March 2007

List of my favourite photographers

I’ll be updating this article regularly. When I find photographers and artists that interest me, inspire me or are just plain good IMHO, then the poor souls will get a link added here:

Joe Cornish: http://www.joecornish.com/
George Duffield
Charles Hood: http://www.charleshood.com/
Malcolm Hey: http://www.malcolmhey.co.uk/
Martyn Colbeck
Tom Mackie: http://www.tommackie.com/
Nick Meers: http://www.nickmeers.com/
Elliott Neep: http://www.enwp.co.uk/
Alexander Mustard: http://www.amustard.com/
Colin Prior: http://www.colinprior.co.uk/

Found via Flickr

Miguel Rita: http://www.flickr.com/photos/miguelrita/
Lara Jade: http://larajade.com/
http://larafairie.deviantart.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/larajade/
Michaela ? : http://www.flickr.com/photos/55678598@N00/
Kerstin Enderlein: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lichtmaedel/
http://www.kerstin-enderlein.de/

Found via deviantART

Igor Laptev: http://www.igorlaptev.com/
http://igorlaptev.deviantart.com/
Marcin Stawiarz: http://www.stawiarz.com/
http://angelreich.deviantart.com/
Juha M. Kinnunen: http://jjuuhhaa.deviantart.com/

My sites list

A list of my sites and where I keep my photos online:

All my sites are listed on the page below, most are just holding pages: http://www.koltregaskes.com/
Please visit my photography site here: http://www.squashyfrog.com/
I have a few photos on GFXArtist: http://koltregaskes.gfxartist.com/
And my deviantART page where you can buy prints, etc. for my work here: http://koltregaskes.deviantart.com/

If you wish to be notified by e-mail of new photos to my photostream, please go here.

Flickr

All my photos (good and bad) appear on Flickr, my page is: http://www.flickr.com/photos/koltregaskes/

For my groups have a look at this post.

Other

My personal site is (needs a lot of work now): http://www.e-lusion.co.uk/
My company site for E-lusion Limited is: http://www.e-lusionltd.com/

Photography links

I’ve started to correlate a bunch of useful and interesting photography-related sites on the web, they range from tutorial to photo-sharing sites:

Photography

http://www.geofflawrence.com/
– A very good free photography tutorial site
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Photography
– One of my favourite sites, Wikipedia’s Photography Portal. Lots of useful articles here

Photo & photo-sharing

http://www.flickr.com/
– The best photo sharing web site there is. I have my photos here at and there are lots of things to look for. I would start on the Explore page here.
http://outstandingshots.blogspot.com/
– Outstanding Shots is a selection of hand-picked photos from Flickr.
http://flickrhits.wordpress.com/
– Flickr Hits is similar to the above but not as frequently updated.
http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/scout.php?mode=top
– Top Explore photos for each day.

Toolshttp://bighugelabs.com/flickr/
– Flickr Toys, this is where I got my profile widget from (http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/profile.php). Also, check out Scout to see if any of your photos have made it onto Explore.
http://www.shirazlabs.com/wickr/
– A fantastic Yahoo! ‘widget’. I’ve set it up to scroll Explore photos as a sidebar but there are many options. Note you’ll need the Yahoo! Widget Engine from here. Very cool.

Mags and rags

http://www.dcmag.co.uk/
– Digital Camera Magazine is my favourite photography mag, it mainly focuses on photography technique rather than technical stuff and camera. There was also Focus Guides, which were monthly special covering topics such as Close-ups and Composition. Sadly they appear to be stopped producing them.
http://www.independent.co.uk/
– One of the newspapers in the UK, The Independent seems to be one that takes photography seriously. Since I’ve been reading it it’s had special supplements for photography and art plus several articles on the photography. It’s also a very good read IMHO.
http://www.timeout.com/
– A cool weekly events listings mag for London, includes music and movie reviews, articles, what’s on and what to do. It also has the odd photography-related article.

Web development

http://www.pixelpost.org/
– Pixelpost is the script I’ve used to created my photo blog at http://www.squashyfrog.com/. A very useful photoblog script that you can tailor to your needs and use any of the hundreds of available themes (or be clever and make your own theme).
http://www.s9y.org/
– A web blog system. Basically I used Serendipity to create this blog. I went through lots of similar scripts/services and this was by far the easiest to set-up and use.

