This Was My Winter Wonderland (And Camera)

Christmas Day at Lough Talt, lake frozen for the first time in “many a year”

FOR THE past three years I reckon I’ve told myself I’d get out, get some more photos, actually start pushing them out online as well.

On holiday in October I picked myself up a Canon IXUS 120IS and it’s gone a long way to re-invigorate the hobby photographer in me. I’m still using the D70 for commercial work but having the small one in the pocket made such a difference over the Christmas and has left me with a great stack of photos to sift through and upload in the next day or two.

Though not jinxing things for myself, it might be high time turned some attention on my neglected photoblog.

These (above and below) are from my winter wonderland, or Lough Talt, Co. Sligo, where I’d made the longer-than-usual-thanks-to-the-weather drive to be with the family for Christmas.

When I’d first picked up the D70, I was genuinely amazed and impressed by the technology within the camera. Flash forward a few years and skip over to the Canon compact and I’ve been left incredibly impressed all over again. In the whole of Christmas, and the two months or so that I’ve had the camera, I don’t think I’ve taken it off the automatic setting – the camera literally doing all the work for you and producing a fantastic quality image at the same time. Don’t get me wrong, I’m as happy behind a full SLR in crafting a photograph as I am in whipping a compact out of my jacket to catch a snap there-and-then but there’s a lot to be said for the marriage of technology, quality and convenience in this case.

Whether it’s enough to egg me towards revisiting my photoblogging, we’ll have to see. It could be fun though…

Christmas Eve at Lough Talt, Co. Sligo

Ken McGuire Photography

Well, I’ve decided to call a halt to the photo blog I was running under photo.kenmc.com, having gone through a few different iterations and approaches from portfolio-ish style to mobile blogging, photos from the mobile phone and all the rest…

As a result, I’ve launched Ken McGuire Photography, something I’ve been putting off doing over the past few months until the theatre calmed down and I had a bit more free time on my hands in terms of getting out and about and getting back to doing something I love. The site, driven by Wordpress with a few tweaks along the way for good measure, will house portfolio work old and new.

There’s no comments on the site, but all the images are being hosted through flickr and individual pages have links back to their home on flickr – you’re free to leave a comment there if you wish. I might yet introduce some pop-up comments, we’ll see how it goes.

There’s a few images in there at the moment, but its the start of something for me, something I’ve been longing to get back around to and hopefully this is the kick in the arse I need for it!

Irish Photographer/Blogger On Nationwide Tonight

Soviet-born photographer Philip Pankov who is now living in Ireland and has provided header images for a few Irish bloggers will be appearing on Nationwide tonight. Philip has an extensive collection of images online from in and around Dublin, Irish pubs, the Irish countryside as well as a range of images from around Italy, France, Germany and Croatia. I’m really into black and white photography myself (and have been for years) so I do like his work.

If you’re near a TV at 7pm switch it on and see what you think for yourself, I won’t actually get to see it at all but fair play to Philip for getting the slot on the show, hope some good comes of it.

PXN8 Before I Blog (with some tyre kicking)

Walter Higgins put out a call for tyre kickers for Pixenate and I figured seen as I got the photo blog back in some kind of structured form that I would lash into Pixenate to resize the photos a bit before uploading them to the blog.

Impressive stuff. The K800 delivers a 2048*1536 shot at around 800kb average, upload was relatively quick and playing around with the basic tools was a breeze. Slight bit of cropping, cropped well. Slight bit of resizing, nice to maintain the aspect ratio. Honestly it was the first time I went to PXN8 with the intention of using the finished photo online as opposed to toying with photos there to see what can be done.

Knowing that, and also knowing that I’m extremely particular about photographs and quality I’ll say that I was impressed when working in colour but a little disappointed in the grayscale and sepia conversion as the image seemed to lose quality around areas close in colour (become very pixelated, grained out). The preview window works really well though Walter, fair play. Good to be able to check everything out without having to do the whole “apply and undo if unhappy” trick.

The final image was cropped at a width of 470px and when saved to disk clocked in at 160kb. One thing I would like to see, unless I missed it, is the ability to compress the photo further. 160kb isn’t ideal if you’re looking at ten posts on a blog homepage, each with a minimum of one image so I’ll confess that I brought the two photos back into Photoshop to drop the size to about 40kb.

Honestly, if I wasn’t a stickler for well compressed web images and I didn’t have access to Photoshop, I think I’d find PXN8 ideal, particularly if you’re blogging your photos and want to make a few adjustments to them. Usability is great, no problem doing anything, uploads well, saves back to disk well plus, the fun effects are actually fun Let me compress those photos even more and I’d be real happy with it…

See the finished post (contains two images), here on the photo blog.

Changing My Approach To Photoblogging

The first of the month has just passed and with about two hours to spare I managed to get my photo blog back in some kind of order. Not that there’s much to put in order – I’ve gone and pulled down any post that previously existed on it, somewhere around 30 odd in total.

I love photography and love my D70 more. I’ve put time and money into techniques, study, lenses and all the rest but day-to-day constraints mean that I don’t get out an awful lot to spend the time I want on photography. Christmas was the best opportunity I had for photos and came away with some fantastic shots from Sligo – all because I had the time to take the walks to plot locations to plan shots in advance.

