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.

PhotoCalc iPhone app

Recently I've been listening to the photo podcast Tips From The Top Floor from German photographer Chris Marquardt.


One of their recommendations was a handy little app called PhotoCalc which won't appeal to the non-photogs out there but for the technical togger it's a nice reference tool to calculate the Depth of Field of a particular focal length/aperture combination.
It'll also guide you on Flash Exposure settings, reciprocal exposures and plenty of other useful, but not all vital, camera related information.

You can find it on the iTunes App Store.


The other reason for this post was to test out the ShoZu app which allows you to update a number of different blogging, photo sharing and social media sites from within a single interface.
So far so good if you're reading this... there's also a rumour on Twitter at the moment that the app might move to being paid-for so I wanted to download it while it's still free.

Seems good so far but you can't post text and images as one post - hence the screenshot in the previous post.

When is a walk not just a walk?

....when it's a blog post!

A week or two ago we decided to take advantage of the unseasonal sunny weather to get out for a walk on the North Downs followed by a late lunch at the nearby pub. The sun was shining, I was spending time with my friends and the promise of a pint at the pub was really helping to keep me going so I did what every self respecting blogger would do and turned it into an opportunity to test out the GPS capabilities on my iPhone.

Tracking
The app that I'm using is MotionX-GPS which I trialled using the free Lite version but wanted more functionality so I've paid the £1.79 to get the fully-featured version. For this bank-breaking price you essentially get the features of a £350 handheld GPS like the Garmin Colorado 300; standard location, speed & altitude info, compass navigation, waypoint/geocache navigation as well as route tracking and the ability to display location and route onto both streetmaps or terrain maps. The other nice touch which will be welcomed by iPhone owners who have tried to use Google Maps GPS is that you can cache maps that you have previously viewed so that if you go out of range of your phone service you can still see the maps of the area since they're stored in the phone rather than downloaded on the fly, plus the maps are from OpenStreetMap which means it keep being updated with more and more details.
It's worth noting that the free Lite version of MotionX-GPS will actually do most of this with the exception of the visual mapping and a limitation of only storing one saved track.

I set the app running as we left the carpark so that it would track our route and also provide us with a handy compass-style pointer to later direct us back to the starting point, shoved it in my pocket and got on with the walk. I pretty much ignored it until we came to a point when our directions let us down and we got a little bit lost... so it was iPhone to the rescue! While it obviously didn't know where we were trying to go to it did show us where we'd been and also where the nearest footpath was. I could feel that beer getting closer!

Geocaching
This software is also suitable for geocaching as you can manually add a waypoint with the cache location and then it will navigate you towards it. The output from the app are .kml and .gpx files which it gives you option to email from your iPhone. These can then be used in Google Maps, Google Earth, Yahoo Pipes and any number of other applications. I've uploaded my route onto my Google account so you can see where we went.

Geo-tagging
Since I had my camera with me and had been snapping away throughout the day while the GPS app had recorded my position I took the opportunity to geo-tag my pictures. The free GPicSync software isn't pretty but it does the job it needs to, namely, matching up the timestamp from my photos to the time logged in the GPS route files and then writing the location back into the EXIF information of the photos.

Sites like Flickr and Google do a great job of visually displaying their photos overlayed onto world/location maps, allowing you to search images geographically as well as by name or keyword.
This software has a another trick up it's sleeve by letting you create a custom .kml file with location markers showing the photos and their location. I've imported this into Google Maps as well so you can see the camera icons and image links that are generated.

If you're interested in customising .kml files for use in Google Earth, Maps or any of the other places you can import GPS information then I'd recommend looking at the Google tutorial on the subject. The files are essentially just XML so they take you through the process of defining the look and feel of tracks, placemarkers and anything else you might want to overlay onto a map including 3D geometric shapes which I could imagine being useful for architects. If there's enough demand from readers then I'll write a how-to guide to simplify the process!

Photography

One of my resolutions was to get out more with my camera (a Canon 400D Digital-SLR with a growing bag of lenses, flashes and assorted bits) since I generally just use it for snapshots which is a bit of a waste.

