Bright sunny summers days are not typically great for landscape photographers. Harsh shadows, and bright direct light don't typically make for good photographic conditions. Sunrises and sunsets offer the best light, but here in the UK, at midsummer, that means very early starts or late finishes. However, Infrared photography is a great approach to making the most of these challenging bright conditions without sacrificing too much sleep.

In many ways, Infrared photography is a lot like normal photography, the only difference is that you are capturing wave lengths of light that you cannot actually see. You can however, usually anticipate what the final image will look like. Typically, foliage will reflect most infrared light, and will therefore be the brightest subjects. Other materials will reflect Infrared light differently to normal visible light. Clouds are good reflect lots of light, but the blue sky can reflect very little, making it look like there is no atmosphere. Water, depending on reflections, can also look very dark.

Although modern camera sensors can capture Infrared light, most have an Infrared cut filter in from of them to improve image quality. This filter prevents nearly all infrared light from passing through to the sensor. However, a tiny amount of infrared light does get through, but it's not enough to impact your photographs. So, to take an infrared photograph, you just need add an Infrared filter to the front of your lens, such as a Hoya R72, that blocks all normal visible light, and only allows infrared light through, and when combined with the IR cut filter on the sensor, a tiny amount of IR light makes it through. In a practice, this means Infrared Photos are possible by just adding a simple filter to your camera, but the amount of light that eventually makes to the sensor is so small, that you'll need exposure times of over 30 seconds, even on bright sunny days when their is the most amount of infrared light in the atmosphere. So, technically possible, but long exposure times mean motion blur will be issue, and hand held shots are out of the question.

Hopefully, it should be pretty obvious that if we could remove the IR cut filter from in front of the sensor, then, inn combination with with the R72 Infrared filter on the front of the lens, then we can restrict all visible light, and allow all Infrared light through to the sensor. This allows us to take hand held infrared photographs on bright days, and my current setup can handle 1/60 second exposures at F2.0 and ISO 400 on a converted EOS-M camera and EF-M 22mm lens, with a Hoya R72 filter.

If you are comfortable converting your own camera, it is very possible to do yourself, but you should be okay with the risk of permanently damaging your camera in the process. If you are not comfortable doing this, there are companies online that will do this for you. Converting your camera is beyond the scope of this article, but you can search online for instructions for your camera model. Please be aware, that this will convert your camera into a full spectrum sensor, without any additional filters, it will capture photographs with both visible light and Infrared light, in practice this means your photographs will have a pink cast to them. But, this will give you the ability to use different IR filters. To only capture IR light, you'll need a filter that blocks light up to 720nm, but you can also use a full spectrum camera to capture near-infrared light, which is anything over 550nm.

Processing IR photographs will be the topic of another article, as there are many options and styles you can choose. I prefer to correct the white balance, then boost the highlights, and then use my own presets to flip the colours in the red and blue channels. This is the process that gives bright pink and white foliage, and deep blue skys with crisp clouds.

You can see more of my Infrared Photographs in my Portfolio, as well as on my Instagram feed.

Choosing a name for your website, your online identity, the thing you'll need to say to people all the time is very important. Ideally, you should choose a name that is short, unique, easy to remember and easy to spell. A good domain should be unambiguous, for example, stationary.com and stationery.com sound the same when spoken, but have very different meanings when written. It also helps to avoid ambiguity with numbers and characters that look or sound similar.

So, my own choice of maniacalrobot.co.uk was the obvious choice! yeah, maybe not. It fails on pretty much every point, but at least it's unique. To handle my online identity, I've been using GSuite, allowing me to easily use this for emails too. Trying to spell this to people is virtually impossible, and trying to type it usually requires 2 attempts.

A simple solution to having long domain names is to simply register a shorter form that you can use, and that automatically redirects to your full address. For me, http://m7r4.uk will automatically redirect to the full http://maniacalrobot.co.uk, and using GSuote, you can add this as an alias to receive your emails on too. But why m7r4.uk? This compresses the complicated words from the full domain into a nice simple letter + number + letter + number. It's easy to say, and easy to spell, and nice and short. ManiacalRobot.co.uk is an M followed by 7 characters, then an R followed by 4 characters, and instead of using the full .co.uk, I simply chose .uk. It's a simple naming scheme that can easily be applied to any domain and makes spelling to people in person a lot easier.

2019 has been a great year for my photography. I started the year by upgrading from my EOS-M, which has served me very well, to an EOS-M5. Apart from the improvement in image quality and resolution, 18 megapixels to 24 megapixels, the extra manual controls have made using the camera much more natural, and the boost in image quality was so big, that I quite quickly decided to add some new lenses to make the most of all those new megapixels. I'm quite a frugal buyer, so I wanted to maximise performance for the best possible cost. Up until now, I've been using wide-angle zooms and standard primes, so I went all in and got a 70-200 F4 L, the base 'L' lens in the 70-200 range, but the image quality on a tripod is simply excellent. In addition to this, I also purchased a second hand 24-105 F4 L IS, the 'kit' lens from Canons pro camera bodies. For the price, this is also an excellent lens, sharp and versatile, but on the negative side, heavy and prone to chromatic aberration, but nothing that can't be fixed in post-processing.

