A few years ago, this would have been seen as perfectly acceptable behaviour and I would have been treated as a welcome visitor, bringing in tourist cashy-money. The iconic image of the American Tourist is one of a behawaiianshirted loud man in shorts with an SLR fitted with a 200mm lens round his neck. The iconic image of a Japanese Tourist is that of a polite suited man looking at the world through the lens of a compact camera. Cameras are tourism. Even us Brits when taking our local money to a different town will usually be armed with some sort of digital camera, and let’s not forget we all have camera phones now.

A week after the 2005 London Bombings, I was in London on a holiday we’d booked weeks before. We didn’t consider it a risk or any of that stuff, but we didn’t realise that, as our hotel was at Euston Station, we would be in and around the area it all happened. Walking round Kings Cross and Euston with a camera and I was stopped several times by the police, asking me if I was there the previous week and if I’d taken any pictures. They were all handing out leaflets like this:

The Police were actively seeking the assistance of the public, and quite rightly as anything that can be used to catch people responsible for terror attacks on civilians should be used - as long as it doesn’t interfere basic with human rights, of course. “Did you take any pictures?” was the question I was asked. Unfortunately, I couldn’t be of any help, but tried as best I could to document the atmosphere around that area the week after the attack. I’ve not many posted the photos I took because they were of difficult subjects, like a group of police carrying flowers to a memorial, or of a woman carrying a placard with a list of the dead (almost identical to a BBC photo), or of the crowd gathered outside King’s Cross for the one minute of silence. They weren’t particularly good photos, either. The very first photograph I took on this holiday was actually of the first policeman to ask me if I’d taken any photos; I answered I hadn’t but that I’d like to take his photo. He consented and I took this photo:

Yes, later on on the holiday, I did take photos of ducks on ponds and stuff, as you’re supposed to, but that first day started with my pretending to be a rather poor amateurish photo journalist.

Today, that is different. Abraham Zapruder would be considered a terrorist suspect, John Filo would be considered a terrorist suspect and I would be considered a terrorist suspect, because today, if you take photos of the police, of government buildings or of the many closed-circuit cameras dotted around our British cities, you can be stopped by police, searched and be asked to delete your photos or even be detained for several hours, all of this under the auspices of the Terror Act 2000.

It’s difficult to know how to deal with this, as it’s not like you can argue with the Terror Act without sounding like a dick, and it’s not like you can reason with a pissed-off bobby with over-reaching powers. Being in the right does you no good if you get your camera accidentally broken with no recourse. All we can do is blog about it, which feels hollow and weak, but when all that’s left, expect to see a lot of it.

In the mean time, here are some photos of coppers doing their job, seven days after the bombing, and not hassling photographers.

There is an excellent resource for UK photographers available here: A short guide to photographers rights in the UK.

Links:
• The Register - No snapping: Photographers get collars felt
• Daily Mail - Photographer held for five hours …
• Photographer arrested by Armed Police
• BBC - Innocent Photographer or Terrorist?

The answer is seemingly arcane and mysterious …

Or rather it is exceedingly simple. There are in fact two distinct kinds of deep-fried pizza; the “pizza” and the “pizza crunch”. One is battered - the crunch - and one is not.

In the interests of science, I bought both a “1/2 Fried Pizza Supper” and a “1/2 Fried Pizza Crunch Supper”. As with all Scottish chip shops, the “supper” means with chips.

Aside for the colonies. What you call chips we call crisps. What you call fries we call … er, fries. Contrary to the simplistic explanations you may have heard, our chips are not the same as your fries (or rather, the Belgians’ fries) but they are in fact much larger and less crisp. As scholars write theses on the difference, here’s a cop-out ‘pedia link so I don’t have to try.

The pizza crunch was served in battered quarters whereas the plain pizza was merely halved and flopped top-down on the hearty potato produce.

Half Pizza Supper

Pizza Crunch Supper

A word on the quality of the pizzas: the chippy we bought these from is renowned for its hand-made pizzas. These are not their fine produce. These pizzas are the cheap frozen kind from the cash and carry. Much like you don’t get the finest cut of beef in a fancy restaurant if you order it well-done, you don’t get the hand-crafted goodness when it’s destined for the fryer.

The edge of the unbattered pizza

If you look closely at the edge of the deep-fried pizza (as opposed to the battered one) you can see it’s been well fried and is crisp and full of tasty oil. Note the tasty chips cheese-glued to the top.

a cut into the unbattered pizza

As you can see in the battered crunch, the pizza itself is remarkably ungreasy. Yes, the shocking truth is that the battered pizza contains less oil than the unbattered one.

a cut into the battered pizza

I’ll be honest, both taste excellent. Sure, they are not hand made and cooked in a wood-fired stone oven, but if you want that, there are plenty of quaint and pretentious little restaurants around. Knock yourself out. These are full-fat ned food for the guy in the track suit that would only run if the ‘polis’ were on his tail. Let’s be honest, they’re cheap pizzas elevated to greatness by being deep-fried. Marvellous.

a fine Pizza Crunch Supper

And yes, to eat either these without a glass bottle of Irn Bru to wash it down would be heresy.

