Category Archives: Posts with Images

A trip to the Museum of Welsh Life

Daily Life, Posts with Images

We went to the Museum of Welsh Life at Saint Fagans on the outskirts of Cardiff. It’s a fascinating place with buildings from around Wales having been dismantled and transported there and re-built and restored. It was very quiet there apart from a few visitors and a small number of school groups. It requires a full day to see everything, it’s also a good opportunity for me to practice a little Welsh as all the staff speak the language fluently.

David called in, ran out of petrol and once again ‘borrowed’ the contents of my petrol can!

Claire made a carrot cake, here’s a photo of Gill and Claire ‘secretly scoffing’ the excess topping.

Gill and Claire #2

Apparently bacon tastes great with the carrot cake topping 🙁 as a result Claire has to cook more bacon, photographic evidence that she can cook!

Claire cooking

A busy Sunday

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Spent most of the day processing the images from Stuart and Karen’s wedding which was at Bryngarw House.

Here are a couple of images from Stuart and Karen’s wedding.

children #1

children #2

Perishability in a photograph is important in a picture. If a photograph looks perishable we say, “Gee, I’m glad I have that moment”. – John Loengard, “Pictures Under Discussion”

A relaxing Sunday

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Lunch at the Hollybush once more today! Julie (my Welsh tutor), her mum and aunt were also there. They were serving home-made apple pie and custard, it was delicious.

Upgraded the PHP version on my local Apache server, not very exciting!

Neil and Michelle have arranged to come and see me tomorrow evening to talk about the photographs for their wedding album.

Neil and Michelle

“Pictures hold life’s experiences. And I feel that with every experience you learn something. Therefore, you learn something with every picture you take.” –Anonymous

An even darker Wednesday

Daily Life, Posts with Images

An amazing amount of rain last night “bwrw hen wragedd a fyn” the Welsh for “raining cats and dogs”, literal translation is “raining old ladies and sticks”. A number of areas in west and north Wales have experienced flooding.

It’s a fact of modern life that computers require frequent maintenance and housekeeping. I’ve just downloaded the October critical update patches from Microsoft for Windows XP, these cure a number of recently discovered vulnerabilities in the operating system. My fax sending software has recently started to hang my machine when sending faxes so that has been re-installed and is now working properly again. I’m also archiving off a number of old files to DVD. All critical folders are synchronised automatically between the two main computers using a very nice piece of software SyncBack. All the hard drives on the main computers are also automatically backed up to high capacity external drives. All my photographic images are burned to DVD after downloading the cards from the cameras and the files are also copied a second time after completion of the job, we also keep the CDs that are sent to the lab, you can’t have too many back ups!

I’ve just purchased and downloaded a Photoshop CS2 script that will simplify my processing of proof prints by automating a number of the tasks that are currently carried out manually. This is a snapshot processed through the script of my son David with Tiegan (she really likes David).

David and Tiegan

Just been to my Welsh class in Church Village, we’re still struggling on numbers but hope a few more people will come along to make the class viable.

“Every man who is high up loves to think that he has done it all himself; and the wife smiles, and lets it go at that.” – David Bailey

Sunday – a day of mainly rest

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We took my mum out for lunch at the Hollybush today (as it was so good last week, we decided to go there again today!), it’s just around the corner from my mum’s house so is also very convenient. We had the usual struggle with my mum over who pays the bill – we won and paid!

I’m sometimes asked whether film or digital is better for wedding photography. I was a long time film user, using medium format cameras for weddings and 35mm for some commercial work. Over the last few years professional digital cameras have advanced to the point where image quality is as good, if not better than medium format film. As a result digital offers a number of advantages to wedding photography over traditional film, these are:-

  • Better handling of mixed lighting, with digital you don’t have the strange orange colour cast with indoor lighting.
  • Greater flexibility in album design, it would be almost impossible with film to create the beautiful montage custom designs we create for our Jorgensen E albums.
  • The ability to have any finished print or album image in colour, black and white, sepia or toned – with film for a sepia or toned image you really had to capture the original image on black and white film. Here are a few examples.

