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What's New 2010 January to June

June 30, 2010 - Reader's comment/question:

My main computer has three drives, one 500 gig and two 750 gig drives. For back-up I have two one gig externals. Instead of getting a multi-drive unit what do you think about using a docking station that can take internal drives. Or, what about the Western Digital portable drive that has a base that allows switching of the drives.

I know you're a regular reader, so you know my latest thinking about external backup drives, which is to go portable to minimize size, heat, noise and cabling. I think the Western Digital portable series are great little drives for everyday home and office use, but my only caveat is that you need to think in multiple units instead of singles or even doubles. Go triple!!!

Get the largest available, which is now 1 TB, and get as many as needed to have two copies of your data. Keep one handy at home and keep the other one at work as your offsite, off line solution.

The WD Passport Elite is the model that comes with a base station, but I wouldn't worry too much about a base station. These drives are so compact and mini USB cables are usually short and easy to manage that a base station doesn't add anything in terms of functionality.

The docking stations allow the use of "nude" 3.5 or 2.5 inch drives, so that you can have multiple internal drives without needing a separate case and PSU for each drive, as is the case using AC powered external cases. It's okay for home use, but I suggest that you get a good name brand model. I had a no-name dock and it stopped working after a couple of years of use.

As mentioned, docks are okay for static home use, but I would not want to "toss" a nude drive into my shoulder bag and carry it to work for an external backup solution. You could get a dock and some 3.5 inch drives for the home backup solution while using a set of the WD Passport drives as the offsite backup solution.

Once I sort out my systems, I'll post an update on what I'm doing for my own backups. At the moment, I just purchased and downloaded the upgrade to Lightroom 3, so I'll have some work ahead of me to transition over this weekend.

I received the dock for the iPad and wouldn't you know it, the line out jack works just fine on this dock. This tells me that Apple must have done something with the 30-pin docking jack for the iPad, or that the protocols are different between the iPad and the iPod Touch for my old dock adapter and cable to not work with the iPad.

Speaking of iPads, there's an app that looks pretty wicked for incorporating the iPad as a second screen with a MacBook. Works wirelessly via a wi-fi network. I'll try it out and report back on how well it works.

I still want to figure out how to use the iPad to stream live TV, but this will have to wait until my switch to a new service provider is finished in the next few weeks. Not only am I switching internet service providers, but because I'm one of those desired bundled type customers, I'm getting a sweet deal to switch my telephone and TV service too. By the end of the month, I'll be enjoying HD channels and a doubling of my internet speed.

June 28, 2010 - Housekeeping note for how to contact me going forward - I am switching to a new internet service provider in a couple of weeks, so all of my email addresses will be changing. To keep things simple and more consistent, going forward I am going to use camerahobby@gmail.com, so please send emails to this address.

With the way the major telecommunications companies are competing for customers in Canada, it could very well be that internet service providers will be changed every few years, as each major offers very attractive incentives and deals to switch. Using a non-proprietary email account ensures that switches will have no effect for contacting me.

As you could tell, I never got around to posting any updates while I was away in Victoria, even though I did have a laptop and internet access at my hotel. While I did not update this website, I was able to update NikonLinks every evening on the MBP (I used the MBP for work as well thanks to MS Word's compability with Mac and PC). It was my first time using Dreamweaver CS4 and I found it quite frustrating to find the properties panel having changed and having a CSS window pop-up everytime I wanted to change some font properties.

Now, maybe the changes Adobe made are what hardcore web editors desire, but for me, Dreamweaver CS3 did everything I needed with a properties panel that had all the major editing features readily available. I found it a big relief going back to CS3 on the PC and could only think of the old adage, if it ain't broke...

While I quite enjoy trips back to Victoria (I lived there for five years), it's tough being away from your family, your house, your bed and your own food for several days. Eating out every day takes its toll on the body and wandering around the small downtown core every evening bored me to tears.

