Andrew Macpherson

On Monday I took some time out to go to Focus on Imaging at the NEC in Birmingham.  This year we got away in good time, and arrived before the halls opened at 10am.

One of the highlights was meeting Dave Cross, Photoshop guru from NAPP who was demonstrating on the onOne booth.  A truly charming person, and if you don’t know of him look at the “Ask Dave” and “Photoshop User TV” podcasts from Kelby TV He started the show with a demonstration of the onOne iPad camera remote control app, and an explanation of how useful this is to the single handed photographer, before he went on to introduce more of the onOne suite.

A big surprise was the absence of Canon but that had been pre-nnounced, and really odd was the apparent absence of Nik Software as their website was advertising Focus — if they were there I neither saw them, nor found them in the show guide.

Sony had various entertainers — contortionists, gymnasts, jugglers — to give you something to photograph, and FJ Westcott were demonstrating their continuous lighting with the aid of a mini studio complete with beautiful model, and a competition for the most interesting shot.

The entries have to be added to their Flickr group by April 1^st and there is a restricted model release, for personal, portfolio, and educational purposes only.

Otherwise the show was interesting, some things one carefully averted ones eyes from (eg Phase One) others were very useful (Lion Picture Framing).  As always it’s important to go to these things with complete research if one plans to buy, including checking whether what one wants will be available. Nomad print boxes for instance only had their heavy-duty cases at the show, so I wasn’t able to save on the simple storage versions, unfortunately the extra cost of the rugged version which they had brought to sell was more than the postage cost.

A big benefit of going on Monday was that the show floor was not too busy, and it was possible to talk with the various suppliers, avoiding the crush of the weekend crowd and the bargain-hunting frenzy of the final day.

After this morning’s update of Snow Leopard I have a new icon in the dock toolbar.  It’s Apple trying to sell stuff, using the downloadable App model that has been so successful on the iPhone/Touch/Pad.

There seem to be some significant savings vs store-bought discs for the same products, eg Aperture at £45 is about 1/3 the usual price, and I’ll be pointing this out at the Camera Club, but overwhelmingly the stock on offer is not useful to me just now, and could do with a 3 line description — more than just an icon, app-title and category — to answer the question “What will this let me do?”

I think I’ll be removing it from the dock, but it will be interesting to see if Adobe’s prices for Lightroom respond to Apple’s price-drop

It’s strange how few calendar templates there are out there for d-i-y calendars.  It was particularly nice to find Jeffrey Friedl’s Calendar Builder a photoshop javascript which builds the month tables for you, and does a nice job of putting a photo in for one to print oneself. (continue reading…)

No; not a golf course.

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…)

Why do I spend more time fighting the print driver than in any other stage of the process?  I have a roll feed printer, I have a simple view on life; here’s what should happen:

1. Turn on printer and load paper roll.
2. Printer either reads a barcode on the paper and is ready to go
   – or –
   Printer asks what sort of paper I’m putting in, and how long is it, and fetches the appropriate profile, even if the paper is from a different manufacturer.  Printer is now ready.
3. I go to my computer and select the picture to print, computer talks to printer to discover available media.
4. I say print, and either the computer puts the job in a RIP (Raster Image Processor) queue so that I can add other jobs to fill the paper, or is gives me a little backchat to ask permission to rotate the job so it fits better, then prints the job and cuts it from the roll.

What actually happens has some marginal resemblance to cloud cuckoo land above.  See if you can spot the resemblance (continue reading…)

Just spent an hour going through an excellent HDR Tutorial from the travel photography blog Stuck in Customs by Trey Ratcliff.  It merges nicely in one spot the various tips I’ve been picking up round the net, and adds in some new to me packages (Topaz Art springs to mind) to help finish the pictures.

He has discount codes for one to use on most of the software he’s promoting (Topaz, Photomatix, Nik and more), so the site is probably worth visiting just to check out his reviews if you’re considering buying one, and pick up the codes if you’re convinced to buy.