Bob 10 – Caffinated Bob

The Massive Dev Chart for Android

I’m proud to announce the first release of the Massive Dev Chart for Android. For those in the know, the Massive Dev Chart is an invaluable online database containing thousands of tested combinations of developers and films for Black and White development.

A portable version of this information already exists for the J2ME platform, and has been in existence for some time. But with the advent of the next generation mobile platforms, there was a gap for a new application to fill the void.

The Massive Dev Chart for Android goes beyond the remit of the original application by providing real-time search facilities for developers and films, providing information for small, medium and large format, and providing crucial extended information where it’s needed.

This is the first in hopefully a line of Android applications from Orange Tentacle and is available in the marketplace on your G1 now.

American Soda GEEK Discount

I’ve been in discussions with one of my fine clients American Soda securing a discount for our the needs of fellow geeks. They’re also hoping to sponsor some community events in the future, so if you’re running a BarCamp, local user group or some such give us a ping.

For the moment though, American Soda is offering a 10% discount for the next seven days on presentation of the code GEEK at checkout. The more people that take up this offer, the higher the likelihood they’ll run more offers in the future with potentially greater discounts. As a sample of their fine produce:

1. Mountain Dew
2. Mountain Dew (because yes – it needs mentioning twice)
3. Tab Cola
4. Paddy O’Brien’s Lucky Charms
5. Teddy Grahams
6. Hershey’s Cookie and Cream (which I’m told are better than Oreos)]

And just because I can:

Coffee – Red Roaster, Brighton

It’s a pre-requisite of almost all technical people – a good supply of coffee. I’ve noted in t’ North that our supply of high quality caffine has fallen off completely. Yes there are Neros, Starbucks and Costas, but these provide only mediocre caffine quality. Really high quality coffee can only be provided from small specialist coffee shops, who really do take care about the beam and the service.

While I’m in Brighton I’ve been visiting Red Roaster. A small coffee shop on St James Street, these people really understand how a coffee shop is supposed to, smell and taste. Their coffee alone is some of the best I’ve tasted, but their service comes with a smile and they support local artists (there’s a photography collection on the wall and they held an open-mic night last night).

Oh yes, and do try the ham and cheese croissant with mustard mayo. NOM.

Leeds Photocamp ‘09

Well that was a fun day. Photocamp aims to take the same ideas of unconference that make Barcamp so successful and bring them to photography. This is the second Photocamp held in Europe, both have been held in Old Broadcasting House in Leeds. Sessions over the day have ranged from theory of composition, through to strobism and urban fashion photography.

Later in the day we got the opportunity to recreate some classic photographs. We split into groups and decided to tackle Bailey’s photo of Paul Lennon and John McCartney and Andreas Feininger’s “The Photojournalist”. For your consideration our results and the originals are shown below.

Ours

The Originals

For those interested in the lighting, we used two strobes, one set to flash against a solid white background at 1/32 for both photos, and for the Feininger a single light tightly snooted pointed directly at the model’s face and for Bailey, a single light behind a shoot-through brolly front and slightly left, with black material directly light to absorb any spill (and hence generating the strong shadow on the side of the face).

The hands on sessions were wonderful, and managed to learn a huge amount in the short time we had. The walk and talk by the fashion photographer (apologies for not catching your name) was a multi-part exercise in working with models, making use of available light, fill-flash and textures. All packed into an hour.

In contrast, the “theory” sessions didn’t carry so well. It’s my own view that while sessions like this are important, they need to be backed with practical work to reinforce the learning experience. Slide-shows are all well and good, but people haven’t just brought piles of gear with them to sit in the corner doing nothing. It does appear that pleanty of photos have been taken, you can follow them on Flickr with either the photocamp, photocamp09 or photocampleeds tags.

We enjoyed ourselves, that’s definite and we would love to see more sessions run like this. To that end I’ve got a secret project in mind, which hopefully you’ll hear more about in the next few weeks.

Roma & The Vatican

Photographs from Roma and the Vatican. This was the first outing of the “travel kit”: a Minolta XD-7, Vivitar Series 1 28-70mm, Minolta 50mm f1.7 MD, Vivitar Series 1 70-210 f3.5, Manfrotto Modo Monopod and a Crumpler PrettyBoy XL bag.

Lessons were learnt on this trip. First off – always check your ISO before you start shooting. On the switch back from Tri-X (for the indoor shots at the Vatican) to Fuji ACROS, I completely forgot to reset the ISO back to 100 on the lightmeter. Alas, I now have several sheets of overblown film. On the flip side, it does give us an excuse to visit again…

The Modo Monopod also died a death over this holiday. I bought it specifically for this trip because I wanted a lightweight low cost monopod to stick a light body and lens on the top. On the second day, the foot fell off at St Peters, and the day after the lower half of the shaft shattered completely. While I appreciate the Modo kit is not designed for pro use, nor to last forever, for it to self-destruct after a few days of use is completely unacceptable. The monopod is currently with Manfrotto awaiting replacement (and has been for a while).

Click the image above to view the slideshow.