I decided to do a quick review of some of the photos in my flickr account. The above photography is of St George’s Market complete with the Big Issue seller who targets the rich who attend the niche culture market each Saturday morning.

It is in this very location where I bumped into Lisa Bonet (read more). I am sure the restraining order still allows me to post about the chance meeting. If you click on any of the photos it will take you to the image on Flickr.

The Belfast Wheel

The wheel closed shortly after this photo was taken having been in place for three years. I don’t hold myself responsible.

The Government

Government House at Stormont.

Kilroot Smog

A view across to the Kilroot Power Station where our overpriced electricity is produced.

A Belfast Street

A view between two Belfast Streets.

Stormont Hill

The view from the doors of Government house at Stormont.

New Belfast Buildings

Belfast have been a hive of development and change over the last ten years. Buildings appear on the cityscape on a near weekly basis.

Belfast Lough

The view from the top of Cavehill across Belfast Lough. From this point you can see the entire city, Holywood, Bangor and Carrickfergus.

Behind City Hall

A narrow street behind city hall. Photographed purely as I liked the idea of double yellow lines on each side indicating you can’t park. I realise this photo is strictly black and white but I have use artistic license to include sepia tones in the post.

Cavehill

Final Photo from the top of Cavehill just as the rain began to fall.

I think the post serves as a Belfast review of the last twelve months but also how bad photographs can look a year later. Images I once thought were reasonable appear stale, dull and unimaginative. I hope the post serves as a marker for avoiding the cliched, predictable, tourist board esque photos these images personify. The line is drawn.

Other Photos :

A few iPhone photos that also feature Belfast in Black and White:
The Titanic Drawing Room
QUB Library
The Belfast Skyline
Harland and Wolff

Despite being a stunning view there is something utterly depressing about looking at the city from this height. From this point you see every aspect of the city from beautiful to the downright ugly.

Perhaps it was coincidental the cloud formation over Kilroot power station appeared as snog from the large chimney on the Carrickfergus shoreline but the trial of cloud looked thick and heavy.

I don’t think this is unique to Belfast. I don’t think any city looks great from above. On a plus point we did manage to see the spots where ‘Closing the Ring’ and ‘City of Ember’ where shot. They definitely look different in real life.

The full set of photos including some experimental iPhone shots can be found in the flickr set.

Over the last year I have been turning my attention to Photography both as a personal development project and also as an education focus within school. There are massive learning opportunities within the whole area of photography. My interest in photography is no secret in school at in September I was approached by two pupils about starting a Photography Club.

With the paranoia surrounding UK education teachers are now especially cautious of using cameras in the classroom. This was different, it was about pupils using cameras not the teacher so naturally I jumped and the next day an announcement appeared in the school notices that the first meeting of the photography club would be the following week.

To my surprise (actually horror) sixty seven pupils turned up. In hindsight it was sad that with the throes of curriculum development we had missed an art form so many pupils were motivated to take part in.

I have decided to look at six areas where photography could be used as a learning tool without swaying too far from the curriculum remembering the infinite benefits of introducing students to such an accessible art form.

1. Mathematics

I am not a maths teacher so these are literally off the top of my head and there are probably a stack I have missed. There is symmetry, shutter speed fractions, Aperture and area of a circle, exposure calculations and finally frame rate when thinking of Moving Image.

2. Science / Physics

We probably all remember working with lens and light when we were at school. Photography if considered scientifically is understanding how light works. Curriculum wise we have lens, light, focal length calculations, refraction, spectrums and the list goes on.

3. History

This Christmas I received a number of photography books (including the “Genius of Photography” and the “Icons of Photography” it is amazing just how much history education uses photography.

Photographers such as George Rodger brought photography evidence of the horrors experienced in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp as well as the Normandy Invasions. In fact some consider photography to offer the real documentary evidence of the horrors of World War II.

4. Journalism

Probably the easiest area of the curriculum to introduce the art of photography. From history through to modern day events we have relied on the photo to communicate much of life. In so many ways it is the photo that survives when the actual news story has long been lost. Take a look at these examples of 13 photos that changed the world, and there are many many more.

5. Moving Image Arts / Art

Photography is a stunning accessible art form and if a student is ever going to create a brilliant piece of Moving Image Art then they have to understand the art of still photography.

