Being organised

Having now reached week 9 of the course (glad to hear I’m not the only one behind in the schedule, Wanda!) it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that ‘Being Organised’ is a very good idea if you’re doing T189. Not only will you have the photos that you have already taken and stored on your hard drive (some of which might be good subjects for editing once you’re more familiar with the digital darkroom techniques), but you will also have the images that you take during the course of T189 – which could be quite a lot. I was astonished to discover than I had about 5000+ images before I even started the course! The first video tutorials are actually devoted to the important task of ‘Being Organised’ and there is one actually titled “Now where did I put that rhino?”

The Adobe Photoshop Elements 5 software provided as part of the course is not only used for the tutorials but also incorporates an ‘Organiser’ so you can keep track of all your images using tags and collections. It stores images by default in My Pictures …. which is NOT where I store my digital camera images unfortunately. I have a separate folder called Cameras inside which are two folders, one for my Fuji Finepix images (my current camera) and the other for the Kodak DX3500 (our previous camera). I also back these folders up frequently to DVD and to ‘Goliath’ our Maxtor OneTouch external hard drive.

Even more annoying, once you have PSE 5 on your computer, it likes to have total control over your images and gets really cross if you start reorganising folders and images outside its interface. It is, of course, possible to use PSE 5 to move images around and create folders but it’s not as simple and straightforward as using Windows Explorer. If you move images outside its interface, it complains bitterly that images have become disconnected from the catalogue and displays a grey box broken in two just to confirm the fact. Furthermore, any drive or media that you connect to your computer or insert into a CD/DVD/Zip/Flash drive is immediately subject to scrutiny by PSE 5 to determine if there are any images on there. Then it offers to catalogue them for you … whether you want them catalogued or not!

The only way I’ve found of squashing this annoying ‘bossiness’ of PSE 5 is simply to single right click on the little camera icon in the taskbar and select ‘disable’. This means it’s loaded but not active and you don’t have it popping up intrusively every time it detects an image that it wants to catalogue. Then, if you re-enable it before you connect your camera or card reader, it can do its stuff and then you can send it back to its slumber again.

My advice, if you want to keep your T189 coursework images separate, is to be pro-active from the beginning and create a folder in My Pictures called ‘Elements’ or ‘T189′ with subfolders for the first eight weeks when you’ll be taking images as part of your assignment. Weeks 9 and 10 are devoted to the ECA so they will probably contain a selection of images from the other eight folders anyway. Then you can point PSE 5 to the correct folder for the week when you are downloading your images from your camera or card reader. You might even create subfolders within each week folder for images straight from the camera with no editing (so you can preserve your original images) as well as another for images you are working on and possibly even another  for the actual images that you submit to the OpenStudio website. It will also make it easy to back up your T189 images to external media like a CD or DVD for safekeeping.

Don’t forget that Elements will catalogue ALL your images and, when I checked the first catalogue it created on my computer, I found it was even adding website navigation buttons and animated gif graphics. There may be an option to prevent it from including .gif images but I hadn’t found that when I installed Elements and it compiled the catalogue.

So, to summarise, my advice is to make sure you create folders so you can specify where your images are saved, use tags and collections (as explained in the video tutorials) to organise and catalogue your images, disable PSE 5 when you’re not using it to prevent it being intrusive and BACK UP your T189 or existing image collections regularly to external media so you don’t lose them.

Now I’m off to my digital darkroom to practise some of the interesting new techniques introduced in week 8 …

Catching up

I haven’t had much time on the computer over the last couple of days because The Artist has needed it for Gallery work. Also the weather has been so changeable that I haven’t been able to get out and take any photos either. It’s midsummer and it feels more like March!

So I copied the .avi tutorials onto a DVD and booted up my laptop, intending to work downstairs, but I found that I had sound and no video – just like I had done when I first tried to run them on the Office desktop. That was a severe disappointment because there’s only one phone line and only one broadband modem – both attached to the Office desktop where The Artist was working. So I couldn’t even go to the T189 website, follow the link to download the codec that made the video work properly and resolve the problem.

