StagePics

Microsoft Pro Photo Tools

Alan — Fri, 23 May 2008 15:49:41 +0100

As a follow-up to my previous post about Geotagging, I see that Microsoft has released its own tool to help with this.

This tool can be used to Geotag existing photographs from a Windows Live map, or to match up points to a GPX track. What it can also do - which is quite neat - is do "Reverse Geotagging" - that is, it goes from your GPS coordinates to a real-world address, town, and county. This information is all then searchable by desktop search engines.

The tool is a work in progress, and is acknowledged to be so by Microsoft. But it does offer good promise for the future.

Well worth a download! The Microsoft Pro Photo website is at http://www.microsoft.com/prophoto/default.aspx - look for "Pro Photo Tools"

LAMP Children pictures posted

Alan — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 09:45:09 +0100

There is now a slideshow of photographs from the LAMP show available for download from the website.

PC Down

Alan — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 11:09:41 +0100

LAMP pictures indefinitely delayed

PC Disaster

Alan — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 10:09:07 +0100

The Potter household is having some difficulty with electrical equipment just now.

CYT WWRY Photos posted

Alan — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 00:03:36 +0000

I have now posted the photographs of this show, which was absoutely first class.

The photographs are password proteced since ...

Geotagging

Alan — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 13:26:34 +0000

This isn't terribly relevant to shooting stage shows, but is something that I have found interesting to try in other aspects of photography. I posted this article to the discussion boards at disboards.com, but nobody seemed all that interested ther. So here it is in the blog!

Geotagging is the process of putting GPS information into your photographs. I'm sure I'm not the only one that looks at ten year old photos and wonders "where was that taken?" With geotagged images, you can just right-click the image and find out where it was.

For new photographs, it's quite easy to do. I bought myself a standard Bluetooth GPS receiver (like this), and a piece of software for my phone (GETrack).

When I am going somewhere I expect to be taking photographs, I start GETrack running on my phone. Every twenty seconds or so (you can configure the interval), GETrack asks the GPS receiver "where am I" and logs the information.

When I get home, as well as getting the pictures from the camera I also get the GPS logfile from GETrack. Then I give them both to the WWMX Location Stamper, which matches the times up to the photographs, and adds the GPS location information in to the pictures. Of course, the camera's clock must be set to the correct time...

So that's the data into the pictures, how do I make use of it? One easy way is to use Opanda Exif Viewer. With this installed you can right-click on an image, then choose an option to show you precisely where the picture was taken using Google maps. Also, Picasa and many other programs can understand the location information.

If you have already-existing photographs that you are wanting to GeoTag, Picasa may be your friend. Choose the picture that you want, and from the Tools menu choose "Geotag". You will then be taken to Google Eart, and shown a set of cross-hairs. Move to where the picture was taken, click "done" and the location information will be added to your photograph.

As you can probably guessed, I am quite enthused. I am currently writing a program to grab information from www.geonames.com and add that into photographs. That will give me things like the name of the nearest town and the country in which the picture was taking - great for auto-generating tags for use in Windows Live Photo Gallery (I did try a program called GPicSync, but it gives some information that I don't want, and I don't want to have to try to get python working on my PC to fix it!)

A bit like buses...

Alan — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 16:30:20 +0100

You wait for ages for a show to come along - the last one was WWRY in June - and then two come along at once!

So the 16th of September saw me going to my first shoot in Glasgow - Theatre Guild were performing The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas. This was my first time in the New Athenaeum theatre (which was lovely), and the first time I had seen Theatre Guild. Having said that, I had known Billy Love - for many years the director of Theatre Guild - through the ROSS Summer School.

I really enjoyed this show - bright (brightly lit), (generally) happy, lovely accessible music, just great fun. That was shown in the final CD, which had over 200 photographs on it - another first for me! So well done to everyone in Theatre Guild!

The next night's show really couldn't have been more different. Not in how well it was performed - both were excellent - but in the style of the show. This was Jekyll and Hyde, by Limelight Productions, in the Carnegie Hall in Dunfermline.

