The first shot I’ve chosen shows a pair of Blue-tailed Damselflies (Ischnura elegans) making more Blue-tailed Damselflies. Two things to note here, firstly, Damselflies opt for a very unique position for mating, and the males and females have very different colours. Adult males of the different species generally look quite distinct (with a few exceptions), but many of the females of the different species look very similar, some species even have females of a few different colours, and to really confuse things, both males and females change colour as they mature. If you can’t recognise what species a Damselfly is, it’s probably a juvenile, or a female, or both. Butterflies are WAY easier to tell apart!

on Flickr – Full-Size

• Camera: Nikon D40
• Lens: Nikon DX AFS 55-200mm
• Exposure: 1/800 sec
• Focal Length: 200mm
• Focal Ratio: f/8
• ISO: 200
• Camera Mode: Aperture Priority
• Exposure Bias: -1.0ev
• Processing: tweaked a little using Aperture’s Dodge & Burn plugin

The second shot I chose is of the largest Dragonfly I’ve managed to capture so far, the Four-spotted Chaser (Libellula quadrimaculata). These guys are very territorial. They get their name because they chase away other Dragonflies that stray into their patch (and have 4 spots on each set of wings). They like to sit on perches that give them a good view of their territory, and will keep returning to their favourite perches over and over again. This makes them a joy to photograph, if you miss the perfect shot the first time around, just wait a bit, and you’ll get another chance! The fact that they like a perch with a good view also means you tend to be able to get shots with nice clutter-free backgrounds too.

I’ve also started to experiment a lot with back-lighting in the last few months. As this shot demonstrates, it can work nicely on insects which tend to have transparent or semi-transparent bits for the light to shine through.

on Flickr – Full-Size

• Camera: Nikon D40
• Lens: Nikon DX AFS 55-200mm
• Exposure: 1/400 sec
• Focal Length: 200mm
• Focal Ratio: f/8
• ISO: 400
• Camera Mode: Aperture Priority
• Exposure Bias: -1.0ev
• Processing: tweaked a little using Aperture’s Dodge & Burn plugin

For those of you interested in such details, this is RPSI preserved steam loco number 186. She’s a class J15 0-6-0 former GS&WR loco, manufactured in Manchester in 1879, and retained in service until 1964. Here we see her on a cold, windy, and rather damp Easter Monday morning near Kilcock Co. Kildare, working the Easter Egg-spress from Dublin to Mullingar.

on Flickr – Full-Size

• Camera: Nikon D40
• Lens: Nikon DX AFS 55-200mm
• Exposure: 1/640 sec
• Focal Length: 55mm
• Focal Ratio: f/5.6
• ISO: 800
• Camera Mode: Full Manual
• Processing: This shot was first tweaked using the Topaz Adjust plugin in Photoshop Elements 8, then converted to monochrome using the Monochrome Mixer in aperture, and then give a subtle sepia tone using the Colour Monochrome brick in Aperture.

Yesterday I posted some of my thoughts on Photographic composition, and used that post as the basis for a conversation with Allison on episode 271 of the Nosillacast podcast. In that discussion we talked about the importance of getting layers into photographs of places to give a sense of depth, and in particular we talked about the importance of the foreground layer. As part of that discussion I drew attention to the fact that there are a huge amount of possible foregrounds for every background. You can usually move hundreds of feet without making much, if any, change to the background when you’ve shooting landscapes. This gives you a wide menu of foregrounds to choose from.

If you compare and contrast these photos with those from my Photo of the Week 111 & 112 post, you’ll get a good example of just how different a shot you can get by just changing the foreground. Both sets of photos have Rathcoffey Castle as the background, both have the field of flowering Rape Seed flowers as the mid-ground, and both have the same dramatic sky at the top of the frame, but both have very different foregrounds, framings, and compositions, resulting very different photographs.

These shots have a far simpler composition, with far fewer elements in the frame. It really is just the field, the castle, and the sky. The previous shot was about showing the many interesting things around the edges of the field, the beautiful old tree, the ancient Ring Fort, and of course the castle, so it was composed in such a way as to show all these things without cluttering the frame. The filed and the sky were in that shot too, but they were almost incidental. Here, we have much less in the frame, so both the sky and the big sweeping field are the stars of the show, with the castle adding some nice interest to the background, but not being the star of the show.

