Richard's Online Journal
[10/10/08] Things To Do In Venice
A handful of photos from my trip across Europe this week. Can’t get enough of looking at random internet strangers’ snaps? Click here for the full set, including Venice style noir, girls playing with diseased pigeons, the square made famous by Miss Garnet’s Angel, and other random assorted images. Images… like these.
Take a trip around the canals with your own personal gondolier! (Bank loan recommended, but no ear-plugs, since none of them seem to sing any more. A couple did however have a mixing deck and separate singer on board.)
The craze in St. Mark’s Square one afternoon - tourists sprinkling themselves with breadcrumbs and trying to attract pigeons to their arms.
One of those nice arty shots that just turned out terrific, of one of the many beggar women around the Rialto bridge.
[23/09/08] Citizen Journalism
“Wow! I can’t wait to get online and find out what it is!”
(To answer the question: A massive, building-shaking fire just down the road from our office, with the bad taste to burn on a day when I didn’t have my good camera. Touched up iPhone pics just aren’t the same...)
[20/09/08] Snap Happy Cameras
On a press trip to Las Vegas at the start of the year, I started getting deeply annoyed with my trusty old Canon Ixus Something. On the last day, after fighting to take snappy pictures for much of the week, I pulled up Amazon and decided that it was time to upgrade to a dSLR. Something cheap. Nothing too flashy. I just wanted something that would take better pics, and offered a few settings to tweak.
That was all. The Nikon D40. One purchase.
I’m not sure how I ended up with two bodies, one the D40, the newest, the upgraded D80, four lenses, a proper tripod, two flashes - one new - around 50 AA batteries, two carrying bags, two manuals, a stack of software… Bah. I’m blaming the pixies.
I’ve played too many Broken Sword games. I can’t see something like this without wondering if there’s gold inside. Or at least a map.
Clearly, I’ve got something of an obsessive personality. I know this, it’s one of the reasons I refuse to even dabble in things like gambling or serial murders. Still, it’s been quite a ride. I’ve been teaching myself from the absolute basics and picking up the rest through simple trial and error. The goal isn’t to take great photos, or sell them for kazillions - not to be blunt, but I don’t want another hobby turning into work - but the personal satisfaction of getting those cool shots when I want them.
If I can find some easily blackmailable person in the high office, I’d love to take said camera for a good poke around places like the Corsham tunnels - the end-of-the-world nuclear bunker not far from here. Or pull a press trip to somewhere deeply photogenic, where the presentation is accidentally delayed due to the presenters crash-landing on a magic island full of mystery and smoke monsters. Something like that.
Until then, Bath Abbey is a great place to practice. The staff leave you alone to take photos, people don’t grumble that you’re there for science rather than religion, and there’s lots of pretty stuff to snap. Two quid ‘voluntary’ donation. Don’t even think about walking past without donating it. Those people have laser-beam stares…
I don’t know how much it costs to spin the hands and start yelling ‘THE END OF THE WORLD IS NIGH!’ to the terrified masses below, but it’s more than a fiver. I asked the spoilsports several times…
It never fails to stun me that regular digital cameras are so bad. Any of them will give you a decent shot of a landscape or similar, but take them indoors and you just end up with a hideous smear of lights, blurred vision, and friends in death masks surrounded by the suffocating blackness. Something as simple as bounce flash fixes it, for the most part anyway, but forget it. You can get little mirror things that stick onto your pop-up flash, but they’re not very good. Just to take a proper picture, the average mortal (yes, I know professionals can get a decent picture out of a milk bottle if they want) needs an insane amount of technology. A couple of hundred quid for the camera. Another hundred quid to angle the damn flash up. Tripods. Remotes.
Just when you think your spending days are over, they suck you back in with the prospect of a wide-angle shot of the Grand Canyon, or a fisheye shot of whatever the hell people think fisheye lenses are good for. Silly fisheyed freak people. Almost as bad as the HDR-to-hell-and-back kids. Shudder…
Note to anyone who’s ever posed with a booth babe. Yes, they really are this excited that you exist.
Don’t even ask about getting started using things like Aperture mode instead of switching it onto full automatic. I think you get bonus points when you stop humming ‘We Do What We Must Because We Can’ every time you switch it over to that mode. More, when you manage to cut the perfect slice out of your photo on command.
The rest, that’s where the fun is. I actually enjoy the post-production bit more than the photography most of the time. It’s fun to take the source image and see what you can do with it, either subtly or by piling on the effects. I invested in a copy of Capture NX and now take every photo in RAW format for more flexibility, and picked up a copy of Nik Color Efex for its amazingly cool features. Both tools are heavily used down at the office photo studio when images come in ruine- ahem… ‘not entirely perfect’, so that’s good to know. The most surprising one of the set is Noise Ninja, which not only works pretty well, it’s priced as a throwaway investment. I haven’t actually pulled the trigger on this one, not yet, but I’m impressed by the files I’ve run through the demo version.
