| Club | Talk Title | Date |
| Loughton Camera Club | Looking Local | Oct 01 |
| Ongar Camera Club | Looking Local | Oct 07 |
| Great Notley Camera Club | Looking Local | Oct 30 |
Wednesday, 4 December 2013
Camera Club Talks 2014
I have been signed up to do a fair few talks next year to various camera clubs in the Essex/North London area.
If you are in the area, why not come along for an evening of my ramblings:
You can find a bit more info about the talks here.
Monday, 8 October 2012
London 2012 Gallery
I have just uploaded a new gallery containing my shots from the glorious summer that was London 2012.
The shots cover scenes from around London before and during the games and a few events that I managed to get tickets for:
It truly was a fantastic time to be a Londoner and every venue was sold out as the British reveled in a summer of sport. I know in some countries The Paralympics did not receive very much coverage at all, but here they were treated with as much reverence as The Olympics with sold out crowds on every day of competition.
The city was decorated with flags and bunting plus pieces of public art appeared all around the city celebrating the games.
Finally I have included some shots from The Team GB victory parade where our athletes were honoured for their stunning performance. For me, one of the joys of the entire period was seeing a young lad in a wheelchair holding up his two medals and being cheered by 100s of thousands of people, maybe sport can change attitudes.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy my London 2012 Gallery.
 |
| Nasty crash in the women's mountain biking |
The shots cover scenes from around London before and during the games and a few events that I managed to get tickets for:
- Badminton
- Mountain Biking
- Paralympics Opening Ceremony
- Wheelchair Rugby Final
 | ||
| Wheelchair Rugby |
 | |
| Paralympics Opening Ceremony |
Finally I have included some shots from The Team GB victory parade where our athletes were honoured for their stunning performance. For me, one of the joys of the entire period was seeing a young lad in a wheelchair holding up his two medals and being cheered by 100s of thousands of people, maybe sport can change attitudes.
 |
| Victory parade |
Anyway, I hope you enjoy my London 2012 Gallery.
Saturday, 6 October 2012
New Zealand Gallery finally On-line
It has taken me nearly nine months to complete it, but I have finally got my pictures on line from my trip to New Zealand in December 2011/January 2012.
We spent a week in North Island then crossed The Cook Strait to South Island which is a landscape photographers paradise with mountains and water everywhere.
The pictures cover a variety of subjects, from people and wildlife through to cities and landscapes.
You can find the gallery here. I do hope you enjoy them.
 |
| Wilson Bay |
We spent a week in North Island then crossed The Cook Strait to South Island which is a landscape photographers paradise with mountains and water everywhere.
The pictures cover a variety of subjects, from people and wildlife through to cities and landscapes.
 |
| Te Aneau |
You can find the gallery here. I do hope you enjoy them.
Monday, 1 October 2012
Shepherdpics gets a new look
There comes a time when you seem to be sinking into a morass of things you need to do, things you promised to do, things you have to do and these seem to stop you from doing the things you want to do. These things are sent to try us but don’t worry things can only get better (did you see what I did there).
I recently hit a moment like this, lots of things to do and so little time to do it. It was time to rationalise!
One of the big jobs I had hanging over me was to redesign my website. I haven’t touched or updated my website for over a year as I knew the whole design needed modernising. Since I created my site things in the web world have changed dramatically.
At the time I created it I would really only have to worry that it looked OK in Internet Explorer on a desktop machine with no problems. There were a few Mac and Firefox users out there but they were easy enough to deal with. Since then the world has changed a lot: Gone are the days when you could have a fair idea what sort of platform your site was to be viewed on. Now phones, tablets, PCs, macs access the site, each with different screen sizes, browsers and javascript support.
User expectations have changed: Homepages used to act as a shop window for the site with “a little bit of everything” being the rule, now minimal designs are much more in favour. Static pages used to be Ok but now we expect all sorts of animations and rollover effects. On the development side: XHTML has pretty much died a death and HTML has risen from the grave to become new all-singing-all-dancing HTML5, the hero of flash-haters everywhere. Javascript has gone from a few lines here and there to giant libraries of code that make development cross platform fast and agile.
So it became clear that I needed to not only update the content of the site but the structure and design needed to be updated too. Looking at the work involved the whole thing became quite a daunting task.
