Tag Archives: photos

Therapeutic

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So it turns out painting is pretty therapeutic, and I’m still pleased with what I’m able to achieve.  So, good news about the paints, and I don’t seem to have backtracked too far since I last picked up a brush.  I’ve started on some cannon-fodder zombies so that I don’t have to worry too much about the fine detail, the whole point is they’re supposed to be gore splattered and broad-stroked.

Here’s the one I just did.

Click on the images for the full size shots.  One of the major problems I have with macro mode on digital cameras is that they really do bring out the worst in the painting 🙂 I need to get a good shot, with good lighting at range, so the figures look more like that do when you’re holding them in your hands.  I’ll play with that I guess.

Turns out

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that the paints are in pretty good condition.  A few jars of solid colour that need throwing away, a few jars of sludge that will need a lot of stiring and re-hydrating, lots of jars of perfectly ok paint and a couple that just need a good shake.

I thought I’d play with the camera and see how it works on macro shots, since I’ve not tried any since we got the DMC-FZ8.  The only ones I have of miniatures are taking with the old digital, this one should be a lot better but it’s going to take a long time to get lighting, positioning and zoom right.

Anyway, in summary, I’m going to try painting tonight.

Update: camera looks pretty good, need to work on lighting and get something better to stand the figures on, but here are a few shots.

Ireland in ’94

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Two quick photo’s from the Ireland trip in ’94, first a bunch of us on the Ferry and then a gravestone (because at the time, I took a lot of photo’s of gravestones).

Double Quickness

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I have two flatbed scanners (assuming you don’t count the defunct all-in-one printer) and several computers.  I wonder if it would go faster if I used both?

I guess I’d have to do different sets of photo’s because the scanners give slightly different results.

Edit: Yes, this is what Twitter is for, so shoot me.  And I think I won’t double up, it’s sometimes confusing enough with only one scanner on the go.

Random Photo’s

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I’m now scanning random photo’s that never made it into albums and have been sitting in little envelopes or packets for several years.  They’re all mixed up, random people, random places, random times.  We’ve got loads of envelopes/packets like these, and they don’t usually have many photo’s in them.

This is good, since it makes me feel like I’m making a lot of progress.  Scanning an album with 300 photo’s takes so long it’s soul destroying, where-as scanning 20 pictures from an envelope and being able to put it into the ‘done’ box is much more morale boosting.

Spare time

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Scanning gives me lots of spare time, takes 20 seconds to preview a scan for three photo’s, then 30 seconds to select the three photo areas and then about 4 minutes for it to scan those pictures.  I tend to scan about 15 or so, and then save them one at a time as PNG’s.  So I have plenty of time while it scans to read the web.

Which means I run out of things to read in Google Reader really quickly.

Which means I’ll probably blog a lot during today while I’m waiting for the scanner to finish a run of three photo’s.  Simes has just posted some amazing photo’s he took this morning with his sexy new camera, I’m jealous.  Click the image to see the whole set.

As we drove to work on Thursday we passed the canal and really wished we had our camera.  There was around a foot of mist rising from the water, it looked incredible.  It’s no wonder people believed in spirits and another world when you see some of the things water vapour and light can do.

We’ve started keeping the camera within reach in the house since the cats have a tendancy to get into silly positions and then fall asleep.  If we go too far for the camera we wake them up, so within reach means we can preserve their crazyness for ever.

Scanning again

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I’m back to the scanning, already posted the results of doing some holiday snaps from the 80’s.  I also did a bunch of random photo’s hanging around and another set from a CenterParcs holiday in 2002ish.  Today I’m doing CentreParcs from 2000 (which has all-together too many photo’s of ducks, ducklings and swans) and we’ll see what else I get done.

I finally settled on a directory structure for storing them all, one of the challenges I have with this kind of thing is I have to find a structure I’m happy with.  Categorising or structuring data tends to bring out my mild-OCDness.  So I’m going for one directory per year, with one sub-directory per photo set depending on what they were.  If we’re not sure what year they’re from we’ll just sort them by decade (which is usually pretty easy to work out, especially for the pre-1990 ones).

The whole process is really slow going, but I think it’ll be worth it in the long run.  There are more and more options for using, viewing and enjoying photographs on digital media so it’ll be nice to have all of our photo’s scanned in.  To that end, I’m doing even the ones I used to ignore (badly lit, out of focus, etc.) without prejudice.

The top level directory for photo’s I’ve finished scanning, or digital photo’s we already had, is up to 7GB and 2046 files.  There’s easily 5 times more than that to scan in, if not more.  I must have 3-400 photo’s from my university years at the very least.

Here’s a quick shot from our back garden in Nottingham in January 2000 (click for full size).

Holiday like it’s the mid-1980’s

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Took these photo’s on a narrowboat holiday in 1988 sometime in the mid-to-late 80’s.  I think we started near Leek and went through Stoke on Trent and down to Stratford, but we may have gone north to Manchester, I can’t remember.  And yeh, I took a pretty shoddy photo even in those days, I didn’t get any better either.


Narrow Boat Trip – School Holiday

And no, I’m not in any of the photographs, sorry.

Edit: The more I think about this the more I think it must have been earlier than 88?  The photo’s are still in their original packet, which is clearly marked 1988.  But I wonder how long I had the film before getting it developed.  I left school in 1989 after two years in the sixth form, which would mean I started sixth form in September 1987.  I’m 99% sure I went on this holiday long before sixth form, which would mean either early ’87 or even maybe ’86 but I can’t explain why the date on the photo packet is so out unless it’s from a different set of photo’s?