Ross Goodman

Just a quick summary of my on-line presence this year.

Twitter

I have invested a lot of content to Twitter this year.
This is primarily due to the convenience of the platform racking up almost 1200 updates in the year here.

Flickr / Photography

I can’t find a way to get stats for the year so here are my top five photos:

Web Site / Blog

By far the most popular post on the site was the photos page here.
Second most popular page is the “About Me” page here.
As for the blog entries themselves they rank at:
1 – Business Objects XI 3.0 New Features – Conditional Prompts
2 – Crystal Xcelsius – Filtered Rows From A Filter Component
3 – Modelling Change In Your Dimensions
4 – Business Objects XI 3.0 New Features – Change Data Tracking
5 – Dimensional Modelling – Facts
As you can see here the site only really started getting traffic last January so that gives me 17300 page views.

Personal Stuff

Obviously the biggest news of the year was the passing of my daughter Emma.
Celebrating the Life of Emma Berry Goodman
And the year ends on another low point with the passing of another member of my extended family.
George Miller – Footballer | 1939 – 2008

I treated myself to a new toy for my camera.

Cactus Wireless Triggers

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Emma has finally gotten around to registering on Flickr after years of me harrassing her to!

She has uploaded some of the photos that she took for her photographic exhibition, have a look by clicking on the photo above.

See the two red dots and the red line?

I’m currently investigating camera repair shops

My camera is out of warranty.

Emma and Sarah were at the Girls Aloud concert at the SECC on Thursday night.

Rather than go home then come back again to collect them I decided to wander around with my camera.

I’m noticing a theme emerging with my photos:

Click on the photo to see the rest of my Glasgow photos.

I recently was fortunate enough to be doing some work for Arqiva on a day that they were doing maintenance up the tower and I got the chance to tag along.

The Emley Moor tower at 330 meters is the UK’s tallest free standing structure. On the inside is a ladder running all the way to the top with 865 rungs, I counted them all on the way up (kidding !) The lift takes just over seven minutes to get to the top.

The viewing deck is 275.3 meters up, the foundations are 6.1 meters deep. 7,000 cubic meters of concrete were used and the structure weighs 11,200 tonnes.

I treated myself to an external flash for my camera, specifically a Nikon SB-800.

This allows me to play around with having the flash off camera. Mucking around produced the photo above, which also gives a sneak preview to the “face fungus” which I am currently cultivating.

As you may or may not know, i love the concept of openid which allows you to have a single authorisation location for multiple sites (including this blog). It also allows you to have a single profile page. It has just scared me the number of places where my profile photo may be, I’m going to spend the next hour seeing how many places I have put it!

OK, in 1 hour I have found 16 discrete sites, and I have not even started with the forums that I frequent !

Exposure is the heart and the art and the act of taking a photograph.

In film cameras, the film must be exposed to light, the light causes a chemical reaction to occur which captures and records the picture.

In a digital camera, the action is the same except, instead of the light falling on a chemical soaked film, it lands on a sensor. Think of the sensor as the camera’s eye, it “sees” the light and records the picture.

I don’t really want to use an eye as an analogy as your eye has a very clever brain behind it helping out. To simplify things your eye needs just the right amount of light to see. Too much light and you are blinded, time to put on your polarised sunglasses (more of this in another article I think), not enough light and it is too dark to see.

The “right” amount of light, is what’s known as the correct exposure. You are letting in just enought light to record a good photo. (continue reading…)

Emma decided to to photography at school this year buit is not a formal course, just a teacher that is taking her through it.

She is enjoying it, but is not feeling that she is getting much from it.

Sarah has also expressed an interest in learning more.

I thought I would write a series of short articles just coving my understanding of the basics. This will help to consolidate my knowledge and act as a reference for the kids.

I suggested a possible change to a Flickr friend’s photo.

From

To

You can see the original here.

I thought it would look better fully monocrome with just the lips and the flowers in their original colour.

Here is how I did it.
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