Back in September 2008, I posted an entry called Tribute to Tom, which showed some of the reporoduction photos I’d done from the collection of my recently deceased father-in-law, Tom Sharp.

I wanted to make something of a lasting tribute so I turned Tom’s memoirs into  a published book. There are lots of places where you can  make photobooks, such as Photobox - where I previously created a photobook - but I decided to go to Blurb.com as they cater for text-type manuscripts as well as specific photobooks.

Tom had written his memoir down in 1996. It forms about 20 pages of A4 typed manuscript, so not too unwieldy.

The process to create your book is pretty similar whichever publisher you go with. You generally download the software, create your boom on your own computer & then upload it back to the publisher’s website. Some days or weeks later your book pops through the letterbox, all neat & professional looking.

I had chosen & processed the photos to go in the book and the manuscript was already written so it was just a case of laying everything out & splitting the text up into chapters. Uploading the book was a little more problematic in that it kept failing. I resorted to checking out the Blurb support forums where someone suggested that uploading from a laptop over a wireless connection could cause problems, so I transferred the file to one of the desktop PCs and it uploaded fine.

Once the book was uploaded & paid for, it was a case of sitting back & waiting for it to arrive. I wasn’t disappointed. I’d opted for a hardback with dustjacket & premium paper & am really pleased with the product. Sitting on the bookshelf with my (large) book collection, you’d be hard pressed to tell it wasn’t a normal published book like all the others on the shelf.

The book cost about £18 although the postage pushed it up to about £30, which isn’t for a self-published book of this quality. But then the book did come from the USA.

The book was a present for my wife. I’ll possibly get softback versions for the kids as once the book is created on the Blurb website, you can order copies of it whenever you want.

Of course, the perils of leaving food out if you have squirrels in the area are that they invade your feeding stations.

The following shots were actually taken last week, before the previous post on setting up the feeding stations. Sadly, we’ve not had any black squirrels on a day where I had the camera handy, but I’m sure they’ll be back.

We’ve been in the current house for a number of years & every year we feed the birds. This is an ideal opportunity for some wildlife photography.

Although we live in the middle of a town, we have a nice selection of garden visitors, given that the garden isn’t really that big.

We have hedgehogs under the sheds, mice in one of the sheds, lots of frogs who visit our waterfall. We are lucky enough (although some would say not) to have black squirrels who, with their more widespread grey brothers & sisters visit the garden nearly every day.

Squirrels present a challenge to anyone who wants to feed birds. They are very forceful when there is free food in the offing. Most bird feeders, especially those made of plastic, are easy prey for a squirrel so don’t waste your money putting peanuts in plastic feeders; they’ll get ripped to shreds.

I have five feeding stations in the garden, all of which have a variety of food. & all are within easy reach of my 400 or 500mm lenses from the house. By providing a variety of foodstuff you will attract different types of bird.

Don’t forget the birds who prefer feeding from the ground. The tray in the fourth shot is a purpose ground feeder consisting of a wooden frame on short legs with all the food on a wire tray.

I utilise the following foods:

• Sunflower seeds
• Black Sunflower seeds
• General bird seed mix
• suet cake with various flavourings - orange/blackcurrent/mealworm/nuts
• suet pellets
• peanuts
• niger seed
• fat balls

Occasionally I’ll make my own fat cake consisting of lard mixed with birdseed that I put in the blender. I then tip this into either the plastic commercial fat cake cases or coconut shells.

I bulk buy most of the food at a local farm shop in large re-sealable sacks.

It takes a while for the birds to realise all the lovely grub is available (although we do feed throughout the year, I probably triple the amount of feed in winter).

The feeders have been up a couple of weeks, so far we’ve seen:

• Blackbird
• Thrush (the most common - and loud)
• Sparrow
• Dunnock
• Robin
• Collared Dove
• Wood Pigeon
• Magpie
• Blue Tit
• Great Tit
• Coal Tit
• Long Tailed Tit
• Green Finch
• Chaffinch
• Gold Finch

I’ve yet to see our Jay visitors & we have had woodpeckers but I’ve not seen them so far this season.

