supersonic feet

Last night I went to the premiere of my best friend, Krishna’s first full skateboard film, Bish Cam. Two showings were held at the new Star and Shadow Cinema in Newcastle - an early performance for the younger skaters and a late over-18s showing.

Both showings went down a storm and Jackie (owner of Native skatestore and Krishna’s flatmate) and others (sorry, don’t know there names) helped set up a flat bank inside the cinema building (it’s still being built out) and everyone just went at it.

Plenty of photos in my flickr set and watch out for Bish Cam on DVD later in the year

When embarking on Random Photography Mission (TM), don’t do it in a huge forest an hour before sunset when no-one knows where you’ve gone.

Forests get dark a lot quicker than open fields thanks to all the trees. They’re also generally far less well signposted than roads. They also tend not to have very good mobile phone reception (trees again). These are all things that can lead quite quickly to becoming lost.

Last night I decided to go on one of my afore-mentioned Random Photography Missions and after driving for a short while, decided Hedley Hall Wood was the place to go. It’s near my old house and I used to walk the dog there occasionally. It wasn’t the easiest place to navigate then and it doesn’t get easier in fading light.

Anyway, I’d walked the length of the ‘main’ area and taken a few photos, but remembered having found a spot ages ago that overlooked the Beamish Open Air Museum. Having not found the spot so far, I carried on into the more dense forest path that eventually leads out onto a farm track through the forest.

It’s at this time that I did get the feeling I may get lost, as the point at which the path emerges onto the bigger track is quite obscured and only remotely obvious when coming from the opposite direction to which I’d be returning. Nonetheless I carried on in the direction of Beamish Burn (I vaguely remembered going that way a few years ago) but the light really was starting to disappear being in dense forest so I turned round before finding the spot I was after (it was a LONG walk back even if I didn’t get lost).

Needless to say, on the way back I missed the path I needed and walked about a further half-mile or so before deciding I really was in the wrong place (the walled private forest and bridge I hadn’t seen before gave it away). Time to turn back again and eventually I did find the little path marker I was after and it was then relatively straight-forward to get back to my car, very knackered.

On top of all that, I didn’t really get any particularly great photos. One or two decent ones, but as I’ve now noticed looking at them on a CRT at work, they’re quite dark. Ah well…

Lighthouse and fog horn

I’ve been taking lots of pictures at the coast near my Dad’s house recently.

After flickr finally adding pages to see comment activity on your photos from one place as part of their swish ‘gamma’ re-design, all was looking good.

Then tonight I tried to get back to the ‘create a flickr badge‘ page and found that their information architecture ain’t all that good. It’s taken me eventually searching flickr’s forums in order to get the link to the page I was after, where the link used to be on your main photos page.

Granted, it perhaps didn’t deserve to be on a user’s main photo page all the time as it’s something you only use now and then, but they seem to have gone from always available to extremely hard to find. I tried going through the various drop-down menus at the top of the page; looking at my account and profile pages; I even looked at the page with the link once and didn’t notice it (the Help > Tools page).

It really doesn’t stand out anymore. For such a handy feature, you’d think flickr would want it very easy to find. One reason I didn’t spot it even when on the right page (aside from the link not standing out in the least) is that the Tools page is under the Help section. To me, help sections are where you go for FAQs, support, etc. and not generally where I expect to find application functionality. Yes tools help you, but in a more functional than advisory way.

Anyway, I found it in the end, just a bit miffed at how awkward I found it.

Finished

Yep, I’m a bit knackered after building these two shelving units after work tonight. At least my reward seems to be a solution to my Ruby programming problem.

Or at least one small part of Sony anyway. Much has been made recently of Sony’s increasingly apparent loss of understanding of their target market over the Playstation 3, with rumours of stuff like overly-stringent DRM and licensing rights to use rather than selling games (not to mention the huge price of the PS3) and their never-ending trend of focussing on proprietary formats, but it looks like the latter might be loosening ever-so-slightly.

