A powerful photograph

From Syl Arena’s Lessons I Didn’t Learn In Photo School…

3. Powerful photographs touch people at a depth they don’t anticipate.
If you want to be a strong photographer… strive to create images that touch people’s lives. The most challenging part of this has nothing to do with the details of creating a photograph and everything to do with living an enriched life. If you know tons about photography but create shallow photos, then read literature, visit art galleries, learn ethnic cooking, volunteer, watch foreign movies, attend theater, travel, coach youth sports…

This week, your task is to take a photo inspired by external sources. Do some of that stuff and then take an inspired photo. Provide a single sentence/paragraph with your picture to explain your motive.

My grandad

I didn’t take this photograph. This is a self-portrait of my grandfather, taken in Korea in 1955. The one thing I can accept credit for is scanning in and restoring the image after the slides were passed onto me this week. I suppose in that way, I created the image you see before you in its current form, but I did not compose the shot.

For me, this is a very touching image. While I knew my grandfather well as a grandfather, this picture represents a man I never met. A man who didn’t have children, let alone grandchildren. In this photo he is the same age as I am now – I’m fascinated wondering what he would have been like.

Ubuntu Netbook Remix on an EeePC 701

This morning I tried Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) for the first time. My first impression was that it’s very polished and usable by non-geeks.

I’m not an Ubuntu user myself; I use Fedora on all my machines – including my EeePC 901. But my other half, Hana, has an EeePC 701. She’s not a geek, and she just wants something that will work for her. She’s seen XP on a 701 and agreed the 7″ screen isn’t really up to scratch.

Recently we tried gOS on the 701. It’s Ubuntu based and very friendly. It’s well laid out and easy to use. Hana used it for a couple of months and got on well with it. The main problem was that wireless never quite worked properly, and using an Ethernet cable kind of spoils the point of a tiny laptop,

So this morning I swapped gOS for UNR. The installation was painless, and first boot went without hitch. The main snag I ran into on the 701 was that the animated menus made the whole system slow down. This turned out to be a bug which was easily remedied by installing two packages.

It’s early days yet – the system has only been functional for about an hour and Hana hasn’t used it yet. I’ll post again with more comments on UNR when we’ve had a chance to play with it.

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Slow shutter

Today I decided that I wanted to go out and take a photo of blurred pedestrians walking down a street, using a slow shutter.

I’d never tried this before but I thought I knew what to do. I used both of my ND filters (an ND4 and an ND8) to limit the amount of light coming into the camera. I didn’t know which settings to choose on the camera so before I set out I had a fiddle with the settings in the well-lit office. On my trusty camera, a Fuji S9600, using the lowest sensitivity (ISO 80) and the smallest aperture (f/11) I was able to get a shutter speed of 25 seconds without overexposing the shot. I reminded myself that outdoors it would be brighter, and perhaps I would have to use a shutter speed more like 5 seconds.

It turns out in the end I wasn’t able to have a longer shutter than one second. I’m still reasonably pleased with the photo, though. Shame there weren’t many people about.

Slow shutter

The moral of the story is: The sun is much, much brighter than you think!

Flies

From Stu:

“This week, your challenge is to take a picture of a creepy-crawly – spider, insect, etc. Preferably a real one, and preferably close-up enough to make out detail. Preferably artistically pleasing rather than just a documentary shot.”

Flies

I hope this picture of a couple of flies on the job will suffice!

New slide scanner

I’ve been playing with my new slide scanner. The typical image quality is demonstrated below.

The family

The colours are nice but unfortunately I can’t seem to get it to work at full resolution. I’ll keep plodding on. Worse yet, the auto-loader isn’t particularly good at all – the screenshot below shows the tray of 50 slides I scanned overnight. Look how many failed to load properly!

Scanned results