Category Archives: Photography

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

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak, Photography

New Gear: iPod Nano 5G

At lunch on Wednesday, Jay and I had lunch with Becky, spending much of the time looking at our iPhones, watching the blow-by-blow of the Apple announcements on Twitter. We had a great time. I’m not so sure about Becky. 🙂

Jay had three predictions:

  • Steve wouldn’t be there.
  • There would be no camera on the iPod Nano.
  • There would be no Beatles-related announcements.

Jay was one for three.

On Wednesday, Uncle Steve did appear on stage to a towering ovation, having beaten yet another life-threatening malady. He was still thin, and his voice sounded gravelly compared to a presentation he gave late last year, but he was still alive, much to the thrills of Apple’s shareholders, I’m sure. Frankly, I’m glad he made it. I think he’s a visionary, and maybe his shiny new liver will give him some shiny new ideas.

After going through a ton of announcements, the event ended with “One more thing…” — a Jobs trademark, and frequently means that the best was saved for last. Conspicuous by its absence was any mention of the iPod Nano — Touch, Classic and Shuffle all got some love during the presentation, but nothing about the Nano. One more thing. Steve talked about video, and how handheld solid-state video devices were grabbing up a big chunk of the market. And he said Apple wanted a piece of the action.

And they’re gonna give it to us for free.

Enter the new iPod Nano, now outfitted with a camera that’ll shoot video at 480p at 30fps. The free part? It’s free because Apple built the camera into the Nano, and kept the price the same. And added an FM radio. And a speaker. And a pedometer. And voiceover. And voice recording. And a slightly bigger screen. Same physical size, same price. Crikey. And it was available immediately.

In reality, it was available for order immediately, and only showed up at the local Apple Store on Thursday. A quick dash from work to the Galleria during lunch has put a nice electric reflective green iPod Nano in my hands.

I love the new finish on the 5G Nanos -– very nice. However I’m inclined to think it’s a fragile finish. In fact, despite it being aluminum, the slick feel reminds me of a plastic case. And I don’t know if it’s that my hands are telling my brain that the thing is plastic, but the 5G Nano feels lighter than my 4G Nano. That’s gotta be some kinda subliminal thing from my fingertips to my brain’s weights and measures division. Speaking of fingertips, the slick feel of the case keeps making me feel like the little thing is gonna squirt out of my hands — it’s the same kind of feel my iPod Touch had.

The FM radio works well enough, although the big ol’ building I work in blocks a lot of signals. BTW, you have to have the headphones plugged in for the radio to function -– it uses them as the antenna, and is aware when they aren’t attached. I’m using non-standard-issue Bose earbuds, and they seem to work just fine as the radio antenna, so it appears there’s no Apple voodoo going on requiring the use of the Apple headphones in order to use the radio. That’s a pleasant surprise after some the headphone wackiness that’s gone on lately from Apple.

The video camera functionality is fun and actually seems to work pretty well. Uncle Steve said that there was one-button publishing to YouTube, with the implication that this would come through iPhoto. However, even in his presentation Wednesday, iPhoto didn’t have an icon for YouTube, and we never actually saw him upload a video anywhere, despite playing some YouTube hosted video shot with the 5G Nano.

I’d wanted to post a new video on YouTube from the Nano, but have yet to get it to work. First off, I found no place for one click publishing to YouTube from iPhoto. Instead, I copied my videos to my desktop, and tried to upload one through YouTube’s web interface. To quote Janie Porsche, “Eeeehhhhnnnntttt!” I didn’t save Christmas, nor did I get a successful video upload. While the video appeared to upload, the backend processing never completed, and finally errored out.

Not being satisified with that — and having a blockbuster video shot with my iPod Nano that I wanted to share — I tried uploading the video via Quicktime Pro. It does have a menu item for uploading to YouTube. Filled in the boxes, and once again, the upload finished, but there was no completion. In fact, I left it churning for about 10 minutes (for about 30 seconds of video) before mercifully ended the process’ life.

