I’ve been suspicious about the images I’ve put up here for a little while. I’ve noticed that from time to time that when I view them as prints or on other machines they sometimes look different.

It’s never bothered me that much up until now. It’s always been “close” and I haven’t regarded anything I’ve taken as being important enough to fret over.

However, it does detract from an image. And it drove me mad when I reviewed this image on a different machine

When looking at my monitor I didn’t see the black cast from the body and the panelling effect in the background. All I saw was black. It made  the birds head look like it was isolated and it was the effect I wanted.

When looking at it in work on a different system, it looked entirely different. Half finished.

It drove me to get a hold of a Spyder monitor calibration tool.

It’s early days. The change to my monitor has been quite severe – most notably the colour temperature. I’m going to  rework a few images and get them printed to see if they are closer to what I expect. But in the meantime, take a look at this and tell me if it’s better/worse and if the background looks more “black”

I’d always wanted to see how hard it is to catch a clay pigeon exploding in mid flight.

(f/10, 1/250sec, 135mm, ISO-400)

Bloody difficult. That’s how hard it is.

Reckon my failings here were the low shutter speed, possibly compounded by poor aperture choice.

Sadly the day I tried it, the weather was pretty dull and grey. Added to that, the lens was never going to be able to track and focus on the clay. I ended up pre-focusing at roughly the range I thought the clay would get hit, then tracking it from the launcher and zooming in on it as I went.

I think I maybe fired 30 or 40 shots trying to get something like this. Out of the set I have 3 where the clay is obviously hit.

Needless to say, it helps if the guys shooting at the clays is competent and hits them more often than not.

Was back browsing my street life pictures and found this one.

In retrospect, this is probably more along the lines of what the judges may have been looking for.

When you’re given a theme like “Street Life” and there is no brief provided to give a context, it should really be up to the photographer to interpret that theme. Sure, they may end up “outside the box”, but if it can be viewed as within theme then it should stand. However, with both themed NIPA competitions this year, the judge on the night has turned up and within seconds passed a comment to the effect of “the council have decided that <the theme> means…”

Instantly I was able to rule out a lot of my shots. More depressing was the fact that a lot of other photographers fell foul of this as well. On the night, I ended up getting second overall in the colour prints section, but to be honest it was marred by my frustration at this ‘secret rules’ thing that seems to keep happening. Myself and a few others mentioned our frustration to the NIPA rep – let me stress this is not his fault, he fell foul of it too.

Maybe next year NIPA will provide a context for the theme rounds on their web site? I’ll be dropping an email to ask them to do just that when the dust settles this year.

Merry Christmas folks.

Hopefully Christmas was good for you and whatever God, or red suited white bearded fellow, you believe in fulfilled his promises for this time of year?

 

Now, can I ask you to stop and check you are backing up your important elements of your pc? No, don't just nod sagely and say "I always backup", actually check you've done it. And if it's automated, actually check it's running and has been working.

Maybe, do a fresh  backup now. Consider it a Christmas present for me.

 

I've talked about backup plans for photographs since I started this blog. 18 months or so. I've taken 8500 photographs on my Canon alone so backups should be pretty important. Indeed, given my line of work, it's a pretty standard approach.

 

So, it's a bit gutting to be sitting her typing on my old pc about the fact that my new pc had a hard drive failure just before Christmas and as a result I've lost something in the region of the last 4 months worth of photographs.

I can recover some. Others are crap and won't be missed, but some that I liked are gone and some of my family are gone.

 

I know I'm an idiot. All the "I told you so's" in the world aren't going to change that. I'd expect it'll take me a few weeks to put things right and get the machine back.

Right now, I'm just kinda sad about the whole thing.

I haven't gone away you know...

I managed to get an hour at the weekend with my camera. It's the first time I've came home and uploaded photos and not liked any of them.

Either that means I'm getting worse at taking pictures, or I'm getting much more picky about what I do and don't like.

Hopefully it's the second one.

I'll probably post some of the rejects at some point since I always said I wouldn't hide the tripe but try to work out what went wrong.

Thumb sized? That makes sense.

With a snazzy little clip thing for your camera strap? Sure.

But black?

Yeah, because when you drop that into a hedge it's going to be real easy to find again.

Yup, the second casualty of my camera life was my little Canon remote control. (The first was a tripod in Dublin, remember?). There I was clicking away and minding my own business, when suddenly fickle lady luck played a hand and my little remote shot off to join the land of the bogs and bushes that is Donegal.

Pain in the...

I didn't realise how much I depended on it until it was gone. Needless to say I had to order a new one.

Now to find a big piece of reflective tape or a "come find me" beeper thing for it...

 

And do you know what the worst bit of it was? The last picture I took with it wasn't even that great.

(f/22, 22mm, HDR composed of 1/8sec, 1/15sec, 1/4sec, ISO - 200, 06/09/08)

OK, so it’s been quiet all week after the flurry of photos from Easter. The plain and simple reason for this is that I spent several hours on Sunday trying to clean my camera.

