by Martin Bailey | Jul 15, 2007 | Art Talk, Musings, Podcast
This is the second part of what is going to be a continuous series in which I’ll show-case multiple individual or smaller groups of shots that would not in themselves make a full episode, and provide my thinking behind the image along with any relevant tips and techniques I might have. Today we’ll look at six more images and that will be it for a while, but as I add more individual shots to my online gallery I’ll build a list for part 3, and keep on going like that. If you have any shots from my gallery that you’d like to know more about, and that I haven’t covered in other Podcasts, please do drop me a line by Private Message from the forum or the Contact Us form, both at martinbaileyphotography.com. Also remember that it’s always nice to actually hear you too, so if you want to record an audio message or question that I will include in a future show, you can do so with the MobaTalk message service on the top page of my Web site.
The images this week are all much newer than the pretty old ones we looked at last week. All shot within the last year, with my Canon EOS 5D, which is a full sized sensor digital SLR camera. The first image that I wanted to look at is number 1159. This was shot on the banks of the Kawaguchi Lake in the Yamanashi Prefecture, which is where I go to shoot Mount Fuji every so often. I’d visited with a friend over from the UK, and had spent a little time shooting Mount Fuji, and as I was doing so, the ladies we can see in this image were tending the flower beds on the bank of the lake. When I finished and turned to head for the car, I noticed the ladies all sitting eating lunch like this. I said hello and we started chatting. They asked if we wanted to sit down and share their snacks and have a cup of tea. I of course thanked them for the kind offer, but said that my other half was waiting in the car, and so we should get back. Actually, at this point they asked if my missus was Japanese and I replied yes. They then asked if we have any kids, and I replied with my usual response which is “no, we’re still practicing”. Usually this just gets a laugh and then the conversation ends, but these earthy ladies didn’t let it stop there. When the laughter had died down one of them asked how long we’d been together. When I told them 16 years, she said that this is an incredibly long time to be practicing without results, so I must be crap at it. I laughed, and could do no more than agree with her. Having broke the ice in this way, I felt very relaxed about asking if I could take their photo, and they kindly agreed and adjusted their hats etc for the shot. Unfortunately I still had the camera on the tripod, so I couldn’t easily get any lower than this, but I shot a frame, thanked them again, and went on my way.
Gardeners
I was relatively pleased with the results, and I decided as you can see to convert this to a sepia coloured image. I did this really to remove some of the distracting colours in the bags and clothes, and to really age the image, as the relatively traditional working clothes of the ladies seemed to lend itself to that. I obviously have also cropped the top and bottom of the image, as they added nothing to the scene. There are some quite harsh shadows across the face of the ladies though because of the hats and the angle of the sun, which was quite high in the sky by this time, which was just after 10AM. I didn’t really have time to think about my settings with the impromptu nature of the shot. I was still at f8, with and ISO of 100, and shutter speed of 1/250th of a second. I wish I’d thought to open up the aperture a little to say around f4 so that I could have softened the background and foreground a little. As it is, I think there’s too much detail in the grass, but I guess it can’t be helped now. Still, this shot has nice memories of human interaction and kindness, which is worth a lot to me.
Autumn Fuji
A few hours later on the same day I shot image number 1161. This is a pretty standard landscape shot, with the iconic Mount Fuji taking up most of the background. I like this shot because of the clouds that form as the breeze blows across the semi-snow covered mountain, which really contrasts nicely against that blue autumnal sky. The other autumnal elements such as the browning grasses and trees, with the pampas in the centre of the frame there all just build up a nice classic landscape scene. What I wanted to talk about here more than anything is that all is not what it seems here. My intention with the image is to portray this classic landscape scene as I have, but in reality, there’s a relatively busy road running between that pampas grass and the line of trees in the middle of the image. I actually had to shoot about 6 or 7 frames here to get one without a car in it. This is cheating in some ways, but all photography is about what we leave out of the shot, right? We choose telephoto lenses for example to get us close to our subject, but we’re not really getting any closer. What we’re really doing is just enabling ourselves to remove more of the world around the subject than we’d be able to do with a wider lens. Similarly here, choosing the right moment to release the shutter is allowing me to remove a car or two that would have given the image a totally different feel, which I thought was worth a mention.
