| Tobacco farmer, Vinales | |
| Camera: Canon EOS 7D | Date: 18-11-2010 16:14 | ISO: 200 | Exp. Time: 1/250s | Aperture: 5.6 | Focal Length: 260.0mm (~421.2mm) | |
I’ve finally managed to publish my photography portfolio from Cuba. Take a look and let me know what you think…
Apologies if you use the RSS feed for my album – this will be fixed in a day or two.
If you’re one of those people who uses loads of Apple products, and is thinking of proposing Steve Jobs for canonisation, then you may be happy with how your iPad works, but if you’re trying to make it work effectively in a Windows-based environment you may have found shortcomings with the “out of the box” solutions.
It is perfectly possible to make the iPad play nicely as part of a professional Windows-based environment, but you do have to be prepared to grab the bull by the horns, dump most of the built-in apps (which are almost all pretty useless), and take control of both file management and communications via partner applications on the PC. This article presents some of my hard-won tips and recommendations on how to do this and get productive work out of the iPad’s great hardware.
| Sheltering from the elements - Vinales, Cuba, November 2010 | |
| Camera: Canon EOS 7D | Lens: EF70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM | Date: 18-11-2010 21:33 | ISO: 200 | Exp. bias: -2/3 EV | Exp. Time: 1/250s | Aperture: 4.5 | Focal Length: 120.0mm (~194.4mm) | Lens: Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM | |
I don’t know whether anyone else has this problem, but it can take me an inordinate amount of time to process photos from larger trips and events. Today is the anniversary of my return from my Cuba trip (as I’ve just been reminded by Breakfast News – it’s also the anniversary of the start of last Winter’s harsh weather). I finally finished processing the shots – last night!
In fairness to myself, I’ve also had a number of “event” shoots such as weddings which have taken priority at various times, but basically I now have a backlog of about 18 months worth of shots to sort out. Oh well!
All I have to do now is post the best to my main portfolio. Hopefully next week! 🙂
| Restful moggie - Vinales, Cuba | |
| Camera: Canon EOS 7D | Lens: EF-S15-85mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM | Date: 18-11-2010 20:18 | ISO: 200 | Exp. bias: 0 EV | Exp. Time: 1/125s | Aperture: 10.0 | Focal Length: 50.0mm (~81.0mm) | Lens: Canon EF-S 15-85mm f3.5-5.6 IS USM | |
After an inevitable delay while I set up my new PC, I’m finally back to sorting out some images. The new beast certainly does what I wanted it to. Processing an 18MP RAW file on the old laptop took up to 30s, now it’s less than 3!
I’m not a “cat person”. Whereas dogs are usually very docile around me cats are usually plain hostile, and even the friendlier ones usually make a bee-line for my scrotum with their claws… However, this moggie in Cuba wasn’t doing anyone any harm, and I liked both the “through the keyhole” effect and the restful colour palette in this shot. I hope it also lowers your pulse by a bpm or two.
I’m in the process of replacing my laptop, and yet again finding that the alleged miniaturisation and convergence of digital solutions is nothing more than a figment of marketeers’ fevered imaginations. I suppose that after the experience of my last desktop replacement (see here) I should have expected nothing more, but hope springs eternal…
I’ve been very happy with my 15″ Toshiba Satellite Pro, new in early 2009, but recently it’s been showing some signs of reaching the end of its economic life, plus the way I now develop my photographs is very compute-intensive, and a faster device would speed that activity up considerably. I also find that the relatively slow single 2.5″ disk leads to very slow startup times and virtual machine operations, both of which slow down my professional use.
Thus my first decision was that my new device should support an Intel Core-i7 processor and 64-bit Windows, at least 8GB RAM and ideally have solid state disks, at least for the boot drive.
The next driver was forced on me by the vagaries of the market. Prior to 2007, most laptops had a 4:3 (=16:12) aspect ratio, but suddenly the market decided that all laptops should be “widescreen”, with a 16:10 aspect ratio. This was great for viewing movies, but meant that for a given diagonal size the new devices were more than 10% smaller than before. Not much good if you’re working on text documents (usually of vertical orientation), or digital images with <3:2 aspect ratio, which is most of them… That’s one reason why my next laptop went from 12″ to 15″, just to maintain the vertical size of the display.