A romantic meal for two

These delicacies were bought at Cafe Q in Strathaven, South Lanarkshire. The prices are visible in the photo above. £2.50 for the fried pizza with chips and £2.60 for the pizza crunch supper. That’s about $5 a meal. All photos can be enlarged with a click.

Note: If you don’t want to read a boring article full of opinions and screenshots, The following string is what you came for, whether or not you know it. "screen -DRRS iphone"

Look! Restarting MySQL from a fricking phone!

For me, there isn’t a perfect SSH application, but iSSH is closest. I’d like a lot more than what’s on offer, like a way of storing passwords and ssh keys. Yes, it’s insecure to have these on an item you can lose, but this is what PINs and the like are for. Imagine staring up your ssh client, selecting your connection, typing in your 4-digit PIN and seeing your connection spring to life. Then, the connection gets disconnected as your bus goes in a tunnel or something, you reconnect automatically and pick up where you left off as soon as you’re reconnected to t’internets. Forgetting your PIN would result in your passwords and keys being flushed from the device, but nothing more than that. None of them does this, but I think it’s the cleanest way.

So, how can we at least deal with a few of the issues ourselves? There’s a simple way and that’s a well-known tool called screen. This gives us our connection that doesn’t lose its place if it gets disconnected and it gives us multiple sessions, after a fashion.

Here’s how I set up my iPhone’s iSSH to launch screen and reattach to my iPhone specific connection:

What that does is launches screen immediately with our iPhone session connected; -S iphone ensures it picks up the correct session and the -DRR does whatever is necessary to create, detatch, reattach, whatever, to get your session back. The line in the manpage is one of the finest I’ve come across:

-D -RR
Attach here and now. Whatever that means, just do it.

Using screen also potentially gives you access to a copy/paste buffer, but the downside of using screen is that you can’t scroll using iSSH’s scrolling gestures, so these are not anywhere as near useful as you’d hope. Version 1.2 claims integration with GNU Screen, so we’ll have to see if that removes some of the problems inherent with using Screen.

Speaking of future versions, apparently, version 1.1 of iSSH is currently held up in Apple’s application testing department, but it claims to do SSH keys and the like, which will take it one step closer to the ideal client. [1]

iSSH has its own forum on google groups.

Update: Dean Beeler, the application’s developer, posted this excellent hint for screen on the aforementioned forum :

An additional tip that gets scrollback working in
screen is by modify the user’s .screenrc file to contain the following
line:
termcapinfo xterm ti@:te@

Update 2: Version 1.1 is on the App Store. Woohoo!

HDR (High Dynamic Range photography) is taking a photo at low, medium and high exposure and blending them together to get the best results. You know how when you get a decent holiday sunset photo and the beach is just a black smear under the gorgeous sky, or you see all the details of the sands with a white sky? That’s what HDR kicks to the kerb. Check out this slightly exaggerated example to see what I mean.

HDR tries to get around the limitations of traditional photography to present images in the same way as the eye sees them. When you look at a sunset, you see the sky and the beach equally as clearly.

You can see the HDR photos on my Flickr page. As you can see, the more I do them, the less outrageous they become.

What you’ll need is a camera that does bracketing (more about this in a minute), a computer and some HDR software. We know you’ve got a computer as this isn’t a dead-tree edition so we’ll get on with the software.

Software

This is dead easy as you have two options and they’re the same on both Mac and Windows PC:

1. Photomatix
2. Adobe Photoshop and the Photomatix plug-in

Yes, there does indeed seem to be a pattern there. So, go get the demo of Photomatix and get your camera ready.

Camera Settings

Bracketing is the art of taking a photo and having the camera then take a darker one and a lighter one just to make sure you get the right levels of light. I won’t go into too much detail on how to do this as every camera handles it differently so open your manual and look for bracketing in the index. It’ll be there, even on lesser cameras. Oh, if you have ever read any other articles on HDR, they all stress the importance of having a good tripod, but if you don’t have a tripod, don’t worry as this tutorial is to get you past the hurdle of taking your first HDR photo to see if you like it. We’ll not be spending any money on this technique until you’re happy it’s worth buying the software and getting a decent tripod.

Before you get too bored of all this dry text, here’s the picture I’ll be showing you how to produce:

Taking your first photos

Sunsets, skies and the like. This is what you should learn on. Getting a triptych of a decent sunset or two or should set you in good stead to discover the software, or if you want to take daytime shots, a decent half-cloudy sky should provide all the contrasty goodness you need.

