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  • Dave 8:53 pm on March 9, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , science, , solarsystem, space,   

    Sheep and the Solar System 

    Wonders of the Solar System

    I love the BBC. On BBC2 tonight there was part one of Wonders of the Solar System. A fact packed and fascinating documentary presented by Professor Brian Cox, who is brilliant at this kind of thing – having somebody there who not only understands the subject matter but is enthusiastic about it and wants to share that enthusiasm with us the viewer, draws you in to make the whole thing very enjoyable.

    Lambing Live

    Following Wonders of the Solar System was Lambing Live. An hour long programme broadcast every night of the week which is nicely slow paced. Interspersed with some pre-recorded reports about all sort of related subjects and very moving in places when problems arose resulting in the death of a new lamb.

    It’s hard to imagine any of these programs being made for any of the other UK channels these days – they’re both journeys in to worlds that are alien to most people. It’s also refreshing that neither of these programmes assume you have a nearly none existent attention span, don’t constantly repeat themselves or have long unnecessary recaps.

    We should be proud of the BBC and protect it from the attacks it gets from time to time – which, to my untrained eye, seem to originate from commercial competition who would never make programs like these anyway. 

     

  • Dave 10:43 am on February 19, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , ,   

    No wonder people share files 

    I love watching films and I love listening to music. I work for a living and have no problem buying films and music.

    It’s taken a very long time for the big companies to finally realise how to deal with music – make it good quality, usable anywhere, good value and easy to get at. I love MP3 shops like Bleep where you can get very high quality tracks at a price that seems reasonable given that there isn’t somebody producing discs, shipping them across the country or even around the world then having the overhead of a physical shop to sell them in.

    These days there are streaming services like Napster and Spotify which are good enough so that you can listen to pretty much anything for less money per month than it used to cost to buy a CD in a shop. Because of the good value of these, I pay for one of them and enjoy using it (Napster, mostly via a Squeezebox in my case).

    Movies on the other hand are a completely different kettle of fish – it seems like music was when the original Napster first arrived. The movie companies doing their best to sell you a crippled piece of crap with your film in it. Because films are sold in a variety of formats with various kinds of rights management attached to them, I’m wary about buying anything because I don’t know if I’ll be able to play it in the future. I already know I won’t be able to enjoy it out of the confines of whatever the seller thinks it should be used in.

    iTunes movies are a complete no no. Tied to the computer or one of their own devices. Apple still get away with this kind of behaviour with music too, iTunes really being a shop that you have to install software to buy from and that software only really working well with devices sold by Apple. Until it’s all opened up for any device by any manufacturer I won’t use it.

    It should be possible for me to buy a film and watch it on anything I want to watch it on and not have restrictions like this.

    I would buy more films if they weren’t crippled.

    TV again is behind the times and suffering as a result. If a TV show is made anywhere in the world, usually the rights to distribute it are carved up in to different territories and people in these territories can’t view content that originates from a different one. The end result of this is that a TV show is made, appears on some companies online TV service and everyone not in that country sees a message saying they can’t watch it. It’s not the 1970’s any more.

    So how about a TV programme shop, selling TV programmes from across the world for reasonable amounts of money in an open format so that people can choose to watch what they want where ever it comes from.

    The actions of these companies to try and protect their media is driving proper customers away – a lot of people don’t download music and movies because they don’t want to pay – they do it because it’s easier and you don’t feel like they’re being screwed by buying some strange format thing that only works on a device they tell you it should run on in an area of the planet that they have also dictated.

     

  • Dave 6:34 pm on February 14, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: chicken, , farnsfield, , , ,   

    White Post Farm 

    Towards the end of last year, I was asked by White Post Farm to take some photos of their animals for use in their 2010 leaflet. They discovered a set of photos I had taken there last summer when I shared a few of them on their Facebook page. The two photos I shared were these:

    Both were taken with a fisheye lens. I think it was the goat photo in particular that caught their attention.

    When I made my first visit to take photos specifically for the leaflet, it was dry but overcast and within an hour it started raining. There were some photos I quite liked, but they all looked like a horrible grey day so I wasn’t really happy with them. I went back again in December when I was taking a mid-week day off work in lieu of working the previous weekend. It was a very bright day with blue skies! – That brightness caused it’s own problems, but that was a much nicer problem to deal with than drab grey skies.

