A few years ago, quite a few now I think about it, I got my wife a telescope for Christmas as she loves stargazing. It was more of a romantic gesture than a genuine belief that she would want to do astronomy in depth. Unfortunately a number of things have meant she hasn’t made a great deal of use of it (3 things, aged 5 and younger), but we occasionally get it out and look at the moon.

I’d been meaning to have a go at astrophotography for a while, and earlier this year bought the necessary adapter to attach my camera to the telescope. I’ve finally got around to giving it a go.

The moon

The photo of the moon above demonstrates that I should spend hours finely adjusting the reflecting mirror/lens on the telescope! The bottom left is about as sharp as I would expect to achieve focusing manually using the telescope, but the top right I would have expected to be equally sharp. I guess there may be other reasons, such as atmospheric ones, but I think the telescope adjustment is the main issue.

Jupiter

A handy app on my iPad told me where Jupiter was, and I was amazed to see three of it’s moons using the telescope we have. I think that is what they are. They didn’t really show up with this exposure, but with longer exposures, the vibration of the telescope with the wind meant Jupiter itself was pretty blurred. Also the over exposure of Jupiter was increase. Tricky thing this astrophotography.

Stars move

I tried some longer exposures to get more detail. In this image, I could see several stars by eye through the telescope, but over 30 seconds it is evident quite how much the sky moves. Or is that the earth moving? Or both? Interestingly, from a geeky perspective, there were a lot more stars visible in the raw photo if I cranked up the exposure in a bit of photo processing software, but only to the same extent as the noise in the image. The only way you could tell they were stars is that they streaked across the image in the same way.

Clearly astrophotography isn’t that easy, particular with respect to dynamic range. I’ll no doubt have another go at it, perhaps after adjusting the telescope, but I’m not going to get obsessed about it. There is better equipment which would allow me to get better photos, but that gets extreme and I don’t have the money for one of these:

I’m investigating new print suppliers for my ball photography now. Any suggestions in the comments are welcome. For a long time I have used the same lab for printing such photos, but this year their customer service has let them down.

First let me tell you about my process; a customer (you hopefully) places an order for prints on my website. For ball photos, which I upload to the website unedited, I then have to edit the photos before ordering prints. That may take a couple of days, depending on how busy I am. I then order the prints online with my favourite photo lab. Normally printing and dispatch happen within 24hrs, but lets call it 48hrs to be on the safe side. They send them first class to me (+24hrs), and check the prints and send them first class to you (+ 24 to 36hrs depending on my diary).

So at the worst I hope to have prints with the customer within 7 or 8 days.

At this point I have to mention Royal Mail, and I’ll try not to go off on one. Why does “Special Delivery” exist? Is it for really urgent post? Isn’t that what should distinguish first and second class? OK, so there might be really really urgent post, but first class should be 24hr turn around. Perhaps it is for that added peace of mind that it will be delivered? Surely all post should be delivered! Enough said. I look forward to Royal Mail being sold off to a private company and the postal service being properly opened up to competition. Hopefully then, post should work as it should.

So back to my print supply problems. Winter balls are tricky because they are near Christmas. Customers want their photos for their Gran for Christmas, and want quick turnarounds. Royal Mail don’t seem to care. First order gets “lost in the post”. Subsequent print orders arrive, so I contact the lab who say words to the effect of “You’ll have to re-order them then”. I really expect better service, and even their website suggests I will get better service than that. Because I am a business, the distance selling regulations do not apply in this case. But this lab also deals with consumers for which they would. They have now lost a long term customer, once I find another decent lab.

A few weeks back, another photo lab phoned me up one a new marketing campaign, with enticing offers asking me to give them a try. Given that I was now looking, I thought why not, and reordered with them. I paid extra for “Special Delivery”, since I’m now behind on my own turn around schedule. Half the prints didn’t show, a few days late. Not sent special delivery. I phone them up. The sent two packages. Neither special delivery. How can RM lose the post twice. Perhaps it was the snow hiding the post van from the postie?  Top customer service this time, they will reprint and send immediately. A few days later the prints show up. Still not special delivery!

I can now finally dispatch my order to my customer 17 days after they first placed the order. I guess with the snow and Royal Mail’s efficiency, there is no chance the customer will get their prints before Christmas

So I am now looking for a new print lab. One that sends prints by the postage method I specify. One that prints reliably. One that fixes issues if they arrive in a gracious and efficient manner. Suggestions are welcome in the comments.

I’m not going to name the two labs who have let me down. I figured you’d guess the postal service so no point hiding that one. But I will give a big shout out to a couple of other companies. Loxley Colour have always given me top prints and excellent customer service. They are a bit too pricey to be economic for ball photography, but are a really top lab. Photobox are a top consumer print lab. They too have given me top customer service, but unfortunately I found their quality too variable to use for professional work – hence my checking of all prints I send out.

This experience has also made me think about my own customer service. I hope I live up to your expectations. If I don’t, please tell me politely and we can work something out.

The presenter had bright white fluffy hair, a luminous patterned shirt, and pink trousers. During the interviews, he didn’t withhold from making things up. And appeared to have breakdowns which required pills. His name was “Brian Bedonde”.

