Flight of Three

A flight of three Royal Thai Air Force Bell 412 Twin Huey helicopters flew past the apartment this morning. I keep my Canon EOS-30D camera ready with the 75-300mm lens to take such shots.

I took this one on shutter priority at 1/250 second and 200ASA. I didn’t use Action Mode as that uses a much faster shutter speed / 400ASA and it doesn’t show the motion of the rotor blades. They rotate comparatively slowly in a cruise.

I also like to use spot metering to optimize the exposure for the helicopter rather than the bright sky. Canon’s Action Mode does not give you any choice.

This is not as sharp as I would like. Next time helicopters pass I’ll try 1/320 and see if I get a better result.

Close to the Same Shot

It’s not easy to take precisely the same shot, even if I knew where I was standing in 1987. I should try again with a print of the original.

2009

1987

See http://bkkphotographer.wordpress.com/2009/09/01/old-bangkok-pictures/

Punnawithi Skytrain Station

I took a walk down Sukhumvit Road, Bangkok on Sunday afternoon. It was not very interesting, being fairly quiet on a weekend. I thought I would try a new area as i have been traveling west to the older parts of Bangkok so much. Now I know why: the newer western areas don’t have so many interesting sights.

Indeed the highlight was looking at two of the new Skytrain Stations on the Sukhumvit Line extension beyond On Nut. I posted a picture above and more to Picasa Web here along with other pictures from the trip: mostly vehicles.

The stations Bang Chak and Punnawithi are structurally complete but need fitting out with ticket machines and so on. It’s interesting to think just how much stuff goes into a station. In Thailand most of it is imported and is the subject of negotiations, contracts and so on.

The stations appear identical to the others on the Sukhumvit Line. I could not get up to the platform level so I don’t know if they will be covered like the new stations on the Silom Line.

So if that was the highlight – peering at an unfinished station – then you can imagine how interesting the rest of the walk was.

Maybe it’s me – it was hot and I tired early. A good photographer should be able to find compelling subjects anywhere. Right?

My Flickr Tags

After looking at a Worldle of my blog I decided to look at my Flickr tags. Here they are:

My Flickr Tags

Flickr converts all the tags you enter to lower case and removes the spaces. This is, I think, to make searching easier. It displays the tags as entered on each photo’s page. Lightroom does the same – I looked in the database.

My variety of tags including ones in Thai and Japanese, is because of the way I use synonyms in Lightroom and then export them to Flickr.

I think Flickr’s tag list is a pretty good summary of my current interests. I have a free Flickr account so it shows only my most recent 200 pictures.

Wordle

This is fun. It’s from a web site called Wordle that creates “clouds” of
terms extracted from a blog.

It is similar in notion to a “tag cloud” in Flickr but more artistic. Here’s mine.

Here’s the Wordle for this blog. You can click on it to get a bigger version.

Clearly I blog mostly about Lightroom. Maybe too much?

River Trip

I like this picture of Wat Arun across the Chao Phraya River, taken just before it started to rain on Saturday afternoon.

I hid in the very good riverside cafe next to the Aurum Hotel when it looked like it was going to rain hard. Good that I did – there was a severe thunderstorm. The commercial river traffic kept going but the Chao Phraya Express ferries were pretty empty.

Finally I gave up waiting and got a taxi to Hua Lamphong Station: the nearest subway station. Unfortunately many of the taxi drivers anywhere in the Rattanakosin Island area are crooks. I had to be very firm that he turned the meter on and did not take me to and jewel shops. Mai pen rai.

I posted a few photos to Flickr and many more to Picasa Web.

My Workflow

This is an update on the steps I take when I come home tired and thirsty from a trip around Bangkok with a card full of pictures, a flat battery and need for a hot cup of tea and a shower.

I don’t like the word workflow but everybody seems to be using it.

This differs in many respects from the posts I have made before about how I use Lightroom, my backup strategy etc. I’ve modified things with experience. I used to write down the steps as a Microsoft Word document.  I think it is better to document it here. Maybe it will help people and perhaps I’ll get some helpful feedback too.

Lightroom Print Presets

I saw what looked like a useful set of Presets for printing photos from Lightroom to standard American paper sizes. They are here on the Lightroom Killer Tips site.

I think that Lightroom makes printing too hard. A few days ago i had to copy a Thai ID card, two sides on a single A4 sheet. I got frustrated trying to print two scanned pictures at actual size. It was quicker to use the photocopy function of my Canon MP610 and put the paper in twice.

I downloaded them and imported them to Lightroom in their own folder. But when I selected a picture to print and went through the presets:

• 4×6 landscape & portrait
• 5×7 landscape & portrait
• 10×8 landscape & portrait

they didnt work! The printer settings did not change.

I found I had to go into the Print Setup dialog box for each preset, set things up correctly. Then I had to right-click on the preset and select “Update with Current Settings”.

That is, the preset didn’t do a thing other than saving me typing a name.

I commented on the post and maybe people will enlighten me. I saw that many others were having problems too.

My guess is that a Preset is hardware-dependent and cannot be generic. So even if Matt set up a Preset for his printer Lightroom would not do anything with it when I imported it as I don’t have the same model.

Lightroom Print Presets

File Unsupported or Damaged

I exported two photos from Lightroom and made a panorama of them in Photoshop CS4.

That worked fine as it always does. Lightroom automatically imported the panorama – a JPG file – and I stacked it with the originals. I have done this many times with no errors.

Later I saw a little error icon in the top right of the thumbnail of the panorama in Grid view. I was able to load the panorama in Loupe View but I think I was looking at the 1:1 preview.

Lightroom 2.4 complained that the panorama it imported is “appears to be unsupported or damaged”.

Which for heavens sake? It’s important!

And what do you mean by “apppears to be”? Either it is or it isn’t. Geez.

How could Lightroom have imported it if it is unsupported?

I opened the panorama in Photoshop. Photoshop read the file just fine. I re-saved it – after making a backup of the original. Lightroom detected the file change and re-read it with no problems. Lightroom was happy again.

I hate these vague error messages with no guidance on what to do. I wonder what got Lightroom upset.

Top Searches

ALL my top searches this week are related to the rumoured Nikon Coolpix P7000.

That shows what happens when somehow you get ranked highly by Google. I am #2 on the Google list. Interestingly this blog is not listed when I type the same search term into Yahoo or the new Bing from Microsoft.

I have not seen any new rumours about the camera since August.