Now they’ve done it again! Almost all new laptops have a 16:9 aspect ratio, which means a further reduction of about 8% screen height for a given diagonal size. This is a right royal pain in the neck, particularly as it is typically accompanied by an increase in pixel resolution, which combine to make text and icons much smaller, just as I’m getting to that age where my eyes are starting to change, and slightly larger text would work better. There are other disadvantages too: a given laptop model is around 8% longer than it’s predecessor, so it may not even fit in the same bag.
This all appears to be driven by fashion, and targeted solely at those who watch movies on their laptops. The goal appears to be “true HD”, and hang the consequences. After some brainstorming, I can only think of three things short wide screens are good for:
On the other hand, they are much worse for:
So where does this put my laptop choice? After rather more agonising than usual, I’ve gone for a desktop, or should that just be “desk”, replacement system :), an Alienware M17x. This is very fast, has the usual stunning Alienware looks, and importantly supports dual disks, with a highly-rated quality screen. The screen is just slightly taller than the Toshiba, but the laptop is a full 5cm wider, and over 1kg heavier. It’s a good computer, but portability is definitely down a notch. The thing which makes it feasible, of course, is the iPad, which now fills the role of the portable, meeting-friendly launch to the Alienware cruiser. Admittedly carrying two devices increases the weight of my computer bag, but usually only until I have decanted the laptop into its base location for the day, and maybe it justifies the weight training…
Thus far, I’m impressed with the beast. CPU performance is certainly as expected, and I’m pleasantly surprised by battery life, at almost 5 hours in light usage. This makes up for the fact that the main power supply is about the size of a house brick, and although the laptop will run off a smaller Dell supply, it won’t charge the battery. On the disk side I’ve installed a Seagate Momentus hybrid drive as the secondary data drive, and that seems to be working well, but my first attempt to install the SSD for the boot drive didn’t work, so that’s still pending. What is annoying is that like all my previous laptops, the LCD panel is nowhere near correct colour calibration with the default profile, so I have to sort that out before serious photographic use. Further updates will follow…
To wrap up, here’s the potted history of my laptops since I started buying my own, and why:
Has anyone else noticed or suffered from this odd trend?
| "Helga", my Porsche 911, behind a tree | |
| Resolution: 1247 x 1870 | |
For the last couple of years, I’ve been working fairly regularly with a chap called Carl. The other day a group of us were chatting, and got to talking about cars we had owned. Among others, Carl had once owned a very souped-up Ford Escort. To explain how fast it was, he pointed out that he’d once “burned off a Porsche” in it.
My ears pricked up, and I interjected “You know, that once happened to me in my Porsche. I was at a set of traffic lights just outside Croydon, and some imp in a mark I Escort pulled up alongside, turned to me with a very cheeky grin, and then left me standing when the lights went green.”
And Carl said “The Sutton bypass. About 1987. Tobacco brown 911 with no rear wing.”
Yes. We were describing the same event from opposite sides of the dotted White line. It was him!
———————
We all occasionally experience odd coincidences, but this has to be a pretty wild one by any standards. It got me thinking – what are the chances of re-encountering someone from an anonymous past event like this?
I reckon that a significant part of the British population have timelines which will never intersect mine at first or even second hand. However between places I have lived and worked, places with which I have family, friend or work connections, events I attend and routes I travel the number of intersections in a lifetime (counting any individual once) must be quite large. Let’s say it’s 10 million. This includes “knows someone I know” and “in the same place at the same time” as well as more direct interactions.
Now I also reckon that I work with perhaps 20 or 30 people at any one time closely enough to have such a conversation, and that group changes at a rate of perhaps 10 people a year. Others might put the figure higher, but let’s use that for now. Therefore since 1987 maybe 250 people have added to that group.
