I don’t want to try it out.  The MacBook Air is now on Ebay and I’ve switched to a slightly heavier MacBook Pro with a nice big 500Gb disc.  The Air is beautiful, easy to use, light and just plain cool.  It is however too fragile for me.

This review was first published on the Warehouse Express website

“I had a problem — I’m a dedicated tripod user, and the holiday firm advised that tripods are either a source of hassle or local revenue in Marrakech. Additionally I’m a bit stiff with tendonitis so a walking staff seemed a good idea. I spent a week on the internet looking at alternatives and the excellent videos on the Trek-tech website convinced me.

Warehouse Express delivered quickly, and I was able to take the trekpod on a trip to a conference in Stockholm.

The top sections join with telescopic twist locks, and the description of how to set up the wrist strap in the same way as Nordic skiers have used for ages with the strap over the wrist then up between the hand and pole is something that other manufacturers could usefully copy. The removable cap on top was comfortable when using the pole as a hiking staff.

The bottom section consists of a tripod made up from 3 x 120 degree arcs that make a round pole when closed. These are held together with a loop and hoop strap which I found completely satisfactory.

This tripod section butts onto to the telescopic sections of the pole as a fairly wide flat circle on either section held together by a hand tightened soft compound covered nut attached to the tripod (bottom section) which screws onto a thread around the bottom of the telescopic section. More of this later.

At the conference in Stockholm I was a serious delegate rather than a photographer, so it was a chance to use the light weight magnetic clip with a pocket Nikon, and it functioned well. The support was useful as one did not want to use flash in the hall, mainly as one was too far away for it to do any good anyway, so some steadying for the long exposures in a dim conference hall …

I stayed over the weekend and joined my friends Geocaching(qv) in the southern parts of the city. This involved scrambling up hillsides, some lovely viewpoints, and a reasonable walk in the woods. I was very happy with the Trek Pod, and packed it for my Moroccan trip.

In Marrakech the staff was useful for helping get through the souk, the quick change from palm rest to magnetic support worked well, and despite my guide’s trepidations I had no problems with people seeking a tripod licence. There were lots of locals who wanted a photography fee of course, not just the professionals — the water sellers and such in the square, but also artisans like the carver of plaster tiles. When you go there make sure to get a pocket full of change, and if you’re going up to the Atlas, buy a box of biros to give to the kids…

The Atlas was next, and again the pod was great. It helped me up (and more to the point down) some fairly rugged terrain, and was able to support my Canon 5D with a fairly heavy lens for some early morning shots.

Back in Marrakech one goes for fairly long treks through the old town to visit various points of interest, This was when the Pod failed. I was walking along and it seemed that the bottom was a bit wobbly. I stopped and did up the screw, and went on only to have the same experience about 200 metres further on. On the third happening I didn’t tighten as I could feel that would finish the thread on the joint entirely.

Limped home and on my return asked Warehouse Express if they would liaise with the manufacturer on my behalf. They very kindly took it back and gave me a credit, having first offered a replacement. — by that time I had concluded the engineering of the joint was not ideal. Great idea, but not quite robust enough for me.”

I later spoke to TrekTec at Focus 2009, they too were only too keen to replace the problem item, or even substitute a different version — they actually have a lifetime guarantee.  Full Marks to the supply chain!

There are 2 axes they can be judged on beyond the simple quality.  One is how far away from the product they stray — are they about Photoshop, or are we in the 3D effects of Photoshop Extended, are we integrating with Adobe Illustrator.  The other noticeable dimension is the photo to artwork axis, with some of the talks being in a zone delineated by the advertising message, and using techniques that work only in relatively low resolution.

My needs as an aspiring amateur stop at presenting my photographs well, whether for club competition,  or as a gallery wrap canvas of a family portrait that someone’s prepared to pay for.  so I’m only going to point you at ‘casts which meet my needs most of the time, and don’t overwhelm the viewer with advertising — some is OK to pay for the content after all, but some casts are 75% advert 20%chat and 5% content.  I may be missing really good content because I haven’t found it (yet), but there are ‘casts that I’m deliberately not mentioning too.

So what shows am I finding Useful?

