In June 2009, my permission was sought to use my photo of Sugarloaf Reservoir, Christmas Hills on a card that would feature in a set of walking cards being designed for the Melbourne area. Needless to say I was happy to oblige and last week I received a pack of the finished set of cards entitled Walks in Nature: Melbourne, courtesy of Anna at Viola Design. Sadly I’m no longer in Melbourne having moved to Sydney in October, but I’ll be sure to pack them in my suitcase the next time I head south for a holiday.

The pack features 32 quality cards that are perfect for selecting a random destination for a day-trip from or equally useful for assisting in planning a series of walks in nature around Melbourne. Cards are colour-coded according season, so no matter the time of year there should be a destination for you to visit.

Packs retail for around $25 (AU) and can be found online at:

• ABC Shop
• Explore Australia
• QBD The Bookshop

After three months of daily use, my top 5 favourite and, in many cases, most used apps are (in no particular order):

Pulse News Reader (Free) – Admittedly I have only been using it for 24 hours, but it is simply a fantastic application for consuming multiple news sources in one place. It’s very well designed, engaging and works exactly as you expect it to. Until I found Pulse News Reader, my app of choice for reading news, most RSS feeds and social network connection updates was Flipboard (free). I love the way Flipboard presents feed items in the form of a magazine that you can flip through, but for reading full length news items and blog posts I think Pulse News Reader has the edge now. I think I’ll still use Flipboard for the time being to scroll through my Twitter and Facebook streams.

Eyewitness (Free) – One of the first apps I ever heard about for the iPad and the one that had a real influence on my decision to buy a pad in the first place. It is basically the digital edition of the Eyewitness photography series, which appears in full colour in the centre spread of the Guardian newspaper each day. Each image is engaging and looks magnificent on the iPad display. Whilst I find Guardian don’t strictly update every single day with the latest image, they do eventually issue all the images published in the print edition, you sometimes just have to wait a day or two longer for it.

GoodReader (Paid) – I can’t quite remember where I heard about this app, but I initially purchased it so I had a single utility to collect, store and read my documents in. Subsequently I have made good use of its many features that include reading files not supported as standard on the iPad, the ability to FTP into servers to retrieve files, connect to a number of web mail services to retrieve attachments I can’t view natively on the pad, download files from web pages that iPad’s Safari won’t recognise and best of all, GoodReader can act as a Wifi connected file repository thus facilitating the transfer of files from one computer to another (on the same network) when there’s no other means immediately available. It also allows you to annotate documents like PDF files.

Moto X Mayhem (Paid) – I used to play a similar browser based Flash game when I was at university. I simply find this game addictive and great fun. Perfect for whiling away an hour or two!

iDo – Notepad (Free) – I like to make lists of tasks I need to complete, or jot ideas down every now and again and iDo has been my app of choice for this over the native iPad app Notes. iDo offers an enhanced set of features compared to Notes including basic text formatting options, note prioritisation and categorisation. More recently I have been trying out To Do’s List (free), but as yet I am undecided on which one I prefer.

Our menu for the evening:

Seasonal oyster with Vietnamese dressing and baby coriander
– Kidiozumi Hahugyokuko ‘Yamahai Nama’, Chiba, Japan

Sashimi style Hiramasa kingfish with wasabi pannacotta, radish and ginger marmalade
– 2009 Cotes-du-Rhone, Clos du Mont-Olivet, Rhone Valley

Cured Marlborough salmon with prawn beignet, orange, mandarin and fennel
– 2010 Derwent Pinot Gris, Granton, Tasmania

Cannelloni of beetroot and goats curd with beetroot salad and pinenut vinaigrette
– 2009 Domaine Pichot ‘Le Marigny’ Vouvray Moelleux, Loire Valley, France

Terrine of Thirlmere duck and fois gras with cured duck breast, figs and toasted brioche
– 2009 Sorrenberg Gamay, Beechworth, Victoria

Pan fried dory with seared scallop, onion bhaji, cauliflower puree and mango chutney
– 2009 Beaumes-de-Venise, La Ferme Saint Martin ‘Les Terres Jaunes’ Rhone Valley, France

Roast Junee lamb loin with caramelised sweetbreads, miso-glazed eggplant and olive crumble
– 2007 Glenguin ‘Stonybroke’ Shiraz, Hunter Valley, NSW

Brillat-Savarin cheese cake with honeyed walnuts and pear puree
– 2007 Sainte Croix du Mont, Chateau la Caussade, Bordeaux, France

Granny Smith apple jelly with vanilla syrup and apple granita

Banana mousse with white chocolate icecream and peanut brittle
– Campbell’s Classic ‘Liquid Gold’ Rutherglen Tokay, Rutherglen, Victoria

Yoko was a fellow participant on a photo shoot I recently attended as part of the portrait photography course I undertook through the CAE in Melbourne, tutored by local photographer Glenn Guy. This was one of my more successful images and the one I’m most satisfied with.

The four week course was an introduction to the basic principles of photographing people, with the main emphasis being on the utilisation of natural light. Time was spent de-constructing photographs in a group environment, as well as covering more fundamental issues of camera use.

The field outing was extremely informative, as well as great fun. The opportunity to photograph with a group of people whose common purpose of attendance is the same was invaluable.

