Just a few feet to the left

Published on by Phillip Drawbridge Category: Photography

I was stumbling around the Web and came across this photo by Kevin Galvin on the natgeo website:

Which looked really familiar to me.  So I hunted around my photos and found this:

 

I took this back in 2006 in Ireland.  Same hut, just a slightly different point.  It shows that where you’re standing when you take a photo is just as important as where you’re pointing the camera.   Mine, is a snap shot.  Kevin’s is a photograph.  The cropping is better and the little stream leads your eye into the image.

I had photoshopped a version:

 

Better cropping and colour has helped, as does the tilt-shift which gives some focus to the hut.  But the foreground is just boring.  Lesson I learned is to look around a bit and don’t rely on doing everything in postwork.   But it was kinda cool to see a similar shot on a website.

Time for an Upgrade

Published on by Phillip Drawbridge Category: Off Topic

I bought my computer nearly 8 years ago. Which as far as computers go is a thousand years. Since then I have upgraded the hard drive (twice), power supply, RAM, graphics card, all the fans. But it doesn’t disguise that it’s still a 800 year old processor sitting on a motherboard that dinosaurs would have laughed at.

I was sitting watching it render a not uncomplex image the other day and decided it’s time for an upgrade. It was at this point that my “computer”, reading my mind, decided to have an existence failure. How did it know what I was thinking? Oh, it still works, after a reboot. But I can tell it’s in a bad mood since I have to coax it to do anything more complicated than add two single digit numbers together. Even then I have to check the result against my phone.

I started looking around. Upgrading to a nice quad-core. How nice would that be? Apparently, Victorians had Quad core computers. Not sure what I was thinking. Even my phone has a quad-core. It seems that eight cores is the way forward these days.

I don’t play many games.  Tomb Raider is the only one I really enjoy.  But I have to turn the settings right down and even then, towards the end, I’m getting maybe 3fps.   It’s just not possible to finish.   It seems that Gamers have the right idea.  Gaming PCs have more computing power than some governments.  That seems to be the way forward.

I’m saving my pennies and I’m looking at an AMD FX 8 core processor, 8GB RAM and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX graphics card. I might actually end up with a better computer than Heidy. Besides being able to render god ray caustics in Carrara in less than a few days, I might actually be able to finish Tomb Raider.

Nikon Df Camera

Published on by Phillip Drawbridge Category: Photography

I’m very much about the retro.  But I’m also very much about the newest and bestest.   So if a camera comes along that looks retro, but has a full frame 16mp sensor then I want it.  I saw this over on uncrate.com.  A 35mm throwback with lots of leather and chrome and a f/1.8 50mm lens as standard.  The only downside to this camera is that it’s a Nikon and I’m a Canon snob.