November in London see’s a true treat for any photographer – there are some amazing photographic exhibitions that all coincide with each other (just).  It would be possible to get to all of them in the day and be totally inspired.  I’m talking Ansel Adams, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Michael Kenna and of course LPOTY.

Update – actually there’s so much more including the Taylor Wessing Portrait exhibition, the Veolia Wildlfie Photographer of the Year, William Klein and Daido Moriyama’s exhibition too.  Looks like a busy time over the next couple of months. 

Rothko / Sugimoto Dark Paintings and Seascapes

See Rothko’s wonderful minimilistic painitings side by side with Sugimoto’s seascapes in the Pace Gallery’s inaugural exhibition.  This is on until 17th November 2012 and is free to enter.

http://www.pacegallery.com/london/exhibitions/11142/rothko-sugimoto-dark-paintings-and-seascapes

Ansel Adams – Photographs from the Mountains to the Sea

See 100 original Ansel Adams evocative landscape and seascapes at the National Maratime Museum in Greenwich.  The exhibition is on from the 9th November until the 28th April 2013.  Tickets prices are £7 for adults

http://www.rmg.co.uk/visit/events/ansel-adams

Michael Kenna

From November 14th until 2nd January 2013 you can see a selection of Michael Kenna’s stunning fine art photography at the Chris Beetles gallery in London.  Details of the exhibition are a little scant at the moment but according to Kenna’s own site the exhibition is running.

http://www.chrisbeetles.com/

Landscape Photography of the Year 2012

From 12th November 2012 until 12th of January 2013 a selection of work from the Take a View Landscape Photographer of the Year 2012 will be be running at the National Gallery in London.  Form what I have seen there are some wonderful shots to be displayed – many from friends and aquantances of mine – not to mention my own work.  The exhibition is free to enter and runs late too

http://www.take-a-view.co.uk/news.htm#News120612C

Veolia Wildlife Photographer of the Year

With some of the most fantastic wildlife shots you’ll ever see, this years Wildlife Photographer of the Year at the Natural History Museum is a must to see.  The exhibition runs until the 3rd March 2013 and tickets are £10 

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/visit-us/whats-on/temporary-exhibitions/wpy/exhibition/index.jsp

Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize

Showcasing the very best of contemporary potrait photography the National Portrait Gallery has 60 works on display.  Running until 17th February 2013 and tickets are £2

http://www.npg.org.uk/photoprize1/site12/exhibition.php

William Klein + Daido Moriyama

Finally at the Tate Modern there is a joint exhibition by William Klein and Daido Moriyama who present a study of life in New York and Tokyo.  The exhibition runs until the 20th January 2013, ticket proces are £12.70

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/william-klein-daido-moriyama

I am pleased to announce that the judges awarded my image ‘Inauguration’ Highly Commended in the Urban category of this year’s Take a View Landscape Photographer of the Year.  Chuffed to bits as you can probably imagine. 

Its a fitting end to this image as it was the last shot I took before falling into the Thames breaking my ribs and smashing up my camera, lens and tripod – was it worth it – well probably not – had not realised how painful ribs can be – but I am so glad it’s got chosen – it will always remind me not to be so stupid !!!

The image will be printed and on display at the National Theatre in London from November 12th until January 12th 2013.  It is also included in the LPOY 2012 book available from Amazon (and other bookshops) here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Landscape-Photographer-Year-Collection-Aa/dp/0749573651 - the book is available from October 29th 2012.

My shot was also featured along with a number of other fabulous shots in the Sunday Times on 28th October 2012.

I’d also like to send my congratulations to all those who have been commended or better still won categories in the competition – for the shots I have seen they look fantastic.

Finally congratulations to David Byrne overall winner (and a winner in other categories too) for his great image of the boat houses of Lindisfarne http://www.85mm.co.uk/lindisfarne/

I am pleased to be able to support the first edition of the Plus One Magazine who’s first theme is architecture.  I have had my shot Quarter Schutenstrasse included in this edition.

Plus One Magazine comes on the back of the great success of the Plus One Book that was published earlier this year.  Once again the magazine is a not for profit magazine with all proceeds going to the charity The Kilgoris Project - one that I very much support.

The magazine is full of some of the most amazing architecture photography from the likes of Julia Anna Gospodaru, Joel Tjintjelaar, Rohan Leary, Steve Landeros, Armand Dijcks to mention just a few.  Its well worth a look.  Its available in both eBook and Printed copy and can be purchased from the Plus One Web site here: http://plusonecollection.com/purchase-magazine/

I’ve always thought that my backup solution was good enough to protect me, but with a recent spate of burglaries near where I live, and having had our own garage broken into I began to think that perhaps I’m not as protected as I thought.

