SLR (DSLR) 2 day weekend photography courses September / October

Posted on August 19, 2011 by PeterG

These courses are being held in Ennis, Co.Clare – but if you’re from Dublin, Cork or elsewhere – read on …. Dublin is now only 2.5 hours (approx) from the M50 in Dublin without breaking speed limits! (check Google maps or the AA route planner).

I’ve just advertised new weekend SLR / DSLR course dates for September (Sat/Sun 17th/18th) with a repeat of the same course again in October (Sat/Sun 15th/16th)  on the main website. Visit the course page here. One of the big selling points of these courses is that course places are limited to three people maximum allowing plenty of one-to-one attention.  Course cost is €295 per person to include tuition, light lunch and snacks on both days.

You can view the course-content-overview here and the course-FAQ here.

In brief the course content covers topics like:

Types of SLR / DSLR cameras, OIS, lenses, tripods, reflectors, filters etc. ; Manual vs. Auto-focus etc. , Timer and mirror lockup; Shooting modes: Aperture Priority vs Shutter Priority vs Manual vs program-shift; Burst/continuous shooting mode; Depth-of-field control and effects; Exposure control: shutter speed vs. aperture vs. ISO,  light metering (on camera and using light meters, grey cards), exposure compensation, histograms and over-exposure indicators, using Flash, intro to HDR photography, Macro photography, Photo-editing-demo ( adjustment layers, layer masking, sharpening etc.).

Although a relatively advanced photography course, it has been consistently well received by both beginner and improver photographers. With each topic, we start with the basics and quickly move up from there.

Subject to weather conditions and time of year, the course typically includes two short outdoor photography field trips as well as a number of indoor and outdoor practical exercises.

Were you looking for an evening or night course in SLR (DSLR) photography in Limerick, Galway, Ennis or indeed Dublin or further afield? Maybe this course would suit your needs better … but maybe not. Let’s consider some of the advantages and disadvantages of evening courses (I’ve taught extensively on both types of course in the past and the observations below are based on my experience).

Possible disadvantages of an evening or night course:

1. In my experience, very few people make more than 70% of the sessions in an evening course – there is always something that comes up on one or more of the target evenings … or as Winter sets in, you sometimes just don’t feel like leaving the comfort of your warm home when it’s wet, cold and dark outside.

2. Evening courses also tend to have higher numbers to make them economically viable. An evening course may be cheaper but you are not comparing like with like. A typical evening course will have somewhere between 10 and 20 enrollments. The weekend course being advertised in this post limits course places to a maximum of three.

3. On a typical two hour evening course you tend to lose 10 mins at the start with late arrivals settling down, 10 mins at the end (early-leavers getting restless) and 10-15 mins on the break (the 15-min break inevitably drags on …. albeit for good sociability reasons!).

Possible advantages of an evening course:

1. Some people find full days too intensive and prefer weekly smaller installments.

2. There is an opportunity for plenty of hands-on practice between sessions. Alas, only the very committed people avail of this (despite great intentions) … and furthermore a good intensive course will also include hands-on practice anyway.

So my personal view based on experience of both teaching and attending as a student at both evening / night courses and full-day courses is that the short intensive day courses are more effective … subject to lifestyle and other normal considerations. I still occasionally teach evening and night courses so I would claim not to be biased from a course promotion point of view.

Posted in Course Notices, Marketing and Promoting | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Using aperture to extend depth-of-field in 1:1 Macro Photography

Posted on August 7, 2011 by PeterG

Macro-f2.8 (depth-of-field very narrow ... 2 or 3mm)

First of all, what is 1:1 macro? You have a 1:1 macro lens if you can get your camera to focus on an object that is physically the same size as your camera sensor while zoomed in to the extent that the object fills the viewfinder. For example, the camera I used for the sample photos in this article was a Canon 400D which uses an APS-C sensor with the dimensions 22.7 mm  x 15.1 mm (… 22mm is about the diameter of a one Euro coin). If I can get an object that has these dimensions in focus while filling the viewfinder, then I have a 1:1 macro lens. Most standard lenses have nowhere near this capability. They are typically 1:5 or worse – in other words, if the object fills more than about 1/5th of the viewfinder the camera can no longer focus on it. For the purposes of this article, I used a Sigma 105mm 1:1 macro lens and my subject was a one Euro coin which has a diameter of approx. 22mm which is close to the longer dimension on an APS-C sensor.