Never mind, I thought, son is away and his computer is even MORE powerful that the Office desktop so I headed into his room, booted his computer … and got exactly the same result.  Now all three of these computers are running Windows XP Home SP2 and are updated to WMP 11 so I’m at a loss as to why they won’t run the .avi videos without downloading the extra codec. I tried Realplayer … no luck … the DVD players … still no luck … this was getting very frustrating…

In the end, the only way I could watch the Week 8 tutorials (yes, folks, I am behind with the course) was to get the original DVD supplied for T189 and try that on son’s computer. Fortunately, given the ‘oomph’ that his computer packs (he plays a lot of computer games) it made short work of the tutorials and I got to watch the first four all the way through without any glitches, out-of-synch problems or crashes.

But this only goes to show that the new video tutorials haven’t completely cracked the problems that some students experienced when trying to watch them.

Sunday Gardening

I spent this afternoon gardening and was hoping to take my camera with me to catch any inspiration … unfortunately it poured with rain for most of the time so I was stuck in the greenhouse, taking cuttings and potting up young plants. Given that my greenhouse isn’t watertight, the rain was hammering on the roof so hard it felt like it was trying to break the glass and the drips were multiplying exponentially, I decided to leave the less-than-waterproof camera back in the house.

So this is one I took earlier …

“Heart of Fire”
Close-up of one of the huge blooms on my Benfica amaryllis – the colour has proved really difficult to capture effectively but I think this is a reasonably good result

Stuck indoors :-(

This morning dawned bright and clear with brilliant sunshine, blue skies, a few hazy clouds and a gentle breeze. I SOOOO want to be out with my camera, exploring, experimenting and enjoying myself …

… instead I’m stuck indoors at the computer, ‘on duty’ in our Gallery until at least lunchtime while The Artist is out painting. Even then there’s no guarantee that I’ll be able to get out this afternoon because he may well want to go out painting again after lunch…

I don’t think the Gallery is going too be busy in any sense of the word – the weather and the coming & going nature of holiday Saturdays will see to that. So I shall just have to knuckle down and get on with those tutorials that I’ve now completed downloading from the T189 website in .avi format to replace the Flash ones that didn’t work properly.

These are some of the results of the ‘ageing an image’ tutorial using Elements:

I spotted these arum lilies on sale, displayed in a bucket of water, at the gate of a farm, during a recent walk. I thought they would make a good subject for an aged sepia image.

This is the circular granite Coastguard Tower standing atop Telegraph Hill, the highest point of St. Marys at a shade under 170ft, in the company of the Decca navigation mast and various radio dishes and antennae for transmitting telephone calls and TV signals (yes, we’re still firmly analogue here – and NO cable!) . It probably DID look like this a hundred years ago!

This was taken on an unexpected sea journey back to the mainland after the May half term week with my daughter because fog had grounded the helicopters. Scillonian III came into service in May 1977 so she definitely wasn’t around a hundred years ago!

This is a typical scene on Scilly – a punt drawn up above high tideline and turned over to prevent it filling with rainwater. I liked the diagonal composition with the lobster pot on one side but I couldn’t quite get the angle I wanted. This one is a candidate for the ‘blurring the background’ tutorial in Elements, I think.

Now back to Elements and the tutorials …

Feet … meet ground …

Yes, it’s been one of ‘Those’ days today – up earlier than usual, getting stuck into work two hours ahead of schedule, lots of running around, galloping up and down stairs (four flights …) and barely snatching half an hour for lunch. Even this evening hasn’t panned out as arranged (no studying or T189 tutorials) and I’m conscious that I still have quite a lot of catching up to do over the weekend. So I haven’t even touched my camera today and it’s sitting alongside the computer looking rather forlorn. It’s the first day in quite a while that I haven’t used my camera.

The weather hasn’t been conducive to taking photographs anyway because we’ve had lots of heavy showers, however the skies have been very dramatic. The torrential downpours speak of thunderstorms in the vicinity although we’ve not seen any lightning or heard any thunder. Right now we have towering ominous steel-grey clouds marching ponderously over the northern sector of the sky but overhead it’s a pale clear blue and the birds are all still singing loudly in the trees.

It’s Midsummer’s Day so tonight will be the shortest night. It never feels like this is the halfway point of the year because July and August are still to come…. but then, I’ve always preferred spring and autumn to summer

Hopefully tomorrow will present more fruitful opportunities for using my camera … the agapanthus are beginning to come into flower and I fancy trying to get some abstract close-ups of those intricate blue flower heads.

