It’s been a hectic week here in Las Vegas, as everyone who attended WPPI 2010 will agree. So many old friends and new friends … the seminars and trade-show … and of course the parties! But the peak for me was obviously the masterclass I presented on Sunday to a group of 35. What a thrill and an honour to be selected to present a masterclass at WPPI!
The topic – Flash On The Run – was an amalgamation of material from my book on flash photography, some of the writings here, and a lot of new photos from recent weddings. The seminar was about how all the techniques fit together on a wedding day to give you the best results from your flash while still shooting fast. And specifically, how to achieve portrait-quality lighting from your on-camera flash.
If I have to go by the number of questions asked and how much longer the seminar ran, it feels like quite a success – and hopefully everyone gained something that will affect their own photography and approach to flash. To everyone who attended, thank you for being there. And do keep in touch with any questions you may have about the material. I’d love to hear from you.
- I will be at Unique Photo’s booth on Mon – Wed, March 8 – 10 at WPPI in Las Vegas, doing a presentation on how our choice of equipment helps define our artistic approach in photography.
I will be there 11am to noon every day. Come stop by and say hello afterwards.
- the March 20 seminar at Unique Photo! Booking is now open!
- the week-long class on off-camera lighting in Wisconsin is open for booking.
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Here is the complete list of workshops and seminars coming up in 2010
March 07, (Sun) - master-class presentation at WPPI (Las Vegas)
title: flash on the run
March 20, (Sat) – presentation at Unique Photo, NJ wedding photography – approach, style and technique
The seminar will be from 11am – 5pm, and will cover a broad range of topics regarding wedding photography. Details will be announced later this week.
It’s done! As mentioned a few days ago, the entire Tangents blog has been moved over to a VPS. The site should now load markedly faster for everyone, and be a less frustrating experience to try and navigate.
Also, it would have been a seamless transition for everyone. Thank you to the techies at Bluehost who helped me move this blog over without a hiccup … and thank you to the techies at WiredTree (the new host of the neilvn site and Tangents blog), for making it a painless transition.
Those who would scrutinize a little closer, will notice the URL has changed. No more planetneil. The splash page for planetneil will remain for now .. but the Tangents blog is now in a new home … neilvn.com/tangents/
You can update your bookmarks if you want, but the redirects should take care of it all.
So let’s get down to the important stuff again … photography!
There are some changes and improvements to this site coming up ..
The biggest improvement is that I am moving the entire site to a new web host. As the Tangents blog gradually got more visitors over the past few years, it has outgrown the capabilities of the web host I’ve been using. I’ve had people tell me about slow access times and time-outs – things which I’ve also experienced.
So the entire site is being moved over to a completely new webhost offering VPN and much much faster access times. So in the next few days I’ll be busy with that change-over. Hopefully it will be a smooth transition and all that you’ll experience is a sudden surge in speed sometime in the next week!
I get frequent emails from readers of this site, telling me what impact this site has made on their photography. With the idea that some of these stories and examples might inspire other readers, I’m adding a new permanent page - success stories.
I’ve received many emails like the one posted there. I’ll add a few more in the next few days. But in changing computers 3 times in the past few years, I’d have a hard time tracking back and finding some of the emails. So if you’ve sent me something similar, please email me again. I’d love to post a few of the best.
I’m constantly amazed when I check my webstats and see this site referred to and discussed on the photography forums across the world. It’s also hugely flattering and humbling that photographers across the world have offered to do translations of various pages on this site. Currently there are translations into Chinese, Italian, French, Romanian, Polish and German.
The translations so far have mostly been published on other sites. However, I would like a more coherent structure to all the various translations. What I intend is to run parallel blogs, all with the same layout and structure. Due to the nature of any blog, the order of the blog posts will be very different between all the others.
Here is the German translation of the Tangents blog posts and articles. Thank you to Michael Krause who did the work here!
I still need to improve the actual look of the blog. At the moment it is just the barebones structure. But the material is there. I’ll finesse the look of the blogs in the next few weeks. In fact, if a reader of this blog is well versed with the Thesis wordpress theme, let me know. I could use the help.
I have the frameworks ready for the Russian blog, and a Spanish blog, as well as one for the intended Dutch translation. I’ll make them active once the material has been collated properly and posted.
The current translations spread across various sites will be gradually copied to the new blogs, and I would like all future translations to be posted there to keep it all coherent and organized.
With this new system, the brunt of the work won’t necessarily fall on the shoulders of just one person. There can be a number of people working on any particular blog, translating different posts and articles. To enable this, I can create Editor accounts for those who are doing the translations, so that they can edit the material directly on the different translation blogs. Contact me if you’re interested in helping.
