Archive for the ‘Photography’ Category

The sky is on fire

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

I don’t know why these sunsets happen.  Anyway, I rushed out to try to capture this one in Sydney the other night as best I could.  It’s hard to get around all that man-made stuff in the way.

Firey Sunset  013

Firey Sunset  036

See the Aperture “Master”

Saturday, June 21st, 2008

Not that I would make adjustments to my photo’s.  They obviously come out perfect from the camera every time. (not!)  In the scenario where I may need to make adjustments to my photo’s outside of the camera, oh let’s say in an application like Apple’s Aperture, it would be nice to quickly compare the adjusted image with the original.  It turns out that this is possible.  In Aperture the original image is called the “Master” and you can simply hit the “M” key to see it and “M” again to return to the adjusted image.

A handy tip…  If I ever needed to make adjustments to my photos.  I think the letter M is wearing off my keyboard.

word.

Bulk remove keywords in Aperture

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

This was annoying me for some time.  Particularly because:

  1. I couldn’t work out how to do it.
  2. I regularly make mistakes in adding keywords to a bulk set of images
  3. I only recently migrated to Aperture from iPhoto and all those imported images are tagged with “iPhoto Original”
  4. When I upload images to flickr I don’t want the weird tags on the images (ref to point 3!)

Anyway, because basically I’m dumb at that stuff, I found this little gem.  It’s a great tip that essentially goes like this:

  1. Select the images that you want to blast those nasty bulk mistake keywords from
  2. Complain to yourself mentally that you wouldn’t need to be doing this if you hadn’t made the mistake in the first place
  3. Make sure the keyword controls are visible (Window -> Show control bar, Window -> Show keyword controls)
  4. Type the keyword you want removed in the keyword box, and (Wait for it)
  5. Press Shift-Enter.  Now this is very important.  Shift-Enter.

My life is bliss.

Photography workshop

Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008

I just finished a great photography workshop through Sydney Photographic Workshops (SPW).  I attended the beginners Digital SLR Photography workshop which was conducted over about 8 weeks in the SPW studios in Alexandria.  All the courses are tutored by professional and practising photographers making them practical and informative. The big finale was held last Friday and consisted of some drinks, some gear, a slideshow of photographs taken by the workshop participants over its course and some prizes for the best photos.  Prizes were awarded for the best photos taken during the course for the following categories:

  • Best portrait
  • Best Landscape
  • Best series

    Let me tell you, it came as a shock to me to win one of the categories.  Which one do you think?  Well, I won the best series category.  Here’s the series of still life pics that scored me that illustrious accolade.

    RulerLamp ShadeCorridor lightsOnly one way

    If you’re in the market for a course where you’ll get to meet some people, (re)invigorate your photography passion and hopefully come out the other end taking better pictures and enjoying it, then I’d recommend it.  If you’re already familiar with photography and need a creative injection then I’d still recommend it.  I was already familiar with SLR photography but still found it fun!  There’s one downside though - you want to by all the great gear!

    If you’re interested, you can find more of my pictures on Flickr.  I’ve only just started using it so be kind :)