• From Wikipedia: FIAP is the Fédération Internationale de l’Art Photographique,  (Eng. The International Federation of Photographic Art), and is an international organization of national associations of photography. More than 85 national associations are members, comprising nearly one million individual photographers.

While I’ve done quite well in Salons so far, having been accepted in all but one of the salons I’ve entered, I received some particularly good news last week.

There are salons, and then there’s the Trierenberg Super Circuit.  It is one of the biggest salons in the world, attracting about 3000 photographers with 20,000 images*.

So, when the results of this years salon were published (www.supercircuit.at), I was delighted to find that I had been awarded a Salon Gold medal for my image “Pink”.

“Pink” – Salon Gold at Trierenberg Super Circuit 2012

There were 3 other Irish Photographers also in the medals, Ciaran Whyte, Gabriel O’Shaugnessey, and David Martin. Congrats!

Ciaran has an excellent blog article on the salon here, he describes the whole process much better than I can.  Also, he has some excellent articles on the whole salon circuit, what it’s all about, etc. Well worth a read.

A few days later, after the medal winners were announced, I received my Report Card from Trierenberg. I was delighted to see I got 23 acceptances. The circuit consists of 4 separate salons, so each image can get up to a maximum of 4 acceptances. In the Nature section, I submitted 4 images, and received 7 out of a possible 16 acceptances, with two images bombing completely. In Open section, however, I got 16 out of 16! Cool!

Overall an excellent result for my first time entering Trierenberg.

References

* The Same Medal, But Different Medal Winner – by Ciaran Whyte

This page is a log of all my Acceptances in the International FIAP affiliated salons. Hopefully it will grow over time.

From Wikipedia: FIAP is the Fédération Internationale de l’Art Photographique,  (Eng. The International Federation of Photographic Art), and is an international organization of national associations of photography. More than 85 national associations are members, comprising nearly one million individual photographers.

4th Luxemburg International Digital Contest

Uncertain Magician

Violin and Double Bass

2nd Taiwan International Salon of Photography

Seagull Reflection

Volcanic Sunset

New Photo Vision – Serbia

Stressed Out

Alanagh by Window

Volcanic Sunset

Uncertain Magician

XXXVI Trofeu Torretes de Fotografia – Spain

Victoria

Freaghcastle

Pink

2012 Tropical Image – USA

Stressed Out

Violin and Double Bass

Victoria

Reluctant Magician

11ième Salon International – SAPWS – France

Stressed Out

Freaghcastle Flow

German International DVF-Photocup 2012 - Hessen

Pink (Salon Honourable Mention)

Mossy Rocks

Volcanic Sunset

German International DVF-Photocup 2012 - Baden-Württemberg

Stressed Out

Clare Glens

Mossy Rocks

Volcanic Sunset (Salon Honourable Mention)

German International DVF-Photocup 2012 - Niederachsen

Pink

Stressed Out (FIAP Honourable Mention)

Mossy Rocks

Volcanic Sunset

9th International Photographic Festival of La GACILLY 2012 – France

Pink

Reluctant Magician

Alanagh in Library

Mossy Rocks

45th E.A. International Salon of Photography – Hong Kong

Pink	Volcanic Sunset

Suncoast Virtual Salon – USA

Freaghcastle	Victoria	Mossy Rocks
Stressed Out	Reluctant Magician	Violin and Double Bass

Trierenberg Super Circuit 2012 – Austria

Pink (Salon Gold)

Trierenberg Super Circuit 2012 – Salon 1 – Linz 

Pink	Reluctant Magician	Violin and Double Bass
Stressed Out	Freaghcastle	Volcanic Sunset

Trierenberg Super Circuit 2012 – Salon 2 – Graz 

Pink	Reluctant Magician	Violin and Double Bass
Stressed Out	Freaghcastle	Volcanic Sunset

Trierenberg Super Circuit 2012 – Salon 3 – Feldkirch 

Pink	Reluctant Magician	Violin and Double Bass
Stressed Out	Freaghcastle	Volcanic Sunset

Trierenberg Super Circuit 2012 – Salon 4 – Wien

Pink	Reluctant Magician	Violin and Double Bass
Stressed Out	Freaghcastle

From Wikipedia: FIAP is the Fédération Internationale de l’Art Photographique,  (Eng. The International Federation of Photographic Art), and is an international organization of national associations of photography. More than 85 national associations are members, comprising nearly one million individual photographers.

Based on those informal chats, I decided to enter a few Salons, so I entered my very first salon – the 4th Luxemburg International Digital Contest. I got the results back today. There were 3990 submitted images, out of which 994 were selected for acceptance. Thats just a shade under 25%. Any image which got 18 points or better from the judges were accepted (from a maximum of 24). Out of the 4 images I submitted, I was lucky enough to have two of them accepted, for which I’m very grateful to the judging panel.

