scrambledmindsMixed up thoughts on the web world, photography and life.

We were on a flying visit to London last week after our time in Croatia. It was time to catch up with some old friends. We had a blast! Hopefully it wont be so long before we catch up again. Good times, good times.

This was annoying me for some time. Particularly because:

1. I couldn’t work out how to do it.
2. I regularly make mistakes in adding keywords to a bulk set of images
3. I only recently migrated to Aperture from iPhoto and all those imported images are tagged with “iPhoto Original”
4. When I upload images to flickr I don’t want the weird tags on the images (ref to point 3!)

Anyway, because basically I’m dumb at that stuff, I found this little gem. It’s a great tip that essentially goes like this:

1. Select the images that you want to blast those nasty bulk mistake keywords from
2. Complain to yourself mentally that you wouldn’t need to be doing this if you hadn’t made the mistake in the first place
3. Make sure the keyword controls are visible (Window -> Show control bar, Window -> Show keyword controls)
4. Type the keyword you want removed in the keyword box, and (Wait for it)
5. Press Shift-Enter. Now this is very important. Shift-Enter.

My life is bliss.

I just finished a great photography workshop through Sydney Photographic Workshops (SPW). I attended the beginners Digital SLR Photography workshop which was conducted over about 8 weeks in the SPW studios in Alexandria. All the courses are tutored by professional and practising photographers making them practical and informative. The big finale was held last Friday and consisted of some drinks, some gear, a slideshow of photographs taken by the workshop participants over its course and some prizes for the best photos. Prizes were awarded for the best photos taken during the course for the following categories:

• Best portrait
• Best Landscape
• Best series

Let me tell you, it came as a shock to me to win one of the categories. Which one do you think? Well, I won the best series category. Here’s the series of still life pics that scored me that illustrious accolade.

If you’re in the market for a course where you’ll get to meet some people, (re)invigorate your photography passion and hopefully come out the other end taking better pictures and enjoying it, then I’d recommend it. If you’re already familiar with photography and need a creative injection then I’d still recommend it. I was already familiar with SLR photography but still found it fun! There’s one downside though – you want to by all the great gear!

If you’re interested, you can find more of my pictures on Flickr. I’ve only just started using it so be kind

So Wordpress 2.5 has been released. It seems pretty slick and the new management interface is much nicer and more functional before. Check out the details here.

I’ve also managed to start putting my photos over on Flickr. It’s all going well and I’m getting them on scrambledminds.com by using the Slickr Gallery and Shutter Reloaded (a Lightbox variant) plugins. Quite a few people think that Slickr/lightbox is slow but I think it’s worth it for single or small sets of photos. For larger sets I just hard link to the slideshow url on Flickr.