Depth-of-field with telephotos

I'm still working through material from last month's trip to Lord Howe Island. Here's one example, a Red-tailed Tropicbird (a species which took up a lot of my time and let me refresh my birds-in-flight skills).

This photo was taken in mid-afternoon light near the top of some sea-cliffs (200m above the sea). We'd been at this location since the morning, and it was a wonderful experience spending so much time with the birds. By the end we had nicknames for most of the individual birds who'd pass us.

These birds have very dark eyes, and this is one of the small number of shots where I managed to get a glint in the eye to give the eye some definition. But while processing this image (in Lightroom of course) I realised it also illustrated a technical issue.

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More on timezones

April sunset

I was going to leave off posting about the end of Daylight Saving Time (DST) until next weekend (when here in Melbourne the change happens) except that this week I noticed a hiccup with one of my devices.

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Terminally geeky: When is Lord Howe Island?

In just over a month I will be travelling to Australia's Lord Howe Island, a World Heritage-listed island in the Tasman Sea. I'll be spending a week there with just over a dozen other photographers. Some of us will be concentrating on the wildlife, some on the landscape opportunities, and some of us will be concentrating on all of it!

In preparing for the trip, I came across a problem with the Apple OS X operating system (used on my laptop and desktop systems). While the zoneinfo timezone database included in OS X (and in many other Unix variants such as Linux) knows about the Lord Howe Island timezone, the operating system didn't allow me to choose it! I did find a solution, but in case you're wondering why this is an important problem, let me first go back to basics.

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Do you know anyone interested in photographing Africa?

Tears of the Arizona (Pearl Harbor)

Shocking news today with cancer news from some friends who have had to cancel from the LuminOdyssey Botswana 2013 photography expedition. As a result we have a couple of new spots available on the expedition: if you or anyone you know might be interested, please have a look.

Meanwhile we've been back from Hawaii for a week now, and with the number of projects going on it's almost like we never went. Almost, but not quite: life's always busy, but we do have some special Maui memories. Continue reading "Do you know anyone interested in photographing Africa?"...

Sundry updates

The "Where is David" map on this site has not been receiving updates for a while, and I'm working on a new solution to replace the Fire Eagle service we used to apply updates via iPhones/Iridium/etc. In the meantime updates to the map will be "sporadic". Currently we're in the U.S.

Haleakala "Crater", Maui

Fire Eagle isn't the only web service to disappear. Google recently announced that Google Reader is due to be shut down in a few months: time to find another way of synchronising news reading from various sources. It's a shame: Google Reader had a decent web interface, and an API which let news-reading apps on my phone and tablet keep in sync. It will be interesting to see what solution emerges to take its place.

I wonder what other free web services we've come to rely on will disappear in the coming months? Continue reading "Sundry updates"...

Configuring or selecting a projector for photo display?

Through Khromagery one of the things I do is to help photographers select and configure electronic photo displays.

A year ago I published an ebook entitled Projecting Photos, which you don't have to be a client to get access to. It's still relevant today, so if you're having to deal with a data projector head on over and check it out! Continue reading "Configuring or selecting a projector for photo display?"...

How I use Time Machine backups

The computer systems we rely on so much for everything from email to processing our photos are inherently fragile. We store large amounts of precious data on them, and having backups is important so we don't lose things when (not if) the storage devices fail.

This article talks about how I use OS X's Time Machine function as part of our backup strategy. If you've got a single OS X machine or a group, hopefully this information will be useful!

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