New Zealand’s North from Jamie Dale on Vimeo.

Film by Jamie Dale.
Music by Beloved Elk.

The post New Zealand’s North appeared first on Jamie Dale Photography.

If you are currently using Lightroom and either have the Shuttle or wish to purchase one in the future, the download below will help you get yourself setup using these two together for fast paced workflow.

Download Here: contour-shuttle-lightroom-5

Please note that this is my personal configuration and yours may differ. It’s easy to tweak so feel free to change it to your personal taste.

The button layout image can be printed to help you remember which shortcuts are which while you get used to it.

All instructions on how to install the config file are included when you download the .zip.

For all other information and tips, please visit the Contour website here: http://ergo.contour-design.com/ergonomic-mouse/shuttlepro-v2

Download Contour Shuttle Pro 2 Adobe Lightroom 5 (and earlier) settings here: contour-shuttle-lightroom-5

Import Settings and printable button map:

The post Adobe Lightroom and Contour Shuttle Pro appeared first on Jamie Dale Photography.

I’ve been toying with this one for a few weeks now and finally got it looking good on a broad range of photographic styles and lighting conditions.

Before

After

The preset gives an even slightly desaturated look while retaining the punch of contrast. It’s perfect on natural light portraiture shots but works well on almost anything.

Download it for free from our shop for a limited time: Jamie’s People Tweaker

To install this preset, open Lightroom 4 or later and enter develop mode, then right click (ctrl click) on the ‘User Preset’ section and select ‘Import’.

The post People Tweaker – Free Lightroom Preset appeared first on Jamie Dale Photography.

Nikon D5200

The Nikon D5200 is a great camera for the price, but it has a few small problems for film makers using this DSLR.

I’ve been using the D5200 for a while now and have just started exploring it’s HDMI output option. The lure of uncompressed 4:2:2 video using an external HDMI recorder is a pretty tempting feature of this camera, but it doesn’t come without it’s caveats.

These caveats are not very well documented, especially in the manual, and I tend to get the impression that’s no accident. Nikon have deliberately muddied the water around the HDMI output features to presumably take the attention off the fact that it can’t do many things you’d expect it to do. Let me name a few.

• When recording on the camera at the same time as using the HDMI output, your HDMI video will drop to 1280 x 720 resolution.
• When taking a picture in Live View with HDMI active, the HDMI video will go black as the shutter is activated.
• In order to get full, non-cropped video in the HDMI output without the on-screen display or the auto focus box, you have to press the “info” button located on top of the camera several times. Great, but doing that gets rid of the audio level meters on the camera’s lcd. Sure, you can monitor audio levels through HDMI, but it’s just another feature that’s been overlooked.

But the big one for me is this. Regardless of your movie settings or wether or not you have PAL or NTSC selected as a format in the menu, your HDMI output will always be a NTSC standard.

For example:

If you select HDMI = “Auto” in the menu, you will get 1080i at 59.94fps.
If you select HDMI = “1080i” in the menu, you will also get 1080i at 59.94fps.
If you select HDMI = “1080p” in the menu, you will get 1080p at 29.97fps.
If you select HDMI = “720p” in the menu, you will get 720p at 59.94fps.

So there is no chance of getting 25fps or 50fps out of HDMI! To bad for all the film makers in PAL counties, looks like you’ll have some conversion work ahead of you if you want to take advantage of the uncompressed HDMI video feature.

These tests are all done using my Black Magic Intensity Pro capture card. I’d be interested to hear how others get on.

The post Nikon D5200 HDMI Problems appeared first on Jamie Dale Photography.

In this post I’ll be specifically talking about upgrading the 13″ Macbook Pro’s from Early 2011, however the procedure is nearly identical for most unibody Macbooks.

The are a few things you’ll need first.

An SSD Drive. I went for the Samsung 830 series as it was the most reliable and performed the best out of all the reviews I’ve seen. It was also one of the best value drives on the market at time of writing from ebay.

You’ll then need the optical drive bay caddy. This replaces the optical drive with an adaptor caddy which your new SSD will sit in. I went for the bundle package which includes the tools (T6 and Philips #00 screwdrivers) and an external optical drive inclosure which will house and run your old optical drive when it’s removed from inside the macbook.

You’ll also need a bit of software to clone your drives when its finished. I use SuperDuper, It’s free and easy – two qualities I admire in day to day life.

The rest is as easy as following this YouTube clip. Enjoy!

The post Best Upgrade for Macbook Pro appeared first on Jamie Dale Photography.

In real terms this means it’s a bad thing if you have two domain names pointing directly to the same page.

The way around this is to chose a domain name to be your primary domain and redirect all other domains names to it.