I didn't really get off the beaten track as I had hoped - I was hoping to visit the historic Ross Bay Cemetary, which is a classic old school cemetary with monument statues and large stones marking the graves of notable persons from BC's history. Perhaps the most famous occupant of the cemetary is Emily Carr, a painter and writer who produced notable, aborginal influenced art of northern and coastal BC. By accident and luck, I did walk by Emily Carr's birth home in the James Bay neighborhood of Victoria, while on the way to Beacon Hill Park (photos taken with the Panasonic GF1 and 20mm lens).

Carr House - the birthplace of Emily Carr

With the summer hours and the need to retire to the hotel at a reasonable hour for some early morning work sessions, I just did not find myself out and about in the best light.

The view near Beacon Hill Park and below Dallas Road

While the trip was for work, I also brought along the iPad for those times when I might be able to connect to a free wi-fi hotspot and check emails. It worked quite well for that purpose although the wi-fi antenna is noticeably weaker than the MacBook Pro. Where the MBP would be able get a full three bars worth of signal, the iPad would only show one, which can result in stalls and dropouts in the signal.

However, It's still quite nice being able to sit in a Chapters bookstore or a Starbucks and be able to connect while sipping away on a Frappacino. A co-worker brought along an Acer netbook and watched a World Cup game streaming on the internet while I checked emails and even used the iPad's on-screen keyboard to type up responses to some messages. My opinion of the on-screen keyboard has not changed - fine in a pinch, but not desirable for some serious typing.

During my trip, the iPad did come into its own in allowing me to lounge on my hotel bed while watching a video tutorial - no, not those kinds of videos. The series of videos are from the Luminous Landscape's Where the F@#$ are my Photos? and features pro stock photographer, Seth Resnick.

Resnick is master of keywording and metadata and it's impressive to watch how he uses Adobe Lightroom to ingest his photos and then keyword, caption and save metadata. While the focus of the tutorial is on ingesting, sorting, captioning and backing up photo files, we also get some insight in Resnick's workflow in the field and at home.

The photo at right has nothing to do with workflow - that is unless you consider it as the reward for the end of a long day of workflow 8^)

Speaking of workflow, check out Chase Jarvis' workflow for ingesting and saving his data in the field and back at his studio in Seattle. It's pretty f'ing impressive what he's got in Seattle - some 64 TB of storage capacity in two 32 TB RAID arrays. Given that he's big into videos as well as stills, he needs a tremendous amount of storage capacity. One telling note about how demanding video editing is (he uses a Red One) when a video is captured in the field, he only saves the RAW files to the laptop and external drive and leaves the editing for when he's back in Seattle.

While Jarvis has a more impressive system to process his work than Resnick, what both have in common is having redundant backups offsite. Resnick tells a story in the tutorial about when his Mac Pro went kaput and locked up all of the internal and external drives connected to his network. It was not so much that the Mac Pro's logic board and power supply going belly-up destroyed the drives, it was more of when the computer started to die, the OS locked up the drives in such a way that he and Apple's tech could not access the data. Fortunately for Resnick, he had a Drobo drive offline and at the end of it all, he lost a mere 4 hours of emails and he was able to restore his entire collection of photos that he thought was gone forever.

It just serves as a lesson and warning for everyone, pros and amateurs alike, to have multiple redundant storage available online and offline.

Another lesson learned is that both Resnick and Jarvis sort their photos by years and then into specific projects produced in those years. It seems pretty simple and obvious, but I've done it a bit backwards by sorting into themes or genres and then sorting into years. For example, I have a Hockey folder for all the photos taken of my son since he started playing organized hockey. Within the Hockey folder, I have sub folders for each year and within those folders I have folders organized by dates of the games and any special projects done within that year. Same with a master folder for family snaps. I think I will be undertaking a reorganization of my files to coincide with the upgrade to Lightroom 3. It will also be a good time to start culling some of the unwanted files within the 21,000 in my current Lightroom 2 library.

A few other Victoria snaps:

You won't get much of a flavour of this seven image pano stitch, which shows the Olympic mountains in Washington State in the distance on the left side of the frame. "Tweaked" with Nik ColorEfex 3.