These two sets of shots were taken very close to each other. The first a little to the left of the Ring Fort, with the Ring Fort included, the other a little to the right of the Ring Fort with it excluded. The Ring Fort is literally just a few pixels off to the right of this shot, but because you don’t see it, you assume it’s not there, and that the field goes on for ever. As it happens it really is a very big field, but doesn’t come across half as well in the shot if you include it’s edges.

As with the previous photos, this pair was generated using the workflow I described on the Typical Shutterbug Podcast.

on Flickr – Full-Size

• Camera: Nikon D40
• Lens: Nikon DX AFS 18-55mm (D40 kit lens)
• Exposure: 1/1250 sec
• Focal Length: 18mm
• Focal Ratio: f/8
• ISO: 200
• Camera Mode: Aperture Priority
• Processing: single RAW image first tonemapped with Photomatix Pro, then tweaked with the Topaz Adjust 4 plugin in Photoshop Elements

on Flickr – Full-Size

• Camera: Nikon D40
• Lens: Nikon DX AFS 18-55mm (D40 kit lens)
• Exposure: 1/1250 sec
• Focal Length: 18mm
• Focal Ratio: f/8
• ISO: 200
• Camera Mode: Aperture Priority
• Processing: single RAW image first tonemapped with Photomatix Pro, then tweaked with the Topaz Adjust 4 plugin in Photoshop Elements, and finally converted to monochrome using the Channel Mixer in Apeture

Sadly there are no hard and fast rules. It’s not the case that you can just learn 5 rules and then you’re Ansel Adams. If there are no rules, then what are there? Well, there are guidelines, tips, and some things to think about before you hit the shutter. For those who insist on thinking in terms of hard and fast rules, there’s only one rule, there are no rules!

I think everyone’s default behaviour when taking photos is to put the subject in the very centre of the frame. That’s probably the single most important reflex you’ll need to change. There are times when a perfectly centred composition works fantastically well, but those are the exceptions. Generally speaking, centred subjects look boring and unimaginative. In fact, they look like snapshots. Pretty much the entire rest of this post will be about how you compose things when you don’t put the subject front and centre. But, before we do that, what about those exceptions? I think the biggest exception is when you have a symmetric subject. A face-down shot of a round flower cropped to a square with the flower dead centre can be stunning, see the example below.

Before we really get stuck in I just want to take a moment to think about what it is that we’re trying to achieve here. The aim of all these tips and guidelines is to create photos that are pleasing to the eye. You want to make the subject stand out, look it’s best, draw the eye, and feel comfortable and natural within the frame. Ultimately, if a photo feels cramped or unbalanced, it’s not going to be natural or pleasing to the eye. If the edge of the frame is too close to the subject, or bisects something in an uncomfortable way, it’s not going to feel right. This again leads to an obvious caveat, if you want to make a picture that evokes emotions of discomfort or tension, then you should invert these guidelines, and strive to do the very opposite!

Lets start with what I think is the most common mistake I see – not giving subjects room to look or move into. If you make a photo of anything that has eyes, or even has anything remotely like a face, it needs room to look into. This goes for people, animals, insects, birds, even flowers! Unless these things are staring directly at you from the very centre of the frame, there should be more space in the direction they are looking than in the opposite direction. If they are looking just a little to the left, frame them just a little to the right, if they are looking a lot to the left, frame them a lot to the right. Again, it’s about balance. The image below is a good example of this, notice how close the back of the butterfly is to the frame on the left, compared to how far away the face is from the frame on the right.

As important as it is to have room for things to ‘look’ into, it’s even more important to give moving things room to move into. You see a lot of people forget to do this with railway photography, and it makes the shot feel cramped and unnatural. Trains need space to move into, as do cars, people walking, birds flying, animals running, people on bicycles etc.. If it moves, give it room to move into. The example below is of a train, if the crop were to fall close to the nose of the train it just wouldn’t work.

Probably the most famous guideline in photography is the so-called “rule of thirds”. You often see this as an overlay in image editing software and even in some camera viewfinders. You simply imagine drawing horizontal lines one third of the way up and one third of the way down, and vertical lines one third in from the left and one third in from the right. This gives you a grid of rectangles. The most powerful places to have elements in your shot is along the lines for long elements, or at one of the four intersection points for smaller items in the frame.