Frailty
In image number 1426, we can see one of those dreamy flower shots that I like to make. I keep an eye out always for flowers situated with a nice bright background that I can use for this kind of bokeh. These flowers were very low to the ground in a border either side of a line of trees in a formal garden in a park in Tokyo. See how I’ve placed the two almost vertical stalks along the right side of the frame, and then allowed the diagonal flower to create some nice bokeh breaking up the scene. I places a number of blue blotches along the bottom of the frame to anchor it down some, along with the darker patch below the bright green, again adding weight to the bottom, improving the balance of the image. I was shooting with my 100mm macro lens, with the aperture set to f3.2 for a nice shallow depth-of-field. It was a little breezy on this day, so these frail flowers were blowing around quite a bit, so I set the ISO to 200, which gave me a nice fast shutter speed of 1/500th of a second.
In addition to talking about the image itself, I wanted to touch on something that I’ve been doing for so long from habit, that I realized when shooting this image has been a pretty stupid thing to do. This is so obvious, that I reckon most of you are already doing this, but just in case you’re as stupid as me, here we go with an explanation. When I need to get really low to the ground, lower than the tripod will allow me by opening the legs out as wide as possible but keeping the camera in the normal position on top of the tripod, I usually set my camera up hanging upside down under the tripod, with the centre pole inserted from beneath. The stupid thing I’ve always done though is that because I’m trying to get as low as possible, I have been extending the legs just enough to get the camera to the necessary position. What this means though is the space between the legs is relatively limited and I end up having a hard time really getting my eye into position to look down into the angle finder. On this occasion, quite by chance, the concrete blocks either side of the flower border were spaced out at such a distance that I extended my tripod legs much further than usually so that I could place them on the concrete and not damage the other plants in the soil of the border. This meant of course that I had to extend the centre pole much further down than usually to get to the necessary low position, but then when I started shooting the tripod was set so high that it was pretty much totally out of the way, which allowed me much freer access to the camera to see into the angle finder. Most of you will probably be thinking, yep, you were being pretty stupid until now, but hopefully at least some of you will have been doing the same thing, and will find this useful. From now on, I’m going to be inserting the pole is leaving it dangling down as far as possible from the centre of the tripod and then extending the legs as high as necessary to get me to the required height. I can imagine that this will make the camera slightly less stable, and I may need to watch that on windy days, but as the weight of the camera is hanging down, under the support, this is not going to be as big an issue as it extending the centre pole up a long way when using the camera the normal way around, with the camera mounted on top.
Gingko Leaves
Next let’s look at image number 1461. I had a brief exchange with Wayne about this shot using the comments feature of the gallery. Wayne is a long time member and major contributor to the MBP community, so this is actually a great time to say thanks Wayne for your comments here and for all your excellent contributions in the forum and the members’ gallery. So Wayne noticed that I’d shot this in manual mode and asked how I controlled the highlights, stopping them from blowing out. He asked had I used spot metering or if I’d adjusted the highlights Lightroom. Wayne also asked how many exposures I made to get the exposure right. So I thought I’d share my answers here, in the hope that it might be of some use. This was shot in my local park during an afternoon walk, and the subject is a cascade of backlit Gingko leaves. I had to act quickly, as the light hitting the leaves would be moving pretty fast as it poured through a small gap in the trees.