This is done by adding a simple .htaccess file to the root directory of your website. Inside this .htaccess file you should paste the following:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.?)yourduplicatesite.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourmainsite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Simply replace “yourmainsite.com” in the above code with your primary website’s domain name and “duplicatesite.com” with the name of your duplicate domain.

The post Multiple Domain Names and SEO appeared first on Jamie Dale Photography.

Here’s my problem: I have a WordPress website at www.xxx.co.uk and I needed to move it to www.yyy.com.au without impairing my seo rankings. It’s worth pointing out that the site is the same, it’s just the domain name that is changing here.

Sound simple right? Well it is when you understand a few little curve balls.

Here are the steps to take:

1. Make sure you have both the old and the new domains verified in Google webmaster tools.

2. In Google webmaster tools, move the old domain to the new one.

3. Change the domain name to the new one in the settings section of your WordPress blog

4. Use a 301 .htaccess redirect so that any old links that are around will point to your new domain.

It’s point number 4. that I want to go into a bit more depth and explain.

I was searching high and low for the correct method of redirection and finally found it. I can confirm that it works perfectly. All you need to do is create a .htaccess file in the root of the WordPress site with the following code. (note that if you are using permalinks, you may already have one, in which case you just need to edit it)

# BEGIN Redirect Rewrite

 Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine On RewriteBase /

 RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !xxx.com.au$ [NC]
 RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.xxx.com.au/$1 [L,R=301]

# END Redirect Rewrite

# BEGIN WordPress

 RewriteEngine On
 RewriteBase /
 RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
 RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress

To explain this further, the “!” before the “xxx.com.au$” means that if the incoming domain is NOT your new one, then rewrite it to the new one and send the user there.

It’s also very important to have these rules BEFORE the WordPress rules, if you don’t then permalinks will not be redirected, only the root domain will be.

That’s it. Leave a comment if you need any additional help.

The post Changing the domain name of your WordPress website using 301 redirects appeared first on Jamie Dale Photography.

I forked out some coin and decided to go with a company called HostVirtual (http://www.vr.org/) on a friends recommendation. They offer cheap Virtual Private Servers at a pay monthly rate that was surprisingly bank account friendly.

A VPS is a server (or shared server) that sits in a rack somewhere in the world and does whatever you want it to. It really is that simple. You can run Windows on it, Linux, or even MacOS. The advantage is that you get stupidly fast internet speeds on it! (1Gbps!)

In 5mins I had setup a flavour of Linux (CentOS) and had a IPV4 and IPV6 address assigned along with my root password to give me SSH access into the box which I chose to provision in LA (7 locations available, you chose the one that is closest to your target users).

I went about installing the usual, Apache, MySQL, PHP, FTP server and configuring the firewall.

When I had put the first website on it I decided to do a ping test to check the speed. I got about 200ms-300ms from this website http://www.just-ping.com/ which checks various locations around the world. It’s an alright figure but was honestly expecting a little more.

So I sent off an email to the HostVirtual support email address and within 20seconds (I kid you not!) I had a response from Mark, one of the support guys telling me ways to get better ping times. This is where he suggested a free CDN service called CloudFlare http://www.cloudflare.com.

Now being dubious by nature I suspected there might be a catch with this free service. I went ahead and tried it out anyway and with a very easy setup I’d added a list of my websites in and was waiting for the DNS to worm it’s way around the world. CloudFlare actually replaces your current DNS so you have to point your websites nameservers to them in order for it to work, which is a great option if your domain provider doesn’t offer this service.

After an hour or so when it had propagated I ran a few tests and found that this little free service had sped up my website load time by nearly 50%. Meaning all my websites were now loading twice as fast as they were, all for nothing! Can’t complain there!

The post Cheap and Fast VPS appeared first on Jamie Dale Photography.

Here’s what he has to say:

“I posted a message on Twitter yesterday stating I thought The Beastie Boys and TopSpin Media “got it right” regarding how to sell music in this day and age. Here’s a link to their store:

[illcommunication.beastieboys.com]

Shortly thereafter, I got some responses from people stating the usual “yeah, if you’re an established artist – what if you’re just trying to get heard?” argument. In an interview I did recently this topic came up and I’ll reiterate what I said here.

If you are an unknown / lesser-known artist trying to get noticed / established:

* Establish your goals. What are you trying to do / accomplish? If you are looking for mainstream super-success (think Lady GaGa, Coldplay, U2, Justin Timberlake) – your best bet in my opinion is to look at major labels and prepare to share all revenue streams / creative control / music ownership. To reach that kind of critical mass these days your need old-school marketing muscle and that only comes from major labels. Good luck with that one.

If you’re forging your own path, read on.

