Over the last couple of years I’ve made several photographs of this Scirocco, but this time I wanted to try something different and really push my little flashes. I wanted to shoot into the setting sun and light as much of the car as I could with 2 SB900s (on SU4 mode), an SB28 and a borrowed Metz. In order to get a useable exposure I needed to use my Singh-Ray variable ND filter and had to dial it down about 3/4 of the way. Tripod mounted, this dropped my exposure 5 stops to 1/60 sec at f8 ISO 200. But even at full power, my lil’ flashes wouldn’t come anything close to lighting the whole car. Initially I experimented with 4 strobes dotted around the car, but with the ND dialed in, all I got were patches of light on the car as you can see below. This was even with the strobes on full power.
There were probably a few ways to do this, but in the interests of time mainly (the sun was about to drop behind the hedge and I desperately wanted it in the frame) I opted to make a series of exposures, moving the lights around the car for each frame with a view to blending them in photoshop later. Actually making the photographs was the easy bit. Merging 13 different layers in post proved to be altogether more time consuming, and to be quite honest having spent the best part of an entire afternoon layering, dodging and burning and tweaking I’m still not completely happy with the result. I think that when I next get a few free hours I will take the opportunity to re-visit the layers and merge them again from scratch. That said, I’m still pleased enough with the result to share. Below are a selection of the layers straight from camera.

Would you have done it differently? I’d love to know. Feel free to share in the comments at the bottom.

These are some additional images that I made of the car a couple of weeks earlier so I thought I’d include them here to.

Volkswagen Scirocco by Neil Alexander

Volkswagen Scirocco by Neil Alexander

Volkswagen Scirocco by Neil Alexander

I’ve also included a February Desktop wallpaper for your personal use of my Struggle image made in the Lake District. Download the size that nearest suits your screen – 2560×1440   1920×1200   1440×900 Note: The simplest way to download is to right click on the appropriate size and select “open in new tab” or “open in new window”

An icicle on a branch - totally irrelevant, but pretty - by Neil Alexander (Click for larger)

Hopefully you won’t have noticed, other than the post the other Friday, but I recently moved hosts with this blog, and before you go any further – this is a nerdy post so if you popped by looking for some new inspiring imagery and corresponding elegantly written “how to” today, then move down the bus, there’s nothing to see here…..

Ok, nerdy, read on….

I figured that at the outset it was going to be a challenge, but I was so fed up with the QOS I was getting from GoDaddy that it needed to be done. I’d put it off for ages as it seemed such a daunting prospect, but in the end it proved a lot less irksome than Id expected. As I’m sure that I’m not the only person who’s not too keen on their current host, I thought I’d do a little post on the process….

First a little background. What possessed me to go with GoDaddy in the first place was the ease of set up. I knew very little about WordPress back then in 2009. In the beginning it ran like a dream, but after a while, and a bunch of plugins it had slowed to a snail’s pace. It would take 12 seconds from typing http://manctog.com in the address bar and hitting return before I’d even begin to see something come back down the wire, which was weird because a dns lookup was returning really fast response times. Even a route trace wasn’t hanging around. The only bottleneck could have been GoDaddy’s oversubscribed shared hosting.

I had initially planned on managing the whole thing myself, but as a web developer of over 10 years experience and a self-confessed nerd much longer, I know from experience that these things go one of two ways….

1) All files are transferred to new host ok. Database population with existing data goes swimmingly, and the DNS just pop’s on over. Sit back, pop a Bud and relax.

or 2) I lose lots and lots of sleep and it all goes to hell in a hand cart!

So at the beginning of February I posted a tweet looking for recommendations for WordPress hosting. I got a whole bunch of spam (thanks) and a few pointers, ended up exchanging a few emails with Ian Young, and Ian offered his company’s services.

I made sure that I had backed up the existing database and downloaded all the content via FTP. I zipped them up and forwarded to Ian. He then migrated the database containing all my archived content, themes and plugins and configured pretty much everything on the new host.

From the outset I had decided to move the blog from manctog.com to a sub-domain of neilalexanderphotography.com primarily because when I’d originally set up the blog I didn’t have the other domain name, and hadn’t decided on how to display my portfolio. This made to change over quite a bit slicker. Once the new hosting was set up and all was working tickety boo, I added a web-forward for the old domain name to re-direct straight through to the new sub-domain. This meant that all the hard work I’d put into Google indexing and the like wasn’t entirely wasted as all urls would redirect to exactly the same pages on the new blog, but with the updated domain.

I found that in a whole bunch of posts, the links to images and to referenced posts were still pointing to the old domain name. A quick browse at the plugins library soon turned up “Search and replace” from here http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search-and-replace/ which resolved the problem in a couple of minutes.