It’s therefore very easy to come up with a crude estimate of the probability that some individual I crossed in my youth would end up working with me, at about 250 in 10,000,000, or 1 in 40,000. That’s about half the chance of winning £10 with a three number match in the British lottery.
However, that’s just the “latent coincidence probability”. You then have to factor in the chance of actually discovering it.
To come up in conversation at a range of 24 years an event has to be pretty memorable to at least one party, and recognisable to another. Trivial or indistinct events get forgotten. I suspect our traffic lights grand prix was one of many for both Carl and myself in our youth, but it’s memorable as the one in which the ancient Escort beat the (almost equally ancient) Porsche, in a way which left my friend and I in my car laughing rather than anything else. I have forgotten almost all the others, where Helga did what Porsche built her to do, and won.
There’s also an upper limit on memorability. If events are too dramatic or tragic they will also preclude conversation.
Even if you have a history of memorable events, they may just not come up in conversation. Carl and I have worked together for a couple of years, and not discussed old cars before. The topic could easily have come up when I was not in the room, or just not listening, and not been repeated.
These factors are more difficult to quantify, but I reckon there’s probably only a 1 in 100 to 1000 chance of discovering the co-incidence at the 24 year range of my example. So for a single event involving just one other main party we have a net probability of the order of 1 in 10 million that I’ll work with that other party, and then discover it. That’s about the same as winning the UK lottery jackpot!
Three factors make things more likely. Obviously if more than one other person was involved this increases the probability proportionately. There’s also a smaller than 10 million group of people whose paths are likely to cross several times because of location or other factors.
You also have to consider that most people have a pool of such events to draw on. We’re talking about events which would merit a special mention in the pub, a couple of paragraphs in the letter home, maybe a blog rather than just a tweet in today’s parlance. I reckon I accumulate these at the rate of one every few weeks. Therefore since my memory became really active, I have maybe 40×25 such events, a convenient 1000 to draw on.
Thus the probability for a given event is ~ 1 in 10 million, but the probability of any such coincidence drops back to ~ 1 in 10 thousand, and maybe down to 1 in a thousand for events based on a home location, a favourite sport or similar.
Now I reckon I’ve had a couple of such coincidences in my career. There are three possibilities: either my calculations are wrong, I’ve set the bar for what counts too low (increasing the number of potential events), or I’m just very lucky.
What do you think?
Stephen Hawking is not only, without question, one of our greatest surviving physicists, but also, remarkably given his disability, one of the field’s great communicators and educators. Having enjoyed his previous writing I was very much looking forward to his insights on the cosmological advances since A Brief History of Time. However, although this latest book is both entertaining and thought provoking, it ultimately left me frustrated with its failure to properly explain these new scientific concepts.
Read the full review 
This is an excellent adventure story, which quickly engages the reader and holds the attention through 500 action-packed pages. At the same time, it raises some thought-provoking observations on how Christianity has evolved, and how the dogma of major religions reflects political rather than spiritual necessities.
Read the full review
| Guests at the wedding of my friends Anna and Adam. Simply the best! | |
| Camera: Canon EOS 7D | Lens: EF-S17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM | Date: 24-09-2011 22:30 | ISO: 400 | Exp. bias: -2/3 EV | Exp. Time: 1/60s | Aperture: 5.6 | Focal Length: 68.0mm (~110.2mm) | Lens: Canon EF-S 17-85mm f4-5.6 IS USM | |
Not a lot to say about this one – it just made me giggle when I was reviewing the photos from a wedding I attended last weekend. Enjoy 🙂
I’m very happy when a film “does what it says on the tin”, but that can mean being badly disappointed when a film fails to live up to the hype attending a major release. After considerable expectation and many supportive interviews and reviews I was expecting rather more of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy .
I knew before going in that the film portrays espionage without action, an “inaction thriller” if you like. What I didn’t expect was that it also lacks humour, intrigue and to a surprisingly large extent, dialogue. So much time is allocated to the menacing glances and thoughtful fiddling that some sections might as well be silent. It’s as if the screenwriters and director got to points where Le Carre was describing characters’ internal thoughts, and decided that we could just be left to guess them.
