Photographer's First Rule

When doing photography, there are simple rules you can follow that make your life easier and ensure you take good pictures. Some only apply to certain types of photography, such as film vs digital or landscape vs portrait. Some of them make a good mental checklist when taking a picture; others make a good written checklist before you set off. When I think of a useful rule, I'll try to share it here, with an example of how it can help or hinder if you don't follow it. Here is the first one.

Photographer's First Rule: Camera Power

Never leave home without a spare set of batteries.

This is especially true if your camera requires an unusual battery. Take my SLR camera: it requires a 2CR5 battery, which is a 6 volt double battery that is quite difficult to find. To avoid being caught out, I recently bought an extended battery pack that takes standard AA batteries and allows faster film wind, as well as longer battery life. Unfortunately, this pack makes the body significantly bulkier and heavier so I decided no to take it to Peru. You will easily guess what happens next. Yesterday, as I had just arrived in Arequipa and was about to go see the Monasterio de Santa Catalina that the Lonely Planet on Peru describes as a paradise for photographers, I realised my camera's battery was empty. Panic! Where could I find a 2CR5 battery in Arequipa? Luckily, Arequipa is the second largest city in Peru, has hundreds of camera shops and the second one I visited had what I wanted. It was a close call though. What if it had happened on the Inca Trail and I had been unable to take pictures of Macchu Pichu? Now that I have a brand new battery it shouldn't happen but having another spare one would be better so I'm going to buy one straight away.

If you have a camera that takes rechargeable batteries, don't be complacent. Recharging the battery takes several hours and the perfect picture usually can't wait that long, that is assuming you have access to a power source and you have your charger with you. Obviously Murphy's law dictates that it will not be the case when your battery fails.

To finish the little story above, I did go to the Monasterio de Santa Catalina and confirmed it is a paradise for photographers by taking nearly 4 rolls of film.

Lines in the Desert

I went flying in a 6 seater Cessna plane this morning to see the Nazca lines from above. This is the only way to see them. They are huge drawings made by a pre-Inca civilisation, the Nazca that span several kilometers on the desert's floor. They are amazing. Also amazing is the fact that we can still see them today thanks to the particular desertic climate of the region. Thats is assuming we don't go around destroying them by driving roads through them, which has been done already.

Now something like this, as usual, is the source of controversy. Why did the Nazca draw those lines and how did they do it? Do they have religious significance? Do they have something to do with water, which is scarce in the region? Are they related to halucinogenic cactii? Where they extra-terrestrial landing strips (the Nazca couldn't see their handy work as they didn't have the technology to fly)? I reckon the archeologists forgot about the KISS principle: the Nazca did it because they could and because it was fun.

2 Hours, 108 Photos

That's three 24 exposure films plus one 36 exposure one.

It all happened on Wednesday when visiting Islas Ballestas off the coast of Pisco, 4 hour by bus south of Lima. The islands are a nature reserve that is home to an amazing number of birds and sea lions, as well as fish, crabs and all sorts of marine animals.

The most amazing moment was the nursery, a beach on one of the islands that is called thus because it is where female sea lions come to gove birth. This is nearly the right season but not quite so the beach was full of pregnant females that are going to give birth in a few weeks. The noise they made was absolutely astounding!

Other beaches where more quiet but still full of sea lions quite curious about the boats and willing to investigate quite closely. Hopefully I'll have some nice close-ups.

Above all this, birds where everywhere: cormorans, seagulls, penguins, etc. They weren't quite as noisy as the sea lions but they were the source of the one unpleasant part of the trip: the acrid smell of guano, the islands are covered with it so we went quite quickly around the parts where we were downwind.

This one 2 hour boat trip more than justified carrying my big 100-400mm zoom lens around Peru.

IE, Floats and Negative Margins

A couple of months ago, I realised I had a problem with my floated figures when viewed on Internet Explorer. One of the aspects of travelling and using Internet cafes is that you invariably end up using IE. As a result, I have just realised why my figures disappear.

Because of the way I float out figures using a negative margin, they are positionned outside the main colum and thus outside the display box of that column. IE assumes that once you have a box everything is in the box unless positionned absolutely. As a result, everything that is out of the box for any reason is cropped along the limits of said box. This happens in situations like this one where you have figures that are floated left with a negative margin or italics or cursive fonts like Zapfino where characters intentionally take more space than their display box. Now the whole reason why I used this way of floating figures was because I wanted the margin of the main column to be simple, because of IE's weird behaviour with margins on floated elements and non-standard way of handling padding and margin together. So by trying to avoid an IE bug, I triggered another one.

So what is the solution then? Well, I'll think about it when I'm back from holidays. It will probably involve some CSS hacks to make IE see something while other standard compliant browsers see the style sheet as it is now. At this point in time, a phrase including Microsoft and a string of very rude words comes to mind.

