Category: Tips/Tutorials

Last weekend I went out to Fort Marcy to watch the cyclocross event that some friends of mine organized. As a keen cyclist, I was happy to be there for itself, but I also brought my camera and took some shots.

It was the first time I’d shot any cycling, and so while I’m a long way from being Graham Watson, but I enjoyed it, and came up with a few lessons learned:

Knitting model

Testing Flickr’s ‘Blog this photo’ functionality – you just click on an image you want to blog about (yours or anyone else’s presumably), and if you’ve set up Flickr properly, you can compose a post on the Flickr site, and it will add in the photo and send it to your blog.

Doesn’t look like to can assign categories in the default setup, so you might be better off composing the post in your favourite editor (MarsEdit) for me, and pasting in the link to the Flickr photo that way.

But still a useful tool, for off the cuff posts. But you’d need to watch our for blogging on other people’s photos – technically you could argue that’s fair use, so it’s OK to put their photo on your blog. But you should definitely include links and copyright information, and ideally be blogging about the photographer and their work, not just using their photo to illustrate your post.

After 18 months of heavy-duty use, my camera body had developed an unlikely problem: it stank.

And my hands took on a weird slightly putrid smell after carrying it around for a while. I guess I should have realised that it might be a good idea to clean it once in a while, but now I couldn’t delay it any longer.

Eschewing a quick check of the manual to see what it recommended, I grabbed a baby wipe and went to work. A couple of minutes later (and no scary melting or marking), everything was much better.

The matte black surface now looks much better, and crucially the thing doesn’t smell any more. Next time I take it out I won’t have to wash my hands when I get home.

Score that one for the baby wipes – the gaffer tape of the cleaning world.