There really isn’t very much point to labour this point as these are the obvious curriculum areas where photography can be studied in detail from the history of art through to modern day photography techniques.

6. ICT

I was going to leave the list at just five subjects but I think it is important to acknowledge the transferable skills offered through the study of digital photography. Having taught Moving Image Arts for a number of years I am amazed at just how much a student’s ICT skills develop throughout the year perhaps even more than students who study ICT, different skills perhaps but essential ones.

From working with hardware (USB, Firewire) through to file compression, storage issues, file types there is an unseen learning process that takes place. I have one student in mind who had little ICT experience at the beginning of the course yet after two years was the proud owner of a Mac Book and was not only able to use the computer in her creative workflow but was also on her way to start a degree course in multimedia.

Conclusion :

This badly written, unedited and probably riddled with grammatical errors post (I’m too tired to proof read) has a single aim and that is to re-focus. Teachers are so tied to curriculum and have little time to develop and be creative yet often the creative opportunities can be right in front of us. With the expectation of a dozen photographers in the photography club sixty seven was a wakeup call.

The next challenge is to fund and offer opportunities students wouldn’t normally have at home such as access to Adobe Lightroom, or Apple Aperture…. we love challenges though.

Aperture 3 brings a stack of new features to managing and processing your RAW photo library. One of the features I like most is the powerful brushes tool. Combine Aperture 3 with aWacom tablet and you possibilities are endless.

Obviously with a stack of time you can pretty much enhance a photo to near perfection but I decided to put Aperture 3 and a Wacom Bamboo 2 to the test with a 3 minute challenge. Recently I uploaded a photo to flickr and within an hour someone had commented on the one aspect of the image I hated most…. the power lines along the top of the photo (see above).

New to Aperture I decided to give myself 3 minutes using brushes and the multi-sensitive tablet to try and remove the lines as a distraction.

One set back I didn’t predict was a little bit of processing time as Aperture applied the brush so the final image isn’t by any means perfect but for a 3 minute challenge I am more than satisfied with the output.

Removing lines on a photo isn’t the easiest of tasks given the textured background these particular lines are on. I am no Photoshop expert but I probably would have approached the image by grafting areas of sky over the lines

I actually only used the “retouch” tool but with the combination of different sizes of brush and softness levels it wouldn’t take too long to remove the lines without even a trace.

Three days on and I really beginning to see the power of Aperture 3 .

Over the last few days I have been working with Apple Aperture 3. The main motivation for some photographers moving to Aperture from Lightroom is the fact iWork, AppleTV, iPhone and now iPad can sync or access images directly from the Aperture library. That said I have a nifty process for getting my Lightroom photos on to the iPad and iPhone using an export folder.

The truth is the Apple fanboy in me simply wants everything to work together, after all the ease of user experience is the main reason I moved to Apple in the first place !!

I have to say I love the way Aperture manages my photos and today I have been experimenting with a range of different presets that are freely available free  on the internet. In this guide I am going to cover how easy it is to install, manage and use presets in Aperture 3.

Step 1: The Presets Menu

Open Aperture 3 and click on the “Adjustments” tab. You will see a “Presets” drop down on the left side of the window. Clicking this will reveal the default Apple presets. The shipped presets are pretty good but a quick Google for “Aperture 3 Presets” and you will discover a treasure trove of user created presets that will instantly transform your images.

Click the “Presets” drop down and select the “Edit Presets” option this will reveal the preset management window.

My advice is to store your presets in groups as it makes finding ‘similar’ presets easier and also makes managing adjustments much easier to manage  as your list grows.

Click the gear icon on the bottom left of the window and select “Create a New Preset Group”

Step 2: Installing your Preset

Now re-click the gear icon and select

“Import”. Browse to your  newly downloaded Aperture 3 preset, click on the icon and then click “OK”

Step 3: Applying your Preset

Back in the main Aperture window select the image you are working on. Now click on the Presets dropdown to see the list of presets available.

You should now see your created group and newly imported preset. Click the Preset name to apply it to your image.

There are obviously a larger number of Lightroom Presets available on the internet but a five or ten minutes on Google and I was playing with twenty different Aperture presets.

Interestingly I have found rather than just applying a preset and exporting the image in Aperture I am much more inclined to play with the image and make further enhancements and adjustments. I have to say I am pretty impressed with Aperture already ! now to create my own preset.