What this also means is that the film lacks the complex plot twists which one might expect. If the characters don’t engage in conversation, then there’s little opportunity to dissemble. Problems like a damaged log book are resolved by simply finding the man who was on duty and asking him to recount his memories, not by any complex act of detection. When a key character who is supposedly dead resurfaces later in the film, there’s no explanation of the timeline, or how he has just been allowed to go back to his cover job with no explanation of his absence.
While the film has a stellar cast, most are sadly underused. The senior spies other than Smiley and the mole have maybe a few lines each and almost no interactions between each other – completely wasting the talents of some of our most senior actors.
The film is shot in a dull brown monotone, carefully stripped of any variation in colour, or tone, or subject, with the single exception of scenes at a key office party. The colour scheme goes well with an accurate portrayal of the dullness of ordinary lives in the 1970s. There’s one very good sequence where Benedict Cumberbatch has to exploit the weaknesses of the low tech environment to extract a key piece of evidence, but most of the period detail is treated as simple background rather than context, a crucial difference.
A spy film without explosions or chases is one thing, but when there’s no attempt to substitute intricate detection, verbal jousting or witty banter then it rapidly becomes a very dull thing indeed.
A few weeks ago the excellent Page Eight with Bill Nighy and Michael Gambon showed exactly how this sort of thing should be done. This much vaunted “film of the year” fails badly.
| Mountain stream at Graenfjall, Iceland | |
| Camera: Canon EOS 7D | Lens: EF-S17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM | Date: 26-08-2011 16:21 | ISO: 100 | Exp. bias: 0 EV | Exp. Time: 1/5s | Aperture: 14.0 | Focal Length: 26.0mm (~42.1mm) | Location: Grænafjall | State/Province: South | See map | Lens: Canon EF-S 17-85mm f4-5.6 IS USM | |
There’s a lovely moment in the film Sahara where Pitt and Giordano are following a typically desperate plan in the hope that if they can kill the villain his men will just surrender and lay down their arms. When, to their surprise, this starts to happen they look at each other and say simultaneously “That shouldn’t have worked…”. This is the photographic equivalent.
There are two schools of thought on how you should photograph moving water. One approach is to use a fast shutter speed and “freeze” the motion. I’m convinced that this is the best approach for large waterfalls, fast rivers or large waves, and you’ll see it in many of my photographs. As long as there’s enough light then there’s no major technical challenge with that approach.
The opposing school of thought is that you use a very slow shutter speed (typically a large fraction of 1s) and show the water as a blur. This expresses the direction of motion, but personally I don’t think it expresses the force or the dynamics so well. However, as Iceland has almost as many waterfalls as Venice has gondolas (see “Waterfalls, Waterfalls…”) I decided that this was an ideal opportunity to experiment.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the slow shutter speed approach does work, but it works best for small features with complex flow patterns, but relatively low flow speed/force. I’ve also reached the conclusion that a lazy man will work harder to avoid work than to actually do the job! 🙂
Here’s the official, recommended method to get a shot like the above:
In fairness, this method works well, even if your photography costs $10 a shot and you don’t see the results until six weeks after leaving the location. However, here is the alternative Andrew Johnston Patent Digital Method:
OK, if I’d had my Cokin filter holder in my bag I would have screwed it onto the front of the lens, which would at least have allowed me to brace my camera with both hands. What’s interesting is that Image Stabilisation technology is good enough that you can get decent hand-held shots at this shutter speed, and immediate digital review allows you to check their sharpness.
Next week – how to induce temporary paralysis so you can hand-hold for 25s for fireworks!
| "Steamed" - action shot of the author, by James Chambers | |
| Resolution: 531 x 397 | |
Iceland is a great place for photography, but you need to be properly prepared to get the best of it, and not come away disappointed.
First, unless you’re very good at research, navigation and off-road driving, you need a guide. Sure, you can get to the well-known sites a short drive from Reykjavik or along the coast road under your own steam, but you’ll miss many of the most stunning locations in the interior. However, if you want to spend serious time on your photography you need to be with a group, and guides, who understand your needs. I can’t praise highly enough the great service I had from first contact with Nature Explorer. Hawk and Finn are both great company, skilful drivers, knowledgeable and entertaining guides, and impressive photographers in their own right. Their administrative staff are also excellent, and their resilience to problems comforting. I’m very happy to recommend them.
