Stuart’s Photography

After recently breaking the cable that connects my Garmin eTrex to my Nikon D200, I decided it was time to go wireless.  Nikon have no product of their own (why, ffs?), so I ordered a GPS Unleashed adapter from foolography of DP Review Forum fame.

And it arrived today  Full review to follow after sunny skies (well, okay, I’ll settle for it to stop raining) and some field testing …

The Eden Project has chosen to use two of my photos for their 2008/2009 Guide Book.

The Nutcracker is a fantastic piece of art, and something everyone who creates software should take the time to go and study!  The whole point of the Nutcracker is to open peoples’ eyes to just how unnecessarily and ridiculously overly-complicated we make things.  You can find this contraption in The Core building, where it stands as the main draw in the room.  Just don’t forget to take the time to check out everything else in the room too :) 

This photo of the Rainforest Biodome has been chosen as the front cover photo for this year’s guide book.  They’ve cropped the top down a bit, and made it look really fantastic.  They were also kind enough to credit me at the back of the guide book.  It’s a great testament to the quality that the Nikon D200 and Nikkor 18-135mm lens combo can produce.   

I’m chuffed to bits over this  

We’ll be heading back down to the Eden Project in the near future, where I’m looking forward to taking photos of some of the things we missed first time around.  I might end up posting a shot of me standing beside the guide books too …

I was very pleased this morning to read that Panasonic has renewed its support for the Our Place World Heritage project.  Our Place is the official UNESCO world heritage photography project, sending professional photographers to visit and record the world’s heritage sites.

With the world facing unknown challenges and changes from peak oil, climate change, and over-population, it’s good to know that there’ll be a record of these heritage sites as they are today.

Apple released Aperture 2.0 last week.  Touted as a major upgrade, with over 100 new features, it’s available here in the UK for £129, or £65 if upgrading from Aperture 1.x.  Folks who recently purchased Aperture 1.5 can upgrade for less than £10.

I couldn’t resist upgrading as quickly as possible.  But was I right to do so, and should you wait before doing the same?  Read on to find out what I think.

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Earlier this week, I bought a Mobile Broadband modem from Vodafone. It’s a neat little device that plugs into the USB port of my Macbook Pro and allows me to access the Internet pretty much wherever I am. Perfect for those all-too-common mornings before work when I’m sat in Starbucks and their T-Mobile hotspot is on the blink. Speeds are good (a bit less than 2mbit/sec), and it’s really nice to be online when I want to be. (I’m on a train to Southampton right now as I write this post, for example).

I’m feeling a little less enthusiastic after attempting to check my Flickr account for any new comments and messages overnight.

Instead of seeing Flickr open up in my browser, instead I was greeted with this Vodafone page:

Naturally, the “About Content control” link completely fails to mention how to remove this restriction (isn’t this always the way with these sort of pages?) Presumably, a simple phone call to Vodafone will sort this out (although that’s going to be interesting … I don’t own a Vodafone mobile phone, something their online systems aren’t geared up to coping with).

I’m just amused that

• … this restriction (which is documented in their ‘personal’ or consumer section of their website) is in place on a product that’s sold as a business product (which is how they get away with their practice of advertising prices that are exclusive of VAT). C’mon, make your mind up - it’s either a consumer product (in which case, I want the price you advertised, not the price I’m having to pay), or it’s a business product (and therefore it doesn’t need parental controls enabled by default).
• … there was no mention of this restriction when I bought the device. It’s a good job that I’m not a professional photographer, losing money because I can’t access Flickr. Vodafone already know that I’m over 18 years old, as I had to provide my age when I bought the device. It’s flattering to think that I still look as good as I did half a lifetime ago, but I’m pretty sure you’d have to be registered blind to get away with that (I think the grey hair might just give the game away )
• … Flickr is considered an 18-rated service, but YouTube isn’t. (I haven’t tried more overtly 18+ sites yet. Maybe when I get to the hotel this evening …) There’s a lot more smut on YouTube than on Flickr. Who decides these things? Some irate nimby numpty from the English home counties phoning customer services to complain that their kids have seen something inappropriate on their phone?