So far I’ve only taken shots through the living room window, but I’d like to get some camoflage material and set up a little hide nearer the feeders or maybe set the camera up near them and take shots remotely.

I’ve given up the battle against these guys. I put the nuts in squirrel-proof metal containers & just buy more of the other food for everyone to share.

Our garden has some large hornbeam trees and is surrounded by trees in our neighbours’ gardens so there are plenty of places for the birds to sit as they checkout whether it’s safe from them to go to the feeders or await their turn, this provides some nice opportunities for some more natural shots rather than on plastic feeders.

I was quite pleased with the following two shots, a young starling & my first shot of our Long Tailed Tits.

I’ve been playing around with ProShow Producer, which is an excellent way of creating photo movies to display collections of shots. It can be used to create movies of all types really, not just static images although it’s described as “slideshow & presentation software”.

I created a short movie of more of the shots taken at the Remembrance Day Service & put it up on YouTube. It lasts just short of 3 minutes (enough time for the Last Post to play twice) and has had over 300 views so far.

Unfortunately the quality of YouTube videos is not great but you get the picture.

Good news this week as I have an article out in the September issue of Digital SLR User Magazine.

The article is entitled “Classic Cars” & is part of the ongoing “Get Out There!” series which aims to encourage others to go out & take pictures of various photographic subjects.

It was especially pleasing to be approached by the editor who commissioned the article based on photographs I’d taken at the Knebworth Classic Car Show in June. You can see some of the shots I took in my previous blog entry, some of which appeared in the magazine.

The article includes tips on how to get some good shots together with information on my post processing technique.

The magazine was out to subscribers on 4th August & should be in the newsagents on the 7th.

I managed to persuade my resident model - my eldest daughter - to spare 15 minutes this evening so I could give the DIY Beauty Dish as quick test.

I didn’t have enough time to give it a thorough testing so just fired off a few comparison shots with the flashgun, beauty dish & DIY Milk Carton Diffuser which I made a while ago.

I still haven’t found a mirror to go inside the CD case to reflect light back out into the dish, so in the end I have made a small circular cone out of thin card & covered it in aluminium foil which reflects light from the flash out into the dish & then out onto the subject.

I set up the flashgun on a tripod using a wireless trigger mounted on the camera to fire the flash. The flashgun - Sigma DG 500 Super - was set on manual. Camera was hand-held & I used the Canon 50mm f1.8 for all shots.

All shots were taken using the following setup. I clipped a black cloth to the living room curtains for the backdrop.

Plain Flash

This shot with the un-diffused flashgun - 1/160 @ f18. Note the light is quite harsh with stronger shadows.

Beauty Dish

This shot with the Beauty Dish - 1/125 @ f6.3. Note the light is less harsh, more diffused with softer shadows.

Milk Carton Diffuser

This shot with the home made diffuser - 1/125 @ f3.5. Note a more even light including around the top of the head, due ability of the diffuser to bounce flash off the ceiling as well as straight ahead. Much softer shadows still.

Milk Carton Diffuser with Reflector

This shot as above but with the addition of a 80cm silver reflector to the left of the model - 1/125 @ f5. Note more light available to the left of the model’s face, hair & shoulder.

I think overall, while the DIY Beauty Dish does soften the harsh light of the flashgun, I prefer the look of the Milk Carton Diffuser for the overall softness of the light. It’s more portable & much cheaper to make than the Beauty Dish!! Having said that, this isn’t a full test & I’d like to do more test shots using all three setups.

I had a nice surprise today when my Photobook arrived. I’ve been wanting to order a photobook for some time but not got around to compiling & preparing all the shots. I changed this last week when I uploaded 88 photographs to make by book.

I’ve been using Photobox for my last few orders, so I decided to try one of their books. They do several versions of the photobook & I decided to go for the ‘Classic A4‘ This comes in  a hard cover which has a window. The cost is £19.99 for 26 pages with each additional page at £1.20. On any page you can have text only, or from one to nine photos.