Reluctant Magician

Violin and Double Bass

Another club member, John Hickey, also scored 20/20 in the projected image section, with a georgeous image of two butterflies. Overall, a great day for the club!

Congrats to Mallow and Cork camera clubs for coming 1st and 2nd respectively.

I’m in the process of migrating the site over to a new design, as I found the old one was dreadfully slow on some devices. Please bear with me while I populate the galleries with images.

Regards,

Dave.

Well, as you may have  have seen from previous articles, I’m rather interested in back-ups, and data redundancy, so no data was lost. I have 3 copies of everything, and 4 copies of critical data. So I didn’t lose sleep over having lost any data. The thing that could have concerned me next is the availability of a new hard drive to install the operating system onto to get the machine back up and running. I happened to have a spare 1Tb Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM drive on the shelf beside my PC. Unused, never initialised, never opened. Before I realised I had the spare however, I scoured the local PC-World and Maplin for a suitable drive. Any drive. PC World had no 7200RPM drives in stock at all. As for the prices for the 5400RPM drives, forget it. Then over to Maplin. They happened to have exactly what I wanted. A 1TB, Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM drive. I got 6 of these from overclockers.co.uk a few months ago for £29 each, or about €35. When the guy at Maplin told me how much they wanted for it, I nearly fell over. €130! On principle, I refused to pay that, and went home where I knew I had half a dozen old 160G drives that would do the job (albiet slowly) until I could get a proper replacement in from overclockers.co.uk. I could get 4 drives in about 3 days for the same money that the local Maplin were looking for for a single drive. It was when I was going through the stack of 160G drives, that I discovered the unused 1Tb drive.

A couple of hours later, I had Windows re-installed, along with Photoshop CS5 and Lightroon 3.4, so I was able to get the images processed and sent off in plenty of time.

I guess this has taught me a lesson. Keep spares. Whether it’s Compact Flash cards, flash guns, cameras, or hard drives. If you can afford to keep a spare, then keep a spare.

The nice thing about this design, is that it distributes the strobes quite evenly around the centre point, so that when an umbrella is inserted (that’s what the hole in the middle is for), it illuminates it nicely.

Here’s a closer look:

And a front view:

Also, here’s the original flash/brolly holder before modification. You can see the piece I removed in order to attach the new acrylic pieces.

In order to make the acrylic pieces, I cut a length of acrylic, and made a notch in it. Then I used cyano-acrylate (super glue) to glue the notched piece onto another flat piece of acrylic. The bond of the cyano-acrylate seems to be very strong, very good for acrylic. Maybe the hint is in the “acrylate”

Anyway, I ended up with an 8-inch lenght of hotshoe-holder, which could then be cut it to length to make several hotshoe holders, and I could bolt them onto the brolly holder at various angles, as can be seen in the second image above.

As for the setup time – with the previous design, I had to set up 3 brolly adapters on the “cross”, then attach three strobes. Now it’s pop the modifued brolly adapter onto the stand, and then the three strobes. About half the setup time. And it’s neater, and I think much cooler looking with the transparent acrylic

The three strobes in the top image are triggered by a single trigger using a 4-way cable. You can see the DIY sync ports in the muddle of the red window, as the IR modules have been removed.

The iPad Camera Connection kit gives you two dongles, one with a slot for an SD card, and the other with a USB connector, for direct connection to your camera via USB cable.

The initial thing I discovered (I have a habit of reading the manual after I’ve tried things out), was that this is not really a tethering solution. It’s more of a backup of the images on your camera, which you can then go through, categories, apply ratings, keywords, etc, then later import into lightroom. There is no option to send direct to the iPad as your shooting. I was kinda disappointed at that.
Also, the other similar application I have on the iPad, called Shuttersnitch, only works wirelessly, not over the USB cable, so does not work with the Camera Connection Kit. Now there’s something for either team of developers to look at, proper tethering via USB cable. There’s several reasons why this would be a good idea.

1. A WFT-E4 wireless grip for my Canon EOS5DII is phenomenally expensive.
2. Eye-Fi with any Compact Flash based camera is notoriously difficult to get working, I’m still trying to find a suitable CF-SD adapter so my Eye-Fi X2 Pro will work in my 5DII.
3. Large RAW files transfer MUCH more quickly over USB cable, so if your in the habit of shooting your subjects in burst mode, that kinds rules out Wifi tethering.

Anyway, the general mode of operation is as follows:

1. Take bunch of pictures.
2. Connect your camera to the iPad via the USB cable and the Camera Connection Kit.
3. The iPad photo app will kick off and ask you which images you want to import. Import your selected images.
4. THEN, you start up Photosmith. You can browse through your imported images, tagging, rating, assigning colour codes, etc. just like Lightroom.
5. Once you get back to your PC you can then import the images using the Import wizard in lightroom to get the images from your iPad to your PC/Mac.
6. All the ratings are imported along with the imported images.