Why do you feel so self-conscious when photographing other people in the street? Oh, yeah. The easily breakable chunk of technology in your hand.
The downside of it all is the phenomenal complexity of taking a ‘good’ shot in anything approaching the traditional sense. Lighting, the mathematics of exposure (1 trenchcoat +1 policeman = 15 years), and working out why the camera’s suddenly decided to start filming nuclear blasts instead of the well-lit room in front of you are all a real bloody drain. I’m not even close to being able to set everything manually yet, but that’s definitely the plan when I’m a bit more confident with the basics.
Flickr’s a fantastic resource for all this stuff, incidentally. Almost any good picture you encounter, certainly most of the ones from the camera specific groups, will offer an option to see an image’s full shooting data, from the mode it was taken in, to all the twiddly little settings. It’s so much easier to visualise things like that, even if the source file has been post-productioned to buggery and back between landing on the sensor and slorching its way up onto the interweb. Hell, it’s a good reminder when it’s my own photos. When you keep roughly 5 out of 200 snaps, the details get lost.
MASTER TIP: When photographing fire, don’t zoom in so far that you melt your lens. PRO TIP: And take the lens cap off. It helps.
This is the part where I was planning to offer some tips, if you’re planning to descend this path of high expense and ultimate pointlessness. Then I remembered, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, so anything I might say would be about as much use as a Ken Rockwell tutorial. So I won’t insult you by pretending differently.
(Pssst: The Nikon 50mm f1.8 is love...)
[18/08/08] Last Moment of Social Pleasure
The following is an actual memorial from Bath Abbey. Not the greatest picture quality in the world, but I only saw it at the last second and had to quickfire. I don’t know who the hapless subject is, but I hope there’s a statue to the person who wrote this somewhere. Possibly a shrine…
Our father, who art somewhere, probably…
I love how every line of this is a back-handed tribute. It’s not only the wonderfully vague ‘Moment of Social Pleasure’, which probably just means ‘got pissed’, but throws up so many other possibilities. It’s the suggestion of “Hopefully he’s in Heaven, but, eh, y’know...” and the final slap of calling it a Humble Tablet. Yes, it may have been a friend writing a memorial for someone with a sense of humour, but I like to think of an angry stonemason, seething at having been emotionally blackmailed into stumping up money to commemorate the Village Git. (Respect for the dead? I’ve heard of it...)
Cheery last line too. Makes you think… cheer up!
Bath Abbey has a few of these unusual photo-spots. Most of the time, it’s your standard religious iconography, but a lot of them really amuse me. Take this apathetic angel for instance. You can almost hear the ringing of the sculptor’s ears after he was told to lose the half-smoked fag and Starbucks mug.
“What? It’s my coffee break.
Still, it’s all very pretty. For some reason, despite having been in Bath for over 8 years now, I’ve never gotten around to heading up to the top of the Abbey to see the place from the highest point. Despite the rain and the wind, today seemed like the time to do it. A hundred of the 200-odd steps up to the top, I started to rethink this - especially at the realisation that who goes up, must come down. If the Abbey really wants to boost its visitors, two words: Helter Skelter. Kids would love it.
I don’t know how much it costs to bribe the staff into letting you spin the wheels of the clock round at mad speed while shouting ‘THE END OF THE WORLD IS NIGH!’ to the terrified parishioners staring up in horror from street level, but it’s more than £5.32. I asked.
Illusion of good weather kindly supplied by Photoshop
Other images up on Flickr, hidden amongst the 95,321,654 World of Warcraft screenshots. Note to self, must redress that balance…
[05/07/08] The Way Of The World (Of Warcraft)
Time Wasted: 10 days, 19 hours, 46 minutes, 23 seconds.
Hurrah! I finally made it all the way through Warcraft. Virtual photos are here. And yes, I say ‘finished’. Wrath of the Licking be damned. I beat this game, and can now hold my head up high as… well… a guy who’s spent three months pretending to be a gnome.
Yes, I’m aware I’m about two years late on this. It’s been an adventure anyway, and quite an interesting research project. I approach RPG design from a very specific direction; the rules of the world and its lore rather than the numbers behind it. I’m more interested in taking out the local Evil Overlord because he’s threatening to destroy the local town than because he’ll drop an awesome hat. In online games, how the players approach the challenges laid out by the designers is hands down more interesting than actually completing them, whether it’s why nobody cares about the PvP areas, or the interaction between different groups. The most obvious are the whole male/female player/character dichotomies, but it extends further than that.
For instance, are players more likely to rely on a hulking Human fighter than a petite Gnome killing machine with pink ponytails, even if both have functionally identical statistics? The sociology… and sometimes plain sociopathy… is a fascinating thing.