global competition for students to create themes for iGoogle, run in collaboration with the Saatchi Gallery London. We received over 3500 entries from 82 countries. The public voted to select the 6 finalists from a shortlist of 36 entries, and an expert jury of photographers and art critics has selected the overall winner.
Entries from the shortlisted photographer's were being projected on the walls, as various friends, family members, photography luminaries, and hangers on (I count myself in that last category of course) inspected and admired their work. And imbibed the occasional lychee mojito as necessary.
Of the finalists I was most impressed by Amelia Ortúzar, in particular this shot:
The warmth of the colours do it for me, and I think the break in composition towards the middle of the picture works very well.
The technical excellence displayed by Fahad AlDaajani's macro work was very good, and the overall composition on this photo caught my eye.
Matjaz Tancic demonstrated a very strong use of colour and form in his work, such as in this photo.
The winner, however, was Daniel Halasz, studying at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest. Here's a representative shot.
I have to confess, that doesn't do it for me; although perhaps technically well executed the subject matter, composition, and lighting don't excite me. Perhaps just as well I wasn't one of the judges.
I've popped back to the UK for the weekend to catch up with friends and family.
Over the last few months I've become very used to having an HTC Dream phone running Android in my pocket in Switzerland, with an effectively unlimited data plan. Internet access while out and about has proven to be fantastically useful -- being able to look up maps online, get restaurant recommendations, and check travel planning websites are things are now take for granted. To say nothing of being able to pass the time on a bus by keeping up to date with my RSS feeds.
I wasn't looking forward to losing this for the duration of my stay, international data roaming charges being what they are.
So I was quite pleased to discover Three's SIM-only Pay As You Go (PAYG) offer. Hand them GBP 10 and in return receive a SIM for the phone, credit for 300 SMS messages, a 150MB download allowance, and calls to other UK numbers (landline or mobile) at 20p a minute.
Once the SIM was in the phone calling 444 to activate it, waiting 10 minutes, and then calling 444 again to activate the GBP 10 credit was sufficient to allow the phone to send and receive calls. To take advantage of the 3G connectivity I had to follow these instructions to add the Three APNs to the phone. I reproduce them here, mostly so it's easy for me to find them again...
From Settings -> Wireless controls -> Mobile networks -> Access Point names, add a new APN with the following settings:
Name
Three
APN
three.co.uk
MCC
234
MNC
20
Leave the other settings empty. That should be enough for the data connection to start working, and you can keep track of how much of the credit you've used by going to http://mobile.three.co.uk/my3 from the phone.
I spent last Friday wandering the streets of Zurich as part of "Googleserve".
Every year the Google offices participate in "Googleserve". At the risk of over-simplifying slightly, we talk to non-profit organisations that work with the local community and ask what they'd do with a few hundred extra volunteers for the week.
This year the Zurich office took part in a number of different projects; cleaning up graffiti, teaching people to use the internet, painting murals at the Kinderspital, ...
I was involved in raising the awareness of two AOZ projects among Zurich's immigrant population (of which, of course, I'm a member). The AOZ is a state-funded organisation with the remit to make it easier for newcomers to Zurich to find their feet and integrate socially and professionally.
The two programmes we were promoting (in teams of 2-4 throughout the city) were:
MAPS Agenda -- this is a monthly free publication that lists (in 13 different languages) events that are happening throughout the Zurich area; focussing particularly on events that are likely to be of interest to immigrants, or that will help them integrate in to Swiss society. For example, one of the events is a weekly free 90 minute German course at Letzipark.
The Konfliktophon -- a telephone helpline for foreigners in Switzerland who think they are being discriminated against, or are having some sort of trouble or misunderstanding with a Swiss person; perhaps a neighbour, or someone in the workplace. They help to try and defuse the situation, and try and see that everyone's viewpoint is represented.
All told everyone who volunteered distributed several thousand of these leaflets around Zurich, and have hopefully played a small part in making things a little easier for people moving to Switzerland.
A Brazilian colleague was in town... and the last time he was here he'd discovered "Karaoke from Hell". The concept is simple enough -- it's like regular karaoke, but with a live band. So instead of drunkenly swaying and singing along to "I will survive" (or whatever your favoured tune of choice is) you get to rock out to one of 150 or so tracks backed up by 3 chaps on lead guitar, bass, and drums respectively.
For example, here's the man himself, from late last year.
So, he's back in town, and what do you know, it coincides with the last night of Karaoke from Hell before it goes on a summer hiatus, so it seemed only right and proper that we went along.