There are four factors that affect depth-of-field:

  • (i) aperture (the wider the aperture, the narrower the depth-of-field)
  • (ii) distance from subject (the closer the lens is to the main subject, the shallower the depth-of-field)
  • (iii) focal length (the greater the focal length – i.e. zoom,  the shallower the depth-of-field)
  • (iv) physical dimensions of sensor ( the larger the sensor, the shallower the depth-of-field – e.g. full-frame results in shallower depth-of-field than APS-C).

In the photos below, the dominant factors affecting depth-of-field were proximity to the subject and aperture. In macro photography, you tend to be very close to the subject. In particular, in 1:1 macro cases, you tend to be either particularly close to the subject or else using a large focal length. What this means is that you tend to get very very shallow depth-of-field – e.g. a few millimetres. In the photos below, I have used different apertures to show how the depth-of-field varies from 2 or 3 millimetres at F/2.8 to pretty much the full 22 millimetres at F22.

Macro-f2.8 (depth-of-field very narrow ... 2 or 3mm)

Macro-f5.6 (depth-of-field starts to extend but still quite limited)

 

Macro-f11 (depth-of-field extends to almost full length of image)

 

Macro-f22 (depth-of-field extends full length of image)

 

Posted in Marketing and Promoting | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Changes to Living Images Blog Notifications – Please read (from Peter Gorman)

Posted on August 5, 2011 by PeterG

If you have been automatically notified of this post, you were previously on the LivingImages  blog notification list.  Ennis camera club members: please note that this notice refers to the Living Images blog …. NOT the Ennis camera club blog which is a separate independent blog. The notification method has now changed. From now, you will be automatically notified of any new post as it is added. It is very easy to unsubscribe from this if you want. The email you receive will have a link to the post …. but before that is a link to your ‘subscription’. You can click on this to remove yourself from the list if that is your preferred option. If you stay subscribed, I estimate very roughly that on average I will add about one post a week (that means one notification email per week to you). Some weeks there will be no posts and other weeks maybe two or three posts. Regards, Peter.

Posted in Admin_Mesg | Leave a comment

Climbed Errigal (in Donegal) today

Posted on August 3, 2011 by PeterG

I climbed Errigal on my holidays today with my 8-yr old son James. It’s in Donegal in North-west Ireland. The views were stunning and I recommend this climb to anyone physically capable of doing it safely if you get a half-decent day. In my opinion, you also need about two weeks of reasonably dry weather beforehand as the first few hundred yards/meters are otherwise very boggy and difficult to cross.

I have three cameras at the moment – an EOS 5D II, an EOS 400D and a Panasonic Lumix FZ18. I brought the 400D with me today. It’s not as heavy or as bulky as the 5D which helps when climbing. One of the difficulties in shooting on a climb like this is getting your exposure correct. The sky will normally be fairly dominant in the light metering so I usually shoot at about +1/3rd EV comp to avoid overly dark landscapes. On a climb like this I don’t have the time or patience to individually adjust for each photo. I’m aiming to get roughly correct exposure with a view to making minor adjustments in editing later. Some of the photos in the gallery below had some minor exposure editing done with the relatively crude (but quick) exposure controls in Picasa. Anyway, it’s more of a diary of the day rather than a display of photo excellence and I’m trying to do my bit for home tourism in Donegal (the ancestral home) which I love. I’ve included some shots taken on the way up and down Errigal, a few of the nearby Poison Glen Church and one of the New Lake in Dunfanaghy near Marble Hill where we are staying. If you are a camera enthusiast and would like to improve your photography, why not check out our 2-day SLR photography course which we run several times a year.  At the time of writing there is one place available on the weekend course on Sat 6th and Sun 7th August.

