Luke Sheldrick's Blog

I figured I’d give a 365 project a shot this year, as I’ve mostly forgotten about taking photos recently, and I quite like having a record of the year.

I started in Janurary, however stopped midway through. Id not renewed my flickr PRO account, due to me not using it much in the tail end of 2011, and used a free alternative. I found Blipfoto, however quickly became frustrated with it. Quite often I would take a photo on the day, and then sometimes postprocess/upload the following day, however their site was far too intrusive with EXIF headers, and upload date. So from the offset, I had photos listed as completely the wrong day, and then not being able to upload a photo for that day, as yesterdays was recorded for it. Argh. So I gave up.

However, I’m not the type of person to be defeated, so will be starting again from 01-02-2012. As this year is a leap year, it will be a 366, to get me around until the end of Jan-2013.

I think it’s going to be a bit of a challenge, as some days, when working from home, I don’t even get out of my PJs, let alone go out and take an interesting photo.

I think from my short test run, I may look at having a theme for a month, not sure on the categories yet, but sure will work something out.

Have upgraded my flickr account, as will be uploading them there, and then will set something up to present them in a decent format. I have the flickr-addon for wordpress setup, but it hasn’t been maintained for a few years, so has a few ‘features’ that I need to look into fixing, as the maintainer looks to have given up.

2012, lets do it!

Last year I bought an Eye-Fi Pro X2, as a neat addition to my photography kit. It boasts a 8GB Class6 SD card, with integrated geolocation and a wifi uploading. Quite neat I thought.

I went for the Pro model as it supported RAW uploading, but was quickly disappointed by the limits of the card.

• Geolocation – I’m not sure why I was expecting more, but this is only using so-called ‘wifi-location’. This is fine in the city, but quite often the reason I want to geotag my photos is because I am in the middle of no where, this wont work there.
• Geolocation – To get your photos geotagged they have to be first uploaded to their servers. I can kind of understand this, as card it’s self doesn’t have enough grunt to process the current wifi macs it can see, and properly geotag them. However these seen macs are stored in the image, so when it is uploaded to the eye-fi servers, they can do the lookup to the database, and assign the correct geotags. Why their app cannot do this, is beyond me. It seems completely stupid to upload 8GB of images, to have them tagged, to download them again, to process. 16GB of transfer, for what would probably be <1Mb if they did this the logical way.
• RAW – Whilst the RAWs will be uploaded, they wont be geotagged. When I contacted eye-fi, they state that there is no standard for the EXIF location tags for RAW. This certainly wasn’t mentioned on the box/site/anywhere.
• Upload to open and public networks – The X2 range come with this service for free for a year. This seemed perfectly fine to me, a lifetime of free uploads would be good, but probably not sustainable. However, it didn’t actually include the access to public networks, i.e. BTOpenzone, The Cloud..etc this only enabled the card to join these networks once you had setup your card with one of the premium accounts that you’d need to pay for separately. Again, this certainly wasn’t mentioned beforehand.

This was all a bit annoying, but not the end of the world. I still used the card, paired it to my MiFi from three. As I have 15GB allowance, uploading wasn’t an issue. I had setup selective sync, so it would only upload photos I ‘protected’. This worked quite well, often when I was at expos, I could be uploading the photos to eye-fi, then using their mobile optimised website, select where I wanted to share the photos too. Giving an almost instant upload to the web, throughout the day. When I got home, the eye-fi agent had downloaded all the files, so I could process them further if I wanted. All quite neat.

I then had a card corrupt totally, not readable in a number of machines (running Windows, Linux or OSX), and none of my cameras. Their RMA process was awful to be honest. Weeks to get a response via email, then a huge delay when thye had received my card back. It seemed they only stated to respond timely when I mentioned them on twitter.

Since then, on my D3o0s, I have set it up to put the jpgs to the eye-fi card, and raws to the CF card. As I don’t use raw on the eye-fi, this works well for me. I in effect have a raid-1 setup, so if a card corrupts, I have the images on the other card.

The other day I saw that eye-fi had launched a new product, the Mobile X2, which allowed direct uploading directly to an iOS or Android device. This is something the hacker community have had for a while, but finally supported by eye-fi is cool. They said they would be upgrading the firmware on the current X2 range to implement this feature.

