of native Windows integration means the dialogs and controls are unfamiliar, all of which takes time to pick up. But I’ve been meaning to learn The GIMP properly for ages, and this was a great opportunity to finally get to grips with it.

I generally find open-source software to be extremely impressive, but full of small bugs. The GIMP (on Windows) is the same. There are no show-stoppers, just things you have to work around. Tools such as the eraser would occasionally just stop working, and a reset of the ‘tool options’ would fix the problem, despite apparently not changing anything (I am aware that my understanding of the software is limited, though, and I could just be missing something). There were a couple of problems with the window system not re-drawing properly on zooms, or after switching to other programs, but, again, nothing that didn’t have a workaround, even if it was just restarting the program. I suspect these were to do with the linux windows-system port rather than the GIMP itself. Whether there are more or fewer bugs than commercial software I don’t know - my instinct says commercial software like Photoshop just has the edge, bug-wise - but at least open-source software can be patched daily, or a skilled programmer could even do it themselves.

Other than the tool-reset issue, image-editing was a breeze. I was processing a few hundred images, and was able to set keyboard shortcuts I could whip through with my left hand, keeping my right on the mouse at all times. This sped things up tremendously. The GIMP saved into native .psd format without issue (I downloaded the 30-day demo of Photoshop CS3 just to check). The image selection tools were effective, consistent and fast; paths as wonderful / irritating to configure as ever. It didn’t blink at importing twenty 2mb layers in one go, nor resizing all of them simultaneously.

The million-windows problem, by the way, is the first use I’ve found for Microsoft’s multiple desktop powertoy - switching between a GIMP and regular desktop was very convenient.

The best discovery came late in the process, when a startup tip informed me of the eraser’s un-delete function. Press Alt with the eraser and it’ll put back anything you erased, no matter when you erased it. So if you realise at the end of an edit that your first magic-wand selection accidentally removed more of the object than intended, you can put it back without having to go through 25 undo-levels and repeat all your work. Photoshop probably does this too, but it’s a feature I hadn’t seen before and was really, really helpful.

Broadly, I was impressed. There was nothing in my Photoshop skillset The GIMP couldn’t replicate, and I didn’t have any more problems than the average with any new program. When you consider the hundreds of pounds even older versions of Photoshop still cost, that’s remarkable. I’ll have to investigate the many online tutorials, as I’m sure there’s plenty left to learn.

I like interesting street entertainers, and two years ago heard about these guys:

Now that is what you call entertainment! I’ve been wanting to see them ever since.

I have shown this image to many people as a clear example of high-level street entertainment savantage. Your I-can-stand-still-for-ages statues probably bow reflexively, if they know their place. Strangely, most recipients cannot fathom why I would possibly want to see a live performance of two upside-down men clenching sparklers between their buttocks. I don’t understand: why would anybody not want to see such a thing? It makes no sense.

They’re called Skate Naked, and perform in Stratford occasionally. On Saturday I missed them by minutes, only turning up as they were collecting money:

Dammit. One day.

I am back. It was great. There was a lot of this:

We left at 2300, and got back twenty minutes ago. It’s 0300. I’m going to bed.

Ten days after getting back, I’ve finally finished processing and uploading our Lake District holiday photos to Flickr: the set’s here if you’re interested. I think Flickr’s Map view is cool:

Built-in GPS is one of the few features I’d consider upgrading my camera for - geotagging by hand in Flickr (or Google Earth via Trippermap) is time-consuming and sometimes tedious, but I do like looking at the results.

While on top of Walla Crag last week I took eight hand-held shots in a panorama. I hadn’t played with panorama software for years, and didn’t have fond memories of getting any working properly. It turns out things have improved dramatically, and much of it is free. Top of the search results was Autostitch, a free, fully-automatic photo stitcher. I wasn’t expecting great results, in less than a minute it produced this:

Which is pretty impressive! You can barely spot the photo blends, and the wavy orientation is to be expected without a tripod. Autostitch offers very few options, however, and I wanted to change the photo order so the lake was more prominent. After downloading three separate programs - Autopano SIFT 2.3, hugin and enblend - and spending an hour trying to get them working properly, this was the final result:

It’s a little straighter, and the blending is of a slightly higher quality. But the programs failed miserably when the photos were placed in a different order, even when I used a tutorial. This was probably due my lack of understanding rather than a bug, but I couldn’t get it to make sense. I’m sure it’s worth persevering with the complex software, but for quick, high-quality results, I can’t fault Autostitch. All good fun. I’ll have to try more of these.

I am back! I got you some cake! It’ll go off if posted, so I’ll eat it on your behalf. YUMS.

Our week in the Lakes was surprisingly dry after the first couple of days, although we saw many skies like this:

It was a great escape, and I’ll write it up properly soon. I now have 702 photos to process, a flat that looks like a bomb went off (including a bag of soup that I’m fairly sure used to be bananas), and an inability to turn off the tennis. Currently catching up with post / email / facebook etc..

The Plan: a sneak attack:

But it is not to be. Oh noes!