I was commissioned to take photos at the NACONF in January. I didn’t know what to expect, but I really enjoyed the event. Some great speakers from around the world. View all the photos on their Flickr stream here. The image above is available to purchase for a limited time via the panodrop Store.

This summer I decided to embark on little project. I wanted to build a fixed gear bike. I’m familiar with bikes and how they’re put together and have spent a fair bit of time upgrading and replacing parts, but I’ve never built a complete one. My original plan was to take my old Create Fixie and replace the frame and a couple of other components. This is what happened at first but it soon escalated with me buying a completely new bike and spending a small fortune. The result however makes it all worth while. I now have my very own unique machine.

Click below to see close up shots and further detail about the build..

The first thing I purchased was the frame. I spent a couple of weeks searching though many different styles and brands. I decided I wanted a modern design, light weight aluminium frame. I came across this, the Cinelli Vigorelli, a track frame from an Italian company. The tubing is triple butted meaning its thinner in the middle and thicker at the joints, so its rigid and light. When the frame arrived I couldn’t believe how light it actually was. The forks were even more surprising with them being super light carbon fibre.

Shot looking at the front forks of the bike.

Choosing the right peddles was important. I did quite a lot of searching and couldn’t make up my mind. It was on the Amsterdam trip with the 5th floor guys when I noticed a couple of them had the new BLB pedals and straps. Once I was home I had a chat with Peter, one of the guys that works there, and he sorted me out with a set. These peddles are great because they’re super deep, holding your feet in tighter, so it feels like you have more control over the bike. I went for plastic cages because the metal ones I had before were destroying my shoes and dug into my feet.

Before I was riding the gear ratio 44:17. That was getting way to easy, and made going down hill a little mental. So I upped  it to a 48:16. This means I can go faster but the down side is it produces only one skid patch on the back tyre, therefore I will need to rotate it round so I don’t wear a hole through it. I picked up this light weight, 165mm, Miche crank set for around £100.

Choosing the saddle was a bit of a mission too! There’s so much choice and I wasn’t really prepared to fork out mega bucks on it. I ended up getting this, the Charge Spoon. The reviews seemed really good and for the price (£25) I didn’t have much to loose. I actually find it rather comfy. Not as good as my MTB seat but better than the one I had before.

The Seat post is a Cinelli Vai XL that I got for £20.

Right.. this stem was a real challenge to get! I ordered it four times (from different places) online only to later receive emails saying it was out of stock. One order on eBay went through but it was lost in the post! So while I was on the Amsterdam ride I spotted it at one of the bike shops we visited. So I got it there and then. I wanted this particular stem because it was short and its named ANT! very fitting with the DigitalAnthill theme .

I was going to buy a set of Profile Design Airwing OS handle bars online then luckily I found that my mate was selling his old pair. Still in pretty good nick and only £10. They kinda remind me of ant feelers…

The brake lever is one of a pair of Tektro RX4.1 Aero leavers I got off eBay for about £15. Having it in this position is fairly odd but it means there’s more room on the handle bars. The bar tape is just black Easton Cork.

The bird is the Colu
mbus tubing logo. As for tyres, on the back I went for a harder wearing Continental Gatorskin and on the front I have a Blue Continental Ultrasport.

The wheel set was the last thing I got for the bike. I didn’t want to spend a fortune on these either, I ended up getting a very good deal. I spotted this set of Navigator Pista wheels for around £180. I liked them because of their deep V profile, light weight, black but also have a fixed, fixed flip flop hub on the rear, meaning you can have two different gear sizes on either side. I saw that on the Dolan site they were selling the set for £99, I thought it must be a mistake, so I ordered them expecting an email the next day saying there’s an error on the site, but nope they arrived the following day!

Shot of the rear drop outs.

Shot looking from the back of the bike.

I purchased this blue half link chain in Amsterdam for around £15. Although it looks nice and allows you to get the back wheel super close to the frame, in reality its not very practical. I’ve been riding with it for about a month now and its rather noisy and is heavier than a regular chain. I’m going to be looking at getting a new one soon.

For the front brake I got a Sram Apex for around £25. Very high quality and gives quick responsive braking. I was a little worried because the rims are not machined and I wasn’t sure what was going to happen when braking on them. So far I haven’t noticed any difference. I haven’t been out on it in the wet however.

