Mike Spinak has written several articles on photo.net. He’s linked from the main page and is about obtaining maximum sharpness in your pictures. Excellent stuff. Must read some of his older articles too!
Tag Archives: Photography
GIMP 2 in Video
Via the Gimp User mailing list, here’s some good tutorial videos showing off GIMP 2.0. I must really install GIMP 2.0 soon and play with it!
Beating the Photography Blues, Trouble on the Streets?
You know those days when you really couldn’t be bothered? Go to work, work the day through, go home, have dinner, veg in front of the tv, go to bed, repeat ad naseum. Everyone goes through troughs in life and Mark’s going through one right now. Here’s his plan for beating the blues!
On a completely different note, this is disturbing. Sensiti was in central London taking photos and looking for insipiration. He started taking photos until 4 minutes later he was approached by a policeman and asked what he was doing. It seems that the CCTV people monitoring the city noticed him walking around with a camera and suspected he was taking photos of children.
What would I have said if I was stopped on St. Patrick’s Day? Besides the parade photos , I took at least 2 dozen photos of the crowd before and during the event! Several of those are of kids looking in wonder and delight at the parade or simply bored and hungry, hanging on to their parents necks.
It’s a sorry, scary, state of affairs. for parents and photographers alike.
What to do? I hardly ever take photos of kids but if I do, I try to make sure people see my approach with a camera. Unfortunately, as Mark points out in the first article, pointing your camera at someone is often one of the hardest things to do as a photographer.
so I don’t take many photos of people!
Much later… Here’s another similar story about 2 photographers on the subway in New York! The train was stopped so they could be interrogated by the police!
Gimp Hits 2.0
I took one day off and Microsoft are fined (a not so huge amount in terms of their cash-pile, and there could be further ramifications for the Free Software movement.) the previous day, and GIMP 2.0 is released! I’d link to gimp.org but that site’s down and out. Here’s the usual Slashdot discussion on the matter including links to a Windows Gimp binary release. Apparently it’s much improved on previous versions!
Here’s the list of mirrors in case you want to download the source tarball now. Some mirrors haven’t updated yet, but gd.tuwien.ac.at has!
Digital Prints – buy, buy, buy!
PhotographyBLOG reports that the growth of digital prints is accelerating at twice that of digital cameras. I’m not surprised really. So many more people have digital cameras these days that not all of them are computer geeks with huge collections of photos on their PCs. They want tangiable photos they can show their friends and family and don’t want to crowd around in front of a noisy, nasty computer.
When I eventually move into the new place (there’s always delays!) I’m going to get large format prints of some of my photos to hang around the house. Spectra Photo in town do 8″x6″ prints for 99¢. Anyone know a cheaper shop or site that supplies to the Irish market?
Misc Photo Stuff
Right, it’s late. Just back from another excellent gig and in need of sleep! Here’s what’s open in my browser tabs right now…
- Photo of the Week on photo.net – amazing star trails and a dramatic foreground!
- Practice Mutha, Practice – practice makes perfect!
- I’m now listed on photoblogs.com
- A review of Noise Ninja, and announcement of a free photo noise removal tool called Helicon. Neither has a native Linux version so I really need to get Wine working.
How to sort 16,000+ photos
If you work at Sports Illustrated and you’re covering a major sports event you’ll be very busy! This is a fascinating article showing a typical digital workflow in action! I thought I had a job to do with 350 photos but that’s peanuts compared to what these guys do!
Steve Fine is looking at two pictures every second. He’s been keeping up that pace, with frequent short interruptions, for over four hours, and he’ll keep it up for three more.
St. Patrick's Day Photos!
Here’s a few photos from the parade yesterday. I’m uploading more to an online gallery but that’ll take longer. I’ve narrowed down the images I want to display, but there’s still 88 of them there! That’s a lot of post processing in the GIMP to do! (Auto-colour correction, maybe crop, resize, unsharp-mask)
When the Chernobyl van and flat passed, the crowd cheered and clapped Adi Roche and the people on board! Not pictured here, but several members of the New York Fire Department were in the parade. As they passed, they were cheered and clapped as well which was great to see!

St Patrick's Day Again!
It’s that time of the year again! I’m just back from the parade in Cork and I have to say, it was much better than last year’s one! I took a “few” photographs, but it’ll take me a few hours to pick out the best ones to post here!
Digital Workflow Guide
This is a short concise example of digital workflow. There’s some handy before and after shots, and some of his ideas are new to me, especially the order in which images are manipulated. Worth a read, but you might be confused if you’re new to all this stuff! Some of his PS actions look interesting too. I wonder how can I translate them to the GIMP world?