Enter MobileMe
Apple offers their MobileMe service as a way to sync bookmarks, email, calendar and contact information between macs and iPhones / iPod touches. I originally had a bit of an issue paying for a service I believed should be free but without a better alternative I stumped up the £59 and set about using the service.

For the main part I originally was happy with the service and enjoyed the push new calendar and contact information very much, it was nice to have almost instant updates from home if a new contact needed a call back or if there was a change to a meeting. Another part of the service was the iDisk, an online cloud storage area for hosting and sharing files. This was never an important requirement for me but it came in handy on a few occasions. Shortly after I signed up in my first year Apple released the “find my iPhone” feature, this allowed you to track down a lost mobile via GPS, send messages to it or make it sound an alert so you could find it under the sofa and in extreme circumstances, if you were sure you could never get your phone back, you could remotely wipe its data. Great I thought so I renewed my subscription at the end of the year.

During my second year however, things were not so rosy. Frequent issues with calendar syncing on my MacBook and even more frequent issues with keeping the iDisk in sync to my MacPro were getting ever more annoying (I now used my iDisk to back up important information) The final straw came when I signed up for the calendar beta program, decided I didn’t like it and opted out of the beta, Mobile me promptly deleted all of my calendar appointments and no matter what I or the apple tech department did, it kept on deleting appointments as soon as they were re-instated from a back up. This made me decide to look for alternatives to the service apple offered and happily charged for.

Apple to the rescue?
Fortunately Apple had enabled easy syncing of calendar information to google calendar (another company I dislike but we wont go into that here) Set up of the Google sync was pretty painless, much to my surprise! I had managed to replace the iDisk with Dropbox a great, free alternative which actually offered more functionality than Apples service, all be it at a reduced storage capacity. As soon as we got to contact syncing we ran into a big road block. For what ever reason the Apple-Google syncing wasn’t going to work for my contacts which threw a huge spanner in the works.

Out of desperation and much googling later I discovered Spanning Sync. A software layer that works as an intermediary between iCal, Address book and Google calendar and contacts. With this bit of software I am now able again to keep all of my calendar appointments and contacts up to date across all of my devices and with the addition of Dropbox and some clever uses of folder aliases I can also keep my files and bookmarks up to date as well.

Are these alternatives like scrumping?
I cant say the migration away from MobileMe has been painless, mainly because of incompatibilities between specially formatted address book entries and google contacts but these all can be overcome. In the end, the only reason I moves away from Apples service was because they failed to update, improve and fix the problems. Would I go back? Maybe but once burnt and all that.

Software I used to move away from MobileMe-

Dropbox – A free file hosting service which links nicely with both the Mac and MS operating system, initially offers just 2GB of storage which is expandable to 100GB if you subscribe; although if you sign up via one of my links you will receive a further 250MB free!

Spanning Sync – Bridges the gap from iCal and Address book to Google calendars and contacts. Comes with a free 15 day trial and then costs $25 a year (around £14) but if you follow one of my links it costs just $20 and you still get your free trial.

If you follow my tweets you will know I posted a while back that I was involved in an exciting new project, well today I am happy to let you all in on what that project is.

Along with my good friend Uzair Kharawala from SF photo school, I will be hosting a few seminars for photographers looking to expand their products with videography. It is safe to say that the new breed of digital SLR cameras that shoot HD video have caused a commotion in the photography world. For the first time since cine-film, forward thinking individuals can shoot and produce stunning videos that have a real market in todays world.

While the camera bodies have stayed the same shape and size the work flow if so fundamentally different it is causing a lot of photographers to shy away from this new and expanding market place. I’m not talking about going out and shooting the next Hollywood block buster, I’m talking about supplementing your skills as a photographer with complimentary video to enable you to offer your clients a rich media product that fits with 21st century living.

Uzair and myself are working hard to bring you an accessible set of seminars that will grant you entry to this emerging market. We are looking to cover both video and photography of three main types of events, portrait session, make over sessions and action events. Dates and venues are still to be confirmed and I will update you all as soon as I am able too. In the mean time we have created this sample video of what we hope to teach you on our seminars.

I was fortunate enough to attend Renault world series at Silverstone yesterday. If you have not heard of the event, Renault book out a race circuit (last year was Donnington park in the East Midlands) and hold several of the Renault specific race meetings over two days as well as the all important F1 demonstration laps.

I was pretty sure we were going to get rained on at some point as the nearer we got to the circuit the darker the clouds became. Fortunately the weather held off for a great days racing.

I have included a few of my favourite images below.

I have worked in the dance music scene since 1999, thats actually where I started my photography career so its always nice when I get the opportunity to work with clubs and DJ’s.

I was commissioned to shoot a portrait for trance DJ, Dave Wright today and I thought I would share my favourite photograph from the session with you. It was taken with my Canon 1D mkIV and processed in Apple’s Aperture 3 as well as in Photoshop. I used a simple wireless flash set up to light Dave and I think the final portraits look great.

