Comments (0)

By Paul Chesterfield, September 8, 2009 5:01 pm

Walk & Weather

Dull and grey. Nothing worth photographing. (Concise enough for you?) Today’s total: 3 frames taken.

Gosport’s weather seems to be settling into a pattern. Each day it seems one side or other of the country is in cloud while the other is in sunshine. Here in the middle, we seem to be under the edge of the cloud either way.

Gosport Camera Club

Tonight was the first meeting of the new GCC season. Having been away from club life for several years, I decided to go along and see if I wanted to try it again. 

Camera clubs, with their mixture of lectures, competitions, events and general discussion with ones peers,  provide useful and – hopefully – constructive advice and criticism of ones own work, and the opportunity to see the work of others. we are always learning, and there is always room for improvement.

Things are obviously run differently at GCC than at my former club, but the same friendly enthusiasm and encouragement were still evident. I think I will give it a try for this season and see how it goes. GCC already has some good Bird/Nature photographers, so it will be interesting to see how my efforts fare against theirs.

Now all I have to do is learn all the new names!

- – o – -

Bloggs & Photographs

Little Egret

Little Egret, Haslar Lake

Red Arrows

Red Arrows

Red Arrows

Cormorant 2

Cormorant

Cormorant

Cormorant

My conclusion? It works … just … but it is a real PITA to do.

Comments (0)

By Paul Chesterfield, September 6, 2009 10:41 am

Another grey start, but with the (forecast) promise of turning brighter later. That said, I didn’t fancy the lugging the weight of the big lens today, so I only took my Ixus 980 pocket camera. I probably missed a few opportunities, but nothing I haven’t photographed before. 15 frames taken.

My one bird photo of the day… a grab-shot of a Cormorant. I was idly photographing water reflections from Haslar Marina Pier when it flew by at high speed. To be fair I would almost certainly have missed it with my big lens; it is slow to bring into operation, and quickly finding a moving object in the viewfinder at that magnification is often more luck than judgement.

Cormorant, off Haslar Marina Pier - Ixus 980

I am always attracted to water reflections, as many of my bird photos no doubt show. Just behind the Esplanade there are several colourful blocks of flats, and the large blocks of colour throw interesting reflection patterns into the water. With nothing much else to show for my walk today, I decided to take a few shots.

Through my spotter scope I can see a growing flock of Oystercatchers on the sand bank south of Barrow Island. More evidence of the migrators returning? Hopefully some will come a bit closer over then next few weeks.

Printing

My printer is an Epson Stylus Photo 2100, which is an “A3+” printer. It is getting a bit long in the tooth, but it can still produce some very nice prints. As with most photo printers, however, the replacement ink cartridges are expensive – in fact replacement ink is where printer manufacturers get most of their profits.

I have been keeping track, and these are the figures I am getting per colour using standard Epson cartridges. (NB: while I print on A3+ (also called “Super A3″) paper, I include a white border area around each photo, so the actual colour print area is more like a standard A3.)

If my math is correct, this works out at 112 cartridges per 1000 prints, or one replacement needed every 9 prints … approx. £1.50 per print just for the ink.

As I seem to be doing a lot of printing this year, I was getting through cartridges at a rate of knots! I decided to try out a continuous ink system, which uses special cartridges fed from large ink reservoirs and is supposed to be considerably cheaper. After some hunting around for advice, I settled on Fotospeed’s “The Quill” system.

I bought the Quill kit several weeks ago, but I have been waiting for a good time to swap over – i.e., when I ran out of several cartridges at once. Continuous Ink Systems are all-or-nothing, and any Epson cartridges which still contain ink are pretty much wasted. Today, with several inks running out, I decided to install it.

/Rant! …

What a palaver! My fault for not checking it earlier, I suppose, but the instructions don’t match the kit that I bought, and the pictures they contain are so poorly printed it is impossible to make out the details. On top of that: the Light Black wouldn’t feed ink from the bulk container to the ink cartridge; the Photo Black refused to print until I disconnected its ink reservoir tube (I have no idea why); and – to top it all - the Light Black started to leak ink from the pre-installed filler connection tube. I now have several nice black spots on my light beige office carpet. Thank you Fotospeed. Not a kit that I would recommend!

Eventually, after a lot of repeated head cleaning and general fiddling about, I managed to get it printing. And, I have to say, the print quality looks okay. There seemed to be a slight magenta tint on some prints, but that may have been the light as it was early evening by then. I will have a closer look at the results in full daylight tomorrow. As for the Quill system itself, I will monitor costs and ease of use while the inks last, and then decide whether to revert to the separate Epson cartridges. Yes they are expensive, but at least I can trust them to do what they are supposed to.

/End Rant.

Incidentally, I do use Fotospeed’s inkjet paper. Their glossy paper in particular is quite good, and shows very little metamerism or bronzing with Epson inks. These are problems experienced with some ink/paper combinations and are caused by the pigment inks, which sit on the surface of the paper, appear different when viewed at different angles.

Comments (0)

By Paul Chesterfield, August 29, 2009 8:32 pm

Sunrise over Portsmouth - A view worth waking up for!

I am not a diary keeper by nature, but I hope this blog/diary will become a record and a reminder of what I have photographed, and where – and possibly even why!  It remains to be seen whether I manage to keep at it long enough for it to be considered a success.

Many of these posts will relate to my daily walks – a five-mile circuit around my adopted home town of Gosport which combines nice views with my new passion – photographing birds.

If you are interested in following my ramblings (in both senses of the word) here is a map. Click it for one you can actually read . . .

My 5-mile(-ish) Gosport Walk

(“Google Is Your Friend™!”)

Many of my older photos can be seen in my galleries here on Images from Nature, a site that I built for myself. Maintaining this site has proven very labour intensive, however, and for the sake of convenience (and not a little laziness) my more recent pictures are on my “SmugMug”-powered gallery site: www.paulcphotography.com. It is a lot easier to let someone else manage all that clever ”behind the scenes” webby programming stuff.

Onward . . .

Keep smiling...

Paul Chesterfield, ARPS, DPAGB.