Look Out

Yet again I find myself offering to host a file or a picture for a friend. Well this is supposed to be a blog about photography and I needed a shot for today, so here it is:

Look Out
By Kind Permission of: Robert Mitchell

This is the first ever shot Robert has posted on the web so he would appreciate any comments you have about it.

Recommended Blogger

Looking for another interesting photography blog to read? Well why not take a look at Paul Indigo's blog. It is well worth a read, as it is packed full of thought provoking articles about taking pictures.

Give it a look - you know you want to.

Stuck in the LAB again.

One of my Christmas presents was Photoshop Lab Color: The Canyon Conundrum and Other Adventures in the Most Powerful Colorspace which, as it goes, has to be one of the longest book titles I have come across in a long time.

It's a long and detailed book that takes some reading, I found it was best to work through about two pages then work out what disk that comes with it was talking about with photoshop and the example disk that comes with it.

But once you get used to the LAB colour space and using the curves to modify it, then it does start to make a lot of sense. The book is cleanly written with lots of examples and the accompanying CD provides just the sort of example images you need to understand the concepts involved.

When would I use LAB? Well I'm only halfway through the book but the advantages seem to be that the LAB colour space separates contrast from colour information. Tweaking the curves (ohh listen to me, I didn't understand curves at all till I read the book!) allows you to boost contrast in areas that would normally be impossible in other ways.

The other use seems to be to provide a real differentiation on groups of similar colours, which would be very difficult to do in any other way, even with the raw processor.

A recommended read for those of you who really want to get into the guts of photoshop. Here is a quick "before and after", I've been playing with (click on the images to view large..it's quite subtle and only really works big):

Original after Raw conversion.

A minor LAB tweak later and Tower Bridge emerges from the gloom and the HMS Belfast has got its colour back. The changes were applied to the entire image yet the man's orange jacket and sign are unchanged.

I got me some buffalo!

Over the last few weeks I have been carefully documenting my photographic workflow. As I looked at each part of my process I kept checking that everything is backed up and safe.

Looking at my archive of images for the last 5 years I realised that I was on the verge of running out of disk space as I had room for just a month or twos shots left. I make that time to get me a pair of Buffaloes.

Buffalo LinkStation Pro

The Buffalo Linkstation Pro is a network file-server in a box. I got myself two of the 500GB version which should give me plenty of room for my photos for a few years.

I'm sure many of you think "two 500GB drives - that's a terrabyte" - well actually it's not. It's one 500GB drive with a backup to mirror it, I stopped buying hard disk drives in ones a few years back when I kept getting asked to help people who had lost loads of important documents due to a hard disk crash. Now I always buy drives in pairs so I have a live and a backup, a 120GB internal drive and a 250gb USB drive to back it up for example.

My first impression of these drives is that they are a real quality product and the people at Buffalo have really thought about what you might need from an external drive.

Installation is a breeze:

• take it out the box
• plug it in to the mains
• plug it in to the network
• Switch it on
• Sorted!

You don't really need to install the client software, but it's worth doing just so that you can find and rename the Linkstations to something more memorable.

Configuration of the backup is done through your web browser. I had a little bit of a problem with this and in the end was forced to read the manual that comes on the CD. The trick is to first configure the backup target share as a "Disk Backup" (you will find it under Shared Folders set-up>Shared Folder Support). then go to the primary drive and set-up the backup to this share.

What is really neat about this backup is that the drives do it themselves, even if my PCs are switched off the drives will still back themselves up every night...cool!

I'm currently looking for a good location for the backup drive as I've just realised that it is directly under the cold water tank in the loft. I will try to ensure that both drives are as far away from each other as possible to increase security a little in event of a flood.

A real quality product...I'm impressed.

Edward Norton - Nature Photographer

Last weekend I popped up to The Basement Gallery to see how my work was going in The Painters With Light Exhibition that is on there.

Whilst I was there I was very pleased to see Edward Norton's first exhibition in the same gallery. I have met Edward on many occasions and its always a pleasure to shoot along side such a talented technician and all round good chap.

Having seen his work on the web it was great to see his work as prints, where they really come to life. If you are visiting Ipswich in January I strongly recommend you pop down to The Basement Gallery: 11 Elm St & 12-14 Princes St and checkout Edwards Beautiful images.

Candle Snuff
By Kind Permission of Edward Norton

POLICE WARNING:

I came across this warning today and thought it best to pass it on to all dog owners:

Police have issued a warning to all dog owners: Watch your dog!
A sniper has been picking off dogs one at a time and almost a dozen have been killed or wounded so far. These horrible attacks have occurred predominantly in the Glasgow area. Police say they have a suspect and an arrest warrant has been issued, but so far, they haven't been able to nab him. Police have distributed a photo (attached) of the alleged suspect please keep your dogs safe and distribute this to anyone who has dogs in the area.

I'm a Blogger

Well I've finally given in and joined the blogsphere. I've just converted all the existing shepherdpics news feed to a blog format and though there is still a bit of work to do, I thought I would release my random ramblings on the world.

Hopefully you will find my musing on digital photography and anything else that catches my eye of interest. Please feel free to comment on my blogs as I love getting feed back.

Chris