Imaging Storm Photography » Uncategorized

My Instagrid.me page

David Bradley — Mon, 14 May 2012 09:57:01 +0000

If you’re not on your smart phone then you will be missing out on all those InstaGram updates. There is, however, an alternative way to check out the snaps I posted to InstaGram

sciencebase on Instagrid.me | The Best Way to View Instagram Photos.

10 photos you should have on your phone

David Bradley — Mon, 07 May 2012 14:28:39 +0000

This is a photo tip with a difference. Take photos of these ten things with your phone to help you remember stuff

• Your printer cartridges showing their make and number
• Your family members’ clothing sizes
• The measurements of your car air filter.
• Travel confirmation numbers, snap the booking confirmation
• Pictures of your current medicines (and prescriptions)
• The types of lightbulbs that fit your home fixtures
• Recipes in books for when you go food shopping
• Anything “borrowed” that you might want to buy for yourself later
• Your family car, bicycles other expensive stealables and your family members (taken as read, but on holiday snap the kids as a reminder of what they’re wearing should they get lost)
• A reminder of where you parked when visiting a new place

Modified from 10 Snapshots You Should Keep in Your Phones Photo Album. Oh and seriously…don’t lose your phone.

idGettr lets you find your Flickr ID

David Bradley — Wed, 02 May 2012 14:41:11 +0000

There are, once again, ugly rumors circulating about the demise of photo gallery site flickr. But, we’re none of us rank amateurs here, we all have separate backups of all the photos we don’t want to lose should flickr be shut down, don’t we?

Well, maybe not and if you want to use a download app to grab them all in one go rather than saving each one to your hard drive manually you will need to know your flickr ID, not your flickr username (e.g. Mine is sciencebase) but your ID, which will look something like this: 43311023@N00

Anyway, idGettr, lets you quickly find your ID from your username so that you can enter it into the appropriate field in whatever download software you’re using. At this moment, that happens to be a gallery plugin for WP, which will allow me to pull all my flickr photos into the Imaging Storm site in one go. Of course, I have offline backups galore of all my digital photos and scans. Of course, I do…

Botswana and climate change

David Bradley — Tue, 01 May 2012 17:20:26 +0000

I am currently writing a news story about how Botswana might be affected by climate and in particular the impact on the tourist sector and the Okavango Delta. I visited the region almost twenty years, followed by a flying visit to Mosi-oa-Tunya (known to us at the time as Victoria Falls). I have written elsewhere about the plight of the endangered African Wild Dog. Anyway, here are a couple of my snaps of the wildlife in the Delta one of wild dog (Lycaon pictus), the other stampeding buffalo.

New Cut Cottenham

David Bradley — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 17:11:37 +0000

This is the so-called New Cut in Cottenham, Cambridgeshire, that drains the local Fenland and into which numerous smaller drains feed from outlying areas, ultimately the drain itself feeds into The Ouse and on to The Wash.

This photo was taken at lunchtime today after a weekend of torrential rain in the area. Yesterday lunchtime the water was about a metre higher. It usually copes with the Fenland run off from the mainly crop-growing agricultural land around here and I have only ever seen it full to the brim once, although that apparently happens quite often.

However, when they build the new town of Northstowe not much more than a stone’s throw from this drainage system, New Cut will have to absorb the run-off from that land too. I strongly suspect that New Cut and the other interconnected Fenland drains will increasingly spill over. Given that the are farmhouses and quite a few dwellings on at least one bank of some stretches it is no great stretch to assume that houses will be at greater risk of flooding than they are now.

By the way, it’s called New Cut (if I remember rightly the embankment was rebuilt in the 1920s), but the drainage system is rather older, predating even the draining of the Fens. More history here.

Scientific tools for photographers

David Bradley — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 15:04:45 +0000

Use these to better understand how various camera settings will change the look of your photos. To provide context, many of the links lead to calculators embedded within the tutorials pages.

via Photography Tools.

Instagrid.me makes a gallery of your Instagram photos

David Bradley — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 11:03:38 +0000

>Instagram fans will be all to well aware that at the moment there is no native method of displaying your edited photos as a gallery on the web. There are, however, lots of 3rd party sites that will make a gallery from your retrofied snaps among them Instagrid.me, which I’ve used to create a contact sheet display of a selection of my recent photos from London, The Cotswolds and elsewhere.

sciencebase on Instagrid.me.

Imaging Storm on Twitter

David Bradley — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 11:00:49 +0000

Until now, the Imaging Storm site has simply posted via my sciencebase twitter feed, but as of this morning the site has its own Twitter handle, imaginatively it’s: @imagingstorm Feel free to join me there!

Snapseed to InstaGram

David Bradley — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 10:40:07 +0000

Snapseed just updated on my iPad tells me it is now “retina display” optimised (well that’s for the new iPad, not my model, of course). But, it also now lets you port your photos directly into Instagram for sharing on that photo network, which is also nice.

I use SnapSeed a lot and have recently rediscovered Instagram (link is to my InstaGrid gallery) although I posted my first photo there some time in 2011…my latest favourite, fun photo editing tool is PicMonkey, which replaces/displaces PicNik (about to be subsumed into Google+ photo editing, I believe).

Making your own booze

David Bradley — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 16:07:51 +0000

Spring is in the air and the blackthorn bushes are in bloom (the hawthorn bushes, also known as “may” are not yet out, so keep your coat on). Nevertheless, and entirely naturally, at this time of year one’s thoughts turn to the formation of sloes and the annual creation of that most cyanidic of seasonal winter beverages…sloe gin.

Actually, pictured is my decanting of last year’s crop of sloe vodka. Here’s a hint, don’t use a coffee filter paper, use a sheet of muslin instead, the filter papers get clogged up very quickly and you will have become very thirsty before enough of the stuff has dribbled through to make a stiff drink. Here’s another tip, the stones (that harbour the seed) of sloes as with all other prunus fruit, including plums, apricots, peaches, damsons etc contain compounds that naturally generate cyano compounds. It’s best not to eat the stones nor to leave them soaking in a bottle of alcohol for more than a year or so…just in case. EtOH in your drink is fairly fine, HCN is most certainly not.

Incidentally, you don’t have to be an alcoholic, have raised liver enzymes or even have a serious drinking problem to check out the alcohol advice on the Drinkaware site.