Darrell noticed these odd spots in a photograph I’d published last week and correctly identified them as sensor dirt.



This sent me into a whole self loathing spiral.
I mean, I’m a good boy. I don’t fool around with other cameras, I don’t go into those sorts of shops, I always use protection and try to avoid exposing my sensitive bits in public…

But still, I’d picked something up.

Seems at some point when I’d been changing lenses a bit of pollutant had managed to sneak into the camera and that it was pretty well stuck as the sensor cleaning (some electro-static charge thing on my camera) wasn’t shifting it.

I asked Darrell some further questions about the issue and he pointed me here as well as providing me some good advice. It seems I could either clean it myself or pay someone to do it professionally.

Well, that sent me off to my local chain camera store to look for solutions. Whilst I’d prefer to have it done properly, the thought that it was something I could learn made me give it a go (that and I’m cheap. Hey! Nobody is sponsoring my camera madness and the amount I’ve spent recently…).

Firstly I purchased a Rocket Air Blower and tried that. The trick with using one of these is to set the sensor to manual clean then hold the camera upside down and blast air into the sensor area. This seemed to life a few little flecks which were sitting in the mount area – I’m guessing these had been kept of the lens by the electro-static sensor clean. But the artefacts on the lens lived on…

So, I resorted to a lens cleaning pen.

Now most photographers I spoke with went a bit green at this stage, you’ve been warned.

Basically you rub the lens pen around the sensor, making sure to get all the corners. Don’t rub too firmly, but at the same time make sure it’s not like getting touched by a rainbow. It’s best to make sure the camera is upside down to encourage the dirt to fall out.  Yep, that bit they say don't touch...

Well, it took a few attempts, but suffice to say I think I got the most of it. Do me a favour. If you disagree, don’t tell me!*

So, today’s lesson. To clean a camera.
1.    Hold or mount the camera upside down
2.    Set the camera to manual cleaning mode
3.    Realise the batteries are nearly flat and the camera will close the mirror before shutting down, so change the batteries and start again
4.    Try using an air blower first
5.    Try using a sensor pen, but be gentle!

Or

1.    Pay someone who knows what they're doing

I found the best way to test if the lens was clean was to take photographs of the white tiles in the bathroom. By looking closely I was able to track the marks and see when they were removed. Best bet is to set the camera to focus at infinity and make sure the picture is over exposed. A good uniform colour is what you need.

I’m almost frightened to post in case it’s not fixed. I'll post over the weekend and we can have a debate.

*Actually do tell me. Please.

The Sean O'Casey Bridge, Dublin

(6secs, f/8, 31mm, ISO-100, 18/2/2008)

 

 

I was sitting here, working on this photograph whilst finally getting some progress with my Unbuntu backup server. I'd finally got the thing to see my main pc, I'd even reconfigured some things to make general computer fun more, well.... fun.

...and then...

The disk in the Ubuntu box eats itself.

Yup. The backup server I'm building to backup my photographs, my documents, my saved games! It's eaten itself. Not quite smoke and a three fire engine call out, but still pretty annoying.

Come to think of it. This photograph was the last one I took before I broke my tripod. Coincidence???

 

... yeah probably.

It was all going so well.
And then there was a clunk...

I'm beginning to think Dermot is a jinx on my camera equipment. When we went out at Christmas, we were no more than 30 minutes into our shoot when my memory card ate itself. This time, we got about an hour before my tripod self destructed.

In fairness, I think it had been coming for a while. I'd noticed the centre column wasn't quite as secure as it used to be and that the adjustment pin was either too tight or too loose, but never just right.

Anyway, it all went bang. I cried (a little).

And I've bought a new one.

Manfrotto 190XPROB Tripod Legs Only - Black

It's very pretty. I'll do a full review when I get out and about with it.

When I originally kitted out for my adventures in photo I bought 2 memory cards. Mostly because I reckoned I'd be slow to upload them to computer and as a result alwys end up with one card full at any one time. when it turned out that I was in fact obsessed with getting them off (the card and onto a computer), I kind of thought the second card was maybe a bit of a waste.

Until Tuesday night in Dublin

I'd taken  maybe 20 photos in Stephens Green Shopping Centre and then either the card or the camera failed and locked into some sort of permanent write cycle. Turning the camera off and on made no difference and I ended up pulling the card to get the thing to reset. I reseeded the card and it seemed to work ok again, but just in case I changed to my never used spare card. A nights good photo followed.

I'm going to use a little time this weekend to test out the suspect card again, but to be honest I think its now going to gather dust and only be a point of absolute last resort.

So, here's my questions for today. How long should a memory card last, and if it is broke will Jessops (its a Jessops brand card) change it if I complain?

Oh, and just in case in case, I ordered 2 new Sandisk cards last night.

Lesson for today - always carry spare memory cards and batteries. And make sure they work...