Andrew Macpherson

Just been trying a borrowed Eye-Fi card with a CF adapter in my Canon 5DII, to see if it would work.  My goodness it was so slow till I turned round to “point” the CF slot in the camera at the hub. then it speeded up to about 15 seconds per frame from having been taking minutes.

When I compare this with Canon’s EOS utility which takes about 3 seconds even on the end of a USB cable with a 5m regenerating extender, and you’ll see why I’m not rushing out to buy one.  The lack of wires would be nice, and I hope we’ll start seeing Bluetooth tethering in every new camera soon, but this is just too slow.

It’s nice to have downloaded an apparently working version of EOS utility (December update), but I would still advise setting “leave image on card” out of general paranoia, along with putting the camera into “one shot” drive mode, just to avoid overrunning the buffer.

I do like the Lr Watch folder feature to bring in the photos transferred on the tether, but found Lr’s built-in camera control less useful than I had hoped — I had been expecting something closer to On-1′s camera remote for iPhone and iPad, with pretty full control, rather than just the remote shutter trigger.

It’s all an issue because we’ll be doing event-style portraits to raise money for camera club funds at the Bishop’s Stortford Carnival on the 19^th. We need a new higher resolution projector, now that the competition resolution spec has improved.

This leads to a thought for the day: “HDTV” describes a comparison with what went before, not any sort of absolute quality.

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• So… What is “Pro” a code for?
• Photo Selection Slideshows
• International Power
• Eye-Fi vs Shooting Tethered
• YN565 E-TTL Flash Speedlite fails with Canon ST-E2
• Another Speedlight replacement
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• Tethering (Continued)

Holiday Photo book

Inspired by Scott Kelby’s post on making soft-cover photo-books for each trip, I decided to follow suit and give iPhoto a go.  One swiftly discovered that he had upgraded iPhoto from the release that came with Snow Leopard to the new version from the App Store.

Scott’s video is great on showing the workflow of collecting the photos for the book in Lightroom, and exporting suitably sized finished JPEGs that will hold good for any book making project.  It’s worth calculating that your photos, especially that mega-panorama probably need restricted to approximately the pixels to fit vertically on the page (eg 8in x 300px/in) as that will immediately be ¼ the size (you do stitch portrait format shots don’t you?).

The iPhoto software / templates have a USP which it would be easy to overlook. Maps.  Lots of the layouts have a small map which you can annotate with your locations.  The other thing iPhoto does,which you have to work at with other book-publishing software is that it makes it very easy to span your photo across a double-page spread.

So why didn’t I go with iPhoto?  Well 2 reasons.

1. Taxes.  In Britain there is no tax on Books or printing (other than forms) Yet iPhoto proposed to charge me VAT at 20%
2. Flexibility.  I found the available layouts restricting.  I would have lived with this had it not been for the tax issue.

In terms of flexibility — I take lots of panoramas.  I also have a 1:2 portrait to landscape shooting ratio.  The templates are very much set up for standard landscape shots, and without the ability to add ones own.  This approach does have advantages in terms of ensuring that the book is well styled, but …

So I went back to Booksmart from Blurb

The Jacobite, fired and ready for off

Just back from one of those remarkable experiences, you know the sort, where you tell people what you’ve just done and the almost universal reaction is “Oh, I’ve been meaning to do that…” in this case it was a trip I arranged for my brother-in-law who is a great railway buff.  We took the steam train “The Jacobite” on an excursion from Fort William to Mallaig.  This is the Hogwarts Express run over Glenfinnan viaduct.

In fact a lot of the outdoors shooting for Harry Potter took place in Glenfinnan, and Alnwick castle (Hogwarts) was transposed from it’s rather flatter borders setting by the magic of post-production up to a promontory on the loch.  I got much fascinating detail from Robert Haining a National Trust for Scotland ranger.  NTS owns the Glenfinnan Monument to the 1645 rising.

Anyway here’s a slideshow: Jacobite Steam Trip (warning 120 Mb)

Just bought Lightroom, at a very nice NAPP member discount, for the job it’s meant to do — Digital Asset Management. With over 20k photos things were getting out of hand, but I was seriously horrified to realise how lax I had become WRT tagging the photos.  Over 12k had no keywords.  Another job to keep one amused for a while, and keywording from a structured keyword dictionary is slightly slicker  in Lightroom compared with Bridge, as Lr will bring up a list of the matching targets, while Bridge obliges one to “Find next”

The first infuriating thing I’ve found with Lightroom is that I can’t Geotag my photos once they’re loaded into Lr.  With Bridge, I would use a combination of GPSPhotoLinker which matches the timestamp against a GPS track to locate my photos or, when I didn’t have the GPS with me, Geotagger to find the right spot on Google Earth.  Bridge would happily re-read the exif, or the xml sidecar whereas Lr really does not want to know. Guess geotagging comes first in the workflow, before import, what a PITA.

Also been watching Scott Kelby and Matt Kloskowski’s “100 Ways Lightroom KICKS Bridge’s @$$” which is very amusing, but reassuringly demonstrates that they’ve not been serious Bridge users for a while. It is a very good introduction to the useful features of Lr, and well wort a working through, and successfully makes the case for Lr as the tool of choice for photographers (I had to start Firefox for this though, it stuttered horribly in Safari here)

No; not a golf course.

The Design Centre, Uslington

Scott Kelby’s tour “Photoshop for Digital Photographers” was in London yesterday, and it was a marathon production for Scott, who not only presented all day, but stayed in place during the breaks to answer everyone’s questions.  He also announced that as he had no flight to catch last night, so he was staying put to make sure that no-one went home with unanswered questions.  What a guy! (continue reading…)

On Saturday July 24^th I’ll be leading the Bishop’s Stortford photowalk, part of the worldwide photowalk. I’m expecting it to be great fun, and a great chance for us all to show off how fine Bishop’s Stortford is.

Scott Kelby, prolific author, is offering a prize of one of his recent books on Lightroom 3 or Photoshop CS5 for the best local photograph, and we also hope to offer the author a fairly large print of their winning photograph locally.  The local winner also gets entered into the worldwide contest for a $1000 photo equipment worldwide first prize (and lots of runner up prizes too…).

The prize is great, but the main aim of the day is to get local photographers together to share their enjoyment and enthusiasm, maybe offer mutual help and encouragement…  All levels of photography experience are welcome, all equipment from camera phones through point-and-shoot cameras, DSLRs to stand cameras with sheet film backs will take pictures — bring what you’re happy with.  Any one of these might take a great photograph, guided by your imagination and eye as the photographer.

I look forward to seeing you on the day!