He suggested not using my own name and specialising in just one type of photography and further suggested that for street pictures, it was a good idea to work mainly in Black & White. And so F4Niko was born and I have been uploading a picture my F4Niko Flickr site every day since the start of the year. I still have a Flickr site in my own name as well as this site and www.goodphotolocations.com but my recent focus has been on F4Niko.

It has been great fun learning how the system works but the best thing is that I already have 38 contacts from all over the World and when I post a picture that they like, they tell me so. This is incredibly encouraging and really helps me to sort my good pictures from my not so good ones. Something that I find really difficult to do by myself.

So let me in turn encourage you to try what I did. Concentrate on your favourite type of photography and keep a Flickr site just for that. If you like street photography, have a look at F4Niko (there is a link in the links list) and make me a contact if you like what you see.

If it’s not too late, a Happy New Year to you all.

Don't believe everything that you read in newspapers

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I hope that nobody will be upset by this, but my experience tells me that the majority of the members of traditional camera clubs also qualify to be members of SAGA or even dare I say it, for a free bus pass. The one exception seems to be the Visual Journalism Group of the RPS that appeals to a wide age range. This is no doubt helped by the fact that it is part of the RPS, effectively the governing body for photographers in the UK and awarding much sought after distinctions.

However, I digress. Recently, I was introduced by a fellow student at college ( a young lady of Polish extraction) to Photography Meetups. This, for the uninitiated, is one of these new words (a bit like bookazines – that another fellow Polish student also introduced me to). Basically, it is organised via the web. You have to sign up to a group in your area or one that does the type of photography that you are interested in. Then you simply book in for any event that you like the look of – pay the modest fee (if there is one) and attend. There is no commitment, no annual fee or any other strings.

In the era of Facebook, Linkedin, Flickr and the like, you can see the attraction. The downside might be that because there is no commitment, you might not get to know your fellow meetupers. But again in my experience, they are a very friendly lot, passionate about photography and keen to learn and share ideas.

So where does the future lie? Will the “no strings attached” meetup groups replace the traditional camera clubs?

I really don’t know the answer but there is a conundrum here. Although the meetups seem free and easy for the participants, someone has to organise them. The workload is significant and unlike a camera club where you can expect a good percentage of members to attend, you might do all the work and then find that it has to be cancelled as there is insufficient interest.

My belief is that each has much to learn from the other. If camera clubs organise events, as they do on a regular basis and invite other people to come along without commitment via a meetup web site, there is a good chance that many people will eventually join the club. On the other side some of those who feel that their camera club has become a bit stale might benefit from finding a meetup group and going along.

I think the whole thing is quite exciting and I have attached a shot from my first studio meetup. A great event. You can see other shots in the gallery.

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EL Skyport

I have recently discovered a great piece of software issued free of charge by the good people of Elinchrom. Called EL-Skyport v 3, it is available to download from the support tab on http://www.elinchrom.com

The great thing about it is that on opening a new project, it presents you with a basic studio layout with the background, camera and object to be photographed already in place. You can then very easily move things around, change background colours etc and add lights of various types in whatever position you wish. It is a great way to experiment with layouts and keep track of shoots that you have done. Although it is designed for the studio, I see no reason why it shouldn’t be equally useful for outdoor shots with lighting as well.

Serious photographers, whether amateur or professional will love it and for students, it is an absolute dream.

If you are lucky enough to use Elinchrom RX flash units, the software goes much further, allowing you to test and control your lights directly from your computer and automatically save the settings you used.

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One solution is to try not to change lenses too often by using an 18-200mm zoom, for example, but however good these lenses are (and my Nikon is fantastic) it does defeat the object and for the serious stuff, you need the best glass possible.

Well, to cut a long story short, I found the other day, having taken a bumper number of shots of the British Superbikes at Silverstone that I had two or three quite large marks on the sensor. One of them was showing as a 5mm long line on the PC monitor and it didn’t look like a hair, more a smudge.

I was discussing with colleagues whether to try and clean the sensor myself or head for our local, well trusted camera repairer and it looked as if the latter was the preferred solution.

Before doing that, I had been looking on the web and the Hurricane Blower seemed worth a try. As I was passing a local Jessops store this morning, I popped in and found that their version, the Rocket Blower, so called because it stands on a rocket type base, retails for an incredible £8. Worth a try therefore but I wasn’t optimistic as the mark really did look like a serious smudge.

Imagine my joy therefore when after a few good blows from the Rocket, I took a shot of some white paper, downloaded it and blew it up and there wasn’t a trace of a mark.

I realise that I might just have been lucky, but I did have three marks to deal with. So I am now totally converted to my blower. If it ever fails to deal with some dust, I will then try one of those suction devices, as this is a more serious version of the same principle of using air to clean the sensor. Touching the sensor, even with professional hands, should be the last resort, in my opinion.

Rocket Blower

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A few things that I now do the night before (if I remember!) are to take a quick shot of anything just to make sure that all seems well. You might also like to make this a shot against a dark or grey background so that you can more easily tell if the sensor needs cleaning. By the way, I now set the camera to clean the sensor each time I switch off and this seems to help.

