Various

Today I uploaded the panos I'd processed over the last few days. Then I wrote a blog post for my photo website about them.

In the evening I read a bit about G+ for photographers and also prepared some images for my pog site.

Panoing

Today I processed a couple more panos. I still have to prepare the images for the web yet though, that will have to wait until tomorrow. I think that the Smart Sharpen filter is meant to have been improved in Photoshop CC, it is loads slower than it used to be in CS5 anyway, so hopefully the results are better!

Researching

This morning I finished off a pano I was working on yesterday, then researched and wrote up a description for it.

In the afternoon I processed another pano, then I spent the rest of the day researching a description for that one. (Researching the description probably took longer than processing the image, which takes a long time in itself).

Photography setuping

It was nice and frosty this morning, so I took a few frosty photos in the back garden.

After that I looked up using a metal cold shoe with a flash. I have a hotshoe to PC adapter that also features a metal cold shoe on top. Most cold shoes are either plastic, or have a plastic centre area (where the trigger pin of the flash rests). Having a solid metal one seemed like it would just short the flash.

According to this thread: Can a metal cold shoe really short out a flash? a metal cold shoe will short the flash, but won't permanently break the flash. The recommendation is to cover the metal with tape. So I did this with my one. According to the thread, some old flashes didn't have a hot foot, and this is why some cold shoes are made of solid metal.

Most of today I spent trying to work out how to do MYN style photography with as little equipment as possible.

In the evening I watched Winter Watch on TV.

Cleaning a PC keyboard

This morning my keyboard stopped working. I couldn't get it working despite trying various sets of batteries including one set I knew definitely had lots of power, and despite restarting the computer. I would guess that the wireless part (either in the receiver connected to the PC, or the transmitter in the keyboard) has stopped working.

I found an old PS2 keyboard in the garage, but it was quite dirty. After checking that it worked okay, I pulled all the keys off it to give it a clean.

Pulling off all the keys took quite a while. Cleaning each key took quite a while. I also soaked them in bleach solution for 2 hours. Then I rinsed them, and had to dry each key. Finally I had to put each key back in the correct position. Thankfully I still had my old keyboard to use as a reference. But the new keyboard has 3 extra keys, and I didn't know what order they went in. However, I think I have put them back in the correct positions. (2 of the keys don't seem to do anything, the other one hibernates the PC.

In the evening, I looked into the MYN style photography a bit more. Mostly just looking at the clamps used to hold the background / diffuser. It wasn't clear to me what sort of socket the Manfrotto 170 Spring clamp uses as it's connection point. People were also talking about adding a mini-ballhead for flash, and I couldn't see how you'd do that either.

In the end I found that my Nikon Justin clamp can be attached to a 1/4" thread by putting the thread through a small hole in the clamp handle, then tightening a 1/4" nut onto the thread inside the handle. Quite hacky, but lets me experiment without buying more equipment. I'm pretty sure I am going to have to buy the 237HD arm though.

Not what I wanted

The last couple of days I haven't got anything done from my to do list. But yesterday I did get an article done for my photo website. And today I did some work on photo 'ingestion'.

Also, Flickr seems to be quite slow lately (images often not loading). It seems that this has been a problem ever since they changed to the 'New' Flickr, but Yahoo have no intent of dealing with the issues: Why is Flickr so slow? Typical Yahoo to break something that was previously working okay. Clare uses Yahoo mail and keeps having problems with them changing and breaking things on that. Though to give credit to Yahoo, they did fix the issue of not being able to add attachments after they broke it.

Writing

The vast majority of today I was writing an article for my photo tips blog. Ideally the article could still do with a couple more illustrative photos, but I can't take those at the moment.

In the evening I also tidied up the upstairs bookshelf.