Venice old and new

[bfitzgerald]

I like the NC-10, and did a nice review on that, one of the best ones I have tried.

Slightly OT here, but Henry..I was reading your blog and I think I spot a real talent for beach shots, you need to get down there asap, and show us more

[bakubo]

Slightly OT here, but Henry..I was reading your blog and I think I spot a real talent for beach shots, you need to get down there asap, and show us more

I am a 4-5 minute walk from the beach so I am there everyday. Lots of opportunities for photos. Take a look at the Hawaii gallery on my website for a whole lot more. This afternoon I added a bunch of new ones from yesterday and last week in the Hawaii/Hawaii 8 gallery:

http://www.bakubo.com

I expect to be back down there with my camera in about 30 minutes.

[Ossie]

MarcoC.

I use a small Samsung NC-10 netbook, which is very nice and compares well to the Asus models

It is the Samsung that I have been most tempted to buy especially as they have now introduced the NC110. My main use will be as a backup for the Jobo GigaOne when I am travelling so that I have at least 2 copies of the files. Depending on where I am and time available I would in addition have the images copied to a DVD/CD as a further safeguard. It is usually quite cheap to get done and worth it for that extra peace of mind. Once back home all the files get transferred to a HDD and copied to DVD. I have had problems with CD's becoming corrupted (software recovered all but a few images) but so far the DVD's have not been a problem.

I would also like to review the images on a bigger screen than the camera's and am hoping that the Organiser that comes with PSE6 will do the job.

Useful reminder regarding theft. Thank you

Bakubo

A few months ago I bought an Asus EeePC 900HA with 8.9" screen. You can read about it in my November 17, 2008 and January 12, 2009 entries in my blog:

Thanks for the pointers all very useful. Great pictures on the web site.

David.

It can view JPEGs perfectly of course but I do not shoot JPEG at all with this number of files to handle. I use a 250GB Iomega HD, bus powered via the plugged-in Asus, and a card reader, to backup my cards. I do not wipe the cards, just back up and keep the full cards.

Thank you for the feed back. I generally shoot in cRAW but when I'm travelling I like to send the folk back home a few images to keep them happy and so the ability to do just basic editing is very useful but not critically necessary.

Cheers

[bakubo]

David, maybe after you get home and have a chance to review your Venice photos some more you may find that you like some of them a lot more than when you saw them the first time. When I get home from a trip and start reviewing mine I always have such a feeling of disappointment in my shots. Then later when I start going through them a second time I usually feel better as I find ones that on second look I like. Good luck!

[braeside]

The conditions are like that shot generally. Of course, it would be no use as a stock pic, which is our purpose when shooting generally - the gondola is empty. He's not got any tourists on board. Therefore, not usable for mags, guide books, or anything much!

I got a good one today, can't post it (no raw processing on my Asus for A900 files) - gondola, couple, gondolier, perfectly framed by freshly laundered sheets hanging out along the little rio. Our best selling Venice pix are of washing hanging out.

David

What? - you never got around to putting in WINE and FastStone?
http://www.photoclubalpha.com/forum/vie ... s&start=15

I am tempted to get a 13" MacBook Pro, small enough to take on trips and useful enough to use, because the Asus EeePC is marginal for viewing, but useful for checking files have copied to the external backup drive from the cards. Wifi Internet use is fine at a push as well. Though I find the iPhone quicker to read my email.

I keep learning good stock photography tips from you David - I have been striving to keep tourists out of my photos, when in fact I should be encouraging them! - I do find however that buyers are fickle and just because one photo of rubbish bins sells a few times, doesn't mean that taking more similar photos will sell an more! Variety seems to be key.

You are missing the Scottish 'heatwave' - to be 23 C today and humid - not what we like.

[braeside]

David, maybe after you get home and have a chance to review your Venice photos some more you may find that you like some of them a lot more than when you saw them the first time. When I get home from a trip and start reviewing mine I always have such a feeling of disappointment in my shots. Then later when I start going through them a second time I usually feel better as I find ones that on second look I like. Good luck!

Absolutely - looking at photos when you can almost compare the actual scene with your photo is bound to disappoint. However, look at it cold after your memory has forgotten the real image and you start to think the photo looks pretty good and often you notice a lot of things in the photos that your eyes didn't at the time of the exposure.

[David Kilpatrick]

The Unix utilities I downloaded, I think, but I have never installed anything on the ASUS myself. I have no idea how to do so, tried one item, it did not appear in the list of programs so I have no idea where it went. Not like a Mac or PC. Anyway, there's no way I could reasonably find the time to review shots when on location.

I have just edited my shots from day 1 - not even looked at Shirley's yet, and also no captions or keywords yet - and it has taken me a full day to get down to 74 final images, retouched and corrected, with a good deal of deletion. Yes, I've got plenty of shots which are needed, but nothing iconic - just a lot of 100 per cent generic images. I would not rate any of them as good photographs, though 20 or 30 would be prime postcard/guide book material.