Activity 7.3.4 Visual Narrative

This particular activity is causing some anguish for students of T189 because of a perceived discrepancy between the instructions and the illustration of the concept on the website. The instructions actually say ” Spend up to one hour taking three images which, when displayed consecutively, tell a story” but the example, displayed above the instructions, shows a single image sliced diagonally into six sections, each illustrating one frame taken as a man with a rucksack on his back jumps from one rock to another.

I understood the assignment instructions to mean that I had to take three (or more) images narrating a progression of actions or situations. But many students have interpreted it to mean producing one image comprising several shots of the progression. Since this isn’t actually demonstrated in any of the tutorials, it has left many students feeling lost and frustrated because they don’t know how to go about it using the Elements digital darkroom.

Of course, the gurus and detectives of the T189 conferences were quickly onto the problem and came up with various suggestions and instructions involving opening multiple images, tiling, cascading, resizing and so on. So there is an interesting mix of images being put up on OpenStudio. You know, you could get seriously bogged down in Elements trying to learn and use some of these effects!

When you upload your three narrative images to OpenStudio there’s a good chance that the three won’t be displayed consecutively anyway – if a lot of students are uploading at the same time, which is often the case in the evenings and at weekends, then there may be two, three or more other images between your three. I think this is probably why so many students are attempting the three-in-one approach.

I’m trying hard not to get hung up on some of the more complex tasks. This week’s recommendation is a total of up to five hours ‘in the field’ taking photographs and I can’t see me getting anywhere near that! But I have successfully completed the tutorial to ‘age’ a photograph and now have some very nice sepia images of Arum Lilies, boats, coils of rope and Coastguard Tower. So I am making progress

Comfort zones

Having been treated to breakfast in bed this morning by The Artist (since the weather was horrid outside and he couldn’t go out painting), I tentatively brought up the subject of T189 and the concept of ‘comfort zones’ which we discussed for some time over mugs of tea.

I explained that I had come to the conclusion that photographing people was definitely outside my photography comfort zone. Apart from immediate family, where I tend to use photography as a sort of visual diary, I very rarely point my camera at people unless they are a reasonable distance away. The complications and implications of photographing people, especially children, has been discussed in the T189 conferences. It was felt that female photographers were more accepted when it specifically came to photographing children whereas male photographers found themselves subject to considerable suspicion. This is sad because children are fantastically photogenic.

Personally, I dislike having my photograph taken and I know The Artist feels the same way. This is despite me having taken quite a few photographs of him painting ‘en plein air’ with his easel, small adjustable sun brolly, Tilley hat and rucksack. He hates the ones that show his face and much prefers the ones taken at oblique angles that cast his face into shadow or obscure it completely. (This is not to say that he is ugly – on the contrary, he is handsome and distinguished with strong features, pepper-and-salt hair and beard, and ready smile ….)

Not that I’m going to be photographing people today because the weather is wet – in fact, it’s just started pouring down again – and there are very few people out and about anyway. So it’s a morning for getting on with Gallery tasks while The Artist is restocking a local outlet that sells his giclee prints and our range of cards.

I feel a cup of coffee calling me ….

Week 7 Assignment

I’m finding this one quite challenging because it requires me to step outside my ‘comfort zone’ and approach photography from directions I’ve never taken or even considered before. There are three activities included in Week 7 and the Assignment comprises six images but not all from the same activity.

So the first activity is:

Composing images in the frame to alter their meaning

Spend up to 2 hours taking photos using composition conventions such as framing, anchorage, juxtaposition and mis-en-scène. Can you create an impression of a false reality for the viewer? For example, can you make something look like it is happening when it isn’t? Or can you, for example, make one person look much taller than another? Remember that in this activity you should not use the digital darkroom to manipulate your images!

How much control over the representation of truth do you have with your camera? 

The second activity is:

Visual narrative

Spend up to one hour taking three images which, when displayed consecutively, tell a story. It could be a simple one such as people waiting at a bus stop, people getting on the bus, then the bus departing, or it could be something far more subtle or complex. What is important is to succinctly frame the key elements of the narrative. The aim of this task is to enable you to develop an awareness of the communicative aspect of your images [...]