    One of the photos that was taken on that first visit during the hour before it rained was this one, which ended up being used in the leaflet…

    There’s a bit of blue in the sky, but I suppose a lot of the background detail doesn’t matter that much when you’ve got a cheeky llama leaning down in to shot to steal the limelight away from the calf and look straight in to the camera!

    The December was where I think I had the time to enjoy the time with the animals and take enough photos in better light.

    Here’s the cow nose from the leaflet:

    Here’s a few more from the December visit:

    There are plenty more on publicenergy.co.uk in the White Post Farm section.

    Finally, I visited again yesterday to pick up an annual pass and a copy of the 2010 leaflet, parts of which appear at the top of this post. While I was there I took a few more photos, including an addition to my 52 week self portrait series.

    Here I am pictured with Darren the Goat…

     

    • emdot 6:49 am on February 15, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      So great, Dave! I think Getty would also love your fish-eye animal portraits — i think they’d sell like hotcakes!! :)

  • Dave 8:58 am on February 1, 2010 Permalink  

    Froggatt Walk 

    The full set can be seen here: Froggatt Walk 01/10

     

  • Dave 3:36 pm on January 30, 2010 Permalink
    Tags: 52weeks, project, selfportrait   

    52 Weeks 

    I was recently persuaded to start a 52 Weeks project – one self portrait per week for a year. I’m not sure where this is going based on the photos so far. Here are the first five in chronological order:





     

  • Dave 12:10 pm on January 28, 2010 Permalink
    Tags: , , photosharing, publicenergy, smugmug,   

    Flickr stagnation and withdrawal 

    flickr

    The screen shot above is what one of my photographs looks like on Flickr when viewed in a maximised browser on a 24” monitor. Five years ago, monitors were generally smaller and the Flickr pages looked quite nicely designed and the images seemed to be a reasonable size. As luck would have it, I found an old photo that contains Flickr running on a 17” monitor. This photo was taken in 2005 which was the year I started using the site. 5 years later, the photo pages are virtually unchanged.

    If I compare the Flickr screen shot at the top with what the same image looks like on SmugMug – again on a 24” browser, maximised, much more is made of the available space.

    smugmug

    Also, clicking on the main image, does a ‘lights-out’ enlargement to make it fill as much as the browser window as possible and fading out the background.

    smugmug2

    It’s not just the layout of the pages on Flickr that are well overdue for an overhaul – here’s a list of other irritations:

    • The speed of the site. It can be painfully slow sometimes, it sucks the joy out of browsing photos because of how long it takes to flick between pages and images.
    • The UK satellite maps are dreadful. When Flickr first introduced geotagging, the Yahoo maps they chose to use had really rough looking barely detailed maps in most of the areas I was interested in. Years later they are still like that – virtually unusable.
    • The attitude of Flickr towards their customers. It’s hard to know if this is all Yahoo these days or what – but there are countless tales of people having their accounts marked unsafe, or even deleted without any kind of discussion or right of appeal.
    • The popularity of the site has diluted the community aspect – This might be a bit of “this club was better before it was popular” type of thing – BUT – there is a lot to be said for smaller and well managed compared to catering for the millions. The help forums and a lot of the groups are depressing to read these days.
    • Unable to retrieve your complete data – It’s possible using third party tools to re-download your photos should you wish, but, it’s much harder to download your photos and also the information that was added after it was uploaded to Flickr. For instance, extra tags, possible extra geo-data, people in the photo and the comments. It really ought to be possible to download an offline archive of your photos with this extra data.

    So, for various reasons I have a few years left of paid Flickr account use. I’m gradually sorting through my photos that were uploaded to Flickr and putting them online at http://publicenergy.co.uk using SmugMug to make it work.

    My plan is to wind down what gets posted to Flickr and use publicenergy.co.uk as my main online photo storage site. notsowildlife.com will continue to serve as my animal photo specific site.

    I have no intention of actually deleting my Flickr account – although I’ll review that decision when my pro account expires in a few years time. For the time being I still need to keep tabs on friends uploading photos there, and it might be inconvenient for the small group of other Flickr users I really care about to keep tabs on my photos.