• Adobe Photoshop Quicktips hosted by Justin Seeley
  About 80 episodes that stick nicely to the point.  Starts with CS2 and moves to CS3 about half way, but is careful to show the CS2 way, as well as the easier methods from the newer version.  Website is under reconstruction as a WordPress blog.
• Photoshop User TV in association with Photoshop User Magazine and NAPP
  Presenters Scott Kelby, Matt Kloskowski, and David Cross.
  Some pretty good tips, occasional equipment reviews, and two ads per half hour show for the books and (North American) training courses they produce.  The shows are weekly, and there is a back catalogue of over 100 hours to download if you can stand it, all the way back to October 2005.   One thing that is very noticeable is how the tools have changed over even such a short time.
• Photoshop Killer Tips  host Matt Kloskowski (above)
  Nice short focused tips, every working day.  Lots of back-issues to work through.  NAPP is mentioned at the start, but there does not seem to be any other funding plug.

You can find all these by searching for photoshop podcasts on the iTunes Store, and they’re all free.  That’s enough to get you started.  Happy viewing, and please suggest other ‘casts in the comments.

NeoCube

My friend David very kindly gave me a cute toy for the Solstice — a set of Neodymium spherical magnets marketed as the NeoCube — they’re fairly small but extremely powerful. Once one gets over being able to have a handful of ball-bearings that don’t go flying off in all directions,the obvious use is for still life exercises.  One can make rather amazing structures as the photo demonstrates, and the videos on the company’s website are an entree to endless hours of frustration.

So anyway it’s a nice difficult subject to light and photograph.  highly polished spherical items.  I had fun with soft-boxes, and black and white foam boards till I got a set of reflections that I liked,  Then the fun begins, to try to photograph it.  The image will only be in focus for very slightly more than a hemisphere at F11 with a full set of macro tubes.  I’ll be making a later post with some good links about circles of confusion, hyperfocal distance and the digital vs film non-issue triggered by thinking about this.

The photo above is a composite of 12 frames loaded into separate layers with the focus slowly advancing from the nearest sphere to the furthest corners.  I worked my way down the stack by hand erasing the out-of focus further content just to prove one can do it ‘by hand’.  It’s noticeable that the shape of the image changes slightly as the focus moves back, even though the camera has not moved, only the lens elements.

Neo Magnet 2

The next part of the exercise is the same subject, but with an extra softbox.  A simmilar set of 12 frames, but this time I let photoshop CS4 take the strain, and used the auto-merge feature (Edit Menu, under Auto-Align — select the layers first).  Frankly it did a better job than I have patience for in 5 minutes, rather than the 3 hours it took by hand. Vorsprung durch Technik (qv), in the phrase made famous by some car advert.  Some of the strips of image it built would have been difficult by hand, and of course the automatic builder makes no assumptions about the ordering of one’s layers, so masks out all the unwanted stuff on every layer.

The common factor on both these images is that the camera has been stationary, and one had focused using the focus ring on the lens, and resisted any temptation to focus with the zoom control, as one is usually tempted to do when using the macro rings “in the wild.”

Racking the Camera to change objective plane

The final photograph is taken again on the tripod, but this time one is using a Macro slider to move the focus by very precise, even amounts.  It is relatively quick to move the camera by a short distance (3mm in this case) between frames, rather than worrying about visible focus for each shot.  In this case the composite has better overall alignment without as much of the distortion that seemed to pull out the far corners.  Overall the Gizmo seems to do a better job.

Macro Slide Rail

What good value unbranded accessories are from E-Bay! it’s particularly true where one is looking at purely mechanical engineering, such as the Macro rail here.  This one came from an E-Bay trader ‘phoebe-g’ but seems to be generally availble from a number of traders.

The file just needs to be dropped into the same folder as any other meta-tag profiles you create to set author / address / copyright notice by saving a completed profile — then when you want photoshop to show that © copyright symbol the file will appear as an option in the Bridge append metadata and replace metadata menus — see the screenshot below  You can select a set of files in Bridge and mark them all as copyright rather than opening the properties of each individually.

Possibly worth pointing out how to save a profile — if you highlight a single photo then go to the bottom of the File menu in bridge there is a File Info option.