June 21, 2010 - Sorry for the delay in posting the next installment of the iPad review (further below), busy with work and getting prepared to travel to Victoria this week.

I'll be bringing along the MacBook Pro and the hotel I'm at should have complimentary internet access, so I should be able to post an update or two while I'm away. Maybe even post a few snapshots of Victoria while I'm there, although, I do find the inner harbour to be a tad boring given the umpteenth time I've seen it. I'll have to wander about some other parts of town to get my photographic fix.

Went to a BC Lions football game on Father's Day with my 12 year old son and a couple of buddies with their sons.

For the 2010 season, the Lions are playing in a temporary stadium made-up of scaffolding, i.e., the kind of aluminum pipes and bars that painters and construction workers erect on the side of buildings. We joked about the safety and security of an arena made from such material, but the arena appears to be quite sound and rigid, even when thousands of people are stomping on the platforms to create noise when the home team is on defence.

When the Lions played in BC Place (closed for putting on a new, retractable roof, hence the Lions playing in a temporary facility), the rules for the kind of camera and lens allowed in seemed fairly relaxed. I've seen people with SLRs and longish telephoto zoom lenses (70-300 consumer variety) snapping away.

When my son and I went through the front gates, the attendant held us back for a more senior person to come check out the Panasonic GH-1 and 14-140mm lens around my son's neck. The senior attendant let us through but warned us that next time, any lens longer than 75mm would not be let inside the arena.

Hmm...it appears the BC Lions are a little bit more wary about lenses than the NFL is. The NFL's rule is no lens longer than 5.5 inches and I believe that's the length when the lens is not zoomed out. So, no matter what the focal length, the NFL is fine as long as the physical length of the lens is merely of average length (sorry 8^)

This means that a Nikon 70-300 consumer lens, sans hood, will be allowed in but is verboten at a BC Lions game, because the focal length starts about where the ban begins. However, if you bring along something like a Nikon Coolpix L110 with a 5-75mm lens, you're good to go even though the Coolpix L110's effective focal length equivalent in 35mm format is a rather massive 28-420mm equivalent.

I think whoever came up with this limitation knows something about photography, because while a 70-300 lens on a DX SLR gives nearly the same reach at 450mm equivalent, we would expect the SLR to provide better quality than the Coolpix camera. Limit the SLR to 75mm and the photographer gets a paltry 105mm equivalent with DX, or if using FX, the straight 75mm, which from the stands, will be decidely wide for sports photography.

Screw the SLR shooter while letting the digicam crowd a pass, because few expect the digicams to get anything reasonably good. And, here I thought I'd get an easy pass with the GH-1, because while it has the SLR look, it's pretty small in size and a lens, when closed, is not going to be overly intimidating. But, the game changes when the ban is focal length based rather than on looks, appearances and physical size.

The game itself was okay, being an exhibition game that's meant for fine-tuning and trying out new players. The Lions lost the game in the dying seconds when they could not stop the Edmonton Eskimos from marching downfield and scoring the winning touchdown with seconds left in the game.

The fishy look is due to creating a panorama from one extreme side view to the other for 180 degree coverage

Being the nosy geek that I am, I stole peeks of the professionals on the sidelines and the gear they are using.

Most used Canon and on my side of the field, I only saw one Nikon using pro walking up and down the sidelines.

I ordered the Camera Connection Kit for the iPad, but Apple is not expected to get stock until the end of the month, which means no delivery until the beginning of July. I’m surprised by how seemingly popular this accessory is and wonder if it really is that popular or if Apple didn’t order enough supply for the initial production run, similar to underestimating demand for the iPad itself and having to delay international launch by a month.

I still can’t figure out why I cannot get an audio line out from the iPad with my existing iPod docking adapters and cables. I reported about not being able to get audio out with my ALO docking cable, and I tried an old SendStation dock/USB adapter and this also does not work even though both work with my iPods. The 30-pin dock connection is, as far as I know, the same for the iPad and for iPods and the only difference is that the iPad has a built-in speaker that is the default audio output when no headphone is connected.