Where Whorehouse was bright, Jekyll & Hyde was dark. Moody lighting predominated, with (slightly) brightly-lit principals, often in front of chorus dimly lit in monochromatic red or blue. An audience's delight, a photographer's nightmare!

Having said that, I was quite pleased with the end results. I never was able to drop below ISO1600, but noise reduction software helped make a good job of the photographs. There are a few where there is significant motion blur, but since they normally coincided with Mr Hyde being rather nasty to the good people of London, the motion blur almost helps the atmosphere along!

Also, as ever, the Carnegie Hall presented the challenge of what lens to use. The 24-105mm gave good wide coverage, but wasn't enough to get really good close-ups. A borrowed 70-200mm would have given first-class head and shoulders, but couldn't come out far enough to see the whole stage.

Maybe I need two cameras and two lenses :)

So, have a look at the pictures and tell me what you think. As an interesting post-script, I put a few of the pictures onto a photographers' website to invite constructive criticism. The name of the show was in the title. Jekyll and Hyde got 65 views; Whorehouse got 160! Must say something about photographers :)

Stagepics going on holiday

Alan — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 19:16:52 +0100

Stagepics will be taking a short holiday.

Once we return, I promise that we will process any orders that have arrived while we are away as promptly as possible.

My apologies to anyone who orders while we're on our break.

Au revoir!

Well done STF Productions!

Alan — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 16:04:31 +0100

Yesterday (Saturday) I had the pleasure of watching STF Productions' presentation of We Will Rock You; the musical hashed together from a load of old Queen songs. And lest this sound an unpleasant way of looking at it, they are great songs and it makes for a thoroughly entertaining show. The whole thing came over very well indeed; the family and I really had a great time at it.

What makes this interesting is that the show was put together via a website - http://www.scottishtheatreforum.com.

Well done to everyone involved!

(PS The photos are on line at http://www.stagepics.co.uk)

Back home

Alan — Wed, 16 May 2007 15:51:26 +0100

I'm back home now, and ready to take orders again - thanks for bearing with me.

I was in fact ...

Made the NODA Scotland News!

Alan — Fri, 04 May 2007 14:09:18 +0100

Big thanks to Mike Jeffries, editor of the NODA Scotland News, for his article on StagePics. And six photographs in ...

Slight delay in service over the coming week

Alan — Fri, 04 May 2007 07:31:44 +0100

There will be a delay in processing orders, as my day job takes me away for ten days.

The Secret Garden

Alan — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 22:25:17 +0100

Discussion of lens options when photographing shows

Ulp! You can find me now!

Alan — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 13:02:05 +0100

And so I have today updated the StagePics website, and added a link to this blog. It's possible to find me now - that's rather scary!

It has been a little quite for the past couple of weeks, which has been quite nice as it has given me some time to recover from the busy time we had in April. However, I shall be out photographing The Secret Garden by The Melos on Monday, which I am rather looking forward to.

I see that Google has now got its web payments system up and running now - Google Checkout. I shall investigate, and hopefully will soon be able to accept payments through that system too.

Falling behind already

Alan — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 08:33:12 +0100

Hey, guess what - I've been remiss at updating this blog. Well, there's a surprise!

Since my last posting things have been very busy. I have added four shows' worth of pictures, and truly have the business up and running. The shows I posted were:

March 2007 - Rosyth & District MS - South Pacific (Club website)

March 2007 - The Bohemians - Titanic (The Bohemians' website)

March 2007 - Bo'ness AOS - The Mikado

March 2007 - Edinburgh Music Theatre - The Boy Friend (EMT's website)

On the less positive side, I have run out of colour ink for my printer and Dell are currently quoting ten days for delivery! I tried to cancel the order and just buy an Epson instead, but the ink has already been dispatched and so I don't imagine I can cancel. Maybe Dell is just being very conservative in their estimation of a delivery date.

Once that arrives, I shall be able to make more CDs!

First posting

Alan — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 10:44:47 +0000

I've now added my first group of pictures to the new-look StagePics web site... what a pity I don't have ...

Getting started

Alan — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 12:08:37 +0000

A first post on a new blog.

The intention is that as StagePics grows, I shall add more entries to ...