It was last August that I decided to load some photos to a stock library. As I mentioned at the time, it was Ray who persuaded me to do this, and he has continued to piss me off impress me with stories of his massive monthly earnings.

Loading to stock libraries is a little like doing the lottery. You start with boundless enthusiasm, convinced that a large payday is just around a corner. After a month or so you realise your chances of winning (or selling) are remote and you lose interest.

“I want to try and photograph a glass properly.”

“Why?”

“What the hell else do I have to do while waiting to die?”

This was the essence of the conversation I had with my wife after I had spent several hours messing about with glasses and my camera. So far, the score was: Glasses 2 - Camera 0; assuming you were scoring based on breakages; but they were just some old, rather valuable, cut-glass sherry glasses that my granny used to own, so nothing to get too concerned about. My wife was more concerned about the hours of fiddling, what was the point?

It all started with a photo in a forum. Just a couple of glasses, but the capture was perfect. They were delicately outlined, there were no stray reflections, they looked fantastic. The poster referred to a book that had guided him to the result: Light:Science and Magic. A quick trip to the Amazon Kindle store and the book was on my iPad.

The book explains the science of light in the context of photography and it is a fine, if somewhat dense, read. After a couple of chapters of theory I skipped to the section on photographing glasses and was ready to begin. At the same time, neighbour Nik had also acquired the book, had skipped to the same section, and a joint exercise was undertaken.

I won’t bore you with the details (yeah, I know, it’s too late), but the concept is that your light source comes from behind the glass and goes through (or around, if you want a dark background) an opening that exactly matches what you see through your viewfinder. As a result, and based upon clever, scientific theory which I don’t recall because I either skipped it, forgot it, or didn’t understand it; the light passes cleanly through the glass to your camera sensor and gives you a crisp outline.

Great in theory, understood or not, but not so great in practice because in reality there is light bouncing off the glass from all manner of other light sources in a room. So our first effort looked like this:

She who must be obeyed’s little sister has returned, this time for an extended stay. Which means she is going to be photographed; a lot.

Formal sessions are yet to commence (it is too bloody hot to do much), but I did point my new Navitar 75mm at her this morning when she wasn’t looking. A bit soft due to F1.3 aperture, inept focusing, shaky hands and generally being a bit crap; but I still like the way it looks:

My penchant for blue plastic piping will have been noticed by both my regular readers; and so when she who must be obeyed expressed a need for a home studio backdrop, I was sure there would be a role for blue piping.

What was required was a frame onto which we could hang assorted coloured backdrops. The backdrops would have to be capable of being rolled down for use, and rolled up again for storage, and we could buy a custom device for around 20,000 baht.

Instead we spent 790 baht on two shitty clothing hanger devices, the sort of thing you see in markets, thinly chromed and tragically constructed. Excellent, and all we needed then was a 2.20 metre length of pipe around which we could wrap a backdrop. Which was why I found myself at the Contractor Store area of HomeWorks this morning. Unlike the main store, which is staffed with thousands of blue coated staff who are eager to please but know nothing, the Contractor Store featured a surly guard who would not let me reverse into the loading bay until I had bought something to load, and a couple of surly attendants who clearly hoped I didn’t want anything.

Tough luck lads, I’m here for blue pipe and nothing can stop me! What’s that, I can only buy a 4 metre length? That’s almost twice as much as I need and about twice as long as the storage bay in the back of my truck. What the hell, I’ll take two and let’s see if I can get them home.

Cash changed hands and the surly boys took my pipes, stuck one end in the back of my truck and then leaned them against the cab, so the whole stuck up in the air at 45 degrees and to an alarming height. I offered rope but was shunned as a thin plastic tie was employed; sufficient to get me out of sight but maybe not all the way home. Anyway, first I had to go to the main store, so I drove to the car park and reversed under the awning, going slowly as I was mindful of the pipe; but there were no ominous noises.

Back from a brief shopping trip with blue-coloured horde and off home. Moved about half a metre and there was a terrible ripping noise. Oh dear. The pipe had gracefully slid under the tarpaulin awning on the way in, and gracefully torn a large hole in it on the way out. Thankfully, my blue plastic pipe was undamaged. Not far away a gang of car washers had stopped work and were watching to see what I would do next. The only decent thing to do would be to present myself to the manager of HomeWorks and offer to pay for the repair of his awning. The only sensible thing to do would be to drive away quickly.

Ten minutes later I was safely home.

Thirty minutes later we had a backdrop.

In my previous life we ran seismic operations in Thailand (when I say “we”, I mean people who actually understood these things), which required the use of explosives. The explosives store was managed by the army and was extremely tightly controlled. Attempts to remove the explosive for nefarious purposes would have been impossible. It would be reasonable to assume that similar controls are in place over weaponry.

So, we should be alarmed and surprised at the news that “130 M16 assault rifles, motars, 11-mm pistols and Minimi rifles” have taken flight from an army base. But of course, we are not. There was a similar incident at another base last year and there will be more in the future.

While you lot have been having a lovely week doing whatever is you do; I have been having a not so lovely week doing what I do sometimes, processing thousands of photos. I enjoy the act of taking photos, and enjoy looking through them and hopefully finding the occasional good shot; but I don’t enjoy eight hours a day of processing for several days in succession. Finished the polo shots yesterday, and then it was on to shots of a party, less than a thousand, should not take long.

Look into the window of any camera shop and the labels on the cameras will scream out the number of megapixels on offer. 16 megapixels!!! Must be better than 12 megapixels!!

It’s mainly bollocks. Stuffing more pixels onto a usually tiny sensor doesn’t help, it just makes the resulting photos look more shit than they would have done with less pixels.

The camera I use for sports has a comparatively large sensor onto which have been placed a total of ten megapixels. My god, that’s less than the 14MP Pentax Optio Crappathon announced yesterday. But guess which take the best pictures….

The below was taken with my antiquated 10MP machine last weekend. I had to crop it so it is actually a 6MP image. Now click on it to see the full size image, (straight out of the camera, apart from the cropping).

A little more than a year ago I wrote a post entitled: I have no idea what it is, but I will probably want it. The subject was the yet-to-be-announced iPad and, as I expected, I did want it, I did get it, and it has been a constant companion ever since.

In spite of the doom and gloom merchants (Hi Lloyd!), it has not broken down, I have not become bored with it; and I can’t imagine a civilised life without a tablet close to hand.

I am aware that the new header image for Pattaya Days has received a mixed reception. It seemed like a good idea to replace text with an actual photo, but unfortunately some people failed to spot that it was a photo and concluded it was the work of a drug-addled idiot with too many fonts and a poor selection in colours.

The other problem is that the site is Pattaya Days, but the sign is photographed at Pattaya night; not acceptable. So yesterday I went to photograph it in late afternoon. Sadly, the sun never shines on the sign, so the result was rather drab.