Now I like to consider myself to be an encourager of karaoke in others, rather than a committer of it, so I wasn't about to get up there and sing. Oh no. But it did afford me the opportunity to pretend to be shooting a rock concert, and get some practice in.
This is trickier than it sounds. In particular, trying to get a combination of shutter speed and aperture size plagued me throughout the evening. As you would expect the lighting was all over the shop -- very irregular, and frequently changing. Matters were not made any easier by singers who displayed an apparently preternatural talent for standing just outside the small circle of light from the (fixed) follow spot.
I was shooting with my venerable Canon 20D (must get around to buying a Canon 50D) with the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II lens, which with the crop factor behaves like 80mm. I'd lugged my 580EX II flash along with me too, but a few test shots quickly showed that any hopes I had of being able to bounce the flash off something and get some benefit that way were forlorn, what with the walls and ceiling being predominantly black.
It quickly became apparent that a shutter speed any slower than 1/60s wasn't going to cut it, the singers were just moving too quickly for that to result in anything other than a blurry mess. So with that decided I was left with aperture and ISO to adjust.
I'd expected that I'd be shooting the whole night at the lens' widest aperture, f/1.8, but proved to be too wide, with too shallow a depth of field. Focus became very hit and miss; the singers were moving too fast, and, critically, a relative large distance to and from the lens for me to just manually focus on a single point, and the narrow depth of field meant that the autofocus had trouble too. At f/1.8 having someone's ear in focus meant that their eyes weren't.
So again, a process of trial and error meant that I settled on f/2.8 for much of the night, being the best compromise between depth of field and letting as much light in as possible. Those two constraints being set I didn't have much choice over the ISO setting. Anything less than ISO 400 resulted in unusable images, and I needed to push to ISO 800 for many shots.
I always shoot RAW rather than JPEG images, and this is a good example of why -- the extra colour depth afforded by the RAW format maximises the chance that detail will be retained that would otherwise be lost when shooting JPEGs.
The results are are at this Flickr set: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nikclayton/sets/72157619124715603/. I filled up a 2GB card with these, which translates to approximately 250 photos, which I weeded down to 90 or so. They required a fair amount of post-processing, and even then many of them are only suitable for web use, as 1/60 and f/2.8 still resulted in some noticeable out of focus areas in a number of them.
Here are a few excerpts, with commentary.
This chap was singing "Jumpin' Jack Flash", and doing a very credible Mick Jagger impersonation, bouncing around the stage and moving his arms every which way. This shot is more or less straight off the camera, converted from RAW, with a little sharpening and correction for the red/cyan chromatic abberation that was particularly obvious around the top of his head. Zooming in it looks as though it's his right shoulder that's most in focus, but it still works at this sort of size.
Taken during the bridge in "Basket Case", which afforded the singer an opportunity to look moody and reflective by the mic. This has been quite heavily cropped from the original, to move the singer to the left hand third of the image, and make both him and the guitarist more prominent.
The original was lit very strongly with a purple/blue combination that didn't do it any favours, so I pushed the exposure a bit, strongly increased the colour temperature, and then desaturated the image somewhat to get back colours that are, if not more realistic, at least a bit nearer reality. This had the unexpected bonus of drawing attention to the different colour washes from the lighting on the singer and guitarist that divide the picture in two, which I find quite pleasing.
Again, this one is quite close to how it came off the camera, although cropped quite severely to focus on the singer. She had a habit of flicking her head to send her hair swinging from side to side, and I probably rattled off 20 or 30 shots trying to capture it before eventually getting this one that's acceptably sharp.
I like this one a lot. For a start, it's acceptably sharp (at least to me), and the lighting picking out the edge of Leonardo's face, forearm, and fingers around the mic work nicely. It's also clearly an action shot, as he's mid-song, and quite possibly mid-note.
And to top it all off, there's the arm of an anonymous audience member in shot throwing the goat. It doesn't get more metal than that :-)
I have no recollection of seeing that through the viewfinder, it was only apparent when I was weeding through the photos afterwards.
So, that was Karaoke from Hell. It starts up again later in the year, September or October I believe. So if you fancy yourself as a budding rock star just looking for a band then I suggest you get down there.
) with the 
, which with the crop factor behaves like 80mm. I'd lugged my 
along with me too, but a few test shots quickly showed that any hopes I had of being able to bounce the flash off something and get some benefit that way were forlorn, what with the walls and ceiling being predominantly black.
