Using Blogger with my revised Photo Notes site.

It has been several years since I last used Blogger and now I am investigating using it as an adjunct to my revised Photo-Notes Site.

This post is being used to test it's feasibility

I am about to see if it can be embedded into  Photo-Notes using an embed I discovered via google search.

iPad as a camera.

The other day my brother called by and he spent some time showing me his photos of some model engineering he was doing. He is just a typical casual photographer but these photos looked quite good on his mini iPad.

"What you take these on?"
"Just this iPad" he replied.

The following day my wife came out into the garden with her mini iPad to photograph some work we were doing in the garden. Again she is a typical casual photographer but again I was surprised with the results, the photo of me on the cabin roof is one.

This prompted me to go out with my iPad Air 2 and take a few shots and yet again I am amazed with the results. Now I am not going to get rid of my RX100 or X-T1 but I can understand the attractions of these devices, especially for the none enthusiast.

Flickr Batch Download Is Available

For a few years I have been experimenting with various utilities, extensions and apps to bulk download photos from my Flickr Account which has over 10,000 photos. Yesterday I had another look to discover that it is now available in the new Camera Role Beta view.

Below is a screen shot from the Yahoo Help site that revealed this.

Step By Step

1. View photos with Camera Role Beta

 2. Select photos. You can use Shift key to select first and last in usual way.

3. Click on Download at bottom of window and following message pops up.

4. Next is the window for you to choose destination.

This is remembered and pre-filled on subsequent  downloads. Note I am using Mac OS X 

5. This is Finder showing the downloaded photos.

The Zip file is downloaded and on my Mac all I click on this and it creates a folder and copies individual photos into it, as can be seen.

Good news for me

Over the years I have used several photo management tools

1. Early Photoshop Elements Organiser.
2. Picasa - before Google Plus ruined it.
3. Lightroom 3
4. Apple Aperture
5. And now Lightroom CC

 The one consistent feature was I uploaded what I considered the better photos, or ones I wanted an extra back-up, to Flickr and now I want to download these to create a copy on my wireless Seagate drive so that I can have them available to show on my iPad without the need to be connected to web, especially useful when in remote locations.

How To Grab Image From QuickTime

This is very easy and uses only software included with Mac OS X.

1. At required place in movie select Edit -> Copy.

2. Open Preview and select File -> New from Clipboard

 3. The photo should now open in Preview where you can save it as JPG, PNG, PDF or TIFF.

You can use Preview to edit the photo before saving if you wish, or just load it into your photo editor of choice.

Of course as long as the photo editor has similar feature for creating photo from clipboard you can skip Preview and create in that editor. All my photos are first edited in Lightroom CC and I import the photo saved from Preview into this.

Hello Fujifilm X-T1

Having said goodbye to Nikon in Feb 2014 and welcome to Sony NEX6 I have just changed again.

Now the NEX 6 served me well for 18 months, including 6 weeks travelling around Australia. I also took a Sony RX-100 II, which I still have and use all the time.

I have a lifelong interests in birds and visit the local hides occasionally where I take a few photos once I get over the embarrisment of my kit being so puny compared to the big boys with their long Canons.  To this end I purchased a Sony A65 and added the Sony 55-300mm lens.

The kit performed OK but I was unsure whether it was wise to invest heavily into Sony A-mount and it still did not focus and track that well

The at my local LCE shop in Worcester I got my hands on an Olympus OM-10 and thought "this is the one for me"! Got so close to buying it but decided to wait until the Birmingham NEC Photos  Show in March. So I began selling Sony kit and saved my money.

Then I got to read and handle the Fujifilm X-T1, love at first sight. Reminded me so much of my Nikon SLRs in the old film days.

So now I am happy owner of Fujifilm X-T1 with 18-55 XR 2.8-4, 55-200 XR f3.5-4.5 and 60XR f2.8 Macro. 

However still not the best kit for birding, or indeed movies, so now I am considering complementing this kit with Canon 70D, or maybe 760D or even used 7D but will wait until the late June firmware release from Fuji which has some interesting updates to the AF especially for tracking and speed.

Goodbye Nikon

The time has finally arrived when I have sold my Nikon D7000 based kit and moved over to Sony Nex-6.

A little more complicated as at first I was going to upgrade my Panasonic GX-1 to GX-7 ready for forthcoming trip to Australia. GX-1 had been good although it's LCD panel had to be replaced after 14 months. Now give Panasonic their due, this had been done free of charge although outside guarantee period but this was my 3rd Panasonic camera and the second to have developed a fault.

I was also a bit disappointed at quality of their 70-200mm lens at 200mm. It turned out cheaper for me to swap GX1 plus two lenses for Sony Nex-6 and their equivalent 2 lens, 16-45 and 50-200mm, the upgrading to GX-7, no doubt due in part to the, then unknown, imminent release of Alpha 600 to replace Nex-6.

 

I still think it was a good move.

 

Posted with Blogsy

How to find iMovie Finalized Movie Files

Finalizing iMovie Files

IMovie is a great program for its cost. Typical Apple software, you have to prod and probe to find out how it works and you do not have to worry how it stores files on your disk. Well I do worry.

I was testing out the movie capabilities of my new indulgence, a Nikon D7000, by filming my two grand daughters. All went well, uploaded video to YouTube for rest of the family to see my master piece and then decided to Finalize project, an option in the File menu. This builds movies of various sizes so that if in the future if you use Share you will not have to wait for the movie project to be rendered.

I thought these pre-built movies could also be useful for just showing on my iMac without having to start iMovie, but where were they.

Locating the files.

The answer can be found in Apple Support pages, here is the contribution by John Cogdell Adelaide, Australia.

So following these instructions i went to Finder and found my iMovie projects.

Right-clicked on project and chose 

Show Package Contents

Still not sure what this "Package" is all about but I think of it as a sort of hidden Zip file.

And hey-presto here are my various size versions of the movie. If I click on any of these they run independent of iMovie using your default player. Alternatively right click on movie and use Open With QuickTime.

I made an alias for the 1028HD version, and moved the alias onto my desktop, renamed it with a meaningful name and now I just click this and the movie starts.