I've been busy on a few other sites recently.

I took the decision to start splitting out the information on Award Sounds into more specific sites.

alancward.co.uk features my photography and I'll continue to post photography-related articles over at that site from now on. I'm just building up that site now, so it may be a bit sparse this week.

The industries of Stock Photography and Stock Music have a lot of similarities.

Stock Agencies

Both rely on artists submitting their creations to agencies. The agencies are changing the way in which the artists interact with the customers of the art. Importantly for the artist, the agencies are devaluing the art resulting in the art becoming commoditised. Unfortunately, the artist is at the end of the chain and is also becoming commoditised.

Now with the increasing size of memory cards, most of us have become all too accustomed to snapping at anything. After all, we can separate out the keepers from the trash back in the office.

Delete in the field?

I used to have a policy of not deleting any photo out in the field, but I stopped this a couple of years ago. Now I'm much happier with fewer images and a higher ratio of shots:keepers.

I've been asked in one comment to see the difference between RAW and jpg images for the Panasonic DMC FX150.

I've used Raw Photo Processor on OS X to get the data out of the rw2 file. The only adjustment I made was to change the white balance from "Auto" to "As Shot". By doing that, it's made the colours more vivid, but still not as vivid as the in-camera jpg conversion did.

I took the Panasonic DMC FX-150 camera on our honeymoon out in Nevada and California. It was an ideal size, quick to start and produces serviceable images. To manage them, I used Picasa since we only had my wife's old laptop with us and it could just about run Picasa. I was quite happy applying quick edits (e.g. adjusting the white balance, shadows and highlights) knowing that I had the raw files to play with back home (ok, I was wrong). Plus I didn't really want to spend any time doing it, so quick edits were the order of the day.

If you're interested in RAW .rw2 support for the Panasonic DMC FX 150, have a look at the recent post on the Lightroom Journal.

There seems some work-around for the Panasonic files. Might be a while before I get to post about this because it may force me down the upgrade route, e.g. Leopard 10.5 and/or Lightroom 2.x. I'm still using 10.4 and Lightroom 1.4 and happy with that combination other than the lack of raw file processing for the Panasonic.

Similar to the Radial Engineering Re-Amping Kit, the Gitzo GT2941L Series 2 Basalt Tripod is another product that simply works as it should.

I needed to upgrade my tripod. I've had a basic consumer tripod for years and I've known about its short-comings for a good many of those years. I'm glad I upgraded, the time was right with the current line of Gitzo's Basalt tripods being discontinued.

One of my major gripes with the Panasonic DMC-FX150 is that the rw2 raw files cannot be opened in Adobe Lightroom or OS X.

As I type, Lightroom still doesn't support rw2 files. Neither does the recent Apple update to supported cameras.

I've been using the Panasonic DMC-FX150 for the past 4 weeks. Most of that time, I was on honeymoon with my new wife in Nevada and California. Obviously, being on honeymoon meant that I couldn't spend time taking lots of artistic shots, but it did provide many opportunities for snapshots. In many ways, the DMC FX-150 was ideal and even today, I'm not convinced there's a better camera for the purpose.

Having lived with the camera for four weeks, here are some thoughts:

Against:

This site's been quiet for the last 4 weeks, mainly because I've been on honeymoon. Well, totally because I've been on honeymoon. I took a conscious decision to not write and just enjoy the time instead. I'll step back up the writing over the next few weeks to get to the original one of two articles per week.