What’s this got to do with photography? Not quite nothing. A photo of a nice carrot cake baked by Oliver inspired me to search the old archives for these recipes, a final task before declaring the weekend over. This was as good a place as any to share them. And just as I was about to hit Publish I remembered I had a photo on Flickr of a fruit loaf from a while back. Have I seriously not baked one since December 2008? Time to think ingredients shopping..

 I came down to breakfast at the Ramada Encore Ipswich this morning to find one of the Reservation staff at the peddles of an exercise bike and keeping up a good comfortable pace.  Sarah and her colleagues are raising funds for the “Beyond the Moon” charity.

Organised by the Ramada Encore Belfast, there are 13 hotels from the group taking part, swapping tarmac for hotel lobbies.

0830 this morning I was woken by my daughter. The snow had settled and she wanted to go and play. A snow ball fight with the neighbours turned into a trip to the park with their sledge.

The snow was crunchy underfoot and compacting so well that I knew this was the day for Igloo 3. (read the rest of the post…)

There’s been a mass of hype over the Mayan calendar and how the end of the world will happen in 2012.  The film industry benefited from it with the blockbuster movie “2012″.  Will it end with a cataclysm? Most likely not one that the rest of the occupants of planet earth would notice.  But for the connected human population the death of the Internet would leave a massive hole.

Can you imagine a world with no Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Google, Wikipedia or YouTube? (read the rest of the post…)

I was checking my own twitter posts on the iPhone to see how they were formatted. I’d been getting new Twitter followers after blog posts but no post read counter changes and wondered what was up. I found that the bit.ly URL shortening wasn’t happening for tweets from WordPress. So here’s a quick test to see if the config updates have fixed it.  Next on the list is working out why the page read count isn’t moving for all reads. As I dislike text only posts here’s Action Man and Barbie from a macro test I did with the G11..

Mark

Fiona Boyle (far left) owns and runs the Taste Bud Cafe Deli in Chatterton Village in Bromley. I’d gone into the village to get something for the pets and to draw some cash. One of the staff had stepped outside to take an order to some of their customers seated out front. Being in a Playboy Bunny costume was a sure sign that it wasn’t quite business as usual.

The team are collecting for the Sunny Day Children’s Fund, specifically for a young lad called Logan born 06-09-07. Sunny Days Children’s Fund is a national registered charity which raises funds to help children and teenagers under the age of 18 with a wide range of adverse medical conditions including Leukaemia, Cerebral Palsy, the Deaf and Blind, Terminal Illnesses, and all other life hindering conditions.

Fi had been asked if she could help raise £50 for the charity and were already over the £500 pound mark!

Reviewing the shots I thought I’d ask the team if they’d mind trying something a little different. They were great sports, Fi, Elaine, Laura and Mercy all holding onto their male bunny Oli.

If you live in the area and find yourself hungry pop in and make a donation for Logan if you can.

Chrissie & Tim run the British Red Cross store in Forest Hill, a busy branch just over the road from the British Rail station.  They’ve had some unique and one off jackets gifted by a Selfridges designer who’s asked that the money raised from their sale go directly to the Japan Tsunami Appeal. The collection also includes a portrait of Aaliyah, Manga characters and more.

The store gets a large number of clothes donations and Chrissie has put together an excellent collection of fashion from old to new to eccentric. She’s putting on a special evening for people to try & buy, raising money for the Red Cross Tsunami Appeal.

We’ll also be setting up a mini studio in the store. People can dress up and have their photo taken with all proceeds going to the appeal. A massive thanks to Creativity Backgrounds for shipping some 1.35m wide backdrop papers so amazingly fast!

If you fancy adding something different to your wardrobe or just fancy a new photo for your online profile or to share with friends and family come along and say hello! Feel free to join the event on Facebook.

The doors will reopen from 6PM until 9PM.

The British Red Cross
Forest Hill
SE23 3HF
020 8699 5864

Following this on the 20th May The Seaside Tribe will be hosting a party at the Hobgoblin (just around the corner) where once again, donations and entry fee will be going directly to the Red Cross Tsunami appeal.

The Seaside Tribe & Mark Emery Photography

That keen photographer was better known for his radio play and the books that followed. I wish he was still around as I loved his work. I never got to meet him, but the younger of my two sisters did and asked him to autograph a postcard for me after a university talk he gave. I’ve kept it ever since, filed away so safely that it took a while to find in the archives.  I don’t recall finding out if this was the only thing she had for him to write on, the image on the front wasn’t what I’d expected from my sister. Rebelling Uni days I guess!

Douglas Noel Adams, creator of The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul and co-writer of The Meaning of Liff and Last Chance to See came up with many such sayings for his books, and a good number of them are now stuck inside my head. I’ve read that he’d keep a number of identical cameras in the boot of his car. Why change lenses when you can get another body to put on the back of each one? I like the way the man thought!

If time is an illusion then so is much of what we see in photography, make-up, special lighting effects and clever editing all adding to the final image. Taking the thinking further, if something is going to be outside of the frame or final crop does it need to be there? Unless it would add or subtract to the light that falls on what can be seen or in some way physically supports it then the answer has to be no. So when building a set or creating a costume that will be used only the once for a shoot and then dismantled, recycled or thrown keep in mind that it’s an illusion you’re creating, you only need what can be seen or has influence on it. Why pay a dress maker to do sleeves and finish cuffs if they’ll not be in the shot? And if the top doesn’t need a back to be shown why waste time and material making one that will never be photographed? If the height of your studio is an issue and you’re only taking shots above the waist have the model kneel on cushions to allow the strobe to be positioned better above their head.

