Well, with a very big apology to all those that received a spam email from my email address, cloned of course - I hate spam as much as you do - I have had to change my email address.

In the last 48 hours I have received undeliverable messages (1035 and counting), people letting me know I have been cloned (4 - thanks!), ridicule (27 so far), and at least two threats to report me to my ISP for being the person in the title.

IT’S NOT ME! Come on people! If you’d read the fucking blog before threatening to kill me¹ you would have realised that I’m not hyping the latest makeyourp3n1sthreefeetlonglaquo super drug or offering to sort your money problems with two swift clicks of the mouse. Perhaps you could sort your money problems using Seppuku²?

So, if you have my old domain email address, I’m sorry, it ain’t gonna work. If you want my new email address you have a few options: 1. Facebook. 2. The contact form. 3. Text message (if, of course you have my mobile number.

Stop the internet, I want to get off.

It always gives me pleasure when I get the opportunity to wind up people in the business (not my department of course!) with legitimate cause.

My mission today was to visit one of the business units with a view to printer rationalisation. The business is way over subscribed on printers and in an effort to save costs and standardise on a particular manufacturer we are talking to the business about their requirements. So, the conversation today went something like this:

Me: Hi! yay, happy me! I want to talk to you about printers.
Manager: Okay, what about them?
Me: Well, I want to take some away from you.
Manager: [slaps forehead] You are f***ing kidding!
Me: Nope.
Manager: [huffs and puffs] I’ll f***ing tell you how many f***ing printers you can take off us! None!
Me: fnar fnar…

I asked the manager to accompany me into the main office area. I pointed around the office.

Me: That one’s dead, so’s that one, that one and that one. There’s nine printers in the office for seventeen staff and four of ‘em are dead.
Manager: …
Office Worker: [Pointing elsewhere] So’s that one!

After the manager had calmed down we discussed requirements and possibilities. The manager flounced, yes flounced back into his office leaving me to do my job.

Oh what a fun afternoon!

By the way - I must apologise, I have been snowed under this week and haven’t had time to write the next article for Beginner Photography. Guess you’ve got another week to work on your photos!

BBC News reported yesterday that the Gunwharf Quays shopping centre in Portsmouth is tracking the movement of people from the location of mobile phones within the site. The report (video) says that 4 aerials have been erected on the site which track whereabouts a phone will be at any time.

The developer of the technology was adamant in the report that no personal information can be collected, they can’t even tell the phone number of the phone that is being tracked. Gunwharf is simply using the information for shopping trend analysis in an attempt to improve facilities for visitors.

Personally I have no problem with this as I have nothing to hide, but, having been to Gunwharf regularly since it opened I have never seen a sign telling me that this information is being collected during my visit. It would have been nice to know.

Of course, when you’re attending a major event such as the Gunwharf Quays Italian Job Mini Event, the statistics will be all screwed up. The owners of the vehicles will wander around at random, visiting places within the centre with no particular direction.

Hey, perhaps we should organise for a couple of hundred people to visit the shopping centre, each with two or three mobile phones in their pocket and just wander around the centre without going to a single shop, bar, restaurant or other facility. See what that does to their “anonymous” statistics…

Whilst at my Dad’s new PC the other night, admiring the speed and the twinkling lights on the front of the spanky box, I pulled up Google and searched for something or other, I remember not what.

Looking at the results there seemed to be these little ticks in green boxes next to each search result that the search engine had produced. Hovering over the link told me that the link had been scanned by AVG anti-virus and it was safe to visit. How cool was that!

Skip forward to a few minutes ago and I’m doing my daily skip read/scan of The Register - a primarily techie and IT news site ¹ and AVG Antivirus is right there on the front page. Ooh, let’s have a read says I. So I did.

It would seem that the new scanner introduced by AVG goes and scans each site for security and then returns the results to the user’s AVG install. Doing so uses bandwidth for the website and the end-user ², which as everybody knows is at a premium. It’s not just limited to bandwidth though.

Whenever AVG scans a site it (the site) will record that hit in the web statistics. OSBlues recounts an interesting story about an investigation for one of his users where there was a spike in traffic. He put it down to the AVG scanner. In the comments for that article there’s information on how to disable the web-scanning on the user’s machine.

I fear though that many users will not care as they got AVG 8 for free and all the web content is free in their eyes too. That’s a different story entirely…

If you’re using AVG 8 then please consider the bandwidth of the little guy like me, help me save it and turn off this facility.

Yes, I know it’s a couple of thousand miles from my home, but The Chronicle Herald is reporting that there’s forest fires in two areas of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada right now.

Goat put a message on his Facebook¹ profile that said simply

is STILL waiting to hear if his house has burned down…

This Google Map show the approximate area currently affected by the fire.

I hope your house is ok bud, we’ll be thinking of you.

For anyone interested, I’ll update this post when/if I hear anything from Adam.

When two of my favourite pastimes, Scouting and Minis, converge I am a happy camper!

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that Peter Duncan is due to complete his tenure as Chief Scout in 2009. I also mentioned at the time that I thought Ray Mears would be an excellent replacement.

It would seem that Facebook people would like to see Richard Hammond as Chief Scout. Now, I’ve got nothing against the guy, but would you really want someone who has to associate with Clarkson as the Chief Scout. Admittedly, he’s regularly in the press (mainly because he can’t get in a car without crashing it) and on TV (Top Gear, obviously) but I don’t see how a car journalist has anything in common with Scouting.