The third activity is:

Exploiting conventions                                                                                                                                                               Consumer magazines use photography very powerfully to make us desire things. If you spend time looking at different types of magazine (for example travel, fashion, food, cars, wildlife, outdoors, hairdressing and beauty) you may notice that each category has its own conventions of the genre such as framing, angle, lighting, mis-en-scène, etc. Look through some different types of magazine and note the conventions of genre that you see. Spend up to 2 hours taking some photos that consciously exploit the aesthetic conventions you have observed.

I need to sit down with a big mug of tea, a notebook, and mull this one over, I think …

A story of attitude

We don’t normally open our Gallery on a Sunday because it’s supposed to be our ‘Day Off’ but, of course, when it’s your own business, the rules fly out of the window on occasions. So this morning was mostly sunny and The Artist went out to complete a watercolour painting he’d been working on. Apart from a brief shower of heavy rainspots, he was OK and returned at lunchtime feeling reasonably satisfied with the result. Anyone who knows an Artist will be aware that they are never fully satisfied … they always feel that they could have done this better or tackled that differently … you get the picture? (sorry, awful pun!)

After lunch it was heavily overcast but not raining so we decided to open the Gallery as there were quite a few people walking past along the beach path. The Artist was doing some framing and I was studying in the office. We were pleasantly surprised by a visit from a lady and gentleman who stayed with us in the final year of running the guest house (we’ve now got self-catering). In the meantime the rain set in, the walkers all hurried home to get dry and I made a big pot of tea so we could chat.

During the course of the chat, we got talking about photos and cameras because he said he’d forgotten to recharge the battery of his videocam so it had gone into a sulk half way through a boat trip to the Bishop Rock Lighthouse this morning. He then opened the rather nondescript carrier bag he’d put on the counter and produced a large, black, heavy ….. FILM camera! Not only was it a film camera but he was shooting using a BLACK AND WHITE film – sixteen shots to a film, he told me – and every one had to count. I was amazed! He had to buy his films from a specialist supplier and send them away to a specialist developer for processing.

He mentioned that he’d been a member of his local camera club since the late sixties and had thousands upon thousands of photographs and slides. He didn’t mind being called a ‘Dinosaur’ by other (presumably younger) members of the club as digital cameras became more popular and he still stuck to film. But, sadly, the atmosphere in the club soured towards the older members who still preferred film and he said he’d left, hinting at some quite unpleasant and hurtful exchanges.

I found that extremely sad because I’m sure almost everyone involved in T189 would be fascinated to browse his collection – a rare treasure in these days of instant digicam results. He bemoaned the fact that he’d gone into Jessops and asked the young male sales assistant for empty cases to transfer some of his slide transparencies into (I can’t remember the exact term he used) but he drew a complete blank – the assistant had no idea what he was talking about. So he just shook his head and left the shop.

I felt privileged to have been able to talk to him and wished they could have spent longer with us, but they had to walk back to their hotel when there was a lull in the rain. However they said they planned to visit again in a couple of years time and I hope to be able to chat to him for longer then.

* * * * * * * * * *

You know, I still have the old Agfamatic 126 cartridge film camera that I took to Canada in 1973 when I was only a teenager …

AgfaPhoto – Wikipedia

Mine is the middle one in the panel of three images on the right – the Agfa Agfamatic 300 Sensor. I have about 500 photos taken with that over the nine weeks that I was in Canada. Unfortunately they’ve changed colour and faded quite significantly over the past thirty four years despite being kept in photo albums in a dark cupboard.

Kodak’s 126 film cartridge

Although the photos have faded, I still have all the original film negatives. Maybe one day I’ll choose the best and get them printed properly … if that is still an option.

Search terms used to find my blog

I’ve been exploring the WordPress ‘Dashboard’ and checked up on the search terms that have been used to find my blog. They made interesting and rather unusual reading:

Search Terms for 7 days ending 2007-06-17

• aqua-marina blog ou
• Maxtor OneTouch “system not found”
• t189
• the more you put in the more
• http://aquamarina.wordpress.com
• alphabet photography assignment
• Sesame Screensaver
•  wellies
• T189 blog

I was especially amused by ‘wellies’ and wondered what that particular searcher was looking for, as well as the Maxtor OneTouch error message which I’d mentioned in passing in the section about backing up.