    For me, my favourite part of this whole photography hobby is actually going out and taking the photos – it is nice when other people see them and like them of course. The not so wild animal thing has had lots of nice feedback from people. Comments left on photos are one thing, but it’s the odd comment from people who have really reacted that I’ve enjoyed the most. People telling me that they’ve had to put one of my cow photos up in their new born daughter’s nursery for example. Somebody telling me their student produced a painting based on one of my cow photos. Being asked how close I get to ducks! or how I clean chewed up grass spat by llamas from my camera! These are enjoyable reactions I won’t forget.

    Flickr has been good socially too – I know quite a lot of good people as a result of Flickr meetups – I think that these events peaked a few years ago too – the love for Flickr is vanishing – so I’m glad I was around at the best time and still have a lot of friendships as a result.

    We’ll see how it all goes!

     

    • Nick 12:28 pm on January 28, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      I feel your pain and recently wrote about issues I had with Flickr; finishing with a plea for them to either sell the service or shove some money at it and actually do something.

      Its a really hard call as the community aspects (when they work) are good, but the actual photo sharing is abismal at best. The service has barely changed since 2004 when it launched apart from adding features that help them make money. Such a basic site with little to no investment (and a small and unresponsive support team) must be a huge money cow for Yahoo. Which is sadly, probably why they can’t be bothered changing anything.

      Off to have a look at Smugmug now!

      • Dave Wild 12:38 pm on January 28, 2010 Permalink | Reply

        SmugMug definitely doesn’t have a community to match Flickr by a very long way. It does however provide a fairly modern photo browsing web site that you can get working on your own domain name. It seemed the best option for me – less hassle than actually hosting and looking after something.

        • Nick 1:24 pm on January 28, 2010 Permalink

          Perhaps a business opportunity to set up some competition for some photography minded IT geeks (or IT minded photography geeks)!?

    • Michael Randall 8:29 pm on January 31, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Very nicely put, Dave. I’ve been somewhat unhappy with Flickr’s display for a while now, and stories of people’s accounts being deleted without warning or recourse make me nervous. The one thing that had always put me off SmugMug was that there didn’t seem to be a way to show your most recent photos – but your site has that.

      Knowing that was possible was enough to get me to try it out – I’m now trialling it, and may switch to it for most of my photos too.

      For the moment, at least, it’s at http://www.pigpog.co.uk – I may try linking it neatly in to PigPog next week.

      • Dave Wild 8:52 pm on January 31, 2010 Permalink | Reply

        Looking at the SmugMug blog, they seem to have a steady rate of improvements – especially recently. I think any extra features now will be a bonus – I’m enjoying the site’s speed and being able to see the photos larger by default. Good photos look much better larger – looking at a lot of my old ones though, making them larger means you can see how rough they are – the 500 pixel size on Flickr brushed a lot of problems under the carpet out of view! :)

        Have fun with it during your trial. I’m still finding things out and there seems to be lots of info about customizing the pages in their forums that I’ve not really looked at yet – I’m going to be concerned with sorting out all of the old images I want to move there that are currently very disorganised – I’m trying to avoid a “2000 random photos taken during the last 10 years” gallery!

    • Austen 4:27 pm on February 4, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Hey there Dave.
      Like yourself i have started trialling other sites, but as of yet havent settled on one. For me the reasons for looking around are different to some of yours, but i too realise that Flickr is past its sell by date, and soon to be passed its use by date. :-)

      I was never a big browser of others photos but yours were ones that always put a smile on my face and im sure they will continue to do just that.

      And it has been great meeting you a few times (because of Flickr) and of course lots of other people. Best of luck with your plans to sort your photos out properley. It sounds too much like real hard work for me. :-)

      • Dave Wild 4:43 pm on February 4, 2010 Permalink | Reply

        Well, I’m going to continue to keep tabs on Flickr and the contacts and friends there so I still see their photos, meet up and all of that kind of stuff.

        As for difficulty in moving, it was fairly easy – I found a Firefox add-on called Smugglr which copied all of my sets in to galleries on the new site – I do have a big pile of photos I never organised that I need to go through, but I can do that gradually – there’s no real rush! Deciding to do it was probably more difficult than actually doing it.