    • Andrew and Lisa #1

    Andrew and Lisa #2
    The car in the above images is the one used in the film Evita.

    Chris and Chi #1

    Chris and Chi #2

    There is one slight drawback to digital (it’s called post processing or workflow), to create the highest quality images you have to be fully colour managed and the photographer rather than the lab is responsible for any colour correction and image cropping. This means more time is spent at the computer preparing images and designing albums.

    I’m sometimes asked how we produce our final prints, while a number of photographers print on ink jet printers, all our work is produced as conventional photographic prints by professional processors – we have yet to be convinced about the longevity of ink jet prints and want to be confident that the images we provide will last well over a hundred years.

    Just met with Stuart and Karen to go through their requirements for their wedding in a few weeks time. Should be a fun day with a mixture of different atire from kilts to uniformed.

    “Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.” Henri Cartier-Bresson

    Third day of my blog!

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    Decided to change hosts for my web site, waited in the phone queue for ages to get through to customer services at my current hosting company. At last a person in place of the music! All my queries answered within a couple of minutes. Now to sign up with a new hosting company and start the tedious process of uploading all my files and configuring the new site.

    Drove to Newport to the BMW dealer to collect some parts I’d ordered last week, a much more pleasant experience than the previous week when there had been a nasty accident just past junction 28 on the M4 and it took over an hour to get from junction 32 at Cardiff to junction 28 at Tredegar Park.

    Had a telephone call to say that the bride who was coming to see me this evening would have to rearrange as her car was in the garage.

    I’ve now managed to copy all my files to the new web host, we just need to amend the name server entries and then we’ll be live on our new site – the web site should be continuously available while all this is going on as it will be a major inconvenience to me and my customers if it isn’t!

    Had an email from Andrew and Elaine to confirm that they’re happy with their album design and I can go ahead and order the album.

    Here’s a small overview of the album design

    Andrew and Elaine's Album

    “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.” – Diane Arbus

    My first day as a blogger!

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    Well I’ve read a few other blogs so I thought I’d create one myself, the aim is to give you an insight into my life and work – I hope I succeed with it and you find some things of interest here.

    I had a phone call from a lovely couple, Andrew & Natalie, who came to see me on Sunday to discuss photography for their wedding next year, they rang to let me know they were booking me and would call around later with the contract and reservation fee. As I’m mentioning Sunday, we went to the Hollybush in Church Village for lunch, loads of meat complete with real gravy! the apple pie and custard was also yummy.

    The engine on my BMW 520i recently stopped and refused to restart at a really convenient spot – in the outside lane of the traffic lights in Tonteg. Fortunately a couple of passers by helped me push it around the corner – BMWs aren’t supposed to break down! It took an hour or so with an oscilloscope to diagnose that one of the relays supplying power to the engine management unit had failed! A trip to the main dealer to lighten my wallet and obtain a new relay. I’ve just fitted the new relay and I’m really pleased that the car is now running again. The brake disks on the Volkswagen Passat are badly scored and the next little job will be to replace them a major service on the other BMW (525i) should get all the car maintenance up to date – the joys of motoring!

    I spent the afternoon making up some Jorgensen wedding albums, they are really lovely albums but as the pages are pre-bound you have to be so careful when mounting the prints and mats – any mistake could mean a new album from Australia. They look really lovely I know my customers will be delighted when they collect them.

    I did some more work on the album design for Andrew & Elaine who were married at the Heritage Park Hotel on the 6th of August, they’re delighted with it so far.

    Andrew & Elaine

    Andrew (Andrew & Natalie) called around with the paper work for their wedding photography, they’re really excited to be having a modern Jorgensen E album to showcase the story of their special day.

    Visited the Rhondda Rebels web site they are playing Sheffield at home on Saturday, I haven’t been to a game in ages, it should be a great match.

    “Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding.” – Diane Arbus