Other

http://www.camerapedia.org
– A wiki for cameras basically

Stock photos

http://www.thinkstock.com/web/
http://www.photos.com/
http://www.123rf.com/
http://www.dreamstime.com/
http://www.comstock.com/
http://www.bigstockphoto.com/
http://www.istockphoto.com/

http://www.flickr.com/people/eugy/
– Eugenia has written about stock photos on her profile, so have a read as it could give you a little earning from your photographs

Photography-related magazine and newspapers

A few links to newspapers and magazines I read:

Newspapers

The Independent
- I’ve never really settled on a newspaper until perhaps recently. I’ve started regularly buying the Independent, don’t say a word. In the last few months it has had ‘free’ week-long specials including ‘Improve Your Photography’ and there is the odd ‘Independent Photographer’ supplement in the Web User magazine (of which I’ve only got Part 1 and 3 L). The Independent takes photography very seriously and I expect to see lots of articles and supplements in the future.

Magazines

Digital Camera Magazine
- I went through many magazines before choosing this one. I thought it was so good that I’m a subscriber. It mainly covers photography techniques and less on reviews or cameras and equipment. But that’s not to say there isn’t much of the latter. A very good all-in-one magazine.
Photography Focus Guides
- From the makers of Digital Camera Magazine, in-depth specials covering (so far) 1: Landscapes, 2: Composition, 3: Portraits, 4: Nikon D50 and 5: Close-ups. I’ve contacted the publisher directly and they say that the magazine will come out here and there and not monthly as it has been, so catch it when you can.
Photoshop Focus Guides
- As with the two mags above this is another Future Publishing publication. This particular one has been going for a while. Similar to the Photography Focus Guides, they don’t come cheap at £7.99 each but you get 130 pages without any adverts. I believe this comes out fairly regularly and covers all aspects of Photoshop.
TimeOut
- Another general mag/paper that has a lot of photography-related stuff in it. It’s an interesting read, well especially if you live in or near London.

Photography books

Here’s a list of photography and Photoshop books I’ve collected over the last few months, as you can see I’ve got a lot of reading. Hopefully these will be good reference material and give me ideas (links go to Amazon UK pages and I will add notes to each book later):

Photoshop

How to Cheat in Photoshop: The Art of Creating Photorealistic Montages – Updated for CS2
The Photoshop CS2 Book for Digital Photographers
Adobe Photoshop CS2 (Classroom in a Book)

Photography

The World’s Wild Places
The World’s Top Photographers: Wildlife
Portraits (World’s Top Photographers S.)
Photojournalism: And the Stories Behind Their Greatest Images (World’s Top Photographers)
Landscape (World’s Top Photographers S.)
Photography and the Art of Seeing: A Visual Perception Workshop for Film and Digital Photography
Rock Faces: The World’s Top Rock ‘n’ Roll Photographers and Their Greatest Images
Love Your Dog Pictures: How to Photograph Your Pet with Any Camera
Through the Lens: “National Geographic” Greatest Photographs
Wide Angle: National Geographic Greatest Places
Wildlife Photographer of the Year: Portfolio 15
The Essential Wildlife Photography Manual: Successful Digital and Film Techniques for Creative Photography

Below I’ve listed some travel and nature books that might come in handy. One reason I would to be a photography is the potential to travel around and capture all the interesting places, buildings, etc. out there. As a general role, Lonely Planet books are pretty much the best travel books around but I have a combination of LP, TimeOut and Rough Guides for several places:

Travel

Rough Guide to Ireland (Rough Guide Travel Guides S.)
The Rough Guide to England (Rough Guide Travel Guides S.)
The Rough Guide Map to London – Edition 2
England (Lonely Planet Regional Guides S.)
The Cities Book (Lonely Planet Pictorial S.)
The Travel Book: A Journey Through Every Country in the World (Lonely Planet S.)
100 Great Cities of the World
The Rough Guide Map Ireland (Rough Guide Map S.)
The Worldwide Guide to Movie Locations Presents London
The Rough Guide to London (Rough Guide Travel Guides S.)
100 Great Wonders of the World
The Rough Guide to Scotland – Edition 7
The Rough Guide to Britain (Rough Guide Travel Guides S.)
London by London: The Insider’s Guide (2nd Edition)
London (Lonely Planet City Guides S.)
Wales (Lonely Planet S.)