I used Manual Mode because the very bright leaves against the dark background were going to fool the cameras light meter, and as Wayne pointed out, had I not taken the appropriate steps to overcome this, the leaves would have been totally blown out. Because I keep my eye on the exposure indicator in the viewfinder, I can get a pretty good idea of how close the exposure is going to be. I can’t remember exactly, but I knew that I need to under expose quite a way to stop the leaves from blowing out, so I set the shutter speed such that it I could see the caret way under zero. I then shot a test, and checked the histogram, and could see that I was still clipping slightly, so I made the shutter speed 2/3rds of a stop faster to compensate further. Now knowing that I would not be clipping the highlights, I shot about 10 frames, with slightly different compositions. I was trying to keep the edge of a tree in the background from creeping into the frame breaking up that total black along the right side. I was also set on getting the very top right leaf in, and the very bottom leaf into the shot, as that beautiful gradation on the leaves was what really drew me to the scene in the first place. I’m relatively pleased with the shot. I love the greens and the dark background, and actually can’t wait to do a bit of printing and see what this one looks like large on good quality paper.
Next, let’s look at image number 1462, which was shot shortly after the last image during the same walk. You can see why my other half gets frustrated. I can’t even go for an afternoon stroll without stopping every five minutes to shoot photographs. Here again, I’d spotted a flower in the shade but with a patch of brightly lit other flowers in the background. It’s that same low sun that was pouring through the trees in the last shot, so again, I was going to have to work quickly, as the patch of brightly lit flowers that I wanted to use for the background would not be lit for very long. I had to stand on tip-toes so position those patches of bright bokeh in just the right position behind these beautiful shaded hydrangea flowers. The shading has actually caused the leaves of the hydrangea to become almost blue, as I was shooting with the Daylight White Balance preset. I don’t want to correct this White Balance, as that would throw out the colour of the bokeh, and the purple of the hydrangea flowers. Plus, I really just like the overall tone of the image as it is. One tip that I wanted to pass on that I recalled when looking at this shot is something that I’ve not actually tried myself yet, despite having carried the piece of kit around to do this for more than a year now. I always carry around an A4 peice of semi-transparent almost white plastic, with the idea that under the right circumstances, I could hold it above a flower, to darken it, by cutting out half the light hitting the flower, and that would allow me to brighten the background by comparison. This would mean that I could create a similar scene to the one we’re looking at here, but in full sunlight. I wouldn’t have to actually look out for these scenes happening by coincidence, just when I’m ready to take the photo. I prefer to shoot things as they are though, and have never really kept my eye out for the right situation to use my piece of plastic. The other reason I carry it by the way is for the opposite reason to this. There may be a time where there is naturally too much contrast between the main subject and the background, and I could use this to level out the contrast of the scene. I’ll get to both of these techniques someday though, and I’ll be sure to show you the results if it works the way I’m expecting.
Purple Hydrangea
So, the last shot for today is number 1466. When I’m out and about, say for a shopping trip or something where I don’t go fully kitted out for photography, I often take just my camera with one lens fitted in my Lowepro Toploader bag, with a little pouch of goodies like my blower and spirit level, spare batteries and a few filters etc. attached to the side of the bag. In that pouch I often also have a LensBaby 2.0, which I will sometimes drop onto my camera to shoot some shots just for fun. The thing is the LensBaby will actually allow you to take some pretty good shots, even though it’s really cheap and easy to use. In this shot we can see what I think is the flowers of the pomegranate tree. The fruit is actually already quite large behind these flowers so I think I’m IDing this correctly.
Pomegranate Flowers
For those of you that have never used a LensBaby, they’re really fun to play around with, and one of the things that I find really fun is how you change the aperture. Basically the lens comes with a little case that contains a number of rings and a tool for pulling the ring already in place out from the front of the lens, and then you just drop the next ring in, and it is held in place by a bunch of magnets. Actually, thinking about it, I’m not sure without checking which is magnetized. There are a number of shiny silver studs in the front of the lens, but the ring itself, although pretty flexible, actually looks more like magnetic material than the studs. Either way, magnetism holds the rings in place. For this shot, I had placed the f2.8 ring in the front of the lens. This gives you just about enough aperture to shoot a sharp image, but really still allows you to play with that LensBaby look, where everything else in the scene seems to be just flowing away from the sharp area. You focus LensBabies by pushing in or pushing the front of the lens away from the camera body, and you move the sweet spot, the part of the lens that is in focus around, by simply moving the front of the lens around. You get instant feedback from in the viewfinder, so it’s easy enough to do, but I do find that focusing can be a little bit hit and miss, especially when using the f2.8 aperture ring or no ring at all, which makes the lens f2.0. You also need to bear in mind that the more you bend the LensBaby, the less accurate your camera’s meter will function, so you have to be pretty careful with exposure, either using exposure compensation or go to Manual mode. As long as you’re shooting digital, you’ll be fine though, as you can just keep checking your histogram and adjust exposure as necessary to keep things sweet.