New kit aside, this year also marked a return to simply going out with a tripod and taking my time to compose landscapes. Recently, most of my photography has been from walking and holidays. It's been quite satisfying to just take my time without any pressures or time contraints.

The year started with a Holiday to Lisbon. A beautiful city with lots to see and do. The weather was great, and complimented the fantastic food. This was a quick shot taken by the MAAT museum on the waterfront. It was a warm afternoon, lots of people enjoying the sunshine, and maybe a drink, by the water.

The boardwalks at Thursley National Nature Reserve provide the next location. It's a great spot for capturing evening light, the windswept trees and grasses providing some great subjects. This is a location that I will need to return to, as I suspect these scenes will look great with different weather conditions.

When I upgraded my primary camera from the EOS-M to the EOS-M5, I converted the EOS-M into an infrared camera by removing the builtin IR cut filter. This requires dismantling the camera, and removing a tiny glass filter that sits in front of the imaging sensor. Once this is done, the camera is now capturing visible light and Infrared light, which in normal use just adds a pink hue to images, but when combined with an IR filter, i use a R72, on really bright days, you can capture Infrared photographs. As leaves and grass reflect IR light more than other surfaces, IR photographs take on an ethereal look.

These last three photos are all long exposure images from Prague during a trip to the Christmas markets. Prague is a beautiful city, but it is also a very busy city. Using long exposures can help to blur out the numbers of people, and combined with exposure bracketing for HDR processing, allows for details to be retained in the shadows, without blowing out the street lights.

How do some seemingly bland Instagram posts get so many likes, and why to all 'repost' accounts have so many many followers?

The answer is likely to be many and varied, involving gaming the Instagram algorithms, and upping your search engine optimisation, but the primary tool in Instagrams armoury is promoting posts. Unsurprisingly, they make it very easy for you to promote your own posts, so I thought I'd give it a go.

To begin, you need to switch from a personal account to a professional or business account. This will allow you to promote your posts, as well as gather enhanced metrics that will show you how successful your promoted post has been.

Once you've picked a post that will be interesting for people, you can go ahead promote it, there is a new "Promote" button next to your posts on your profile view. Then you just need to decide how much to spend and what your target audience is. Spend is based on how much you want to spend per day, and how many days you the promotion to run. For your target audience, you can define some simple parameters, or just let Instagram choose for you. Lastly, you need to pick what the action of the promotion is, you can link to your Instagram profile, link to your website or online shop, or send a direct message to your Instagram message inbox.

For this experiment, I decided to use a recent Infrared photograph post. Infrared photos are eye-catching, they have a special interest to them, and they are not an effect that the average person can reproduce. After picking the post, I then promoted the post a £1 a day, for 10 days. I had, and still, have no idea if this is a lot to spend on promoting, for me, it's a fairly small amount of money, and worth it in the name of experimenting.

Promotion Results

Over the 10 days the promotion ran, the post reached a fairly impressive 3424 impressions, these are the number of times the post was seen, by 2549 people, and nearly all these people aren't following me already because I don't have many followers.

There were 12 clicks on the promotion, so that's 12 direct clicks through to my profile, of which 3 people, or bots, decided my feed was interesting enough to start following me. I don't expect many of these new followers to stick around though.

Cost per follower: £3.33

The post itself earned 554 likes. This was the most surprising part, I wasn't expecting this many. I have no idea if these are genuine people who like my post, or bots trying to game the Instagram algorithms, but it does look good having a big number there and it will be interesting to see if this number changes.

Cost per like: £0.02

9 bookmarks is a promising outcome, I'm assuming bookmarks are by genuine people, who have seen something they might want to come back to.

Cost per Bookmark: £1.11

Finally, a single person wrote a comment due to the promotion.

All in all, I am quite impressed. I wasn't expecting much, and I now have a good starting point for future comparison. The next phase will be to try this again in a few weeks, or more likely months, and compare the results.

A shortlist of hopes and dreams, things to achieve, and memories to make.

• Visit Svalbard
• Learn to draw
• Visit Iceland
• Return to Japan
• Visit Australia
• See the Northern Lights
• See The Milky Way from a dark sky site
• Get my Photography published

Keeping on top of all the tasks of modern life can be tricky. How many times have you got to the end of another weekend and ever wondered what you achieved in the week? Well, this happened to me all the time, until I started to keep a weekly todo list. The idea is simple:

1. Get an A4 notepad.
2. At the start of each week, on a new page, note the week number, and write down all of your tasks you want to get done.
3. Keep referring to the list during the week, and tick off tasks as you complete them.

