Photography Resources Newsletter

Friday 11th July 2008

Featured week

Living History Museums

This week we turn our attention to Living History Museums, some call them outdoor museums. The simplest way to explain these are as demonstrations of a set time period with buildings, people in costumes and more set in the period. In some cases its fully working farms run as they would have been at the time, in other cases its collections of buildings that have been pulled down and rebuilt at the site allowing a larger concentration of historic properties.

We have visited many of these impressive sights, that provide interest, education and a great many photographic opportunities.

Recording Living History

A photo of the painting 'A Days Outing' by Italian artist Frederico Andreotti. Notice his characters are living and are not statues. He has made it appear, well, like a photograph.

We thought that you could count the number that existed on your fingers, but have discovered quite a few more. In part this is because we have perhaps widened the definition, as more places have a living museum aspect, but even so there are quite a few that we have discovered in this exercise, and several are now on our list of must visit locations.

As you may by now expect we have produced a list Living History Museums we have identified, and have links to their websites and other information, in addition a large parentage of these we have produced location guides for. Some as featured guides, but also many are quick guides, the quick guides in this case still have a lot of information and most have photographs as well.

We haven't included other areas that a have period role about them like railways set in a set time, or windmills, or re-enactment societies as these are already being covered, or will be, separately in specific classifications. There are probably others we have yet to discover, in particular I expect there are more historic farms. If you know of others please let us know.

We have an article Living History Museums, this is on visiting and getting the best photographs at them, it also considers in more depth what they are as well. Another article m aking people disappear, looks at how to get images without people in, either by suggesting ways to take them in public places like Living History Museums, castles, stately homes etc, and a technique that can be used which is part photography and part editing that allows you to achieve the same end results.

We have not produced further articles as we wanted to put the bulk of the effort into producing as many location guides in as much detail as we could. These locations are quite different, and we decided rather than to have common information in any way it was better to cover them each individually. Most you will find have photographs, and in many cases cover far more than on their own websites, this has been possible as we have visited many of these sites, have guide books on several, as well as information that was available elsewhere. If of course you have more information or recently visited and can tell us other points we would love to expand these as we would any of our location guides.

In addition you will find this starts another NEW section, called Living History, this will have other parts added later such as information on re-enactment societies and major re-enactment events. In addition we will at some point be adding more articles on a wider range of areas connected from period costume to staging a re-enactment photograph. This can be simple, a couple of friends and a visit to a fancy dress shop or a far larger near film grade production, complete with many effects.

Over the summer you will find a very large number of re-enactments taking place, some at the places we have featured this week, but also many others put on by re-enactment societies and at other attractions. The best of these that we are able to identify are covered in the photographers diary section for each month. The large battles are the ones most people come across but don't miss the others that show life or situations at a different time period.

In the News This Week

Nikon have also brought out 2 'Getting Stated' guides for Capture NX2, these can be downloaded free from the Nikon support website. A full manual was and still is available. One of these is a few pages and multi language, the other 'Quick Start guide' has 20 pages including cover, and is largely full of small pictures showing how to do a very small number of basic things. This hardly touches the surface of what this software can do, and there is a risk that people will use this guide and think that's all it does. The full manual has 267 pages. The 60 day trial version of the software is still available. Camera Images have a one day, 1 to 1 course, that gets people fully competent with this software.

Nikon has brought out an upgrade to the WT4-setup utility V1.1.0 and Thumbnail Selector V1.1.0 this only affect users of both the D3/D700 cameras and the WT-4 (radio connection). It is not compatible with the D300, who, if using a WT4, should continue to use the existing versions.

Summary of Articles Included this week