Following on from my initial entry this year into the Cotswold Monochrome Salon, I’ve also entered the Beyond Group Salon. This salon is only for projected images, so I didn’t have to make a decision whether I should enter prints or not. It does however offer the option for entering both colour and monochrome images so I entered some of each. (It also offers a ‘nature’ class, which I didn’t enter.) Once again acceptances count towards BPE awards.
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I have a Canon EOS 1000D plus a 70–300 zoom lens … realistically will I need a tripod for telephoto shots?
I was asked this question recently by an artist friend of mine, and the automatic response to this sort of question is usually, yes, you should use a tripod. That’s not a terribly helpful answer however, as you then have to consider what sort of tripod, and what compromises using a tripod would entail. A cheap tripod may give little if any benefit, and the better tripods may be specialised to particular uses. (and note the difference between ‘need’ and ‘should’!)
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The WordPress core is very flexible and has a massive collection of free and premium themes, widgets and plugins that allow it to be used in many different ways, but with this flexibility comes the problem that blogs implemented on WordPress tend not be as fast as other sites implemented on simpler or more focussed frameworks. Some of this is inevitable in its wide scope, but there are ways to improve the performance.
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When out and about taking photos in the countryside I don’t just take photos of the large vistas. I always have a macro lens with me for taking photographs of smaller things that catch my eye (and not just flowers and fungi!). I’m starting to gather together some of these images of small parts of the landscape to make up a collection — here are an initial few which will be added to from to time:
Devastation 2
I decided earlier this year that I needed to enter more competitions (perhaps that should be ‘some’ rather than ‘more’). I missed the closing dates for the first one that I’d planned to enter, so made sure that I got some digital images ready for the Cotswold Monochrome Salon.
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This is a quick overview of the process I go through in taking an image from the camera through to a print. It was originally written for the local camera club.
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Image metadata and search engines
Part 1 of this two part series had little if anything to do with getting your work found by search engines. There are a few extra bits and pieces of image metadata that sit outside the image file. These pieces of metadata are relevant for search engine optimisation (SEO) rather than for identification and ownership.
There are potentially three areas where information about the image can be placed outside the image file contents, and so potentially of use to search engines in identifying the content of the image. These are particularly useful for giving a hint about the subject matter to Google Images and other image directories, as technology hasn’t yet moved sufficiently far forward for search engines to be able to just look at the image itself to determine the content!
Continue reading “Image metadata for artists and photographers (part 2)” »
What is metadata?
At the most basic level, metadata is data about data.
Artists and photographers who manage their own websites may be aware of the metadata that web pages can contain, but which is not normally visible to the viewer, such as a list of keywords, or a short description of the page contents, or a host of other more technical information which may also be present.
What many may be less aware of is that image files can also contain their own metadata, either because a camera put it there, an image editor put it there, or the artist put it there. This brief article is about the metadata that might be in your image files, which bits you might not want to be there, and most importantly which bits you might want to add! In the latter category are copyright information, and items useful for search engines.
Continue reading “Image metadata for artists and photographers (part 1)” »
Following on from my initial entry this year into the Cotswold Monochrome Salon, I’ve also entered the Beyond Group Salon. This salon is only for projected images, so I didn’t have to make a decision whether I should enter prints or not. It does however offer the option for entering both colour and monochrome images so I entered some of each. (It also offers a ‘nature’ class, which I didn’t enter.) Once again acceptances count towards BPE awards.