I’m not a YouTube video expert, but to me, it seems like YouTube doesn’t like converting the Nano video stream into whatever it prefers. I like the video shooting capability, but so far, the one-click publishing to YouTube seems to be falling on its face for me. YMMV.

Speaking of pulling video from the Nano, it appears that the only way you can access your video gems is to put the Nano in “disk mode”. I tend to slam my iPods in docks when I’m done with ’em, and pluck ’em out at a second’s notice as I’m headed out the door. In disk mode though, you can’t do that. You have to do an orderly eject from the Mac desktop or iTunes. While that’s not a real big deal, it does take longer, and it definitely doesn’t fit with how I’ve been using my iPods for years. A prediction: I will foul up that sequencing at some point, and toast the load on the new Nano, forcing me to go through a restore.

One thing of note. The camera will not shoot stills — it’s motion only. My understanding is that that’s not uncommon in fixed-focus, fixed-zoom solid state video cameras, but it still would’ve been a nice thing to have. (Pardon the pun.)

The built-in speaker was a surprise the first time I accidentally hit play on a music screen while showing the thing to co-workers. The sound is tinny, of course — on a movie of my Bernese Mountain Dog, playback made her sound like Chihuahua — but the fact that it’s there at all is cool and is great for quick and dirty video sharing.

The slightly bigger screen is nice. When playing tunes, the thing displays artist, album and title with no scrolling — a nice UI improvement. Not a big deal, but nice.

I really thought the form factor would be different with all the new toys, but Uncle Steve says it’s the same form factor. The photos I saw early on made me think that the new Nano was a little thicker, and more squared off on the sides. That doesn’t appear to be the case. Obviously, there are changes to the case in order to accommodate the bigger screen and the camera on the rear. And in a brilliant move, the headphone and dock connector have swapped positions on the bottom, meaning new accessories if you have a toy that is strict about that sort of thing.

Also, the capacity isn’t stamped on the case anywhere. That tells me Apple can stockpile cases, and put them on whatever capacity comes down the line. (C’mon Apple — 32GB would be sweet!!!) My guess is that the new case manufacturing process probably doesn’t lend itself to a quick turnaround. This way it doesn’t matter what comes next as long as the form factor is the same.

Two paws up on the Colinomometer. 🙂

Photography

Order Fulfillment

2 Comments

For the last three years, I’ve used Yessy to handle the sales of my photographs. I have just made the switch to Zenfolio. Here’s why.

Yessy handled the order side just fine. However, it was still up to me to fulfill the order — print, mat, frame, ship — and because there wasn’t a good way for a buyer to walk through a lot of assembly options for an image before purchasing it, it made my offerings pretty rigid, which I felt was somewhat constrictive.

Zenfolio partners with mPix, who can handle all elements of order fulfillment. Basically, it will save me a ton of time and effort, and gives my potential buyers so many more options than I could ever deliver any other way. You want one of my images printed on metallic paper? Done. Black aluminum frame? Done. Shipped to good ol’ Aunt Doris? Done. A fuzzy psychedelic mat? Well, maybe not so done.

I’m really excited about making this change, and have high hopes that it’ll make things easier for folks looking to hang some of my work on their walls. Give it a spin at http://colinwright.zenfolio.com, and let me know what you think.

Photography

Photos on the Brain

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Remember the photographer we met in Santa Fe? Well, as a refresher, his name was Simon Biswas, and I’ve been following his journey. I dropped him an e-mail Friday to see if he’d be interested in stopping by in St. Louis. As it ends up, he was in Chicago, and was coming to St. Louis anyway. Through a flurry of e-mails, we figured out that he would be in St. Louis last night.

Beck pulled out all the stops — steaks, baked beans, corn on the cob, and a homemade apple pie. And we waited. And waited more. As it ends up, it took Simon a little longer to get here than he thought. I fired the grill up at 10.30pm. 🙂 Dinner was great, conversation was great, and it was a hoot to hear about his travels. I think we overwhelmed him with our late-night hospitality, and we all finally crashed about 1.30am.

