Daily Archives: Sunday, 21st October 2007
Robin Hood – Childhood
It seems that the children of Nottingham and its surroundings have been inspired by the exploits of Robin and his gang. So much so that a group of young boys are playing at being outlaws when they probably should be working in the fields, or whatever labour kids were supposed to be doing at the time.
And of course, the kids get into trouble when they see Guy up to no good. Guy, some token soldiers and a blacksmith are performing a little experiment. A prisoner is tied up wearing a metal breastplate, which successfully deflects the arrows the soldiers fire at it. Guy is suitably impressed, and pausing only to kill the prisoner to make sure the existence of the armour is kept secret, he’s just about to go back to the castle with the blacksmith when he spots the boys. After the traditional chase, all but one of them are captured by the soldiers.
The last boy, Daniel, is found by Robin, which is quite lucky, really. While Robin takes Daniel back to his base, Guy gets nicely menacing with the other boys, though his Toad of Toad Hall exchange was more comical than than really menacing:
We didn’t see anything, sir
If you didn’t see anything, why would you say you didn’t see anything?[1]
And off we go with more of the usual silliness. The blacksmith is, so he says, the only man west of Jerusalem who has the secret of how to make the special armour, which requires a secret ingredient, “black diamonds”. The Sheriff wants lots of it for his Black Knights, so much so that he agrees to pay the rather high asking price.
Robin’s not too happy. He doesn’t like the idea of the Sheriff having an army of “invincible warriors”, and has a lot of fun trying to prevent that from happening.
Lots more fun follows, including a fight between an armour-clad Guy and a distinctly unarmoured Robin, which Guy somehow manages to lose[2], and they all live happily ever after. Well, Marian’s going to be a little less happy, as the Sheriff is threatening to be even nastier to her ailing father.
Interestingly, Djaq suggests that the armour may be made of Damascus Steel, which was real enough, though generally known for making swords rather than armour. Which is far too close to reality for this show! Let’s hope they get back to normal levels of silliness next week.
[1] One of the rabbits is a weasel, etc. 
[2] Well, duh…
It’s feeding time
It seems the feed problems are not going away. As far as I can tell, Feedburner is deciding that the feeds being served by this site are far too slow, and so it gives up trying to update.
Now the actual feed is working, so I’ve removed the automagic redirect to Feedburner and changed the links in the sidebar so that they point at the actual feeds rather than the redirected Feedburner address. So anyone connecting directly to my feeds should find that service has been resumed, and anyone who decides to subscribe now will get an up to date feed.
On the other hand, anyone subscribed to the Feedburner address will be getting some breakage, but I’ll try to fix that with some .htaccess trickery.
It does mean that I won’t see any statistics on how many people are reading[1] my feeds, but I can live with that.
[1] Well, subscribed to. How many actually read this stuff is another question altogether….
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.2
Since I got the Canon 30D, my image processing software has been Adobe Photoshop – initially CS2, and more recently CS3. Now Photoshop is a superb package, with enormous power and flexibility. For images that need cloning, fancy processing and editing, tweaking of brightness, contrast and colour in selected areas, and much more, it’s wonderful. But a lot of photos don’t need anything like that. They need to be adjsuted a bit – maybe the white balance, saturation, or a quick tweak of the curve[1]. And for that, Photoshop can be a bit slow.
Adobe were aware that they weren’t quite doing all they could for photographers, and after a lot of work, they revealed a new product: Lightroom[2]. I downloaded the beta about a year ago, fiddled with it a bit, but couldn’t really get to grips with it, and sort of forgot about it. Some time later, it was released under the slightly cumbersome name of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, but everyone seems to call it Lightroom, so I’ll do the same.
I read a few reviews, and as time passed, a lot of quite sensible people seemed to be suggesting that this might actually be a useful piece of software. After version 1.1 was released, the positive comments seemed to become more common.
So, I did some reading, and downloaded a trial – by which time it had been updated to version 1.2. And after a bit of fumbling, I began to get the idea. Lightroom is designed to work with RAW files, which suits me perfectly. You can make a lot of adjustments – many of them the same as those you can make with Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), the Photoshop plugin that is used to convert RAW files into other formats. Like ACR, the adjustments are not made to the file itself – it can save them into “sidecar” files in the same way that ACR does, and it will happily read in changes made in ACR, but its default behaviour is to save everything in its own database.
Apart from the usual adjustments to the overall image that I’ve referred to above, there are also tools for removing red eye, removing spots and a nifty crop and straighten tool. The crop tool takes a little getting used to, as rather than moving a copped area over the image, you actually move the image behind the crop area. This actually works very well, and the crop area includes a “rule of thirds“[3] grid, and a finer grid appears when rotating the image to align a horizon or other feature.
Once you’ve made your adjustments, you’ll want to do something with your image. Lightroom makes it easy to export in other formats – JPG, PSD, TIFF, with easy control over the size and resolution of the exported image. Another nice feature is that you can make it do something with the exported images – I’ve got a setting that automatically drops the images into the Flickr Uploadr, which saves some time.
And Lightroom can produce web galleries based on templates which it can automatically upload to your website, and nifty slideshows to show off your pictures. Oh, and it’s got toys for printing, too.