        • Milo42 5:58 pm on February 4, 2010 Permalink

          Interesting post I had not given much consideration to flickr in that respect guess I’m always to busy to look in depth at it. You raise some good points. I have never seen smug mug so I will check it out in more depth when I can find time.
          The great news is that it has an RSS feed so I have hooked up the RSS feed of your pictures to my google reader and I’m sorted I will see the images you post.

        • Dave Wild 6:26 pm on February 4, 2010 Permalink

          I think there are plenty of alternatives, but looking at the SmugMug blog, they seemed to have a bit of drive to make their product better and my limited experience of their forums and support looks good too.

          I already track the ‘friends’ Flickr RSS feed – which is basically Flickr contacts that I really care about rather than the hundreds I added years ago out of politeness! – I think I’m going to go through it and subscribe to the individuals though because I think things fall through the cracks and it’ll be good for me to get in to the habit of keeping track of photos where ever they are.

    • Milo42 9:27 pm on February 4, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Yes I had come to realise I was missing new pics relying on the flickr email and have slowly been adding RSS feeds. RSS seems to be a better way to go. It will be interesting to see how you get on with SmugMug

    • John 11:33 pm on February 4, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Good luck on your move away. I have started using Flickr and left numerous times. I have an account now but only to share photos with very specific people and participate in a group I started years ago. Otherwise Flickr does not appeal to me at all.

    • Primed Minister 12:37 am on February 5, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Hi Dave,

      Sorry to hear you’re withdrawing from Flickr as I enjoy looking at your photostream, however I can relate. I agree that an overhaul is overdue. As websites go Flickr is quite a basic site now and at times it is slow, it could be a lot slicker all round really. A ‘light box’ feature for instance where the image ‘expands’ large above the web page would be a good one. How hard would that be to implement? Surely Yahoo have the time and resources? The geotagging, I agree with you, I gave up geotagging my images a while back as the maps simply aren’t detailed enough to pinpoint an exact location. Also grey seems to complement images better, it looks more neutral, yet we still view our images on Flickr against stark white by default.

      One of the things I enjoy about Flickr though, like everyone else, is reading people’s comments but what I regard as spamming, i.e . the addition of graphics and icons or replacement of words for meaningless icons is quite irritating. On some photostreams I don’t bother to leave a comment at all because of all the graphics and award icons you have to sift through to get to the actual ‘dialogue’. It’s a shame there hasn’t been some kind of filtering setup to automatically ban the graphics from appearing or a toggle on/off feature to make it optional.

      For all its flaws I’ll carry on using Flickr until I’m convinced of switching to a suitable alternative. SmugMug sounds interesting although I haven’t got the time to work on my own website. Credit to you for looking into other alternatives.

      Cheers, Paul.

    • premiump 12:34 pm on February 5, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Yep, all good reasons Dave, and control of your own content is always something you have been really good at. As it goes, I let my Pro account lapse before Christmas, intentionally removing over 500 photo’s to keep it within the free “viewable” limit.

      I can’t say I have missed it.

    • Freester 7:47 am on February 9, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Dave,

      Sorry to read this. Yet I understand completely.

      I just wanted to say without you I wouldn’t have found Flickr, and wouldn’t have found the joys of phototgraphy. During this time I have gone from an MTB’r taking the occasional snap to someone who is quite proud of his photography. It has taken time and effort but I wouldn’t have embarked on this journey if I hadn’t heard of Flickr via you.

      I completely understand your reasons.

      I am getting a bit baffled by the amount of utter crud on Flickr that get’s bombarded with backslapping ‘great shot’ comments, awful awards and zero constructive crit.

      You’ll be missed.

      Mark (aka Freester)

      • Dave Wild 10:30 am on February 9, 2010 Permalink | Reply

        Well, not using Flickr is one thing, giving up on taking and sharing photos another, and I have no intention of giving up those activities :)

    • Lazlo Woodbine 8:58 pm on February 25, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Sorry to see that you’ve more or less left Flickr – thought I hadn’t spotted anything new from you for a while. IMO Flickr is changing / has changed for the worse… but I’m as guilty as anyone for doing the quick and easy ‘great shot’ comment (although I have grown out of the whole award and invite stuff…).

      Don’t know enough about the technical side of things but you’re right, when you think about it, I’ve been on there for 3 years and it hasn’t changed a bit. Oh well, it costs me nothing to be a ‘pro’ so I’ll stick with it (the idiots stopped charging me because I used to be with BTInternet about 8 years ago!).

