Skip to main content

Good Grief

It's been a while, hasn't it?

So, yeah, not been feeling the "photography" vibe for a while. Or the "geek" vibe. Or, in fact, any sort of vibe at all. That's what tetracyclic antidepressant's do for you, I suppose.

But I'm back on the wagon (or off the wagon?) now and should be able to do something interesting. Autumn is here. My favourite season of all. And an Indian summer, too, according to the MET office. Means clear skies, warm days, and lovely low sun for awesome lighting effects.

Speaking of which, I got to try out the best of my new lighting rig in anger the other day with the ever-awesome Northern Oak. I've used it indoors for a few bits and bobs but, as is the way with hobbies, haven't found anything where it would be genuinely useful in a "real" photography situation. Carting a bag full of umbrellas around "just in case" gets tiring after a while. Literally. It's quite heavy.

In the personal projects (see here, here and here) I've done, I've used strobes for the key light, fill light and, occasionally, back light. The sun has been low in the sky of late and given me a great opportunity to use a shoot-through umbrella or two as fill for the long, diffused shadows the Autumn sun is so wonderful for. More on that later.

So in the meantime I've managed to even out my somewhat wonky brain, if only for a while, and the EOS500D is back as a permanent fixture in my walkaround bag (or "man bag" as many refer to it). Hope to bring exciting things in the near future!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Juniper Network Connect on Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Juniper Network Connect is a very popular VPN client for corporate networks. It bootstraps from a Java applet and has native versions for Windows, Linux and Mac, and works very well. Unfortunately, it seems that Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and 10.6 Snow Leopard have some issues caused by a dodgy installation program. One common way to make it work is to enable the root user and log in with full admin privileges under OS X and install it that way. This is a sledgehammer approach to a fairly simple problem, opens up security issues, and didn't even work for me. I won't even bother exploring that route in this blog post. There are a couple of other things that can be done to make it work, though. If you upgraded from a previous version of OS X and already had the Network Connect client installed, you may just be suffering a simple permissions issue. These instructions are for Network Connect 6.2.0, but they might well work with other versions with a tweak. From Termin...

Top 10 of 2013

One of the things a fan of music must do is put themselves through the annual trial of trying to figure out which of the albums they bought/borrowed/stole this year are the best. It took me until about March last year. This year I have been a little more proactive and have produced a list already. I bought 55 albums this year. I also acquired a further 58 through freebies, promos, borrowings and artists giving me stuff. That's a lot of stuff to choose from. I was considering limiting my self only to stuff released this year, but decided that some things were too good to leave off despite them being discovered by me this year, although released some time in the past. This didn't end up making the job any easier. Anyway, after much deliberating, thinking, changing of minds and giving up in disgust, I have produced a list of 10 albums split evenly across "metal" and "non-metal", as well as a handful of "honourable mentions." So, without further a...

Something is afoot - Opera Mini on iPhone

Strange things are afoot. 20 days ago, Opera submitted the iPhone version of Opera Mini , their mobile browser, to the Apple AppStore. 20 days later, it was actually approved, despite previous browser technologies and the like being rejected for "duplicating iPhone functionality". Strange indeed. Having used Opera Mini before on many different devices, both touchscreen and traditional keypad based, I have long appreciated its raw speed, excellent rendering engine and intuitive navigation controls. But can it stand up to Safari on iPhone for browsing excellence? The answer: sort of. The Good Like its predecessors, Opera Mini for iPhone is blazingly fast. Using Opera's own proxies, web content is compressed to within an inch of its life to reduce bandwidth requirements, and the browser itself renders what it downloads so fast that the likes of Safari just can't keep up. Even on a GPRS only connection it is almost as fast as Safari on 3G for largely text based page...