My previous jobs, and my photography business, were essentially very specialised. I would concentrate on one thing at a time in incredible detail. Be it one line of code out of hundreds of thousands or one small part of one image or histogram, they all lead to a certain inward looking, insular working life.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still doing all those things in my current role, but these are interspersed with many other activities.

On the coding front, the new corporate web site is in the latter stages of development and testing and is due for release on the 1st April (what a day to choose). It’s driven by the usual blend of php and mySql and really seems to work well. I’m very happy with the way it’s come together. I don’t think there’s another site in the market sector quite like it.

On the image front, I’ve been doing quite a bit of photography for the department and this is set to continue. I have a big portraiture shoot this Monday with a few others lined up after that one. In terms of stock photography sales, things have been varied. They are still coming in but prices seem to be quite a bit lower than when I first started. That, I guess, is entirely to be expected.

I did have one very good sale in excess of $750 a little while a go. A relatively difficult image to reproduce, hence the high price I suppose.

In other news, our dog …. the one that features in this picture blog and this preamble has recently passed away. Murphy was sometimes grumpy, often silly, but always lovely. He was only 6 years old, which is far too young really, and we all miss him very much still.

The next one is of one of the cannons just as it was set off by its crew. The camera churned out about 20 shots in a few seconds to get this one…

Lesson for next time: Cannon shoot stuff out a long way. Pull back, pull back.

If you are an existing client I’d like to thank you for all your custom to date, it really has been appreciated. You’ve taken me to lots of places that I would not have seen otherwise and you’ve offered me the opportunity to photograph some amazing things, in particular some really fantastic interior spaces.

Thank you all.

The opportunity to photograph the inside of an exceptionally large bendy bus does not present itself that often. Even less often comes the opportunity to photograph one that has an interior built to represent the inside of a home, the suburban street it’s on and the interior of a car. Kitchen, lounge, road, level crossing, car seats and steering wheels all inside a bus so long that it’s hard to imagine how it ever made its way to the Harpenden House Hotel.

The bus is the brainchild of the folks at Liverpool Victoria and the aim is to travel the country helping to educate young children on various safety issues that exist both in the home and on the streets.

A few weeks back it was the turn of the children of St. Dominic’s School, Harpenden who were taken through the bus and shown, room by room, all the things that they should be wary of. From poorly insulated wires, boiling pans, matches, medicines and chemicals through to clothes drying in front of lounge fires and various roadside hazards. The bus and its contents represented a pretty impressive portfolio of accidents just waiting to happen, all in a perfectly safe and secure environment I might add.

From a photographic perspective the shoot represented a number of challenges. Firstly the range of ambient lighting was pretty much full spectrum. From a very bright and contrasty exterior to a sequence of interior rooms that went from fairly bright to virtually completely dark. There were also a number of TV screens and a projector screen that needed capturing along with the ambient lighting etc.

Secondly the cramped conditions inside the bus made for an interesting time when trying to get the right composition. The kids were brilliant however and the LV= guide was exception (I wish I’d got his name) and by the end of the tour we’d managed to get what we were looking for.

We all had a great time, particularly the children. Fun AND educational ….. and a very, very long bus.

The reason I’m digging it up now is that I’m considering submitting it to my photo agency and as part of the submission process I need to provide some keywords for the image so that image researchers might be able to find it.

So here’s the thing. I’d be very grateful for any help with the keywords. What does this image mean to you? How does it make you feel? What might you type into a search box to find it?

I covered a PR event a short while back to celebrate the opening of a Cafe tied to a residential social care project and I was really taken with this magnificent jukebox. It’s a 1940′s style Rock-Ola reproduction and, frankly speaking, it went straight onto my list of “things that I really, really need and cannot do without”. Or at least it did until I was struck by the fact that its magnificence is matched only by its £5,500 price tag.

If you want to own one, just for a moment, they can be rented through the folks at Jitter Box who broke the news about the price tag to me very gently over the phone only a few short minutes ago.

A visit to my home would just confirm this print avoidance affliction. I think it’s time for that to change so I’m gradually selecting some of my favorite images and making them available as prints.

The first two galleries contain images that I am very fond of for one reason or another.

Machines

The machines gallery contains some of my personal favorite photographs of various machinery including classic car abstracts and some WW2 based imagery.

Wranglers

The wrangler gallery contains favorites from my American Wrangler shoot in the Big Horn mountains, Wyoming, USA.

Prints are available in a number of sizes up to 18×12 inches. I hope that some of you enjoy the imagery as much as I have over the years.

Katie Steed and Aaron Wood run Slurpy Studios, a Harpenden based animation and web design company.

This year’s Harpenden Classics on the Common event will take place on the 28th July 2010. This is one of my favorite yearly photographic opportunities and is, I think, the best event to take place in Harpenden all year.

I covered the event in 2009 and some of the images of the day can be seen here.

I need to break through a couple of issues that I’m having. Firstly I would like to discover exactly what the big players (Adobe, Nikon etc) do to raw histogram data before rendering it as a plotted graph. I’ve come to the conclusion that they do not simply plot the data values when rendering a particular colour channel or composite RGB histogram. I’m thinking they first perform some data smoothing or apply some other algorithm to reduce data spikes and perhaps other things. The histograms I am producing are often the same as those produced the big players, sometimes similar and sometimes quite different and my histograms are produced from the raw image data so something else is going on after the gathering of the data and before the plot.

Secondly I need to find out a little more about the actual meaning of Black and White points in relation to raw histogram or image data. I am assuming that the concept of Black and White points relates directly to the luminosity histogram and I would just like to have this confirmed.

If any readers can help and are willing to chat either over the phone or online I would be very grateful.

UPDATE: Well, the RAW vs Smoothed histogram issue seems to be solved or at least improved significantly.