And finally the smiley face on the down tube. Basically this was the deciding factor for me buying this frame .

So to recap here’s a full list of components:

Frame: Cinelli Vigorelli

Wheel Set: Navigator Pista

Pedals: BLB Track Pedals, Double Strap, Double Cage

Crank Set: Miche Primato Advance Track 48T 165mm

Bottom Bracket: Miche Primato Bottom Bracket

Seat Post: Cinelli Vai XL

Seat: Charge Spoon

Stem: Cinelli Ant Stem

Rear Tyre: Continental Gatorskin

Front Tyre: Blue Continental Ultrasport

Innertubes: 48mm Presta valve

Rim Tape: 700c 14mm Wide

Bar Tape: Black Easton Cork

Brake Leaver: Tektro RX4.1 Aero

Brake Caliper: Sram Apex

So over all its been an interesting project, I’ve actually learnt quite a lot from it. I was very fortunate that all the components I bought fitted together and I didn’t have to send anything back. The bike rides beautifully, its so light and responsive. So if you have a spare grand lying about I recommend giving a custom build a shot!

Any questions feel free to right a comment, Ill try to get back to you promptly

I asked around and did a bit of research and it seemed the best starting place was a 50mm f1.8.

I decided to go with Nikons own prime lens. I found a seller on eBay who was flogging one in mint condition for £80 delivered. I placed my order and it arrived next day. Magic.

First impressions, I thought it was very small. It’s certainly smaller than my other lenses, Lighter too. It looks kind of funny and insignificant attached to the big body of an SLR.

During my lunch break I went out round town and the studio testing it out. Below is one example.

To get an idea of the size here it is against my other lenses. From left to right: Tamron 100-300mm, Nikon 18-105mm, Falcon 8mm and Nikon 50mm.

Click MORE below: To see close up images of the lens and more example shots.

The lens has a maximum f stop of 1.8. Which roughly means the aperture opens up pretty big allowing more light in. I just about understand the concept of the f stop but its quite difficult to explain.. So I wont bother. Any way below are two images to demonstrate the principle, the top one is f22 (minimum amount of light) and the bottom is f1.8 (maximum amount of light) 

I took this photo to compare the size of the back facing lens ( I’m sure there’s a technical term) of the prime and my fisheye. The prime lens is nearly double the size. I look forward to taking some night shots with this lens as I imagine it lets in a fair bit of light. The lens can be controlled by the camera meaning it can auto focus and auto select the best shutter speed and fstop. This is quite a nice feature to have even though I’m used to the fully manual fisheye. It means if I have to, I can quickly get a snap without faffing about with the controls too much.

Here are some photos I took on the day of getting the lens…

A waste studio character drawn one of the walls at Tribe.

Tribe’s welcome sign. As you can see the DOF is ridiculous!

Top hat light.

New mental rug. It looks like its made out of loads bowties.

Blue stringy pillow

Keep an eye out on my Flickr as I’m sure there will be more photos soon.

The ShoeBox comes in another larger box, this was actually my second one. The first got pretty much destroyed in transit! The Guys at ShutterCal sent a replacement free of charge. Super cool.

The photos come separately in a small cardboard envelope. They arrived in perfect condition. The reason for this post is really to show what the photos look like close up and possibly answer a few questions you might have about them.. for example how big are they, do the photos get cropped to fit the square card etc..

First off let me say that the quality of these prints is exceptional. I haven’t printed photos taken from my iPhone before so I was a little unsure if they would look any good.

Below are all 31 printed images from January stacked. (I’m quite pleased I found this site in time to start the project on the 1/1/11. All those 1s look kinda cool.)

Click More to see the rest of this post.

Below is the cardboard ShoeBox you store the photos in. This comes in three different designs, Maplewood, Birchwood or plain. Mine is Birchwood.

Below is the inside of the box. There are 12 slots, one for each month.

Below are all 31 photos laid out in the same order as they appear on my Calendar.

So I’ve found out that the images don’t get cropped, which is actually a good thing. Although If you upload very wide images they do end up getting scaled down quite a lot as you can see below. My advice is upload photos that are as square as possible.

Another thought I had was what happens to portrait photos?!.. Well below is the answer. They get turned on their side. This is cool because it means you don’t get any black on either side of the image. Again if you want to avoid having too many photos on their side try and upload cropped images.

