Category Archives: Photography

General photography natter — gear, thoughts, ideas, and the odd photo.

Geek-Speak, Photography

Speaking of Photos

One of my biggest fans talked with me by phone over the weekend, and wondered if I was still shooting, as there’d been no new photos on the site in a while.

Never fear, I’m still shooting.  The Deauxmayne is going through some behind-the-scenes renovations in the photo section that should make it easier and more automatic for my new photographic work to appear.  I’m probably still a week or two away before I get all the code written, bugs squashed, and pages finalized.
Patience, patience.  Once the dust settles, I think it’ll be easy for everyone — me, and my fans!  🙂

Photography

Football and Photography

Did you catch the Super Bowl last night?  Yeah, you and the rest of the planet.  🙂

Aside from the at-times hilarious commercials, and the spectacles of the game itself and The Rolling Stones (along with their censored lyrics), the thing that really caught my eye was the series of photos of the players and coaches posing one-on-one with the Lombardi Trophy.

Wow.

I don’t know who shot those, but they captured the fun, magic, respect and emotion of everything tied up with that trophy and what it respresents.  My gosh, I wish I could capture so much feeling in my work!  I don’t know who shot those, but he/she/they did an amazing job with this shoot.

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak, Photography

News of the World

Today’s a big day in MacLand — Steve Jobs is on the stage right now delivering the Gospel according to Cupertino, and it looks cool so far. New OS, new iLife (including updates to iPhoto that will get my attention — 250,000 images in a single library, which will be enough for me for a while), a new iMac based on a dual-core Intel processor that is allegedly 3.2 times faster than the old one, and a promise that the whole hardware platform will be on Mactel before the end of the year. Dang — had those things been announced, I might not have bit on the Quad. OK, OK, I probably would’ve bit on the Quad anyway, but I can act like I wouldn’t’ve! 🙂

Of course, with my shiny new machine and the announcements today, that means my OS and iLife are already “old”! Wonder if there’s a cheap upgrade path for recent purchasers?

One of the things I’ve been harping about is the lack of native code for the new Mactels. Well, it looks like Apple will “dual-head” things for a while — a universal binary that will work on both Mactel and PPC. That’s cool, especially given my concern about the performance of Rosetta with hogs: Photoshop CS2, etc. In fact, even Steve Jobs indicated that PS may not be good enough for professionals under Rosetta. Sounds like Apple’s making the decision I made to pounce on the Quad a little tougher to justify, but for PS alone, I still think I made the right decision, and can’t imagine being on any other platform right now.

On another note, I also found a really cool Lightroom primer at Luminous Landscape. This article just underscores how much I wanna play with this code. Read through it, and see what you think. For me, I believe this will be product that will manage to do things the way I want to, and still give me the features I want.

Apple Existence, Photography

Lightroom

In this morning’s e-mail was a blurb about Adobe’s competitor for Aperture — named Lightroom.

From what folks are saying, if you look at the video and adverts for Apple’s Aperture, they are essentially the mark Adobe is trying to hit with Lightroom, albeit with a lesser system footprint needed on the Mac side. (Aperture doesn’t exist for the Window platform, although Lightroom will.)

Myself, I have a preference to have this workflow tool fit in nice and snug against Photoshop CS2, and Lightroom should do that. While Aperture will let you use CS2 as your image editor, and allow you to open things from within it using CS2, I’m not yet convinced that the integration between the two products is as tight as I might want.

So, this morning I pulled down the 140Mb file that includes the Lightroom public beta and a bunch of samples, and I’ll start playing with them this weekend. Hopefully, Lightroom will be everything it’s cracked up to be, and something that I can begin using to publish the photo archive for the site.

Nice birthday prezzie, eh? 🙂

Photography

Talking Shop

Last night, Karen from SullivanGray DesignWorks came by to help wade me through some of the steps needed to get Colin Wright Photography off the ground (from a legal and tax perspective). She had some great info and some good ideas — all of which will help move my little upstart along more quickly.

The coolest part though was just talking shop. We talked about gear, shooting concepts, business plans, my experience at DLWS… basically all things photography. That was terrific! I don’t get those opportunities very often, and I really relish ’em. It’s that kind of conversation that really fuels my dreams for my photography. She’s (primarily) a wedding photographer, and it was fun to hear about that segment of the photography business, and reinforce why I wouldn’t want to shoot weddings!

So why would I want to avoid what is probably the most lucrative bit of photography I could get my hands into? Stress, stress, and….. oh yeah, stress! I have enough self-generated stress on a daily basis without adding the stress of trying to capture a couple’s most stressful day accurately and error-free. Photography for me is my release, my stress-buster, my refuge. I enjoy sitting back and watching the sun rise or set, or tromping through the woods or desert, looking for subjects that interest me.

That’s photography for me — me, God and nature… communing, listening, speaking and relaxing.

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak, Photography

JAlbum vs. The Powermac and The Money-Go-Round

So last night, I upgraded to JAlbum 6.1. This version is touted as being multi-processor aware, and a little smoother to work with.

It was, and it was.