What I do have is a half decent camera in a 3.2mp Cybershot bundled into the Sony Ericsson K800i. I’ve also started to carry my Konica Minolta dImage X60 (with a 1gb SD, bargain at the time) in my bag as well so I’ve got something handy and quick to shoot with. So thats the approach I’m taking to the photo blog. Two previous attempts to manage the blog showcased what was pretty much a back-catalog of existing works. I could trawl through 10, 20, 30,000 images in my collection, pick out a few, tweak them as I see fit and then pop them online.

But there’s no challenge in it. I’ve already got the photos, so where’s the motivation? It was the shoot over Christmas (in between my two weeks spent lying on the flat of my back coughing my lungs up) that gave me the motivation to get back into the photo blog side of things, only this time, using the tools that are already at my disposal. Some people blog their thoughts, I figure I’ll blog moments – through photographs. Snapshots, thoughts captured in image form, all at the spur of moment. No tricks, no photoshopping, no showcasing exhibition material, just down-to-earth photos of moments that grab me during the day. The push for me is to snap the photo that day and blog it the same day – its fresh when it goes live. Also a way for me to see what exactly I was up to on a particular day, sometimes when you’ve your head buried in four jobs and countless projects its a bit hard to remember!

That said, the blog is relaunched, I put a new theme together this evening and the inaugural post (take three) is live. Will likely put a little more development work into the theme over the weekend but I’m enjoying it for now….

Thinking About Photoblogging?

One of my new years resoultions has been to start pumping my photography out to the web. I’ve got cds, dvds and two machines currently sharing my photo load (with over 20,000 images) at home and I’ve vowed to make 2007 a year where I can actually concentrate on getting more of my personal work online. DeviantART was great and was a good means to keep me publishing but I decided to haul out of there and relaunch the photoblog last September.

So while September and October were good months, November seriously lacked due to so many other commitments and I’ll likely backdate some images for December (that were actually taken during December) to make up for a total post count of 0 for that month. And though there hasn’t been any activity, thus far I’ve managed to spend some time physically planning the presentation and workings of the photoblog before lashing anything up this time.

While I will stick to using Wordpress as the main engine to drive the blog, Wordpress isn’t for everyone. So if you’re considering starting a photoblog, take a look at this wiki entry from Photoblogs.org which lists photoblog scripts and software. It will certainly give you food for thought and a nice list of alternatives to Wordpress.

Hanging New Photographs

Up until yesterday I hadn’t touched my photoblog since late June so at about 10pm last night I got a massive case of Spring-cleaning fever just as we head into the cold months of the year.

This of course means that I’ve deleted all the content from my old iteration of the photoblog (which was basically a rehash of content I publish(ed) on DeviantART), launched it with a new theme and some new works (archives here).

Ten photos or so on it now and definitely more suiting of my actual style and interests (gigs, people) than anything else. Trying to update it daily (or at least schedule a load of posts in advance), been meaning to try showcase some of my more recent stuff since, well, around the time I lost interest in the last iteration!

The theme works really well at higher resolutions (1280*1024), just a simple photoblog theme I picked up and will eventually get around to tweaking to my liking…. The original theme, Nishita, can be downloaded here.

Nikon Climb Aboard The Flickr Train

Via Steve Rubel’s blog it seems that Nikon have struck up a partnership with Flickr which will see the introduction (for the first time ever) of graphical contextual ads on Flickr by a third party company in relation to their photographs. What it means for users is that they’re going to wind up with a small Nikon logo beside photos they’ve snapped using Nikon gear.

As a Nikon photographer (I’ve been shooting Nikon for years both film and digital) I can’t say that I would mind at all to have a Nikon logo appear along side my photos, or have my work appear in a planned Nikon-only gallery on Flickr. Its something about photographers, liking to show off the gear they shoot with. Mainstream you’re either a Nikon user or a Canon user (out of the main players), so it will be interesting to see if Canon decide to make any similar moves. Think Google would buy Canon and co-brand Google Images?

Free Stock Photos

In the line of work that I’m in, its essential to get good stock photography when you can’t get out and take your own. I’ll keep this brief because the site can speak for itself.

If you’re looking for free stock photography, pay a visit to the Stock eXChange over at this address (sxc.hu). I’ve an account with BigStockPhoto and its not too bad, some nice photos but you can be quite limited. That said, sxc.hu has a huge amount of photos from some very talented stock photographers and if you’re looking for ideas for a shoot, photos for web or print content then I suggest looking no further than here. Its quickly become my favourite haunt for stock photography…seen as its free and all

DeviantART Mobile

I’m a subscriber to DeviantART and this year will mark my second year (in April) as a subscribed member. Us subscribers are allowed into the ‘beta’ program, which allows us beta test a load of new features in DA and one of those is Deviant Mobile. At least to an extent. When uploading new photos and ‘deviations’ we can choose whether or not to allow our works appear on the mobile edition of DA, which has gone live according to Mobile Crunch.

Users, mainly in the US, can then log on to Deviant Mobile, scan through thousands of submissions, pick up new works for your phone, leave comments and all the rest. Of course, if you have a have decent phone or PDA you could browse DA regularly as well. Mobile Crunch warns users about data charges, and I’ve got to second that. The size of deviations on DA from people not used to publishing images to the web can be ridiculous, expect downloads of up to 1mb in size and beyond for full view.

That and the fact that your own work is available on mobile medium leads to doubts I have about the distribution of works of art via mobile, especially since I recently had one of my own photos ripped off on DA. No doubt there will be tons of feedback on this over the coming weeks but can’t say that I have use for the service.

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