I was just browsing the Sony site again looking to see if there’s any sign of the W950i phone coming out and came across a big ad for a new Sony camera, the a100. I thought I’d check it out through curiosity and it turned out to be a D-SLR (Sony’s first I think?).

My next thought was that it would probably be stuck using Sony’s proprietary Memory Sticks given their track record on such things, but it turns out they’ve actually been sensible and used a Compact Flash slot instead (though still providing an adapter for Memory Stick Pro Duos). I don’t follow the photography scene, but it seems Sony have bought Konica-Minolta or something along those lines, so perhaps that’s the reason - the camera was mostly developed already with CF.

The other camera specs look pretty good too - a 10.2MP sensor, quick auto-focus and image stabilizing within the camera and a price point of $900 for the body only (about £515). I haven’t read any reviews yet, but if they’re good then perhaps my good friend Ken, who just ordered a Nikon D70s at the weekend, should have waited a bit

UPDATE: Seems Sony have just entered a partnership to jointly develop D-SLRs with Konica-Minolta.

Since I went on the MASER MIGLIA 8 last year, I’ve been getting a bit more involved with The Maserati Club (TMC) by helping redevelop their aging website. Through this, Seymour Pond (outgoing club president and editor of the club’s award-winning magazine, iL TRIDENTE) saw my photos from MM8 on flickr and decided to use a couple in the iL TRIDENTE article on the event.

I’m honoured that any of my photos were deemed worthy of printing in the magazine and last night I got a copy of the new issue from my Dad with the two photos in it. The first is a small one of the landscape surrounding the Grand Canyon framed with the doorframe of the Maserati Bora Paul Muizelaar kindly loaned my Dad for the trip.

The second was printed full-page and is the one I actually posted on this blog when I returned from the trip. It’s great to see one of your own photos printed full-page in a glossy magazine, so I’m quite proud of myself hehe.

I’ll try to post a picture of the magazine itself at some point.

On the website front, development of the spiffy new TMC site is still ongoing. The design is pretty much finalized now and club members at the dinner in the Panini Collection in Modena last month got a look at a recent revision. I’ve been working on the design with Andy Katz, with Seymour providing creative input as well and it’s been a great process to get such good suggestions and feedback from two guys with plenty of experience in design.

We’re now waiting for the structure and functionality of the website to be completed before I get to start building a system to run it all. I’ll refrain from posting a sneak-peek of the new design as I’d like to keep it a surprise for most of the members, so anyone who wasn’t in Modena gets to wait a month or two (or three looking at the list of great features to be developed!) for the site to launch.

Bora Bora!!

This looks a bit familiar, non?

Yeah, so I did buy a Canon Digital IXUS 50 (known as the Powershot SD400 outside Europe, and with an extra ‘ELPH’ tag after that in America).

The camera is indeed tiny. Somehow its size hadn’t quite registered with me when trying one in a shop, but when it arrived and I started opening the many-layered boxes to get at it I wasn’t sure there would be room left for a camera. And yet, there it was, no larger than a credit card in width and height (though I think it’ll be a while before we get a camera of this quality that’s actually as thing as a credit card).

So anyway, here it is sitting on my new laptop:

The picture quality is pretty damn good for such a small camera (it’s obviously not going to match the EOS 350D I took the above picture with, but that doesn’t mean it’s anything other than great still). It starts up fast; focuses fast and takes pictures fast. It’s fast.

I didn’t expect such a small camera to perform so well, especially with the continuous shot. I’d post some example photos if I had any that were worth it, but so far I’ve just been taking random pictures at home. As soon as I have some decent ones they’ll go on Flickr though.

I’ve just been looking at compact digital cameras with a friend who’s after one and I’m well impressed with the Canon IXUS 50/60 range. The picture quality looks good (on the screen of the camera at least) and the speed at which it takes the photos is great for a small camera. The continuous shot is particularly impressive.

If I ever recover financially from my new laptop and forthcoming road trip around Europe, I may have to look at buying one as a ’snappy’ camera for when the 350D is too much hassle to lug around.