Photography is a bottomless pit.

Photography is a great hobby. For most, it’s pretty accessible. You don’t need a DSLR. You don’t need lots of megapixels. Within reason, you can get similar results for most types of shot with a normal point-and-shoot with some manual controls, as you can with a £5000 professional DSLR. I say within reason, because many situations are helped a lot by having better manual controls, better performance in low light, and a more versatile selection of lenses and accessories. Plus, unless you are enlarging prints to a poster size, you don’t really need 10MP sensors. In fact, one could argue that more pixels lets you relax your composition a little, as you can crop and still retain a lot of quality. I know I’ve fallen into that trap before.

However, no matter how accessible photography is for the hobbyist, once you start to get into paid work, it becomes a lot more difficult. If you’re just shooting for yourself to show online or in a photo album, you can get away with a lot of things you couldn’t in a professional situation.

For example: colour calibration. Most people don’t know or care about it. If the picture from the printer turns out slightly different from the one on the screen, then that’s the printers fault, right? Well, no. You have to calibrate your monitor to show the correct colours. You have to profile your printer, so software knows it’s capabilities and can adjust the picture accordingly. You have to be careful when transferring pictures in between programs, as some use different colourspaces. It’s all stuff that’s important for a pro, as you can’t get away with having colours that aren’t accurate. However, for a beginner looking to sort their colours out, it’s overwhelming. Just a glance through this page reveals how in-depth you can go with it. It’s a lot to read for someone who just wants to print a picture how it’s shown on the screen.

There are similar problems when it comes to post-processing. Go onto any photography forum, and there will be multi-page threads discussing the best way to organise and edit photos. Do you use Lightroom, Bridge, or the one that came with your camera? Do you do RAW edits in that program, or Photoshop? How in-depth should you do your editing before switching to something like Photoshop? What’s the best way to go about sharpening a photo?

There are multiple ways to achieve the same (or similar) effect in a program like Photoshop. People will constantly argue about the best way to do something, and this is extremely confusing for someone just getting into this sort of thing. I’m still not sure on the best way for what I do.

Currently, I import photos from a memory card using Lightroom. Lightroom organises into folders in the naming format “yyyy_mm_dd”. I then add tags to the photos, and maybe make a collection if they’re all the same subject. I then go through them, and flag my favourites, then develop these using the develop module in Lightroom. I do as much as I can using the adjustments in Lightroom, and only export to Photoshop when I need some more control. When I’m done, I usually export to jpeg in a subfolder named “Edited”, with size and output sharpening based on where the photos will end up.

I feel this gives me a decent amount of control, but I’m always looking for a better way to do things. I know that I need to learn more about sharpening and masks in Photoshop. My problem is that I am partially colourblind, so things like white balance and tints are very hard to judge. I do my best, though.

Don’t even get me started on lighting. That’s another post.

Hmm…

Windows Live Photo Gallery vs. Picasa?

Both seem to be very similar on features. both allow organisation of photos, syncing with online albums, tagging, all that jazz. Windows Live gives you 25gb of storage (although I believe that is shared with whatever else you use on SkyDrive) while Google lets you have a measly 7.5gb (although that’s more than most users need for normal use, and you can purchase more).

I haven’t actually installed Picasa yet, but I’ll give it a try later on. The problem with both of these, though, is neither will recognise my RAW files from my camera, as Canon don’t seem to recognise that there are many users using 64-bit OSes. So for now, my RAW support is limited to Photoshop and Lightroom. Not a bad thing, however, as it’s let me have a much reduced selection to view and tinker with, with only my edited and completed pictures, and other general snaps from my phone, and other people’s cameras. This is quite handy as it lets me sift through my better photos, while the ones I disliked and didn’t bother to edit don’t show up in the gallery (I never delete them).

So where does Flickr come in? I’ve used it for a while just as a sort of portfolio of my favourite pictures. I can remember the URL easily, so it’s easy to show people work, and it gives you a decent amount of space, although resolution is limited unless you get a pro account. However, aside from the “Flickr Uploadr”, they don’t have an organisation tool, with all the organisation expected to be performed on the actual site. This is fine, but if you have your edited photos around various organised-by-date folders, then you can forget to upload stuff after you’re finished post-processing. I believe there is a plugin for Lightroom, though, which might do the job. I also see that Live Photo Gallery has an option to upload to Flickr, so it may turn out that that is the best option.

I shall download Picasa and have a play now. From what I can see right now though, it may be that Microsoft will win this one. Shocker!

Something to do on a Saturday night…

ISPs suck, mostly.

So it appears I’m being speed limited in the evenings now. I went from fairly fast speeds in the day (although not massively fast for what' we’re paying) to godawful speeds in the evening. Just speedtested, and here are the results:

And we’re paying for “up to 8 meg”. I understand I’ll never get 8 meg due to the limits of our phone line, but we can normally get 5-6 on a good day.

I looked into AOL’s fair usage policy, and it seems to be deliberately vague.

“If a Member's usage exceeds what AOL Broadband deems fair and reasonable for a residential broadband service, speed-limiting restrictions may be applied during peak hours (typically evenings) in the first instance.”

The rest of it is like that too, if you care to read it. It just seems so unclear. There are no hard limits on how much you can download, and it doesn’t tell you how long you’ll be limited for. I have been downloading a fair bit recently, but a lot of it has been things like Windows 7, and Linux installs to test on my laptop. It’s not like I’ve been downloading 24/7, and I still ran into the limit.