So, pretty obvious right? However, I’ve found this method really helps me because of a really simple thing: dedicating a whole, new, A4 notepad page to each week. Now, I generally only have a 5 or 6 tasks jotted down for each week, which means there’s a lot space on the page left over, perfect for making notes throughout the week, and it’s this act of making further notes throughout the week, that keeps you coming back to your task list.

A recent trip to Canada provided an excellent opportunity to photograph the beautiful landscapes around Vancouver Island. With outlying islands, dense old growth rainforests, rocky shorelines, and long sandy beaches; Vancouver Island has a treasure trove of photogenic scenes.

Starting from Vancouver city, just getting to the island is a fantastic experience, either take the 15 minute flight, or the 2 hour ferry, both offer great views.

I’ve been busy building a new section of the site dedicated to Calculators!.

Calculators are interesting things, especially when you can quickly change variables and see the result set update.

Calculators will become an important section for growth going forward. The first calculator to be released is a Compound Interest Calculator, illustrating the amazing effects of compounding interest in savings accounts. The calculator gives you access to all the data as the interest rolls up each year, as well as graphing the accumulation curve.

Making calculators as interactive as possible is one of the goals. In addition, all calculators will have a full API for programmatically accessing the result sets, or for creating direct links with starting parameters for the calculator to pre-populate the calculator. For example, Here’s a link to illustrate how £10,000 can become £34,582.51 over 10 years, and if you want to access the data directly, you can use a command line tool like cURL:

curl https://maniacalrobot.co.uk/calculators/compound_interest.json?capital=10000.0&frequency=quarterly&monthly_deposit=100.0&rate=6.0&term=10

Simply appending .json to the path will automatically give you a JSON result set, which you can then use with other programs.

At the beginning of December 2018, I’ve signed up to https://www.prolific.ac, to see if it’s possible to use online surveys as a reliable additional income source.

Prolific specialise in providing a platform for academic research, with typical surveys taking around 10 minutes, and an aim to pay around £8 per hour. Surveys are reserved on a first-come-first-served approach, meaning you need to have the survey's webpage open, or you'll miss out. Most of the time, there won’t be any surveys, with a handful of surveys appearing per day. I wasn’t continuously checking as I have my main job with Salesforce during the day, so I was very much checking Prolific during breaks and evenings. This would have reduced my potential to pick up all available surveys.

So, how much did I make? Over 1 month, I was successfully paid for completing 28 surveys, 2 surveys are pending payment, and 2 surveys failed to complete. Below are the successfully completed surveys that have paid out:

Reward	Bonus	Time
£1.00	£0.00	00:10:59
£0.42	£0.00	00:07:09
£0.95	£0.00	00:14:13
£0.20	£0.00	00:02:37
£0.42	£0.80	00:04:11
£0.60	£0.00	00:02:06
£0.13	£0.00	00:01:43
£0.52	£0.00	00:05:46
£1.20	£0.00	00:15:36
£2.00	£0.00	00:06:45
£0.40	£0.00	00:01:43
£0.20	£0.00	00:02:40
£2.10	£0.00	00:26:53
£1.50	£0.00	00:14:59
£1.30	£0.00	00:14:50
£0.70	£0.00	00:13:47
£1.25	£0.00	00:11:05
£1.09	£0.00	00:13:45
£1.00	£0.00	00:06:19
£0.37	£0.00	00:07:53
£1.20	£0.00	00:04:03
£1.10	£0.00	00:12:19
£1.00	£0.00	00:05:44
£0.75	£0.08	00:11:43
£0.50	£0.00	00:05:52
£0.61	£0.00	00:03:20
£0.20	£0.00	00:03:52
£2.10	£0.00	00:15:08

Together, over a month, this is a total of 4 hours and 7 minutes of work and paid a total income of £25.69, which works out to just over £6 per hour … not great. However, one thing that surprised me about this experiment was how engaging some of the surveys were. Although there were some pretty boring questions, there were some genuinely interesting questions, likely due to the academic nature of the surveys, but this was a small positive that I was not expecting.

Could I recommend this is a main income source? No, unfortunately from my brief time, I just cannot see how this would make a decent income. From what I can tell, surveys are a numbers game, the only way to make more money is to complete more surveys, which at £6 per hour is too little for the effort. Assuming you could complete surveys all day, a 10 hour day would only pay £60, with costs still to factor in.

Could I recommend this as an additional income source? Although it's only a small amount, Yes. However, you might need to consider any tax implications. Technically you should be paying tax on these earnings, which could decimate your potential for making any income, although the UK government have recently announced that you do not need to declare the first £1000 of non-employment income. Which means you’re unlikely to need to worry about this unless you have multiple non-employment income streams.

As a future experiment, I Might try running multiple survey sites in tandem, to see if better payouts are available.

This is a retrospective post featuring photos from 2018.