An inordinate number of seaside pictures for springtime

[gominokouhai]

Last week, stormsearch and I spent a couple of days walking the coastline in East Lothian. Pictures from the first day, Tantallon to Tyninghame, have just absorbed my entire monthly quota on my free Flickr account. I need to stop going to picturesque places. This is going to get expensive.

Or maybe I could start resizing the damn things before I upload.

Taster:

Tantallon Castle and Bass Rock

Who remembers Tau Ceti? Probably one of the most awesome games of the 8-bit era, and certainly the one that I wasted the most of my childhood on after the original Pirates!. Had a proper 3D first-person view and shadow rendering. The buildings on the surface of the planet were several kinds of odd cylindrical shape (generated using a table of line widths, I believe), like this:

This is St Barley's Church in Coventry St Baldred's Beacon, on the shore near Seacliff. It brought back memories.

I must dust off the old CPC6128 some day. I still have a working machine and the disc still works.

Continuing the video-game theme, there were barnacles from Half-Life, too.

East Lothian has interesting rocks.

It's also stormsearch's preferred stamping grounds.

So it doesn't surprise me at all that it was here I found the Play button for the world. I didn't try to press it.

The full set is on the Flickr. Photos from Day Two will be up in due course, but I may have to wait for my quota to refresh.

Comments

[spudtater]

I was somewhere round there recently. Did you spot a little tiny ickle concrete dock amongst the rocks?

[gominokouhai]

Yes. There was a lobster boat in it. J has those pictures.

[brucec]

Do you only get 1024x768 photos with the free Flickr account? I've noticed that some of the better photographers (e.g. http://www.flickr.com/photos/duncansmith/) have photos with a higher DPI and lower resolution and have been wondering if it's a trick they use when they're processing them.

[gominokouhai]

Yes, bigger sizes are a Pro thing. The free account only provides images at a 1024*768 maximum. And I've been uploading them at full size, wasting my upload quota. The full-size ones will still be available (so they tell me) if I ever find the money to upgrade.

There's all manner of potential Photoshoppery you can do to change resolution, file size, whatever. I'm a purist. I just take my shots directly off the camera.

[brucec]

So you're not a fan of RAW/DNG mode? I've been thinking about getting a new camera (so I don't have to take photos using my phone when I go cycling in the Alps in July) and wondering if it's worth getting one that has RAW support over other features. I'm currently leaning towards the "prosumer" models that looks like a DSLR but isn't.

[gominokouhai]

I am unfamiliar with RAW mode. My camera records directly to JPEG, so that's what I use.

[brucec]

If you go into the SETUP menu on your S7000 and enable CCD-RAW, then your photos won't be compressed on the camera - instead, the raw data will be saved and can be converted as you want on a computer later. Different manufacturers have different RAW formats as one would expect, but Adobe has standardized it in DNG - Digital Negative - which a few manufacturers have implemented. A lot of people seem to prefer RAW mode because the files contain more data than the JPEG ones.

An explanation is http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/understanding-series/u-raw-files.shtml .

[gominokouhai]

Thanks for the link, that's a useful site.

At present, I like being able to fit a day's shooting onto one memory card; JPGs are adequate for my needs; and post-processing sounds like work. If people start offering me money for poster-sized prints then I'll change my mind.

[brucec]

If people start offering me money for poster-sized prints then I'll change my mind.

Won't it be a bit late by then? :P

[gominokouhai]

Why? Are we running out of scenery?

(Beauly–Denny line. Wind farms. On second thought, don't answer that.)

I plan to take new photographs.

[brucec]

There are some photos that you will take and only realise later on are worth printing in a large format. If you've already lost detail then you may be disappointed that they don't look as good as they could have. For example it's not every day that the conditions are right for capturing a photo like http://www.flickr.com/photos/bcran/4056327412/in/set-72157603706635023/ .

[gominokouhai]

All true. But given the amount of extra work, time, and money (not least for the storage space), I'm content at the moment simply to say that I don't do large-format prints. I'm only a hobbyist after all.

[brucec]

Fair enough. I must admit to being surprised when someone claimed they couldn't upload their photos of BSDCan because they only had Photoshop at home; following up they claimed it was worth the effort, but I too remain to be convinced. As for price, you can get a 4GB SD card for a tenner now - that should hold around 400 photos. I guess it might be a problem if you tend to snap away like mad and discard lots once you get home?

As for large-format prints, my dad's recently been doing lots of ordering from PhotoBox: we now have a large print from last winter on my bedroom wall, and I've been thinking about getting one of my photos printed on a canvas to hang in my flat.