First I would need to learn HTML5 & jQuery. Then I would have to look around to see what extensions I could use to make things wizzy and learn how to use them. I would then have to design the site, build it & make sure it works in loads of different browsers on lots of different devices. Finally I would have to write a Lightroom web gallery to generate the galleries.
Whilst none of these are particularly onerous tasks in themselves they add up to a fair bit of work and in the longer term a fair bit of stuff to maintain and keep up to date. In the end I decided that I really didn’t need to invest that sort of time on updating my site. So it was time to outsource the job. I spent a while trying out various providers of photo websites (which I will detail in another post) before settling on PhotoDeck.
I am rather happy with the resulting site, but please let me know what you think of the new layout.
I recently hit a moment like this, lots of things to do and so little time to do it. It was time to rationalise!
 |
| Less fussy home page |
One of the big jobs I had hanging over me was to redesign my website. I haven’t touched or updated my website for over a year as I knew the whole design needed modernising. Since I created my site things in the web world have changed dramatically.
At the time I created it I would really only have to worry that it looked OK in Internet Explorer on a desktop machine with no problems. There were a few Mac and Firefox users out there but they were easy enough to deal with. Since then the world has changed a lot: Gone are the days when you could have a fair idea what sort of platform your site was to be viewed on. Now phones, tablets, PCs, macs access the site, each with different screen sizes, browsers and javascript support.
 |
| 500px style gallery page |
User expectations have changed: Homepages used to act as a shop window for the site with “a little bit of everything” being the rule, now minimal designs are much more in favour. Static pages used to be Ok but now we expect all sorts of animations and rollover effects. On the development side: XHTML has pretty much died a death and HTML has risen from the grave to become new all-singing-all-dancing HTML5, the hero of flash-haters everywhere. Javascript has gone from a few lines here and there to giant libraries of code that make development cross platform fast and agile.
 |
| Magic wall style galleries |
First I would need to learn HTML5 & jQuery. Then I would have to look around to see what extensions I could use to make things wizzy and learn how to use them. I would then have to design the site, build it & make sure it works in loads of different browsers on lots of different devices. Finally I would have to write a Lightroom web gallery to generate the galleries.
 |
| Clean App style interface on smartphones. |
Whilst none of these are particularly onerous tasks in themselves they add up to a fair bit of work and in the longer term a fair bit of stuff to maintain and keep up to date. In the end I decided that I really didn’t need to invest that sort of time on updating my site. So it was time to outsource the job. I spent a while trying out various providers of photo websites (which I will detail in another post) before settling on PhotoDeck.
I am rather happy with the resulting site, but please let me know what you think of the new layout.
Tuesday, 17 July 2012
A Sixth of the way already
So I'm now 2 months in to my 365 project and things are going well. London is gearing up for The Olympics and it's associated cultural Olympiad which means that it's a very target rich environment.
Which makes up a bit (but not much) for it being the wettest summer ever.
Which makes up a bit (but not much) for it being the wettest summer ever.
 |
| Passing Strangers |
 |
| Beacon View |
 |
| Before The Funeral |
 |
| Cloud over Temple Field |
 |
| Greenstead Church |
 |
| Pentery Church |
 |
| Pidgeon and Piano |
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| Scruffy the huffy chuffy tug boat |
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| Dancing Shadow |
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| The Shard |
 |
| Towards Bumbles Green |
Sunday, 17 June 2012
One down, eleven to go
A month ago, to celebrate my birthday and my present of a brand new Olympue Pen EP-M1 I decide to embark on a 365 project. For those who don't know, the idea is that you have to take a shot every day for an entire year.
So far I have managed to find something to shoot every day, so here are the highlights from my first month at this:
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| British Summer Time |
 |
| Man on a Mission |
 |
| Lambourne Church |
 |
| The Tower of London Tat Tower |
 |
| Sign of the times |
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| Key Light |
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| Audley End |
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| Morris Men |
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| One Poultry |
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| Watching you watching me |
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| The Gherkin |
 |
| Crates |
Tuesday, 17 April 2012
Google Map Lightroom Web Gallery
Now that Lightroom 4 is here geocoding is suddenly centre stage and images don't feel properly filed unless they have a set of co-ordinates attached to them. Whilst LR4 offers many features that are needed to handle geocoding and maps, it is noticeable that the web module does not offer the facility to export these pictures in a map format.
As part of the redesign of my site I decide that it might be nice to create a photo gallery driven entirely from a Google map and produced from Lightroom.