Today, it was a late sleep in, and loads of conversation over breakfast, image backups, laundry and some story swapping. I learned a lot about life in New York City (where Simon hails from) and the world of a freelance photographer. There’s surely a lot of day-to-day security in a 9-to-5 job, but man does freelancing sound good… at times. I definitely recognize it’s a ton of work, and likely not in my sweet spot.

After an afternoon of talking shop, Simon left, and left for his next destination. I really enjoyed talking shop with him, and am looking forward to following his journey to its conclusion in a week.

Photography, Vacation

FST : Day 7 – Santa Fe NM to Shamrock TX (370 mi)

Today, our eyes turned east as we wrapped up our stay in Santa Fe. Once again, we traipsed downstairs, expecting another zoo-like experience in the “free” breakfast arena at the hotel. As it ends up, there were no kids running around, and there was more on the agenda than just breakfast.

Remember the photographer Beck met in the hall? Well, he was at breakfast this morning, and I got a chance to talk with him. His name was Simon Biswas, and he’s in the midst of an 8-week cross-country trek. He was stuck in Santa Fe with a broken-down vehicle — one of the dangers of the road, I suppose. We talked about cameras, especially the Canon G10, and had a great conversation.

We asked Simon about his lodging, and he mentioned that he wasn’t using hotels (much), and was relying on the kindness of strangers through a site called CouchSurfing. My understanding is that folks announce their willingness to put up a stranger on their couch, and travelers sign up, and sleep on their couches. There’s a whole bunch of trust in that model, and I’m just not sure I’m trusting enough to either be the couchsurfer or the couch supplier. Still, it does sound like a cool way to meet a lot of folks, and see how folks in different parts of the country live.

All good things must come to an end, and our time to depart came. We said our goodbyes to Simon and went to load up the Jeep. I wish him well on his quest!

The highpoints on the travel leg today were the Cadillac Ranch and the Big Texan, both near Amarillo TX. We’ve been to both before, and both needed revisiting.

The Cadillac Ranch is a collection of ten classic Caddies, all buried nose down into farm land outside Amarillo. Passers-by are encouraged to stop, bring their spray paint, and leave their mark upon the classics. And mark they do. I’m not sure there’s a part of these cars — inside or out — that hasn’t been painted at one time or another. We brought paint, and left our mark, although we learned a few things in the process. First, our paint was waaaaaay to thin. Everything we sprayed ran miserably. It’s hard to make good characters and symbols when the paint is running like water down the car surfaces. Secondly, we need to bring Sharpies. There were loads of Sharpie-based scribbling on the Caddies, and that really seemed to work quite well. I think Sharpie makes a chisel-point marker that’s in excess of an inch wide — that oughta do.

Last time we visited, the weather was nasty, wet and muddy, and because of that, we had the place to ourselves. This time, the weather was hot and basically clear, so there were loads of folks around. We were there about 45 minutes, and ran across thirty other pilgrims to this site. That was cool. It was a neat community feeling. Each of us knew why we were there, and there was some camaraderie from that. Every now and then, someone would happen by that didn’t bring spray paint cans with them. Usually, they could find someone leaving who still had paint in their cans, and would pass ’em on. That was cool. We donated ours to a family that had stopped by, and had just finished dumpster diving at the site for cans with paint in them. To say the least, they were thrilled to get our leftovers.

Beck and I both shot quite a bit, much as we did last time. Almost everyone there had a camera, and were shooting not only what they’d painted, but other notables from the Caddies. You see, what was there today would be gone in a week or so as fresh paint replaced the old, so capturing what you saw while you were there was way important. There was even a pair of girls shooting with an old Polaroid SX-70! That was cool to see, although I don’t know how in the world they’re still finding film for the thing. I’m pretty sure the camera was older than they were.

