I got feedback from Caroline thanking me for making Flying The Flag available under a CC licence. She used it in a SoulCollage she made for Reluctant Nomad, who blogged it with accreditation.
This is only the second or third time that someone has told me they used one of my images. It makes me wonder how many times they have been used without the user letting me know.
Categories: Thoughts
Tagged: Creative Commons, Photography
I came really close to throwing my tripod in the ocean this morning. I have a Manfrotto 390 Junior tripod with integrated pan and tilt head. It was a pretty good buy at the price I paid but I have come to realise that it is not quite stable enough for my needs. More importantly the head is virtually impossible to position and lock accurately, which is why it nearly ended up in the ocean today. I was trying to take soem close-up shots of a piece of seaweed and everytime I tried to lock the tripod at the elevation I wanted there would be just enough play for it to drop to just below what I wanted. So it was a fight to guess how much too high to set the elevation to cater for this. So I think that my next photographic purchase will be a better tripod and a good ball head.
Categories: Thoughts
Tagged: Photography
I just came across afuckaday, which sounds like a cheap and nasty porn site, but is actually a blog showcasing some pretty nice artistic nude and erotic photography. Check it out if you’re into that sort of thing.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Photography
Last Sunday we went for a drive to Hermanus having heard from Faith that there was a good bookshop there; so after the obligatory lunch at nino’s we popped into Hemingway’s. This place is not the kind of used book store where you pick up ragged copies of trashy novels for a few bucks. They have a wide variety of books including out-of-print collectables and in a section containing erotic and nude photographic works I saw a number of Sam Haskins’ works and an old copy of David Bailey’s The Lady Is a Tramp: Portraits of Catherine Bailey; a beautiful book but very expensive at R1,200, particularly since Exclusive Books lists it for R408, but perhaps it was a signed copy or special for some other reason.
I was looking more for technical and historical photography books though, rather than photo essays. Visiting stockists of new books these days is depressing because South Africa is such a small market that all they ever seem to have is a selection of books that rehash the same info about digital photography, and usually begin something like “Let’s assume you’re a moron that has never seen a camera before”. If you want to buy better, or more advanced, books you need to buy online and then you have no opportunity to browse and page through books to get a feel for them. I was pleasant therefore to browse through the small selection of older photographic books. Some were very old; yearbooks dating back to the 1960s,for instance, while others were a little more pricey than I was hoping for. I did buy four books though at just R220 for the lot.
The first two interested me not only because I want to become more profficient at working with models but also from a historical point of view. They date back to 1984 and were published under the Squire magazine banner and feature all South African models, including some old favourites from my youth; like Vanessa Wannenburg, Miss SA 1977. I have only a vagure recollection of Squire magazine and had never seen these guides before. No doubt they did not appear on the shelves of your local CNA and I was also not very interested in photography in those days in any case.
There were some other books on photographing and lighting nudes but as I have still to graduate to photographing clothed models with any regularity I gave those a miss and settled for a book on technique and one that might help me earn some pocket money from my photography and also contains some beautiful photographs to look at.
I’ll definitely be visiting Hemingway’s again, but I think I’ll wait for winter when it isn’t stiflingly hot in there amongst all the beautiful books.
Categories: Photos
Tagged: Books, Photography
I was idly looking around for product info on the web and had a look to see if I could find a web site for the Photo Connection chain. I couldn’t despite going to their sister brand Incredible Connection’s site and from there to the parent company Connection Group’s site. I couldn’t find any link to a Photo Connection site. Their group profile page doesn’t even mention that the brand exists; strange considering the length of time that the brand has been trading, at least one year, perhaps even two.
Noticing that they have a Customer Feedback page I tried to leave the following comment.
Just wondered why there does not appear to be an Internet presence for your Photo Connection brand. This seems strange to me considering the fact that photographers are so tightly hooked in to the Internet in this digital age. Almost all investigation and a lot of purchases are done on-line so if you don’t have a presence there you must surely be losing out.
but when I submitted the form I got this error
Microsoft VBScript runtime error ‘800a01ad’
ActiveX component can’t create object: ‘CDONTS.NewMail’
/feedback_complete.asp, line 98
Sadly this type of haphazard approach to the Internet as an interface to customers and potential customers is all too common amongst South African businesses. A great number of businesses have no Internet presence at all and when they do these are often outdated, broken or written to work with only certain web browsers.
Companies, I’m tired of…
It should not be easier for me to buy products on-line from foreign vendors than it is to do so locally. The Proudly South African campaign would have us use local businesses to stimulate our economy. This would be a wonderful idea if only local businesses made it easier to do so.
Categories: Thoughts
Tagged: Computing, Photography, South Africa
Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir, Flickr’s most popular photographer, now has her own web site and blog. She has posted a number of the photographs that she shot for a Toyota advertising campaign, work she got on the strength of her body of work on Flickr where she is known as _rebekka.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Photography
For some time I have been thinking about getting a compact digital camera. My DSLR and its paraphernalia are too bulky to carry around easily so I usually leave it at home unless I’m expecting a photo opportunity to arise. Today I took the plunge and bought myself a Canon Powershot A540. While not tiny enough to be pocketable, it is still smaller than any other camera I own and I will be able to carry it around with me in a little pouch that clips onto my belt.
It is quite a full-featured 6 megapixel camera with a 4X zoom lens providing a 35mm equivalent zoom range of 35mm to 140mm. It uses the same DIGIC II processor as the 350D, 400D, 20D and 30D DSLRs and has the same level of manual control as my DSLR does. It supports ISO up to 800 but is quite noisy at this. The picture of my son here is the first one I took with the camera and was taken at ISO800 in a fairly dim room, towards a window with the afternoon light streaming in. The image had a lot of noise and I had to run a de-noising tool over it twice, once before doing anything and again after adjusting the curves. This is why the image is a bit soft. I will play with it some more tomorrow but I think that this camera is going to serve me well.
Categories: Thoughts
Tagged: Photography
So yesterday’s rumours were true. Canon has announced the EOS 400D DSLR, to be known as the Digital Rebel XTi in North America. They have also announced two new lenses, the EF 70-200 F/4L IS USM, an upgrade of the EF 70-200 F/4L, which adds image stabilisation to what is already a popular lens. Even more interesting, given the popularity of the EF 50mm F/1.8 and F/1.4 lenses is the announcement of the EF 50mm F/1.2L.
Categories: Thoughts
Tagged: Photography
It seems that someone in China slipped up long enough to let the guys at Engadget get a look at a page on the soon to be announced (tomorrow?) EOS 400D DSLR, successor to the 350D/Digital Rebel XT/Kiss N. As the page was in Chinese, the interpretation of the specifications is sketchy but it seems to have still have an APS-C (1.6× crop factor) sensor but that resolution is upped to 10.1 megapixels. Besides the resolution increase the big new feature appears to be ultrasonic dust removal, which will make it worth getting. It isn’t mentioned but I would also like to see it introduce spot metering as was done with the 30D.
So the question now is, do I start looking for falling 350D prices and pick up a bargain as an upgrade for my 300D, or do I wait a few months and jump straight to the 400D?
Categories: Thoughts
Tagged: Photography
