At today's Net Prophet conference, Old Mutual launched their Entrepreneurs' Guide as part of their "Do Great Things" campaign. I was honoured to be one of the entrepreneurs who contributed content to the guide, so it was great to see the final product finally launched to the public about six months after I was interviewed. The project was the brainchild of Jack Kruger, head of Old Mutual Digital and the notable omission from the credits list on the site, and took a lot of work from a big team to put together. You'll find my contribution at DoGreatThings.co.za/duncanforrest
Minor gripe: I'm generally much more comfortable behind the lens than in front of it, so it's not often I like pictures of myself. The stills for this project were taken by the brilliant Clare Louise Thomas, who managed to pull off a miracle by creating a number of pictures I really like! Thanks, Clare. My small gripe with the web design is that the person in the screen grab above isn't actually me - it's my mirror image. I undertand why designers feel the need to flip images, but it's always bugged me when it's noticeable, and now that I've been flipped it's even more so! :)
I'm fortunate to live very close to Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden, and over the past few weeks I've taken the kids and my camera for quite a few walks through parts of the garden. Now kids' noise and patience levels aren't usually recommended ingredients for successful bird photography, but despite that I've managed a few pleasing shots recently. I'll hopefully get around to posting more of them in due course but for today I'm only including sunbirds in this post, because they're probably the most frustrating of the birds I've photographed recently.
So, let us examine sunbirds' crimes against photography:
For starters, they're pretty hyperactive little blighters and spend far too much time flitting from bush to bush in search of the next snack.
Most species are quite protective of their territory, so birds of both genders are easily distracted by the need to chase off competing birds.
When they do sit on the same perch for more than a few seconds at a time, they tend to hide their faces in flowers a lot, and generally devote much too little time to posing co-operatively against distant, neutrally coloured backgrounds.
Then there's that gaudy iridescent plumage of theirs that makes them so attractive to look at, but a nightmare to expose correctly: there's a fine line between shiny and blown highlights.
Next, there's the little matter of their not so little bills. Side on, they have the potential to lend a graceful and attractive curve to a picture, but a sunbird that's facing you is likely to look silly even if you do miraculously manage to keep both head and bill in focus.
OK, so their crimes are numerous and heinous, right? Maybe we should just ignore them and never photograph them! Unfortunately I don't seem to be able to do that, so I keep going back for more frustration. Here are some pics from yesterday and two weeks ago, none of which is quite good enough for me, so I guess I'm condemned to continuing the quest for better sunbird photos.
First up, the Southern Double-Collared Sunbird. I was going to post just one of these, but I couldn't decide on my favourite. I'd appreciate your input on which you prefer, and why. Hint: See down below where it says "0 comments"? Click that and make the number bigger!
SD-CS #1
SD-CS #2
SD-CS #3
And now for the even more frustrating Orange-breasted Sunbird, probably the gaudiest and most beautiful of our sunbirds. They seem to prefer the Erica gardens which are quite far up the hill at Kirstenbosch, so the kids tend to be bored and wanting to go home by the time we find our first Orange-breasted Sunbirds and that means I haven't had much quality time with them...
O-BS #1
O-BS #2
O-BS #3
PS: I just discovered that Kirstenbosch tweets, so if you're on Twitter and in the area you may want to follow @KirstenboschNBG
It all started with a tweet from Shem Compion on Easter Sunday saying he was planning a seascape shoot the next day. I shoot landscapes from time to time, but I've never tackled seascapes before, so it was a welcome opportunity to try my hand at something new and to meet Shem before David Burstein and I head off to the Masai Mara with him in September. After a morning of on and off rain in Cape Town that had me skeptical about our chances of good weather we headed off to meet Shem at the Dappat se Gat parking area in Kogelbaai at around 4pm.
Of course seascapes call for wide angle lenses, but I rarely head out on a photo trip without my Bigma and that proved useful while we waited at the parking spot. First we were treated to a fly-by by a Jackal Buzzard which yielded a few usable shots including the image that I'm currently using as the header for the blog:
and I quite liked this one too:
Then right next to the car I captured this Cape Robin-Chat:
With the distraction of the birds over, we headed down to the beach. It soon became apparent that without the right kit I was going to battle to slow down my shutter speed sufficiently to capture much of the movement in the water that I was going for. David & Shem both have beautiful Lee filters (both graduated and constant neutral density), but all I had available in the way of light limiting filters was my circular polariser. With that fitted, the aperture stopped right down to f/22 and the ISO all the way down at 50 the slowest shutter speed I could manage we first arrived was 1/4s, but with swell running quite hard that was enough to bring out the movement in the breakers:
and in areas of the shore with significant movement, like this rock, though only on bigger, faster moving waves:
which occasionally had us (David, in this case) on the hop:
Fortunately the light soon started co-operating, thanks largely to the rainstorm that was approaching from the West. As the sinking sun filtered through that we received beautiful yellow-golden light:
which lit up the clouds boiling over the top of the Kogelberg. This is the first image I posted the next day...