One thing I found is that the default connection method is wifi. This takes absolutely AGES when working with RAW files that are up to 30Mb each. So slow in fact, that I almost gave up at that stage. But I persisted, and found an “advanced import” method where you connect your iPad via USB, import the images into lightroom with the normal method, then use the Photosmith sync to get the ratings metadata. 3 seconds per image as opposed to 30. And the metadata was applied to the correct files even though they were imported via an alternative method to the Photosmith sync.

So while it’s not a tethering solution, it’s a great way of having a backup of your images in the field. Even if you were only to sync your camera to your iPad every few dozen images or so, you’ll have a backup on the iPad in case of flash card disaster. And, if you’ve got your images on the iPad, you can categorise them and tag them as you shoot in the field, or on the trip home, which will save you some time when you get back to your main post-processing computer.

Now that I have it, and have sorted out the “advanced import” option, it’s certainly a usable and useful addition to my list of iPad photography apps, and makes the iPad more useful in the field. If only there was an option to display images as you shoot them!

References:

Apple iPad Camera Connection Kit:
http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC531ZM/A
Photosmith Website: http://www.photosmithapp.com/

Anyway, a couple of weeks after purchasing on eBay, they duly arrived.

The first thing that I noticed that they were far lighter than the 2300 mAh cells I normally use, which was not a good sign. Especially if they were actually NiMH, the same technology as I’m used to, they should be heaver if their capacity is greater. Anyway, I stuck on a dozen to charge. They charged quite quickly, another bad sign. If the cell charges quickly, then the charger has managed to put less energy into the cell. And the chargers I use are smart chargers, with deep-cycle, refresh, bad cell indicator, etc.

With all these bad signs, I decided to discharge the cells and measure the voltage at regular intervals. A 500mA load over a few hours sounded like a reasonable test to me, so I got me a 2.4 volt, 0.5A bulb from and old torch I had lying around and hooked it up to two of the cells under test. Then I did something quite geeky. Over the next several hours I set a timer to go off every 15 minutes so I could measure the voltage across the terminals. This is the result, and the difference is quite startling.

So, the 2300 mAh labelled battery versus the 3000 mAh labelled battery. Which is which?

Well, the cheap eBay battery (labelled 3000 mAh) lasted just over an hour, at which stage the voltage took a nose-dive towards zero.

The Aldi “Activ” brand battery, which was labelled 2300 mAh kept going, and going and going. 4 hours later the graph started dipping, and when it hit 1.99 volts I gave up. I had the data I needed, and the graph says it all. If the Aldi battery is really 2300 mAh, and not some kind of 12000 mAh super-battery, then all I can assume after that is that the labelling on the  eBay battery is a mistake. Or maybe just downright dishonest. I suspect the latter.

From the above graph, it looks like the eBay battery is actually 1/4 of the 2300 mAh batteries capacity, or approximately 600mAh, which is only 20% of the labelled capacity. NOT EVEN CLOSE to the labelled capacity.

I’m wondering what the eBay seller who sold me these pieces of crap will say when I ask for my money back. Probably nothing. They’re probably used to that question.

My new catch-phrase should be: “You can learn from my mistakes!”

–EDIT–

I’ve had a few e-mails with the seller. I initially said to the seller that the items were not as described, then I pointed them at the graph above.

They offered to refund $10 (€7) of the price to compensate me for my trouble.

I said that I would not be happy with anything less than a full refund.

They then asked that I return the items to China. I pointed out to them that the cost of returning the 50 batteries from Ireland would cost more than the original item including shipping from China. I offered two choices

1. They can refund me the full price, at which time I will consider giving positive feedback.
2. They don’t refund me, and I will leave negative feedback and open a case with eBay.

The next mail agreed to the first option. And I can tell you that the feedback will be marked as positive, but only because they refunded me. The comment will contain information that the 3000mAh cells were measured at 600mAh.

So, I’m getting my money back. So all ends well. Now I’ve got to decide whether to actually put the batteries to use in something like remote controls, or just dump them. At about 600 mAh they’re really only good for recycling. Ya. In the trash they go.

“You can learn from my mistakes!”

When we arrived, the sky looked good. It looked very good. John and myself headed off in seperate directions. After taking a few initial shots, what was was coming up on the preview screen on the back of my camera looked reasonable. If I got one keeper out of a trip to the coast, I’d be happy. Normally, one trip meant one keeper, and on rare occasions two.

We kept shooting until about 40 minutes after sunset, and the time flew. Each direction I looked gave a new possibility. Fanore beach has a rich variety of foregrounds, from ripples in the sand, to lonely rocks, to green, lichen-covered slabs.

This was one of the rare occasions I got multiple keepers. I’m showing a selection here, but I guarantee you there’ll be more shots processed out of that evenings collection of RAW images.

There’s something about that kind of sky, and that kind of light, combined with the kind of place that you can only get in The Burren which only comes together once in a blue moon. And that evening it did come together. It was Magic.

–edit– here’s a couple more –edit–