Photography

Note to self and others: never use Picasa to download photos direct from the camera when using RAW+JPEG. It has a nasty habit of downloading the JPEGs, then deleting the RAWs. Ouch. Always use a card reader on the Compact Flash card instead.

I went to the Focus on Imaging show at the NEC at the weekend. The show itself was a little disappointing, obviously oriented more around trade sales than the end-consumer, and was marred a little by poor organisation from the NEC resulting in large queues, a car-park merry-go-round, and so on. But nevertheless, there were some interesting stalls - Canon and Nikon having the largest and most impressive, with some substantial Canon L-series lenses on display.

Well, it took me a while, so both of my travelling companions already got their photos up. But I finally got round to posting up a few select snaps from our Lake District trip a month or so back. As I expected, most of my interesting shots were of the tragically recursive variety: photographs of photographers.

I’ve been interested in photography since I was small, progressing through a simple fixed-focal-length compact camera to a basic 35mm SLR, playing with many cameras, including SLRs and compacts, and now back just to a digital compact camera I quite like. I’ve found digital sufficiently liberating that it has re-invigorated my interest in photography: primarily because it makes everything easier and cheaper. (Maybe one day I’ll invest in a 35mm digital SLR but I still want something smaller).

Just spent a little while consolidating all my photos: moving the remainder from my Gallery installation on andrewferrier.com to their new and preferred home on Flickr. My Flickr account is now vastly more populated with photos (and more variable in quality). This script basically did all the work. It doesn’t support nested albums, so I had to move all sub-albums to the top level, as well as removing the few ‘symlinks’ I had on photos (later versions of Gallery support this).

I feel a bit like Richard Gere in Pretty Woman, but without the good looks, the riches or the sexy female companion. I’m now enclosed in a room on the top (26th) floor of the Holiday Inn on Van Ness Ave., and it’s much nicer than the motel I stayed in last night. The only problem is the altitude; as Gere said ‘[I stay here because] … it’s the best’. I asked for a high room too because of the view - it is fabulous (see this photo).

So the Redbook residency is over, and after a little dance around the Bay Area this morning involving Best Western, Hertz, and BART, I’ve rid myself of my car (minimum hassle, especially considering I dented the bumper), and am sitting in a shabby motel a few blocks off the dodgier end of Market Street in San Francisco. I’m none too impressed - despite the seemingly ubiquitous free wireless - simply because the area doesn’t feel that great.

Went for a trip up to Napa today (through downtown SF, across the Golden Gate, around to Napa via Sausalito, then back down the eastern side of the bay via Oakland). It was a beautifully sunny day, so I took plenty of photos with the new Sony. Sunny weather always makes photography easy, even for amateurs like me, but I have to say I’m quite pleased with the results. You can see the latest photos in my Flickr photostream.

I am now the proud owner of a Sony Cybershot DSCW-55, which I’ll use for the remainder of my trip around the Bay Area to take some photos, after my Canon Powershot failed. I got it from Best Buy for the bargain price of $240 including a 1GB memory card. Not bad for a 7.1MP camera, especially given that current exchange rates almost halve that price when converting to pounds.

It appears that my problems with my Powershot may not be the result of mishandling after all; I’m a victim of the dreaded E18 error. This appears to be a design flaw in Canon compact cameras that they refuse to acknowledge the existence of (the fact that there’s an extensive Wikipedia page for the problem says it all). Numerous solutions have been suggested; I’ve tried taking the camera apart a little to clean out around the lens but got nervous and screwed it back together again.