I have the iPad’s dedicated dock from Apple on order too, so we’ll see if that finally allows me to get an audio line out instead of having to use the headphone jack. This annoys me, because on Head-Fi.org, I have seen photos of other people’s iPads using the same kind of ALO docking cable as me, so it must work. However, I cannot find any setting on the iPad that would indicate that the built-in speaker can be turned off in favour of an audio line out. It seems to me that it should be automatic that the speaker mutes itself if a docking cable or adapter is used for audio out, just as the speaker mutes when a headphone is plugged into the iPad’s jack. I’m hoping that I’m just missing something obvious about this.

Videos
There’s not much to say here, video playback is as you would expect, which is quite fine. The iPad supports 720P HD, so the quality can be quite good. It’s obviously a much better experience watching a movie on an iPad than on an iPod Touch, but as mentioned in an earlier posting, the weight of the iPad eventually wears your wrist down if you hold it with just one hand.

The downside to video is the need to do a conversion to a video format that the iPad supports, such as MPEG 4. AVI files need not apply and even files that you can view with Quicktime on a Mac cannot be viewed on an iPad, which I find odd. However, this did not come as a big surprise since the iPod Touch is the same for video file compatibility.

This necessitates a tedious and time-consuming conversion process with any existing, non-compatible video file if you wish to enjoy on the iPad. It would be much nicer if Apple would allow the iPad to be compatible with all the standard video files.

But, that's a minor gripe compared to being able to lounge around in my living room and catch up on a number of photography tutorials that I've bought, but have yet to find the time to really get into them. I don't know if the thought of having to watch the videos on a computer is what turns me off, but the iPad is such a nicer experience.

What is really irksome though is that one website that I would like to keep up-to-date on, D-Town TV at KelbyTV.com, uses Flash to post their videos online. Instead of simply being able to go online and review a video on demand, I'll have to see if the videos are available via iTunes and download them that way, which is just another time waster and barrier to entry.

I know that I did write that the lack of Flash support would not be a huge bother and it's not because D-Town TV is the only Flash-heavy site that I'd like to visit regularly, but cannot via the iPad.

Photos
I uploaded a small portfolio of photos to the iPad. Most of them came out looking wonderful on the iPad’s LED screen. During the uploading process, a small window popped up advising me that the photos would be optimized for the iPad. I have no idea what that means and whether it’s merely resizing the photos to fit the iPad’s screen resolution or if something else is being done to the photos. The files uploaded are mostly JPEGs with some TIFFs mixed in and all were full sized, meaning I did not downsize the resolution to fit the iPad.

The only photos that did not look so good are ones that I knew would be iffy if seen on a high quality, high resolution screen, namely a bunch of over-the-top cloud and skies photos. I say over-the-top to mean that the editing really distorts the reality of the photo into surrealistic images, but also does a lot of harm in substantially increasing noise. It’s the noise that shows through very clearly on the iPad’s screen, so much so that Iremoved most of those photos from the iPad.

The ability to have different albums (collections of photos) means that you can have several portfolios on the iPad. I can have an album of personal work, as well as an album for family snaps, and if I were still photographing weddings, an album for that too.

The built-in slideshow capability is nice, but you’ll have to do some fiddling with the timing and the number of photos to try and get a reasonable sync with the song chosen. What’s great about the slideshow feature is the ability to access any music file uploaded to the iPad to sync with the show. This is a very simple and obvious thing, to be able to access any song on the iPad to sync with your photo slideshow, but it’s these little things and attention to detail that make me appreciate what Apple has done to make the computing experience more user friendly.

Unfortunately, what Apple giveth, Apple taketh away with the iPad’s Photo app. To be blunt, for organization purposes, the app is crap.

