Thursday 15 April 2010

KG Images - new site design

My good friend and one third of ImagesOfEssex, Keving Goodchild has just completely overhauled his website.

Thre are lots of lovely new images on there from around the UK and further afield.


Snake and Ladder
(by Kevin Goodchild)

I was involved in the design of the site,  so why not take a look and leave a comment below as to what you think about it.

Monday 12 April 2010

Deleting old Lightroom backups

Lightroom is a nicely thought out application and one of it's nice thoughts is that it reminds you to backup your Lightroom database on a regular basis. This is a good thing, you should listen to it's advice and make sure you take those backups regularly.

If you always cancel out of the backup dialogue, or worst still have disabled it ,just delete your Lightroom catalogue now.  This will save all the hassle of waiting till something goes wrong with your hardware/software/mind. Always, always make sure you have a backup.

The only problem with the Lightroom backup system is that it can start to fill up your hard disk with lots of old copies of your catalogues. It would be nice if there was away to automatically limit it to only keeping 2 months or so worth of backups.  Well after a quick bit of fettling I worked out a way to do this.

The instructions below are for windows PCs, if you've got a Mac there is probably some animated icon of Steve jobs you can click on and all your problems will be solved.

1.First identify what directories you are backing up to.  These are usually in a folder called Backups inside the directory where your caltalouge lives In my case they are:
D:\Catalogs\Lightroom\Backups
and
D:\Catalogs\Lightroom\Archive\Backups

2. Open Notepad:
  • In XP choose Start>Run and type notepad click OK.
  • in Vista/Windows 7 just type notepad in the search box & click on the notepad icon

3. Paste in the following code:

forfiles /p "D:\Catalogs\Lightroom\Backups" /c "cmd /c rd @file /s /q" /d -60


replace D:\Catalogs\Lightroom\Backups with path to your backups you found in step 1
Repeat for each of the folders you found in step 1.
My final file looks like this:

forfiles /p "D:\Catalogs\Lightroom\Backups" /c "cmd /c rd @file /s /q" /d -60
forfiles /p "D:\Catalogs\Lightroom\Archive\Backups" /c "cmd /c rd @file /s /q" /d -60


Note: the -60 at the end means "delet backups older than 60 days" you can edit this to any number of days you like.

3. Save the file as DeleteLRBackups.bat (the .bat bit is very important) in a c:\batch folder (if you don't have one create it).

4. Now all you need to do is schedule this as a task to run whenever you like.

Friday 9 April 2010

Do you Facebook?

If you are on Facebook, why not pop by The Images of Essex page, Become a fan and invite all your friends?

If your not on Facebook,  do you actually exist ?

Monday 5 April 2010

Published! - BBC Countryfile Magazine

Today marks the publication of the April edition of BBC Countryfile Magazine, which has a feature on "Wild Essex".  The photographs for this feature were supplied by the Images of Essex team.

The picture Editor of the magazine, contacted us via our website which is provided by the Foliopic system. It proved to be quite a challenging assignment, as we requested to make the images as "spring like" as possible. Bear in mind the country was being lashed by the worst winter for 30 years and spring was the latest it had been for many years. Indeed, so unfavourable was the weather that as I was talking to Tor (the picture editor) on the phone about the commission, huge snowflakes were blowing past the window.

We had two weeks to get a long list of shots from across the county, sharing the work amongst the three of us meant that it was quite achievable...if only the weather played nice. For the first week, slate grey skys hung over the county and things looked like it could get quite tricky to get the required shots.  But the weather was with us on the second week and all the locations were all snapped.



My fellow Essex Imagers worked hard to get the required shots.  Dave Peck did a great job of shooting The Company Shed on Mersey Island - it's just a shed so Dave got some great shots of it's fishy produce instead of just a picture of a shed. Whilst Kevin Goodchild managed to use his influence with the military to get access to the broomway on Foulness.


The Picture Editor had requested that we email the shots to them as they were taken, but instead we used our Foliopic website and created a private password protected gallery where we could upload the images easily and the customer could brows to pick the shots they liked.  This was a much better way of working and made things quicker and easier for us all.

If you are passing a newsagents, why not pick up a copy.

Saturday 3 April 2010

"Coast" - Exhibition opens at Rayleigh Mill Coffee Shop

Coast - an exhibition of my photography from around the Essex coast opens today at Squires Coffee Shop, The Mill Rayleigh.   It runs till June 4th,  so you have plenty of time to pop in for a coffee and a look at the pics.

Leigh Creek
(Now Appearing at Squires Coffee Shop)

Friday 2 April 2010

Essex on View Gallery opens

Today is the opening of Darren Chaplin's new gallery Essex on View at View Garden Centre.
Darrens plush new premises will be featuring some of my work.  The new collection includes a couple of rather fetching canvas prints I have had made by Fresh Pixel Design (highly recommended).  If you are in the area why not pop in.

Cockles
(Now available on Canvas)

Gallery Opening Times:
Mon, Thurs, Friday 11am - 4pm Sat, Sun & Bank Hols 11am - 4pm Tues & Weds by appointment only.

Thursday 1 April 2010

Dav Thomas is photographer of the month for April

After my trip to the Peak District at the beginning of the month,  it has been a joy to view Dav Thomas website and his stunning large format images of the region.  So I figured it would be a good time to make him photographer of the month so, you can all enjoy his work.

Burbage brook sanctury
by Dav Thomas



Previous Photographers of the Month