One of the photography twitter accounts I follow linked to a lenscratch post a few months ago, I liked what I read and so I subscribed to it.  I didn't realise at the time that it had been listed in Source's 10 photography-related blogs you should read list but it is definitely a worthy entrant into that list.

What I like about reading lenscratch, is that it puts me in mind of the experience of visiting The Photographers' Gallery in London.  When visiting the gallery, there may be a headline exhibition going on, but there are also plenty of alternative exhibitions too, by photographers I may never have heard of, of subjects I've never considered working with.  This is what I like about lenscratch.  Pretty much every post features someone I've never heard of, and presents their work in a Photographer's gallery style - highlighting a couple of their projects, displaying text from the photographer about their work, and showing a sample of the photographs.

The Artist's Gallery: California Open Exhibition and Sky Bergman is an example of one such post, specifically the Sky Bergman bit, focussing on photographs of Japanese commuters.  It appeals to my sense of the everyday, the fact that a single photograph doesn't tell you much, but when you put a collection of them together you start getting an idea of the interaction of people on the underground, of the different kind of people you may see, etc.  Explained much better at lenscratch as

I became fascinated by the interaction of the people on the Japanese subway system. There are few places in the world where one’s income, marital status, race, and interests bare no consequence to the person sitting next to them. One exception, however, is of those individuals on a subway. The Japanese people have created a society that heavily relies on public transportation as opposed to being a culture of cars. Social rank is not implied by your means of transportation. The young, the old, the rich, and the poor, sit next to each other, share each other’s space, and occasionally glimpse into each other’s lives

I'm enjoying the concept of a collection of everyday photos at the moment, something which is probably obvious from my current project choice of "Out of place".  Having just read the chapter on "Everyday subjects" in Lomokev's new book 52 Photographic Projects I was pleased to see the sentence "At times single images aren't very strong, but with lots of them they become greater than the sum of their parts" which sums up pretty exactly what my motivation is.

Back to lenscratch, it is one of the few blogs that I take my time reading, I don't skim read it as I do with many others, I savour it, usually choosing to save the experience for a weekend when I have the time to enjoy it the most.  Give it a try.  But, before you go, what other photography related blogs should I be savouring?

As part of the Madgex appraisal process, we do 360 degree reviews where we each nominate 6 people from the business (peers, line manager, line reports, project managers, etc) to list things we're good at, and things we could better.  As part of the management team, I did this activity last year as well.  I wanted to visualise mine, so I used Tagxedo to produce me the following images.  The first one is from 2009, the second is from this year.  

2009

As a tool Tagxedo was really good, as I could load up the text into it, and then use the "Customize Words" option to remove words that weren't really relevant - i.e. Madgex, Jane, and the name of our products.  It also has automatic functionality to remove punctuation, numbers, etc.  This was something I'd considered doing at our latest Madgex hackday until I was swayed by the idea of doing something about dogfriendly drinking establishments...

The other weekend I found myself in a pretty place with enough spare time to do a bit of work for a comparison of the different "film types" available for ClassicTOY to try and work out what the best option would be for a landscape. I thought this might be of interest to others, so here they all are.

Note: These photos were all taken within minutes of each other, in non changing weather, but not under any form of "controlled circumstances"

The "control photo", taken with the native iPhone 2G camera:

Photo taken with "CLS Original #2"

Photo taken with "CLS Original #1"

Photo taken with "Overexposured B/W"

Photo taken with "Overexposured Color"

Photo taken with "Vintage Damaged"

Photo taken with "Vivid"

Photo taken with "High Speed B/W"

Photo taken with "Desaturated"

Photo taken with "Normal Sepia"

Photo taken with "Normal B/W"

Photo taken with "Normal Positive"

Photo taken with "Normal Negative"

Summary

My usual first choice of "film" for this app is Vivid, but it doesn't work quite so well for me as some of the others in this scenario (which is kind of why I did this exercise i the first place).

None of the black and white, or sepia, options really stand out for me.  Of them all, the Overexposured B/W is probably the best, but I wouldn't really rate any of them.

So, normal positive seems to be the most similar to the standard iPhone camera colours, but still has a bit more something about it, for instance the definition in the reflections are bolder and stand out better.  Definitely an improvement over the standard.  I think this will become my first choice for landscapes.

When I was at SQLBits the other week, I was introduced to Redgate's SQL Search tool via their lunchtime session about Source Control in databases.

SQL Search is a free tool which helps to:

• Find fragments of SQL text within stored procedures, functions, views and more
• Quickly navigate to objects wherever they happen to be on your servers
• Find all references to an object
• Integrates with SSMS

I installed it on my machine a few days later and have had it happily running ever since, with no errors and no noticeable slowing of Management studio. I've come to use it quite a bit in my development process, mostly for looking for stored procedures as I find the process of

• type in a bit of a name of the procedure in the search box
• hit return
• look at the results returned
• click on the one that I want
• if necessary, click on the "Select object in Object Explorer" link

to be a lot quicker than typing

SELECT * FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.ROUTINES WHERE ROUTINE_NAME LIKE '%bit of a name of the procedure%'

and then navigating through the object explorer to find the relevant object.

