Category Archives: Photography

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

Apple Existence, Photography

Crossing the Streams

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been battling printing issues, trying to print some contract work on canvas through my Epson R1800. To say it hasn’t gone well is giving the experience too much positive light.

As I researched the issue, I noticed that I wasn’t the only one seeing dark prints with the R1800, and not just on canvas. I’ve seen that with other media, but I “band aided” the problem by increasing the brightness of the ready-for-print images. Not elegant, and shouldn’t be necessary, but it worked… generally. However, that process didn’t translate well onto canvas, and after blowing through a roll of canvas, and a lot of ink, I was still no closer to printing canvas correctly.

One of the interesting things I noticed was that the Windows-based folks weren’t having this problem. In fact, some folks would bring the same image up on their Leopard-based Mac and a VM-based Windows XP environment, see exactly the same thing on the screen, but get different print results. And the results on the Windows side were spot-on.

The more I read, the more I decided it was time to put VMWare Fusion and Windows XP on my MacPro.

A quick run up the road, a little time spent installing, and I’m close to having XP on my Mac. For printing. Crazy, eh? I truly have crossed the streams! 🙂

Geek-Speak, Photography

Custom Paper Sizes

Casey has engaged me to do a little printing on canvas for him. This is the first time I’ve tried to print on roll paper, and the first time for me to print on canvas.

First off, it took me forever to load the 13″x20′ roll of Epson Premium Canvas Matte. As documented, you’re supposed to gently push it through the rear paper guide until the paper stops. Well, there are two stops, and from the first one, the paper will never load correctly. One problem down.

That’s when I ran into the conundrum concerning custom paper sizes. If I set up a custom paper size at exactly the size I wanted, I was unable to select canvas in the printer dialog. Believe me, I tried every combination I could think of. What fixed it? Well, I made the width 12.94″ instead of 13″ — found that one on a website somewhere — and I changed the margins to 0.25″ at the suggestion of another site. I’m not sure which fixed it, but it’s fixed, and that’s the important part for tonight.

I am getting some bodacious form feeds after the printing process, but I can recover from that reasonably well, although the end of the roll fills me with fear! 🙂

Now if I can just get the colors right on the canvas….

Blatant Commercialism, General, Photoblog, Photography

New Photo: Old Glory and The Golden Gate Bridge

The US flag is illuminated brightly atop a boat traveling beneath the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco CA.



Old Glory and The Golden Gate Bridge is available in a variety of sizes, with an unframed print matted at 11×14, and framed images at both 18×24 (single mat) and 22×28 (double-matted). Please visit my sales gallery on Yessy if you are interested in purchasing Moonrise at Half Dome.

Apple Existence, Photography

A Little Coolness

Tonight, I arrived home to find an e-mail from Amy Judd at NowPublic. I’d never heard of Amy or NowPublic, so I was a little surprised at her request. She was writing a story about the PRODUCT (RED) branding concept, and asked if she could use one of my photos of my iPod Shuffle that she found on Flickr.

I did a little poking around at the NowPublic site, and from all appearances, it appears to be grass-roots journalism, aimed at mobilizing the average Joe into reporting on just about anything, from local to national to international stories. I liked the feel of the site, their expressed respect of my copyright wishes for my image, and the fact that they asked before just using one of my images. All good marks in my book, so I said “yes”, added a comment, and now have my first published photo in a journalistic context. Definitely a different stroke for me.

You can see the article here. Look for the slideshow, and you’ll see my image, as well as plenty by other folks. Enjoy!

Apple Existence, Photography

Genuine Fractals Strikes Again!

Last night, I was working through some images, and Genuine Fractals dropped a tickler indicating that there was an update available. I’m pretty gullable, so I almost always update as soon as something tells me it wants to. I left the code downloading all night — it’s only 50MB (plus or minus), but their download site is (and has always been) very slow.

Today, I go to install the new code, and it tells me there’s no previous version. Since this sounded very familiar, I looked around the Deauxmayne, and found how I’d tackled this before. Sure ’nuff, the same problem with Leopard still exists, and the same workaround still works.

One nice thing about writing all this stuff down — even if no one else is reading it — is that it saves me time and trouble in the future!

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak, Photography

Bad Adobe, Good Adobe

I can always tell when something is happening out in the wastelands of the tech world. NewsFire will be screaming at me with multitudes of new feed-matter. Tonight, NewsFire was definitely screaming, and Adobe figured prominently in two threads of thought and chatter.

The first was the Good News. Adobe released the first public beta of Lightroom 2.0. This is claimed to be 64-bit ready code, and chocked full of new features. I haven’t had a chance to load it yet — I wanna see if there’s any caveats about keeping a separate library, etc. You can bet I’ll be playing with it this weekend, and seeing what I can do with it. Currently, I only use Lightroom for DAM, and really don’t use it for quick touches, printing, web site building, and all that other good stuff it does well. Casey keeps nudging toward using it for more than just that. His site is mostly built with Lightroom, and it looks pretty dang good. That’s a pretty good endorsement.

And then came the Bad News. Adobe released some word on the Next Big Thing: Photoshop CS4. (And the crowd goes wild…) And it’ll be 64-bit…. (wait for it)… if you’re on Windows. Yep, the big ol’ Macs like mine will still have to contend with 4GB of memory for the beastliest images we can put together, with our Windows-based brethren able to address vast amounts of memory. From this interview, the guess is that the performance boost would be in the neighborhood of 10 percent, unless of course you’re loaded gigapixel sized images where, with enough memory, the 64-bit version could be 10 times faster!

