The Geekery

I don’t usually do reviews, I generally end up rambling, but thought I’d give it a shot with my camera/laptop back. I’ve had the Lowepro CompuRover AW for about 3 years now. I got it when I decided I wanted to start carrying my Nikon D70s around with me, as well as my Dell Inspiron 9300. I originally had 2 shoulder bags, quite cumbersome if you realize that the laptop alone is nearly 8lbs of laptop, not hugely heavy, but quite a beast if you’re carrying it all the time.

I had a bit of a challenge with this laptop, because it’s a 17″ wide screen laptop, and most bags target smaller laptops. So I dropped by a local camera store, and took a look around. I found the CompuRover to be the right size for the laptop, and even better, handled my largest lens too. So I purchased it. When I got home, I moved all my laptop equipment, cables, card readers, power cables, etc, and then all my camera equipment. This made the bag pretty heavy, but when loaded on my back, I couldn’t feel a thing, the straps lifted the bag up nicely, and shifted the weight from the lower back to the shoulders, and made it feel good.

Jump forward 3 years, and it’s still going strong, I’ve got more camera equipment, and changed out my laptop, but it still going strong. The bag has been on multiple tours of the Dallas zoo, as well as various walks around the local parks, and the trips to and from work, getting thrown about, and onto my shoulder, several flights to and from various parts of the country, as well as back home to the UK. The stitching has held, the plastics are still very solid and no breaks. The elastics are still quite springy. The bag could easily be passed as “like new” if it wasn’t for the fact I had a cat and a dog, and their various off-sheds due to it coming up to summer.

So if you’re looking for a strong, sturdy laptop/camera back, with plenty of room for equipment, this bag certainly fits the bill.

We had great weather last weekend in Dallas, reaching a nice 62F, so we decided to hit the Dallas Zoo. It’s probably the first time I’ve got the camera out in a while, excluding some small photo shoots for the office. Lugging around my D70s, and my Sigma 70-200, managed to make a complete circuit of the zoo this time. We ended up walking about 2 miles, and another mile on the monorail. GPX file for the tour can be found here, which can be opened in Google Earth, or your favourite GPS manager. Tinkering with some new software Zoner Photo Studio Professional, which is capable of taking GPS information, and creating KMZ files, and append the images to the map, as you can see here.

The picture to the right is probably one of my favourite from the trip. More can be seen on my gallery.

EDIT: Forgot to actually link to the KMZ file… oups.

I’m a little bit of a photography fan.  I might not be great , but I do enjoy playing around with the gear.  A few weeks back, Joe McNally announced a new book.  I took advantage of Amazon’s pre-ordering, and snapped one up.  It arrived today.  Now to get reading…

100+ reasons to carry-on when flying.

If you’re new to lighting, studio or not, Strobist rocks. Recently I’ve discovered a new resource. ProPhotoLife is another blog that has a lot of studio based walk throughs, giving examples of setups, lighting guides, and all kinds of cool stuff. The nifty thing is how he’s doing some of it. See if you can spot what he’s using for light stands in some of the videos.

Sometimes, when taking pictures in poor light, and using high ISOs, the best thing to do is convert to black and white. It gives the effect of grainy film. I’ve got some side-by-sides here.

Every once in a while, I need to batch add copyright notices, or similar disclaimers to images. Not that I’m that good at photography I need to copyright them, but I feel the need is still there. Adobe Bridge has the ability to append/replace metadata in images (EXIF for JPEGs for example) with additional information. However, figuring out how to make the templates isn’t exactly easy. A quick guide on building a nice quick template can be found here. The basics require the use of Photoshop to set a dummy image with the data you need, and exporting it as a template. Once saved in the right location, Bridge can see the template, and apply to images. Pretty cool.

This year, I got roped into taking part in NADA 2008. While the prospect of doing yet another conference was not so appealing, the prospect of getting to a new city was interesting. This year, NADA is hosted in San Francisco, so the potential of seeing the Golden Gate Bridge was pretty cool, as well as those hills. After arriving at about 11AM, the first day was spent working on setting the server up in the conference room at the hotel. This was so the DRMs could do testing, and training. Pictures are going here.

A new toy to help me with one of my projects for this year. I’ll have some pictures up shortly.

A little bit of a mouth full, and rather nerdy, but works pretty well. Gary Fong developed a Lightsphere Cloud, but I was resourceful, and constructed one from an ice cream container. I don’t even remember what ice-cream it was, but the container was the rigid semi-transparent plastic. I removed all the stickers, and labels. I then took my SB800 and traced a line in the lid around the SB800, and cut it out using a knife. When used (I’ll get some pictures of that later), it creates a nice even light source.