There is not much to the Photo app on the iPad and I’m disappointed that it does not offer more in the way of organization. It would be great to be able to touch and then drag thumbnail images around to create a custom order that I think works best for presentation. Unfortunately, the organization of the photos is by chronological order (as in when the photo was taken) with the earliest at the top and the most recent photos at the bottom. Renaming the photos will not do anything to sorting the photos that way you want.

The workaround to getting a proper, custom order for photo presentation is to not sync to your own folders on a Mac computer, but to use iPhoto to create events. Importing a custom collection of photos in a folder can be imported into iPhoto as an event and the photos inside an event folder can then be sorted by name. Then you sync the iPad to iPhoto instead of to a personal photo folder. You will then have the presentation of photos the way you want on the iPad.

There is also a curious thing about the Photo app. Tapping one of the top left corner buttons allows you to select photos for copying or emailing. However, the first time I used the Photo app, when I tapped the button, I saw a red Delete button beside Copy and Email. Try as I might, I could not delete any of the photos using the red Delete button. The next day, when I tried again, the red Delete button disappeared even though nothing had changed and I did not sync the iPad with my MacBook. It’s rather weird and points to some kind of bug in the Photo app.

The features that do work in the Photo app are nice though. When you tap on a thumbnail, the chosen image enlarges to fill the screen. Flicking with your finger scrolls to the next image (or back if you’re viewing a middle photo). Tapping on the enlarged image gets you a tiny thumbnail scroll at the bottom of the screen, which you can also use to select an image for viewing, but when I say tiny, I do mean tiny.

As basic as the Photo app is, I do have to say that the viewing experience on the iPad is delightful. The backlit, LED screen provides a viewing experience that’s like viewing slides on a light table. Now, certainly, we’ve had LCD monitors for a long time and using browsers like Bridge, Lightroom and Aperture provides us with a light table like experience by being able to view multiple thumbnails (slides) on the screen. But, what I’m getting at is the intimacy of using a loupe to view slides. There’s nothing like placing a number of slides on a light table and then zeroing in on a slide that looks promising, putting the eye to an 8x loupe and then yelling out swear words that would make a sailor blush because you nailed the shot.

Today, you use a browser to scan through your digital files, click on one to view full screen and then zoom in to 100% to really check out the details, but usually, I don’t swear anymore. Today, you don’t have the intimacy of viewing very small slides by yourself and being in your own space with your own thoughts. It’s kinda hard to be intimate with two large LCD monitors sitting in front of you so that you look like some kinda quantitative, algo-based stock trader, or the director of a NASA shuttle mission.

The iPad gets you back to that personal space again. I’m going to be presumptuous about this, but I think Brooks Jensen of Lenswork magazine is going to love what the iPad means for the photo viewing experience.

Jensen is not one of those photographers that needs or wants to print big. Big for Jensen probably means an 11x14 and normal sized prints are 8x10 inches, a size that allows him to hold it out in front of him and allows him to really concentrate and get a feel for the photograph. Large, like 30x40 inches, which seems to be a trend in fine art photography, is just too big and too impersonal for Jensen. Thus, an iPad with its fixed screen size and ability to be held close in seems like it’s right up Jensen’s alley.

I wonder now, very seriously, whether the photographic print will continue to survive as a final output medium. I’m sure that there are still millions of 4x6 prints being produced by the usual suspects of mini labs and drugstores, but looking at my own group of family and friends, I don’t see very many 4x6 prints being produced anymore.

Everyone is still taking pictures, probably more than they ever did with film, because digital is “free,” but what are they doing with those image files? Most times, they probably end up on the hard drive, stored for posterity, but otherwise not seen beyond that first or second viewing on the monitor. The more dedicated amongst us might put a slideshow together on a DVD, but even that seems like too much work now. The more likely scenario is that the image files will be copied over to a portable hard drive and then viewed with the family on the TV via a multimedia box like the WD TV. The more ambitious amongst us have probably networked those photos to wirelessly stream the files to the TV (not me, I’m still a luddite).

