Bonfire night and firework photos

I love bonfire night and the fireworks so this year I made sure I took my camera with me and much to the chagrin of my wife I also snuck my tripod in too.

Much like my moon photos, I've been waiting to try my hand at photographing fireworks for some time however unlike the moon shots I didn't just need to wait for a clear night!

The local bonfire night rolled around so I made sure I was ready for it - it turns out that there is a basic setup and settings that essentially guarantee some nice shots. The rest is lucky timing and (in my case) waiting for the smoke to clear!



Aperture
A tripod is a must since we're going to be using pretty long exposures and a cable release is useful if you've got one. Other than that, use manual focus nearly at infinity, set the aperture nice and small to allow a huge depth-of-field whilst keeping everything in focus.
I did make one mistake though, I've since been reminded that f/22 is a bit too small to use since it can cause diffraction problems resulting in less-than-sharp images. Knock it down to f/11 or f/16 to be on the safe side.



Exposure
I used exposures of between 4 and 8 seconds to capture the movement of the fireworks but if you've got a locking button on your shutter release then you can set the camera to Bulb and just expose as long as you like.

Don't worry about opening the shutter earlier than you need to since the sky should be nice and black - you can wait for a firework to go off then let go of the shutter.
One technique, which I decided not to use, is to have a very long exposure (20-30 seconds plus) and to cover the front of the lens with something dark between fireworks so that you can capture multiple explosions.



The rest of my shots from the night are on flickr here.

Podcasting

I'll skip the usual apologies for the lack of posts... take it as read from now on that I'd love to be posting more often but both work and my personal life are pretty busy these days so unfortunately this site gets left behind. My hope is that I'll upload more frequent, short posts rather than the rambling ones from earlier this year.

Podcasting

 

As some of you might know, I produce a podcast called PhotoLegal which neatly combines my interest in photography, technology, audio work and legal/civil liberties. It's hosted by the fantastic team of Darren Hector (professional wildlife photographer), James Barisic (our resident lawyer), Kate Day (Communities Editor at the Telegraph) and Phill Price (amateur photographer and IT guru).

 

The show managed to rack up 10,000 downloads over it's first series and we're now halfway through our second - this time around we're broadcasting live while we record so it's a bit more fraught for the hosts and my recording setups but it gives us a level of interactivity that other podcasts don't have.

 

The Early Days

I got involved early in the first series after hearing Phill sound like he was recording from a cave - since then we've had our fair share of problems ranging from noisy recordings, poor mic placement, uneven levels and more recently some bad audio dropout over Skype which actually caused us to abandon the recording, although we continued for the benefit of our live listeners.

 

Darren and Phill took inspiration from the audio setup posted by PhotoNetcast when they originally started recording the show - it basically consists of a Skype conference call routed through a mixer and an additional USB line-in to allow the recording to capture both the local vocals and the remote guests. It actually works very well, especially at the start when we were able to have Darren and Phill in the same room with just James and perhaps a guest coming in via Skype.

 

I streamlined this a little by removing the unnecessary digital-analog conversions that using the mixer required - my trick is to use something called a Virtual Audio Cable which is a small driver which mimics an output on your computer and allows you to route it where-ever you like. Using the VAC and it's accompanying Audio Repeater software I'm able to output our Skype call along with any local vocals to a recording package, to our live streaming software and back to my speakers/headphones as well!

It's a trick I used to be able to do with one of my previous soundcards (M-Audio Delta66) but since my desktop computer broke I've not been able to use it's features and have been reliant on a laptop instead. I've got a sneaking suspicion that Mac users might be able to do this natively but I'm a lifelong PC user so I have to resort to hacks like this.

 

If you're interested, I record using Cubase but this is overkill for a simple live recording - it was very useful when I had multiple local vocals to mix into the call on the early setup but once it was all being done using the virtual cables this was so much of a problem. Something like Audacity is a good, free, alternative. I know Darren favours Soundbooth on his Mac.

