steve – Page 24

August 23, 2011August 23, 2011

Pierreview

It’s something I’ve been meaning to look at for a while, so what is it?

Well…….

Two of Birmingham’s most committed journaleers and artists of human experience—a bi-polar working class warrior with a romantic streak you could drown a fascist in, and a cheerful nihilist in love with his own legend—are willing to take on the challenge of visiting every one of England and Wales’s 56 surviving pleasure piers in two weeks, because two weeks is as long as it’s possible to get off work.

Piers are the phallic symbols of our desire to own the motherly sea; our Victorian forefathers covered them with the lace dressings of amusement to prevent the working class getting too excited. Since then they’ve rotted slowly, like Britain’s empire and its self respect.

Those from Birmingham are perfectly placed to write about an ephemeral British seaside because that’s what the seaside is to them: a ghost, a Vaseline-smeared Shangri-La cobbled together from Carry On films, hazy childhood memories and nostalgia for a bygone era.

(from pierreview.co.uk (c) Jon Bounds and Danny Smith)

So there you go, I was going to attempt to write something witty about it. But to be honest I’m crap at that sort of thing so I left it to Jon/Danny (actually copied it from their site).

So what can you do. Click below might be a start.

I know the 100% target has been reached, but that was a getting the thing off the ground level – more money might mean they get an occasional meal, maybe a new furry dice for the clio and possibly a better quality of camp site.

July 23, 2011July 23, 2011

OS X Lion

Well it’s here……

And I’ve installed it twice (Mac Mini and Macbook). It’s not an entirely new thing for me as I have used the developer preview version for a short time, whilst that was fine the transition to my main Mac (Mini) wasn’t as straight forward as you’d expect from an Apple OS

The initial issue the download, with Snow Leopard it was DVD based so as soon as I bought it I could use it. With Lion it’s an App Store purchase, so for me a fairly slow download. It took around 2 hours to download the 3.5 (ish) gb of data. Which isn’t great, but that’s more of an ISP issue to be honest.

So kicking off the install the application does a little bit of behind the scenes work, then you presented with what looks to be a standard ‘About 33 minutes to install’ – I know these timings are usually bad, the MacBook took around 50 minutes to progress the 33 minutes (the Mini was much the same).

After the initial reboot it’s ready to go…………

Well, for some reason the log process is slower than before but I’ll put that down to 1st boot

Once it’s up and running you get to play with new OS, well you do unless you open mail.app first. Though I’m probably awkward as I have large mail file. So Lion is effective a dead OS with this going on, what probably didn’t help was Spotlight’s insistance on wanting to search my HD. That was soon disabled and the sloooooow mail setup continued. Eventually it started and you are confronted with the new mail client.

Yuck

As you can see it looks like mail on the iPad, which works on the iPad – but looks odd on a 21″ screen to be honest (even as a small resized window it looks odd). However it’s not all lost as you can restore the classic Mail.app look, which I have done.

Less Yuck

So back as before, apart from larger looking, bland grey system font. Which doesn’t seem to be changable.

So when you first start properly what do you notice, as I have the Magic Trackpad the scrolling is immediately apparent. It’s wrong, actually it’s set to the way a iOS works, which is fine for a touch screen device, but seems unnatural for a desktop/laptop device. You can tailor the gestures a bit more than on Snow Leopard, so less need for BetterTouchTool (for me).

New icons appear in the toolbar, Launch Pad, Mission Control and bizarrely for a MacMini – FaceTime.

Lovely buttons

LaunchPad is effectively makes lion look and feel like iOS. To be honest I’ve not found that I use the feature, so the icon has been removed for me.

Mission Control replaces the Spaces Icon (although it’s still on my MacBook), but as the way to open it is easier on the trackpad (4 fingers swiped up) the icon has gone.

Lion seems to have picked up the fact I had 3 desktops setup on Spaces previously and those are displayed on the Mission Control Screen. Also using Control – Arrows you can navigate through them.

