Grays Life

My photography & marketing blog

James

How Technology helped spark renewed interest in running

Health

Getting out into the nature with a Garmin Forerunner Smart Watch
Image: Garmin

For years, I ran on and off. I’d run for a few weeks, and then the runs would dry up. I had no specific goal, nothing to aim at. It was more or less the same with cycling, and this is how I would keep fit between the two.

As the family grew, I wanted to get out and about more, to balance the stresses of life with some time hitting the pavement or cycling far out along the coast. And so I bought a sports watch to start tracking those runs and rides.

A Suunto watch was my first venture, and my interest was piqued by the statistics that the watch would throw back at you. This naturally led to starting a Strava account as a place to put those runs, and the rest began to build up from there.

But my interest level took off when I traded in that Suunto for a Garmin Forerunner 255. At this point, I was in my early 50s and wished I’d started years before, with time and an increased fitness level on my side.

Image: Garmin

The Suunto was OK, but big, old and clunky. The Garmin caught my eye because it had more features, a colour screen and a better heart rate monitor built into the watch. The Suunto didn’t have that. Instead, it relied on a heart rate monitor strap. This might have made it more accurate, but I found that the strap caused itchiness while wearing it and for hours afterwards. So I was looking for a watch with a built-in heart rate monitor.

Cue the Garmin Forerunner update in 2021, and with lockdowns happening on and off and me running way more than I had before, I decided to jump ship and buy the Garmin. From the off, I realised that the Garmin is hands down one of the best sports watches out there—especially the Garmin Connect App. I had bought the Strava premium app, but as soon as I saw Garmin Connect, I ditched the subscription and got all the details on the data from Garmin Connect.

So, hands down, Garmin helped get me out more, not just running and cycling, but walking and hiking. Strava helped me connect with friends; no doubt, seeing my friends out and about helps keep me motivated to go out. Then, the monthly challenges also help keep the motivation high. All of which beats keeping score with a notepad and pencil!

Squeezing Max. Speed out of your WordPress Website

WordPress

Ok, so you’ve chosen a domain, and a host and your website is up and running. Hopefully you chose a good host, see a separate post on why I think Cloudways.com is one of the best out there. Keep reading to find out my tips for getting the most speed from your website.

If you haven’t chosen a web host, then there’s still time to pick out the best to suit your wallet and website. Generally, when you’re starting out, a basic site will be fine. This is especially true if you’re starting a new blog or site that has no traffic yet. You’ll likely take time to build it up, so there’s not much point being on an advanced, speedy, expensive server with no traffic to serve. However, you’ll want to be able to transition to one if your web traffic does build up, so knowing how easily you can scale your website is going to be important to understand. 

So, how to tune up your site. Here’s some tips and reasons why you need to use them:

Use a good host, my tip is to use Cloudways.com – you can easily scale to a more powerful server, the account comes with free backups, has great customer support and you can site your server near to your users or customers, i.e., if your readers are in the US, then locate your server in New York.

Use a cache plugin, the one I’m using on this site is developed by Cloudways and is Breeze. It’s bundled with their hosting plan, and out of the box is a great way to speed up your site. Caches work by keeping close to hand all the files needed for the pages that are requested most often. A bit like a warehouse having their fastest selling products located next to the delivery pick up door. It helps on cutting down on the time it takes to serve files, including the html code, images, JavaScript and any other items that your pages are linking to, including PDF files, etc.

Similar to a cache is a CDN, or Content Delivery Network. Using the above example of the cache but extending it to a user in Tokyo looking at your website, which is hosted in London. The images and files would have to travel across the internet via a myriad way, getting stuck in bottlenecks along the way. All of this might take several seconds, by which time your user in Tokyo has given up waiting and moved on. By using a CDN, those images and files are stored closer to the user/customer, e.g., they might also be in Tokyo, or Shanghai, still closer to the user than having to come from London. Cloudways uses Cloudflare, one of the largest and fastest growing CDN networks in the world, with over 300+ offices located worldwide, there’s sure to be a server located close to your visitor. If that’s the case, then the files are supplied superfast, helping to keep your visitors glued to your website.

Having a powerful enough server – If your site is getting a lot of traffic, then you will have to consider moving to a better specified server, e.g., start out on a server with 1GB RAM, but with an increase in traffic, you’ll want to move to 2GB, 4GM or 8GB.

Get your imagery right – Ensure that you use the right sized images on your site. Don’t upload huge images and expect the site to load them quickly. Try to size them so that they are appropriate, i.e., a 500kb image is fine for the front page, but a 10mb image isn’t. Use Adobe Photoshop, or Adobe Express or Canva to prepare images correctly, but there are plugins or services available to compress your images to a much lower size. Be aware though that when you do this, you’ll generally lose the meta data that might be in your image file, and this may or may not be an issue for you. 