Sigma 12-24mm letting me down badly at 16-24mm (it is perfect at 12mm), SAL 70-300mm G doing much the same at 200-300mm - it really is no better than the old Apo D 100-300mm, and twice the 'apparent' size. I chose not to take the Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 as it won't fit the airline-profiled kit bag so easily, but I wish I had done. Fantastic results from the 28-75mm KM generally.

David

[pakodominguez]

Sigma 12-24mm letting me down badly at 16-24mm (it is perfect at 12mm), SAL 70-300mm G doing much the same at 200-300mm - it really is no better than the old Apo D 100-300mm, and twice the 'apparent' size. I chose not to take the Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 as it won't fit the airline-profiled kit bag so easily, but I wish I had done. Fantastic results from the 28-75mm KM generally.

David

I took the 17-35 f2.8-4; 28-75 f2.8 and Tamron 70-200 f2.8 to my trip to Peru last Easter (on the A700) and I share your feelings: the 28-75 is a winner! the 17-35 performed properly and I could leave the 70-200 home and take the 35-200 Xi and the Lensbaby instead (I didn't need the f2.8 while working with the long zoom)

BTW, any special technique for caption/keywording you rimages?

Regards

[bakubo]

David, from your recent posts about the trip to Venice it sounds like you are disappointed with it from a photography perspective. I hope the trip otherwise was fun though. Maybe you had some good experiences and you will remember those much longer than you will care about the photos.

By the way, an Italian friend from Busto Arsizio just got back from Venice too where she was attending the S.Pellegrino Cooking Cup 2009. She told me she had a fantastic time! Did you see anything about it while you were there?

[braeside]

Welcome back David - it seems hotter here than it was in the Middle East in May

[David Kilpatrick]

It's hard for the photography to be bad in Venice, but midsummer is not the best time - dawn is too early, and sunset is in the wrong place. Spring and autumn sunsets go behind San Giorgio and the Salute when seen from the San Marco fondamente, and in winter, align down the Grand Canal as seen from the Rialto (and various other places). I've always been off-season or during Carnevale to Venice in the past, and despite shorter days, more of the day is useful and the sun angles just work better.

We stayed in Mestre, which is a very popular hotel location for visiting Venice without spending an extra €1000 to be located in the city itself. There are supposed to be trains every few minutes and the journey takes 10 minutes, costing €1, ending at Venice S. Lucia Ferrovia. However, the trains are not reliable and the information system is broken. One day, when it rained, we could not leave the hotel until mid-day but we lost nothing - all trains had been stopped by the rain and most were running two hours late. We still had to wait half an hour for a train. Then, the vaporetto takes 10-20 minutes to get you to wherever you want to go from the Ferrovia stop - or you walk for the same time. So unlike staying in the heart of Venice, there could be an hour either way from hotel to startpoint of day's walk. We were lucky, our Mestre hotel was right next to the station, plenty of others widely advertised as '15 minutes from Venice centre' are actually a good half-hour walk or a sporadic bus ride away from the station.

We also wanted to check out the Venice Lido (not Lido de Jesolo) one day and that turned out to be a total waste of time, though the 90 minutes of boat travel involved was not too bad. While it was pretty hot in Venice, Scotland is less comfortable right now - the nights are too warm, the humidity is right up. Our neighbours looking after our dog thought they had to rescue her from flooding on Tuesday, and tried using buckets to lower the water level in our yard (of course, she just went through the water, no worries). The house on the other side had to call out water authority pumps, the rain was so heavy the drains burst into their basement kitchen and flooded it with sewage. We had an anti-backflow valve fitted way back, 1991 I think, and it has held out ever since.

For keywording, I use Expression Media Pro (used to be iView Media Pro). I name the files in such a way that subjects automatically group together when sorted, thus every shot with a gondolier as the main theme is in a series 'venicegondoliers1.jpg' and so on. Capture time sorting then organises them into locations. I also do some visual selection - for example, all photographs which show plants or gardens might be selected (add a preset keyword batch for this); then all pictures containing public transport, ditto; then all pictures showing restaurants - until I run out of ideas.

Captioning is a bit more individual, I start with a basic caption applied to all pictures like 'Venice June 2009' and write/paste in further caption info individually or in small batches. Author and copyright info is added at the start in my name. All Shirley's images are filenamed to end in ...sk.jpg so I just find that string, and change those to her authorship. This is lost when importing to Alamy, but I can use the same search term to locate her pix and reassign the pseudonym.

