Indigo Jo Blogs

Birds in flocks,
originally uploaded by Indigo Jo.

The other day I had the use of the family car, so I decided to go down to the South Downs, a spectacular range of hills next to the south coast of England, including the Long Furlong near Littlehampton and the Devil's Dyke outside Brighton. Neither of these are here, but I got some interesting pictures, and maybe I can get better ones another day insha Allah.

My trip to Arundel

The fuel bill was less pleasant - half a tank of petrol cost £20 (over $40). Fuel costs really are criminal here now.

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I've just been informed that a photograph I took in Portobello Road in Notting Hill, west London, has been included in the Schmap London photo guide. You can find the guide here, and the picture in the vegetarian restaurants section accompanying a review of the Grain Shop. That bit of Portobello Road is one I thought was rather characterful (it's further up from the genteel Hugh Grant territory) and I sort of hoped they would include the photo to illustrate that rather than hide it in the restaurant reviews. But the Grain Shop itself is actually somewhere I go in quite a lot and their cakes are rather nice if a bit sweet. You can find the Flickr page for the photo, and my comments about it, here insha Allah.

Posted by Indigo Jo at 7:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The weekly British photographers' magazine Amateur Photographer has a feature called Backchat (sponsored by Nikon), in which readers are invited to contribute their "thoughts or views on photography". This week's is from one Graham Marsden, who ponders the popularity of image manipulation software. Anyone who reads the British photography press will notice that a fair number of them have regular features on skills particular to one particular piece of such software, and there is at least one magazine dedicated to it. Marsden notes:

I know that the development and improvement of photographs has a long history, going back to the early days of airbrushing Trotsky out of pictures of the Soviet leadership to even my own keen dodging and burning of black & white prints in my LRPS panel many years ago.

In painting, of course, improvement was the norm. Henry VIII sent Holbein to bring back a likeness of Anne of Cleves. He was so taken by the result that he married the poor girl, who he later described as 'that Flanders mare'. Poor Holbein was put between a rock and a hard place by the need to please both sitter and king.

Continue reading "The appeal of image manipulation software" »

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Last month I got myself a digital camera with money I'd been given by relatives for my 30th birthday (£30 each from most of them, and I have plenty of aunts and uncles on my Mum's side). I decided I needed some decent image editing software if I'm going to sell any photographs (and since I'm out of work at a bad time of year to be an out-of-work agency van driver, and office temp agencies aren't interested in me, I thought it was as good a money-making idea as any). At first my eyes fell on Bibble Pro, a RAW processing package you can download, of which I was aware through blogging its updates on my other blog. However, I happened to go into the computer shop in the Bentall's department store in Kingston on Thursday when they had their last copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements for £50 (it usually costs nearer to £70), beating Bibble Pro by some margin. So after some consideration, I bought it.

Continue reading "Photoshop Ailments" »

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