Contrasts
London Sunset
As I mentioned last year about this time I really love the varied seasons you get to experience in London. At the moment my journey home at night either involves getting very very wet or being treated to the most spectacular sunsets.
Tonight it was a sunset and it was amazing.
Photo Storage and Workflow
I have a lot of files that I keep related to my photography and need to be able to find them again later on. I have given a lot of thought to how to organise the photos so that I can find them by associated categories and based on date.
A few months ago I decided to move away from my flat directory structure, with directories being category names, to something more advanced. I gave the opensource tools available a look and non of them really looked easy enough or powerfull enough to do what I need to do. Someone at worked showed me ACDSee and its great categorisation system and I thought I would use this as the tool to store archive my photos with. I remember ACDSee from the mid 90’s and figured a product this old and mature would be a safe bet.
As it turns out the introduction of the database into ACDSee is by no means mature, I discovered this when the application crashed half way through making a backup and then corrupting it’s database. Some reading of their forums got me to this thread which suggests I am not the only person suffering from this DB issue. I managed to recover the database after hours of messing around and immediatly exported it to a text format. Now I am starting down the road of developing my own archival system.
The full entry contains details of how I store my files, this is as much intended for someone to get some ideas for their own workflow and for me to document how I work so that I can write the archival system to compliment my workflow.
Canary Wharf
I first came to London in March 2000, we had offices in 1 Canada Square which is the tallest building in Europe at the moment. It was the first building to be built on the Canary Wharf estate. I took a couple of photos with my Epson PhotoPC 600 of the area.
When I discovered these photos again a couple of nights ago I had a look for other old photos around Canary Wharf and found one I took in 2002 from roughly the same angle as the earlier one but just from further away. The 2002 photo was taken with my Olympus C3000 Zoom camera.
Today I went back to the same spot and took another shot with my new camera. Unfortunately I cannot go to the same place as the 2000 photo since there is now a modern flat complex.
The full entry has the 3 photos for a comparison of the growth of this area.
Midland Grand Hotel
Attached to St. Pancras station in London is a huge victorian Gothic style building, it is the old hotel that was operated by the Midlands Railway. Eventually when the hotel closed it became offices and now its empty but listed as a Grade 1 historic building.
Fountain Square
I went to drop someone off at Victoria Coach Station today, on the way there we walked through a little mall called Fountain Square, at first I thought its pretty grimy and dirty but on the way back I took another look and noticed it was actually a pretty kewl place. I took a couple of photos that can be seen here.
