October 29th, 2004
The two most soothing everything-will-be-alright-love voices in the world are those of Charlotte Green who reads the Shipping Forecast on BBC Radio 4, and that of the legendary British DJ John Peel who very sadly passed away this week.
At age 65, he remained arguably the coolest disc-jockey on the planet, and his legacy is that of influencing and chronicling the musical lives of so many people, especially those of my generation. His uniqueness was in the sheer breadth of his musical knowledge, and the way he steadfastly played you what he thought you needed to hear, not what you thought you wanted to hear.
I’d write more, but there is already a great page of tributes and other links up here
A nice site called Radio Plus has conveniently posted free legal downloads of a lot of songs recently featured on the John Peel show.
And finally, here’s Peel in his own words over at The Guardian.
October 29th, 2004
Today I have the musical guest spot over on my friend Matt’s burgeoning audioblog website Benn Loxo du Taccu. It’s a great Sierra Leonian danceclub treasure I found and titled “Tell me if you want me to go”, though the real artist and title remain unknown.
Here is the article
October 28th, 2004
Canon has posted a firmware update for the Canon EOS 1-DmkII. It lists the changes as being:
1. Added new functions for communicating with the Speedlite 580EX
2. Reduced noise when shooting bulb exposures
3. Fixed sensor-cleaning operations
None of which sounds particularly exciting but it’s always best to have the latest, right?
October 28th, 2004
The British Press Photographer’s Association (BPPA) has launched a book and exhibition entitled Five Thousand Days, which chronicles photography by BPPA members covering the first five thousand days since the fall of the Berlin wall. The book has its own website with galleries and a link to pre-order it from Amazon.
There’s also an article about the production of the book over at The Digital Journalist by Neil Turner. Neil has a great website devoted to issues in digital photography with useful articles and tutorials.
The book is edited by Harold Evans who wrote the definitive book on press photography - Pictures on a Page - which is seemingly not that well known outside the UK but a great read. It is worth it for the chapters on cropping alone, which are guaranteed to make one think anew when staring at that screen trying to work out how to make a crop.
October 28th, 2004
Here’s a great little piece of free software (donationware) for OSX that sets your desktop to a live view of the earth showing areas of light and darkness, complete with real-time weather patterns, and more. It’s very slick and amazingly is written by a fifteen year-old kid called Gabriel Otte.
OSXplanet
October 27th, 2004
In the early days of digital photography one had Photoshop and if you needed something to clean up those pesky NC2000 images, you would probably use Quantum Mechanic. Now that technology has advanced so far, there is a plethora of software floating around for the digital photography workflow. Here is a summary of the main software players in the field of professional digital photography, or those I think merit a look at…
Image Browsing
Photo Mechanic (Mac/Win)
FotoStation (Mac/Win)
ACDSee (Win)
BreezeBrowser (Win)
gThumb (Linux)
Image Editing
Adobe Photoshop (Mac/Win)
The Gimp (Mac/Win/Linux)
Archiving
iView MediaPro (Mac/Win)
Portfolio (Mac/Win)
Canto Cumulus (Mac/Win)
RAW Workflow
Bibble (Mac/Win/Linux)
Camera RAW (Mac/Win)
PhaseOne C1 (Mac/Win)
Card Recovery
PhotoRescue (Mac/Win)
Image Rescue (Mac/Win)
Transmitting
Fetch (Mac)
Transmit (Mac)
FileZilla (Win)
WS_FTP (Win)
NcFTP (Mac/Win/Linux)
gFTP (Linux)
Any suggestions for useful software I have left out are welcome…
