When I first bought a canvas I was pretty hesitant, the cost can be quite steep and I had little to no idea of the quality I was going to get. After looking around I decided to go with Hello Canvas. I sent the photo off and a week later a magnificent canvas came through the post. A great ridged frame and the printing stayed true to the shades of the photo.

When I ordered my D7000 Jessops offered me a free canvas as part of the package. I chose my photo and got it printed, eagerly awaiting is arrival. It arrived and to my dismay it was set on a relatively thin whimsical frame and the colours just weren’t 100%; none the less it still had the magical canvas feel.

I have now accumulated another 4 canvas’s all varying sizes, all from Hello Canvas. Their superb print quality and thick robust frames put them heads above others and customer support is great. One of the prints I ordered arrived damaged during the shipping. I got in contact with the Hello Canvas team who sorted me out even though I was missing the order number (dad deleted the email with it in).

I would recommend to anyone with a half decent shot in their library to get it printed on canvas by Hello Canvas. Because HelloCanvas are super nice they have given me a 15% off code for you to use when you buy a canvas from them.

Coupon: “hellormasperofans”

I always found this shot interesting, but when I uploaded it to Flickr I didn’t expect it to garner as much attention as it did. I thought I would share its story…

I’m a countryside person, used to rolling hills and  my own personal space. Visiting Hong Kong where people walk at “city speed” and don’t understand personal space was quite a shock. I found myself often making a cradle around my camera to avoid people knocking it.

To take this shot I steadied myself on a lamp post to avoid being walked into and held the camera up in the air to get a good vantage point. I used live view to get an idea of where I was pointing it, waited until the lights went green and snapped a couple shots trying to fill the scene with as much as possible. In post I cooled down the white balance and helped the yellows pop.

The reason I initially took a warming to this was because it is one of the few shots you can look at time and time again and spot new details, someone smiling or a sign that you don’t recognise.

When Apple envisioned this hub they saw you going home and plugging in your devices, then heading out again. Now we take our hub with us into the living room, the kitchen, meetings, lecture and even sometimes the actual pub. The idea that the cloud is going to be our new home doesn’t work for me. I would rather keep as much as I can locally for speed, ease of access and privacy. What I see happening is the cloud acting as a bridge. We no longer have to come home and plug in to sync all our data. Instead we turn on and connect anywhere anytime. This is what iCloud is doing; unlike most services it is giving us access to our hub from anywhere.

The cloud is not a new hub it is a bridge.

Living in a rural area you don’t tend to get the opportunity to take many shots of traffic a night, but my recent trip to Hong Kong seemed like an opportune moment to try something new. I was staying with a friend that didn’t live to far from pretty busy roads which looked ideal. We waited till about 10-11 by which time it was as dark as it was going to get in a city full of lights and headed off to a bridge to get a good vantage point.

To do light trails you should be looking at extending your exposure time for as long as possible. The best way to do this is to drop the ISO and close up the aperture to a high f-stop. One factor I hadn’t thought about was the background light; nearly every sign in Hong Kong lights up, all the shop have their lights on and street lighting covers the rest. this meant even with my ISO at 100 and aperture at 22f I couldn’t get an exposure of more than 10 seconds, meaning my light trails were weak, so we called it a night.

A couple days later we thought we would try again, but this time chose a busier road with less background light. The images definitely came out better this time, but needed some serious work in Aperture to get them to a good standard. A couple tweaks to the curves and changes to things like the colour temperature, I managed to achieve something that was half decent.

With this experience in mind I decided it was time to order a neutral density filter for my camera. From past experience I had learnt that buying filters can become expensive, especially when you have more than one lens of different sizes. So I took the decision to order a Cokin P series holder and some filters to use with it; the idea being I will now be able use all my filters on all my lenses. This along with my recent move to a house that conveniently has a bridge that crosses a dual carriageway only 100m down the hill means that I might just be having another crack at making some light trails soon.

This is where it gets hard, either mobile phone manufactures have to define a standard then release it through all their phones during their refreshes and eventually years later it will be in common use. Or one company that has everyone already hammering to get the newest device and can spread millions of them in one go does it. The only company that has that kind of control over the market is Apple. No doubt their solution would be elegant, but what they can achieve that no other manufacturer can do is volume. The Olympics is the ideal testing ground for this and I would love to see it happen.