... but the more I look at it, the more uncomfortable I am with that horrible blown out section of sky - a reminder once again that once your highlights are completely blown there's no rescuing them despite the extra latitude that RAW images give you. Next time I set out to shoot seascapes, I definitely want a graduated filter in my bag. Here are a few more shots from the afternoon:
and, finally, the one that I think is my favourite:
Be sure to check out David's and Shem's photos from the same shoot too, but don't forget to come back and leave me some feedback!
If you're a Lightroom user and like to geotag your images, you've probably found yourself frustrated that there's no way to manage photos' location data natively within Lightroom. The links to Google Maps that Lightroom provides from photos that have embedded GPS co-ordinates are nice, but you can't edit the data or do much else with them.
When I first started geoencoding a few years ago, the pick of the bunch of Mac apps that I tried was PhotoGPSEditor and that served me quite well, but it added a very slow and frustrating step to my workflow that got in the way of seeing my pictures in Lightroom quickly. Geoencoding apps like this work by matching (or interpolating) your photos' timestamps against those in a GPS track log to determine the co-ordinates at which each photo was taken. Most standalone apps like PhotoGPSEditor then create new copies of your images with the co-ordinates baked into the new image's EXIF data. When you're working with several hundred RAW images of 20MB+ each, reading and writing complete copies of each image takes ages. To save some time I used to have PhotoGPSEditor read the source images from the CF card or external hard drive on which I'd brought the images home and write them to the Drobo where the images in my Lightroom catalogs live. Unfortunately PhotoGPSEditor seemed prone to crashing if you gave it more than a few hundred images at a time, so importing the couple of thousand images I routinely accumulate on a trip was extremely tedious. Anyway, you get the picture - enough moaning about how I used to do it!
Some time last year, while looking for something entirely unrelated, I stumbled upon Jeffrey Friedl’s Blog. If you're a serious coder and you've ever had to wrangle regular expressions, then you'll probably recognise Jeffrey as the author of "Mastering Regular Expressions" (or "The Owl Book"as O'Reilly aficionados will know it). Imagine my surprise when I discovered that someone whose work I knew and respected in a very different field was also the author of a wide range of Lightroom Plugins and, best of all, a brilliant geoencoding plugin!
Unzip and place the plugin file somewhere sensible. (I use ~/Pictures/Lightroom/Plugins/ where ~ is my Mac user folder)
In Lightroom, go to File > Plug-in Manager and click "Add". Navigate to the folder where you put the plugin and click "Add Plug-in"
Once the plugin is installed, there's one more tweak I recommend before you leave the Plug-in Manager screen, and that's to click the "Configure Plug-in Extras menu items" button. By default the plugin adds lots of ways to interact with your photos to Lightroom's Plug-in Extras menu, but quite a few of them aren't going to be relevant unless you happen to have taken pictures in particular parts of the world. To reduce clutter, I'd suggest unticking any that you don't need:
All Jeffrey's Lightroom plugins are distributed as donationware. In the case of geoencoding plugin that means you can use it forever without any cost if you really want to, but after six weeks you'll find that you're limited to working on batches of 10 photos at a time. Given how useful the plugin is, I'm sure you'll find yourself wanting to donate well within the generous evaluation period. The quantum of the donation is entirely up to you, so I suggest you use the plugin for a while to assess how much you're using it and how much time it saves you. If the answers to those questions are "often" and "a lot", be sure to reflect that in the size of your donation.
Once you have the plugin installed, it's time to encode some images. Most of the time my geotagging data comes from a tracklog created by my trusty old Sony GPS-CS1, but let's start with a static example. First, select one or more pictures in Lightroom whose point of capture you know. Now launch the plugin from File > Plug-in Extras > Geoencode....