Needless to say, there’s a lot of mileage in this one. But the bottom line is that I can’t access Flickr on this mobile broadband device until someone from Vodafone decides otherwise.

It’s great to live in a free country, isn’t it?

PS: It looks like their gateway also attempts to reduce the size of images being downloaded.  So maybe access to Flickr will prove to be the least of my worries!

Here are my twenty most popular photos (according to Flickr’s interestingness ranking) after 15,000 views. It will be interesting to see what the list looks like after another 15,000 views

Click on each thumbnail to see the full photograph.

My photo of Cardiff Castle from the grounds of Bute Park has been chosen for use in Schmap Cardiff Guide.  This Time Magazine article has more information about Schmap.

(I’ve only just come across this - I hope John will forgive me for being remiss at moderating the backlog of comments awaiting approval. I get a lot of spam, mostly because of how heavily read my blog was back when I worked on Gentoo Linux).

If I could have one wish, it would be to take my MacBook Pro, my Nikon D200 and the whole GPS satellite system back in time to visit the places I write about back when they were more than the mostly-lost memories that they’ve become today. I’d love to be able to see what the docks were like before the Glamorganshire Canal was emptied by an unfortunate accident in 1951. I’d loved to have walked under the Walnut Tree Viaduct before it was dismantled in 1969. Heck, I’d have even loved to have seen the old power stations that have completely disappeared from Taff Vale.

But I can’t. All these things were gone before I was born, and several decades before I settled in Wales in 2000 (yup, I’m one of those ‘orrible invading English from across the border )

Fortunately, there are folks on Flickr who are sharing their photos from these times. It’s an act of generosity that I really appreciate. I just hope the generation that follows us all one day learns to understand and respect the history of South Wales that we’re all trying to preserve before it’s gone forever.

John Briggs is one of those people kindly sharing their photos on Flickr. John’s photos, from his book Before The Deluge: Cardiff Docklands 1970’s, provide an excellent snapshot of life in the docks some twenty years after the Glamorganshire Canal had finally closed, and after the Bute West Dock too had closed.

Two photos in particular caught my eye this evening whilst taking a first look through John’s work, because they provide more information about the Junction Canal that still survives today.

Junction Canal to West is a great shot of the Junction Canal that used to link the Bute East Dock, the Bute West Dock, and Sea Lock Pond on the Glamorganshire Canal. The railway viaduct in the foreground is the Bute Viaduct, which carried trains across the Junction Canal to the western ank of the Bute East Dock.

This is the TVR Viaduct, which carried trains over Junction Canal and down to the eastern bank of the Bute West Dock (originally called the Bute Shipping Canal). From the curve, I’m guessing that this photo is looking west along Junction Canal, but I could be wrong

You can see more of John’s photos up on Flickr, or pick up a copy of his book Before The Deluge: Photographs of Cardiff’s Docklands in the Seventies.

As a bit of an experiment, I’ve added a new link to the bottom of each photo of my walk along the route of the Melingriffith Feeder.  When you click on the link, Google Earth will open up and will take you to where the photo was taken.  You’ll need to have Google Earth installed, and if prompted what to do with the KML file, tell your browser to always open the file using Google Earth.
This uses the FlickrFly service.

I’ve updated the Merthyr Road project page to include a list of planned articles too, so that you can see what’s going to be coming up over the coming weeks.  There’s only time each week to publish one article in the set, but I normally find myself coming back from each trip out with photos for two or three articles at a time.  I guess it’s one of the advantages of how all the routes between Cardiff and Merthyr - historical and modern - are intertwined.

The original plan was to spend just one year - the whole of 2007 - on the Merthyr Road project.  With the photos I’ve already taken this year, I have enough material today to publish articles right the way through to August.  Maybe things will change as the year draws to a close, but today it’s looking like the Merthyr Road project will take up a good chunk of 2008 too.