Nature

Light on the Earth

My computer set-up

Yep I have one, well 2 and another which is sort of dead.

Hardware

I recently bought a Rock Extreme CTX Pro laptop. A laptop has been on my luxury-to-buy list for years and I decided to buy one when a much lower than expected VAT bill came my way one month. It’s amazing but eats up battery power like nobody’s business. It’s to get me away from my monster desktop machine upstairs as it’s basically a desktop replacement machine. I have a 64 bit AMD 3200+ 2GHz machine. Quick tip here, don’t buy anything 64 bit, not until 2008 anyway, bloody hard to get drivers (as its too expensive for developers to develop on) and some software will just point-blank refuse to work on it. My machine has a lush 1.5Gb of RAM and a snazzy nVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT gfx card in it. It’s dog slow at the moment. I’m about to upgrade to a 2GHz 3800+ AMD Athlon 64 Dual Core CPU and up the RAM to a total of 2.5Gb.

I’ve bought a Buffalo NAS external hard drive and put all my data files on it (PST, pictures, music, etc). The purpose? So that I can access all this from my desktop and my laptop without having 2 computer on at once. I can log on to mail and browse my files on my laptop without turning on my desktop machine. All I need is the external drive and my wireless router on and Bob’s your Uncle. But yeah, it’s a little slow. I could get a faster wireless router, which might be on the cards but the new spec for wireless isn’t due to be rectified until 2008/2009! It’s not that bad just a little annoying.

Software

The desktop runs Windows XP Pro x64. Personally I cannot seen any difference performance-wise. The software itself is identical to its 32 bit relative. I was eager to upgrade to Vista but Microsoft had stupidly slapped a huge price tag on it so it’s a big no no. Besides, there are no drivers for 64 bit computers. As for my laptop, that runs Media Centre, sorry Center, or MCE. Not much difference to Pro. It has a nice fluffy front end for Media Center for when you’re watching DVDs or TV but nothing else special.

I will be writing up a large list of all my other essential software (non-photography) so keep an eye out for a post on this.

The Vista Question

So upgrade to Vista? I touched on it above but to me it seems far too expensive unless you buy the OEM version and that means a clean install (no upgrade option normally). I have XP Pro on my desktop and MCE on my laptop and that limits me to the Ultimate version. And at £250+ for the upgrade version alone I can safely say I’ll be going for the OEM editions, especially as I will be buying the new Office (full version again) soon. I’ve been beta testing the Office 2007 version – its’ great btw – and the license will run out very soon.

Ignoring the stupid price tag, for me as a 64 bit desktop user it’s a no brainer as currently Vista x64 doesn’t allow any digitally unsigned device drivers to be installed and so I reckon lot of my kit won’t work with it. By the way, all variations, Ultimate, Home, Basic, as well as 32bit and 64bit versions are bundled with ALL versions of Vista on the same CD/DVD, you’re just buying the license key to unlock the version(s). I won’t have the same problem with my laptop but that is down to software and the x64 edition will refuse to run any 16 bit applications, unlike the 32 bit edition. So a bit iffy there as there are still, surprisingly, some apps running at 16bit and I’m sure some essential software for me is 16 bit. It’s recommend that you have 1Gb of RAM and if your hardware works on XP then it “should” work on Vista (32bit version anyway). Performance is supposed to be the same, so it’s not all bad. It has been said, though, that we should check our security software and find Vista updates first. PC Pro says there shouldn’t be any need to install any third party firewall program, especially if you’re using a router. The spyware software isn’t too bad either (though I’ll stick with Spyware Doctor for now). Still no virus software bundled, shame but I’m happy with ZoneAlarm/Avast. DirectX10 sounds like a good deal, especially for development but there aren’t any games for it yet. Only Crysis is on the horizon and that’s not out until April. Vista does look pretty, but not for me not yet. If I get Vista for my laptop then I’ll write an article for my views.