Our next stop was the Big Texan, just 20 minutes down the road. This restaurant advertises both east and west on I-44 that they are home to a free 72-ounce steak… and that’s kinda true. The deal is that you have to woof the 4½ pound steak down — along with a salad, baked potato, dinner roll and shrimp cocktail — in an hour, and the meal is yours for free. No one was on the clock this go around, but we did ask about the cost of failure — $72, or a buck an ounce. And now, if you need inspiration, their web site has the records of the folks who’ve done it, and their stats (age, weight and time). Right now, one of the hot dog eating champions holds the record at just under nine minutes. That’s half a pound a minute, or two ounces every fifteen minutes. Sustained. Wow.

Last time we were here was an Easter a few years ago, and things were a little peculiar — Easter brunch was the rule, rather than normal steak operations. This time, we had a normal meal — for me, an 18-ounce ribeye — along with the fixings and some fantastically sweet tea. Great eats, even off the clock. 🙂

We continued our drive to Shamrock TX without much incident, aside from loads of road construction. The one bad thing that had crept up on us as we moved into the southern plains was the temperatures. Along with the cloudless skies and sunshine came ever-increasing temperatures, and by the time we got to our room in Shamrock, the Jeep was reporting that we were back to 100°… again. Fortunately, the room was palatial, and once again Shamrock presented itself as an oasis in the crazy heat.

Photography, Vacation

FST : Day 6 – Santa Fe

This morning, we planned our day around being at the Old Towne Square most of the day. The best way to start a day of exploration is with breakfast. We’d been selecting hotels with continental breakfast included. I know that “free” ain’t free — TANSTAAFL, ya know — but it’s just more convenient to not have to strike out in search of breakfast. However, this morning, we’d likely have been better off going elsewhere. There were kids everywhere, doing what kids do, and the community TV was tuned to Spongebob Squarepants. Urgh.

Once we hit the road, things got a little quieter, and we found ourselves near the Old Towne Square pretty quickly. The area was friendly, full of great shops and restaurants. A few stood out.

One of the first places we found was the Monroe Gallery. I’ve not been in too many galleries that focused specifically on photography, so finding this place was a real treat. The Monroe’s current exhibit, A Thousand Words, focuses on photojournalistic images, which is a little outside my normal experiential sphere, however, there were plenty of times when I had to blink back the mistiness from my eyes as I gazed upon some of these wonderful pieces. There were images by photographers I was familiar with (Eddie Adams and Joe McNally, for example), along with iconic images that I’d seen my whole life. These were serious prints too — values in the thousands and tens of thousands — as contrasted against what I print. Truthfully, this was photography as it should be… moving, emotionally, telling a complete story with no caption necessary. No epiphanies about my work from this — my photography is far, far away from photojournalistic — but I was touched, humbled and inspired to view a collection of masterpieces like this.

There were jewelry shops everywhere. Beck was “gentle” on only took in a few of them, and they were interesting. Plenty of nice pieces, unusual cuts, and not too terribly out of line pricewise. And there was everything you could want — rubies, moonstone, coins captured as jewelry… a very big selection. I think it’d be pretty easy to spend a full day just touring the jewelers’ shops, enjoying all the play-pretties.

For lunch, we stopped at the Atomic Grill. This place was a nice surprise. After wandering around in the 80° weather, we were ready for something light for lunch, and finally chose these guys from among the many choices downtown. They had loads of different beer (although surprisingly they didn’t carry Red Stripe), which under other circumstances would’ve been intriguing. However, after all I’d been through in the last few days, it was iced tea. 🙂 Beck and I each ordered a gyro, and man was it great! I was really surprised how light and flavorful it was. AG’s definitely a place I’ll revisited when I get back to Santa Fe.