All that remained to do after that was to update all my various online presences with the new blog url – my portfolio, facebook, twitter account etc etc, and I was done. It was so simple and hassle free, I’m still amazed.

All in all I’m really pleased that I got Ian involved – I probably could have done all of this myself, but quite frankly there just aren’t enough hours in the day what with juggling my IT and photography businesses and a young family…..

If you have any queries, then as usual, feel free to hit me in the comments below.

2003 (03) Honda Civic 1.4 Imagine (Petrol)
Mileage: 31k
Doors: 5 (Hatchback)
Colour: Silver
ABS
Drivers airbag
Electric mirrors
Body coloured bumpers
Electric windows
Power steering
Central locking
CD player
5 months tax
Price £3495 ono.
Call 0161 870 6181

Location: Altrincham, Manchester

I’ve added the shots from the wedding that I did a couple of weeks back to my gallery – check them out here.

Brian Auer over at Epic Edits is running a pretty cool competition – “The $50 film camera”. Yep you guessed it – it’s a film themed and you gotta shoot it with a camera that cost less than $50 (or about £25). They’ve managed to get Ilford and Lomography involved with the prizes. The deadline is the 12th September, so get shooting – it sounds like fun. For more details, go here.

On a slightly different topic, my backup regime. I use EMC’s Retrospect to run a nightly batch job to automatically duplicate images that I download from a CF card or scan negs onto my pc to an external USB drive. Every other day, I use Retrospect to copy the latest changes to the USB drive over a VPN to an external drive attached to a pc at home. It’s all been working fine for months, but lately my office ADSL connection has been getting attacked which causes the router to drop the connection and the backup job to fail. The result is that the data gets copied over the Internet all over again, but they’ve been failing repeatedly so I’ve just had a bill from my ISP for exceeding my 50GB a month limit! I got an email warning last month, but an invoice this month. Fair enough I guess, so I’ve stopped the job that copies the data over the VPN and ordered a 32GB USB flash drive from Dabs and will have to copy the data manually for the time being until the attacks die down. The problem that I have now is managing changes. New files are easy enough to manage, but if I make changes to a bunch of sidecar files in Lightroom how do I reconcile the differences with the offsite storage? Any ideas????

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Brief post today. Computer equipment is all overheating (its topping 100F in office again), so I’m struggling to process shots from the wedding. It was a great success and I’m pleased with my results. Off to London for 36 hours shooting tomorrow, so I ain’t gonna get the rest processed until later in the week. Going to see the Street & Studio exhibition at the Tate Modern, and roam the streets . Not got any themes in mind just yet, time for that later, but really looking forward to it!

Off topic: My Ipod (5th Gen) video not so long ago decided it wasn’t going to play any more video podcasts, which I’ve found quite annoying as I watch Photoshop User TV & Matt Kloskowski’s Lightroom podcasts on there. Just tried a complete reset and resync but that hasn’t worked either. I reckon its probably an Apple update that’s killed it, but unfortunately no more time to investigate. Had planned on loading it up for the train journey down, will have to do withouth. Apple Grrrrrrr

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So while I fart about with my desktop and try and get it back up to speed again, I’ve been working on an Amazon store for the website on my trusty laptop. Any extra way of brining in a little more revenue isn’t to be sniffed at, and Amazon’s A-Store is a rather nifty set up. Ok, the commission rates aren’t great, but hey it’s taken me like a couple of hours, and I’m up and running. Check it out here, and PLEASE get your wallet out

Oh and here’s another one – www.alexprager.com – some truly fantastic photography.

Some of you readers out there may be aware that back in the day or BC (before children), I used to spin the ol’ 1′s and 2′s for a living (DJing to the laymen out there). I’ve been having a clear out of some spare hard disks to make room for more RAW files and I happened across some of my old mixes. I supported The Charlatans on a couple of tours around the UK and Europe at the time of their “Us and Us Only” tour around 1999 / 2000 inhabiting the tour bus with the crew and providing the “support act” to warm the crowd up before the band came on stage. It was quite an experience I can tell you – different city every night and all that – not quite Black Sabbath, but it was pretty rock ‘n’ roll. I also did some work for Toploader around the time they released their debut album “Mama’s Big Onka” in 2001. Prior to that I had several residencies at clubs around Manchester when the scene was still thriving (and the music was good! ). I also have literally hundreds of old mix tapes in the garage too, which I’m slowly but surely trying to digitise. Though some are a bit on the iffy side, and I don’t just mean the quality of the recordings, there are a few gems in there that really take me back. So I thought I’d share them for those that are interested rather than having them sit on some old drive gathering dust so to speak. If you pop on over to my profile page on my main site, you’ll see them at the bottom of the page. Feel free to pop on over and get your ears wet! Check them out here.

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