* Forget thinking you are going to make any real money from record sales. Make your record cheaply (but great) and GIVE IT AWAY. As an artist you want as many people as possible to hear your work. Word of mouth is the only true marketing that matters.
To clarify:
Parter with a TopSpin or similar or build your own website, but what you NEED to do is this – give your music away as high-quality DRM-free MP3s. Collect people’s email info in exchange (which means having the infrastructure to do so) and start building your database of potential customers. Then, offer a variety of premium packages for sale and make them limited editions / scarce goods. Base the price and amount available on what you think you can sell. Make the packages special – make them by hand, sign them, make them unique, make them something YOU would want to have as a fan. Make a premium download available that includes high-resolution versions (for sale at a reasonable price) and include the download as something immediately available with any physical purchase. Sell T-shirts. Sell buttons, posters… whatever.

Don’t have a TopSpin as a partner? Use Amazon for your transactions and fulfillment. [www.amazon.com]

Use TuneCore to get your music everywhere. [www.tunecore.com]

Have a realistic idea of what you can expect to make from these and budget your recording appropriately.
The point is this: music IS free whether you want to believe that or not. Every piece of music you can think of is available free right now a click away. This is a fact – it sucks as the musician BUT THAT’S THE WAY IT IS (for now). So… have the public get what they want FROM YOU instead of a torrent site and garner good will in the process (plus build your database).

The Beastie Boys’ site offers everything you could possibly want in the formats you would want it in – available right from them, right now. The prices they are charging are more than you should be charging – they are established and you are not. Think this through.

The database you are amassing should not be abused, but used to inform people that are interested in what you do when you have something going on – like a few shows, or a tour, or a new record, or a webcast, etc.
Have your MySpace page, but get a site outside MySpace – it’s dying and reads as cheap / generic. Remove all Flash from your website. Remove all stupid intros and load-times. MAKE IT SIMPLE TO NAVIGATE AND EASY TO FIND AND HEAR MUSIC (but don’t autoplay). Constantly update your site with content – pictures, blogs, whatever. Give people a reason to return to your site all the time. Put up a bulletin board and start a community. Engage your fans (with caution!) Make cheap videos. Film yourself talking. Play shows. Make interesting things. Get a Twitter account. Be interesting. Be real. Submit your music to blogs that may be interested. NEVER CHASE TRENDS. Utilize the multitude of tools available to you for very little cost of any – Flickr / YouTube / Vimeo / SoundCloud / Twitter etc.

If you don’t know anything about new media or how people communicate these days, none of this will work. The role of an independent musician these days requires a mastery of first hand use of these tools. If you don’t get it – find someone who does to do this for you. If you are waiting around for the phone to ring or that A & R guy to show up at your gig – good luck, you’re going to be waiting a while.

Hope this helps, and I’ll scour responses for intelligent comments I can respond to.”

Do check out his post and website: http://forum.nin.com/bb/read.php?30,767183

– Jamie

The post Marketing Music appeared first on Jamie Dale Photography.

Sonisphere is in its second year and this time with close to 130 bands, they have extended the revelry to three days in total and increased capacity from 40,000 to a maximum of 55,000 black-cladded, riff worshipping festival goers per day.

Day one saw Europe invoking the first mass sing-along with their crowd pleaser The Final Countdown followed by the industrial/electro legend Gary Numan whose set was heavier and precisely tailored to the eager audience with extended versions of his classics Cars and Are Friends Electric.
Alice Cooper headlined the Saturn stage with his trademark theatrical performance which this time included inflatable dolls and giant size syringes.

All guns firing on the Second day with the Apollo stage hosting Anthrax, Placebo and headlining act Rammstein with their epic light and pyrotechnic show. Sparks flew as Rammstein’s industrial metal set exploded with a show of fire breathing, rocket launching and crowd surfing in a rowboat.
The Saturn stage shook with Soulfly, Fear Factory and Motley Crue and an exceptional vocal performance from Skunk Anansie.

Placebo

Even with all 55,000 tickets being sold the festival felt comfortable with a final day line-up including Iggy and the Stooges, Alice in Chains, Slayer, Pendulum and Iron Maiden who had the crowd worked up early on and carried the momentum though to the final song.

Festival organiser Stuart Galbraith commented on the success of the festival saying ‘One of the key advantages at Sonisphere is the alternating stages letting fans have the opportunity to see all the main acts rather than having to choose due to clashing performance times. We also work closely with the authorities, the local community and the land owners to ensure the best possible festival for our audience.’

Sonisphere promises to be back next year with what’s expected to be an equally impressive line-up of bands, comedians and performers.

Alice In Chains

The post Sonisphere Review appeared first on Jamie Dale Photography.