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

Cactus Wireless Triggers

Basically you have a transmitter that goes into the hotshoe of your camera and you have a reciever that goes into the hotshoe of the flash unit. This means that you can trigger your flash via a radio signal!

My flash has an IR sensor it it so you can set it to flash whenever it sees another flash but this means there has to be line of sight between your camera flash and the remote flash. Using this method you can “hide” your flash and have light coming from all sorts of directions.

Typically flash coming from any direction other than your camera will improve a portrait !

Here I had my flashgun sitting behind Elaine’s feet pointing up towards her face.

If you are interested in off camera flash have a look at this site: Strobist and their corresponding Flickr Group.

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.

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 !

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.

If your photo is over exposed, there is too much light, it will be too bright, too much white, you will loose detail in the bright areas. This is also known as “blown highlights”.

If your photo is under exposed, there is not enough light, it will be too dark, you will loose detail in the dark shadow areas.

You can use software to manipulate an image, generally you can salvage some detail from underexposed images but it is very difficult to recover over exposed images. This means you should err on the side of underexposure when you take a photo.

How do we control the exposure that we take?

There are two mechanisms that we can control that will affect the exposure:

APERTURE

The aperture is the “hole” in the front of your camera that lets in the light. Strictly speaking the hole is in the lens. This hole can change in size. The larger the hole, the more light gets into the camera. The smaller the hole, the less light. The aperture is measured in FStops, the larger the FStop the smaller the aperture.

F22

F8

F4

F2.8

F1.8

SHUTTER SPEED

The shutter is a “curtain” that blocks the light once it has passed through the aperture and controls when the light gets to the sensor. You can control how long the shutter stays open for, long shutter speed, more light gets in, short shutter speed less light.

ANALOGY TIME

Instead of taking the perfect photo, I want the perfect glass of water. A 1/2 pint is just enough to quench my thirst. I can turn the tap on fast (large aperture, lots of light/water) but I need to be careful and only hold the glass under the tap for a short period of time. Alternatively, I can turn the tap on slowly (small aperture, a little light/water), to fill my glass I now need to hold it under the tap for longer to get my 1/2 pint. If I try and put 3/4 of a pint of water into my 1/2 pint glass, I will have too much water (over exposed), it will spill make a mess and be wasted.

Now that we know that exposure is a function of aperture and shutter speed, how do we control this? We do this through the various modes on our cameras.

CAMERA MODES

Auto

The camera will “work out” the correct exposure by looking at the picture, it will automatically set the aperture and the shutter speed. As this is automatic, there is nothing for you to do here other than press the button and then bask in the results. Safe, but boring.

Shutter

If you use shutter priority mode, YOU control how long the shutter is open for and the camera will decide how large an aperture to set to get the correct exposure. You can get some creative effects by changing the shutter speed. Long exposure, see movement, blur things, short exposure, freeze the action.

Aperture

If you use aperture priority mode, YOU control the size of the aperture and the camera decides how long to open the shutter for. You can get some creative effects by changing the aperture, small aperture, sharp photos, large aperture, you can blur “parts” of the photo. More on “Depth Of Field” in another article.

Program

In program mode, you can cycle through the permissible combinations of shutter/aperture settings.

Manual

In manual more, YOU set the shutter and YOU set the aperture. YOU are responsible for ensuring that the values you select will result in a correctly exposed photo.

EXPOSURE COMPENSATION

Up until now we have assumed that the camera will work out what the “correct” exposure is. The camera may get it wrong. You may want to override this for a particular effect. This is done via exposure compensation. Here you tell the camera that you want to deliberately over or under expose the photo and it will change the settings accordingly.

I have kept this article deliberately simple.
I will discuss FStops for example in another article.
I will add some images to highlight modes etc on my camera (Nikon D50) at a later date.
If you have any preferences on the next article, leave a comment.

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.

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.

Load the original picture into photoshop.

Added an adjustment layer (the black and white circle at the bottom of the layers pallette.

Choose Channel Mixer

Tick Monochrome and fiddle with the sliders until you are happy with the image.

The whole image is now black and white, how to get the original colour back?

Next to the later thumbnail there is a layer mask, currently all white, white means that the layer effect will be seen.

Click on the white layer mask.

Select the colour black and a brush you are happy with and paint in black on the picture the areas you wish to be in colour.

When you paint you do not see black, what you see is the effect of the adjustment layer being masked out, so you “see through” the black and white that has been added.

You can see my version here