Next, dump your preconceptions. Even short distances or intervals bring dramatic variation in scenery, weather and lighting. Well known sites may be quite crowded, or almost empty. A classic view may disappoint, and then half an hour later a less obvious subject may be portfolio material. Dedicated dawn-watchers may disagree, but in my view timing isn’t critical – “golden hour” extends well into the morning and from late afternoon, but more importantly the quality of your light is much more likely to be controlled by the weather than the hour. Iceland rewards being prepared more than missing breakfast and supper.
Protect your kit well, and carry spares for everything! Iceland is a harsh environment. You’ll be doing long distances on rough roads. The volcanic dust and ash gets everywhere, and is very abrasive. You will end up soaked by rain, waterfalls and geysirs (in my case, “all of the above”;)). The failure of my 15-85mm lens wasn’t the only hardware problem in our group, although the others were mainly more minor problems with things like batteries, filters, lens caps and retaining rings. Several cameras gained battle scars from knocks and falls. I also managed to destroy a pair of trousers and gave up on a faulty battery. Nature Explorer even had to resort to a spare super-jeep!
As a minimum, make sure you have a second camera body and a second “standard” lens (whatever that means for you). My cheaper Canon 17-85mm lens rescued my trip. Consider carrying three batteries for your main body in case one dies as happened to me. Also remember one of the hidden advantages of using mid-range Canon kit – someone else in the group may be able to help. You will end up shooting in wet or dusty conditions, so a Kata Rain Bag or similar, and cheap filters you don’t mind wiping with anything to hand are both essential!
Iceland is cold, but it’s not the temperature that gets you (for our trip it was consistently above freezing and up to 14C), it’s the wind. The answer is lots of layers. For me the combination of sweatshirt, microfibre jacket with detachable lining, warm hat and raincoat with hood was about right, but others might need even more. I can also recommend carrying a flask of coffee. I ended up buying one on the first day, and leaving it behind, and had to haggle with hoteliers a couple of times about filling it, but it was well worth the effort.
Deep pockets are useful in two different ways. In a practical sense they are a great solution to the ridiculous baggage limits airlines are progressively imposing. If you can shove a couple of lenses into your trousers and heavy batteries into your jacket then the baggage allowances become less of a problem.
In the metaphorical sense you need to be prepared for high prices – Iceland isn’t cheap, especially by the standards of say the USA or southern Europe. That said, by UK standards and given the current exchange rate it didn’t feel that bad. I will comment on the recommendation made by almost every web site and guide book to buy lots of booze at the incoming duty free store. I’m now convinced this is a con trick to get free beer for Icelanders. Unless you’re a real alky, don’t bother.
Don’t expect to get anything done on the go. I had visions of sitting in the jeeps reading, writing my blog on my iPad, or at least preparing for the next location, but despite Finn being a very smooth driver this was absolutely impossible – the roads are just too rough. Not for nothing does my map of Iceland have a road classification I have never seen before: “main road – unsurfaced”. 🙂
Be prepared for all photographic opportunities, and for lots of shooting. Although my Canon 7D got most use, the 550D also came into its own for wandering around Reykjavik, and I always had the S95 in my pocket for the unexpected. I shot at every focal length from 10mm to 300mm, and at every speed from 25s for the fireworks to 8 fps for the puffins in flight. I photographed landscapes, buildings, people and action. By the end of the trip I had exceeded my Cuba shooting total, having exposed around 2100 frames, with ~1150 (~30GB) retained for further processing after initial filtering. I used about 56GB of CF cards, plus a small amount on 2 8GB SD cards for the two smaller cameras.
There’s a saying “chance favours the prepared mind”. If that’s ever true, it’s true of photographing Iceland.
If you want to see more of my Iceland photography blog, or get a few specific location ideas, please go to www.andrewj.com/blog/iceland
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