I look forward to working with everyone in expanding this. Thank you!
My good friend Scott Bush started a 365 project this year – alive for 365.
The idea with a 365 project is to take one photograph a day. But instead of taking the task upon himself, he roped in 6 of his friends, myself included. We each get to contribute an image a week, thereby easing the load from just one photographer having to produce such a huge number of photographs on a personal project.
Scott also decided that he wanted this project to have more meaning, and he is making available 10 prints of each daily photograph. These 10 prints will be sold at a very affordable $20 per print; with the profit going to the American Cancer Society. More details on the follow us on Twitter.
Today is my first turn to be have a photographed featured and offered for sale – the image above. Check the website often to see the latest images.
I want to thank all the readers of the Tangents blog, and everyone who has contributed to this site – whether in asking questions, or posting their suggestions and help, or adding new material. A sincere thank you to everyone who has passed the site on to friends and colleagues, and a big thank you to everyone who has linked to my site on the photography forums.
That’s my Google analytics Map Overlay for the past 3 months .. a quarter million visits from across the world! Russia, Indonesia, Nepal, Finland, Algeria, Iceland, Chile, Morocco, Poland, Germany, Turkey, Italy, Netherlands, UK, Ireland, and of course my home country South Africa, and where I now live, the USA. 176 Countries across the world!
I changed the website into the current blog format in May 2007. Before that, it was a mish-mash of a few web pages. Since I changed it to a more easily maintained blog format in 2007, traffic has steadily increased. In fact, at the start of 2009, Alexa ranked the planetneil site at 220,000 of all the websites in the world. Right now the planetneil site is hovering around the 150,000 mark. That’s a big jump in just this past year!
I get many notes from people telling me this website has had a huge impact on their photography, and it always feels good to hear that. It’s an incredible feeling knowing that I have been able to help someone in understanding something, or improving their photography, whether personally or professionally.
Now, I just need to get my email inbox down to zero! There are so many emails that I haven’t been able to get to in the past few months with the usual August – November crunch period. I’ll do my best to get to them all. Keep checking in!
With all this, my own understanding of photography, and my experience and skills have grown too over this time. In a way this website has been an unfolding of that as I learn.
So, from me, to everyone across the world, thank you … and here’s to a wonderful 2010 ahead.
Sony released the Cybershot DSC-WX1 digital camera in August ‘09 – a nifty little P&S camera for which they claimed unprecedented low-light capabilities. This compact digital camera has a number of interesting features, of which one of the more interesting one is the Sweep Panorama Mode. It automatically stitches a panoramic image as you sweep the camera around in a near 180 degree angle.
Before we check out the rest of the spec, a little more about the Sweep Panorama feature. It is simplicity itself to use. You simply dial the camera to that setting, hit the shutter button, and sweep the camera around you in a steady motion. That’s it.
Here are a few examples where I tried it out in New York. Now, the obvious way to use this camera would be in a landscape mode, capturing a sweeping vista around you. But in Manhattan, it just made sense to try the WX1 out in vertical mode.
I cropped the images here in a square format to post on the blog, so you will have to click through to the larger image to see the vertical sweep.
Times Square, New York Here I captured a near-180-degree sweep overhead. I started the capture looking South down Times Square, and swept the camera overhead and backwards to capture part of the buildings behind me. Pretty wild! Click through the image and see.
. Flatiron Building, New York
Similarly here, I used the Sony WX1 in an upward sweep.
Click through onto the actual image to see the vertical panorama.
I found this quite impressive. Actually, my response was more, “Cool!”
The beauty of this feature though is that the camera does this automatically for you, on the spot. No need to stitch it together in Photoshop.
You do see some artifacting, especially to the extreme edges as the camera tried to stitch together disparate parts of the scene. Also, if there are people or cars or such moving across the frame, it will give a jagged staggered rendering. This sometimes adds to the effect. But generally, this mode works better on static scenes and subjects. If your motion is unsteady, or the camera can’t stitch a panoramic image from what it is capturing, it will stop and inform you.
Here are two more images, in the more conventional horizontal panoramic mode.
(Once again, click through to see the larger image)
I want to share this hilarious clip, created by David Getson, a member on the Digital Wedding Forum where this was first posted. David has started to create animated clips about forum members that apparently are .. *cough* *cough* .. superstars. Thank you David – I had tears in my eyes from laughter. And I only wish I were half as good as this made me out to be.
(btw, the DWF is the forum to be on if you are serious about wedding photography.)
