Well despite the worst efforts of the weather (cloud and rain) I managed to get at least one decent photo of the partial eclipse with my new Nikon D90.
Category Archives: Photography
The Tragedy of War
From the Australian War Memorial uploads to the Flickr Commons project.
Studio portrait of 1626 Private (Pte) Walter Henry Chibnall, 10th Light Trench Mortar Battery, pictured with his son William Beresford (Billy) Chibnall. […] He was killed in action at Passchendaele, Belgium, on 12 October 1917, aged 32 […] Pte Billy Chibnall enlisted during the Second World War, serving with the 2/21st Battalion. He was taken prisoner of war and died, aged 30, on 20 February 1942 at Ambon.
Very sad.
Retronaut: Siege of Leningrad
The ever fantastic “How to be a Retronaut” website has posted a brilliant collection of colour images of modern Leningrad which have been matched to, and partially overlaid with, black & white photos of the Siege of Leningrad during World War 2.
The collection has been put together by Segei Larenkov.
First Solo Photo Exhibition!
I’ve been doing photography for over half my life now (( there’s a scary thought! )) and after having my first ever exhibition jointly with Donna recently I’ve now ended up with my first solo exhibition!
I’ve got 5 large prints and 7 small ones (all framed limited editions) on view at the “Cafe Have Ya Bean” in Upwey, so please do come and see it. It’s a lovely place run by Terry and Liz, nice food and they do a great cappuccino! 🙂
Google Student Photography Prize
Google is running a photography competition to develop themes for iGoogle in conjunction with the Saatchi Gallery London for higher education students around the world. You’ll need to submit 5 photos to make up a theme.
36 shortlisted students will get their photos turned into iGoogle themes, 6 finalists will get exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery and the winner will get a GBP 5,000 bursary and a day with the documentary photographer Martin Parr. Entries close 31st May so if you’re interested (and eligible) you’d better get your skates on!
My first art exhibition!
Donna convinced me that I we should do a joint art exhibition with her paintings and sculptures and my photography and ceramic work, and so in my usual timely manner (not) our “Wonderment” exhibition opens tomorrow (Saturday 18th April) at the Jarmbi Gallery, Burrinja Cultural Center, 352 Glenfern Rd, Upwey here in Victoria and runs until the 10th May.
Tomorrow (Saturday 18th April) is our opening event running from 1pm to 3pm – if you can make it we’d love to see you!
Ubuntu Intrepid Packages for Digikam 0.10 (KDE4) (Updated)
Finally I’ve stumbled across packages of the KDE4 version of Digikam (0.10) which is currently in beta.
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/digikam-experimental/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main
They’re part of the Digikam Experimental Personal Package Archive (PPA) and so track the latest development releases (0.10.0-rc1 as I write this) and work for me on Ubuntu Intrepid with KDE 4.2 (at the moment) – remember to install Marble!
Note
Many thanks to Maarten Fonville who previously provided packages that this story originally pointed to, and who commented with the above alternative archive.
Searching Photos by Drawing a Picture
OK, so maybe you’ve got a few hundred, or thousand, photos that you’ve taken, but how do you search them ? You could try and tag them for everything (if you’ve got the time) but wouldn’t it be nice if you could just draw a picture and search for that ?
Well the Digikam folks are working on that by incorporating some of the existing ImgSeek projects code into the KDE4 version of Digikam (0.10.0).
They’ve got a short video demo of it up on YouTube (embedded below).
The War on Photography
Bruce Schneier has a great blog article on “The War on Photography” that is causing problems for photographers in formerly free countries around the world. If you are into photography (and/or freedom) it’s well worth a read. One part I will reproduce here is a paragraph with some useful links for us photographers (I’ve added the link for “photographers rights” which wasn’t in the original).
This is worth fighting. Search “photographer rights” on Google and download one of the several wallet documents that can help you if you get harassed; I found one for the UK, US, and Australia. Don’t cede your right to photograph in public. Don’t propagate the terrorist photographer story. Remind them that prohibiting photography was something we used to ridicule about the USSR. Eventually sanity will be restored, but it may take a while.
The Aussie version is already printed and in my camera bag, and remember that:
The 9/11 terrorists didn’t photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn’t photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn’t photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid.
It’s just security theatre..
Links to useful documents:
Donna’s first YouTube video – From Autism to Artism
Last night Donna and I managed to get her first YouTube video online called “From Autism to Artism“, based around her photos from childhood, her paintings and the song “Beautiful Behavioural Mutations” from her Mutation album (and no, I can’t keep up with her creativity!).