Month: June 2010

Wireframing a website? No?

Then you won’t need this terrific set of wireframe stencils for OmniGraffle.

That is all.

Want a nine-minute briefing in media law? Here you go.

This is a recording of a 16 year-old rather clearly stating his rights as a photographer working in a public place, to a police officer attempting to detain him for… actually, it’s not clear what. There’s a rather good article (and comments) about this specific incident on the British Journal of Photography website. See also the photographer’s own blog.

For those keeping track, there have been numerous recent incidents of photographers being detained, questioned, or searched while working in public places. So many, in fact, that the next issue of Amateur Photographer magazine will include a free gift: a lens cloth handily pre-printed with the advice issued to MPS officers by their own head of ‘Specialist Operations.’

Meanwhile, if you want a more complete briefing on what you can and can’t photograph, this presents a somewhat more comprehensive and nuanced interpretation of the law.

So, the banks made unwise lending decisions that exposed them to unwarranted risk in the credit markets. Loans defaulted to an extent that enough damage was spread through an important ecosystem for the government to have to step in to prop up the industry.

A year or so later, an oil company is revealed to have made unwise engineering decisions that exposed them to unwarranted risk in the offshore drilling industry. Well-heads ruptured, spreading enough damage through an important ecosystem that the government had to step in and demand $20bn in…

…wait, hang on. Remind me why we bailed out the banks, again?

Meh. Drat. Ugh.

I’ve broken my blog again, I fear. Eventually I’ll roll my sleeves up and get it sorted, but I’m too busy right now.

Meh. Blech.

[edit: unborked now, just ugly. Ah well.]

Here’s a very useful overview of different microphone types and how they react in a noisy room environment:

For what it’s worth, I usually shoot interviews with a Sennheiser lavalier mic/radio kit. Since I rarely have anyone with me who knows how to handle a shotgun on a pole, my Røde shotgun’s audio is rarely heard beyond the first rough-cut. That’s the NTG-2 model used in the video. It’s terrific value and a decent mic, but I’m not often in a situation where I can get usable audio out of it.

However, on occasion it’s a complete lifesaver – for run-and-gun interviews in a really noisy room, for example, you need a long shotgun, ideally a handheld cardiod if you’ve an on-camera reporter.

At the other end of the production scale, I’ve been known to strap a £30 wired lavalier to a broom handle and use it like a (boomed) shotgun mic. It’s laughable, until you realise how much better it sounds than the in-camera mic. Cruddy-but-listenable sound is better than no sound at all.

The film made with the aforementioned chickens:

It should, I think, be obvious that we were mucking about.