Select that and a form will pop up to allow you to set various aspects of the metadata.

You’ll probably want to set Author and the copyright notice and url on the general page, most of the IPTC data and possibly some of the origin data (credit / source) if you work through an agency, or need to credit your company. If you apply that to your photo you can then go to the Tools menu and, with the photo still highlighted select Create Metadata Template that will read in the values that bridge will allow you to save, and you can check the ones you really want to save for applying to other pictures.

When you save your new profile, remember what name you give to the file, and you can then search for that name to find the correct folder to put the copyright setting file you’ve downloaded from my blog (right-click here and SAVE AS), and once it’s in place it’ll just appear in your menu

Hope that helps!

What a revelation! There are speakers out there who will entertain and inform, as most do, and still mix in useful photographic, and club competition knowledge at the same time.  Until David Steel came along the overwhealming message from the club had been “You are an oik, you are here to worship at the feet of those who have achieved recognition, you cannot expect to get explanations, or instruction outside of comments made during judging.”  Actually chaps, as one paying for a proportion of the visitor’s time, it is one’s absolute privelage to endevour to maximise the benefit of that visit.  Equally as a club member, it is one’s duty to share any small understanding one may have with anyone who wants it to the best of one’s ability — that’s what clubs are about.

Anyway returning to David Steel’s show, for show it was, with individual slides, commentary and AVs to summarise each half, we had an exciting glimpse of a trip to India with special access. David and his wife were travelling by car with their personal driver and guide, rather than in a huge coach party, and consequently could stop, look, interact and photograph where the coach would have hurtled on by.  David dismissed some of his carefully set up shots as “holiday snaps” then went on to show how misdirection enabled him to capture candid moments, and how cropping and merging converted an aide-memoir into an image that captured and gracefully conveyed a spirit of the place, converting an honest workaday shot into a ranking competitor.

This was a show one left well satisfied, without that usual irritation or frustration at strange remarks unchallenged, detail missed.  David Steel had done his job for the evening, and done it well.

But the club needs to get a presenter’s radio mouse.

Well it’s all about learning and taking part, isn’t it?  Sometimes it’s also about discovering that a judge sees disinterest where you are trying to convey something rather more complex or “softness” where each hair is distinct.

Anyway on the  B&W print front, I’ve made an abominable start.  The consolation was selling 2 of the 3 on the way home, so they can’t have been too bad.

I did get 2 really good marks on colour prints, and was surprised and delighted to get nice marks on my first 2 projected images.  I really do want visitors to rate the photos I’m putting up here, so please do click on te stars or leave a comment (but not in Russian thanks )

The problem a refurbished flat, with plenty of space that just isn’t getting potential renters through the door to look.  The idea is to break out of the mould of sterile pictures, and try to add some aspirational zing to the advertising.

Jessica very kindly offered to do the shoot on a TFP/CD basis to build up her portfolio, with a view to getting pro modelling and film extra work.  I think that the results were worthwhile — have a look at the studio shots in my portrait folder as well — the sepia head shot makes a wonderful canvas.  Jessica was a joy to work with, and made my job much easier.  Life as a photographer is so much better when the subject also wants to look good.

Equipment: Canon 5D, 70-200 f4 L, Elinchrom D-Lite 2 Go, Chinese wireless flash trigger, shooting tethered to the MacBook Air.  Shooting tethered allowed Jessica to get a feel for how the shots were coming out, and, seeing that helped her to work with me to improve the results.

Thank you Jim!  great series.

A weekend away in Hereford, and many shots with a very bright, largely overcast sky.  Not completely lacking texture, but almost completely blown by the time one’s foreground was exposed.

So the first thought is “Oh no here we HDR again,” but actually the answer is given in the Adobe TV movie “Learn Photoshop CS4 – Make local adjustments in Camera Raw“ the adjustment brush got down between the ruined walls of Llanthony Priory to let me reduce the exposure on the sky to the point where the texture my eyes had seen was also there in the image.

The skies the following day had a similar burnout problem, but in this case triggered by shooting up-light into the haze from the overnight rain evaporating which you will still see at the horizon, and for them, with their very different skyline, the answer was the Graduated Filter illustrated in the same video.