For those who just want the goodies
To borrow some text from Joe Colson:
This information is intended for plug-in developers and those intrepid souls who want to understand what lies beneath the surface of a Lightroom gallery engine. It isn’t my intention to make this series of posts a definitive guide to Lightroom gallery engine design or anatomy. Instead, I’d recommend starting with the Lightroom SDK 2.0 Programmers Guide and Lightroom 2 SDK available from Adobe. The Adobe guide is a good starting point, but you can learn even more by dissecting an actual gallery engine, including those that are included in the SDK.
As per usual I am standing on the shoulders of giants here and in this case the whole thing is based on this article from Sitepoint and some code from Joe Colson's article on a geocoding plug-in.
The first problem to solve was how to generate an xml file of co-ordinates. To do this I added the following code to the manifest.lrweb file.
Which just builds up the xml file from the details of each image. The only tricky bit is converiting the coordinates to decimal degrees which is achieved by this bit of code
Then it was just a question of modifying the javascript to pickup the values from the generate xml file. Using JQuery this is easily achieved like this:
The rest of the code is pretty standard stuff from the SDK.
I hope you found this of use and please leave a comment if you use the code anywhere, I love to know who reads this stuff
As part of the redesign of my site I decide that it might be nice to create a photo gallery driven entirely from a Google map and produced from Lightroom.
For those who just want the goodies
- Click here for an example of a site generated using this plug-in
- Click here to download the web gallery as a zip file
-
Extract the downloaded zip file.
-
Copy the archive contents to one of the following destinations, depending upon your system. If you have not already done so, you will must create the Web Galleries folder manually.
Mac
Users/username/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Web Galleries/
Windows XP
C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Adobe\Lightroom\Web Galleries\
Windows Vista/7
C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Web Galleries\
In Windows XP, the “Application Data” directory is usually hidden. The same may apply to the AppData folder in Vista.
-
Open Adobe Lightroom and access the Web module. In the upper right, under “Engine”, you should seea new gallery called Shepherdpics Map.
To borrow some text from Joe Colson:
This information is intended for plug-in developers and those intrepid souls who want to understand what lies beneath the surface of a Lightroom gallery engine. It isn’t my intention to make this series of posts a definitive guide to Lightroom gallery engine design or anatomy. Instead, I’d recommend starting with the Lightroom SDK 2.0 Programmers Guide and Lightroom 2 SDK available from Adobe. The Adobe guide is a good starting point, but you can learn even more by dissecting an actual gallery engine, including those that are included in the SDK.
As per usual I am standing on the shoulders of giants here and in this case the whole thing is based on this article from Sitepoint and some code from Joe Colson's article on a geocoding plug-in.
The first problem to solve was how to generate an xml file of co-ordinates. To do this I added the following code to the manifest.lrweb file.
AddGridPages {
filetype="xml",
template="markers.xml",
rows=1000,
columns=1
}
this uses the index page markers.xml to generate the xml doc
<markers>
<lr:ThumbnailGrid>
<lr:GridPhotoCell>
<marker>
<name><% =image.metadata.title%></name>
<thumb>content/bin/images/thumb/<%= image.exportFilename %>.jpg</thumb>
<desc><% =image.metadata.description%></desc>
<largePage>source/<%= image.exportFilename %>_large.html</largePage>
<lat><% =lat%></lat>
<lng><% =lon%></lng>
</marker>
<% end %>
</lr:GridPhotoCell>
</lr:ThumbnailGrid>
</markers>
Which just builds up the xml file from the details of each image. The only tricky bit is converiting the coordinates to decimal degrees which is achieved by this bit of code
<%
local gpsData = image.metadata.GPS
local lat
local lon
if gpsData ~= "" then
local iter = string.gmatch(image.metadata.GPS, "%d+")
lat = iter() + (iter() * 60 + iter()) / 3600
lon = iter() + (iter() * 60 + iter()) / 3600
if string.find(gpsData, "S") then
lat = -lat
end
if string.find(gpsData, "W") then
lon = -lon
end
%>
Then it was just a question of modifying the javascript to pickup the values from the generate xml file. Using JQuery this is easily achieved like this:
var name = $(this).find('name').text();
var desc = $(this).find('desc').text();
var largePage = $(this).find('largePage').text();
The rest of the code is pretty standard stuff from the SDK.
I hope you found this of use and please leave a comment if you use the code anywhere, I love to know who reads this stuff
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