That’s it for this week. I hope you’ve enjoyed these first two single exposures episodes. Before we finish I’d like to say a huge thank you to all of you that nominated this Podcast in the Podcast Awards. As usual I was totally unaware that this was coming up and started calling for nominations from the 12th of July, when there was actually just three days of voting left, so we may well have missed the boat there, but still, it was great to see you guys rallying around trying to drum up nominations. Thanks again for all of your support.
Remember that the Movement assignment is underway. All entries should be shot after Monday the 25th of June, up until the end of the Assignment on August the 5th, 2007. You’ll be able to upload your entries to the assignment album on mbpgalleries.com until the end of Sunday the 5th anywhere in the world, so no need to worry about time-zones. For more details, take a listen to episode 92.
So that’s it. Thanks for listening, and we’ll speak again next week. Bye-bye.
Show Notes
The music in this episode is from the PodShow Podsafe Music Network at http://music.podshow.com/
Audio
Subscribe in iTunes for Enhanced Podcasts delivered automatically to your computer.
Download this Podcast in MP3 format (Audio Only).
Download this Podcast in Enhanced Podcast M4A format. This requires Apple iTunes or Quicktime to view/listen.
by Martin Bailey | Jul 10, 2007 | Art Talk, Musings, Podcast
This episode marks the start of what is going to be a continuous series in which I’ll show-case multiple individual or smaller groups of shots that would not in themselves make a full episode, and provide my thinking behind the image along with any relevant tips and techniques I might have. Sometimes it will just be a showcase with nothing specific to say about it. I intend right now having gone through my online gallery to talk about 12 images in this and the next episode. There are no plans after that, but I will almost certainly add more individual shots to my gallery as time passes, so in the future, we’ll definitely see a part 3 and a part 4 etc. I could probably find a fair few other shots as well to talk about, but haven’t selected any more at this time. If you have a particular image from my online gallery at martinbaileyphotography.com that you would like to know more about, and that I haven’t already mentioned in a previous episode, please do drop me a line using the contact form linked in the top menu at my Web site, or by private message in the forum, and I’ll add it to the list for future episodes. I’ve mentioned an email address a few times in recent months, but that has now somehow gotten on to some spam mailing lists, so unfortunately, for the majority of you that use the Internet for positive reasons, I’ve decided to disable it. That means that once again the only way to contact me if you don’t already know my private mail address is via the forum or contact us form.
So, the first image I want to look at today is number 363. This was shot in the grounds of a temple on my way back from a walk around a park not far from my Tokyo apartment. It is of a Dainichi Nyorai statue, basically a type of Buddha statue. The reason I wanted to talk about this image today is to emphasise that the most obvious subject is not always the most effective. Here, instead of focusing on the face of the statue, I decided to focus on one of the somewhat soiled bronze lotus flowers positioned on a long stalk to the side of the statue. Shot back in 2004, I was using my old 10D, with my 100-400mm lens at 275mm. To throw the face of the Buddha out of focus as much as possible I opened the aperture up as wide as it will go for this focal length, which is f5.6, and this gave me a shutter speed of 1/10th of a second in this light. Looking back at the EXIF data for this, I should have selected ISO 400, to get a faster shutter speed, but I actually had selected 200. Handholding this at 1/10th of a second means that it is slightly soft. Definitely softer than I would like, but it still works relatively well and this image has actually been used in a US based magazine on Buddhism called “The Light of Consciousness”, so some others seemed to like it too.