You can get more information on Dave Wright on his agency page and on his Facebook page and I am more than happy to hear from you if you would like a portrait shooting yourself, you con contact me from the link in the menu bar above.

I thought I would share this image with you that I took whilst on the way to a meeting last month.

It’s of a transmitter tower just outside Emley Moor near Huddersfield. I have driven past it many times but the weather or time has always been against me until last month. I was running ahead of schedule and the weather was glorious so I could not help stopping and taking a quick couple of images.

My intention was for this image to be black and white but because the mid-afternoon sun was so beautiful it really added something to the colours. Thats one of the great things about photography, you can take an image with a pretty concrete idea in your head of how it is going to be when processed but at some point during the conversion the image demands to be processed in a particular way and you end up with something entirely different to what you expected.

The image was captured with Canon’s 1D mkIV and processed in both Apple’s Aperture 3 and with NIK color efex.

Just a quick note to anyone who uses Apple’s Aperture 3 who use either an automated or manual backup system to safeguard their images.

I have just found out that while Aperture is open it takes exclusive control of some or all of the images in its projects. If you attempt to run a backup of your images or Apertures library file you run the risk of either not having some files included or at worst case causing directory issues on your back up volume. This applies to both managed files as well as referenced files.

I have been advised to ensure Aperture is closed before attempting any backups. I am not sure if this applies to Aperture 1 or 2.

UPDATE: Just to clarify which backup system I am using. I have an external 4TB firewire drive which I use for both my live video work and as a backup to my current photography projects. I use Chrono sync to keep my photography projects backed up. I had set the backups to run as soon as the drive mounts (this takes me out of the loop so I can’t forget to run the backups) but after this advice I will now be manually running the backup when I know there is no image editing program open.

I was recently commissioned to film two internal promotional videos for Arla foods.

Working alongside Design Junkie we followed a customer through the advertising journey for Anchor butter and Tesco stores. The whole sequence was shot using Canon’s 5D Mk2 camera. If you have not seen footage from this camera already it is truly a game changer. The shallow depth of field is amazing and up until the release of this camera has only been achievable by using a high-end film camera, usually only available to the big motion picture companies.

Like any professional equipment it has pro’s and con’s but if you are aware of its shortcomings you can create some stunning video. As we were not recording audio on set the 5D was easily the best tool for the job. We used the shallow depth of field to isolate the Anchor products from the background giving them centre stage.

The edit was completed in Apple’s Final cut pro and colour graded using Magic bullet ‘Looks’

Just to let you know I have uploaded a new commercial portfilio here – greswoldephotography.co.uk/portfolio If your reading this from my site, there is a direct link on the menu bar.

There are only a few images there at the moment but as I find a little more time I will add to them.

I was lucky enough to be invited down to “Converge 2″ at BFI on London’s South Bank by Philip Bloom on Wednesday. Converge 2 was a film conference focusing on using the new breed of HDDSLR’s (such as Canon’s 5D Mkii or Nikon’s D3s) for movie and film making. Read on for my review of the day and its speakers.

After a somewhat shaky train journey which saw me further away from London after the first hour of travel then when I started! I arrived at the BFI in London just in time to walk straight into Richard Jobson’s enthralling talk on directing. Richard has directed many films such as New Town Killers and Sixteen Years of Alcohol and during his talk he offered some invaluable advice on directing, working with the fragile actors and some technical limitations of the new HD shooting DSLR’s.

Philip Bloom was next up discussing the merits and limitations of using HDDSLR’s for movie making and showed a great piece comparing all the current crop of cameras against two 35mm film stocks. I have long admired Philips time lapse shots and I was delighted to see his talk finish with one of his best, “Sky”

Next up was the legendary Rodney Charters, renowned director of photography on the hit series 24 staring Kiefer Sutherland. Again, Rodney offered amazing an insight into the world of big budget filming.

Last up were the delightfully over the top Bui Brothers. The brothers, hailing from over the pond, offered some great advice on gear, workflow, tools and other was to make your life easier on set. They were a new one on me but their infectious energy soon got me ready to tackle the nightmare of the London Tube at rush hour.

In conclusion I had a great time over at Converge 2 and would highly recommend anyone interested in film and the fusion with HDDSLR’s to keen an eye out for the net instalment and I would like to thank Philip Bloom once again for my invite.

Ringwood brewery’s Excuses’s home page can be found here

I had the pleasure shooting (along with the guys from Brew Media) three ‘promo’ adverts for Ringwood brewery’s excuses’s you tube site last week and the fruits of my labour are now online here. The whole concept of the adverts was good excuses to enjoy a pint instead of going in to work (not that i condone that sort of behaviour!)

I really do enjoy shooting video, it’s actually what I trained in after leaving school all those years ago! I have been involved in quite a few video shoots recently from corporate videos, team presentations and now web-ads, if you look really closely I feature in the advert with the gnomes (no I wasn’t one of the gnomes, I was on the phone!)

For any photographers and / or videographers reading this, the footage was shot on a Sony Z7E and edited, colour graded and sound produced in Apple’s Final Cut Studio 3

Here are a few stills from the footage