Software list

This’ll be the software article then, OK, no points for guessing that I’ll chat away about software here. A list of software appears below:

ACDSee
– I’ve been using ACDSee for years, I have Pro Photo Manager 8. It’s a little slower than it used to be, especially when searching within large amounts of pictures but it’s still king in my eyes for picture browsing. I’ve even started photo manipulating in it.

Adobe Photoshop
– Yep, I don’t need to say much here. I need to learn this. I have a few books and a will grab any of the PS Focus Guides from Future Publishing when I see them but first thing is first learn the camera, learn the techniques then I’ll come to PS. I’ve downloaded the CS3 Beta and will get it up and running when I decide to have a look (I think I get 30 days free).

Corel Paint Shop Pro
– I’m kind of tempted to buy this, I used to use it back in the day (before Corel had its claws around it). I’ve had a quick play for a free trial recently, it still looks the business. Hmmm…

Picasa
– A simple, free photo viewer and editor from Google. Not used much, though. I think you can now share photos with it.

GIMP
– Again, not used much but it could be useful when I start getting serious with photo manipulating. I want to try the fake tilt-shift technique on some of my photos as the effects I’ve seen on other pics are amazing.

Also, I’ve tried a few photo sticking-pictures-together tools but so far I’m either too pants to photograph panoramically or I’ve not found a program that an idiot like me can use and get good results from.

I will be writing up a large list of all my other essential software (non-photography) so keep an eye out for a post on this.

Photography training info

Here is a bit of info on some training I hope to take at some point. As I work and don’t have the luxury to take time off I’ve opted for the home study option. After a long period of searching the net and obtaining info from all sorts Open College of Arts came out on top.

The site looks good and gives lots details of their courses. What I like about them is that there is a potential to gain an academic qualification or two. They stress, however, that although they are in the process of applying for validation of a BA Hons degree it is not available at the moment. The highest award that they can offer students is a Diploma of Higher Education (DipHE) in Creative Arts. This is made up of 120 credits at Level 1 + 120 credits at Level 2. I also like that you are assigned a tutor who will guide you through the course. Course details and links are below:

Drawing:

DW1: Drawing – http://www.oca-uk.com/courses/drawing/drawing1
DW1: Drawing in Colour – http://www.oca-uk.com/courses/drawing/dr_col
- £450, 5 months, 3 hours a week (for each course above)
- 40 level 1 credits (combing both courses above)

Painting:

PT1: Watercolour – http://www.oca-uk.com/courses/painting/p1wc
– 40 level 1 credits (£580, 10 months, 7 hours a week)
PT2: Relating to Other Artists – http://www.oca-uk.com/courses/painting/p2rtoa
– 60 level 2 credits (£580, 10 months, 7 hours a week)
PT3: Advanced – http://www.oca-uk.com/courses/painting/p3adv
– 60 level 3 credits (£580, 10 months, 7 hours a week) – probably will not do

Photography:

P1: The Art of Photography – http://www.oca-uk.com/courses/photography/ph1aop
– 40 level 1 credits (£580, 9-12 months, 6 hours a week)
P2: Landscape – http://www.oca-uk.com/courses/photography/ph2Land
– 60 level 2 credits (£580, 9-12 months, 6 hours a week)
P3: Advanced – http://www.oca-uk.com/courses/photography/ph3adv
– No credits that I can see (£580, 9-12 months, 6 hours a week)

On top of the prices is an £100 assessment charge for each course if you want your work to be assessed (and gain the points). Plus you pay for postage to send your assignments to your tutor, though free when they come back. I’ve included the drawing courses, my plan was to actually start with the basic drawing course to see how the whole home-study thing goes, then take on the first photography course. I’m not sure this is such a good idea. The times quoted above are guides and I would say double these. So if I was doing both courses I would need 18 hours each week, that’s 3 hours over 6 days each week for 10+ months.

At the moment I cannot afford this anyway, but would certain like to take the basic courses. I still would like to combine pencil drawing and photography but need to concentrate on one or the other with such training. Either way, completing these courses will take several years.