Taken By Machine

Updates Coming Soon! (Really!)

machine — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 17:56:07 +0000

Apologies to all for the lack of updates but my shooting schedule has been pretty heavy in the past month or so. I have been posting new work on my MySpace page however… so go ahead and friend me there if you wish.

MySpace appears to be where more of the paid shoots are to be found these days so I’ve been paying more attention to that site and less attention to Model Mayhem, which hasn’t been terribly interesting in the past month or two. I’m noticing fewer new models joining up in my area, most of them requiring pay, MUAs, stylists to be provided (despite having little to no experience), and lots and lots of rules about what they will and won’t do. Riiiight. I think I’ll pass…

More Axia!

machine — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 06:12:07 +0000

A few nudes under the cut…

Naomi

machine — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 06:00:01 +0000

Faust’s Birthday Shoot

machine — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 05:53:36 +0000

Flickr Co-Founders are leaving Flickr

machine — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:48:20 +0000

Heh. I can’t say that I’m that shocked… what with Microsoft’s buzzards continuing to hover around Yahoo… see the details here. I’m sure they’ve signed some amazing non-competes to prevent them from starting a future alternative to Flickr.

I’m not going to gloat about it… I’m no longer grumpy about Flickr and will probably go back to using it in a limited way to publicize my work… at some point or another…

Wordpress Upgrades

machine — Sat, 24 May 2008 19:49:01 +0000

This might be of interest to those of you who use Wordpress to manage your blog… and probably to no one else.

For those of you don’t care about WP, here’s a photo of a beautiful woman holding up apples in a suggestive way.

Oh those apples…

Wordpress is easy to use, free, and has a huge community of developers creating themes and plug-ins. The only mildly irksome thing about it, at least for me, is upgrading to the latest version. I’ve had a horrible WP experience about 3 years ago that completely trashed my old blog… so I’ve been wary about tinkering too much with this one. Unfortunately, I found myself having an impossible time finding a new WP theme that I liked which was compatible with my outdated version of WP (2.0.1)… so I figured that it was time to upgrade.

I’m pleased to say that upgrading WP to the latest version has become so straightforward that there’s even a WP plug-in that automates the upgrade process for you. The whole thing was totally quick and painless… except for one glitch where going to page 2 of this blog would create an endless redirecting loop. Not fun. Apparently this is a known issue for some users who upgrade from a version of WP older than 2.3 to 2.5… but there’s a plug-in that you can get here that fixed the problem by disabling the redirects. I could have probably avoided it if I kept up on my upgrades.

Now I’m off to hunt for a new theme…

Reply Hazy / Try Again

machine — Fri, 23 May 2008 04:54:20 +0000

Last week I took a chance and bought another point and shoot… my 3rd in the past two years.. and hopefully the last one for the NEXT two years (at least). The last one took a nasty knock on a concrete slab and stopped working soon after… the damn thing was too hard to hold on to! I was happy enough with the results of the photos, but it was a very fiddly camera to grip and use if you had hands bigger than a Japanese teenage girl’s.

I’ve been researching new cameras like the Canon G9… but in the end, instead of the latest and greatest (which I can’t afford) I decided to go back to the past and bought a cheap used Olympus Camedia-5050z made way back in 2002. This camera had quite the devoted following and was even used by a lot of photojournlists who needed a powerful compact camera with a good lens. After playing with it for a few days, I can see why it was so beloved.

In many ways it’s STILL a much better p&s camera than most anything else currently on the market… for one thing… the lens is big and bright… an f/1.8… which I’ve never seen on a P&S camera before. And (while being portable) it’s big enough that I don’t feel like I’m going to drop it all the time. It’s made of metal and has a comforting heft. You could use it as a weapon in a pinch. It uses AA batteries and CF cards. It’s only 5 megapixels, but that’s the sweet spot for a p&s (as far as I’m concerned)… anything too much bigger takes photos that are too noisy for my liking. It starts up a bit slowly and the LCD screen isn’t as big or as bright as modern pocket cams… but that’s to be expected.

If you find a used one in good shape, I’d recommend picking it up.

Three More Dinas

machine — Thu, 22 May 2008 04:24:25 +0000

Andy

machine — Wed, 21 May 2008 04:51:03 +0000

Two Empty

machine — Tue, 20 May 2008 04:10:05 +0000