My current backup solution utilises Mac’s built in Time Machine backup which writes to an external mirrored NAS drive, thus all of my images are on 3 separate disk drives. Surely that’s enough?  It certainly should protect me from hardware failure and accidental deletion, but what of burglary or fire for that matter.  The shiny NAS drive next to my iMac would surely be a target for any toe rag, and fire, well that wouldn’t discriminate between my kit.  In the past I’ve also performed an export from Lightroom of my finalised images onto a separate external USB drive which occasionally I update and take to work – the problem with this is just remembering to bring the disk home, and then remembering to perform the export and then remembering to take it back to work – I’m a bit hopeless really !!!

So I’ve been looking for a better solution thinking that storing some of my images online must be the right way to go.  But here I have a problem – living in the UK and in the country means my ‘super fast’ broadband connection means I have 1.4Mb.  This really rules out a full online backup solution like CrashPlan or Mozy – plus those solutions are quite expensive.  What I really wanted was somewhere that I could just dump my finalised images – this way I can keep the size down – which is important for upload speed – and also the cost of online storage.   Even just storing the finalised images though is going to need a large amount of diskspace – my images as TIF format are around 50Mb each, even compressed they’re ~35Mb.  That means using free services like Google Drive, Dropbox and the like are all out of the question unless you go down the route of purchasing space.  I also looked at storing my images on Flickr in a separate account – but restoring files individually would be a real pain.

But I may have found the answer – Amazon recently launched their archiving service called Glacier.  Unlike online backup solutions, Amazon Glacier service is essentially just very cheap online disk space – how cheap? Well if you copy your files to the US then its $0.011 USD / Gb / month.  There is no charge for the actual upload. There’s no limit on how many files or how large your archive is.  Amazon work out how much space you use and charge you monthly.  As I say Amazon’s solution is not a backup service – its intended for organisations to store archival data for long periods of time usually without needing to get the files back, and here’s the thing – if you do need to download your files then it costs more to download them – up to 10Tb of data – then the cost to download the data is $0.12 USD / Gb / month – also the files are not available immediately – they may take up to 4 hours to prepare for download.  Now the download cost is more – but for me I’m, only going to download the files – if my local backups are somehow compromised – so I’m happy to accept the additional cost – and to put it into perspective I have 32Gb stored at the moment – that’s going to cost me $3.84 USD – I’m a cheapskate but I’m happy with that!

So currently I have 32Gb of data stored and my estimated yearly cost for this is $3.84 USD – for that I think I will also store the original RAW files too !!!

The Amazon service is meant for commercial organisations and therefore they have not provided a client for performing the uploads / downloads, instead they provide an API that can be coded against.  Its pretty simple to code against – but luckily we don’t have to.  There’s a couple of clients available – the first is a Windows only client called Fast Glacier (www.fastglacier.com) and there’s Simple Glacier (SAGU)  (http://simpleglacieruploader.brianmcmichael.com/) that supports both MAC and WIndows.  Both clients are free.

Setting Up Amazon Glacier

So Amazon Glacier is the solution for you, but how do you set it up?  Well its really simple.  First of all go and sign up for the service – http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/  and click the Sign Up button.  If you’re already got an Amazon account you can login using your normal username and password.  You will need to put in your personal details and tick the box agreeing to the standard terms – hit the Create Account and Continue button.  You will now be asked to enter your payment details.  On the next screen you’ll be asked to accept a small charge to your credit card – signing up is free, although Amazon do charge your card $1 USD and then refund it back again to check the validity of the card.  Once you’ve done this then you’re ready to go.

Now you need to install your Glacier client, either Fast Glacier or SAGU.   Even though I’m an iMAC user – there was just no way my paltry broadband would allow me to upload 32Gb – well it would but would take a month or so to upload !! So instead I chose to do the initial upload from a quicker network using a combination of Starbucks and work !!!  So I’ve installed Fast Glacier on my laptop, rather than the iMac.

Installing both clients is simple – just download and follow the instructions.  Once you’ve installed them you need to configure the clients with your Access Key and Secret Access Key.  You can get these from your AWS Portal https://portal.aws.amazon.com/gp/aws/securityCredentials.  Get the Access Key and enter that into your client and in the portal click the Show Key link and cut and paste the secret key and put that into your client.  Now you’re configured and ready to use Glacier.

