All posts filed under: Photography

Harley Riders in Okinawa

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Along with the presence of Dr Pepper, A&W and Spam, the military presence in Okinawa has led to the popularity of another American icon – the Harley. On weekends there are often groups of bikers cruising up route 58 towards Cape Hedo, and once a year many of the riders parade along Gate 2 street as part of the local festival. Fantastic bikes, but as a Brit, I’d rather have a Triumph. 🙂

Upgrade to Snow Leopard

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Last night I installed the new OS X 10.6 operating system on my Mac. It should make my computer run faster, getting the most out of the quad core processors. It is also “built for the future with 64-bit and 32-bit compatibility.” A word of warning… Just tried to print with the 5100 and found out that I had to install a new driver that was designed for Snow Leopard. I wasn’t able to find the driver on Canon’s U.S. site but eventually found and installed it from the Canon Japan site here.   The driver was only released on the 20th of October so I’m glad I didn’t install Snow Leopard when it was released in August. I also needed to upgrade to the latest version of Earthdesk. The upgrade did cost $12.95, but now even the amount of snow and vegetation patterns  change from month to month. Everything else seems to be working fine…

F.A.Q.s – Do you use a light meter?

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Short Answer: Yes. Either the camera’s built-in meter, or a hand-held meter. Long Answer: The AE prism of the Pentax 67II is able to do spot, center-weighted and matrix metering. The built-in meter, like all in-camera meters is a reflected light meter. It works very well, but sometimes when the lighting is complicated it is best to measure the amount of incident light rather than reflected light. To do this you need a separate handheld incident light meter. If I used the in-camera metering for the following shot of AIBO the white background (which the meter would presume to be grey) would fool the camera and consequently underexpose the image. When shooting in the studio a light meter that can measure the amount of light (including that from strobes) is invaluable. A cable from the light meter allows you to trigger the flash, or the Sekonic can also be fitted with a transmitter to wirelessly communicate with pocket wizards on the strobe or battery pack. (I used the light meter attached to a pocket wizard transmitter for a studio shoot yesterday …

Manza-mo

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Preparing for a couple of events next month. Today I’m making some prints of images that are currently not available through the prints section of the website. This one of Manza-Mo stood out. I think the Canon imagePrograf printers are able to produce much better blues than the equivalent Epson models. Something that is vital when producing images with vivid blue skies and a turquoise ocean.

Calton Hill, Edinburgh

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Today in my inbox was an email announcing the latest pictures by Stephen Wiltshire. Stephen’s an amazing artist whose work I admire and whose career I have followed since I was about 8 years old. One of his latest drawings is  the view from Calton Hill, Edinburgh. Made me smile as I was there just a few years earlier. The original of Stephen’s drawing  is available for purchase on his website at £8250. And even Jeremy Clarkson’s been to Calton Hill. He drove there from London and back on a single tank of gas. Impossible? It appears not…..

Photography on the Big Screen

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There have been a couple of biographical films recently about photographers. The first is Annie Leibovitz: Life Through a Lens. It was released in the US in 2007 but I didn’t manage to see it in Japan until it was released on DVD a few months ago. I found it interesting especially the behind the scenes stories of working with various publications and the evolution from journalistic fly on the wall images to high fashion. The second movie Visual Acoustics is about the architectural photographer Julius Shulman. You can see the trailer for the movie here. It was released at cinemas in the US last Friday (October 9th), so it may be a couple of years before I get to watch it. Something to look forward to!