The example blow shows placing the main subject, the butterfly, on one of the intersections of the rule of thirds grid (and giving it room to look into):

And this second example shows a vertical element in the shot, in this case the bird’s body, being placed along the rule of thirds line. What you’ll also notice is that the head is at one of the crossing points, and again, the bird has plenty of room to look into:

It’s also common to place the horizon in your shots along one of the two horizontal rule of third lines.

Don’t feel you HAVE to be bound by the rule of thirds though. It can make for some stunning compositions, but it’s not even nearly the case that all well composed shots follow the rule of thirds.

Don’t be afraid to edit your composition in post, and don’t feel bound by the aspect ratio of your camera. If you want to crop to enhance the composition, do it! My camera has only one cross-shaped auto-focus point, so when I shoot macros, I make sure to centre that one autofocus point right over the part of the subject that must be in focus. This leads to a sharp image with a boring composition, the simple solution is to crop it to a stronger composition. I often shoot with the express intention of cropping to a square or to a strongly panoramic aspect ratio. Empty space is often as important as the subject in a strong composition, but empty space in the wrong place is a distraction, so crop ruthlessly to get rid of it! For moving trains I often find a panoramic aspect ratio really helps to give a sense of speed, like in the shot below:

Something else that can really help compositions is the inclusion of a strong diagonal element. For some reason our eyes seem to really like diagonals. The example below uses a strong diagonal element in the composition by having the branch the butterfly is sitting on exit the frame right in the corner. At this stage you should also notice that the butterfly is at one of the magic rule of thirds points, and that it has plenty of room to look into.

Now I want to change track completely, and move to the very difficult challenge of getting good photos of places. This is really hard, because the places we want to capture are very three-dimensional, and our eyes see that thanks to our binocular vision. The camera however only has one ‘eye’, so it flattens the scenes it captures. Not taking this flattening into account is probably the biggest cause of boring photos of places.

Before moving on to matters strictly compositional, I want to also remind you to be very careful of mergers and intruders. Mergers happen when you have two things behind each other that shouldn’t be. We don’t naturally notice them because we see in stereo, but like I said, the camera doesn’t. We’ve all seen examples of this, people with trees or signs spouting out of their heads and so forth. Be careful how you place things at different distances into your composition, so that nothing or no one sprouts any un-wanted appendages! As for intruders, these are things poking into the frame you don’t want, like a stray tree branch, or the edge of a road sign etc.. Take a moment before pressing the shutter to check that there’s no unwanted distractions at the edges of your frame.

Now – how do we get a sense of depth into our shots of places? Ultimately it’s generally about layers. You need multiple layers to get a sense of depth. The more the better, but be sure to try get at least three. To get a good shot of a landscape or a place you need something of interest in the foreground, something of interest in the mid-ground, and something of interest in the background. That’ll give you a sense of depth. In general, the actual landscape or garden or building will be the mid-ground. If you’re lucky to have some nice clouds then you get the background for free too. What usually takes the most work, is finding an interesting foreground.

The example below shows four layers. In the foreground we have the tree, in the mid-ground we have the field, in the background we have the castle, and the 4^th layer comes from the spectacular sky:

When it comes to the foreground you can get quite imaginative. There are all the obvious things like rocks, trees, flowers or fences, but there are other things you can do too. Simply having a tree branch or something else frame one or two of the edges of your shots can work really well as a foreground. Another great option is to get down low and use the texture of the ground as your interesting foreground. In the case of the example below, the leaves make for a nice foreground, the building an interesting mid-ground, and the dramatic sky a good background.

You can even use something as simple as the shapes of shadows to add some interest to the foreground, as shown in the image below:

If you can’t get layers, strong lines heading to a vanishing point can work very well, but you’ll only get that opportunity sometimes. You should of course grab it when you can, but you can’t rely on always having that option. The example below uses the parallel converging lines formed by the canal, the path, the railway line and the train to give a very strong sense of depth (also notice where the vanishing point is – on one of the magic Rule of Thirds points):

If you can’t get long straight converging lines, a gently winding path can serve the very same function, as shown below:

Finally, I just want to end with another very simple tip, with one very notable exception, avoid putting the horizon dead-centre in your shot. The rule of thirds lines are often ideal, but you don’t have to go that far, just get it a little off centre. What’s the caveat? When you’re shooting a reflection, getting the horizon absolutely dead centre often works fantastically well.