 

Posted in Marketing and Promoting | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

A brief beginner’s guide to aperture and depth-of-field relationships

Posted on July 29, 2011 by PeterG

If you put your camera into aperture-priority mode, you can directly control the aperture value (F-stop) of your camera’s lens. Some compact cameras, most bridge cameras and all SLR cameras should provide an aperture priority mode.

The smaller you make the aperture, the greater the depth-of-field. The term depth-of-field describes how much of the photograph between the front of the lens and the end of your field-of-view appears to the human eye to be in focus. Depending on various factors including the aperture of the lens, this can vary from as narrow as a few millimetres to as wide as the full scene front to back. I’ve shown two examples with photos from my library. One of these is taken at F/2.8 (a very large aperture) and the other is taken at F/40.0 ( a very small aperture). The smaller aperture photograph results in a wider depth-of-field.

Shallow-Depth-of-Field (Large Aperture f/2.8)

Which is better? That’s a question of personal taste. Personally, for close-up images of flowers, plants etc., I prefer a relatively shallow depth-of-field.

What else as well as aperture affects depth-of-field? There are four main factors that affect depth-of-field in a photograph.

(1) Aperture Value:  The smaller the aperture, the wider the depth-of-field

Wider-Depth-of-Field (Small Aperture f/40)

(2) Distance from subject: The closer your main focus subject is to the lens, the shallower the depth-of-field – e.g. if you have an object in focus right in front of the lens, the image falls out of focus quite rapidly behind this.

(3) Optical Zoom: The more you zoom in on the main subject, the more rapidly focus falls off behind and in front of that subject – i.e. the shallower the depth-of-field. This is a similar effect to reason (2) above.

(4) The size of the sensor: The larger the physical size of the sensor, the shallower the depth-of-field. So for example, all other parameters being equal, an aperture value of F/4.0 will result in a shallower depth-of-field on a full-frame camera than on an APS-C camera which in turn produces a shallower depth-of-field than a compact camera etc.

Why might you want to use a narrow depth-of-field or a wide depth-of-field? A common reason for using a shallow depth-of-field is to draw attention to your main subject. In the example shallower depth-of-field photo above, the snail shell is the only object in reasonably sharp focus and therefore your eye is drawn to it. On the other hand, if you take a landscape photo, you normally want everything in focus from front to back of the image.

There are various websites and smartphone apps that allow you to calculate depth-of-field precisely for a given focal length, sensor size, aperture and distance from subject. You can google for these if interested.

If this topic and other related topics are of interest to you, why not consider doing one of our two-day SLR photography courses where we cover this and many other items in a lot more detail.

Posted in Marketing and Promoting | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

High ISO full frame SLR vs compact or bridge camera

Posted on July 27, 2011 by PeterG

One of the big advantages of a full-frame SLR (35mm sensor) over an APS-C (smaller sensor) and compact or bridge cameras (even smaller sensors) is better performance at higher ISO levels. (Scroll down to look at some image examples near the bottom of this post). Increasing your ISO allows you to take photos at faster shutter speeds. The relationship is quite simple. Assuming the lighting and aperture remains constant from shot to shot, every time you double your ISO you can use twice as fast a shutter speed. If you increase your ISO by a factor of 4, you can use 4x times as fast a shutter speed. This is important in many scenarios. One example is hand-holding the camera. While it does depend on the focal length of your lens and whether you have image stabilization/VR, a fairly simple rule of thumb is that the average person cannot hand-hold a camera and get a steady shot if the shutter speed is any slower than 1/60th second. So let’s assume you are shooting in aperture priority and about to take a photo at ISO-100 and the camera indicates the shutter speed is 1/15th second. This is likely to produce visible blurring if the image is enlarged much above 6x4inches. To avoid this, you could increase the ISO value to 400 and your shutter speed will now change to 1/60th second (i.e. four times faster … because you have increased your ISO by a factor of 4). This will result in a fairly steady shot for most people. In very low lighting conditions such as indoor concerts etc. you may have to use this method more aggressively to achieve the desired shutter speed – e.g. if your camera indicates a shutter speed of 1/4 sec at ISO-100, you need to go to ISO-1600 to get a shutter speed of approximately 1/60th second (i.e. approx. 16-times faster).