The scope of the search can be narrowed to a specific object type on a specific database, or left open to every object type on every database on the instance.

As with my review of the eyemodule, this review was originally on the janeandrichard site and dates from early 2001.

The Review

During our trip to the Maldives, we used underwater disposable cameras to take photos of fishes. These came out reasonably well, but weren't of wonderful quality. So, we decided to invest in a proper underwater camera. We'd also been carrying a small panoramic camera around with us, which again didn't produce all that good quality images. So, an APS camera appeared to be the ideal solution. Ironically, we haven't had the opportunity to take it snorkelling since.

We bought the Weathermatic camera at Heathrow Airport as we left the UK for a long weekend in Iceland. It was the only waterproof APS camera we could find at the time. Although for the trip to Iceland we didn't need a waterproof camera, one that was weatherproof and didn't object to being dropped in the snow was a good idea.

The photos it produces are of a pretty high standard, and we've had no problems with it in the 2 years we've had the camera.

The specification claims that it can go underwater to a depth of around 10 metres (we've taken it down in swimming pools, and lakes and things to 3 or so metres and it has been okay).

The controls are designed to be easy to use underwater, and this also makes them quite easy to use with gloved hands. Of course, this makes the camera quite bulky (and also, being bright yellow it isn't subtle).

We're in no rush to replace this camera, and it is used as our main camera for all events.

Over Christmas I adopted Richard's old iPhone. He'd upgraded to a nice shiny iPhone 3GS, and his old 1st generation iPhone was sitting around doing nothing, so I thought I should give it a reason to live. That, and the fact that my trusty Nokia Navigator 6110 was on its last legs.

I only got my hands on it the day before we flew off on our holidays, so I added a few applications that I already had on my iPod touch, and bought a few photography applications that Richard already had and found useful, or that I'd seen impressive reviews/results from. I also took pot luck and bought one that I just stumbled upon.

One of my uses for the iPhone within photography so far has been for updates to flickr/twitpic/email on the go - using wifi where I found it I managed to upload 104 photos whilst we were away keeping friends and family in touch with our progress. I almost always have a backlog of proper photos (by which I mean taken on either my d80, or on one of my, ever expanding, family of film cameras). So, processing as I go is important to enable these to be shared quickly.

Applications

I have 3 types of photography applications on my iPhone.

• Applications for sharing
• Cameras
• Processing

Applications for Sharing
I only have the one application in this category - flickr. It allows me to look at my photos and those of my friends, to access my favourites, to edit the details of my photos and, most importantly, to upload my photos at full resolution adding tags and sets as I go. Whilst we were away I used email to upload photos to flickr as I could queue them up, so that next time I found a wifi connection they'd just go, however this only emails a smaller version of the image. Being back at home where data roaming is cheap (if not a bit slow), using this application is my preferred upload method.

Camera
I have 2 camera applications in addition to the standard one, NightCamera and Hipstamatic.
NightCamera is my first choice whenever I'm lacking in natural light - so, early mornings out with the dog, indoors, night time.
Hipstamatic is a new purchase, so I haven't had a chance to work out when I'm going to use this application yet, so I'll probably revisit this in an additional post sometime. Up until now I've liked taking the photos on a "normal" camera application and applying filters afterwards - this is a change as I'll have to get it right first time.
The standard iPhone camera isn't the best camera in the world, but it is adequate in most situations. The thing that makes the photos more usable, at least for me, is the ability to use different applications to achieve different effects.

Processing
This is where the iPhone comes into its own for photography. My rules are that everything taken on the iPhone must be processed on the iPhone and uploaded from the iPhone. No post processing on my laptop (as I mentioned earlier, I've got enough of a backlog already). So, the ability to do some element of processing is important. I have 4 applications that fall into this category.
The 4 applications are, in no particular order, ShakeItPhoto, CameraBag, MillColour or Adobe Photoshop Mobile.
ShakeItPhoto tends to get used for photos which are primarily signs, or bright expanses of colour.
CameraBag and MillColour tend to get used for images which are more landscape or people related, or which I'm trying to make a bit arty.
Adobe Photoshop Mobile tends to get used to put borders on things, and sometimes to do the nice blur effect.
In all cases, I'm using the pre-defined filters, rather than adjusting individual levels. I don't find the representation and resolution on the iPhone screen to be quite sufficient for fine adjustments, so I'm happy to default to a more pre-defined effect.

I'm still looking for an application which allows for custom rotation - i.e. correcting a slightly wonky horizon. If you know of one, please let me know.

Sample Photos

Standard Camera + ShakeItPhoto

Standard Camera + CameraBag

Standard Camera + Mill Colour

Night Camera + ShakeItPhoto

Night Camera + Camera Bag

Night Camera + Mill Colour

Night Camera + Adobe Photoshop Mobile

Hipstamatic

PhotographyBlog pointed me at PhotographyBB the other day. This is primarily an online magazine, producing a free PDF version monthly. I downloaded the most recent one, popped it on my iPhone, and have been reading articles in it over the past few days.