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On the whole the app behaves and looks like a true-blue Mc App, and more importantly, it works well, and for the price, I’m really happy with the functionality it offers. My previous app was Cha-Ching 1.X, and there’s no doubt that Money is a lot less playful an app, and that it feels a lot more business-like. To be honest though, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Cha-Ching sometimes felt like a toy app, this feels like a grown-up mature app. Money is not cluttered or intimidating though, but it definitely feels more utilitarian. You also get the impression this app has been the beneficiary of a few more development cycles than Cha-Ching. It feels a lot more polished and fine-tined than the nascent Cha-Ching.

Before I get stuck into some of the things I really like about Money, I should also point out some of it’s foibles. In my mind the most glaring omission is a lack of support for tagging/keywording. I’ve become very fond of tags/keywords, and I really miss them in organisational apps like Money (and iTunes). In Cha-Ching I had set up quite a few Smart Accounts which were triggered by keywords or combinations of keywords, and these had become an important part of my workflow. Thankfully I was able to re-create these same Smart Accounts in Money, but not as elegantly. I had to basically simulate tags/keywords by adding words or phrases in the description field, and then searching for those in my Smart Accounts. This mean you don’t get auto-complete on your ‘tags’, and it’s also much more prone to typos. I have a working solution, but this is the one area where I find Money inferior to Cha-Ching.

My only other complaint is a minor one, but it was initially very frustrating. When you enter a transaction you do so in an overlay that pops up over your list of transactions, and as you create your transaction you tab through it from field to field. That is until you come to the drop-down for choosing the transaction’s Category. One nice thing about this drop-down menu is that you can type in it and it begins to auto-fill and scroll the list for you. The problem comes when you want to select an item in the list after you’ve expanded it by hitting the down-arrow. My reflexive action for selecting the value and collapsing the menu was to hit return. This is the WRONG thing to do! It commits the transaction as-is, and at this point in the proceedings you haven’t entered an amount, a payee or a description yet! The correct way to select a value an collapse the list is to click on it or to hit tab, which I find counter-intuitive. It took me a fair few empty transactions to get over my reflex to hit enter and learn to hit tab instead, but after a few hundred transactions I think I have it down now

So, what do I like? Since the only other personal finance app I’ve ever used extensively was Cha-Ching 1.x, I can’t avoid drawing comparisons to it when describing Money. The biggest change is that the display of transactions is much more compact and hence easier to scan through in Money. Each transaction is just one line, so it looks much more like a spreadsheet. I can easily see fifty or more transactions on a page with Money, while you’d be lucky to get twenty with Cha-Ching!

Another fantastic improvement is a running total column next to the amount column. This sounds so trivial and so obvious, but Cha-Ching was totally lacking it. It makes accounts much easier to reconcile, and mistakes much easier to find.

The biggest advantage for me though is robust transfer support. In Cha-ching you could not easily transfer money between your own accounts. You had to do it as two completely independent transactions, a withdrawal from one account, and a deposit into the other. This made editing a transfer a nightmare, because you had to find the two un-linked parts and edit them individually. In Money the transactions are linked so you only need to edit the details in one place. Additionally, Money makes it easy to jump from one half of a transfer to another by adding an in or out arrow next to the amount in the amount column that acts as a link to the other half of the transaction in the other account. I transfer around a lot of money between my personal account, my credit card, and my business account as I buy business stuff on my personal credit card and then pay myself back from my business account, so good transfer support is a big deal for me.

Another nice feature is the ability to program in recurring bills. It’s great to be able to see what bills are due out of what account when. This makes it easy to ensure there’s always enough money in the right place at the right time to avoid referral charges and un-necessary overdraft interest charges. I should point out that this is a feature Cha-Ching has too, and to be fair, I found their interface for it marginally easier to use than Money’s, but just marginally.