Our live broadcast is handled by LiveStream which is designed for video streaming - we block off the camera inputs but use it's video abilities to put up graphics and notes.

 

The problems came when we tried to avoid us all driving around to physically be together during the recordings - Darren, Phill, James and a guest would dial into a call hosted by me with my recording gear ready to go. Add another guest and the recruitment of Kate as co-host and suddenly we had 7 people on the call and discovered that Skype struggles a little!

General interference, noise, pops, varying volume levels, random audio dropout and finally completely dropping users from the call meant that our chosen method of communication was starting to look problematic.

 

The Solution

Our solution came from Rob Wright who suggested an alternative VoIP system called Ventrilo - it requires a host server to be running somewhere but when we trialled it for our latest recording the results were spectacular.

Call quality is a huge improvement over Skype which I suspect is because we have a handful of people using a single server rather than Skype's thousands of users. It's also got some nice features such as Push-To-Talk which avoids unwanted background noise and can be set to an automatic trigger or a keyboard button. Each user also has more control over the level of their audio input and output.

The big benefit for me is it's ability to record a call itself - I can set it running and not worry about it, plus it even records the local user unlike Skype's output. It records in a proprietary format but this isn't the problem it might seem since it actually logs and records each user's individual audio, allowing me to export each on separately into .wav files and then back into Cubase for some proper multi-track editing. I tend to apply noise reduction as required, EQ each channel and normalise the levels, then it's run through compressor and gate VST plugins before mixing down to a single .wav file again and another export to MP3.

 

It's really great to have a noise-free VoIP service since it makes the editing job much easier and the recording and export abilities mean mixing the final track is a dream compared to our earlier attempts.

 

Hopefully this has been useful to some of you - I do realise it's quite a narrow field of interest but there's not a lot of comprehensive information about this sort of setup as a lot of podcasts only have one host and possibly a guest; we're a bit unusual with our 6 or 7-way discussions!

 

 

The image at the start of this post is from Colleen AF Venable's Flickr photostream under the Creative Commons Share Alike licence.

iPhone 3GI

Within weeks of the new iPhone 3GS hitting the stores there's already rumours of the next update, dubbed the iPhone 3GI...
Before you get too excited I should let you know that the report featured on the excellent site The Onion and goes into details such as:

"Not only is this our lightest and slimmest model ever, but as any truly savvy Apple customer can clearly see, it's also the most handsome product we've ever designed."

And describes "a multi-touch interface that provides those who are "cool enough" with a rich user experience."

If you've not guessed by now (or aren't familiar with The Onion's style of satire), it's a spoof, with the 'I' standing for 'invisible' but for a couple of days there was a growing number of tweets around it as people got a bit caught up in the next big thing from Apple.

US patent granted on podcasting

Photographer and podcaster @WildlifePhotog tweeted a link on Friday to a Softpedia article detailing a patent that's apparently been granted to US company VoloMedia.

Q) So what's their big new invention?

A) Podcasting.

That's right, VoloMedia are claiming that they invented podcasting. The patent was filed in 2008 but is a continuance to a previous one in 2003 and covers the concept of "episodic media content" which could include not just podcasts but potentially also things like RSS feeds in general. As Ars Technica points out it's hard to work out what's actually been invented here since they aren't claiming to have actually created the ability to download a media file or an RSS feed itself.

VoloMedia are currently claiming not to be interested in licensing deals however this is an obvious threat to anyone producing podcasts, in particular large companies who now face the prospect of a retrospective claim being made for licensing monies.

Personally I feel sure that podcasting was already around in 2003 and if someone can demonstrate prior art over this then the patent can be invalidated. Wikipedia has a statement that they emerged in 2004 and this has apparently been enough to overturn an application to trademark the term the following year.

EDIT - There is a suggestion that the first podcast may have been in July 2003 from Boston radio broadcaster Christopher Lydon following his attendance at BloggerCon in Harvard. At around the same time ex-MTV host Adam Curry apparently wrote some software to extend RSS feeds to include audio content and automatically download archived shows to his iPod.