Compiling the book is relatively simple. You upload your photos into an album and select the album you want to produce your photobook from. Then it’s a case of selecting your page templates for each page & dragging your photos from the album into the photobook template. You then add any text and send your book through for printing (having paid first). My big criticism is that given that an awful lot of cameras work on a 3:2 format, hardly any of the templates work to this format so you have to crop your shots to fit.

Photobox quote a 3-day turnaround for their photobooks. This was where they fell down. It took 10 days to get my book. I received an email saying this was due to one of their binding machines breaking down, at least I got an apology half-way through. The problem was that the standard prints I ordered at the same time took 9 days. Having said that, I uploaded some more prints at about 10am this morning and at 12.20 I got an email saying they’d been sent first class!

Anyway, what’s the book like?

Well, I’ve nothing to compare it to as I’ve never seen one of these products before (apart from a friend’s wedding which cost a lot more than twenty quid!) I have to say I’m pretty pleased. The cover is substantial card, around 4mm thick with a rounded window through which I can see one of my photos. The website says the paper is 170gsm gloss. I don’t know about that but it feels nice and has a more satin feel to it.

All in all I’m pretty pleased. I paid a bit more than the standrd rate because I added extra pages but at these prices, I’ll certainly be looking into getting more.

I mentioned on my post about going to the Focus on Imaging show in Birmingham, that I bought a mount cutter for framing prints. It arrived a week or so after the show & I’ve used to to make help frame 4 prints.

Given the tens of thousands of photographs I’ve taken, it’s something of a surprise that I have very few on display in the house. There is one of the kids walking in the woods, taken about 5 years ago which has been in the hallway for a few years. There are one or 2 holiday snaps in small frames dotted about the house but nothing else on the wall.

I did have some military aircraft shots at the bottom of the stairs but a burst water tank leaking through the ceiling onto them ruined them, they were never replaced.

I bought the cutter in an effort to make sure I framed some shots to put them on the wall. And maybe to prepare some other shots for display elsewhere, should the opportunity arise.

So I bought the Longridge Duo Plus system bevel mount cutter. It’s a bit of a mouthful for a system which basically cuts out holes in mounting board. So this is the kit, it’s quite large as you can see on my kitchen table. I went for the Duo Plus - there are several sizes, this is a medium, you can get smaller, this one should take A0 card.

The kit comes with everything you need to make perfect beveled cuts in mounting board. And consists of: 

• The cutting plate & rail
• straight cutter
• beveled cutter (which can be used left or right-handed)
• spare blades
• spare blade holder for beveled cutter
• screwdriver
• pencil & marking out tool
• tape measure
• tutorial DVD

My project was to take some portrait photos of my daughters, print them out & frame them for display on the wall. I took the shots a few weeks ago & selected 3 between us which we liked. I printed them at A4 on the home printer, although I’ll probably get Photobox to print out more permanent prints & replace them later.

I got some frames from the hobby superstore down the A1M & found some 300mm by 400mm which happened to be in a sale. The next shot shows what I was working with.

Using the cutter didn’t take long getting used to at all. I’d seen the demo at the Focus show as one of the sales team gave me a personal run-through of how to use it. I also watched the DVD which gives you the techniques required to get perfect square beveled cuts. 

I got some mounting card from the local art shop in town, I think it cost about £2.95 for a sheet & they have a wide selection of colours. I bought 3 colours to run my first tests.

I measured out a 400mm section from 2 contrasting coloured card sheets & cut them with the straight cutter, it’s just like running a guilotine up the silver guide rail & performs a perfect sharp cut, I then trimmed them down so I had 2 sheets each 400mm by 300mm to fit the frames I’d bought.

You then turn the card over, coloured face down, and mark out your frame using the supplied marking tool. You then slide the card under the rail & butt it up against a stop so it doesn’t slide off away from you. Then you put the bevelled cutter on the rail and slide it to the exact position where your line meets the cut out ‘V’, fix a plastic stop, move the cutter to the other end of the line & fix the other stop.