Although I can’t ever envisage the day when phone cameras will replace the SLR they are getting considerably better for quick, creative photography. iPhone photography is becoming an art form in its own right with various flickr groups and competitions. Our 70 stunning photos taking with the hipstamatic app remains a firm search favourite.

Since purchasing the iPhone 4 I have been playing with the cheapest and feature rich iPhone camera application I have come across.

Camera+ offers the ability to capture, edit and share photos on the move, it is everything the iPhone camera should have been. At the time of writing the developers have submitted an updated version of the application for iPhone 4 users so expect this little application to get even better in the next few days.

Capturing

Camera+ considers every aspect of mobile photography workflow. A handy grid when taking a photo not only ensures your photographs are straight but also allows you to follow the rule of thirds quickly when on the move.

Camera+ also offers a handy image stabilisation function to ensure each photo is as sharp as possible which is particularly handy at music gigs ! The grid is great and I would highly recommend using it as much as you can.

One slight negative is the editing function allows cropping but I can’t seem to be able to rotate the crop to straighten aspects in post production. Perhaps will we see this feature in a future update.

Post Production

This is where things become fun. Say goodbye to snapping and sharing rough unprocessed images on Facebook or Twitter. Camera+ features a comprehensive range of editing and enhancing features.

Each photography session is displayed in a lightbox type arrangement, click on a photo to see a range of editing and sharing features.

The first step in your mobile photography workflow is to crop your work appropriately. If you didn’t line up your shot perfectly when you took it, you can easily fix that with Camera+.

With a single tap, you can make your pics square, 4×6, 8×10, etc. As I mentioned earlier it would be great if there was a straighten or rotate option.

Camera+ comes with a range of effects and photo enhancements. The scene modes help you get the best photos for your particular situation. With Camera+, you get to choose from several scene modes including Backlit, Sunset, Night, Portrait, Beach, to name just a few.

It is clear a photographer has been in the driving seat in designing this application. Lisa Bettany who you may know from http://mostlylisa.com/ has designed a range of stunningly effects.

With a single tap, you can transform a photo from a drab iPhone snap to an emotionally laden masterpiece. There are dozens of 1-touch effects for you to experiment with so that you can get the perfect results every time.

With Camera+, you can also easily add 1-Touch boarders with several great border designs so that you can put the finishing touch on your photos before sharing them with friends.

Sharing

If you enjoy sharing photos then you are going to love this application. With Camera+ you can share your photos with friends on a range of social networking sites : Facebook, Twitter, Email and Flickr are all included.

The process of sharing is quick and easy and accounts can be set up in the application settings.

Everything works perfectly the only aspect worth mentioning is that Twitter sharing doesn’t use the traditional services such as TwitPic but a nicely presented Camera+ sharing area, you can view a sample of one of my shares here.

Samples:

I have posted a few sample photos to both Flickr and Twitter (see here). The sharing feature is worth buying the application alone. The fact I can also add photos to flickr sets means I can keep mobile uploads together for easy management.

Conclusion

I am using Camera+ on a daily basis, the capturing, editing and sharing features are stunning and application is genuinely fun to use. The only two criticisms I can come up with are that the sound effects can become annoying but can easily be switched off and some of the processed images can be a little noisy in places. Although these might read a negative they are not enough of a reason to give Camera+ the TotalApps 5 rating.

With future improvements promised I can’t see me straying from Camera+ for quite sometime to come. At only 59p (introductory offer) it is definitely an essential partner for your iPhone camera!

Links:

Camera+ (iTunes)
Flickr

There are a number of great photography projects you can enjoy with your family, one of the best is a night in the dark painting with light.

I am no photography expert but found the process of painting with light really quick to set up and easy to achieve reasonable results. The best thing about this project is the entire family can take part, if they can write they can draw with light.

I took this photo last October and gave it the title “Green Peace” ! All you need is a camera, tripod, a torch and a dark room and you will be drawing with light in minutes.

Step 1

Lock your camera securely on the tripod, frame your shot having a family member stand in front of the lens drawing out their name using their finger. Bearing in mind you are going to be taking photos in complete darkness I would make sure the area around your tripod is clear to ensure your camera remains save.

Step 2

Set up your camera. I set the ISO to 100, and used manual mode with a long exposure of around 20-30 seconds. Perhaps in hindsight the bulb mode might have been easier to allow the younger members of the family time to spell their name out.

