Ok, last post about it I promise! If you missed, or indeed want to watch the documentary “Reaching for Glory: Inside Irish Rugby 07″, you should take yourself over to cdworld.ie who have the DVD on-sale for EUR 20. My copy has already been ordered and should be out with me over the next few days. Cheers for the pointer Mike! 
So, it would appear that getting into Stock Photography is a little harder than I had thought at first. Shutterstock have decided to reject the below images due to “Limited commercial value due to framing, cropping and/or composition.”
Back to the drawing board (in 30 days!!) I guess!
Well, I said it would be unmissable, and how right was I?! Last night, I watched Reaching for Glory: Inside Irish Rugby 07 and I was completely blown away by it. Not only was it a brilliantly put together documentary, with some amazing camerawork and a kick ass soundtrack to go along with it, but, the levels of access that the crew were given to the inner workings of the Irish Rugby Team were unbelievable. I’m not sure if there’s going to be a re-run or DVD released for it, but, for now, you can check out some clips on YouTube via the Reaching for Glory: Inside Irish Rugby 07 site.
This is without doubt my favourite, giving some insight into the work-rate that goes into becoming one of the worlds best rugby teams:
This one has been puzzling me for a while, but, at last I think I have it figured out. I have my entire photo collection stored in a library created by Apple’s Aperture application. This contains well over 10,000 images which takes up ~42Gb of disk space. As well as containing the images themselves, the library also contains all my edits, tags, image ratings, folder structure etc. For the past few weeks, I’ve been pondering how exactly to back this data up, and keep what I have on my iMac in sync with my backup copy, which much be kept on my server off-site.
Obviously Aperture provides a means for creating backups of your library, using Vaults. The only problem with this however, is that Vaults do not like working in a networked environment and are designed to work with an external hard disk primarily. Being paranoid (which is the correct way to be!), I want to have this backup stored off-site, in case of my Mac being stolen / house burning down etc.
There is a bit of a nasty hack you can use for Aperture, whereby you create a vault on your local disk, manually copy the entire vault over to your network share, then ctrl-click on the vault in Aperture and update the drive location to point to your networked vault, and then updating the vault itself. Whilst this does actually work, I have found it is not very practical over any form of internet connection. I can get an average of about 6Mbps upstream out of my internet connection at home, and it still doesn’t work very well. The reason behind this is that Aperture likes to compare the vault and the library before doing any updates and this appears to be very bandwith intensive.
So, my most recent idea was to start using the tried and tested method of rsync to keep my local vault and my networked vault in sync. So far, so good. All appears to be working - just as expected. My vault is now rsynced with my server (which in turn is copied off to another completely separate box). Right now, I’m in the middle of restoring my networked vault to my MacBook to see if the entire process works from backup to restore. My only worry is that although there are ~10,000 images in my vault, Aperture tells me that it’s restoring library file xxx of 80003 - wtf?! I guess I’m just going to have to sit it out for a few hours and see what happens!
Way back last year, I wrote a piece about this article by Chris and his experiences as a stock photographer. I had been meaning for quite a while to get myself set up with a stock-photo agency, but, had never quite managed to get around to it. One of the main reasons for this was the fact that I did not have a great workflow or photo management practice set up. Thankfully, I now have this problem almost sorted, thanks in the main to Apple’s Aperture, which is a wonderful application for any photographer.
So, yesterday, I decided to get myself set up with two separate stock photo agencies, to give them a whirl and see what’s what in the world of stock photography. I’ve decided to go with Shutterstock and iStockphoto as they seem to be two of the biggest and most respected out there. Both have a completely different approach to selling photographs and compensating photographers, so, it will be interesting to see which works out the best for me.
My aim is not to make a huge amount of money out of stock-photography, though, if things start to happen that way, then, like Chris, I would certainly look at the possibility of focusing more time and effort into shooting exclusively for stock. But, being able to get some reward out of what I shoot would certainly be a nice bonus. I’ll report back here over the coming weeks and let you know how the whole experience goes, currently, I am awaiting some images to be approved to see if I even meet the grade to become a stock photographer.
Tomorrow (Monday) evening, at 21:30, every Irish Rugby Fan should be glued to their TV and tuned into RTE1 in order to watch “Reaching for Glory: Inside Irish Rugby 07″.
This is a fly-on-the-wall documentary following the Irish rugby team as they allow a camera crew unprecedented access to their preparations for the gruelling RBS Six Nations campaign. The advertisments on the TV for it look amazing, especially listening to Paul O’ Connell shouting at his team-mates, asking them “did you put the fear of god in them”. Sounds like an absolutely fascinating insight into the inner workings of the Irish Rugby Team.
Wow, how cool is this. ITV-F1 are carrying a story today saying that F1 team, Red Bull Racing, are from midday today offering fans an opportunity to have a picture of themselves painted onto a special-livery being run at this years British Grand Prix.
The team intends to raise $1 million for the Wings for Life charity, which supports people with spinal injuries.
From midday today, fans can upload a picture of themselves onto Red Bull’s website (www.redbullf1.com) at a cost of £10 and choose where it will appear on David Coulthard or Mark Webber’s Red Bull-Renault during the Silverstone weekend.
I certainly think that I’m going to have to go check it out and see if I can get my face on the car, all for a very good cause!
Ok, so, I checked it out, and here I am!!
I wrote last week about Skype updating their application to reduce echo whilst using the inbuilt speakers and mic on iMac’s and MacBooks, but followed my post shortly with an update to say that the software update had in fact broken my bluetooth headset quite badly.
I was far from the only person who was experiencing these problems, but, the good guys over at Skype worked hard and fixed it pretty quick. More details over on the Skype Blog.
All through the election campaign, Bertie was harping on about the fact that there is currently something around 2.2 million people employed in Ireland, almost full employment, and something to be quite proud of. But, we know that many of those 2.2 million people are not Irish, probably something in the region of about 400,000 (I’m guessing that figure!). And today, being polling day, I’ve heard that there are almost 3 million people entitled to vote in the General Election. So, my question to you, because I really don’t have a clue, is where do these almost 1 million people come from?!?! Yes, I know some will be students, but, we don’t have that many over 18. Some will be ex-pats, but, again, do we have that many?! Any thoughts / ideas are most welcome!
Ok, there’s going to be plenty of MINI related news appearing here over the coming weeks, but, here’s a good place to start. Check out this MINI, which has to be just about the ultimate pimped out MINI, covered in over 1 million Swarovski cristals, and currently on exhibit in New York!
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