The blade is on a swivel, you push it down into the card & slide it from one stop to the other, thus getting a perfectly bevelled & straight cut. You then switch the card round 180 degrees and do the same for the other side. You then have to adjust the stops to do the last 2 sides. Provided the blade is set to the correct depth, you get a perfect cut-out every time. Marvellous!

So after doing both mattes, making sure the inner one has a smaller aperture than the outer one, you’re ready to mount your photo.

This is the finished product after cutting.

I’m really pleased with my new mount-cutter. They’re not cheap but they do a brilliant job. I just need to get more prints sorted out. The problem will be finding the wall-space now that I can produce nice bevelled frames.

You can find more information about the Longridge Bevel Cutters at their website: http://www.longridge.co.uk

For the last three years we’ve hired a trailer four our annual summer holiday. We found a guy in Baldock who had excellent hire rates. Last summer I went to pick up the trailer & we got talking about the forthcoming weather for our holiday. Troy said he had a special interest in weather as he flies a microlight. I said I was interested in flying too as it was one of my main photographic interests. He asked if I had a good camera & explained he was looking for someone to take some aerial shots of his church. A deal was done.

When we got back from holiday I arranged to meet Troy in a farmer’s field in Baldock. He has his microlight aircraft all set up & ready to go. I had two cameras, one had the Sigma 18-50mm & the other had the Canon 100-400.

Troy flies a Sky Ranger twin-seat fixed wing microlight which is basically the same shape as a small plane but made of aluminium tubes & a fabric (dacron) skin. It is a little cramped for a strapping 6′3er such as myself but I was soon strapped in. I had to make sure that the camera straps didn’t foul the control wires which run along the centre console & also had to be careful not to fiddle with the dual control foot pedals. I had taken the precaution of using an extra strap on the camera so that it was attached to my belt, just in case I managed to drop if while hanging out the window taking pics.

We were soon rumbling along the runway, which is basically a thin strip of grass right down the middle of a ploughed field. We managed to take off before we hit the A1M at the bottom of the field. It was probably perfectly fine but I was sure we just missed clipping the top of the hedge which runs alongside the motorway. Troy said something about really noticing the extra weight on board.

We took off into the skies of North Herts & spent some time climbing with me getting used to the feeling of flying again. Apart from one trip to Scotland on Ryanair a few years ago, the last time I flew was on my honeymoon, 20 years ago! I loved it. I’m sure my face looked like a Cheshire cat.

The main purpose of the flight was for me to take some photos of the building Troy’s church meets so we did some passes adjacent to London Road in Baldock. Troy explained that he was not allowed to fly a microlight over habited areas so we had to do it just on the outskirts of the town, looking in. I was glad of the 100-400 zoom although I had to make sure I kept the shutter speed up to minimise camera shake. The best way to take the shots was to open the side window. This gave a clear shot but it was bloody windy. The Sky Ranger has a cruising speed of about 80 miles per hour, so sticking a camera out into the air & you sure notice it. It’s even worse with the big zoom lens. It’s a wonder I got any shots the amount of buffeting the camera suffered.

We got the shots of Troys church, plus the local Tescos, then we headed down the A1M towards junction 9 at Letchworth, from there I took some longer distance shots of the Lister Hospital at Stevenage. I was amazed to be able to see quite a few tower blocks of London in the distance. We then took some shots of Letchworth. I was amazed how different the town looks from above. It was often difficult to work out where we were. I wanted to get a shot or two of my house but had some trouble finding it. When I did find it, the angle we were at meant that the large Hornbeam trees at the bottom of the garden completely obscured the house. I could see my neighbours’ houses though.

At some point Troy asked me of I’d had enough and it was an emphatic "No" from me. So he flew around the other side of Letchworth & I managed to get some shots of the girls’ schools, all three of them. I got some shots of St Nicholas Church at Norton which has always held a special place in my heart since that’s where Jane & I married.

I took some shots of Troys house before we landed and the trip was over. It was one of the best things I’d done for a long time. Troy said I could go with him again anytime I wanted, which is great news.

I spoke with Troy last week & he tells me he will be starting to fly again around April & I’m welcome to join him. With a bit of luck he’ll let me take the camera up again.