Android is suffering from fragmentation, where each handset maker has a variation of the OS; So when Google update you have to wait for the manufacture to modify it and then hope that your woefully under powered cheap handset will run it. Google are combating this with making the ‘Holo’ theme used in Ice Cream Sandwich mandatory, but they are not going all they way.

It looks like Microsoft has learnt from their previous experience in this market and by watching others namely Palm’s WebOS and Google’s Android go up against the iPhone. People want their phone to stay simple but be smart at the same time. They seem to have found a balance between Google’s open to everyone and Apple’s full control approaches to offer real an alternative. This combined with the eye watering aesthetic that Nokia have been using since the N8 it makes it a real pleasing offer.

The titled interface is a refreshing way of looking at a phone compared to Android and iOS’s very similar UI’s. Microsoft seem to have realised that the key to getting a phone OS to stick is to get apps, something WebOS failed at. I hope this could be another XBOX for Microsoft.

Now they are forcing people to upgrade to the latest version their computer can use. The only issue there being that some people still use XP! An OS that is nearly 10 years old and can only run IE8. Windows 7 is actually quite a respectable OS to use, and even has some features I would like to see on my Mac. Microsoft needs to get users used to the idea of updating.

I fear Firefox is likely to fall into the same trap Microsoft did with IE; people getting left behind on old outdated versions. This is a real issue with the web moving so fast and new standards being created daily. Only the Webkit browsers seem to be any good at staying up to date. Chrome Automatically updates and Safari updates are pushed by Apple through the OS regularly.

Fibre

Fibre optic broadband is sorely needed in the UK; the problem with what is currently being done is BT is rolling it out to all the big cities and to the houses at already get +4Mb/sec, what they see as the profitable market. Where if you take my dad’s home connection for example we are lucky if we get 1Mb/sec.The house in question is in a small village of 250 homes with 550+ people. This is the kind of place where FTTC is needed, this is where the investment is needed; communities that lie out side the 2 miles range recommended for optimum performance.

The Sorry state of the UK’s broadband and BT’s monopoly is summed up by this heroic project, B4RN. The fact that a project like this is being so successful shows that there is demand and it is economically viable to supply broadband to these areas. This project is an amazing example of what can be done and I would love to see more of this in 2012. I like the government I just feel they need to be putting more into building an infrastructure if they want to reach their goal of having the best broadband network in Europe by 2015.

4G

With the US and many other countries readying for 4G, where are we? We are stuck behind waiting for the auction of the spectrum to take place. Ofcom recently postponed the auction, but even then the spectrum used still isn’t free till 2013. This disappoints me because it provides such a convenient solution to extending broadband in rural areas. The speeds it offers rival that of FTTC and for rural areas where there are many dwellings isolated from the main road it offers an ideal solution that doesn’t suffer so badly from the last mile syndrome we see in copper. I would love to see a company that uses the 4G spectrum to provide solely internet. In all this doom and gloom however O2 and EverythingEverywhere are doing trials of 4G in London and Cornwall respectively.

Links

I am quite passionate about broadband and connectivity and if you are here are some links that you might find interesting.

SamKnows – Best way to check what is currently available in your area and any changes. Also tells you the distance from the exchange as the crow flies.

Gigaom – They have a lovely little section on broadband that covers anything to do with connecting to the internet

thinkbroadband – Great for news on developments and current coverage.

BT Infinity checker - Check to see when BT’s Infinity service will be available in your area or not as the case maybe.

Speedtest.net – Great way to check your performance

When I subscribed I was expecting for it to match half of my iTunes library; however I have been mightily impressed with it not matching just under 30 songs out of 3000. Interesting enough it matched most of the songs from an album but not 2 from the same album, peculiar? And then it found another 3 songs that had too lower Bit Rate for it to match.

Thanks to the wonders of having unlimited broadband I promptly downloaded almost 2000 songs to improve the quality. It is a great service at a nice price, but I am not sure if it is one I would re-subscribe to; simple because the biggest benefit to me is one off upgrading of my music. My iPhone is large enough to hold all my music so the idea of not having to worry if something is on my iPod is not their. As a backup solution I have too many photos to not backup my computer over the internet anyway.