Matt's LiveJournal

Here are the candidates for my favourite photo of last month (I discounted the nice one with the clouds, as I already made a similar one photo of the month earlier on this year.)

No poll this time; I'm more just musing. Comments welcome, though!

Two Heads

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'Ello 'ello 'ello

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Graveyard Flower

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The Bride and Groom

I'm a bit late picking my July photo for my Favourite Photo of the Month 2008 set.



[Poll #1239410]

If you pick something else, either it's got to be from the photos I shot during July, or you have to provide a working time machine. July's been a pretty low-scoring month for photos for me, I must confess. The bucketloads of rain didn't encourage me to get the camera out.

More picture usage: Today's entry on the oil pipeline explosion in Minnesota in Steve Levine's The Oil and the Glory blog features a photo of mine from the Bourton-on-the-Water motor museum.

Mmm. Just got the latest version of iPhoto, from iLife '08, and I have to say I'm liking it. The kind of auto-arrangement it does of (what used to be) "film rolls" into Events, very much like photo sets in Flickr, is very nice, and the way you can "skim" through an event by dragging the mouse across the key photo and seeing all the individual ones is lovely.

It's also added a few nice touches that I was just starting to really miss in the previous version. In particular, the cropping tool now had a grid to help you with the rule-of-thirds -- well timed, considering I just started reading through a load of tutorials on composition -- and there's not just highlight and shadow adjustments available, but also noise reduction. NR is definitely useful for my not-so-hot current camera, especially when zooming in for a crop.

You can also copy and paste adjustments from one photo to another, so if you've got a series of similar photos, you can play with one until it works and then just clone the goodness.

So far, colour me very impressed. I think this will stave off some of my pangs of desire for Lightroom or Aperture (definitely heading more towards Lightroom right now) for some considerable time.

On the ferry the other day I saw a poster for a "Photo of the Day" exhibition at the Create Centre, which is about five minutes away from my flat. I headed there last night, and it was rather groovy. This is a local collection of photographers all doing the one-photo-per-day-for-a-year thing, although the rules have apparently rather mutated over the couple of years they've been doing it.

When I say "local", I mean very local, too. It didn't take me long to work out that one of them even lives in the same street as me. And the reason the photo was on the ferry is that one of them works on the boats, too, and I bumped into several of the ferry crew that I knew.

It was interesting to see what people from the same area as me take photos of. There were some on the wall where I've taken _exactly_ the same photo, which is interesting, but there were surprisingly few of those, considering we must pass many of the same things each day.

Anyway. Website here.

Did that with my friend Nicki, and, erm, her friend Nicki (the observation that Nickis were on a buy-one-get-one-free offer got me a clip around there ear.) After the exhibition we went to the Kathmandu restaurant on Colston Street, which turned out to be a little gem, really nice atmosphere and very good food, so I'll be going there again.

And that's it for my oh-bloody-hell-I-really-should-update-LJ-guilt-assuasion today :)

Since I licensed most of my photos on Flickr under a Creative Commons licence, I've had one used in an online news story, and just now I've received an email from a TV company (Banner Caswell) who want to use one of my photos in a forthcoming show (this one, for use in a show about colour blindness¹.)

Am I just lucky, or do the rest of you Flickr-using lot get things like this quite often, too?

¹ I don't even know how they found that particular photo. It's not as if it's tagged "traffic lights", or "colours", or whatever...