Great you think. This solves my shutter speed problems. However, there are always trade-offs in photography and the trade-off in this case is that the higher the ISO value, the ‘noisier’ (more grainy) the image becomes. The smaller the physical size of the sensor, the more visible this noise is. In recent years, there have been significant technological improvements in this area but there is still a relationship between the clarity of the picture at high ISO levels and the physical size of the camera’s sensor.

Let’s look at two relatively current cameras at the time of writing: the Canon EOS 5D-II which is a full-frame SLR and the Panasonic Lumix FZ18 which is a bridge camera with a much smaller sensor size.

The first two photos show a photo of a mug at ISO 100 and ISO 1600 using the full-frame camera. You won’t see much difference. But look what happens in the last two photos with the Panasonic. The first photo is okay at ISO 100 but the one at ISO 1600 shows dreadful ‘noise’.

ISO 100 full frame EOS 5D II

Full-frame-ISO-100

Full-frame-ISO-1600

Now look what happens with the Panasonic Bridge camera. The first photo below at ISO 100 is okay but the 2nd one at ISO-1600 is dreadful.

Bridge-Camera-ISO-100

Bridge-Camera-ISO-1600

As you can see there is a huge difference in quality in the ISO-1600 shots when you compare the full-frame against the bridge camera. This is the main reason, I invested in my first full-frame camera. The difference between a full-frame camera and an APS-C sensor camera is less pronounced but still visible at higher ISO values. I’m told the latest Canon and Nikon APS-C offerings have improved higher ISO performance very significantly but I have no first hand experience of this yet.

In defence of the Panasonic Lumix FZ18, it is an otherwise really good camera for its price point. It combines very close-up macro capability with 18x image-stabilized optical zoom in one camera … but unfortunately, its high ISO performance is very poor.

If  you would like to find out more about this and other photography topics, why not consider doing one of our SLR photography courses. See our SLR-Photography-Course page for more details.

Posted in Marketing and Promoting | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Setting up Nymgo voip to work with Sipdroid (on Android phone)

Posted on July 25, 2011 by PeterG

This has nothing really to do with photography – so what’s  it doing on my photography blog? Well, I spent so long getting the thing to work I thought I would spare anyone else the torture. What’s it all about? It’s a description of how to setup a voip (voice-over-IP) phone service on your smartphone if you have a data package. Why do it? It can reduce your phone costs. For example using Nymgo as my voip provider, based here in Ireland, I can currently (at the time of writing) ring a UK O2 or Orange mobile phone for 3.7c per minute and UK landlines for less than a cent per minute. Interestingly, in typical rip-off Ireland style, it costs approx. 7c per minute to call an IRL O2 mobile via Nymgo …. twice the UK price !!!! Maybe there’s a good reason – e.g. the additional cost of sending signals through the ionosphere over Irl? :)

Disclaimer: this may not work for you, so when purchasing your first Nymgo credit … go for the smallest amount which is $10 and don’t blame me if it doesn’t work for you – it took me ages to get mine working .. but hopefully this guide will get you there.

Some notes before we dig in:

(1) Why Sipdroid instead of Skype? Well although I can use my HTC Desire’s data connection and get good quality on Skype, I get broken voice over wifi? Why? It seems the reason for this is that the Skype app (unlike Sipdroid) does not prevent the proximity sensor from switching off the display when you bring the phone up to your ear to make a call. It also seems that when the display screen goes off on the HTC Desire, the wifi rate is somehow throttled down leading to the broken voice. If you use it handsfree (where the screen does not switch off) the quality is fine. I don’t know if this problem is specific to the HTC Desire or a more general Android issue. With the Sipdroid app, there is a setting to prevent the screen going off and this means your wifi works fine and you make a good quality voip call.

(2) Be careful about over using your phone’s data connection for any voip service. If you have a low monthly data limit, it may cause you to exceed it and you may pay heavily for this. Voip calls typically require 100Kb/sec in each direction – i.e. 200Kb/sec total bandwidth. Some use a lot less than this. However, if you use your home wifi, these days this usually has no upper data usage limit or if it does, it tends to be quite high.