I took three photos, without a tripod, at +2ev, 0ev and -2ev, which is posh-speak for dark, normal and light. You’ve looked up how to do bracketing on your camera by now, right?

See how on the left, you can see amazing cloud patterns in the sky but they’re above an inky blackness, and how on the right, the clearly pictured trees are sitting beneath a flat white sky? Normally, those would get stickers stuck on them by Boots the Chemist for being craply taken, but, in conjunction with the well-exposed middle photo, they are precisely what we want.

Before I forget, you need to be shooting all three shots with the same aperture settings. Look up “Aperture Priority” in your camera manual. Remember lower numbers (like f2.8) allow quicker shutter speeds but only have a short range of focus (depth of field) whereas higher numbers (f22, for instance) allow much more to remain in focus, but require more light or slower shutter speeds. If light allows it, go for higher aperture numbers, especially if you are using a tripod.

Photomatix

Load up the demo version of Photomatix and click on the Generate HDR Image button and select your three photos like so and click OK.

This will give you the settings as follows. The image alignment feature can make up for our spack-handedness not using a tripod. Click OK and wait for the progress bar to do its thing.

Just click through the next screen by clicking Tone Mapping.

On the next screen, you’ll get loads of options. If the photo looks too weird, click Default and start again. Settings can be saved and loaded.

Play with the settings until you get something that looks good. There are no hard and fast rules, but here’s one setting I find makes a huge difference in picking out detail: the Microcontrast slider.

Once you’re done, you may want to save your settings. However, you will want to press Process (cropped off the bottom of these grabs, I’m afraid) and watch the progress bar march relentlessly from left to right.

Save your picture and post it on the internet somewhere for all to see. Don’t forget, when you look back at your earlier HDR attempts, you may well cringe at how overdone they look. Don’t worry about that just yet. Play with the sliders to your heart’s content and get the outrageous manipulations out of your system.

Here are some examples of my HDR photos:

Please take the time to comment.

Update: Photos now linked to Flickr. Go comment on them there.

Normally, when you buy a camera, you get a fairly bog-standard average quality lens. This lens has one job and that’s to take in big and make it small enough to fit on the bit of the camera that captures the light. What macro lenses do is pretty much the opposite of that. So, what would happen if you turn the bog-standard lens round and held it to the camera?

This is what would happen:

Click for 1280px wide version

However, there must be a way to do better than manually holding the lens to the body, right? That’s where a quick trip to eBay for a Macro Reverser Ring, armed with £5 of paypal goodness comes in.

See that ring? It’s a reverser ring. It fits to the 58mm screw threads on the standard Canon lens and allows you to mount the lens backwards.

With this ‘new’ lens, you’re now armed to take some scary macro photos.

Please note, you’ll need to take a few photos to set the exposure time as the camera can’t do anything automatic. You’ve turned your fancy electronic lens into a lump of manual glass. Learn how to focus and zoom carefully.

I prefer at this point to computer control the camera, but you can get the same stability using the countdown timer.

Oh, and while I remember, that shot above is a reduced version of the shot I took. Here’s a 1:1 pixel crop. Scarily Macrotastic!

You can see more of my macro photos here in my Flickr Macro set, if you want.

Upon opening your Jock Monsieur, you will see a layer of Doner Kebab meat on top of a Naan Bread, maybe with some Glasgow Salad (chips) poking out from underneath. The wonders that await!

Once the top layer has been removed, you can clearly see the two tubs of Sauce, the Glasgow Salad on the left and the Crappy Salad in the middle with the Onion Rings, Pakora and Chicken Tikka all huddled together for warmth on the right.

As a serving suggestion, I’ve laid it out with the crappy salad atop the chips, a piece of chicken tikka balanced on top of the salads, an onion ring surrounding a piece of pakora, a wall of doner meat served with a feuille of naan with a choice of two sauces. Sparkling Italian rosé replaced the traditional Irn Bru, but purists be damned!

Or, alternatively, you could just shovel half down your Tennents-lined gullet whilst dropping the other half (crappy salad deliberately, the rest less so) on the pavement.

Next time, I may brave the hallowed Pizza Crunch Supper for your delection. With a half-pizza deep fried in chip-shop batter and piled on a wodge of chips, it truly is the champion of the artery-hardeners.

About the author. I’m an Englishman that lives in Scotland. I used to live here a while back, and in the last year just returned here after 8 years in Paris. This will give my culture shock the background it needs. My Munchy Box was the £4.95 10″ from Tandoori Nights, Stonehouse. Clicking on any images will bring up a 1920px wide version. Comments would be vastly appreciated.

To make this post seem like it’s worth something, here’s a picture of a tree.

HDRed and stuff. If you want to go look at more of my pics, go look at my Flickr page.