Yes, as it says above, this is CallMeAlan.uk, the personal website of a guy called, perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly, Alan.
alansworld {at} [gmail.com] will find me, should you care to discuss anything I've written about. I welcome any feedback.
March 2021: I seem to have developed diabetes! Read all about it
right here
I am
ambidextrous. Read about my ambidexterity
right here.
A note to surfers: on this site I make no real attempt to cater for phone and tablet users. Some pages will look wrong. Sorry,
but I'm just not good enough to make it all work correctly.
Let's talk about my incurable chronic mental aberration, taphophilia, and have a look at some pictures which explain
the condition. Hint: a taphophile is a grave hunter and photographer. If you don't need to read about my taphophilia you can hop
straight over to
My catalog of grave photography albums
This is a series of my photograph albums about Greenham Common, near Newbury, Berkshire, in central south England. I live in Newbury, and the Common
is where I'm often to be found, invariably with one or more of my cameras slung around my neck. It's a wonderful and often quite surprising place,
and my intention here is to give you a flavour of what it was, by looking at how it looks today.
Greenham Common used to be an American nuclear airbase, until that closed, roughly at the same time as the
Cold War was called off, and they ripped it up with big yellow tractors and things. But they left behind many many enticing clues and photogenic
reminders of its past. So this is my acknowledgment and thanks to those who, when ripping up the
former airbase, left us those reminders of what it was.
I want to talk about the Sigma Quattro and Foveon sensors - what they are, how they differ from the more usual and normal Bayer sensors,
and about the difficulties and differences about processing their RAW files, which have the X3F extension. Let's learn about why you
won't be processing an X3F in Lightroom, ON1, Affinity or DxO, to name but a few. No, you're going to have take a different approach.
Read my article about Quattro / Foveon / X3F.
Then read about which of today's RAW tools opens Sigma DNG files with a
few mentions of the X3F format.
For a number of years I've been arranging and performing mainly classical music pieces.
The method was to plug a MIDI keyboard into the computer (Mac more recently, Windows in the past)
and use a piece of software to capture and then correct, amend and mix the piece into a finished music file.
So click through and listen to a handful of my favourite pieces.
On 10 May 2022 DJI released the Mini 3. Greatly anticipated, most of its details had been leaking for several weeks
before the announcement, so there were no real surprises when it was officially announced.
I was one of the great anticipators; however, an enormous downside became apparent: price. Sure, it has object sensors, to avoid
crashing and so on, which the Mini 2 doesn't. It has a better camera sensor, and a few other improvements. BUT .... how much is it???
Well, it's nominally twice the price of a Mini 2. Twice. I humbly submit that the improvements of the 3 over the 2 are simply
not worth it, and accordingly I'm sticking with my superb and most excellent Mini 2. If and when I do upgrade it will be to
a DJI Air 2S, which, for roughly the same price as a Mini 3, is a much better craft. Enough said about the Mini 3.
You really MUST get a DJI Mini 2 drone!
Let me enlighten you
I've kept detailed statistics of every flight. I've now reached 100 flights (November 2021).
Read about my flight statistics
right here
Tutorial on how to get not only the video from your latest flight, but also how to get hold of the flight records
and decode / decrypt them into a useable CSV file containing SOOOOO much information.
The Mini 2 is tiny! You can easily lose sight of it and panic!
What you need is a super bright light mounted to it.
This is what I did
When out flying, please don't make any mistakes like this
Do you want telemetry subtitles in your DJI Mini 2 movies? Height, speed, distance? This is how
Imagine your DJI Mini 2 movies with a subtitle at the bottom of the picture, updating every one second, showing distance, height and speed.
It can be done, and quite easily,
providing you're a Mac and Final Cut user.
This is my look at a piece of Newbury history - an illustrated look at the old Sterling Cables site, which featured the derelict
cable building, once the tallest building/eyesore in the town, now demolished
... their many application software packages filtered down to two one, and the use of a control surface
I talk about how I've reduced the vast number of RAW processing software packages down to just two that work well and work
quickly enough that you don't need to go get a coffee every time you click Process.
Of these applications only one will work completely and efficiently with control surfaces - the Loupedeck andthe Behriger X-Touch Compact.
Read about The Loupedeck: edit in Lightroom in a way you never imagined
Read about The Behringer X-Touch Compact, a (better??) alternative.