(3) Why Nymgo? I googled and there seemed to be a good deal of positive reviewing of their service as very low cost while providing satisfactory voice quality. The instructions here are specific to Sipdroid using pbxes.org and Nymgo as a voip provider … but most of the instructions are generic other than the Nymgo addresses so with a little adaptation it should work with other voip carriers.

(4) If you want a simpler setup, just use the Fringo android app. It is simpler but the call rates are not just as cheap.

(5) Apparently some mobile phone operators block voip calls over your data connection. Mine worked with O2.

Who is who and what is what in the chain of requirements? My own understanding is limited here so I may be factually incorrect in some terminology etc., but it worked for me anyway.

(1) You need a pbxes.org free account. Pbxes is a SIP provider (SIP is a protocol) and it routes voip calls through sipdroid on your phone. When you have your pbxes.org account, you then have to set up extensions and trunks (see details further down) and let pbxes.org know who is your voip provider (Nymgo in my case … see details further down).

(2) You need a VOIP service provider. I chose Nymgo as you can purchase credit in advance rather than have a monthly subscription and Nymgo appear to be one of the cheapest services that still offer reasonable audio quality. This particular post details how to setup Nymgo.

(3) Sipdroid. This is a free Android voip app that you can download from the android market place. Probably exists for iphone too – I don’t know.

And now the details:

Having established your pbxes account, login and fill in some details about your voip service provider, your username, extension etc.  I have to acknowledge great assistance here from Paul Weiss’s site but I’m putting in my own screenshots here as the screens presented to me were slightly different than those shown on his site – one or two extra fields that may have been added since he posted his excellent guide.

Click on the extensions tab and choose SIP (as opposed to Classic). *** NOTE: with all pages you enter in pbxes, there is a submit button at the bottom. You need to click on submit AND THEN ALSO click on the you have made changes line that appears on the top of the page in red in order for your changes to come into effect.

 

Choose any display name you like as far as I can see. Set your extension to any value. I used 100 copying from Paul Weiss. One of the initial problems I had was that I did not enter any extension – I thought this was an optional extra … but I couldn’t get it working until I did. I also entered in my latitude and longitude although I don’t think this is necessary. Here is what my screen looked like after I had filled in the details:

Now you need to add your trunk details (details about your voip provider). Here is a screenshot of mine. Note that the password here is one you created on Nymgo.

There are some other fields below this but I left them blank. When you have filled in the above, click submit again and then click the changes line in red at the top of the screen.

You also need to fill in the Outbound Routing on pbxes. See menus on left hand side. You only need to fill in the first line or two in outbound.

And as far as I remember, that’s all you have to do with pbxes.org   Next step is to configure your sipdroid app. Before I forget, once you have it all configured, here is how to use it with your address book on Android (at least on HTC Desire). Hold down a contact until you get the contact menu appearing and select ‘send text message’. You then get a submenu that includes sipdroid so you click on this. You need the full international code for the phone number. Alternatively you can key in a number directly in the top ‘Phone Number’ field when you launch sipdroid. Now back to sipdroid configuration. Click on menu, settings after launching sipdroid. The main thing to fill in is your ‘sip account’.  Important, your username must include the string ‘-ext nr’ or it won’t work – e.g. my extension nr was 100 and my username (see screenshots above) was dukelamonty … so my username on sipdroid is dukelamonty-100   For password put in your pbxes password. The server or proxy seems to default to pbxes.org … so stick with that or put it in if it is not the default. My port defaulted to 5061 – leave it at that. Towards the bottom, I ticked use ‘wlan’ and ‘use 3G’. You can subsequently decides which it uses through your normal phone comms selection process – ie. wifi vs 3G … remembering that wifi is using your home or other wifi’s monthly allowance whereas 3G is using your mobile phone’s data connection (normally limited in Ireland at time of writing … except for some of 3-mobile’s smartphone plans). I think that’s it. If you try this out and get it working, please leave a comment.