Lotus and Dainichi Buddha
I think this shot may not have worked so well if the lotus flower had been cleaner. It is perhaps tempting to brush it clean, but the earthy feeling added by the bits of dried grass and dirt stuck to it work quite well for me. Then you can also see that I positioned the features on the face of the Buddha strategically in the right side of the frame, with the eyes, nose and mouth clearly visible, though out of focus. The bindhi or the spot on the forehead of the statue is also clearly visible kind of driving home the fact that this is a statue of Buddha.
Gear Down – Approaching Runway…
The next image I wanted to look at today is number 465. Here luck meets preparation, as it often does, when I captured a Green-Banded Swallowtail butterfly coming in to land on an Orange Cosmos flower. There were a few of these butterflies fluttering around the Cosmos patch in a park here in Tokyo, and I was tracking some of them with my 100-400mm lens, hoping for a shot like this. Apart from the fact that I clipped the tip of the left wing of the butterfly, it all came together here. I don’t even remember if the butterfly actually landed on the flower after this, but with his head and front legs just entering the depth-of-field here, and the flower perfectly crisp, it really looks to me as though the butterfly has his gear down coming in to land. As usual, I was making sure I had no distracting elements in the background by watching the angle I was shooting from, ensuring that only the blotches of orange against the green background made up the backdrop.
Again shooting with the aperture wide open at f5.6, I had the lens set to its longest focal length of 400m and the ISO at 200, giving me a shutter speed of 1/800th of a second. I find with shots like this patience is very important, as well as luck. You can have everything come together in just a few minutes if you are lucky, but really spending an afternoon at least, just shooting and shooting, can really increase your chances of getting something that stands out a little more. Of course, if you’re aiming to shoot wildlife that is harder to come by, or you want just the right conditions, you will have to invest much more time and often money, but the fact is most of us can’t go that far for one reason or another. Usually for me, apart from a few extended trips a year, most shooting is done on either one or two days over the weekend, within driving distance of home, so getting yourself to the right place with the equipment to capture your intended subject and giving yourself plenty of time can give you more than a good chance of capturing something to be proud of, like I am of this shot.
This next shot, number 504, is one of those that I shot on more of a family outing type trip, as I was walking through the backstreets in Kyoto with my other half. Kyoto is a beautiful place, steeped in culture, and oozing with photo opportunities. I have to admit, I can’t really pinpoint why I like this photo. All I know is that whenever it shows up on my desktop in a slideshow of my shots, it captures my attention. Trying not to sound too vain, I of course like all of my shots that I display in my slideshows, but obviously some stand out more than others. I usually understand why, but this one just grabs me for a reason I can’t place, so I thought I’d include it here anyway. This was shot towards the end of 2004 with my 20D now, and the 100mm macro lens. It was raining, which explains the little twinkly lights on the end of some of the leaves. Because it was overcast and raining I used an ISO of 400, which with an aperture of f3.5 gave me a shutter speed of 1/80th of a second. I was in aperture priority mode and had applied -1 stop of exposure compensation to stop the background becoming too bright due to the large patch of dark leaves in the frame. The camera would have also tried to make the scene brighter, more like a sunny day, and the atmosphere would have been lost. You can see that I included the old style window on the house making up the background, and there’s the diagonal top of the roof around the doorway, and the bamboo screen on the upstairs window that are often used in Japan to stop too much hot sun from entering a room during the day. These are kind of graphic elements and shapes, but because I focused on the overhanging leaves in the foreground with a wide aperture, they’re out of focus. They’re in focus enough for us to be able to make them out though, and this makes us work a little harder to understand the shot, and split the graphic, man-made elements from the natural elements of the leaves. Maybe this is why I like the image, but I’m not sure.
