stocksfamily.org » Photo

Loving the new web site tools!

richard — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 23:18:00 +0000

A little while back I posted about a plug-in for Windows Live Photo Gallery that adds support for uploading directly to SmugMug. Now, it gets even better – I’ve found a plug-in for Windows Live Writer to easily add photos from photos.stocksfamily.org into blog posts:

Grab it from the plug-in gallery on live.com.

SmugMug uploader for Windows Live Photo Gallery

richard — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 22:40:00 +0000

Well, that didn’t take long. Omar Shahine has whipped up a very nice publishing plug-in to enable Windows Live Photo Gallery to publish directly to SmugMug. Just gave it a whirl, and it works flawlessly!

http://www.shahine.com/garage/content/PublishOnSmugMug.aspx.

Bloody Adobe!

richard — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 22:15:00 +0000

As part of a school project, Campbell was using my camera over the weekend to take some pictures of the bits and pieces she had been using to make a fire extinguisher. As I do, I loaded the Nikon raw files into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, converting to Adobe’s digital negative format at the same time. Imagine my horror when I couldn’t convert the images to jpeg.

Turns out it’s all my own fault. I upgraded as soon as a new version was released.

It seems there is a bug in the DNG converter in version 1.4 of Lightroom. Not the version for Mac, apparently, only Windows. I guess the folks at Adobe still assume that anyone doing anything arty is using a Mac.

Thankfully, rolling back to the previous release was quick, painless, and restored what had been broken. But the real issue is why did this happen in the first place? It’s a pretty obvious piece of functionality that should be well and truly embedded in the test plans by this stage. If I was someone who depended on this software for my income I would be really upset (as opposed to mildly annoyed).

I can only imagine the outcry if, say, Microsoft released an update for Office that meant you couldn’t save an Excel file once you’d loaded it.

Amsterdam photos

richard — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 05:16:00 +0000

I’ve been pretty slack on uploading photos over the last few months. Campbell’s gallery is way out of date. In an effort to start making up for it, I’ve uploaded some pics I took in Amsterdam over the weekend. Check them out at http://stocksfamily.smugmug.com/gallery/5172079_QXwER.

Post-It picture paper

richard — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 03:23:00 +0000

I’ve just tried out one of the coolest (but let’s face it, most unnecessary) things I’ve seen in a long time – Post-It picture paper. Basically as the name implies, it’s a 4×6 inch piece of photo paper, but with the rear side coated with Post-It removable adhesive. Print quality in my Epson R210 is pretty good, and then you just peel and stick! And remove.. and stock… and remove… and stick…

Time lapse is fun

richard — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 23:57:00 +0000

Always wanted to muck around with this, but never got around to trying it. My camera (D70) doesn’t have an interval timer, but Nikon Capture makes it so easy!

Stick the camera on a tripod and aim it at whatever you like.
Connect the USB cable, making sure the camera is in PTP mode, not mass storage.
Fire up Capture Camera Control.
Select “Time lapse” from the menu, set your options, and away you go!

I used an interval of fifteen seconds, and just let it run while I was busy doing stuff around the back yard. I ended up with 448 shots, a span of almost two hours. Because I was planning to turn this into video anyway, I used the smallest jpeg setting the camera supports, which gave me a frame size of 1504 x 1000.

Next, I fired up my trusty copy of Studio. After first setting the default length of a new slide to one frame (the software default is four seconds) I dragged all 448 shots onto the timeline. Add some cheesy SmartSound for background music, and we’re away!

Here’s the results… it’s the old cliche of rapid cloud movement, but I like it anyway!