The recommendation from Amazon is that you create a vault and add your files to that vault – moreover they suggest that you zip up your files into a single file.  I don’t think there are any hard and fast rules here, what I have done is create a vault for each year – so currently I have 3 vaults 2010, 2011 and 2012.  You also have a choice on where the Vault resides – there’s a couple of US options, one in Ireland for the EU and one in Asia, the storage costs are marginally higher for Ireland ($0.011 USD / Gb / Month), I just chose the US – although its probably slightly slower to upload.  I then export each of my finalised images by year as TIFs to compressed zip files – I’ve included around 30 finalised TIF files per zip file which works out around 1.2Gb per file for my shots.  I think it’s better to upload a few smaller files than one huge file.

My initial upload of 32Gb has taken me a few days to complete from various networks, but now I have that base, I should be able to upload on a monthly basis to keep up to date – I’ll probably do this from home and probably run via SAGU from my iMac.

So I now finally feel safe from fire and burglars; the initial upload has taken some time, but now I’m up to date the incremental uploads should be manageable – even on my slow link and as for the cost well its almost none existent, I’m now about to upload shots from earlier than 2010, plus my wedding photos (all of them) plus various holidays.  It’s still not going to cost much more than $10 USD a year – I’d say that’s pretty good value for money and peace of mind.

A couple of weeks ago a new landmark was opened in London – yes there was the Shard, but further along the Thames in East London a new mode of transport was added – a cable car running from the O2 south of the river to the Excel Centre North of the River.  The official name of the cable car (in today’s lets sponsor everything speak) is the Emirates Air Line.

I’ve watched it being built over the last 9 months or so from my office window, its actually quite a remarkable achievement - especially in the time that was available – and its opened in time to ferry visitors from one Olympic Venue to the other.

I managed to jump on board a couple of weeks ago – I paid the £3.20 it costs to cross one way on my Oyster card and hopped on board.  I was the only person in my car (around 5:30 on a Thursday evening) and I have to say the whole experience was really rather pleasurable.  It fair whizzes across – it takes around 5 minutes, and as you leave the terminal it accelerates with some force.  As it crosses the Thames at some 100m in height it opens up some stunning new views across London.  The O2 in the foreground, the office I work in on the right hand side, followed by Canary Wharf, the Gherkin, the Shard and on the horizon the BT Tower.  There’s not much time to shoot and certainly no chance of any long exposures !!!  Also the windows are fairly grubby already – both inside and out – although that’s probably not a surprise as they cross the Thames around 280 times a day.

Here’s a quick snap taken from around half way across.

I’ll definitely be taking the crossing again and at different times of the day – what I’m really looking forward to is those low fogs you often get early in the mornings in Autumn – where just the top of Canary Wharf is visible.

If you’re interested here’s the official Emirates Air Line

I am pleased to say that the great people at the Black+White Magazine have published four of my shots in the current (August 2012) issue of their fabulous magazine.  My shot of the Laban Centre is printed across two pages – and I have to say it looks fabulous.  Its on the shelves now.

I am pleased to announce that I am supporting the efforts of Ivan Makarov and his team of volunteers in producing the first of the Plus One Collection photobooks.  The idea behind it was simple – photographers on Google+ all donate an image, and then Ivan and his team would create a book that would be published with all of the proceeds going to charity.  In this case the charity was Kiva.  The book was published on March 20th 2012 – and is available to purchase as an eBook, soft or hard covered book from Blurb.

To read more about the project and to order your copy have a look on the PlusOneCollection website

On 29th September 2011 a new visual art’s centre was opened in Colchester.  Colchester for those who don’t know is Britain’s oldest recorded town, but wandering around it might not seem it, with a mixture of the old and mostly not so old. And now Rafael Viñoly’s spectacular new arts centre has brought the town kicking and screaming into the 21st century!  Its controversial for sure – but then aren’t most public art spaces especially in hard times, but it is a wonderful addition and a great piece of architecture to boot.

The building itself looks fantastic – and there’s a lot of scope for more detailed shots too.  The building is clad in TECU Gold – a malleable coper and aluminium alloy.  At the moment its golden colour but I expect it will dull down over time.

And looking down from the viewing platform:

One of the commended images appeared in Sunday Times magazine on 23rd October 2011.  Both of my images can also be seen in the Landscape Photographer of the Year 2011 – Volume 5 which is available from all good bookshops – including here at Amazon.

Best of all my images will be displayed at the National Theatre in London between the 5th December 2011 until 28th January 2012 (Admission free).