Kyoto Autumn Leaves
Seeds (not black and white)
In image number 573, you can see what initially seems to be a black and white image. This is in fact though shot in colour, and not converted in any way. The file is still a colour image. I shot this in January 2005, again with the 20D and the 100mm macro lens. I was walking in the nature research institute not far from my home in Tokyo and noticed this dried up flower head with the seeds kind of mummified, left over from the previous autumn. It was just sitting in the shadows, waiting to be photographed, and because of the shadows, the scene seemed to have lost all its colour, apart from a slightly detected brown cast of the stem of the flower itself and the dried grass in the background. Again shot at ISO 400 because of the low light, an aperture of f5.6 gave me a shutter speed of 1/80th of a second for this shot too. The depth-of-field from an aperture of f5.6 at this distance is quite shallow, but keeps enough detail in the back of the flower for us to still make out the overall shape, and yet throws the background out of focus so much that it’s just a patchy layer of bokeh, which is what I’m usually trying to do with my photographs. Winter in Tokyo is relatively warm in comparison to say England, where I was brought up, or Hokkaido, the bestest place in the whole-wide-world, but still, on this day there was quite a nip in the air, and I recall how clear and fresh that cold air was as I shot this. Or maybe it wasn’t quite that cold? I can’t help but think that maybe my memories of this day are being altered by the stark appearance of this wintered, withered flower head. This reminds me that photographs are not just a record of an event or a particular day or subject, but as our actual memory of the day fades, photographs become that memory. In years to come, if my memory does fade totally, so that nothing is left, I will be able to look back at these images and remember these years that I spend in Tokyo, assuming that I’m no longer living here of course, and recall everything, though probably filling in lots of gaps with the imagination that I hope will still be intact, even if the memories aren’t.
Now let’s look at image number 1026, shot almost exactly a year ago, at the end of June 2006, with my 5D and trusty 100mm macro once again. I titled this photo “Gas Mask” for reasons I hope will be obvious if you’re viewing the image along with me. A little ID work after the shoot revealed that this is a female Astochia virgatipes, a type of large fly, native to Japan. With ISO 200 I shot this hand held with an aperture of f4 for 1/125th of a second. I should also mention that I was using the Macro Twin-Lite MT-24EX, which is a strobe system from Canon that allows me total control over the angle and strength of both of the strobe heads attached to a mount on the front of the lens. Because I was using the Twin-Lite, I could have gone for a smaller aperture, but the shallow depth-of-field here again helps to keep our focus on the most interesting part of the subject, which are those big rainbow coloured insect eyes and the straw like mouth protruding down below them. It also allowed me to get the front legs pretty much in focus and we can also make out the second set of legs behind those. The torso of the insect becomes just a pale fuzzy blur though, kind of acting as a backup element for the gas mask like face. It’s all too easy when shooting insects with macro lenses to get into the habit of bulls-eyeing them in the center of the frame, especially when hand-holding your camera, because focusing is much easier that way. I really here though just wanted to say that unless you are really just documenting a species, with no intention of making an artistic image, you really want to still keep composition in the forefront of your mind. Here you can see that I’ve used the rule of thirds by moving the subject away from centre to the left vertical third line. This of course increases the amount of leaf we can see, and is much better balanced than it would have been had I bulls-eyed the subject.
Gas Mask
Let’s look at one last image for today, which is number 1152. Here we see, again the face of a statue of Buddha. This is the Amida Nyorai at the Sensouji temple in Asakusa, a popular spot for both Japanese and foreign tourists visiting Tokyo. I go there once a year or so, sometimes just for the hell of it, but more often these days when friends come to town and I head out to show them the sites, as on this occasion. Unfortunately, for my friends that is, I can’t go to these places without taking a camera, so I generally keep them waiting to varying degrees while I get shots like this. It was raining quite heavily on this day, and the thing that caught my eye with this subject is the rain that had run down the face of the Buddha giving the appearance that the status was crying. It’s a relatively large statue, so I put the 1.4X extender on my 70-200mm lens and shot from far enough back to get a good angle at the face. I didn’t want to shoot from too tight an angle, looking up at the statue. Again, a dark subject on an overcast, rainy day, so I applied minus 1.3 stops exposure compensation in Aperture Priority mode to keep it necessarily dark. The aperture was f4, the widest for this lens with the 1.4X extender, but at this distance, it’s enough to keep the whole face and the hair on the right side in focus, yet once again give me some nice out of focus bokeh in the background. I tried this in black and white, and one of the Lightroom presets actually really brings this out. I might upload another version at some point, but for now, I kind of like the swirly patches of green caused by the leaves on the trees behind the statue. Note too that I purposefully cropped very tightly on the face here. I didn’t want to leave too much room to the top or bottom of the face, so that the viewer can see without doubt what I’m trying to portray, which is the tears of the statue. Also note that I prefer the landscape, horizontal aspect rather than portrait for this. I shot a couple of vertical portrait frames, cropping in even closer on the face, but that became too much. The bokeh either side of the face here help by adding balance, in my opinion at least. The ISO was set to 200 by the way, which gave me a shutter speed of 1/30th of a second, so I was relying heavily on my image stabilization while hand-holding for this shot.