Posted in tech-stuff | Tagged , , , | 14 Comments

Uploading or emailing large photos – DSL vs. mobile broadband

Posted on July 24, 2011 by PeterG

This is a slightly technical article but I’ll try to keep the tech-speak to a minimum. The jist of it is that if you have a smartphone with a data connection, you may get very significantly better upload speeds on this than with conventional landline broadband uploads (at least in many parts of Ireland). In my case uploads of several hours can be reduced to less than an hour by temporarily using my mobile phone broadband instead of my landline broadband.

If your broadband connection is conventional landline DSL, this is probably actually ADSL. The significance of the ‘A’ is that it stands for asymmetric which means that you get greater bandwidth when downloading from the internet or receiving email than you do when you upload to the internet or send email. Even if you don’t own your own website, you still ‘upload to the internet’ when you are for example posting photos to Flickr, Facebook  or online photo development services. How good your landline ADSL upload and download speeds are depends on what country you live in, your service provider, what package you are paying for and how physically close you are to the nearest exchange.

Let’s look at my own case: I have a supposedly 3Mb/s ADSL connection with Vodafone (via an Eircom line). In reality, the best speed I can get is about 1.6Mb/s. However, I am a good distance from the nearest exchange and I have extensions etc. on the phone line which doesn’t help. I’ve measured my average download and upload speeds as follows: max download is approx. 1.6Mb/s while max. upload is approx. 200Kb/sec.  However, let’s look at an alternative option. I have a HTC Desire with an O2 account. The Desire is an Android phone which allows data tethering – i.e. if your subscription has a data package/allowance you can connect your PC to the internet via the HTC Desire. When I do this (more on how to in tech details section at end), I get the following sorts of speeds: 2.4Mb/s download and 875Kb/sec upload. The precise speed I get is very dependent on where I place the phone (more on how to in tech details section at end). However, taking these as broadly representative figures of both my ADSL and mobile broadband upload speeds, the mobile upload speed is well over four times faster with the mobile. Clearly, it would be tedious to switch connections between the two methods regularly but equally clearly, if I have say 20 photos each 5MB in size to email to someone or to send to an online developer (i.e. a total of 100MB), then it makes sense to transmit this (upload it) at the 4-times faster speed. Assuming a 50% mixed overhead and error rate figure (just accept this :) ), using my figures above, each method would require the following upload times:

Vodafone landline broadband with an upload speed of 200Kb/s would take approx. 2.22 hours to upload my 100MB of photos.  HTC Desire on O2 data connection would take that length of time divided by about 4.4 …. i.e. about 33 minutes.  (Calculation details for anyone interested in tech details at end).

Other considerations: Most mobile operators put fairly ungenerous total monthly transfer limits on your data package and you pay heavily if you exceed this. e.g. my O2 limit is 10GB. I should praise three mobile here whose bill pay data packages are unlimited. If I was starting again, I would go with them on this basis. *** You need to be careful not to exceed your monthly limit. You can download apps to keep a running track of your bandwidth usage if it is something that concerns you.

Some tech details:

1. Tethering your smartphone: This is usually fairly straightforward on an Android phone. In the case of HTC phones, you must first install their ‘HTC sync’ software so that the phone is recognised. Then you simply connect the phone to your PC or laptop and you choose ‘tether’ from the list of options that appear on your phones screen. Then you are ready to go. You may have to switch off your normal house wireless internet to ensure that the PC chooses to use the tethering route rather than the conventional route. With iPhones, some of the operators charge a tethering fee aswell as a data fee – e.g. O2 do this or at least used do this but this does not apply with Android phones – I can only guess it’s built-in to the Android OS … but I don’t really know the reason for the distinction. For the truly technical among you, you can actually get many smartphones to connect wirelessly to your PC instead of physically tethering it via the USB cable but that’s another day’s work and I don’t know if you will achieve quite the same speeds this way.