On a Mission

You might notice that Dashboard is missing from Mission Control, I’ve disabled it as it was an annoyance accidentally switching to that screen using spaces. The icon is still there so I can launch it that way.

So hows it looking in general, you may be asking. Well it’s a tale of 2 devices. The MacBook which is much older and has the worse specification looks to be fine, everything opens and closes faster. Startup seems snappier, shutdown was always quick. The Mac Mini however is slower, sluggish after the update. Maybe after a days it might return to normal.

As for Applications, CS3 looks to behave. I Know Adobe Lightroom 3 works along with my Canon Eos software. VMWare Fusion 2 is behaving as it should. iTunes was a bit weird though. I updated it before the Lion upgrade and it needed upgrading again afterwards. iPhoto is still a bloated piece of crapware (though needed for syncing photos with my iOS devices). Only thing that I use which I know is broken is Rsync.app – as a PPC app it wont work because Rosetta emulation is no longer available. Which means I need to fine another back up solution.

~~I’ll try a few reboots to see if I can improve the Mini~~ Seems to be much better at shutdown/startup since i’ve done a few reboots. So to conclude slightly disappointed in the performance issue on initial install, but I guess things take a little while to correct/sort out and I’m relatively happy about some of the improvements. Not too sure if it’ll change my life yet (maybe once the promised virtualisation comes out).

July 5, 2011July 5, 2011

Macro night

It’s a bit like the model night, only smaller. So small models I hear you cry, well no. It’s close up shots of things.

This time I took my setup to the hall (light tent, flashes, laptop and camera), set up on a table and shot away……

Pentium

Memory

big ring

small bracelet

The setup is no different from what I’ve used before, but it’s nice to have the time and space to set up the shoot. Also it’s nice to share and pass on knowledge about the setup. One thing is for sure, I really could do with a Macro Ringlite (well specifically the Canon MT24EX Macro Ringlite). Odd colours are from using a mixture of cool and warm up filter gels over the front of the 580MkII flashes.

Thanks to the members of Yardley Photographic society who came along 🙂

June 30, 2011June 30, 2011

Found one

As someone who sells (occasionally) though Alamy it’s not very often you get a chance to find a sold image. Well today one popped up and the hunt began. Well I asked on the Alamy Forum if anyone had spotted and someone found it using google!

Anyway, the artical……..

Observer

I’ve edited body of text out as it’s copyrighted (the banner probably is as well, but I don’t think that’s too bad to copy!)

Observer

So there you are, a bit of self promotion 🙂 (still looking to find a printed version of it)

The full (web) article was written by Rowan Moore and can be found on the Guardian/Observer here.

June 21, 2011June 21, 2011

Portrait Night

I don’t really photograph people, well except for strangers in the street and the family – so you’d have thought tonight was the night for me to avoid at Yardley Photographic Society as it was Portrait night (run and studio gear provided by Martin Coffey & Dave Boyce). But I thought i’d go along and have a go.

The old school hall does convert rather well into a temporary studio (at this point I should have took some shots of the setup for the purpose of this blog – I didn’t so use your imagination about what a temporary studio in an old school hall looks like).

The setup was a high-key type (white background) and four Elinchrom flash heads. The front lighting setup used Elinchrom BXRi 500 style units (not too sure about the exact models) and the white backdrop was illuminated using a couple of older Elinchrom D Lite style units.

The flashes are triggered using Elinchrom Skyports (which are little hotshoe based triggers). So how did I get on then?

Actually I enjoyed it, we had a mixture of models to shoot (I will get the names and post them!)……..

Yardley Photographic Society - Portrait Night

Technical data for those that are interested: All shots taken using a Eos 5D MkII, EF24-105 f/4 L, ISO200, F/13, 1/125.

Apologies for those that hate high key and clichés. I enjoyed myself and that’s the important thing.