      Will now bookmark your new sites to keep up to date with your rather wonderful animal and landscape shots.

      Cheers

      Steve

  • Dave 11:22 pm on December 6, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , ,   

    White Post Farm Photos 

    White Post - November 2009

    White Post - December 2009 

    I was recently asked to take some photos for White Post Farm. What they wanted was some extra photos in the style that I’ve kind of gotten myself in to over the last few years – i.e. fairly silly close-ups that hopefully show some of the animal’s personality.

    I had two visits – the first one was very quick because it chucked it down about an hour after I arrived. The skies were quite dark and grey too so I wasn’t that happy with the resulting photos. I got the opportunity to have a second visit on Friday and the weather was lovely. A very low winter sun posed problems of it’s own, but it was preferable to dark grey skies with poor lighting overall.

    There are a number of shots of that one llama who used every trick in the book to get food out of me – mostly successfully!

     

  • Dave 11:19 pm on December 1, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , customerservice, mobile, , three   

    I don’t like having a go at script reading call centre people but… 

    When I changed mobile contracts recently, I phoned my old network (Three) and told them to cancel the contract and was forced to listen as the person on the phone went through their list of special offers to keep me as a customer. Despite me saying that I just wanted to cancel and wasn’t interested, they insisted on carrying on. After a very long time it transpired that I had phoned a few days early so to avoid a charge I had to phone back.

    When I phoned back, I had to listen to all of the same stuff, despite telling the person that I’d already listened to it before – this was extremely tedious but I was glad to be eventually shut of them.

    Unfortunately cancelling the contract puts me on the list to be called back to go through this again. I explained to the first caller yesterday that everything  was already sorted, I had no need of the contract or any other offers – but she continued to try the things on her script. I had to stop her again and tell her that she was wasting her time because I definitely didn’t want the number or the contract at all – so it didn’t matter how cheap it was or what offers they had.

    The next day I get another call with the same kind of questions being asked. This time I explained to the man that this was the fourth time I’ve been through this script with somebody and each time I’ve explained that I have no interest in any of the products.

    He said “I understand that” – and then carried on with the script!

    I said excuse me, did you understand what I just said to you? Because you’ve completely ignored me and carried on trying to sell me stuff. He said yes and carried on again!

    By the end of this I was raising my voice.

    I don’t think good customer service is ignoring everything the customer says in order to try and sell them stuff – but throughout my life, all of the dealings I’ve had with any mobile phone company has led me to the conclusion that they’re all bastards!

    If they phone back again, I might say something rude ;)

     

  • Dave 11:18 pm on November 29, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , ,   

    SKY TV on the XBOX 360 

    The Sky Player on the Xbox 360

    Positive Point

    • The Interface is very nicely done.

    Negative Points:

    • The quality of the streaming is really bad (it’s also bad on the PC player)
    • The selection of channels in the online subscription can only be described as shite – If you think of Sky TV, most people would probably want the big programmes that get stuck on Sky One – they are nowhere near this bizarre selection of bottom rung channels.
    • Even if you do find something on there worth watching – you might get a notice saying that the programme isn’t being broadcast online – you’re told this in a VHS rental video  ‘upcoming features’ style – it looks so nasty and amateurish.
    • The initial offer when it became available via the Xbox was for 3 months for the price of two – this seemed like a cheap way to lock people in to 3 months of the service before they could escape.
    • The Zune Marketplace can quite happily stream films at 1080p with Dolby Digital sound – this makes the Sky service even more of a joke as it shows it up, raises it’s leg and pisses all over it.

    So, reading between the lines there, it’s safe to say I didn’t like it. It’d need a big channel like Sky One, streamed in HD to the quality of the Zune Marketplace to make it worth considering. At the moment it’s just awful.

     

  • Dave 11:16 pm on November 14, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: notsowildlife.com, website   

    notsowildlife.com updated 

    notsowildlife.com

    I’ve done some tidying up on notsowildlife.com recently. Since I decided to rip out all of the text only posts and move them here, I had to make sure that notsowildlife.com looked ok with just the image posts. So I started with the latest release of the theme and re-applied the relevant changes from before. I also ended up moving things around because it was just the images, so I think it’s better now and seems tighter.

     

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