But perhaps the most interesting bit is the Library, which allows you to organise your ever-growing image collection. By adding keywords to imported images, you can group, classify and otherwise select images based on whatever criteria you find most useful. Because you have access to all that lovely Exif data, you can easily find all the pictures you took with a particular lens, or a particular ISO setting, or which you’ve labelled in a particular way.
So, after a couple of weeks of using it, I decided that I had to have it, and I’ve ordered it. It should arrive before my trial runs out, which would be useful. This afternoon, I spent some time reorganising all my existing image files. I put all the “output” files – PSD and JPG files – in a new folder, and the RAW files (plus some JPGs from the odd occasions when I let the camera produce those) in another, then imported all the original files, with their ACR sidecar data where it exisited, into Lightroom. Now all I’ve got to do is go through over 5,000 files and add suitable keywords….
Lightroom: if you work with digital photographs, it might be useful to you. It’s available for Windows and Mac (both in the same box, even!), and you can get a 30 day trial from Adobe, which should be long enough to make up your mind. There are lots of resources on the internet to help you get to grips with it, and some good books, too.
[1] Note for people who don’t know what that is: don’t worry about it, I’ll start making some kind of sense soon.
[2] As opposed to darkroom, see?
[3] Or “general guideline of thirds” as I prefer to think of it
Related posts
Terry Pratchett – Making Money
Yes, it’s the latest Discworld novel from Terry Pratchett. This one sees the return of Moist van Lipwig from Going Postal. Things are going well at the Ankh-Morpork Post Office under Moist’s leadership. In fact things are going so well, that Moist is getting dangerously bored. So bored that he’s taken to trying to break into his own Post Office, just to keep his hand in.
So it’s probably just as well that Lord Vetinari, the Patrician of the city[1] has a proposition for Moist. He wants him to take over the Bank of Ankh-Morpork and the Royal Mint. Things at the Bank aren’t too good. There’s something very strange in the cellars, everyone thinks the Chief Cashier is a vampire[2], and, well, it’s all a bit odd.
Moist turns the job down, but when a delightfully bonkers old lady leaves her shares to her dog, making it the controlling shareholder, and making Moist responsible for the dog’s well-being[3], he finds himself in charge anyway. And in a whole pile of trouble.
It’s all the usual enormous fun, and a lot lighter in tone than Thud. Moist takes things forward, which fits with the Patrician’s plans for the future of the city. And in an unexpectedly topical scene, he narrowly avoids a Northern Rock style run on the bank.
And it’s also fun to see the familiar characters from the City Watch from another angle – Pratchett fans have spent so much time inside Sam Vimes’[4] head that it’s quite odd to see him through other eyes.
If you’re a Pratchett fan, you’ve probably read it already, unless you have the strength of will to wait for the paperback to come out, which I certainly didn’t. I got mine in Waterstone’s as soon as it was available, and it came with a little pack of, err, genuine Ankh-Morpork banknotes, which was nice. It was also half price, which was even nicer.
For those of you who haven’t read Terry yet[5], it’s really time you started. While this is a sequel of sorts, it’s as good a point to start as any. Then you’ve got some catching up to do…
[1] I’d call him Machiavellian, but Machiavelli wouldn’t last five minutes in Ankh-Morpork…
[2] As it turns out, he’s something much more frightening than that.
[3] A little matter of a contract with the Guild of Assassins…
[4] Have I mentioned that my laptop is called Vimes?
[5] The reviewer in the Guardian asked the question what’s wrong with you? to those people
Fancy a drink?
This is a close-up detail of the drinking fountain in the Bigg Market, Newcastle. I hadn’t previously noticed how fierce the lions looked – enough to put people off drinking the water and send them into the nearest pub.
I took this using the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM Lens, which is great for pulling out the fine detail in the stone and metal.
Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM Lens
After attempting a few close-up pictures of plants and various bits and bobs, I came to the conclusion that I wanted a proper macro lens – one that could actually produce an image on the sensor that’s the same size as the object being imaged. I read a few reviews and narrowed my choice down to a Sigma lens and this Canon model. Both were rated quite well, but the Canon did have some distinct advantages that went a long way to justifying its higher price. So after a lot of dithering, I ordered it from my usual supplier, Cameras2u. As usual, their price was very competitive, it was in stock, and in my hands shortly afterwards.
My first impressions were good – it’s a good, solidly built lens, and the focus ring moves smoothly. Unlike some cheaper macro lenses, focusing is entirely internal – so it doesn’t increase in length as it focuses. This is really important for macro work, where you can be getting very close to the subject, and lenses that extend can be a bit awkward.
Once I got round to actually using the lens, I was even more impressed. With its maximum aperture of f/2.8, and the ability to focus as close as 31cm, it does an excellent job of getting up close and personal, with a shallow depth of field. And as a 100mm lens, it’s a moderately useful telephoto, too. Of course, as it’s a prime lens, it’s not as flexible as a zoom, but the quality of the glass more than makes up for that.
I’ll be playing with it a lot more over the next few weeks, and posting some sample images. So far, I love it. 
Related posts
That’s a big one
A bigger variation in my weight today, that is. Probably due to eddies in the space-time continuum[1], or last night’s dinner, or something.
[1] Is he?[2]
[2] HHGTTG reference 