Though Alamy is nothing like the earner it should have been, it continues to function - July kicked off with a $300 sale of a studio pic, taken for one of my British Journal reports, showing a Canon 1000D SD card and battery door both open with the card and battery half inserted. I end up with £120 for a detail pic of a camera which I had to take anyway. June ended with a $50 sale, a simple macro shot of the words 'RSS Feed' picked up by differential focus, on an LCD screen. There's no way trips to Venice are needed to feed saleable images into a stock pic site, in fact your own bathroom or kitchen would be a better destination.

David

[artington]

Interesting comments here, particularly those on lenses. Personally I quite like the Sigma 14/2.8 and David's comments about the 12-24 suggest I may be in the right frame there. Ditto for the 100-300, which is a nice little thing although probably not up to the IQ required by photo agencies but that doesn't bother me.

A couple of observations on other elements covered in the string. Firstly, in my view (as a past part-time FX trader) the euro is absurdly over-priced against the dollar and yen (but not so much against the pound), which compounds the ludicrous prices you have to pay in the two great European rip-off cities, Venice and Paris (as is London for that matter). If you want value go to Tokyo, where I was a couple of weeks ago, and where you can get an excellent seated restaurant lunch for around 1,500 yen (say USD 15) or a bit more if you want a beer. Immensely photogenic too although, being a business trip, I had little time for that and in any case took my Panasonic LX3 rather than any Sony camera. I had forgotten how much of a true 21st Century city Tokyo is - fabulous, colourful and vibrant. I imagine for Europeans there is plenty of value in any dollar based country too - certainly that was my experience on a no-stinting holiday in Jordan in April. So avoid Europe IMHO.

Secondly, Alamy. I have tried this without success and have concluded it is not worth my effort. I think this is down to the modus operandi of the key-word search engine rather than any issues of photographic quality (but then I would say that ) For example, taking the Venetian theme, a search for vaporetto brings up 928 entries while one for gondola does 16,741. I doubt many seekers are going to trawl more than a few pages (60 images a page) so success will be front loaded towards earlier providers (with prefix A..) and the current B.. are right at the very bottom of the pile - at least that's how it looks to me; this makes it a rather pointless exercise for new contributions. Furthermore, the Alamy snapshots, even zoomed, are pathetically small and unimpressive despite the underlying image size needing to be 50 Mb (or whatever) and the web pages are generally horrible to look at unlike Smugmug or Zenfolio. That said, I'm not sure whether these are any better as commercial outlets, particularly for non-US contributors, but they are certainly prettier. I suspect the whole web photo hosting business is massively over-subscribed because of gazillions of hopeful amateurs (like me) spoiling the pitch for those who do this for a living - hence my decision to do my bit by stopping doing so. I guess in this information overload age the only solution for pros is the old one - the personal touch, via personal networks or agencies.

[bossel]

It's hard for the photography to be bad in Venice, but midsummer is not the best time ..

I had been advised not to go in either summer or winter - summer can be very hot and smelly (and crowded). Would suggest to there close to May or September.

We stayed in Mestre, which is a very popular hotel location for visiting Venice without spending an extra €1000 to be located in the city itself.

It's time you beef up that british pound again or Europe will see less and less british guests And we will all come over to London or Edinbourgh for holiday, a cheap beer and fish and chips (and a curry )

We stayed in a hotel in San Marco, 125 Euro per night. A 5mins walk to Rialto or Piazza San Marco, clean, good breakfast, helpful staff. Initially thought about Mestre, but the advantages of staying in town made us pay a bit more (though 125 in San Marco is really not that expensive).

lens wise, I used the Sony 18-250. Had the 10-20 with me but not enough time too change lenses back and forth. That 18-250 is really useful, with all the drawbacks it has.

Btw if ever I have some time I should check my pics and start a Venice picture thread

[Dr. Harout]

... I should check my pics and start a Venice picture thread

I would love to see those shots.

[David Kilpatrick]

The problem in Venice isn't just the euro exchange rate, or costs in general - the rail and bus fares are low, and the vaporetto reasonable for what you get. Even the accommodation we booked, a business hotel with first rate free wifi broadband throughout, was identically priced to any UK hotel of the same type in midsummer. No, it's all down to the beer! Here, a pint (580ml) is about €3 - Venice, 400ml €7 or 600/660ml €9 - even some places trying to sell you a litre glass for €12 (we did not try that!).

The joke with Alamy is that on the day we arrived, I made a sale at $46 with Distributor Commission - 40% - Alamy adds 20% - $18 approx to us - call it €15. We had just asked for two 330ml beers from the hotel without checking the price and that was €14 (their first and last sale to us) - so the value of a picture used commercially has come down to paying the photographer a couple of bottled beers.

Even so, we are still getting over £4,500 a year from the Alamy images or roughly £0.50 per image per year. It pays for the travel.

I'll post some Venice pix soon, still going through raws.

David