I have been fascinated by photography ever since I was a child. These days I am seldom more than a few metres from a camera. My photographic interests sprawl from artificial intelligence through to vintage zoom lenses. Unsurprisingly, there’s also quite a lot of Linux in the middle. :-) More…
I like taking photos. Trouble is that I’m a tad trigger-happy with the shutter button. Over the last few decades I have captured around ½ million of my own digital images and about 33,000 scanned from 35mm neg. On top of that there are around 45,000 edited/retouched images – not to mention a thousand or…
My wife took a late-evening home delivery from our local supermarket this evening. Usually when The Boss is in “tidying-up” mode, I find it best to make myself scarce. I was slightly puzzled way it was taking her so long to pack stuff away . So I ventured out of my studio and went to…
Visited my mother in Southampton today. It was a warm day so I stepped out on the balcony. This has magnificent views to the west, overlooking the River Itchen. It is also pretty close to Southampton’s famous Cobden Bridge. This is a major road and pedestrian bridge crossing the River Itchen. It forms part of…
Question appeared on a forum to which I belong with regard to emulating tungsten lighting with RGB+CCT. To find out, I fitted a good old fashioned Philips “Photocrescenta” incandescent bulb and a Mi-Light FUT-105 LED into a double E27 double bulb holder and mounted the assembly on a standard studio boom arm. The Mi-Light FUT…
I had a studio photoshoot booked for last weekend. Unfortunately, my model was poorly and it was too late to book another. Consequently, I was in the unusual situation of actually having a free day, whilst also being in an experimental frame of mind. So I thought it might be rather good fun to try…
Wishing you a very merry peaceful Christmas, followed by a happy, successful New Year. Creating this year’s card This year we wanted to do something a little different. So we decided to deploy Stable Diffusion open source artificial intelligence to generate the main image. Unfortunately AI is not good at drawing signs. So that was…
Creating the main image for this year’s Christmas card was not the straightforward “one-click deal” I hoped it would be. Seems synthetic stupidity is very much alive and kicking in the world of artificial intelligence. Fact is, AI is still not all that bright. In order to create the one successful image we finally chose,…
Seems the British Government has set up an open consultation on copyright and artificial intelligence. It aims to discuss with the public how artwork stored on cloud servers, or processed using cloud-based software should be treated with regard to being used to teach AI (artificial intelligence) machines. Essentially the Government offers three possible choices:- Do…
It’s quite an exciting time in the FOSS graphics world at the moment. After a long, long wait, GIMP 3.0 is finally at RC1 (first release candidate) stage. Debian 13 (Trixie aka Testing) users have just received the long-awaited KDE Plasma 6 desktop – with full Wayland support. Which I have to say that after…
For reasons I will never understand, it seems the United States has just re-elected 34-times convicted criminal and adjudicated rapist Donald J Trump as its president. As a Brit, sadly there is nothing I can do about this. All I can offer the world is a few futile acts of defiance, whilst mercilessly ridiculing jumped-up…
One of my pet hates is the soft-touch rubberised coating some manufactures put on their kit. It invariably fails sooner or later. Indeed, I’ve had quite a lot of kit over the years where the rubberised coating has failed. Fortunately it is usually fixable – or to be more precise, removable. Depending on the coating’s…
One of the most annoying features on standard SD cards is the write protect tab. This tab often seems to get caught and pushed into the “read only” position when one inserts an SD card into a card reader or camera. Thus rendering the card “read only”. It seems a particular issue with the slots…
Is AI, a serious threat to artists? Or yet more IT industry bullshit? I’ve been in the IT industry for many years. I still look back with some amusement at a teacher who told us, a class of 8-9 year olds, that computers were, “Modern labour-saving machines“. Having spent most of my working life either…
I’m a clumsy clot and I’m always knocking my phone off my desk. OK it’s ruggedised and the floor is carpeted. Nevertheless, ruggedisation has its limits. Also my phone is a heavy old beast, weighing some 360 grams. That’s around 3/4 lb in “old money“. Which means that those flimsy plastic phone holders you see…
By which I mean testing my Tamron 500mm Catadioptric lens. It was a nice warm reasonably clear day today, peaking 24°C. So about an hour before sunset I took my Tamron, fitted on the front of my µ4/3 Lumix DMC-GX7 up to my favourite vantage point on Portsdown Hill, Hampshire. This is a wonderful place…
I was pleased to note that our collared doves have returned after several year’s absence. Of course I have no way of knowing if they are the same collared doves. But whoever they are, I’m rather fond of them and delighted to see them back in the garden again. Related Images:
Quite a lot of noise in the photography press regarding Ricoh Pentax’s new point and shoot film camera, the Pentax 17. And even more noise regarding its somewhat hefty price ticket: £550. Choices However for me it would have to be a choice between one of these (below) Pentax ME SUper, or more likely a…
About a decade ago, I decided to go “mirrorless” – basically abandoning my heavy old Pentax DSLR and going for a system camera that is smaller and lighter. At the time I considered the new Fuji mirrorless offerings and micro four thirds. Problem was that at the time Fuji raw files would not work in…
I’ve been flirting with affordable LED in the studio for over a decade. And on each experiment, I’ve had change out of fifty quid. My latest sortie involved a pair of these things They have simple removable diffuser, reducing the need for a soft-box, they’re fairly robust and in addition to being dimmable they also…
I suffered my first hard disk failure way back in 1987. Fortunately I recovered 99% of my data. However, successful recovery required quite a lengthy struggle and a somewhat inelegant bodge. Since then, I’ve held something of a fascination, some might even say an obsession with backup systems. Over the years, I have tried all…
A thread on a photographic forum to which I belong started me thinking about using gobos. I always liked the idea of a proper gobo projector, but for a modifier that I would likely only use occasionally, I didn’t like the cost. So I decided to have a look around to see if there were…
Today I decided to make my own affordable detachable camera and equipment lanyard straps. I used some cheap generic “Peak Design compatible” buckles, bought direct from China via Ali Express, together with some generic anchors from the same source. I also used some 25mm nylon webbing I’ve had kicking round for ages. Granted, perhaps bright…
Problem is that memory cards can and do fail – even the expensive ones. And of course the world is littered with fakes. Being a bit of an old skinflint, almost all my memory cards have come from Amazon or similar. But I always add one extra precautionary step to the process between purchase and…
Driving through the West Sussex countryside on my way back Chichester, I spotted this tiny stone Chapel, literally right in the middle of nowhere. The board outside read St Mary’s Church Sennicotts. But the odd thing is there is no other building near. Nearest building I could see was about 400 metres away. The church’s…
A couple of months back, a question was raised with regard to how to prevent cable connectors falling out of cameras during tethered shoots. Well my tethered shoots are almost always tethered wirelessly these days. However I do sometimes need to attach a power lead. As my wife reminded me, when we’ve done shoots with…