In general, I haven't really been a big fan of PDF magazines, because I've never really found a good way to read them. However, the iPhone works really well when combined with a 3rd party app - Felaur PDF - and it has been a pleasure.

The magazine is well put together, and informative. I especially enjoyed the book review of Hollywood Portraits: Classic Shots and How to Take Them and the suggestion to take a look at Larry “Darkman” Clark Darkmans Darkroom and especially the photographs that Larry has taken using the styles from the book.

I've subscribed to the PhotographyBB RSS feed and will be using it to ensure I don't miss another edition.

One day last week we had a conversation in the office about how one of the team felt he could only read bulleted lists these days, or articles/posts which told him how many things he'd have to read - i.e. The 5 best laptops, the top 3 SQL keywords etc. I thought this was ridiculous.

Google Reader and Instapaper are my online reading tools of choice. I use Google Reader to keep an eye on a lot of feeds, feeds about development, photography, leadership, dogs etc.

I've noticed recently that there are some feeds I only read on a desktop/laptop - these are feeds which contain items I may wish to action (like upcoming event notifications which I may want to attend or tag) or which contain a series of links (like The Morning Brew). These don't get attended to in my mobile versions as it's just too hard - instead they linger around until next time I open google reader on a laptop/desktop. In an ideal world I'd be able to set a preference somewhere that allowed me to mark different feeds as being displayed on different hardware or even simpler according to a filter I'd set up.

Some other feeds will be briefly skimmed through before the posts I value as interesting are saved to Instapaper so that I can read them properly, and at my leisure at a later time (the Instapaper iPhone/iPod touch app works really well for this)

Still others are consumed within google reader - these are mainly photography related, such as my flickr contacts photos, some visualisation feeds. Basically items which are image rich and again, don't require much attention.

I downloaded an online-only iPhone/iPod touch RSS reader app (named RSS) a few weeks ago which is linked to my google account. This comes complete with an Add to Instapaper link making my process even easier and saves me having to do battle with mobile Google Reader (at least 2 clicks needed to get to the proper HTML page for Adding to Instapaper).

So, having actually stopped and thought about it for a while, I'm not really any different - a lot of content is skim read with only a small percentage making it into my real, studied, reading list. And even making it on to Instapaper doesn't guarantee that it still looks interesting enough to actually read. My attention window is definitely shrinking, but you'll almost certainly never know this because there are no bullet point lists or top x hints here and you'll have moved on long ago :-)

The Review

One of the attractions of the Handspring Visor, has to be the springboard modules. What a totally neat idea. The first modules released though, weren't really that interesting to me. The eyemodule on the other hand, was a really cool concept.

So, I own one of the original eyemodule cameras (there are two kinds now). It's very small, and adds very little size or weight to the Visor. The images it takes are pretty good for something so small, but you're not going to want to throw away your proper camera and rely on this.

It loves bright light conditions. If you would consider using a flash on your normal camera, don't even try with the eyemodule. The images may look okay on the screen, but they'll probably turn out speckly. But, in the right conditions, it works well, and can produce some great pictures.

The original eyemodule cameras can take three formats of pictures, small black and white - 120 x 160 pixels, large black and white - 240 x 320 and large colour - 240 x 320. The small black and white ones take about 9k of memory, the large black and white ones take around 40K and the colour ones around 180k. So, you can fit quite a lot of pictures into an 8MB visor. When we were on holiday in New Zealand, I had around 250 pictures in there, mostly little black and whites, but with 10 or so colour ones too.

The eyemodule 2 cameras can take short video clips too, these use up more memory obviously, and if using a colour visor then the film will be colour, otherwise it'll be black and white (sounds strange, but that's how it seems to be).

So, will I be trading my eyemodule 1 in for a 2? Not yet. I'm happy with the camera I have, and maybe the 3 will be even cooler.

Looking back
This was my first digital camera, and I replaced it with a Canon S20 when the eyemodule, along with various other toys (and my bag) was stolen. As part of the clean up operation my eyemodule photos have moved on to flickr. It is quite strange reading what I wrote about it producing some great pictures when now I'm used to a much higher standard of digital imagery. It is also quite amusing (to me) to see what I took photos of - the building of Richard's Dad's shed, toys in the office, and lots of people - none of which I would have taken film based photographs of at that time, so I guess it recorded 6 months of my life which would have otherwise gone (mainly) unphotographed.

This is the toy that gave me an interest in digital photography, and I remember enjoying using it very much, and being delighted with how it worked and what it could do and I've enjoyed revisiting those images whilst moving them over to flickr. I've also spotted that there is an eyemodule-related group there too - so I may have to submit a couple of images to it. I'm delighted to see that the eyebrowse gallery still exists too.

So, sample photographs:

More photos can be found on my flickr stream under the tag eyemodule