After we returned to the hotel, and while on a search for a soda, Beck ran across a young guy and an older gentleman discussing photography. Had I not been so tired, I’d like to have joined them. The young guy was a Canon shooter, using a 5D and a G10. He sang the praises of the G10 to Beck… only a day after I’d done the same. You see, I’ve been finding it hard to pull out the 40D during the trip. The G10 is so small, easy to carry, and aside from superwide or super telephoto situations, it’s done everything I’d needed and anything I’ve asked. Folks looked at it, and weren’t intimated by the size, thinking it was just a point and shoot. And yet, I could do almost anything with it that my 40D would do. The young photographer basically said the same thing. Great minds, I guess.

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak, Photography

Printing… Again

For quit a while, I’ve been struggling with my trusty ol’ Epson R1800. Struggling to the point where I’d pretty much decided to kick it to the curb, and either outsource my printing or replace the printer. Replacing the printer has been a tough thing to think about — I’ve got too much indecision between the R1900 and the R2880, and I didn’t want to buy into another set of printing problems if these printers manifested the same printing challenges I’d been having with my R1800. And outsourcing the printing… well, I’m a bit of a control freak with my hardcopy, so that was also tough.

In a nutshell, my printing was horrible. Images were waaaay too dark as compared against my color calibrated screen. This was making for two elements of workflow — one to get the image the way I wanted it on screen, and then monkeying with that copy in order to print it appropriately. Or, I could work the image on my Mac, bring up a virtual Windows XP session, and print from there. Eitehr way, it was twice the workflow, and a bunch of trial and error for each image, leading to wasted ink and media, and a general disinterest in printing my work. What good are my images if I’m not printing them?!?!?

As Vincent Versace taught us at DLWS, we work in service of the print. However, my passion lies in the creation of image, and the tuning of it to get it the way it looked in my mind’s eye, not with monkeying around with print settings to get the print even remotely close to my on-screen image. Printing should just work (or be pretty dang close to just working — I’ll take a endure a little tuning). For me, printing had become a distraction, and was taking me away from the joy of working with my images.

I’d researched this print issue before, and had seen loads of other folks running OS X Leopard having the same problems with their printers, with no real solutions in hand. Then I happened upon a website that pointed to this being a common problem with Macs that had been upgraded to Leopard, rather than having fresh installs. That fit me exactly. I went through the steps on the site — many, many steps — and was finally ready to print. A couple of days of life got in the way, but today, I ran some test prints…

And it was glorious.

Colors looked like they did on the screen. Shadows were good. Bright areas were actually bright again. And now I’m churning out print after print on both matte and glossy media, and once again discovering the joy that’s there when you can hold your image in your hands. There’s a tangible quality to a print that transcends the image itself, and makes it even more real.

Welcome back to the fold lil’ ol’ R1800 — I’ve missed ya.

Apple Existence, Photography

First Geotaggings

While on The Mountain this weekend, I schlepped my Garmin GPSmap 60CSx with me wherever I drove. My intent was to take a bunch of images at Prentice Cooper, and figure out how to get them tagged from the tracks on the GPS. I played with it some while I was on The Mountain, saved my tracks, and then came home.

However, there was an important fact I wasn’t aware of. When you save a track on the Garmin, the timestamps disappear, making the data virtually useless for geotagging!! Fortunately, my MacBook Pro had one of the tracks I used while on The Mountain, so not all was lost. However, I got trapped by another anomaly.

I tried to set my camera to the same time as the GPS. Of course, the GPS time was perfect, but the camera time needed some adjustment, so I set it against a known good time source. What I neglected to do was check the timezones for the two devices. My camera was still on Central Time, but my GPS was on Mountain Time (probably from the Big Drive last year). And my geotagging software wanted to use the system time (Central Time) to line everything up. Combine all that, and you have photos that didn’t tag in the right place, and some images that had no data whatsoever.

Now that I have the times lined up, and using the track from my MBP, I now have some images geotagged correctly. Pretty cool stuff. I didn’t know it, but if you look at an image in Preview on the Mac, you can get additional data about it, some of which is the GPS data. From there, you get a “Where’s Waldo” look at the globe to see where the photo is from, and a button to send you to Google Maps to see the detailed location. That’s pretty cool.