It looks like it's going to come down to a matter of timing between the podcasts and the aggregation software at the time and the specific dates detailed in VoloMedia's patent claim.

Kudos to the regular blogger

I'm realising that this blogger malarkey needs a fair bit of time
devoted to it, you've got to have something interesting to say (whether
your readers agree or not is another question), do enough prep or
research to ensure that it's factually correct, spend some time writing
the damn thing and then revise/edit so that it makes sense.
So kudos to the bloggers out there who have other jobs or time pressures
and yet still manage to post frequent, interesting content. Of course,
you could always just throw some words together and hit send but I think
that the best amateur bloggers probably spend as much time getting the
post up scratch as professional bloggers and journalists do.

With that in mind and with a unusual lack of hubris on my part I've
realised that while I am still working for a living and wanting to spend
my spare time doing things like scuba diving, mountain biking,
photography, growing veg on the allotment, DIY around the flat.... oh,
and spending some time with my long-suffering wife as well, I'm not
going to be able to update this blog with anything like the regularity I
had originally intended.

It's probably not going to affect many people in the scheme of things
since there's still not that many of you reading this on a regular basis
(the Google Analytics show that most of you are one-off or sporadic
readers). I'm not going to compete with people like Mashable or The
Register for speed and volume but I'll still post about major things
that catch my eye.

Podcasts

I've been listening to podcasts on-and-off since I first got a 4th gen iPod (the black&white screen and click wheel) and now regularly put one on in the car on my drive home from work.

I use a Kensington LiquidAUX to charge and connect the iPhone to my stereo's line-in socket. The main draw for me on this product is that the charger's also got a handy wireless remote control that fixes to the steering wheel allowing me to skip tracks safely without fumbling with the iPhone's touchscreen which doesn't have the tactile feedback of previous iPods.

Most of the podcasts I listen to fall into three categories - comedy, photography or technology and there's a special fourth category reserved for anything by Stephen Fry who's recently released a new book, The Dongle of Donald Trefusis, only by podcast.

Some of the other podcasts that I've been listening to are:

Tips from the Top Floor - photography tips from Chris Marquardt.

Stephen Fry's Podgrams - a series of audio essays (sadly not updated for a while now).

Guardian Tech Weekly - audio updates from the tech writers at the Guardian newspaper.

I'm also very keen on one podcast in particular - it's a new one called PhotoLegal which is a great listen for anyone interested in the legalities and rights surrounding photography. You'll see in a future blog post why this one is close to my heart...

Strobist Boot Camp II

One of the blogs I read religiously is Strobist, the photography and
lighting site from David Hobby (@strobist on Twitter). David's a
photographer and photojournalist from America who for a long time has
been running a very popular website dedicated to sharing his techniques
for off-camera flash photography.

In case you're wondering, the American call their flashes a strobe so"Strobist" just refers to flash photography - I guess the English equivalent site might be called "Flasher" but that might get a different audience!
Where David really excels is in explaining through simple steps how to achieve some pretty amazing lighting in your photos - specifically, the power and flexibility that comes when you a) stop using the little popup flash on your camera, and b) take that flashgun and move it away from the hotshoe.

Over the years the Strobist blog has covered a huge range of basic and more complicated flash techniques through his Lighting 101 and Lighting 102 series. They're definitely worth a look if you're even slightly interested in improving your flash photography.

This summer sees the start of Strobist Boot Camp II, a repeat of last year's series of practical challenges since there's only so many technique lessons you can post to a blog. David will be setting a number of assignments that the readers of his site will each attempt in their own way - the winner at the end wins a prize.
If you're reading this at some point after the Boot Camp has finished then there's nothing to stop you completing the assignments however the real interest for me is going to be comparing my entries to all the others as we submit them via the Strobist Flickr pool.

I'm going to be following the assignments and hope to post on here and my Flickr stream about my equipment, techniques and results. If you're entering too or just want to have your say then I'd love to hear from you via the comments on this site or my Twitter feed.

UPDATE: The first assignment is here!