In the Static Location tab of the plugin you have a number of options for entering the location. You could enter it manually, cut and paste it from somewhere or use the great Google Earth integration provided by the plugin. For maximum accuracy, start by clicking the "Show Crosshair Target in Google Earth" button which will add a temporary overlay in Google Earth. Simply position your Google Earth viewport so that the centre target is at your desired position, then return to Lightroom and click the really cool "Import Location from Google Earth" button (which works fine for me in Google Earth 5.2.x despite Jeffrey's disclaimer in the dialog). That pulls in the location from Google Earth, and does a reverse lookup to arrive at a description of the location too:
If it's a location you're likely to re-use (like home, where it's pretty pointless to fire up a GPS logger whenever you shoot) the you can save the location as a preset to easily call it up again in future.
Before you proceed, you'll probably also want to configure the map URL that gets added to the metadata. You can choose your preferred map provider (Google, Yahoo, Bing in various languages), the style (map, satellite, hybrid, etc) and which extra layers to include (Wikipedia, Panaramio etc). Disappointingly, though, you can't control the default zoom level of the map you link to. I often find myself having to zoom in when I've clicked through.
The plugin maintains the geoencoding data as "shadow data" within Lightroom and doesn't write it back to original files by default, but I generally like to have the data in Lightroom's native GPS data fields too. Unfortunately the plugin architecture means you have to take a slightly roundabout route to achieve that. As explained in the "Write Back" tab of the plugin dialog, you have to start by writing the geodata to the original files and then read it back into Lightroom. I'd imagine that if you're using DNG files then that's a slow and painful process akin to the standalone encoding I used to endure, but since I keep my images in their original RAW format, we're only talking about writing & reading tiny XMP sidecar files, which is more than quick enough for me. Note that if you have existing XMP sidecar files, but they're out of sync with changes you've made in Lightroom, you should manually sync them before you get the plugin to add geodata to them. I always set my catalog preferences so that metadata changes are automatically written to the XMP files, so I don't risk losing them. If you're confident that your sidecars are up to date and know that you want your geodata written to them, you'll probably want to tick the box on the "Write Back" tab to enable automatic writeback during the encoding process:
Right! With all of that done, you're ready to return to the "Static Location" tab and click "Geoencode Images and Write Image Files". If you want the geodata back in its native Lightroom fields, now's the time to invoke Lightroom's "Read Metdata from File" command as described in the picture of the dialog above.
If you're getting your GPS data from a tracklog, then it's just a case of pointing the plugin to the file, setting your timezone & camera clock offset if necessary, and deciding on the fuzziness to allow. As long as your interval between tracklog points is smaller than the fuzziness value, pictures taken between two tracklog points at different locations will have their positions interpolated from the neighbouring tracklog points. If, however, your logger lost signal at some point and so there aren't any usable points within the fuzziness interval from the timestamp of a photo, the plugin will skip those photos and tell you about them in its simple error log.
One of the features I really appreciate is that Jeffrey's plugin isn't limited to using GPX tracklog files. If your logger produces output in any of the myriad formats understood by GPSBabel then you can have the plugin convert files on the fly for you so you never have to do any conversions. My Sony logger produces NMEA-formatted files stored with a .log exenstion. To tell the plugin how to deal with that, start by clicking on the "Config..." button on the "Tracklog" tab. First, tell the plugin where to find the gpsbabel binary. (If you're using a recent edition of GPSBabelFE on the Mac you'll need to drill down below the main package in your Applications folder to Contents/MacOS/gpsbabel.) Once the plugin has tested your GPSBabel binary you can then tell it, for example, that .log files should be interpreted as NMEA files by passing GPSBabel the argument -i "nmea".
OK - that's it for now. This has turned into a longer and more time-consuming post than I imagined. I actually started out thinking I'd add a post about the seascape shoot I did with David & Shem on Monday, but then I realised I hadn't geoencoded those pictures yet and one thing led to another. The seascape post will hopefully follow soon! In the meantime, I hope this one proves useful for someone. If it does, please leave feedback!
After this morning's Easter egg hunt, the kids & I decided to make our own version of the classic picture that crops up every year. TinEye currently finds 517 matches for the what passes as the original, but it's hard to tell where it originated. I think our version is ever so slightly more kiddie-friendly. Incidentally, TinEye says no one has reposted our version yet. Come on - what are you waiting for!
Alright. Enough procrastinating already. I've been threatening to start a blog since before the phrase was coined and never got around to it. But, hey, it's only been 17 years since I built my first web site back in the postgrad lab of what was then UND - I doubt anyone's been holding their breath. So, what should you expect here? I can't be sure of course, but I expect I'll be posting an eclectic mix of things that interest me, principally focused on tech, gadgets, photography and life in general. I hope some of it proves useful, even if only to me! :)