In an ironic twist, I think we’re headed back to the 1960s when families would gather in the living room while dad sets up the projector and screen to show off the photos or videos from the recent family vacation or event. Except that this time, the viewing is on the HDTV and the resolution is also HD for both photos and videos.

An iPad can be the new family album for those times that we want, again, a more intimate viewing experience and I was thinking that when the family goes and visits grandma on the other side of the country, they can pull out the iPad and show off the latest photos and videos…except that today, you don’t need an iPad to share family memories with grandma on the other side of the country. You can simply upload the files online and then send grandma a link and she can view the photos and videos as quickly as you upload them.

So, the iPad is not that paradigm shift in sharing our photos, because we’ve already long passed that shift with the rise and dominance of the internet. I just hope that everyone has a backup plan in place to secure those memories…

Usage
Steve Jobs recently revealed that the tablet concept was developed first and that Jobs had an epiphany about how the touch-based tablet would make a great phone, which resulted in shelving the tablet in favour of the iPhone. This is where I think Apple should have broke the two apart and develop the iPad to be a bit more computer-like instead of as a glorified iPhone that must be chained to iTunes.

While it’s obvious that using iTunes is a convenient way to centralize the uploading of content to the iPad, I think we should be able to utilize the iPad outside of iTunes too. It would be nice to be able to connect the iPad to a computer and have the computer see it as another hard drive device and thus, be able to freely transfer content back and forth like you can with a portable hard drive.

It would be nice if the iPad had a real USB port. It would be nice if the iPad had a CF and SD card slots. It would be nice if the processor could be more powerful so that something like Photoshop-Lite or Lightroom-Lite could be developed to allow for some basic editing. It would be nice if the screen could be calibrated. It would be nice if…

Hold on, if I need all that then why don’t I just buy a laptop? It’s too easy to want this or that when a new product comes out and we need to keep expectations in line with what the product is meant for. The iPad is not meant to be a laptop despite the availability of wireless keyboards and accessories to turn the iPad into a laptop.

I do see it as a new way to experience multimedia content as a complement and supplement to the regular computing experience. It’s slick, it’s easy to use and it has that Apple panache and way of connecting with its users.

For photographers, the viewing experience can be great and now that I have a way to organize the photos the way I want on the iPad, as kludgy and as inefficient as it is, we can make it an effective promotional device. However, I think those that hoped for the iPad to be more technically capable, i.e., tethering, may have to wait a while for Apple or third-party software vendors to develop the proper apps for that purpose.

It would be great to be able to be able to setup a little custom network to wirelessly transmit JPEG files to the iPad – set the camera to shoot RAW+JPEG (medium size and resolution) and be able to set the camera to transmit only the JPEG file (for efficiency). I think that it's already possible for iPhones to transmit photos to the iPad via Bluetooth or wi-fi, so let's make it more useful for photographers using digicams and SLRs. I don't know, is there an app for this already?

I suppose that fault of many of us that we see such a great device and immediately think of all the different ways that it could be used if only we had the software and the accessories to do it.

The next iPad update will have to wait until the Camera Connection Kit arrives in the first week of July.

June 15, 2010 - I had hoped to discuss the use of the iPad’s Camera Connection Kit with this update, but when I visited the Apple Store and FutureShop in downtown Vancouver on Monday, there are none to be found. I will have to order one online and then report back later on. In the meantime, let’s discuss some other aspects of the iPad.

Size and weight
There have been some comments about the iPad being heavier than expected. While not exceedingly heavy, the 1.5 lbs will eventually wear out your wrist if holding it by one hand, which many people would naturally do reading a book.

There has to be a compromise between weight and battery life. No doubt Apple could make the iPad meaningfully lighter by using a different battery type or by removing one of the two batteries, but then we wouldn’t be getting the 10 hours of expected normal use from it.

If you’re a frequent traveller, you will likely appreciate the compromise Apple made to boost the usage time instead of making the iPad lighter.