I set up a job to run through about 11,000 photos in the 2005 archive, creating new pages, thumbnails…. everything. You could watch the counter drive onward an upward at a much improved pace over the iMac. On the iMac, it was about five seconds per image. On the PowerMac, it was about 2-3 seconds per image, and this was happening on multiple processors — I think as many as three of the four. Astonishing performance.

Unfortunately, there are still some glitches with JAlbum 6.1. I still encountered two java out of memory errors along the way. I just restarted the album build, and it took right off, so no issues there. I’ve been reading about some ways around that though — one is to invoke from a script that uses the java command line memory allocation parm (JAlbum by default will use no more that 256Mb), and the other is to change an XML properties file somewhere inside the app. That’d be the best answer, but I don’t yet know how to do it.

Anyway, the new machine and new code rocks, and I think I’m back to getting good albums posted!

(BTW, as a note, there are occassions where the image can’t be displayed when the thumbnail is clicked on. I know why, and just have to fix the code. Patience! 🙂 )

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak, Photography

New Gear: Apple Power Mac G5 Quad

Yeah, I’m an idiot. I bought bigger gear. Story of my life. So sue me! 🙂 (Poor Darla!)

Last night, I finally finished the chess moves that would allow me to put a dream workstation at my desk: a PowerMac G5 Quad. Two dual-core 2.5Ghz G5 processors are steaming along inside the brushed aluminum case, and are making merry inside my creative world. To that, I added an Apple 20″ Widescreen Cinema Display — the same size and resolution as my iMac that is now redundant.

Last night, Sio powered the thing up for its first light, and I began the process of moving my iMac’s brains into the shiny new canvas of the PowerMac. That process was incredibly easy — the migration path involves connecting the two boxes via firewire, and it takes care of the rest. About 3.5 hours later, the PowerMac was mine. The only thing I’ve noticed that wasn’t quite right was my hostfile, which was easy to change. A very impressive migration! And with this machine, I can keep all the photos and music on the internal SATA drive, rather than a firewire attached PATA drive. Verra nice.

Frankly, with the new monitor on the desk, my workspace seems less cluttered — something Beck also noticed. It’s nice, and allows me to have a little more elbow room on the glass desktop. I’ve spent the better part of the afternoon re-cabling and trying to clean up my office. Both are daunting tasks, but I’m making headway, and expect to be in good shape later in the week.

So, it’s faster, easier photoprocessing and overall snappy performance for me. I can’t wait to try JAlbum with this rig. The creator of JAlbum has created a multi-processor aware version, so I expect that building the photo part of the site will be much less painless!

Photography

Yosemite Photos

I’m still working on post-processing my Yosemite photos, and trying to come up with some clever gallery presentation for them on colin-wright.com. However, as I do that (and thirty other projects at the same time — my day job is getting in the way of my passion), I’ve found that Moose Peterson has published a gallery of his Yosemite shots, some of which were shot at DLWS last month.

Dang it, I don’t know what I’m doing different, ’cause some of mine — at least to me — are every bit as good as those. He’s got some older stuff there with fog and clouds that I never saw while we were there, but I think the first six shots are ones I saw while we were there. And I think I even took some images of the same subjects.

Moose gets to places I’ll never get to, and photographs critters I’ll never get close to. He really is a master behind the camera. I gotta tell ya, though, based on the landscapes he’s marketing, I think I’m ready to throw my landscape hat in the ring.

Wander through Moose’s Gallery and wander through my favorites as well as my shots from Yosemite last month, and see what you think.

Geek-Speak, Photography

New Gear: Wacom Intuos3 6×11 Tablet

I’ve been thinking about getting a tablet for a while. Soooo many Photoshop folks swear by them, I figured they couldn’t be too wrong. And that was confirmed at DLWS when Joe Sliger from Wacom had tablets to share with us for our use during the session.

I was blown away! The control available using the tablet and pen was unlike anything I’d ever used before, and I decided then that I absolutely had to have one. I grabbed Joe for a few minutes and talked about the various models, and we decided that with the 20″ widescreen display on the iMac, the 6×11 “widetablet” would be the best answer.

An eBay buy-it-now later on Sunday, I had an Intuos3 headed my way. And today, it arrived!

The box was ginormous — easily two feet long — and I was concerned that maybe I had waaaay overbought, and not realized the size of the big tablet. However, once I opened the shipping box, and got the Wacom box out, I realized that it was just very well packed. The tablet itself is about 13″ wide, and about 9″ deep — a quite manageable size.

Joe told me at DLWS that many folks work with the tablet in their lap, and I may get to that point, but I think for now, it’ll be desk based. With that size tablet, there’s a bunch of desk real estate eaten up, so I may need to do a little redesigning around the thing, with maybe a “tablet house” under the iMac into which to slide it. I got nothing but time to figure that one out.

The biggest challenge so far? The same one I had at DLWS. I can’t figure out when I’m actually on the tablet, touching it. The sensitivity is such that when the pen is just over a quarter-inch above the tablet, the cursor on the screen starts responding and moving, so my brain says I’m making contact, but I’m actually not. It’s kinda like walking down steps, and thinking the next one is a little closer than it really is. 🙂

So, it’s a new world for me and my photos. I think in the last six months, I have done so much to improve my workflow and tools, that my photos will almost certainly suffer the benefits of all these new things!