At least Ray Mears lives the outdoor life, using his skills to live off the land, not tearing it up in the latest Lamborghini or Ferrari. I still say Ray Mears. I might even start an apposing Facebook group for Ray Mears to become CS. Would you join?

Rather than overload my loyal readers with yet more information than they both need right now, I thought I’d do a very quick recap (very quick!) and reminder about the first challenge.

If you’re reading this for the first time then welcome! You can read all the posts in the series so far by looking at the category archive for Beginner Photography.

So far we’ve got:

Article 1 - Introduction to the series and choosing a point & shoot (P&S) camera.
Article 2 - What to look for in a P&S
Article 3 - Some of the most commonly used photography terms.

My dad suggested that I’d missed “Exposure” from the list. I felt at the time (and still do) that the “exposure” can get particularly technical and really isn’t necessary. As long as you remember that if someone asks what the exposure of a particular shot was then they probably mean what shutter speed and aperture (both in the article) you used. I also realise that I haven’t mentioned white-balance. This is something that will be addressed in next week’s article.

Challenge Number 1.

First announced in article 3 (above) the challenge is simple:

Your task, should you wish to accept it is to take a photograph of a car. It doesn’t have to be a special car, it can be your daily ride. What I do want though is for you to take it from a different angle. Be it on the ground, directly over the top, really close up or really far away.

Once you have taken your photo, process it on your PC, take note of the shutter speed and aperture of the photo and upload it to a photo hosting site 3 and then leave a link to it in the comments with a short description of what you did to take the photo and what you think is good or bad about it.

No evaluation of your photo will be done unless you specifically ask for it! This is about self improvement by trying and doing rather than competing with other photographers. The photo must be an image taken for the tutorial and not a stock image that you have piled on your computer!

So, let’s see what you can do! I will be playing along and using my Point and Shoot camera so that we are all on a level playing field. Of course, if you don’t own a P&S but have a funky DSLR that’s fine too!

Whilst trying very hard not to utterly confuse the reader with terminology, I want to provide a few of the most commonly used terms, phrases and colloquialisms that can be heard in photography and photographic circles. I will try and provide a link to more detailed information for those that want to go deeper. Bear in mind that these will be very basic explanations. So:

• Shutter Speed. One of the two most important things to consider when taking a photograph. The shutter is what lets light into the camera to make the photo. The shutter speed is how long the shutter will stay open for. For example, on a cloudy day you might compose your photo and see that the shutter speed is 1/125 second. That’s one one hundred and twenty fifth of a second that the shutter stays open for. Not long is it! On a bright sunny day that could be 1/500 or even 1/1000 of a second. By comparison, some of those lovely night shots that you see couple have the shutter open for 30 seconds, or in some cases even minutes!
• Aperture. Also known as the f-stop, this term simply describes how big the hole in the lens is. The bigger the hole, the more light will get in and the less time the shutter will need to be open to correctly expose the shot. ¹ Aperture also affects depth-of-field (below). The aperture is normally written as f5 or f11 (as examples). Try and remember it like this: The higher the number, the smaller the hole. The smaller the hole, obviously, the less light can get in.
• Depth-of-Field. This describes how much of the photo is in focus. We’ve all seen those photos where part of the main subject is very sharp in focus but an object behind is out of focus? The photographer (if he hasn’t manipulated the photo in post-processing) will have changed the aperture to affect the d-o-f. You can remember depth of field by remembering the smaller the f-stop, the less d-o-f.
• Composition. As we get further through I will talk more about the composition of an image and the basic guidelines you can follow for what is guaranteed to make your photo ordinary or stand out. This includes the simple things like checking for blinking people, cutting off heads and/or feet right through to putting a particular point of interest on a “third”².
• Chimping. I think I’ve already mentioned this, but chimping is where the photographer will take a photo and then immediately look at the screen on the camera to check the composition and/or exposure. Think of a Chimpanzee that picks his nose and then spends ages looking at it. Chimping. It’s not a bad thing, especially when you’re trying a new technique, so don’t worry if you get caught chimping!

Those are the most important terms I think we need to know right now. Have I missed any that are really important to the absolute beginner? If you think so then perhaps you’d like to leave the term in a comment with a simple explanation of what it means?

The Challenge
I promised to a couple of readers that I would set a task. It’s been difficult to set a task when I haven’t really explained much of the technique for actually taking a photo but anyone can just “point and shoot”. So. Your task, should you wish to accept it is to take a photograph of a car. It doesn’t have to be a special car, it can be your daily ride. What I do want though is for you to take it from a different angle. Be it on the ground, directly over the top, really close up or really far away.

Once you have taken your photo, process it on your PC, take note of the shutter speed and aperture of the photo and upload it to a photo hosting site ³ and then leave a link to it in the comments with a short description of what you did to take the photo and what you think is good or bad about it.

No evaluation of your photo will be done unless you specifically ask for it! This is about self improvement by trying and doing rather than competing with other photographers. The photo must be an image taken for the tutorial and not a stock image that you have piled on your computer!

I’ll give you a couple of weeks and then I’ll write a new post with all the links to the photos for everyone to see.

Good luck!

Another of the street entertainer at Poole Quay in 2007