Size wise, when I first heard the dimensions of the iPad, I thought, geez, a nine-inch screen? How good is that going to be for doing various tasks, but never judge something until you can actually see and experience it yourself. When used in landscape mode, the screen size is just fine whether it be for surfing the net, checking emails or watching videos. I think I will likely keep the screen orientation locked in landscape mode, since it makes the best use of the available screen real estate.

Not coincidentally, the size, landscape wise, is about the size of a paperback novel opened up…hmm…

About half the size of the 17-inch MBP's base...

...and about half the thickness

Remote App
Although the iPad can utilize the many thousands of apps developed for the iPhone and Touch, in reality, the initial marketing claims of having over 100,000 apps available is a bit over the top. In reality, you want to use apps developed specifically for the iPad to take advantage of the current generation processor and significantly larger and higher resolution screen.

Take Apple’s Remote app as an example. This is a free app that allows your iPhone or iPod Touch to connect to your iTunes library on a Mac computer (not sure if this works for PCs too) through your wireless network. Once connected, the Remote app can access all the music in the library and playback any song.

You can even control the volume, but I’d expect that this will degrade the sound somewhat, because it’s in the digital domain and with digital volume, as you decrease the volume, you also decrease the resolution. However, this is my favourite app, because it allows me to be a couch potato in controlling the music from my listening chair in my hi-fi room and has made the desire for a remote controlled preamp less relevant, which is nice since it will save me a significant amount of money from not buying such a preamp.

I really hope Apple updates this app to take advantage of the iPad’s screen real estate, because, while the app does work on the iPad, it looks and works the same as on the iPhone or Touch.

When you start it up, the screen size is even at the same size as on the Touch, but you can increase it to 2x to fit the iPad’s larger screen (2x linear increase in both directions, which results in a 4x increase in surface area, like going from 6 MP to 24 MP, photographically). All that the 2x increase does is magnify the pixels and the result is a pixelated display, which is, actually, still better than the smaller size. With the larger size, scrolling through the alphabetical list on the right side of the screen is no longer a joke and a torturous test of fine finger dexterity and motor skills. In other words, most times, my finger is seemingly too fat to hit the letter that I want when using the Touch as a remote. It’d be nice if like OS X’s app dock, you can set it to magnify as your finger gets near and scrolls through the alphabet. With the iPad, the letters are now large enough that my finger can actually hit them more times than not.

Out of curiosity, I tried using both the iPad and Touch at the same time as remotes and both worked fine controlling the same library on my MacBook Pro without any conflicts over the network.

If I used the Touch as the remote to play a song, the iPad did not automatically refresh itself, but when I touched the “Currently Playing” button, it brought up the song details chosen with the Touch and vice versa. I could flip back and forth between the Touch and iPad.

What can I say, a bit of old school rock and roll from the 1970s

Audio use
My online music purchasing is very limited. Some years back, I bought a dozen or so songs through Puretracks, a Canadian online retailer. Not because I really wanted to buy 128 kbps quality music, but because I had an Epson rebate card with a few bucks left on it to use up and I couldn’t think of anything better to buy with my $20.

If you didn’t already know, 128 kbps quality really sucks the soul out of music. There’s no depth or dimension to the music because the presentation is as flat as a piece of paper. Spending a dollar on a 128 kbps quality song is a waste of money, but I do grant that if you really want a piece of music and there’s no other choice, then get the 128 kbps song rather than go without music. I’m as picky as the next audiophile, but I’m not wholly a celibate purist who will have no truck or trade with low resolution music files.

Apple finally got that some people (actually, lots of people) want better than 128 kbps and a couple of years ago, started offering 256 kbps quality for a small premium of $1.29 per song instead of $0.99 for 128 kbps quality songs.

With that in mind and with about another $20 of rebates on a credit card to use up, I took my first foray into buying songs from the iTunes store. It’s easy and fast…too easy, too fast and too damn convenient, which can lead you onto the path of impulse buying and a much larger bill than expected. Something that I’m sure Darth Jobs and the evil empire of Apple is all too keen to encourage in order to add more to their billions, 99 cents at a time.