Alas, what was pitched to us as a serious art slot in a major program was in fact a pilot for a video version of Fonejacker. Needless to say none of those invovled in the exhbition were prepared to sign releases, and we have explicitly withdrawn any consent for the footage of us to be featured. Feeling slightly miffed to have wasted the time.

I’ve got a picture up in an exhibition in Oxford, starting in a few days time. The “press release” details are:

Made In Oxford

Photographic Exhibition by the Oxford Flickr Group
3rd – 31st October 2009 – free entry
(Opening night for press/exhibitors only 2nd October)
The Jam Factory, Holly Bush Row, Oxford, OX1 1HU (near main railway station)

The exhibition is the brainchild of a group of 30 local photographers who live, work and study in the Oxford area, most of whom had only met online before we decided to arrange this exhibition.

We’re here before term starts and we’re here when the tourists have jetted back to their own cities. And whilst it’s an outstandingly beautiful city to live in, it can get awfully boring photographing the Dreaming Spires again and again. So what we’ve set out to do is try and show you our Oxford instead. Every exhibitor has attached a little explanation to their photograph – what it is, why they took it. All the photos are geo-tagged and marked on the exhibition map so you can find out where we took them if you feel like exploring the city yourself.

Garrett Coakley, one of the organizers, said “It’s been an exciting challenge setting up an exhibition when most of the exhibitors have only ever communicated online – it just goes to show that when you have a internet-based community of like-minded individuals you can translate that into a real-world event. We’re looking forward to organising more events like this in the future.”

If you’re visiting Oxford and fancy taking away a slightly more interesting souvenir than the usual set of cheesy postcards and an Oxford University T-shirt then take a card, visit the website link , and purchase yourself a gorgeous shiny new book with all the exhibition photographs in. You can also purchase prints and books at the venue.

Pretty fun stuff. Do go and take a look if you get a chance (like if you happen to be in Oxford for a dedication service…)

I’m generally making the prints I sell at exhibitions as limited editions, but at the moment, that’s pretty much the only way I will sell them. So in the next few weeks (ok, that will probably mean months) I’ll add a new section to my website to make them more widely available – while still being very exclusive.

I’m working on a community art project at the moment called the Oxford Photographic Grid. The aim is to photograph Oxford in a systematic way rather than focusing only on the tourist attractions. The basic idea is that a grid is overlaid on a map of Oxford, and then a single photo is taken at each node location on that grid. If you’re interested in finding out about this project, please visit the project website.

We are currently looking for Oxford-based photographers (both amateur and professional) to take part. If that’s you, please sign up on the project website.

Thanks to Matt Durber for creating the banner & logos for this project.

Thanks for the pictures. I got them from the post office today. They are excellent! – Rhiannon Ward, Corpus Christi & St Hugh’s Ball

Nick and I are thrilled at the photographs you took, they are fantastic. - Nick and Rachel

Thank you very much for the disk of photos you dropped around yesterday. Miranda and I are delighted with them. – Simon and Miranda

The Tate Modern in London is currently having an exhibition contrasting contemporary street and studio photography. As part of the exhibition they are showing work submitted to a moderated group on Flickr. I submitted my signature photo to this group and it was accepted, so it is now being displayed on a monitor in the Tate Modern from time to time. The image above is screen shot of it being displayed on their website. Below is the screenshot when the mouse hovered over my picture.

From the submitted photos, 100 will be chosen by a panel of judges for inclusion an exhibition photobook. I’m quite hopeful I’ll make the final cut. We’ll see…

I’ve seen Wordles in number of places now, and so I thought I’d jump on the bandwagon. Here’s a Wordle of this blog created today – although not including this post – but perhaps iteratively doing it could be interesting… – perhaps not.

This was created at Wordle.net. The size of words depends on the frequency of their occurence. Consequently it shows what I post about most, or at least the words I use most when posting. It’s not surprising to see photos, wedding and Oxford coming up quite large. Perhaps the colour scheme I choose is not the best as ball comes up quite large, but it took me a while to find because it is in a light colour. Another factor affecting it’s size is that I use it slightly interchangably with event, meaning both come out a little smaller than wedding.

I may resort to creating one of these each month, I may not. We’ll see.

I lent one of my cameras to a friend – Mark Porter – for his trip to Chelsea flower show. He got some nice shots and I had difficulty chosing something to put up here. I’m sure Mark will post some more on his blog once I get around to burning them to a DVD and giving him the photos. Whilst I’m happy to lend my kit to friends, next time I might not the day before a wedding, I’m not sure I can handle the extra worry.

My little girl planted, with a significant amount of help from Daddy, a runner bean at a bank holiday children’s event. I was pretty amazed to see how much it grew in a single day (the start point represents 3 days growth from first appearing), so thought I’d set up my camera to record it time-lapse. Frames are taken 5 minutes apart. I don’t have a power lead for my camera so the number of frames was limited by my battery ‘s power. I may try again another day with a fully charged battery.

I thought it was pretty interesting how much it moves, so thought I would share.