Step 3

Find a suitable light source. We used a 4 LED wall light from Ikea which was easy to hold and created a multi light stream effect but any small torch will work, the finer the point of light the thiner then light line it will create.

Step 4

Now the fun starts. Close the curtains / blinds (best to do this at night anyway) and turn off the lights. Click the camera shutter button while the person in front the camera spells their name an appropriate word. I would definitely suggest an additional torch for the camera operator or easy access to the main light source in the room.

Step 5

Once the drawing with light fun is over, import your photos into your computer and use your photo editor to flip them horizontally so the text is readable. You can obviously play with the image in photoshop for example adjust as in the photo above.

Enjoy.

It is one thing to use post production software such as Aperture or Lightroom to enhance the look of your photos but what about getting creative at the point of capture. This morning I have been playing with the brilliant Lensbaby Composer. If you haven’t heard of this lens before well in short if offers greater focus / bokeh control with a selective focus on particular areas of the view (known as the “sweet spot”).

1. Unboxing

The Lensbaby comes in a compact box with everything you need for some creative soft focus photography :

The Lensbaby comes with the Composer lens and a number of different sized aperture disks (these can be changed easily). The sizes included are :

f/2.8, f/4, f5.6, f/8, f/11, f16, and f22

These control the size of the “sweet spot” i.e. the area that is in focus.

2. Installing the Lens

The lensbaby composer comes in a number of different camera fitting types so obviously as a Canon owner I needed the Composer with the Canon fitting.

Attaching the lens involves the same process and installing any other lens. My advice would be to install your selected aperture disk before putting the lens on the camera. I am using disk f/4 for this demo.

3. Getting Started

To get the best from the Lensbaby they recommend using the Aperture Priority Mode (AV). First you have to set the focus by ensuring the lens is pointed straight ahead (i.e. no tilt).

Then using the focus ring ensure the centre spot is in focus. You can lock the lens in focus at any point.

Having Fun

This is where the fun starts. Pointing the camera at your subject you can gently tilt the end of the lens to move the area of focus. You may need to adjust the focus slightly with each move.

Initially I was moving the Lensbaby composer to extremes but after an hour or so of getting to know what it can do I found I was able to adjust the lens in smaller steps to gain more controlled photos.

I would also definitely recommend locking the focus in place once you are happy so all you have to worry about is adjust the “sweet spot”.

I have uploaded three photos to flickr of my first trip around the garden with the Lensbaby. It is great fun to use, I found I had to be 18-20inches from the subject to ensure clear focus in the sweet spot.

There are more photos in the flickr set here.

You can add additional optics to the Composer including a fisheye which I would love to have a play with. On the whole the Composer is amazing. One difficulty I did face was ensuring my shot was in focus.

Obviously there is no auto-focus available (which I rely on too much). Using the Lensbaby Composer will definitely help train my eye to ensuring shots are in focus.

Conclusion

The Lensbaby Composer isn’t cheap costing just under £170 so if you are starting out on your lens collection journey it might not be at the top of your list. That said it is definitely worth the investment, the creative scope of controlled bokeh is massive and the Lensbaby puts you in control.

The additional optics cost just less than £70 and would make for the ideal christmas or birthday gift to complete your collection !

Full Specs : Double Glass (Multi-coated Optical Glass Doublet) included Focal Length: about 50 mm Focus Type: Manual Aperture Type: Interchangeable, magnetic aperture disks Apertures: f/2, f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, f/8, f/11, f/16, f/22 Minimum Focus: about 18? (45cm) / Maximum Focus: infinity Size: 2.25?(5.7cm) h x 2.5?(6.35cm) w / Weight: 3.7 oz (104.9g) No electronic communication between the lens and the camera body.

Five years ago I bought an antique copy of ‘Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari’ (The Cabinet of Dr Caligari) on Ebay. The 1919 German film is studied by film student throughout the world, seen as the birth of German Expressionism. The film has been a source of inspiration for directors over the years with the most obvious being Tim Burton.

The pack arrived and for some reason I only managed to get around to opening it this week when it was rediscovered the dull metal tin in an old box.

I am not sure why I actually opened the film tin but to my surprise as well as the actual film the tin contained a number of old documents and receipts that went alongside the release.

