Online photography

I’ve had a busy few days despite having taken some time off work.  At home it’s been time to catch up on some jobs that needed doing around the house, and everything else is taking a back seat, which is why I’m overdue a blog post.  What photography time I have had in the last few days went on a presentation that I gave to Dublin Camera Club last night.  Read on for more on that, as well as the usual little bit of info on today’s image.

The presentation, which I was first asked to do late last year, was titled “Photography and the web” and despite having had months to prepare it, I inevitably left it to the last minute.  It was a fairly wide ranging overview of some of the different websites I enjoy visiting as a photographer, with me presenting screenshots of the various sites and talking about why I find them useful.  Somewhat ironically, I did the presentation offline, wanting to avoid the glitches that I’ve seen others hit when trying to use mobile broadband for this sort of thing.

For those who couldn’t make it (or for those who are interested) and in the interest of sharing information, which is one of the strengths of the internet and those sites I recommended, I’ve put the slides online as a PDF together with the links that I recommended people visit.  As a slideshow without any words it’s probably a tad boring but hopefully from it and the links you’ll get the idea.

The photo above was captured very quickly just a short while ago to illustrate this blog post, and is of the keyboard of my beloved Apple Macbook.  I took it with the nifty fifty at f/1.8 to give me really shallow depth of field.  It’s lit primarily by the ceiling light in the room, which was high at back camera right.   There’s a lot of fill light from the ambient light bouncing off the light-coloured walls of the room so there’s not a whole lot of shadow.  The ceiling light itself is a hard light source as it is small and far away (to quote Father Ted) but the light walls of the room turn the room into a large softbox.

The shot is a tad like what a stock photo might look like, though it would fail a stock library submission for a number of reasons – noise (due to the high ISO as I was too lazy to light this with strobes), the presence of the logo, even out of focus, and the fact that the dirt on the keys of the laptop is visible.  However, as an illustration for a post about my presentation on the internet it is the perfect image.