Today I opened the eye-fi manager on my mac, and it indeed said it had an update. It then listed direct mode as a feature for my card, but that required a firmware upgrade too, great. Or not, it listed the firmware it needed as being the current firmware, so failed every time. Looking on their forums a few people here and here. It seems their PR department had been working overtime, and all marketing shouldn’t have gone out yet. Oh dear.

Anyways, reading further into it, I could upgrade my card manually upgrade the firmware by unregistering it and registering it again, losing my settings. Not something I’m overly fussed about. So once I had done that, I downloaded the iOS application, to find out, the new one isn’t on the store yet. I guess this might be what they’re waiting for.

The android app had been, so I grabbed my ZTE Blade, and installed. The card now shows it’s self a wireless access point, so the app connects the phone to that AP, and that’s then how the card uploads to the phone. Took a few snaps and indeed, they were uploaded to the phone.

However, now the phone is connected to the eye-fi, it itself now cannot get to the outside world. On Android, if you have a wireless connection, it drops it’s connection over the cellular. Naturally the eye-fi card doesn’t have an internet connection, so now both devices are isolated. Also an interesting thing, you can edit the setting on the card, from the phone, but only if you have an internet connection, which naturally now is broken.

As far as I can see, I cannot change this behaviour in android, so looks totally broken.

It’s such a shame when companies hype a product so much, but when it comes to the crunch, it really doesn’t live up to the promises.

So last weekend I went to visit some friends for the day, and packed a usual day trip bag. I’ve always been aware I don’t really travel light, however when I got everything out to take a “Whats in your bag” photo, I was quite shocked, on just how much stuff I carry around usually.

Below is the outcome of emptying my bag… quite a lot of stuff in there… maybe I should think about scaling down?

At least I can safely say, I’ll never be bored if I get stuck anywhere.

I’ve been at Mum’s over Christmas, and is always a bit weird coming back to the area.
I moved away to Southend-on-Sea (Essex) when I was 14, and lived in Essex until very recently.

I was meeting Mum from work today, to go on to visit my Brother for the afternoon. As I’m one of those people who are usually early, and I had a few hours to kill so thought I’d go for a wander.

There was always an area near to where I used to live, that was totally different to the surrounding area, and always somewhere I’d love to escape to. I always dreamt of living in one of the houses, and today was a bit of a shock, to realise, well actually I could if wanted to. At that point, I realised, I’m getting old. It’s like I always wished I’d work in IT, with a nice car…blah blah when I was older, and now I actually do it’s a bit like, well what do I do now? Well I know next time I have to move, which I hope isn’t anytime soon, that I’ll be looking in SE16.

Anyways back to the houses, they’re all in a small bit of Bermandsey, by the Thames, and Greenland Docks, but they have the most picturesque surroundings. Most overlook their own water features or ponds (like the above), and I just find them amazing.



Throughout my visit, I was followed by the Cygnet above… maybe he was trying to butter me up, so if I moved into the area, I’d keep him in stock of moulding Hovis.



Amazingly, the car above, I’m sure has been in that same parking space, since I left, when I was 13 (so a few years). Still has up to date TAX, but never looks as though it’s moved. Amazing.

As you may have gathered I’ve been spending some time with my D60. I must say of all my hobbies it’s probably the most rewarding.

I’ve been looking at loads of pictures on flickr, and there are some stupidly amazing shots. However to get that extra edge a lot oh photographers use a technique called HDR, or High dynamic range imaging. I’ve been itching to have a play, but also watched to play with panoramic stitching.

So before I set off on the trip to work tonight, I quickly nipped pass Southend Seafront, and took a few snaps.

So first I played with the stitching together, it wasn’t as straight forward as the tutorials had made out, the main difficulty I had was filling in the sky. Got over that and this is what I came up with

Then I had a play with HDRs. In my case mine was a psyudo-hdr, the difference being that I did all my editing from a single RAW image, rather than different RAWs, with different exposures. This is what I came up with



I really quite like how it came out, especially for my first attampt.