Crying Buddha
Apart from the exposure compensation and composition tips though, there’s really nothing more to say about this other than the need to keep your eyes and mind open to opportunities like this. I’m sure that ninety percent of you would have also seen this image, had you walked around the side of the temple, but this is what I wanted to briefly talk about before we close. Every time I go to this temple, there’s no one in the grounds or at least very few people. Everyone walks along the row of small stalls that line the pathway up to the temple, and go inside for a quick pray, but from the number of people I see either side or behind the temple, I can only deduce that 99% of them simply turn around and walk back down the same route, out of the temple grounds. I’ve spoken about this before, way back in episode 3, but it’s amazing what you can find by just looking behind yourself every so often. Staying aware of what’s going on behind you and taking a look besides or behind what it is easy to think is the main subject. When walking with friends I sometimes unnerve them by turning around or peering into places that people wouldn’t normally look. I’m pretty much constantly on the lookout for things like this Buddha, that well deserve to be photographed, if only we venture into their domain. I’ve actually come away from certain locations in the past without a single shot of the main attraction. It often doesn’t even appeal to me photographically, but most people can’t see why I’d do this. The way I see it is, if I want to simply document the place, I might well shoot a few frames, but they would simply remain on my hard drive as just that, a document. A reminder to me of what I’d been to see. Shots like this will rarely make my online gallery, or become the subject of my Podcasts.
Hopefully I’ll be striking a cord with some of these image discussions. Again, please do mail me if you would like to hear about any other images in my online gallery. When you do so, please include the URL from the bottom of the image page, and not from the address bar of your browser. The browser address is relatively dynamic, changing depending on how you got to the image, but the URL below the image is a permanent, absolute link. This goes too for mailing links to your own or other members’ images in the mbpgalleries.com site, where many of you are sharing and commenting on each others’ work.
I do need to quickly apologise for around half a day’s outage of both Web sites last week. I don’t think any data was lost, but I did receive a few email from members saying that they’d received a mail saying they had received a Private Message in the forum, but when they looked there was nothing there. I thought at first this might have been caused by the sender deleting the mail from their outbox before the recipient had viewed it, but as there were two people on the same day, I’m thinking they might have been lost at the beginning of the outage. So if you sent someone a PM on Thursday or Friday last week, please check to see if the recipient actually got it. Sorry again for this inconvenience and for the inconvenience caused by the outage itself, and thanks very much for all of your supportive comments once the site came back up.
One last piece of housekeeping before we finish – remember that the Movement assignment is underway. All entries should be shot after Monday the 25th of June, up until the end of the Assignment on August the 5th, 2007. You’ll be able to upload your entries to the assignment album on mbpgalleries.com until the end of Sunday the 5th anywhere in the world, so no need to worry about time-zones. For more details, take a listen to episode 92.
And with that, all that remains to be said is have a great week, whatever you have planned. Bye-bye.
Show Notes
The music in this episode is from the PodShow Podsafe Music Network at http://music.podshow.com/
Audio
Subscribe in iTunes for Enhanced Podcasts delivered automatically to your computer.
Download this Podcast in MP3 format (Audio Only).
Download this Podcast in Enhanced Podcast M4A format. This requires Apple iTunes or Quicktime to view/listen.