It turns out the original owner of the ‘can’ was quite a Caligari fan. The tin contained an original receipt for the rental of the film from the British Film Institute dated 26/1/1960, at first I panicked assuming I had bought a rental that hadn’t been returned to the BFI for fifty years but fortunately I then found the receipt for this reel.

It turns out the owner was such a big fan of Caligaria  that in 1963 he contacted “Entertainment Films Company” in New York and bought his own copy of the film for $34.95 plus $1.50 to cover the postage to the UK.

In addition to the receipt there are seven Polaroid photos from the film and a series of information sheets, newspaper cutouts and class handouts. Ironically I have been teaching German Expressionism for five years and the Caligari resources lost in this tin are quite superior to those I was using each year.

Some of the newspaper articles are dated 1967 and there is even a photocopy of the RadioTime listing for the film for 10.55pm on BBC 2 although sadly no airing date is attached.

The first photo had to be Noir.

My favourite resources have to be a typed document with photos glued on and a photocopy of the November issue of Flickers Magazine. Many of the photocopied documents are written by Gerald McKee who in 1960 became a member of the VFC and subsequently became the editor of Flickers in 1979.

Gerald enthusiastically continued to edit the publication, until his death in June 2007. Flickers still exists today in a slightly different format (web link).

I think the only negative with the pack is the small sticker on the back of the metal tin that says “2 Reels” which means I only have half the film but I still consider it a golden find. If there are any fans out there who would love this pack please get in touch.

Links:

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (IMDB).
British Film Institute
Flickers Magazine

Over the last year I have been playing with the official Flickr for iPhone app It was great to be able to access your flickr account in the palm of your hand but the app hasn’t seen much development or improvement over the last few months.

Following a call out via Twitter I am very pleased to have replaced the standard Flickr app with the brilliant FlickStackr. FlickStackr is stunning on the iPhone but it really has the edge on the iPad’s as the larger screen really  makes the app one of the most enjoyable way to use flickr.

Having used the app for a few days now it seems the only apparent limit to the application is that you are not able to delete a photo from within the application that said you can pretty much do pretty much everything else.

If you own both an iPad and an iPhone/iPod Touch the good news is FlickStackr is a single app compatible with both platforms, buy one and it works on both.

You can view your own photos, your sets, your favorites and your contacts and their photos and videos.

Suggesting the application transforms flickr might be considered a push but one of the best features for me is how easy it is to view photos by my contacts or via flickr explored.

Tap on a photo to see it full screen with the full screen photo browser letting you swipe through photos and zoom by pinching in both landscape and portrait modes.

FlickStackr features a great slideshow mode, hook your iPad up to your TV or VGA screen and you can wow your guests with your photo gallery. FlickStackr is a completely new way to interact with flickr.

The app is remarkably fast given it is dealing with a large amount of images by removing the need for paging while looking at large photosets. FlickStackr  works automatically in the background with photos being cached locally for fast access.

FlickStackr allows you to edit every aspect of your photo, tags, exif and photo location viewing etc. but for me the best edit feature has to be the way FlickStackr handles Groups.

Tap on an image, tap edit and groups and FlickrStackr will display all the groups you are a member of, you literally tap each group to instantly add that photo.

So why Stackr?

A unique feature of the application is the ‘STACK’. The Stack lets you mark photos and sets from you or any other people. This stack is saved on your iPad, so that you can keep this list without having to publish it to flickr. Useful when you want to review photos later, or share them all via email.

Uploading Photos

FlickStackr also allows you to upload photos directly from your iPhone/iPad. Use the device’s photo library as source, the camera, the Camera Connection Kit, or using iTunes drag and drop, to get photos from your computer. At upload time you can specify : title, caption, tags, sets, groups, geo location, privacy and Exif and GPS information is maintained when uploading.

Support for Multiple Accounts

FlickStackr is the first flickr application I have seen that supports multiple flickr accounts. This is ideal for households sharing an iPad or for people with multiple identities online.

I love it. FlickStackr has not only given me a new way to access my own photos but also the work of my contacts. I often found I only really ever saw other’s work was when I was selfishly uploading my own.

With FlickStackr I find myself lifting my iPhone and viewing what has been going on that day, favouriting and commenting more. This is flickr as it should be ! If you are on flickr make sure you make contact with us here.

Links:

Get FlickStackr