Tag Archives: photos

more insta stories

15 Saturday Dec 2018

Posted by in food & drink, gastronomy, instagram, sevilla, social media, tapas, tapas bars

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Running three Instagram accounts is a bit challenging at times, especially as I like to put SOMETHING up there every day. Lately I’ve been having fun with the disappearing stories, and will soon put some of them up permanently.

Here are some I did today (what you can’t see is that the little Winnie the Pooh in the middle pic is animated and doing a happy dance along the bar shelf). Click on the image to make it bigger… or you could pop over to the accounts and see the stories while they’re still there…

Sevilla Tapas

Azahar Gourmet Getaways

We Love Tapas

 

moving on from picasa…

20 Monday Aug 2018

Posted by in blogging, photography, work

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Moving on from Picasa… but where to?? Actually, this change came about in early 2016, which basically meant that there would be no more updates or support for Picasa, but it didn’t affect the existing versions. In fact, Peter downloaded the last version for his new laptop last month and it’s been working fine. That is, until Saturday.

I uploaded some photos from the day out, planning to do some editing and hopefully get a couple of review updates posted (my massive backlog is ALMOST cleared!!), but while the photos were uploaded properly into the file, they didn’t show up on Picasa. I thought it might just be a glitch and so I just shut things down, thinking that things would probably be back to normal after a reboot. But nope.

It occurred to me to reinstall Picasa, but then I thought I might screw up my present Picasa “library” which is showing everything I uploaded before Saturday. I also checked with Peter and his Picasa also wasn’t showing new photos he uploaded, so the possibility of losing everything seemed likely. Damn.

The thing I have always liked about Picasa was its simple editing options, and also that it was easy to scroll through the library that showed all my photo files. It also had a text option, so I could add my watermark, a collage maker, plus I could export the edited photos to other files at smaller sizes, keeping the originals in the original files. Google Photos, the recommended substitute for Picasa has only basic cropping and filter features, so it’s useless for me.

What to do?? I mean, photo editing is a HUGE part of my job, and I’m really stuck if I don’t have some means of doing this. I tried downloading the Windows Live editor, but that one doesn’t appear to be working either. I also tried GIMP and have just spent the last two hours totally frustrated with it, which is the same experience I had with it a few years ago. I’m sure it does wonderful stuff if you know how to do them, but it is not a user-friendly platform at all, and is very “clunky” in terms of finding the uploaded files and then exporting them.

I honestly don’t know what to do next. Any ideas?

food photo class & wine tasting

23 Friday Feb 2018

Posted by in food & drink, gastronomy, photos, sevilla, tapas, wine

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[click on image to enlarge]

A rather unusual event this week, being a combined cata by Bodegas Izadi, and a photography class given by Vicugofoto, which took place at the Restaurante Maria Trifulca, at the Triana end of the Isabella II bridge.

The building is an obvious landmark, with a history interesting enough to be worth a short digression. It was originally built in the early 1920s as the offices and boarding point for the steam river boats to Sanlúcar de Barrameda at the mouth of the river, but after some 50 years of operation it could no longer compete with cars, buses and trains. In the 80s it was converted into use as a restaurant (El Faro), and a few years ago passed into new hands as the Maria Trifulca. The name comes from the river beach near Heliopolis which was hugely popular during the 20s and 30s, until an explosion in the nearby gunpowder factory resulted in a great tragedy and the beach was closed down.

The photo class was quite basic, more a demonstration of various tools for lighting and other technical aids than about technique and framing. There were ten of us participating and we each took turns trying to get the “money shot” of the various dishes that were brought to us.

This was followed by the wine tasting organized by Bodegas Izadi, a relatively small Rioja winery founded in 1987, with food pairings prepared by the restaurant.

We started with Larrosa, a very nice fresh rosada which was probably my favourite, paired with two types of nigiri. Next up was Blanco FB, a fruity white that nicely paired with salmon tartare. Then onto the Reds. A 2015 Criaza with char-grilled octopus (probably the best food of the evening), followed by Selección with the main course of grilled presa Ibérica, and finally El Regalo, another red, with the cheesecake dessert.

Thanks to everyone who helped organize the event, and the staff at Maria Trifulca.

heic? wtf?

12 Friday Jan 2018

Posted by in casa azahar, cats, computers, iphone

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So HEIC is the name Apple chose for its new HEIF standard for photos. HEIF stands for High Efficiency Image Format, a more streamlined way to store image files. Using advanced, modern compression methods it allows digital photographs to be created in smaller files sizes, while retaining higher image quality than its JPEG alternative. Which sounds great EXCEPT that nobody else is using this format other than Apple, so it won’t download on my computer, blah blah…

After locating an app that would convert HEIC to JPEG, a friend told me that it was actually possible to turn off the HEIC option on the phone, so I have now done that. I mean, I now have 256 GBs and am sure I’ll never get up to using even half of that, so I’m not really interested in saving space. Anyhow, Morcilla looks just as pretty in JPEG, wouldn’t you agree?