NathanDrew.org

I hate the term ‘budding’ but it seemed the most appropriate for someone who’s enthusiastic about something but also not a professional or expert so in M&S style… here’s the idea…

Got a new camera recently? Upgraded to a new DSLR or just got a great new compact camera? Flickr is a great place to share your photos, get feedback, advice, ask questions etc and I’ve recently become the only Admin for a group called Striving Amateurs and have decided its a good time to give the group a bit of a new direction.

The group is all about amateur and professional or experienced photographers to help one another out by sharing how they achieved an effect or sharing ideas and web resources etc. At the moment the group is still growing but if you’re looking for a friendly place where you can ask for advice and feel free to post your pictures and learn from the others then please join the group at the link above ). Most people on Flickr will tell you how they achieved an effect if you post a comment on their photo and this group also aims to encourage this. Check it out.

Here’s a sample of some of the photographs in the pool…

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

For a long time I’ve had a bit of an interest with photography, given half a chance to use my Dad’s SLR, whether it was his old film one or his newer DLSR I was always keen on having a go! So, it comes as no surprise that I ended up getting my own!

While getting used to my shiny Canon 450d, I have been using flickr a whole lot more and have found inspiration within the realms of light painting!

For those of you that don’t know, ‘Light painting’ usually involves fairly long exposures and a light source. From what you generally see on flickr, there’s 2 main types – static lighting that lights up a scene with funky colours or ‘drawing’ with a light source.

Here’s an example of painting a scene with a light source and ‘gels’.

The Throne Room by JohnnyBlough

Generally these sort of photos are done with a flash or ‘strobe’ and using different colour ‘gels’ in front of the flash. You use a long exposure and light up different parts of your subject to build up the end result.

I’ve experimented a bit with a few different light sources and here are some of the results… 

These first two are of a lightning bulb, one with me touching the side of the bulb to attract the strands of lightning to one spot and one with a bit of foil on the top to keep the strand in one place constantly.

Blue Touch by me

Match Stick Lightning by me

This one below is using a light intended to sit in the bath and light it up! Random I know but I was going through firebox.com looking for interesting light sources.

Technicolour Spiral by me

Now I’m usually a bit anti Sony stuff, probably because I’ve always preferred Nintendo consoles etc. I did once have a MD player/recorder however so I’m not completely against them. My sister showed me a clip of a new mp3 player that looks pretty awesome – and very original. I’ll let the video speak for itself…

Well this is pretty random but Engadget had an article showing this video -I thought it was pretty funny…

In case you were wondering, the game it’s playing (albeit probably unwittingly) is Tap Tap Revenge – which is like guitar heroes but for the iPhone/iPod Touch.

Having nearly given up on fixing the hardware issues on my old laptop to get it to have both the wireless AND the keyboard working at any one time (some sort of ACPI issue ) I decided to try and install xubuntu a really old box.

By old I mean AMD 475Mhz old and when it eventually loaded up the installer it got so far as partitioning the disks and then failed! I thought it must be yet another hardware issue so gave up for a while. I tried again and this time booted into the live cd and tried to partition it manually – it failed with the following:

/dev/hda1 is mounted; will not make a filesystem here!

So, did a bit of digging about and it seems like its a long standing issue in some installations of Ubuntu based installs, but there is a fix that worked for me and to save anyone else that might be looking to fix this error I’ll post it here so you dont have to sift through forums or bug reports to find it:

From the bug report here:

vi /lib/partman/commit.d/30parted
Put ‘update-dev’ right after close_dialog.

#!/bin/sh

. /lib/partman/definitions.sh
for dev in $DEVICES/*; do
    [ -d "$dev" ] || continue
    cd $dev

    open_dialog IS_CHANGED
    read_line is_changed
    close_dialog
    [ "$is_changed" = yes ] || continue

    disable_sap "$dev"

    open_dialog COMMIT
    close_dialog
    update-dev
    done