Tuesday 27 November 2007

Photography in Public Places wallet card

In a discussion on the Ephotozine forums about Phil Smith being stopped by Ipswich police and requested to delete his images, one site member, Dave (going by the pseudonym of Mad-Dog's) detailed a card he carries summarising the law concerning photography in the UK.

I have created my own version of the card and you can download it as a jpg from here.


Click for large version

Printed at 300dpi this should produce a credit card sized document that you can easily carry with you and may help you challenge any over-zealous police officers you may meet.



Related Posts

Public Photography and the Law
Jobsworths and not-so-jobsworths

Saturday 24 November 2007

Painters With Light Exhibition opens in Norfolk

Regular readers will be aware that I am a member of The Painting with Light Society - A group of Landscape Photographers from East Anglia. There are eight of us in the group including such talented folk as Jon Gibbs who won Landscape Photographer of The Year and Ian Flindt who had five pictures Highly Commended in the same exhibition.

Our latest exhibition has just opened at The Stable Gallery, Kelling, near Holt. The Exhibition runs from 24th Nov - 23rd Dec.

Happisburgh Dawn
(Click...or visit the exhibition to view large)

The exhibition will feature the work of all 8 members of the society together with prints from a guest photographer, Kate Barclay. In total over 40 framed prints will be on display.

Framed or Mounted prints will be available for purchase so why not pop along for a look if you are in the area.

Wednesday 21 November 2007

Not convinced of the need for Raw?

I often see on forums, people saying that they have shot both raw and jpg and can't see a difference. An additional comment, since Lightroom has entered the fray, is "Lightroom handles jpgs and raws..so why bother with raw?".

Over at The Luminous Landscape, Michael Richeman has produced a great example of the difference between the two formats when you actually do the same processing on them.

Here is a photo from my recent trip to the Lake District and yes it was captured in Raw:

Morning Mist
(Click to view large)

Thursday 8 November 2007

PhotographyVoter.com buttons for your rss feed

PhotographyVoter.com (PV) is a great site that allows you to see what's new in the world of photography. Stories are voted on by the sites members so it helps you find the really interesting stuff easily.

As you can see I have added vote buttons to the site to make life easier for PV users to tell the world how great my blogs are. Now I have worked out how to do the same for my rss feed and I thought I would share it with everyone. So this is what you do:

  1. Sign up with Feedburner and set your site feed up to use feedburner (all the instructions for this are on the feedburner site).
  2. On the Optimize tab select Feedflare

  3. In the box marked (Enter or paste Unit URL) enter this: http://web.shepherdpics.com/FEEDFLARE.XML


  4. Click Add New Flare
  5. Check the feed box next to Vote for this on Photography Voter.com

  6. Then click Save

That's it! I hope you find it of use.

Check your Gear..even if you think you don't need to

Sunday morning I got up early (4:30am) and headed down to Heybridge Basin to see if I could get some dawn shots. Heybridge basin is where a canal (the Chelmer Navigation) meets the tidal estuary of the river Blackwater. A sea-lock connects the two, when there is a high tide.

The river itself is surrounded by high sea walls and for most of the time the tide is out. So it is not an easy location to shoot, but I had planned my shoot for a time when high tide coincided with dawn.

The night before was the Saturday nearest to Guy Fawkes Night, which means an awful lot of fireworks. I'm sure this is a lot of fun for a lot of people but for us it's a pretty retched time as you try to comfort two terrified dogs, who get really stressed out by the bangs and occasionally throw up with the stress...which is nice. In the middle of this mayhem I was trying to pack my gear for the following morning.

I packed carefully, following my checklist, but when it came to the point of checking if the batteries were fully charged I looked at the camera and it said 3/4 full plus I knew I had a spare battery in my kit so, with all the rest of the hassle that night, I didn't bother....big mistake!

Things started off well with me perching on the edge of the lock to get an image as the sun started to rise over Northey Island.

Heybridge Dawn
(Click to view large)

Then the most remarkable thing happened, as the tide started to rise the place burst into life, the lock keepers appeared & started to open the lock, boats started to move and even the pub opened..all at 7 o'clock in the morning!

Obviously high-tide is the only time that boats can get in and out of the basin and so people have to build their activities around it. Realising that it wouldn't be long before a boat made it's way towards the lock I positioned myself on top of the rear lock gates and waited till the boat came in to the exact position I needed it to make the composition I had set up complete.

Waiting to Lock
(click to view large)
If you look carefully you can see a lock keeper on either side of the image, helpfully balancing the composition


Now all I needed to do was wait for the boat to come in to the lock and I would get a nice series of pictures of the boat locking in fantastic light. At precisely the wrong moment my battery ran out. So I quickly opened my pack and got the spare out...which was flat too!

I had no choice but to pack up and walk away, muttering to myself about the one that got away. Lesson learned - always check your spare battery has charge. I hope you can learn from this and don't suffer a similar fate yourself.

Tuesday 6 November 2007

Alternative template for iView Media Pro and the PayPal Shopping cart

I was asked by Chris Herring if I could help him get the iView and payPal template working on his site. Having finished the job I thought that I would make it available to everyone who wants a different look for their iView Paypal galleries.

To use it just follow the instructions here but use this file instead of the paypal.zip file mentioned.

I hope you find it of use and if you do use these galleries on-line please let me know and I will be happy to link to them.


Related Posts
Creating an ECommerce Site with iView and Paypal
Using The Controlled Vocabulary with iView Media Pro

Friday 2 November 2007

Lemon ~ Limited Edition Management ONline (an update)

It has been pointed out to me that version of my Limited Edition Management system Lemon that could be downloaded from the download page, was not the version stated.

Well it turns out I was caught out by a case sensitive webserver, it should be sorted now so those of you who need it can download Lemon version 1.1 here.

Thursday 1 November 2007

Peter Heyes is Photographer of the month for November

If you are a regular viewer of UK photography, as I am, you often see the same locations appear time and time again. This is often due to the locations being close to the road.

Peter Heyes avoids the easy option of standing at the bottom of a mountain to take a picture of it, instead he climbs it in all weathers to produce images of amazing beauty.


Striding Edge
by Peter Heyes

His website is full of fantastic images of the mountains of Britain and is well worth a look round for all the amazing images of these wild places.



Previous Photographers of the Month