Oh the life of a National Geographic photographer! Visiting exotic locales. Getting exclusive access. Being where the action is. Seeing wonders rarely seen. Well perhaps not!

The Photo Society, an advisory board for the photographers of National Geographic magazine recently polled its members to get feedback on the risks and hazards they’ve experienced whilst on assignment. The result is a rather off-putting table of figures covering injuries (streaming blood while hanging from harness at 1500 feet, venomous bites), accidents (seat belt releases with helicopter tipped over volcano, paraglider crash) and political and war-related issues (tear gassed, stoned by religious group, held at gunpoint).

Alongside this are a series of vignettes where photographers talk about what they have encountered in the field:

…In Lebanon I was stopped at gunpoint by a 14-year-old with a rifle who tore the photo out of my passport…

(NP: A bit worrying as I’m off to Lebanon later this month!)

…I had to beat a black bear off a guy who was drowning while being held underwater by the animal…

So for a real taste of what it can be like to be a National Geographic photographer check out the links above and decide if its still something you’d like to do!

Philip Bloom is probably more accurately described as a digital cinematographer. However he’s a huge fan of the low budget movie look and pushes use of DSLRs – such as the Canon 5D Mk II – to film with. He’s even worked as a DP with Lucasfilm using his DSLRs.

The other thing he’s very well known for is his timelapse movies. Something I’ve been getting into of late (largely inspired by Philip). The timelapse category on his blog is a must see for anyone that’s even remotely interested in this sort of thing.

Because of his focus on video more than static shots, his site does cover a far wider range of subjects then you might be interested in is you’re just a “single image” photographer. However with the additional video capabilities of many DSLRs today I do think it’s worthwhile having a look at what’s possible. Perhaps it will inspire you to try that under-used function on your own camera!

Philip Bloom
http://philipbloom.net/

I discovered Dave as he seems to hang out a lot with the other David I mentioned (duChemin). He does a lot of commercial work and one of the things Dave tends to focus a lot on is telling a specific story through his images. In fact, sometimes a single image is not enough and he’ll also post video (timelapse usually).

His projects and work is always inspiring and whilst his blog often highlights commissions he’s working on, he does frequently include behind-the-scenes or making-of videos to show how and why he took the shots he did and what was involved to get them. These on their own can be very interesting and show some of the effort involved in getting the shot (for example, hanging off a zip line for a recent shoot) and are a reason to follow the link below!

Dave Delnea
http://blog.davedelnea.com/

Trey Ratcliff is Mr HDR and as such, with the love/hate dichotomy that exists around HDR some people may instantly think his site is not their thing. However, whilst I agree that some of his work may have been pushed a little too far, he is an expert at combining exposures and creating some great and memorable images. In fact one of his images was the first HDR to be hung in the Smithsonian in the US.

More recently he’s started providing little mini video tutorials on his site (they don’t always relate to HDR) and as its always interesting to see how others approach a subject are usually interesting to watch.  Even if you already know the techniques it can be good to get a reminder. So don’t let the HDR tag put you off and check out his site below.

Trey Ratcliff
http://www.stuckincustoms.com/

David duChemin bills himself as a world and humanitarian photographer. He has a great focus on improving your craft rather than just buying the latest kit and regular readers of this blog will be very familiar with the Craft and Vision site he set up in this vein.

His blog is an interesting one to follow as often it’s not about the latest photo he’s taken, or some new project he’s working on but instead he writes about the challenges of remaining creative and developing your vision. Earlier this year, after deciding to sell his home in Vancouver and become a travelling nomad (in a Landrover called “Jessie”) he took a spill on a photo trip in Italy and ended up having to be med-evac’d back to Canada with broken legs, ankles and hip. I only mention this as reading his blog you might wonder what it’s about but persevere and you’ll get a lot out of his blog.

David duChemin
http://www.pixelatedimage.com/blog/

So first up is a local friend of mine and unlike the others in this series he’s probably someone you’ve not heard of (unless you’re local to Leeds!) – award winning Photographer Rick Harrision. In 2009 Rick won the UK’s National Trust / Sunday Times photography competition with a superb shot in the Lake District. Although he started as mainly a landscape photographer he’s turned his hand to portraits, cityscapes, events and of course not forgetting his (rather strange) obsession with farm animals! Annoyingly he seems to be good at whatever he turns his hand to.