You’re recording what’s in the box (frame). Think outside it!

This lunch break didn’t feel like an illusion and was over far too fast. Back to work!

Precision Optical Instruments Laboratory was founded in Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo. Their goal was to do research into quality cameras. One year in they produced the Kwanon prototype, Japan’s first 35mm camera. After a further year they registered the trade mark “Canon” and produced the Hansa Canon, launching in Feb 1936. In 1947 the company became Canon Camera Co., Inc. The makers of the great range of dSLRs that so many fellow photographers use every day. The first SLR I bought myself was nicknamed “The Tank”, the Canon T90, much loved by Fleet Street photographers for many years. Even if you don’t shoot with Canon a large percentage of you will still be using a camera that owes something to Japanese ingenuity and design.

I urge fellow photographers and fans of photography to help support the people and industry in Japan and make a donation. Give up something you can live without for a while.

UPDATE: Thoughts of those in Japan continued to run through my mind today. I learnt that the Richter Magnitude Scale is an a base-10 logarithmic scale. A 8.8 is many times more powerful than an 8.0. Newzealand had it bad, Japan far far worse. If the quake hadn’t hurt them many people lost their homes, family members or their own lives in the few minutes the tsunami took to wash away towns. The earth quake, tsunami and nuclear hazards are I’m told now joined by volcanic activity. Friends talk of people leaving Tokyo, no doubt in a state of bewilderment, confusion or shock. For some it must feel like the four horse men of the apocalypse have ridden in.

I’ve made a donation to the British Red Cross who are passing the money on to their counterparts in Japan, but what more could be done? An idea had been taking form today and I now have a few friends that will be helping out. Can you?

How many of us use products by Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Panasonic or other brands with roots in Japan? Quite a few I’ll wager.

Photo Aid 2011 – Project Sun Rise

If you can join in and help us out in London or run an event in your home town please do. With the global photographer communities sites like Flickr has helped create we should be able to raise a significant amount of donations to help those in need by doing something we already love, photography.

The idea is a simple extension of the 100Strangers project created by Teppo Moisio in Finland.

Get strangers to pose for a portrait, preferably well lit with studio lighting, either strobe or constant, in return for a donation to the charity via uk.virginmoneygiving.com/PhotoAid2011 (Recommended by TBRC, events run outside the UK will have to set up their own VMG page).
The photos taken should have the project logo and text added to help spread the word, the images added to the Flickr group for the subjects to download and post onto their profile sites such as Facebook.

All sorts of things bring me great satisfaction. Excluding family activities my top three would be photography, coding & problem solving and I love it when they all come together. In my IT work I write code to eliminate manual data input wherever possible as to err is human!

I put the images from Mal’s party online so that all her friends could help her rate them. Only the ones they flag will end up on Facebook and in her photo album.

Problem: How to ensure I export only the correct images from Lightroom?
Solution: With a couple of Perl scripts.

Lightroom uses a SQLite database to store its data. One script on the web server outputs a list of rated files from the Coppermine gallery as ratings.lis. It’s a simple list, one file per line. A second script on the PC (shown below) takes the list, finds all of the right images in the LR3 database and updates their rating values to 5.

Job done, all the right images selected and updated in a few seconds, no errors

If you want to use the code I recommend installing ActiveState Perl if running on Windows. Ensure you have your ratings.lis input file and this script in the same directory as the .lrcat file. Update the .lrcat file name in the script to reflect your catalogue name and comment out the “$folder=18;” line by prefixing it with a #. When run the script will list the folder numbers in the catalogue and exit. Pick the correct folder number for your files, uncomment the line and update the number. The second run will update the ratings.

[update.pl]

$folder=18;

use DBI;
my $dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:SQLite:dbname=Mals 30th.lrcat","","",$dbargs);

if (! defined $folder) {
  my $query="SELECT AgLibraryFolder.id_local, AgLibraryRootFolder.absolutePath, AgLibraryFolder.pathFromRoot FROM AgLibraryFolder INNER JOIN AgLibraryRootFolder where AgLibraryFolder.rootFolder=AgLibraryRootFolder.id_local";
  my $query_handle = $dbh->prepare($query);
  $query_handle->execute();
  $query_handle->bind_columns(\my($id_local,$rootFolder,$pathFromRoot ));
  print "Please set \$folder to the right value, this will ensure you don't update duplicate file names in another directory\n";
  print "id_local,rootFolder,pathFromRoot\n";
  while ($query_handle->fetch()) {
    print "$id_local,$rootFolder,$pathFromRoot\n";
    $folder{$id_local}=$rootFolder . $pathFromRoot;
  }
  exit;
}

my $query="SELECT Adobe_images.rootFile,Adobe_images.rating,baseName from AgLibraryFile,Adobe_images WHERE Adobe_images.rootFile like AgLibraryFile.id_local AND folder=$folder";
my $query_handle = $dbh->prepare($query);
$query_handle->execute();

$query_handle->bind_columns(\my($rootFile,$rating,$baseName));
print "rootFile,Rating,baseName\n";
while ($query_handle->fetch()) {
  # print "$rootFile,$rating,$baseName\n";
  $index{$baseName}=$rootFile;
}

open (RATINGS,"<ratings.lis");
while (<RATINGS>) {
  $_=~/^(.*)\..*?$/;
  $base=$1;
  print $base . "\n";
  my $update="UPDATE Adobe_images SET rating=5 WHERE rootFile=$index{$base}";
  my $update_handle = $dbh->prepare($update);
  $update_handle->execute();
}

$query_handle->finish;
undef ($dbh);