Getting busy…

/in , ,

I’ve had quite a few requests for individual training days coming in recently so my calendar is filling up quite fast for the next couple of months! Midweek slots are still looking pretty good but the weekends in July and August are filling up quite quickly so if you are interested in booking a day do please get in touch ASAP.

To encourage the mid-week slots through the summer I’m going to extend an offer through July and August. if you book a full day’s training midweek I’ll discount it by £25, so you can book a whole day for just £150. Strictly for bookings in July/August only.

Coming soon to a bookstore near you..

/in , ,

As I’m getting quite a few bookings now for my one-to-one training days I thought I’d upgrade the notes I’m giving to my students and get them bound up into a proper book.

That idea soon expanded and I realised I’m going to make a series of them!

Here then, is the first of many I’m planning to release over the next few months.

In truth it’s not quite finished yet, but i did order a few copies today of my current work-in-progress as I’ve got a couple of clients on Saturday for one-to-one training so I thought that rather than giving them tatty single sheets I’d give them the current version of the book instead.

Give it a few weeks and I’ll have a much better version ready for a proper release so watch this space!

Not a terrorist..

/in

If you read any of the major photography magazines you can’t fail to have seen all the fuss over the past few years about photographers getting stopped by the Police for the heinous crime of, wait for it… Taking Photographs…

OH NOES!

Anyway, thanks to the good folks of the I’m a Photographer, Not  A Terrorist campaign things are getting somewhat better. I’d urge you to visit their site and get up to speed, and you can also download their new leaflet detailing the history of the campaign.  I’ve still got a copy of the original PHNAT Bust Card in my bag

in January last year I spent the day in Trafalgar Square London at the Mass Photo gathering where over 2000 photographers turned out to show unity for photographer’s rights. Here are some photos from the day in (my flickr set here)

 

In the news..

/in

Had a little piece in our local paper today.  (Click on the picture for a bigger version)

The article is a rather succinct version of the press release which the Royal Society sent, and though it’s not the most exciting read in the whole world it’s still nice to see it in there.

Nice they included a link to my site too :)

One-to-one training..

/in , ,

It seems that my one-to-one training sessions are proving quite popular at the moment. I’ve had several new enquiries in the past couple of weeks which has inspired me to up my game a bit for the new students booked for later this month.

I’ve already got a load of separate worksheets which I’d made to cover photography basics such as shooting modes, exposure, depth of field etc. but I’ve decided that as the sessions are becoming more regular I’m going to revisit them and make an updated/upgraded version in the form of a couple of proper books which I’ll get printed up properly and make them available at a small fee to attendees on the training sessions.

As mentioned over on the training pages until the end of June I’m offering one-to-one training at a reduced rate equivalent to a place on a group workshop, that’s saving about 25% over the usual price. Applies to bookings made until the end of June only so if you’re interested please get in touch asap.

Phew..

/in

Thank Steve for that!

A lovely lovely man from Apple just phoned to say my Mac’s back in the land of the living.
Thankfully it was just the graphics card which had failed and so they gave me the option of paying for a service replacement part of the same model I had in there, or an extra tenner to upgrade to a significantly more spangly bang up to date one. No charge for the repair either way.. Hmm, let me think?.

Suffice to say I’ll just pick up a new card in the morning and normal service will be resumed.

Phew, he says breathing a huge sigh of relief. I’m a very happy chappy now :-)

Poorly sick..

/in

.. No, not me, my Mac.

Last wednesday was one of those nightmare scenarios every geek dreads. I got up fired up the mac, checked my email then went to grab some breakfast. On my return I was met with the rare but horribly daunting grey screen of death, otherwise known as a kernel panic.

I’ve only ever had a couple of these in over 5 years as a Mac owner and usually a power cycle is all that’s needed, but sadly not this time. Several reboots, safe boots, hardware self tests and verbose mode confusion boots later I’d come to the sickening realisation that yes, it’s broken.

I even stripped it right back to a minimal bootable configuration, removed all my drives and external peripherals, swapped the SSDs for the original boot drive which I knew was a valid boot disk, still no joy. Locked hard on the apple logo.

Damn.

So, genius bar appointment booked for Thursday morning where the lovely Nick went through much the same process I had before plugging in a USB drive to run some more thorough diagnostics on the main board before proclaiming that indeed it was a definitely a hardware fault and they’d have to take her in for the attention of very clever people who live behind the shiny aluminium portal that leads into the secret world beyond us mere mortals. I reckon I must’ve had a bit of dust in my eye or something because as they wheeled her off through the door it was like watching the vet wheel your dog off into the operating theatre and your not actually quite sure if you’ll ever see her again..

As a side note, tut tut Apple.. They said they’d phone me on Thursday evening with a status update. It’s Sunday now and i’m still waiting for that call..

Making an exhibition of myself

/in ,

Richard Olpin pictured at the Broadwalk Arts Exhibition

For the next couple of weeks myself and some photographic chums from Bristol have taken over the space in Broadwalk Arts to exhibit some of our photos.

In addition to myself there are a fantastic selection of photos from the magic picture boxes of Maureen Arnaiz, Tanya Hazell, Tash Jones, Christine Lewis, Goncalo Martins, and Richard Williams.

It’s been quite an interesting experience so far, proper comedy setting up on sunday which mainly involved me faffing around for about three hours and then sorting everything out in about 10 minutes flat right at the end of the day.  Having popped back on monday morning to tidy up I had a sudden realisation of how I *should* have done things first time round. Suffice to say next time it’ll be a lot easier.

About half of the photos I’ve got on display were from my LRPS panel, the rest are a few I thought might be of interest to the locals including a few of my severn bridge shots etc.
When I got my confirmation letter from the Royal Society they sent a press release to send out to the local press so I asked my friend Gonzo (Goncalo Martins Photography) to take a few pics at the exhibition to send along with the release. Probably won’t be quite as pretentious as the one on the right here, but it’s fun all the same :)

Confirmation..

/in

I think my postman must’ve been psychic this morning as no sooner had I said “hmm, I wonder when I’ll get my confirmation letter from the RPS” than the doorbell rang and it was Phil the postie with a mailer tube, addressed like so:

There’s my first clue on the address label :)

Inside was an official confirmation letter, certificate (complete with unfortunate typo on my surname) and a special RPS lapel badge to wear to official ‘suited & booted’ events too.

They also sent a proper press release for the local papers so I’ll send that out next week, though I’ll get one of my photographer friends from Bristol to take a few snaps when we set up for our exhibition at Broadwalk Arts next week (more on that in another post..)

All things digital..

/in , , ,

Popped up to Highnam yesterday morning for the Gloucester area RPS meeting, which this time was mainly focused on a showing of the images from the RPS Digital Imaging Group print exhibition. I’d not really thought about joining any of the special interest groups up until now but as I’m a big fan of the digital workflow it seems like a good idea so I’m going to join that one this week.

I did take up the prints from my successful distinction last week and showed them to some of the members who were very complimentary about the standard of both the images and the presentation/print quality which was very encouraging, indeed I was encouraged by several people to start working towards my ‘A’ panel as soon as possible which was ace.   A couple of people were asking about my digital workflow and how much work I’d done on the mono conversions etc. so I thought I’d post a quick before/after example of one of the successful images from my panel here.

And by popular request, lots more examples of this type coming soon!