His site isn’t a blog as such (hint Rick – perhaps you should start one!) but does showcase his great photography. I’d also recommend following the links through to Flickr to see some of his more recent work including some of the strange local events and festivals that take place in our part of the world.

Rick Harrison
http://fortybelowzero.com/

Imported Light is my portfolio site which mainly shows off photography from my travels. Until recently it was mainly a Flash based site but I’d been having a few problems with it and decided it was time to revisit the site and see what I could do.

The new site is now live and I’ve switched to HTML5 using jQuery for the animations and effects. Everything is still driven in the background by SlideshowPro Director which allows me to export new albums directly from Lightroom into the database which then in turn automatically updates the site. All very easy!

It took me quite a while to decide on a replacement front-end slideshow module to replace the Flash version but in the end I settled on Galleria. If you’re a photographer and want a (reasonably) easy way to present your photos on your site but still have control over styles and setting then I can heartily recommend this tool, and its free to boot. It contains loads of options to tweak almost every setting you could want and a range of custom themes to use – although there is a small charge if you don’t want to use the default theme.

I’m planning to refresh this blog soon too. Its served me well but with advances in WordPress I think its time to see what I can do. It’ll be a while yet but look out for a new design before the end of the year.

I use a Huey Pro but if you don’t want to buy additional equipment, here’s a quick way to make sure your brightness and contrast look right.

Photo Friday have produced a neat page to test and calibrate your monitor. Follow the link below to check your monitor.

Photo Friday: Monitor Calibration Tool

I’ve long thought it strange that whenever you add a link in Flickr, either as part of your profile within a caption for one of your images, they rewrite it to add in a rel=”nofollow”. The effect of this tag is to stop a search engine (which obviously ranks Flickr quite highly) from following the link and therefore helping your own site’s search ranking.

This is a common thing to do in comments (in fact this blog’s comments do that) as a means to avoid spammers improving the search ranking of their phishing sites. However to do it in my own profile and captions has always struck me as ungenerous and somehow against the community spirit of the web.

The above issue aside, as you will know I have this site, and my portfolio site www.importedlight.com and recently I began experimenting with adding links from some of my travel photography to one or other of these sites. However I ran into a problem.

Working in the web analytics industry and using Google Analytics on both my sites, I of course wanted to include the Google Analytics utm_source, medium and campaign tags on the links so I could see how effective they were at driving traffic to my sites. The problem is, if you do this and then make the linked text anything that looks like a URL or domain (i.e. www.importedlight.com) Flickr would rewrite the linked text to be the same as the actual link href. Linked text that didn’t look like a URL (i.e. “My Site”) works just fine.

For example, if I wanted to add the following:
<a href=”http://www.domain.com?utm_source=flickr”>www.domain.com</a>

Flickr would convert it to:
<a href=”http://www.domain.com?utm_source=flickr”>www.domain.com?utm_source=flickr</a>

Which is not very pretty!

Despite the issues Thomas Hawk has had with Flickr help (example here) and the general bad reports of staff that don’t really help, I decided to have a go at raising what I thought was a bug in the Help Forums. It seems everyone’s reports of how bad Flickr help is were true!

You can see the post I made here. Within seconds the response from one of the Flickr staff was it wasn’t a bug, it was that way by design to stop phishing and the thread was closed denying me any chance of responding! Frankly the phishing argument is bull!

So what they are saying is that I can post a link which says something like “Follow Me” and gives no clue what-so-ever as to where the link is going and that all fine. But if I actually try to be helpful and say use my domain as the linked text its a massive phishing risk and is not allowed. This just doesn’t make sense. If it was for phishing then they certainly wouldn’t let me use text such as “Follow Me” or “My Site” either.

So come on Yahoo – either sell Flickr to someone who cares and wants to develop and grow the service. Or pull your finger out and start spending some money on it yourself. Its definitely starting to stagnate!

Firstly, there’s a great write up over on the X= blog about why you should import and convert your photos to Adobe’s DNG format. Definitely worth a read.

Secondly, apologies for it being a little quite round here of late. I’ve been working on a new site that I will be moving all my travel photography over to in due course and it took slightly longer than anticipated. Although its not 100% complete yet it is now open to visitors and you can check it out at www.importedlight.com. Be sure to check out the galleries option which displays a world map showing where each of the photo sets were taken.

If you’ve got any comments on either using DNG (are you a fan or not?) or feedback on the new site, add them below!