2. Measuring performance speeds and where to place your phone: There are many broadband speed testers out there. Here in Ireland, I use irishspeedtest.com …. you can ignore their login request by choosing the ‘no registering’ option at the bottom of the page. Then just click on the start test button to find out your upload and download speed tests. I would try it a few times to get an average speed. In the case of the mobile broadband, you will probably get quite different speeds in different parts of the house. So if you have a portable laptop, then it makes sense to test various places in the house to find where you can get the most reliable highest speeds. Again, for each location, I would take several readings and average them.

3. Time to upload calculations:  Step 1. Convert our example 100MBytes of data to Mbits of data as broadband speeds are quoted in Mbits/sec. One byte = 8 bits, so 100MBytes = 800Mbits. Now convert this figure to Kbits per second so that we are comparing like with like. 800Mbits approx = 800,000Kbits. Divide this by my 200Kbit/sec landline upload rate to find out how many seconds it takes to upload all this data. Answer in this case is 4000 secs. Divide by 60 to convert to 66 minutes and divide again by 60 to convert to 1.11 hours. However, I am assuming a combined packet admin overhead rate (that’s the non-data part of the packets) and error/retry rate of 50% (wild figure plucked from nowhere) making my actual upload time 2.22 hours. Even if this 50% rate is not accurate, broadly the same figure will apply to both schemes so the factor of 4 improvement applies anyway.

4. Disclaimers: these are roughly the figures that apply with my landline and my mobile broadband with my specific service providers. Your figures may be different and may suggest an even stronger case for uploading via mobile or equally may suggest no case at all. Use the speedtest software to check it out! ***AND DONT FORGET IT MAY BE VERY COSTLY IF YOU EXCEED YOUR MONTHLY LIMIT ON YOUR MOBILE PHONE’S BROADBAND PACKAGE.

Posted in tech-stuff | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Looking for an SLR DSLR photography course near Dublin

Posted on July 23, 2011 by PeterG

Well, sorry, I can’t help you there right now … but what about a weekend away for a 2-day course in charming Ennis, County Clare on Fri/Sat 17th & 18th September or if those dates don’t suit, the same course is scheduled again on Fri/Sat 15th & 16th October.  Ennis is only two and a half hours from junction 9 on the M50 without breaking speed limits. Don’t take my word for it. That’s according to the AA route planner. The entire route is now dual carriageway or motorway. See M50-to-Ennis-AA-route-planner    Google maps suggests 2 hours 18 minutes for the same route which is even less.  At the time of writing, there is currently one place remaining on our weekend course on Fri/Sat 6th & 7th August. For bookings or more info visit our course page at 2-Day SLR Course Ennis  If you can’t make these dates but would be interested in possible future dates for a repeat of this course or our 2-day studio portrait course, send an email to info@livingimages.ie and we will keep you posted of dates as they arise. We can also send you a list of accomodation possibilities if this helps. We’ve been running our photography courses since 2002 and getting very positive feedback ever since so trust me, you’ll enjoy the course and learn a lot. So if you have an SLR and want to get away from the automatic settings and start using and understanding the more advanced  settings, learning about terminology, useful accessories, what all the buttons do etc., then this is the course for you.

While this is a relatively advanced photography course, it works well for both enthusiastic beginners and seasoned photographers who have never really explored the full potential of their SLR cameras. Call Peter on 086-1033122 if you are unsure if this course is right for you or visit the course FAQ page at: SLR-course-FAQ-page.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

One place left on 2-day SLR / DSLR photography course Ennis Sat 6th Sun 7th August

Posted on July 11, 2011 by PeterG

At the time of writing, there is now one place remaining on the 2-day SLR course in early August. It’s a case of first-to-book gets the remaining place. The course caters for three people in total. More details on this course can be seen at:

http://www.livingimages.ie/training/2d-SLR-photography-course.html

… and remember if you are tuning in from Dublin, it’s now only two to two and a half hours from Dublin to Ennis via Limerick.

While this is a relatively advanced photography course, it works well for both enthusiastic beginners and seasoned photographers who have never really explored the full potential of their SLR cameras. Call Peter on 086-1033122 if you are unsure if this course is right for you or visit the course FAQ page at: SLR-course-FAQ-page.

Posted in Course Notices | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment