Google, Bing and Yahoo have recently decided to standardise the semantic markup they use for various types of posts – the newly appointed standard is schema.org. Could be a book, business listing or a recipe – the idea is to add some tags to the html on the page so the search engine can more intelligently “read” the page. For instance, instead of just using an <ul> to list ingredients, you now tag each item of that list with <li itemprop="ingredient">. It should result in more specific and efficient searching – Google already has its own recipe search, just as it does for images or books.

Apart from gripes about Google’s recipe search actually not including most independent bloggers’ recipes (I’ll spare you that rant for today), the problem is that all us food bloggers were happily getting used to the previous darling of semantic snippets, microformats. There are several WordPress plugins that will help you write a recipe with the microformats markup needed, and I’ve been using hrRcipe in unadulterated form up to now.

For the moment, Google search still uses microformats and I would be happy to wait until someone else developed a schema.org compatible plugin, but unfortunately Google+’s own “+1″ buttons use the schema.org markup to determine which image is used as representative of a post. Without the itemprop="photo" attached to the tag my header logo gets used for the recipe image, rather than the appropriate thumbnail.

So I delved into the depths of hrecipe, and jigged around with the js/hrecipe_format.js file. All my additions and changes are marked in the comments starting // ZJWS:, but essentially I’ve changed some formatting for my own nefarious purposes and added the relevant schema tags so that they show up listed alongside the microformats.

Here’s the changed file: hrecipe_format

If you take a look at this link to Google’s rich snippets testing tool, you’ll see an example of one of my recipes using the new hrecipe file. Note that information for both microformats and schema.org are appearing nicely.

Hope this helps some food bloggers out there struggling to keep up to date with Google’s latest pronouncements!

In a word… brilliant. I recently went on two mostly walking holidays – one to the Grand Canyon and Bryce Canyon, and one travelling around Newfoundland.

The big advantage, of course, is the weight. I’m still using my GF1, with four lenses (wide 7-14mm, 20mm prime, 45-200 medium zoom and 100-300mm for wildlife). Even with all four lenses in my rucksack, the weight was hardly noticeable and I’m really not used to carrying anything at all on my back… (read: sofamonkey).

I love taking photos, both for the images that I nerdily fiddle with back home, and for the memories that my goldfish mind loses rather quickly without a photographic reminder. But I travel with my boyfriend who, whilst happily tolerant of the odd snap as long as it doesn’t include his face, would understandably get a bit bored if I had to stop every 50 metres or so to take off my rucksack and pull the camera out. So I needed to find a solution which would keep my camera handy at all times, while not impeding walking or scrambling over more tricky terrain, something that was easy to carry but also secure for the camera and lenses.

This is my double-strap solution:

Firstly, a sling-style strap from Black Rapid which screws into the tripod mount at the bottom of the camera and slings over the front of the body, leaving the camera to dangle just behind the hip. For a less strenuous trail without a pack, this is a good solution – the camera bounces much, much less than on a longer neck strap, the weight is comfy for long periods on a shoulder and the camera is at a perfect height to just grab with one hand to steady it on more tricky terrain. To take photos, it just slides up and down the strap and you can limit its range of movement with stoppers on the strap. For general walking, it seems to sit there just fine. (I don’t carry a tripod for hiking, just travelling with a small Gorrillapod for sunsets and night photos – but if you did want to leave the tripod mount free, I believe there’s an adapter which lets you attach both strap and tripod.)

However, the sling is impossible when wearing a rucksack and it seemed silly not to take advantage of the pack’s straps. Op/tech has the perfect solution – it makes these little clips (the reporter/backpack system connectors) which fasten onto each shoulder strap of a rucksack and then click into male and female connectors, attached to the camera’s side strap lugs. The camera then hangs on your chest but since the straps are short, there’s hardly any bouncing when you walk. The straps are long enough though that you can lift the camera to eye level to shoot, both portrait and landscape.

Two notes: the reporter just clip around the straps rather than into them, so need to be placed on the rucksack above horizontal straps to stop them falling down vertically. Then there are a male and female connector which fix to the camera’s strap lugs – the ones on the GF1 are a bit tight, so you won’t want to put them on and take them off constantly, but it was a 5 minute fiddle to attach them with tweezers and they aren’t too huge to leave in place.

In combination with the sling strap, shortened a bit and hung around the neck, this is a perfect hiking solution – with the pack on, the camera fastens onto the shoulder straps of the rucksack, so all the weight is distributed there. It was so comfortable and secure that I felt I should put the camera away only once in 10 days of hiking, when fording a river with a bed of slippery stones.

When I wanted to sit down and have a snack, the camera unclicked from the reporter straps and the sling strap took the weight around my neck instead, leaving me free to take off my pack and keeping the camera secure at all times, without having to find a rock to put it on.

For the moment, I’m still putting the lenses in the rucksack itself, which means setting down the pack briefly. This wasn’t much of an issue as changing lenses inevitably involves a brief halt in walking anyway, and it’s a good excuse to drink/snack in any case. Plus the challenge of capturing the best shot possible, with the currently mounted lens, did my photography good I think.

The internet is full of rabbit holes of knowledge, just waiting to entrap the unwary geek – you wake up in the morning knowing absolutely nothing about Japanese-made lenses from the 1970′s, the history of the Pentax Spotmatic camera or the radioactive properties of lens coatings. Yet three hours later, here you are armed with a bit of dangerous hearsay, a list of Takumar lens codes in chronological order and a new eBay account. Oh dearie me.

I promise I had no intention of becoming one of those people that obsess about legacy “glass”, the “purity” and “truth” of manual focussing or the quality feel of a forty-year-old metal lens. But, I have to admit, there is something really quite cool about recycling a clearly well-made bit of kit that would otherwise be defunct and taking pictures with it. I know, I know – that’s what the lens was designed to do, and the physics of bending light have not been tinkered with recently. Still, photos feel different: considered, imbued with meaning, state-altering. Photography with a capital P. Oh dearie me, again.

I blog about food and so, when time and hunger permit, take pictures of it too, but my current lenses weren’t perfect for the job. So here’s why I picked a old, 100% manual lens, the Super-Multi-Coated Asahi Pentax Takumar 50mm f1.4:

• Price: there are some native Micro 4/3rds lenses out there to consider but they are a bit punchy in terms of price. The 45mm Panasonic Leica Macro is slower, pricey and I’m not sure how much I’d use the macro capability. In between the 20mm and 45mm lengths are the 25mm Nokton f0.95 – fast yes, but manual focus – and the upcoming fully automatic 25mm f1.4 Panasonic. But I’m not sure how useful 25mm would be for my purposes and so I wanted to experiment with new focal lengths and working manually with the GF1 before investing heavily. The Tak cost me 150 dollars on ebay, and I probably could have paid 30 or so less had I been willing to wait instead of clicking the “buy-it-now” button like a demented toddler insisting on breakfast NOW.
• Slower manual photography suits food: unless my hungrier other half Fabio is hovering in the background, or ice-cream is melting, tinkering with focus and exposure for a few seconds isn’t going to make me miss the shot
• The bokeh (I always have to say that in a Bostonian drawl “bow-kaaaay, dahling”): it’s lovely, ethereal, creamy.
• Focal length: I’ve got the 25mm 1.7 Panasonic which is super, but it’s a bit wide and with a minimum working distance of 30cm it doesn’t get me close enough – great for overhead shots of plates and tables, but not for luscious closeups or side-on views. I’ve got the workaday 45-200mm lens too which gets tighter, easier to compose shots, but its working distance is about a metre which can be tricky! This Tak lens has a working distance of 45cm and that 50mm length, becoming 100mm on Micro 4/3rds, seems to be ideal.
• It’s fast: I was looking for a lens that would let me get shots in a dark brown + black granite kitchen around 5pm. Even though I like to fiddle around with off-camera flash too, that extra stop is helpful.

Initial impressions are that it works brilliantly. No, there’s no autofocus and no automatic adjustment of aperture – the lens doesn’t talk to the the body in any way. Indeed, you have to select the “Shoot without lens” menu option to get the camera to stop giving a lens attachment error. But the way the Micro 4/3rds bodies work – letting the light straight through to the sensor for a continous live view – means that some exposure metering is possible. There’s the usual histogram on the screen as you compose the shot, which helps nail the exposure, if not 1st or 2nd time then certainly third, and automatic ISO adjustment works, patchily, too.

Manual focussing works surprisingly well – in M mode, the scroll wheel alternates between shutter speed and manual focus assist, which magnifies a portion of the image to really get the focus perfect. Unlike the native M43 lenses where this springs into action as soon as you touch the focus ring (if you have the MF assist menu option active), that extra click is actually useful as you can get in the general focus region first before looking at the fine detail – helpful to avoid looking at an entirely blurred screen where you can’t tell whether you should pull back or go forward. Focussing using the Panasonic viewfinder, which doesn’t have a great resolution, is accurate too which was an unexpected bonus, and means that manual focus lenses can be used in bright sunlight.

There are some quirks: in Shutter priority mode, the scroll wheel should control shutter speed, but for some reason my GF1 only lets me slow down the speed and not increase it, which is odd. In Aperture priority mode, I’d expect ISO, when set to automatic, to change more consistently than it seems to. I think both of these might need some menu experimentation to understand.

The lens feels like quality (oh, here we go) – it has that desirable all-metal construction, and gives satisfying chunky clicks as you turn the aperture. Focus has a beginning and an end, unlike the native M43rds lenses I’ve been using, and a distance scale too, which makes life easier when judging initial focus. There is a redundant Manual/Auto switch which did something or other on Pentax bodies – it got in the way when changing aperture at first, but now my fingers have learnt to ignore it.

This is (confusingly) a M42 mount lens which does need an adapter to fit the M43rds body: for this type of the Takumar lens – and there are several iterations described on the web – you apparently need an adapter without an internal ring. I picked one up from Rainbow Imaging on eBay for 15 dollars which seems well constructed and works perfectly.

All in all I’m really pleased, and I have a feeling that working manually will only improve my photography, not that there’s terribly much room to go the other way. I won’t post any samples here, as there are ennumerable pictures from better photographers online already, but (utterly non-expert opinion continues) my initial pictures show a gorgeously shallow DOF when wide open with dreamy backgrounds while smaller apertures give super-sharp results and colours are comparable to Panasonic’s modern lenses. I’m sure photos will pop up in my flickr stream sooner or later. If you’re interested in reading up about the various Asahi Pentax Takumar 50mm 1.4 lenses, I suggest the following resources, but the rabbit hole obviously goes much deeper:

• One owner’s opinion on why it’s his favourite lens
• Advice on adapters for the Micro 4/3rds body
• Discussion and some image samples
• What to do about yellow discoloration of the lens (answer: put it in sunlight)
• Takumar lens codes

There is no perfect bag: the stuff I need a bag to carry and do changes from one day to the next, and may not overlap with what you think very much at all. However, I’m pretty enthusiastic about my new camera bag, so I thought I’d do a quick writeup in case it’s useful for anyone wondering about buying it. There’s a full selection of photos and video on the InCase website, so I’ll limit myself to describing whether it lives up to what I wanted it to do:

Fits and organizes the tech that I haul for nearly every flight?

YES – it’s got those padded dividers with velcro sides that let you reorganize sections as you want and fit my GF1 and lenses with room to spare for headphones and three mobiles. My iPad goes in a specially designed pocket and a full length and width document pocket is padded and fits my MacBook Air perfectly. Bottom, back and sides are all padded too, so no worries about shoving it under my seat on the plane.

Easy access to passports and travel docs, computer and ipad for airport security?

YES – the sling design lets you quickly swing the bag around to the side, undo the top zip without any awkward elbowing of people behind you in the queue and access whatever you need to. Much better than handbag rustling or backpacks that need to be plonked on the floor while you bend over to search inside, or indeed messenger bags (I always end up holding the flap under my chin while searching the cavernous depths). The document pocket keeps paper reservations and passports tidy.

Practical to take on weekend city breaks for urban trekking?

YES, MOSTLY I haven’t had a chance to really test walking with it yet (at least not to my normal standard of 7 hours pavement pounding, sightseeing and museums). But the shoulder strap is very padded on both ends and the buckle doesn’t cut into my chest at all. It is a one-shoulder design, which may be an issue for girls not quite as pancake-like as me, but I find it comfy. The strap is super-adjustable and reversible and has a quick-release system over the chest which loosens and tightens the strap within certain limits. This means that it’s easy to go from “walking mode”, with the bag pulled tight into the back and slightly diagonally orientated, to “lens changing/rummaging mode” with the strap looser and the bag to your side, ready to open the top zip.

The fabric is urban, a textured grey weatherproof canvas that would look perhaps even more at home with skinny jeans and biker boots than with waterproof trousers and trekking shoes. Certainly it’s not going to look out of place in Hoxton among the likes of Chrome messenger bags.

One downside: it’s a little big for my build – I’m 5′ 7″ and fairly slim and it does extend beyond my back on both sides, even when tightly fastened at an angle. As a day bag for a Micro 4/3rds system, it’s a bit oversized – the joy of these small cameras and lenses is that they can be stuffed in a small handbag rather than needing a big tote. But since I inevitably end up carrying around camera plus accessories, iPad, water, snacks, wallet, maps, guidebooks and phones when on a city break, I don’t think a little extra room is a huge biggie. Yes, to be a proper city bag, it’d need to be about 6 inches narrower. But, as I keep telling myself, there is no perfect bag and this one is darn close.

On the day when it passed closest to the Earth for… well, aaages apparently. Does anyone actually keep track of these things, apart from statistics-mad US news programmes? I am convinced they have hundreds of people in bunkers somewhere, each with a bakelite telephone hotline to the newsroom, just poised to feed the latest sports, weather or special situations numbers upstairs.