Thamesmead – from The Buildings of London
Do I have any resolutions for the New Year? Most days I decide I’ve got to try and do at least something a bit better in future, but my record over the lists I’ve made at the start of some previous years isn’t too positive. Though I suppose it’s better to start with good intentions.
So here are a few things I’m going to try and do or do better in 2014
1. Get back to working more with panoramic images, particularly on the River Thames and the Thames estuary.
I’ve never really come to terms with moving away from using film in panoramic cameras to using digital cameras. I need to concentrate on subjects and find ways to work which are less tied up with techniques.
I’m intending to work with just two basic formats, roughly corresponding to my earlier panoramas from the Horizon or Widelux and X-Pan cameras, but taken with the D800E.
2. Try and panic less, think more and take fewer pictures.
All too easy – both with film and more so with digital to get excited and keep taking pictures rather than keep carefully assessing the situation.
3. Make sure to keep a closer eye on the settings the camera uses in automatic modes and avoid messing things up.
In particular I’d like to avoid finding I was using silly slow shutter speeds before I’d taken lots of pictures with camera shake or subject movement rather than after I’d taken a lot of pictures. Auto-ISO can help here, though it doesn’t always work as I’d like.
4. Check my lenses are clean more obsessively
Ruined too many pictures last week on a longish walk with one of my sons because there was a greasy fingermark on the lens filter, which produced flare that hardly showed up in images on the screen on the back of the camera but is annoyingly obvious when you view the images on the computer screen.
5. Cut down on equipment; carry less and sell things I no longer use.
Perhaps there are also more things I can do with the Fuji cameras rather than the Nikons to ease the load on my shoulder. And some of the old film cameras I’ll never really use have appreciated in value with current fads among some amateurs for film. It’s unlikely to last, so its time to cash in.
6. Learn how to use more of the settings etc on the D700 and D800E
I began this today, and think I have managed to sort out what the four shooting menu banks on the D800E are meant to do. Basically they retain some of the shooting menu settings you had before you switched the camera off or changed to a different bank. Its a feature of limited use as it doesn’t allow you to save a setting so you could start at the same configuration each time you open a bank, and because more of the settings you might like to store aren’t on the shooting menu. There is a similar set of banks for the Custom Settings menu also. I’m sure some users will find these useful. I’d always looked at them and thought they would be useful if I found out how to use them, but somehow hadn’t got further than being totally bemused by the manual before today. It’s been rather a disappointment to find out what they actually do, as almost all the things they store for you are those I’d probably set the same in all four shooting menu banks.
7. Get on with scanning my work from the 1980s and start publishing my major project on London’s Buildings.
One of the first things I put on line back in the 1990s was a site ‘The Buildings of London‘ from a project I worked on for around 15 years. It is still on line, more or less as I first put it there in 1996, with a few more images I added the following year.
8. To republish some of my earlier books as PDFs with more pages and larger images.
My books on Hull and the Lea Valley both contained pages with 4 or 6 images printed rather small, mainly in order to keep down costs of these volumes. Although PDF versions of these books are available, they currently still contain small images of many pictures, following exactly the book layout. I hope to republish these as PDF only versions in which all of the images can be viewed at a reasonable size.
The Hull book in particular should be of added interest since Hull is to be the UK City of Culture 2017, and I also hope to make this work more readily available on the web in advance of this.
And finally I hope as ever to take better pictures and write more interesting posts here! Let’s hope that the new year, 2014, is a good one for us all. Happy New Year!
______________________________________________________
My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
To order prints or reproduce images
________________________________________________________