A D-SLR (the SLR part stands for Single Lens Reflex which refers to the fact that you actually look through the same lens that you'll be shooting through) is a great improvement on most compact digital cameras since it offers you complete control over every part of the camera while most compacts will just try to give you a properly exposed shot with the minimum of fuss. Fine until you want to be a bit more creative.
I'm not saying that you can't get good shots with a compact, or that a D-SLR will automatically give better shots but it does give you more opportunity to experiment.


I've been playing with mine and will be posting to the excellent flickr as I do more. My flickr page is in the links to the side but be patient since there's not too much on there at the moment.
One of the reasons I chose flickr rather than Picasa is the community element to it - posters are encouraged to share photography techniques and to leave comments on other people's shots whick makes it a great place to learn more about the processes involved in making the type of shot you like. It's always fun to check out flickr's interestingness page to see some of the best new uploads.


Helping me along the way are a couple of useful sites including the UK based ePhotoZine for general tips, review etc and the popular Strobist blog run by the American newspaper photographer David Hobby which focuses, if you'll forgive the pun, on using flash and light effectively.
Again the community of flickr comes to play with a very active Strobist group where you can post images for review, tips and see how others have achieved their shots.

Since I don't seem to be able to post without mentioning the iPhone I'll just throw a little link in to one of David's recent posts where he uses his iPhone as a handy light for low-light shots. Very inventive!
I'll also be posting soon on the GPS facilities of the iPhone, both standalone and how you can use that to geotag your photos locations so watch out for that.

New Year's Resolutions

New Year's Resolutions
I don't like New Year's resolutions.

I've gone through the usual "Give up chocolate" variations when I was younger and for a couple of years stuck to the corny "I resolve to not make resolutions" in an effort to get out of it all but at heart I just don't like them.

Why should I suddenly decide to do or not-do something just because it's another year? Plus, they're always so negative, along the lines of "Lose weight" or "Give up ..." (fill in the blank with your favourite food/activity). I like to think I'm a positive person so I don't like to focus on a negative goal.

So this year I didn't make any and I nobody asked me what mine was so I didn't feel pressured into making one up on the spot - I guess we were all too busy keeping our neighbours awake with the late night (or early morning...) marathon session of Singstar that marked New Year 08/09 to be bothered with things like resolutions.  Phew.

Work
January is also renowned for being a difficult time at work.

You've hopefully just had a fun-filled December followed by some holiday leave, Christmas Day and a New Year's party so it's understandable that you start to feel a bit down in the cold, dark days that follow. It's made all the worse since a lot of tasks in December are tagged with a 'follow-up in the New Year' so suddenly you're back from your break with twice the work to do and no bank holidays in sight.

It's no surprise that more people hunt for new jobs in January than any other month but of course this year that's been tempered by the current economic climate - people are staying where they are since no-one wants to be part of the "last-in first-out" list of cash-strapped employers.

Resolving things
In an effort to snap out of the January blues I've done two things, stopped moaning to my long-suffering wife and instead shared some of my work concerns with colleagues (who turned out to be feeling the same so now we're all working to fix things rather than moaning about them privately) and realised that I've stopped doing a lot of the things that I used to do (or wanted to do) that I enjoyed.

I made a decision that I needed to have more fun, or if you like, I made some resolutions but instead of the usual negative ones mine are a bit more upbeat along the lines of "Get out and take more photos", "Be more creative" and "Go mountain-biking".

So far it's working well; in the last week or so I've been more positive at work again, I've combined two of the above and went out to take some creative photos which I'll put onto Flickr soon and also got thoroughly exhausted mountain biking on Sunday with Charlotte and some friends. It's all paying off and it's far easier being happy and relaxed again - maybe there's more to these resolutions than I'd realised.

I've also re-embraced my inner geek which used to be fairly present when I was younger and ran my own webdesign agency with a couple of mates but that side of me had recently been ignored apart from some fairly simple sites for friends and family. Hence my new iPhone and this blog - time to get back into the tech lane.