More Comment Spam

I wish I didn't need to do it but I just re-configured this weblog to only accept comments from people registered with Blogger because I was getting too much comment spam. It won't solve the problem completely because some of the spammers are actually registered users. Sorry about that. Maybe you can report spam from registered users to Blogger. I'll have to check out.

London, Miami, Lima

I am in Peru! I flew American Airlines via Miami to get there.

The first leg was done on a Boeing 777 with a 2-5-2 sitting arrangement in economy. I drew the short straw and ended up getting seat 36E, that is right in the middle of the central five seats somewhere at the back. As a result I had to annoy two people every time I wanted to go to the toilet, which on a 9-hour flight I have to d at least twice. On the other hand, I was quite surprised by the leg room which was very good for an economy cabin so all in all the flight was nice. And congratualtions to the pilot who landed us very smoothly in Miami, by far the best landing I've ever had on a 777.

Then I was pleasantly surprised that Miami, as opposed to Houston or Newark, has a real international transfer facility meaning that they take care of your luggage and immigration checks are simplified.

The second leg of the trip was done on a Boeing 757 with the typical 3-3 sitting arrangement. I had an aisle seat and it was a quiet flight, with once again a nice landing. I reckon AA pilots have taken special landing courses recently. That or the automatic landing software on AA aircraft is better than average.

May The CSS Be With You!

Malarkey has just come up with the best article ever on CSS selector specificity. An essential read for all web designers.

iPod

I gave in. I bought an iPod. I went for the 60Gb one for two reasons:

1. It is the only model that can store all of the 23Gb worth of music I own;
2. With a camera connector, I can later use it as a backup for this new digital SLR camera I intend to buy.

I gave it a lot of thought before actually buying it and even after ordering it, I still wasn't sure whether it was a good move. Getting it delivered was a not simple either. I ordered it from the Apple store on Monday. On Wednesday I came back from work to find a card through the door telling me they had tried to deliver it to me while I was away. I thought wow, this is fast! So I called the delivery company, Lynx to see if they could deliver it at work rather than home. They told me to call their main number. Then the guys there told me to call Apple directly because Apple requires them not to change the delivery address, apparently to ensure that nobody would steal my stuff by calling pretending to be me and having the delivery address changed to their own. Indeed, when I called Apple, they confirmed the policy and told me that if I wanted to have the address changed, I needed to send them an email with a scan of my passport and a hand written signature. At that point, it was much easier to ask my project manager if I could work from home on the Friday so that I could receive my parcel. And so I did.

Now that I have been using my new toy for a whole week-end, I love it! Having all your music at your fingertips in a gadget that small is just amazing. When using my Palm as a music player, I always had to take the time to download a few albums to it and would end up listening to the same thing for weeks on end. Now, I've got everything in the iPod, all 5839 tracks, so I can decide what to play depending on the mood, wherever I am. Genius!

Now I just have to buy a few extra gadgets to go with it, such as a case to protect it, a second USB cable for the office, a dock for the living room, a camera connector, a microphone to use it as a recorder, speakers to share the music around...

Comment Spam

This weblog had so far been free of comment spam. Unfortunately, the spammers have recently found it. I'll leave it as it is for the time being but if it becomes too much of a nuisance, I'll change the settings to only allow registered users to leave comments. As usual the rudeness of a minority is detrimental to the majority.

Peru Here I Come!

On Saturday I will be 1 year older. But more interestingly, that day, I will be on a plane to Lima, to spend a 5 week holiday in Peru. I haven't completely sorted the itenary yet but the rough plan is:

• Lima for 3 days;
• Nazca to see the famous lines, with maybe a stop in Pisco on the way to see the nature reserve of Islas Ballestas;
• Road and train to Cuzco, probably via Arequipa and Puno, with a peek at Lake Titicaca;
• 3 days in Cuzco to aclimatise to the altitude, followed by the 4 day Inca trail trek to Machu Picchu and return to Cuzco by train;
• Iquitos, one of the few inland cities in the world that is not reachable by air road, only by plane and boat, because it is in the middle of the rain forest, on the Amazon river;
• Tarapoto, still in the rain forest for less remote than Iquitos;
• Chiclayo, on the coast, with possibly a couple of days in Piura near the border with Ecuador and where the beaches are supposed to be fantastic;
• Trujillo, still on the coast, to see some more beaches and the ruins of Chan Chan;
• Back to Lima, with possibly a stop in Chimbote on the way.

Of course, I'll have my camera with me, with enough film to last me the whole holidays*.* Yes I still use film. I am planning to replace my EOS 3 with a brand new digital EOS 5D but unfortunately Canon have decided to release that model next month, while I am away. So stay tuned for some Peruvian photos.