Fraser Speirs Cocoa and Photos

Edinburgh Castle

I visited Edinburgh Castle with my friend Neil yesterday. It was really great - I hadn’t appreciated how much there was to see in there.
There are at least three army museums, the crown jewels of Scotland and the Stone of Destiny. The Royal Apartments are the part of the castle in which James I was [...]

Going Wide

I don’t really think my photography could be said to have a particular ’style’. The very thought seems hopelessly pretentious. Still, I was looking through my Aperture library a while ago and noticed that the number of images I’ve shot with my EF-S 10-22mm lens is dramatically higher than I would have expected for such [...]

Making Do

I started to read Strobist, then I bought a flash. Then I had to find something to shoot with flash. Turns out that babies are awesomely cute subjects for this kind of thing, and I happened to have one handy.

Beth Speirs
I shot this with an umbrella - first time I’ve done that - but not [...]

The Second Step in Photography

There has been a lot of talk on various blogs about new photographers’ next steps. Most comments surround the (many) virtues of the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II lens. John Gruber, Dan Benjamin and James Duncan Davidson kicked it off on an episode of The Talk Show. Recently, Bill Bumgarner chimed in about [...]

London Eye

The legacy of Britain’s millennium projects has not been universally glorious, but one enduring star project is the BA London Eye. It’s basically a gigantic ferris wheel with capsules the size of garages in place of the usual chair baskets. About 25 people ride in each carriage.

Canon EOS 30D, Canon EF-S 10-22mm @ [...]

April Does London

My trip to London with April went really well. It wasn’t exactly a photographic expedition, since I didn’t have Carolyn as a second pair of eyes to check that April wasn’t playing in traffic (not that London traffic moves very fast).

April Playing in St. James Park
Canon EOS 30D, Canon EF-S 10-22mm @ 22
1/30 @ f/4.5, [...]

Intimidating Ontologies

I was talking to my photo buddy Eric Wyllie the other night. We were chatting over some of the things I had written in my Aperture/Lightroom comparison and were comparing our practices in Aperture, which we both use.
Eric’s heavily into keywording, but I’m just…not. I’ve never really known why I couldn’t get into it, but [...]

An Aperture User Looks At Adobe Lightroom

Partly just because it was there and partly because I feel like I haven’t given it a fair crack of the whip, I spent some time yesterday and today with Adobe Lightroom.
For those who don’t care to read the minutiae, I’ll get to the point: In my opinion, Aperture vs. Lightroom is the same discussion [...]

HP B9180 First Impressions

This summer I was standing in The Irish Bank in San Francisco with Brent Simmons and John Gruber talking about Adobe Lightroom. Mr. Gruber told of how, when he had blogged about choosing Lightroom over Aperture, his readership automatically assumed that he had done a deep analysis of both applications along multiple axes of functionality [...]

Second Editions

I was listening to a podcast yesterday in which a photographer was talking about his approach to printing, and specifically his means of differentiating prints made at one time from those made at another time. His method, which I thought very smart, was to take the idea of ‘editions’ and ‘printings’ from the book [...]