Use Cloudflare – Without labouring the point, Cloudways offers the Cloudflare Enterprise package to its users, which means for $5 per domain, you can get your site under the umbrella of Cloudflare and see your site get automatically supercharged. This is a seriously good reason to choose Cloudways hosting, as the regular price you’d have to pay for the Cloudflare Enterprise tier is in the thousands of dollars per month. You’ll also get a ton of side benefits, including lazy load images, images that resize on the fly, firewall policies that keep the bad guys and bots out, meaning that your site is focusing on delivering great content to your visitors, i.e., the visitors that you want to have on your site.

All the tips I’ve put here are powering this blog. I regularly test the speed response via Cloudflare and it’s currently 98/100, which is about as fast as you can get. I started out with a free Cloudflare account, and then moved all my domains to it. I found that Cloudflare has some of the fastest DNS hosting out there, with Time To First Byte, and Page Loads in a fraction of the time other hosts take to respond. If you want to understand each of these points more, then write a comment and I’ll help explain in the replies.

Creating a Magazine Front Cover Mock-up with InDesign

Marketing

I’ve always wanted to feature on the cover of a magazine, but since that hasn’t happened yet, I’ve got a shortcut to get there :). So, I chose LFI, the Leica Fotographie International magazine for Leica owners. And nope, I don’t have a Leica either, though I do aspire to own a M10 Monochrome. But, since picking one up to look at, at a trade show, I fell in love with the pure blacks and whites that the monochrome sensor delivers. That’s a separate blog post that I’ll get to write at somepoint.

Anyway, using Adobe InDesign, which I use more or less daily, I decided to have some fun and put together a magazine cover featuring some of my photographs of Cardiff Bay. Now, armed with the powerful design tool, I am ready to turn this dream into reality. To not just capture a moment, but to frame it, design it, and present it in a way that translates my vision into a cover-worthy masterpiece.

Designing a photography journal front cover in InDesign with your own images involves several steps. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you create an eye-catching and professional cover design:

A mock-up front cover of the Leica Fotographie International magazine for Leica camera owners, created in InDesign.
  1. Set up the document:
    a. Open Adobe InDesign and create a new document (File > New > Document).
    b. I set up the document to the same exact size as the LFI magazine [215mm x 460 – remember you’ll need to prepare a double page spread] and gave it 3mm bleed.
    c. Click “Create” to open your new document.
  2. Set up the number of pages that you want. In my case, I set up an 8-page document
  3. Using a copy of LFI, I then set about copying the titles of the featured articles and sub-articles on the cover in a font that more or less matched exactly. I’m not a font expert, and I suspect LFI use their own typeface, but this was close enough for me.
  4. Prepare rules ready to line up the images so that the right amount of white space is around each image and each element on the front page.
  5. Place the main image onto the front page and position it:
    a. Use the shortcut Ctrl/Cmd+D to import your chosen images, this is always much faster than going to the top menu bar and selecting ‘File -> Paste Image’.
    b. Navigate to the folder where your images are stored and select the one you want to use.
    c. Click “Open” to place the images in your document.
    d. Click and drag the images onto the canvas.
    e. Use the Selection Tool (V) to resize, rotate, and move the images to your desired positions.
  6. Create a title and other text elements:
    a. Use the Type Tool (T) to create text boxes for your magazine’s title, tagline, and featured article headlines.
    b. Using the appropriate fonts, font sizes, and colours to copy the same format.
    c. Position the text elements on the cover, ensuring they are easily readable and complement the images.
  7. Add design elements:
    a. I created a simple barcode and placed this into the right position to keep this as consistent as possible.
  8. Fine-tune the layout:
    a. Use the Align panel and Smart Guides to ensure proper alignment and spacing between elements.
  9. On the inner pages, I kept the same theme as the issue I was copying the work from, just changing the images to my own. Then once everything was in place, I was ready to export it as a hi-resolution PDF.
  10. Export and save your work:
    a. Once you’re satisfied with your front cover design, go to File > Export or press Ctrl/Cmd+E.
    b. Choose the desired format (PDF, JPEG, or PNG) and set the necessary export options.
    c. Click “Save” to export your magazine front cover.

By following these steps, I had myself a magazine cover in an hour or so’s work. InDesign is fiddly, and requires plenty of concentration. But, like all good things that take a lot of effort, and the result is rewarding to say the least!

Here’s the full, final PDF version of my Leica Fotographie International magazine cover for June 2022.

james-gray-leica-fotographie-international-lfi-magazine-coverDownload

The Dream Team: Combining Zeiss Loxia Lenses & Sony A7

Photography

Making the move from Fuji to Sony about 8 years ago was one of the best moves I’ve made in photography. The images that I got from the Fuji were great, but the increased sensor size of the Sony A7 is something else. The images are incredibly detailed, sharp and have a huge depth of colour.

My Sony A7R with a Voigtlander 40mm manual lens

The Sony A7 was matched up with a manual Voigtlander lens. It was the perfect set-up as it took up almost no space, and I could get pictures I had previously struggled to take. Previously, on the Fuji, my autofocus lens would frequently hunt back and forth, looking to focus the image. After an age of to-ing and fro-ing, it would be focused, but the moment had passed. And, in photography, it is all about the moment. At first, adjusting to the slower pace of manual focusing took some time. Still, soon I discovered the immense control and creative freedom it offered.