• Glenn Guy – http://www.travelphotographyguru.com/
• CAE Melbourne - http://www.cae.edu.au

I was extremely pleased to grant Peter Dabbene the right to use one of my photos in his latest book of poems titled “Optimism” when he contacted me mid 2009. Peter kindly sent me a copy of the book once it had gone to print and it now lives in our lounge room.

Purchase a copy directly from Peter via his website at www.peterdabbene.com or off of Amazon.

So I happened to hear that Powderfinger were doing three free, surprise gigs in Australia on Friday (October 2nd). Brisbane had been first on the list and when I found out that they were only giving 30 minutes or so warning (of the exact location) before the next gig via their twitter page, they were heading to somewhere in Sydney. I think most people assumed Melbourne would be the third and final stop, so when I left work I went straight into the city (which was confirmed as the location shortly thereafter) and headed to Federation Square, which to me seemed like the only logical place they might appear. There were already a few others there too, iPhones and laptops in hand and at around 5:30PM Powderfinger announced that they would be there for a 5:50PM performance. By the time they arrived at 6PM, probably a couple of hundred people had gathered. Having been one of the first there, I was fortunately just a couple of people back from the front.

The band were traveling light, bringing with them just their guitars, a small wooden box to substitute drums and a small amp & microphone for vocals. They were promoting their forthcoming album Golden Rule and played a small set consisting entirely of new material. It was a casual gathering and was over within 30 minutes, but everyone seemed to love it. I was pretty disappointed that on the day I decided to leave my camera backpack at home (with camera in it) I missed a prime opportunity to use it. However, I did have my mobile with me which I used to get a photo and a video of the second song they played.

It made for quite a sweet Friday evening.

Back in June I wrote about how the Guardian had started a camera club using a Flickr group as the basis, setting monthly assignments for members to undertake. July’s assignment was portraiture preserving anonymity, for which I submitted a selection of images I captured purely for the purpose of this assignment. I was very pleased to notice today my collection featured on the Guardian’s site along with a small critique by one of the photo editors. It’s really encouraging when something like this happens and I’ll be sure to continuing submitting work for future monthly assignments to try and get further feedback and exposure.

This is what prompted me to write frigtool, a little application that takes a desired image width and height, then searches out some random flickr photos, scales them randomly, then crops a random region matching the desired width and height, finally outputting the image for saving. You’re unlikely to ever get the same image twice, even if the same source image is used.

To make it all a bit more interesting, I also wanted the ability to provide a few tags to refine the content of the images selected, as well as the ability to specify whether it should be my flickr photos that get used, or those from other flickr users who mark their photos with a suitable Creative Commons licence.

I have made it available for all to use via my website at http://www.jamescaws.com/frigtool/.

I envisage it being useful for designers who need to quickly obtain dummy filler images of a specific dimension to insert into a mock design. There are probably a heap of other uses for it too that I can’t think of — let me know in the comments below how and why you use it.

If you think the maximum image dimensions you can provide are a little on the tight side, this is because larger images would require a large original image to be obtained from flickr in the first place, which not only slows down the generation process, but also eats up my bandwidth. Depending on how much the utility gets used, I might eventually transfer it to another server with less bandwidth restrictions, at which point I’ll allow larger images to be generated.

Please use this post’s comment facility to report any bugs, provide suggestions or simply let me know how you find it performs.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/SwanseaJobs

For a user without basic HTML experience, I think using the Feed43 system might prove a little tricky, however for those with some mark-up knowledge, they should find the pattern matching mechanism quite powerful, resulting in more accurate feeds than those generated by the other sites I listed, FeedYes and Feedmaker, if indeed they could even manage to produce a feed in the first place.

For those interested in how I set-up the RSS feed, the Swansea jobs page is located at http://www.swansea.gov.uk/jobs. Using this as the source page address at feed43.com, I set-up the following item (repeatable) search pattern to pull out each job listed on the page:

<p ALIGN="left"><b>{*}
<a name="{%}"></a> {*}
{%}<br>{*}
{%}<br>{*}
{%}<br>{*}
{%}<br>{*}
{%}</p>{*}
<p>{*}

The text matched and extracted using {%} is added to a list of per-item search results, whereas {*} matches are discarded. This therefore allowed me to set my RSS item titles as {%2} (the job title), the link template as http://www.swansea.gov.uk/jobs#{%1} and the content as

{%5}<br />
<br />
{%6}

Unfortunately the HTML mark-up of the jobs page is not perfect which results in an invalid portion of content in many cases. I know that Feedburner has an option to make feeds validate, so this is one of the reasons why I have piped the resulting feed through the Feedburner service.

Over all I found the Feed43 system quite straight forward to use and it also has some nice little extras too, such as being able to email a summary of the feed name, feed URL and URL for editing to a designated email address for reference. Well worth a go if you want to keep tabs on new jobs or other regularly updated items on a static web page that does not offer a RSS or Atom version to subscribe to.

What I am most looking forward to is their monthly audio slideshow by one of their own photographers, explaining how they approached the assignment. As a person who enjoys taking photos, but who has never attended a class or fully interacted with a professional photographer, sometimes you wonder how the professionals would do it, what settings they might opt for, or what kind of lens they would use, and these monthly videos promise to give a good insight into how it’s done. Just as a result of watching their June audio slideshow by Sarah Lee, I have learnt a few interesting points.