One path to get around this is to dual boot the Octoputer, running 64-bit Vista (Adobe says that’ll be the supported platform). That would be just like a native Windows machine, but would require me to purchase a new Photoshop license. Currently, I don’t believe Adobe allows you to upgrade version and change platforms in the same fell swoop. The other path to get tasty 64-bit goodness would be to virtualize a 64-bit Vista environment through VMWare (Parallels doesn’t currently support this), and run CS4 in that environment. The big question there is whether you’d burn up the benefit of the 64-bit code by virtualizing it.

So in one day, Adobe delivers both Good stuff and Bad stuff. I’m not sure whether I should be happy or mad. Or both. Or neither.

Wait for it… and the crowd goes “boooooo”…

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak, Photography

Storage, Storage, Storage!

Another photographer’s harddrive bites the big one, as documented on Flying with Fish today. Documented are the trials, horror, tribulation and eventual cost of recovering a drive with important, unarchived data. For folks like me, the numbers are staggering, at well over $2K per drive. Incredible backup strategies could be had for the cost of one of these failures… and this guy has gone through two within a year of each other. Blecch.

With some first-hand experience twice in hand, the author points to a couple of nifty sites, as well as having a glowing recommendation for a harddrive recovery. One article he points to is something called “Hard Drives Die!” … to which I’m sure he’d give a resounding “Amen!” This piece lists five rules for data storage and preservation: store your data in two places, changes out drives periodically, use an automated backup procedure, rebuild your system when you replace your drives periodically, and if a drive is making noise, start figuring out what you’re gonna do about the data on the spindle. The article goes into much more detail about each of these, and is well worth the read.

His other link is to some specific information concerning the harddrives in some Macs. Specifically, this info speaks about the problem some MacBooks have had with a certain revision of Seagate drive. The good news is that my MacBook doesn’t include that drive in its configuration. The bad news is that my MacMini server does. Not the best news in the world. Now, the scary point here is that when the drive crashes, it crashes bad, scratching the platters, essentially thumbing its little electronic nose at any recovery attempts. So, if you back up a lot, you’re in good shape. If you can replace the drive before it fails, even better.

So… OWC has 320GB harddrives (and at the same 5400 RPM as the current 120GB that the Little MacBook That Could sports) for just under $148. You replace the MacBook drive, take the evicted 120GB and put it in the MacMini. And the potentially disaster-waiting-to-happen 60GB Seagate? Put a case around it, and turn it into an external drive for storing the backups of the shoots the MacBook carries around when traveling. It’s not too likely that both drives would fail…. is it? 🙂

The key point here kiddies is that storage is cheap, relatively speaking. For the price of recovering one drive, you could put a Drobo on your desk, and still have enough coin left over to fill it up with 1TB drives, and still have enough left over to put an external drive outside the laptop for Time Machine backups. The alternative universes of data loss just ain’t pretty…..

Family, Geek-Speak, Photography

A Rant About Content Overload

I struggle daily between the creation/capture/manipulation/production of my content, and the consumption of others’ content. With all the web play-pretties out there, it’s a hard journey to weed out the things that are just fluffy entertainment from the things that can challenge me, my art, and make me see things a little different. I’ve contended for years that the MTVisation of my generation has killed our ability much of the time to focus on any one thing for very long. We seem to consume content in short spurts, just the way the old MTV used to feed it to us. Interestingly, those timeframes aren’t terribly dissimilar than the amount of time a quarter would buy on a video game or pinball machine.

Periodically, I go through a big purge. For example, I have well over 2000 emails to myself from work or other places, informing me of some website I found, some idea I had, some concept that I thought would be good to write about. This “note to myself” has been pretty helpful for some things, but generally, I never look at them again, except in a fit of housecleaning my inbox, finding these voices from my past so old and outdated as to be useless in the here and now.

NewsFire (a *terrific* newsreader on the Mac platform) has 782 RSS feeds waiting for me right now. At times it has been over 1000. I have updates I wanna do to MySpace, Flickr, Deviantart, Classmates, Twitter, Plazes, LinkedIn, and my own sites, in order to drive some exposure for my work. I have 60,000 images in my library, most of which need to be cataloged and keyworded, and many of which could actually turn into saleable art. I have easily 10,000 scans of images from my family that need to be posted somehow, and made available for comments so that the far-flung family can tell me who’s who, where they are in the images, and why, before there’s no one left who knows or remembers. I have cycling I want to do. I have a horribly stale gallery space in St. Charles that desperately needs some attention and rework. I have at least two photography-oriented organizations in town that I want to begin working with. And my copy of WordPress is telling me there’s a new release that should be installed tonight. And I have half a dozen or more books that I wanna read, each of which will have nuggets o’ knowledge that will help my work my images.

I’ve got a lot of consumable content queued up.

The challenge between creating the content my soul needs me to create, and enlightening it with new concepts from around the net without falling into a pit of self-indulgent web-based clickery is… well, it’s hard. Somehow, I’ve got to get better about filtering out the inspiring from the inane, the deeply funny (because laughter is a great thing!) from the guy getting his privates compressed into an octave or two higher singing voice on a outdoor stairway rail while skateboard sliding down it, and the beautiful animals in nature from the little dog who can grunt out “I love you” to the camera.

It’s all about priorities. When I went to the Mac platform almost three years ago, one of the big banners I marched beneath was the “it just works” banner. The good news is that it does. The bad news is that it does it almost too well, making it entirely too easy for me to chase the shiny objects, and not push my dreams into reality. The time has come to dull some of the shiny objects, and get the priorities in place.

So will you, the reader, notice anything different? Probably not. At least, nothing drastic. I will be doing some facelifting here and there, and things might be down from time to time as I work on upgrading stuff. But generally, I hope the biggest thing noticed will be a little more attentiveness to this site and the others, and more new content on all the sites.