Then pack the bag in a methodical way and you’re ready to go.

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The closing date is 23rd October 2010. A great excuse for an Autumn holiday.

Guernsey

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The interesting thing about projects such as this is that as well as having to get to grips with the challenges of photographing buildings during the day and at night, it is an opportunity to learn more about the buildings themselves, the architect, the owners past and present and even the history of the period when they were built.

I decided to go for Regency architecture, which basically means John Nash working for the Prince Regent. Between them they completely changed the area of London, from Buckingham Palace, along the Mall, Trafalgar Square, the Haymarket, Regent Street, Regent’s Park and most of the streets surrounding the park.

They also had a big impact on Brighton with the centrally located Royal Pavilion which still stands today as the single building that most defines the town.

Working on this project, mainly with the Nikon D300 and using Photoshop to correct and process the images, I also took some black and white films and also colour slides, which for me still produce some of the best colour available.

I do recommend that you have a go at shooting some buildings in different conditions and hope that you enjoy the new images in the architecture section of the Gallery.

The Holme, Regent's Park

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I had already read stories of how you could cut out a tree from a landscape with ease but nothing had prepared me (or indeed anyone else who was there judging by the gasps of amazement) for seeing what it can really do.

The first “killer” new thing is Proximity Match. Simply by selecting an object with the lasso but including some of the surrounding area (ie. not selecting too accurately) and then choosing Proximity Match, you can remove an object even if it has fine detail on the edges and it will leave you with a background that looks as if the object never existed.

On the edges of a picture, you can use “Content aware fill” and expand the sky or other key landscape areas to fill the edges of your selected area. For me, this was the most incredible thing to witness as it really seems that the program is reading your mind.

There are a few “mundane” things like Lens Correction that emulates the use of different (very specific) lenses. This could save you a fortune and cost the lens manufacturers dear. Camera RAW 6 automatically improves the image quality for you!

And then there is “Puppet Walk”. With this, you can put three of four dots on a horse’s leg, for example and then move the leg to a new position in the picture. Now, we are out of the realms of what we currently know as image manipulation and into changing pictures to be what we wished they were in the first place. You might even make the local carthorse look like Red Rum!

There are many people, particularly those outside photography who feel that using Photoshop in this way is cheating and part of me has to agree. One cannot help but feel that the future will belong to image manipulators, not photographers. However, we can’t hold back the tide and the reaction from the RPS members last night convinced me that CS5 is set to become the “must have” item for photographers in 2010.

I know that we have always manipulated images, even since Ansel was a lad, but we really are on the threshold of a time when we all will be able to produce results that would have been considered award winning just a few short months or years ago.

I have been racking my brains and trying to think of good analogies to the situation but it is difficult. Robots build economy cars today that are consistently better than luxury ones of a few years ago. TV, the web, mobile phones etc allow us to do more that we ever thought possible. But there are many rich people who are still prepared to pay large sums of money for a hand built car or a designer brand of electronic equipment.

I am sure that the “photographers??” of the future will develop the new skills in new areas to continue to amuse and stimulate us, but it seems to me that it is going to get much harder to compete with the robots.

Congratulations to the Adobe team of software engineers on their amazing achievements but I am not sure that they are really on the side of the serious photographer. Perhaps I will have to take a look at video. Oh dear – I think I’ll have to think it out again!

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I hope that you will pay it a visit or two and find it useful when you are planning holidays or just weekends or away days. More importantly though, I hope that you will join in and recommend some of your favourite spot. The best way to do that is to email me at john@goodphotolocations.com

Currently the site consists of a list of places that you can search by continent, country, town etc and soon there will be suggestions of special regions of the World, such as The Lake District”, where there are lots of photogenic places within a small area. As well as sharing your favourite places, please let me know if there are any new features that you would like to see on the site that will make it easier to use or more helpful.

Lake District

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Suddenly though, the ease of the digital system looks like it might be starting to bite us and we need to be careful.

In the UK the Government have been accused with some justification of rushing through the Digital Economy Bill. The most important part of this as far as photographers were concerned seemed to be Clause 43 that basically said the if someone wanted to use one of your images but couldn’t trace you as the rightful owner, they could pay a fee to the Government and go ahead. This has now been dropped and you can read more about it on the Stop43 web site www.stop43.org.uk

Don’t relax though. Talk Talk, one of the UK’s three biggest Internet Service Providers has said that it won’t co-operate with measures in the same bill to combat file sharing that include insisting the ISPs block the sites of customers suspected of copyright infringement.

The Royal Photographic Society has issued a guideline that recommends all members to ensure that proper attribution is given to their work in all situations. It goes on to list some concerns about the new rules. You can see the detail on www.rps.org and then by clicking on Copyright statement.

As if this isn’t enough for us simple souls to worry about, the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) and others have filed a class-action lawsuit to stop Google scanning 18 million books for an online database again they are worried about copyright infringement. You can read more about that on www.asmp.org

I am sure that we will be hearing much more about these and other related issues over the coming months and years and it is pretty clear that photographers everywhere need to keep their wits about them.

Copyright

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