Craft and Vision

For a while now I have enjoyed reading eBooks from Craft and Vision.  Some are electronic equivalents of paper books - others are unique ePublications from people such as David duChemin.  You get his drift from “…the point, for
most of us, is deeper photographs, not merely larger ones”.   You can download a free example here - Craft & Vision - 11 Ways You Can Improve Your Photography where authors at C&V “…to contribute an article about something they wished they’d learned sooner, a way in which others could improve their photography…”   They are without doubt very reasonably priced publications (usually $5, or $4 if you sign up to their newsletter), and very interesting, but I have struggled as to how I can make notes about the ideas and techniques as I like to do when reading printed books.   I thought I might need a tablet PC to enable me to do this, but this would be a lot of money and I decided I would investigate alternatives to try and save this money.

My solution has been a combination of Foxit Reader and Ditto Clipboard Manager and you can see the result of highlighting the ebook in the screenshot alongside.

If you download and install Foxit Reader you can make it your default pdf reader.  My suggestions for setting up are:

1. Show thumbnails of pages by clicking on double page icon at LH side.
2. To easily highlight text: Click Views > Toolbars > Comments.  Click on the highlight Text Icon. (This means that you can select and highlight text all in one go)
3. To enter into Read Mode, choose View > Read Mode (the PDF will be displayed in a way to maximise the view area.
4. You can hide all comments with Comments > Hide all comments or vice versa
5. NB.  You can even have it read out loud with View > Read out loud…

If you download and install Ditto Clipboard Manager you can collect each ‘clip’ as you highlight them in Foxit Reader by clicking CTRL C - up to 10 clips - and then view them in the Ditto clipboard manager.

1. CTRL C to put onto clipboard.
2. To view the clipboard, click on the Ditto icon in the notification area (bottom right)
3. You can select a particular clip, or several (use shift, click)
4. Right Click, then click Paste Plain Text Only to paste the text into the active window.
5. In Foxit Reader you need to just annotate text, so as to copy it first, then RC and choose to highlight.

If you have an iPhone then a combination of Dropbox and IBooks makes for easy reading of eBooks.

Hope this helps.

During the last year, Bishopthorpe Camera Club has relocated to wonderful modern surroundings in the Village Hall.  Meetings in the last few months have been punctuated by singing - not by Roger however - but by the well-known Ebor Players rehearsing in the main hall.  The Club offered to take photos and hence I found myself turning up to the final night with some apprehension - in the same way that my children’s life is blighted by having a Dad who has a hobby of photography, I have still have vivid memories of many amateur dramatic productions starring my father.  I needn’t have worried.  I have been told many times that the annual Bishopthorpe Pantomime is professional dramatics, and it is true, as the photos will prove.  I really enjoyed it and congratulations to all involved.

Well, I’ve done it.  Chris Sharples Photography was at the AYJS Christmas Fayre, and is now publicised in the village.  From a request in May to take photos of friends from the photography club, I have now racked up a large supply of professional dry mounts and the printer can be heard whirring away most weekends.  A big thank you to the friends who have helped me build up the studio portfolios on the left-hand navigation bar.  And to staff at AYJS especially Mrs Bloch.  I now have studio bookings for before and after Christmas (please contact me for gift vouchers for Christmas) and I’m thoroughly enjoying “working with parents and children to take photos that show we had fun and will bring smiles to peoples’ faces”.