Now this policy wasn’t in effect when we signed up to the contract, so they must have changed it. Maybe this allows us to cancel the contract without a fee, but I don’t know. What annoys me is, they are advertising a service with “unlimited downloads”, yet this seems very much a limit on what you can download. It’s just hidden, as they must have realised how many customers they would push away with a download cap on their product.

This seems to be a problem with a lot of ISPs. They advertise a product, and when they cannot deliver to the demands of the customer, they blame it on the customers themselves. However it is their own fault. They failed to plan ahead for the amount of load they would receive, and refuse to invest in new equipment to help them deal with the traffic. Even worse, some ISPs are spending the money on Phorm. This is a way to deliver targeted advertising to customers, based on their browsing habits. Not only does this infringe on the users’ privacy, it may damage income from sites and online shops. Surely ISPs should be spending money on enhancing their service, not something which I’m sure the majority of users do not want.

I’m planning on switching to O2 Broadband, as they offer a nice discount to users who already have a mobile contract. However, my family do not want to lose their email addresses, which are provided by AOL. Another reason to sort out your email addresses. Use an address not tied to an ISP, or even better, pay for your own domain name, which can be switched between providers easily!

First Thoughts

Finally got it installed! Was a pretty easy process, once I had the partitioning sorted.

Setup was really simple, and after a short time, you’re able to create an account and log in. I’m greeted with a really nice, clean desktop. No icons apart from “Send Feedback” and the Recycle Bin. If it were up to me, I’d hide the Recycle Bin by default, as it tends to lead to people storing their documents in there, but that’s a different post.

Still a bit worried about using Windows Media Player after hearing of it corrupting mp3 files, so I installed foobar2000. Once set up, that works perfectly.

I just also installed Live Essentials from the link in the Start Menu (which, incidentally, is nice and empty. I’m not sure if that’s because I’m used to an old install of Vista, or whether Vista came with a lot more stuff preinstalled). After downloading the file, I chose to install Writer (which I’m using to write this post) and Messenger. They both work fine, but I feel as if Messenger needs a redesign. It doesn’t really fit in with the aesthetic of 7, being quite cluttered.

I feel like they should get rid of the buttons at the bottom, the adverts at the bottom, the “What’s New” section, and streamline the top part, too. As it is, I’ll probably go back to Miranda.

Some of the new features seem quite handy. I love the new taskbar. It only shows the icon of each program, and will show a preview of the window as you hover over it. Great for when you have multiple windows of the same program running, and it looks a lot cleaner. There’s also a new feature – I forget the name of it – where it you grab a windows titlebar, and shake it, it will minimise all other windows. This also looks really handy for looking at things on the desktop, and also stopping me from getting distracted. The “Show Desktop” area won’t be used much by me, as I don’t store stuff on the desktop really, but it’s pretty well implemented. Hover over or click on a small area at the far right of the taskbar, and open windows will go transparent, allowing you to see the desktop. It would be a lot more usable for me if it allowed you to extend the taskbar over two monitors, as currently you have to aim for the small button, rather than just dragging your mouse down to the far bottom right. That’s an issue with my setup though, but I’ve always wished Windows would include better support for dual monitor setups.

What have I missed?

Oh, libraries. Now by defauly, your user folder contains “Libraries”. These are Documents, Music, Pictures and Videos. From what I can tell, they appear to be virtual folders where you can add multiple sources of documents. For example, if you have a music collection split over multiple folders or drives, you only need to go into the Library folder for Music, and they will all be in one place. Seems quite handy, but I do like having all my stuff organised properly, and together in one actual folder.

Jumplists also seem really handy if you’re doing repetitive tasks.

For example here, I hovered over the Paint entry in the start menu, and it came up with recently opened files using paint. I can see this becoming way more useful as I use things more. Right now, it isn’t doing much.

One last thought, going back to the Libraries. I’m not sure I like how the “Will” button on the Start menu takes me to Libraries, rather than my actual user folder. I’ll have to see what I can do about that.

Edit: I forgot to add something while I was talking about the options with the window movement. None of it comes close to the similar things on OSX. Windows Flip just seems like a pointless add-on, it's not actually useful at all as you can barely see the content of the windows. Alt-tab is slightly better, but still nowhere near as useful as Expose on OSX. 

Here we go

Gparted is doing its thing as I type. Hopefully this will all work out. Just using Gparted has kinda made me want to go back to Linux again, it's just a really nice experience. And I love fluxbox!

I'll update as I progress.

Edit: Gparted broke Vista, but I think a repair of it is fixing it. Doing CHKDSK now. 

Nearly there...

Decided to do a full backup before I messed around with partitions for installing Windows 7. Didn't realise it'd take so long. I've got 5 minutes left on my music collection, which has been going for over 2 hours! Just my pictures to backup now, which shouldn't take too long. 

I'd forgotten that I had Synctoy setup to just copy new and updated files, which would have saved so much time. But instead, I just copied the whole directory. Stupid.

It's given me a bit of time to do some tidying though, done a bit of cable organising behind my desk. On the cheap, too - I didn't want to pay for cable trays and stuff, so I stapled wire twists to the underside of my desk and used that. Seems to be working quite well so far. 

Might be a long night if I want 7 installed by tomorrow...

Edit: seems Vista doesn't want to let me shrink my partition by more than 98mb. Going to bed, I'll sort it out tomorrow.