It’s hard to get excited about a personal finance app, so it’s no surprise that I don’t crave for time using Money, but I will say it’s made an otherwise painful task a little less unpleasant, which I quite high praise for personal finance software in my book!

This is a shot that I had been chasing for over a year when I finally managed to captured it last month. The Common Blue butterfly (Polyommatus icarus) is very small, and very camera shy, but also very beautiful. The male’s back is plain electric blue, which is pretty spectacular, but the female takes things to a whole new level, having a beautiful mix of browns, blues, and oranges on her back. The patterns at the tips of her wings are both intricate and beautiful. Many people consider this the most colourful Irish butterfly, though I disagree, I think that honour should go to the Peacock Butterfly. Regardless of whether or not it’s the most colourful butterfly, it’s certainly one of the most beautiful.

The best chance you’ll get to capture the back of these fine lady’s wings is in the evening time. As the wind falls and the sun gets low in the sky, you’ll sometimes find them sun-bathing on top of tall stalks of grass or wild flowers like thistles with their wings open. If you approach very slowly and very carefully with a long enough lens you have a chance of getting off a good shot. I took this one on a beautiful still and clear summer evening along the banks of the Royal Canal near Deey Bridge and the 13^th lock with my 55-200mm zoom zoomed in all the way to 200mm.

on Flickr – Full-Size

• Camera: Nikon D40
• Lens: Nikon DX AFS 55-200mm
• Exposure: 1/400 sec
• Focal Length: 200mm
• Focal Ratio: f/8
• ISO: 400
• Camera Mode: Aperture Priority
• Exposure Bias: -0.7ev
• Processing: This shot was tweaked a little using Aperture’s Dodge & Burn plugin to selectively add brightness, contrast, and saturation to the butterly

Initially I had tried four apps (MoneyWell, Moneydance, Squirrel, and iBank), since then Connor P suggested a fifth to me, Money 3 from Jumsoft. A sixth major contender also came onto the market in the form of Quicken Essentials, but since they don’t offer a free trial, they were not even considered. To me, the lack of a free trial speaks volumes about a company’s faith in their own product. If you won’t let me try before you expect me to buy, you’re not in the running for my hard-eared cash!

I spent all day yesterday going through the options again, and went so far as to enter about 25 test transactions spread over two accounts into my two favourite choices, Squirrel and Money. I really love tags, so Squirrel nosed ahead because of its support for tagging, and because it was the most competitively priced. Late in the afternoon I made my choice and paid for Squirrel.

Happy with my new purchase I set to work adding in all my transactions for July, and within minutes realised I’d made a terrible mistake. Squirrel is buggy. Not just a little buggy, unusably buggy! The phrase “Register365″ got stuck in the auto-complete buffer, so no matter what I typed, in ANY field, what came out was all or part of “Register365″, even when I tried to type numbers to enter the amount of transactions! I’d type “410″ and Squirrel would enter “reg” into the input box! To say I swore loudly is putting it mildly. A total failure to take keyboard input is one hell of a serious bug! I wrote an email to support explaining the bug, and how infuriated I was, and waited for a reply. Later that same evening I got one, it was from the developer, Axel, and it was very friendly. Axel said he was familiar with the bug, and that it was fixed in the next version of the product. I replied asking for an estimated shipping time for the update, and was told it would probably be around September. I had also inquired about a refund, and Axel had said he would process one for me if I couldn’t wait for the update.

Since Axel was responsive, helpful, and friendly, I decided to have another go and try add a few more transactions to Squirrel. The bug could be gotten around by restarting the app, and if it didn’t happen too often, perhaps I could last until September. After-all, the app has the perfect feature-set for me, and a very nice interface too. Unfortunately, things didn’t go well. Not only did the first bug re-occour within a few transactions, a new bug also raised it’s ugly head. Each time I’d edit the description of one transaction, TWO transactions would get that new description, the one I wanted, and another one nearby! What was worse, when you combine the two bugs together, you get every error being multiplied. In just a few minutes, about half of my transactions had garbage descriptions as I tried desperately to fix all the errors the auto-complete bug was generating. At this stage I’d had enough. I emailed Axel again, described the second bug, and asked for a refund. Axel again replied that he was aware of this bug, and that it too would be fixed in the next version. To Axel’s credit, he processed my refund very quickly.

