Teach your dog to take photos

Kodak

PHOTOGR-ARF: Oscar the dog with his camera.

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How will you fill the time indoors this winter? Well, you could teach the dog to take photographs.

Kodak has a helpful video on its podcast website showing how to get Rover into the photography hobby. You'll find it at http://tinyurl.com/dghcwh.

Jenny Cisney, chief blogger at Kodak, was inspired to get her dog taking photographs by the possibilities presented by the Gorillapod, a versatile tripod with bendy legs.

It can be used as a flexible, three-legged conventional tripod or it can be wrapped around any convenient object, such as a tree, a fence post or a dog's neck.

Ms Cisney has attached a compact camera to her dog using the Gorillapod as a collar. Then she sets the self-timer and lets the mutt loose. Heruns around sniffing here and there, as dogs are wont to do, and bingo - after 10 or 20 seconds the camera fires and he's taken a digital doggy pic.

While looking at Kodak's podcasts, check out the photo bookmarks. It's another instructional video that has a germ of a good idea for keeping the children amused indoors on a wet afternoon.

It is all about making bookmarks from photographs. However, it goes beyond simply printing long, thin photos and laminating them (although that is a good idea, too).

The Kodak Pro Imaging podcast category has plenty of good ideas for all photographers. The reader who sent us a nasty email berating us for our digital enthusiasm, when everyone knows that only silver-based photography is the genuine art form, will find much to confirm his prejudices in the John Sexton video.

Mr Sexton learned his skills from the great Ansel Adams, and, as he says in his eloquent praise of black and white film photography: "I still like the magic of the silver process."

He even likes the uncertainty of not knowing how well he has done his job on location until he gets back to the darkroom and develops his film. He reckons that "the look of film is different from images digitally generated, just as cinematography film is different from video".

He shows examples of his work in a good-quality podcast that is downloadable for replay on portable MP3 devices.

This podcast is an 11-minute tutorial that might inspire digital photographers to set their cameras to monochrome, even if it isn't the same as film.

- © Fairfax NZ News