Embracing Manual Focus

Using manual focus has forced me to slow down and be more deliberate with my compositions. This new approach has led to a deeper connection with my subjects and a better understanding of the nuances of photography.

Having used the Fuji X-Pro for a few years, I was impressed with these new mirrorless cameras. They weighed less and made a lot less noise when taking pictures. As street photography was something I was interested in, as well as taking photographs of landscapes, moving to Sony and its full-frame cameras, I could take even higher quality images.

The reason for moving to a manual lens was down to a couple of features that stood out, and they were: Focus Magnification and Focus Peaking. Making one of the custom buttons a focus shortcut lets you quickly zoom into the image. With the help of focus peaking, you can see what parts of the image are in focus. The Fuji could do this, but it seemed that the Sony had taken it to a new level. Also reliability issues with the Fuji, with both problems suffered with the lens and the body, helped reinforce the decision to switch.

But the Sony was a step up from my Fuji X-Pro1. However, a year or two later, Sony was bringing out its next iteration, meaning the original A7R was now discounted. And with a couple of eBay sales of various bits of lenses and old film cameras that I was no longer using, I was able to pick up a new Sony A7R.

The Journey to Loxia Zeiss

All was well with the Voigtlander lens, and having a camera that took super high-quality images that didn’t require a suitcase of attachments to be dragged around, was a bonus. The only drawback was that the lens didn’t give me any EXIF information about the lens settings. The camera would tell me the shutter speed, but I have no record of the f-aperture or lens length for all those images I took with the Voigtlander.

Zeiss Loxia 50mm lens

The Loxia Zeiss lens is specifically designed for Sony’s E-mount mirrorless cameras, like the Sony A7R. It offers exceptional image quality, build, and ergonomics. On the Loxia range of lenses, when you start to focus the lens, the image automatically zooms to allow precise focusing without setting up a custom shortcut button. Making the workflow faster again. But the selling point for me was that the lens information is transferred, so the f-aperture and lens length is captured and written into the EXIF settings.

But, buying brand new Zeiss Loxia lenses isn’t cheap, and these retail for £1250+. Buying from eBay wasn’t an option. I’d bought and sold for years, and a single fraudulent transaction where I was duped out of a sale of a computer encouraged me to look elesewhere, especially as PayPal sided with the guy who committed the fraud. I’ve not used either eBay or PayPal since. I then found www.MPB.com, a site specialising in second-hand lenses and camera equipment. I saw on their site a Loxia 50mm lens that was less than half the price of a new lens. It came with a 6-month warranty and a 14-day return. So, I bought a 50mm lens, which looked like new when it arrived. I guess manual lenses aren’t for everyone. 

The Results Speak for Themselves

The image quality produced by the Loxia Zeiss lens is truly remarkable. The sharpness, colour rendition, and contrast have taken my photos to a new level. The lens’s ability to render beautiful bokeh and emphasise my subject has allowed me to create previously unattainable images with my autofocus lenses.

These images were all taken on a trip to the Parque Natural da Serra da Estrela mountains in Portugal, late November 2022. Map Reference: 40.32829852262338, -7.587306628567526
Winding roads, which were in great condition, and would be perfect for riding a motorbike along…
The colour of the leaves in the autumn sunshine were quite beautiful – during a spot of “forest bathing”…

Conclusion

Purchasing a second-hand Loxia Zeiss lens for my Sony A7R has been a game-changer in my photography journey. The combination of outstanding image quality and the challenges and rewards of manual focus has profoundly affected my image capture approach. I am now more mindful of my compositions, more in tune with my subjects, and more capable of producing striking photographs. If you want to elevate your photography and develop a deeper connection with your art, give a manual focus lens, like the Loxia Zeiss, a try.

Zeiss Lens PDF Attachements:

brochure-zeiss-mirrorless-system-lenses-enDownload
brochure-zeiss-e-mount-lenses-enDownload

What is EXIF metadata?

Photography

Parque Natural da Serra da Estrela
An image I took in the Parque Natural da Serra da Estrela in November, 2022.

EXIF stands for Exchangeable Image File Format and is a standard for storing metadata in image files taken by digital cameras and smartphones. This metadata can include a wide range of information such as the camera model, lens type, exposure settings, date and time the photograph was taken, GPS coordinates, and more.

View the EXIF Data of my photograph taken in the Parque Natural da Serra da Estrela – using this service, https://exifinfo.org, it’s possible to see the data embedded on this image. It’s also useful to check before you post a picture online, to see for yourself what metadata you’re also sharing…

EXIF data is useful when organising, sorting, and editing photographs and checking the exposure settings used to capture a particular picture. Some image editing software and online services can also read and use EXIF data to automatically enhance or correct images. However, always check that you’ve removed the location/GPS data from a picture so you don’t inadvertently share location information and compromise your privacy when sharing online.

Tip: If you have GPS data that you want stripped out of the EXIF data, then use this free online tool that compresses your images, removing EXIF data at the same time: https://imagecompressor.com