Below you can see that this image is at the maximum size of the frame.

On the back of each picture is some text that is displayed on each photo on the ShutterCal site. I made the decision to add the location of each photo too. Something I would recommend if you are thinking about doing this project. It allows people in the future to have a rough idea where the photos were taken .

And Finally scale. Below is one of the photos next to my iPhone. The exact dimensions of each photo is 8x8in or 10.2×10.2cm

So overall I’m super pleased with how these have turned out. If you’re doing/thinking about a daily photo project of your own on ShutterCal I would highly recommend you invest in this. There’s nothing like having a physical copy of something in this digital world .

Ever since I got my first iPhone back in ‘07 I’ve tried to take a regular picture of what I was up to. Really this was just for my own personal record and the photos weren’t really all that great. Over the past year or so since I got my DLSR and I started to take a real interest in photography. I have noticed that I was taking more photos with greater consideration. With the new iPhone 4 picture quality is actually very impressive and in the right conditions it can produce some very nice photos. Because I now have a camera with me all the time I thought I would experiment by taking one photo daily. I roughly started this in September ‘10. I kept doing this for about 3 months during this time I was trying to think of ways I could keep an organised record of it. I wanted to have it online somewhere so it would be backed up and I could show other people what I’ve been up to.

More after the break…

It was on Jan 10th ‘11 that I came across shuttercal.com. I had decided I was going to try and make my own simple blogging site where I could upload a photo and add a small amount of text. Before I started trying to achieve this I thought I would have a quick look on Apples app store to see if there is an app that allows you to upload a photo from your phone to a blog in some way.. this is when I came across shuttercal’s app. I read the description and immediately signed up!

Shuttercal is pretty much the ideal site I was looking for/going to try and make. There is a small profile about your self and the equipment you use down the left. In the middle they have used a calendar based system for displaying the photos.

Uploading photos to the site is dead simple. You can either click on the day where you want to add the pic and it gives you the option to choose a file and add a description. Another way is via the iPhone app. The app is very basic, It allows you to choose a photo from your camera roll, select a date and add a description. I have spoken to Scott (DefaultArtist) who runs the site and he says they’re working on the next version which will include more features.

(above images taken from shuttercal.com)

After looking at the site some more I noticed they offer a printing service too. At first I wasn’t bothered by this and thought it would probably be a waste of money. But the more I looked and thought about it I eventually decided I would go for it! What they have done is create what they call a “shoebox” which is a custom box with 12 slots in where you can place your photos from each month. At the end of every month you can use their online print manager to select the style of print you want then get it shipped directly to you.

I decided to work out how much all this was going to cost me.. basically its quite a lot.. But I haven’t really got many of my photos printed. It’s so easy to take a million digital photos nowadays and just leave them un-touched and forgotten on a hard drive somewhere. I really liked the idea of having a physical collection of 365 photos from every day of a year.

So enough of my justification here’s a little break down of the costs to have these pics printed and shipped from California to the UK.

Starting cost is $43.98  which includes one month of photos, shoe box and shipping.

Monthly cost including shipping is $16.99

11 months at $16.99 per month.

11 * 16.99 = 186.89

 $186.89 plus the $43.98 starting cost (inc one months worth of prints).

186.89 + 43.98 = 230.87

Total cost for the year is $230.87 divided by the current conversion rate of 1.5 $ to the £.

230.87 / 1.5 = 153.91

£154 for the year divided by 12 for monthly cost.

154 / 12 = 12

£12 a month divided by 30 for cost per photo.

12 / 30 = .40

So it costs roughly 40p per print, £12 a month and £154 for the year.

Again this might seem a lot and I know there’re plenty of other online printing services that print cheaper but the thing is I would never go to the bother of manually organizing and ordering a monthly batch of photos. Plus these are printed on high quality thick paper on both sides and with the description, date and photo number.

So over all I think its a worth while investment… well, we will see.

I would highly recommend giving this a shot if you have an interest in photography! It all most forces you to be aware most of the day, looking out for the perfect photo opportunity. This can be quite exciting but also slightly annoying especially when its getting to the end of the day and you still haven’t taken a photo. I’m not trying to take an amazing photo everyday I’m simply using the process as a means of practice and a way to document what I get up to.

I will add another post once I receive the shoebox and first batch of photos.