I’m very torn about my experience with Squirrel. On the one hand, the app shows great promise. It’s well designed, does everything I need, and has a nice mac-like interface. I also get the impression this app is made by a very small company, possibly just Axel himself, and as a general rule, I like to support indie developers. I also get the impression that Axel is very passionate about Squirrel, and is working very hard to make it a great product in the future. However, none of that excuses shipping, and charging people money for, a product that’s so buggy it’s unusable. Axel knows about these bugs, yet he keeps taking people’s money, I just don’t find that acceptable at all. In fact, if I’m honest, I find it deeply immoral. As I see it, Axel either needs to issue a bug-fix update for the current version of the app immediately, or stop selling it until the next version is ready to ship. I can end on a some-what positive note though. The fact remains, I got my money back promptly without any hassle or any argument. That also says a lot.

Since Squirrel turned out to be a bust, how has my quest ended? It’s ended with Money 3. I just bought my license this afternoon, and I really do feel like I’ve gotten a good deal this time. I’ve entered many transactions, spread over 4 accounts, and not a bug in sight! *touches wood* The interface is nice and mac-like, the feature set is a good fit for me, and it works. It’s not perfect though, for a start, it doesn’t support tags, but I can do everything I need, and I’ve hardly had to change my workflow at all from Cha-Ching. At about &euo;40 (inc. VAT), the price is descent too.

For now, I’m happy that I’ve found a good, reasonably-priced personal finance app for the Mac – Money 3 from Jumsoft.

on Flickr – Full-Size

• Camera: Nikon D40
• Lens: Nikon DX AFS 18-55mm (D40 kit lens)
• Exposure: 1/1000 sec
• Focal Length: 18mm
• Focal Ratio: f/8
• ISO: 400
• Camera Mode: Aperture Priority
• Exposure Bias: -0.7ev
• Processing: This shot was edit using both the Topaz Adjust and Topaz Detail Photoshop plugins.

The big change here is that I’ve finished breaking the elements up into three distinct categories, the lines themselves and the outlines of station sites, the major stations where lines start, end, and meet, and the other labels and stations. Inside the containing Belgian Railways folder in the KMZ you’ll now find these three groupings as folders. This makes it possible to turn off everything except for the lines themselves, so you can zoom out and see the big picture without clutter. You can then add in a little more detail by enabling just the main stations, and when you zoom in deeply you can turn everything back on.

As I’ve already said, I don’t consider this a finished product. For a start, the accuracy of the mapping of some of the lines is now behind the resolution of google earth in many areas. A lot of these lines were mapped before Google updated their imagery to cover the entire country in high resolution. I need to re-trace hundreds of km of past and present trackbed to refine the position. There are also still a few inconsistencies in style in some of the labels. As I re-visit all the lines one-by-one over the next few months I’ll be cleaning up those inconsistencies as well as refining the position of the lines. I still have a lot of work to do to trace station outlines. This was not really an option before the high-resolution imagery came out, so the vast majority of stations are not outlined yet.

Finally, at the moment the project contains very little historical data, and almost no links for further information. It’s my plan to add basic historical data and links to as many stations as possible in my next pass. I also plan on including data about the history of many of the lines before they were nationalised. In Belgium the state has run the railways for a long time, so it’s easy to forget the old historic railway companies.

Anyhow, with all the above caveats out of the way, here’s my latest KMZ file:

• Bart’s Google Earth Railway Histoy Project (Belgium): 100706-BelgianRailways.kmz (1.57MB)

In Leixlip there’s a massive viaduct that takes the Royal Canal, its towpath and the Dublin to Sligo railway line across the river Rye and its rather large valley. This heron was sitting on the wall separating the railway from the canal on the viaduct, and he didn’t fly away even when I got right to the edge of the canal on the towpath. I was still a good 5 meters away, but I don’t usually manage to get even nearly this close.

on Flickr – Full-Size

• Camera: Nikon D40
• Lens: Nikon DX AFS 55-200mm
• Exposure: 1/800 sec
• Focal Length: 200mm
• Focal Ratio: f/5.6
• ISO: 200
• Camera Mode: Aperture Priority