I can tell there’s some goodness in the data from the geotagging effort that I haven’t yet begun to tap. I kinda feel like I’m getting to the party late on this technology, but I think I’m becoming a quick study.

So which software am I using? Right now, GPSPhotoLinker seems to be getting me the most mileage, but I suspect HoudahGeo will buy me more usefulness for images for which I have no data. The batch processing from GPSPhotoLinker is slick, and really hums right along. HoudahGeo is integrated with GoogleEarth, and I suspect that’ll make it pretty easy to tag the old trips.

Watch for more fun and games as I figure out how to exploit this new technology! (Well, new to me, anyway.)

Photography

Of Moose and Me

Anyone who’s read this site for any length of time knows that Moose Peterson holds a special place in my view of photography. I respect his body of work, the sense of responsibility to the environment he displays, and frankly, his strong desire to inspire others to go off and find their photographic muse. Moose has recently joined the Twitterverse, and today I had an exchange with him.

Essentially, my take was that he was seeing a lot of product movement on Twitter, and was questioning whether there was any sense of community on Twitter. That’s a really good observation, and a really good question.

With that in mind, it seems like I could do more giving back to the photographic community, and I should. Now, I’m no Moose (as I told him today), but maybe I’ve got something to lob out there to the three or four folks who read one of my blogs. And like Moose told me, “there is even a possibility that from our community, we can infect others and then, well, anything is possible!”

As Darla says, true dat.

So here’s the deal. The photographic chatter is gonna move over to colin-wright.com. That’ll keep all that info in one place, and leaves The Deauxmayne for all the other technological nightmares I get myself into. And I’ll try to get more regular at posting material on “the other site” — setups for the things I’m shooting (especially with the new macro lens), my crazy backup strategies… who know what else might show up!

Thanks for challenging me, Moose!

Photography

A Bee in the Freezer

Today’s experiment in macro land involves my Canon MP-E 65mm macro lens and a carpenter bee. The bees and I have had an ongoing feud over ownership of my deck for the last few years. My take is that if they think they should own it, they should help pay for it. They, on the other hand, march up and down the deck, buzzing us all day when we’re on the deck, enforcing a no-fly zone.

One of them was stunned in a small skirmish on the deck, and I knew I had an opportunity to photograph this bee under some controlled circumstances. Based on some material I’d read, I knew I could drop the little dude into freezer, and be able to photograph him without him squirming around so much. I extracted him from the freezer, and took him to the deck for a proper photographing.

The biggest thing I noticed was that there was a ton of condensation on the bee, especially noticeable on the eyes. I was also fighting a 20mph wind, which was making it tough to set up the shots. These images may not be the best in the world, but I’m pleased with my first foray into photographing these little guys with this awesome lens.

Photography

Macro Playground

Last weekend, I had planned to continue working on converting some old VHS tapes to digital media, sucking them into Doc Oc. However, a couple of tapes later, I found that both my VCRs had become crusty from lack of use. One even had gained a taste for tape eating.

As punishment to them both, I dissected them. 🙂

Two days of dissection left me with two VCRs with the mechanical parts separated from their planars, and loads of things to photograph with my Canon MP-E 65mm macro lens. I won’t bore you with all the details on every discovery on the parts — there was nothing earth-shattering — but I definitely had a ball photographing this treasure trove of small electronic parts and gears.

Although I photographed many different types of small parts, my favorite images were those where I was capturing the different colors on resistors, some kinds of capacitors and glass diodes. I also dissected a DVD drive from one of the units, and got to play with the laser’s lens, which was a gorgeous color of blue.

My least favorite items? Well, surface mount stuff wasn’t as amazing as I was expecting. It was cool to capture things that small, but there wasn’t much beauty to them — little black boxes with printing atop. Give me regular ol’ circuit board components. They’re colorful, big enough to make for good lighting, and they create some neat images, especially in moderate density clusters.

Take a look at the clusters of photos below, and let me know what you think.