With 256 kbps, you get a reasonable facsimile of the original CD quality, which for hardcore analog fans, is still not good enough sonically. However, since I made my peace with analog years ago and have embraced digital wholeheartedly, I’m okay with $1.29 per 256 kbps song, even though I could buy the CD and get full resolution 1440 kbps AIFF files by ripping the CD. Being able to buy a la carte is a wonderful freedom to be able to buy the songs you want rather than be forced to spend $15 on a CD filled with mostly crap content.

Think about this, there are few CDs (or records) that are good from song 1 to song 10 (or whatever the end number is). A good record might generate 3-4 hits with the rest of the record comprised of second-rate filler songs. If you take a 500 CD collection and split the difference at 3.5 songs per 10-song (average) CD, you have 1750 songs that you would consider good enough to listen to while there are 3250 songs that you could care less about. At an average of $15 per CD, you’ll pay $1.5 per song, which results in over $2600 spent on the good songs and over $4800 on lousy songs. Not exactly great economy and not to mention a big waste of space having to store all those CDs (or records).

The big downside with iTunes, for those of us that care, is that the quality is still limited to 256 kbps. While there are some web retailers that offer high resolution music downloads, they are predominantly classical music, which is great, but the music that most of us care about, commercial pop/rock, is not even available at basic CD resolution. Unfortunately, with the way consumer society is trending, there may never be enough demand to compel Apple and its ilk to offer higher resolution music files, because for so many, 128 kbps is “good enough.”

However, like I said, I don’t to be a purist about this, I just want more choices available for those of us with more discerning tastes.

Next update, photos and videos on the iPad.

June 14, 2010 - Now this guy has got a good imagination for how to surprise and please his wife with a gift of an iPad in a unique and novel way.

Speaking of iPads...

I finally broke down and bought myself an iPad last week. On a lunch break, I headed for the Apple Store in downtown Vancouver and checked out the iPad for the first time. I had to fight through the massive crowds, elbowed a couple of grannies out of the way, body-slammed some teenyboppers and dropped-kicked a grungy, twenty something (who looked like that Mac dweeb in those idiotic commercials) to make my way to one of the two dedicated tables for the iPad in the store.

Okay, just kidding about fighting my way through the crowds. While a steady stream of people was checking out the iPads, I was able to demo an iPad almost as soon as I walked in. A minute later, I sought out the first available store employee and asked if he had any iPads in stock. Given news reports that many Apple Stores were sold out, I was readying myself for a “no stock” response, but the store did have stock of the one model that I wanted. Order placed and about 10 minutes later, I walked out with my brand new 64 GB, Wi-Fi model iPad – CAD $840 after taxes.

I specifically wanted only the Wi-Fi model with the largest capacity, because spending $840 is enough for an iPad. I did not want an on-going cost of $30 or more every month just so that I can have internet access whenever and wherever I am, because I know my iPad will see 90% of its use at home where I have a wireless network.

I’m not going to bullshit you about seeing the iPad as some paradigm shift in the way we experience things on-line or how we digest multimedia content. I want one so that I can more easily move around my house and surf the internet whenever it moves me to do so. There are several times during the day that I think of something, or wonder about something and want to research it on the internet, but can’t because I either don’t have a computer handy, or they’re elsewhere in the house, or connected in a way that I cannot make use of them easily.

There's something familiar about this website...

For example, I use my big PC most days to update the websites and edit photos, but I don’t keep it on all the time, so it’s not instantly available whenever I need a computer for a quick and simple task.

My MacBook Pro tends to move either from my audio room, where it is a music server, or in the home office, where it might be doing some mundane tasks. I don’t have the 13-inch MacBook anymore as a spare and it would really be nice to be lounging in my living room and do some surfing instead of being tied down to one of the two rooms with the computers.

The iPod Touch works in a pinch, but really, the diminutive size gets at you after a while with the constant two-finger expansion to make websites readable. The Touch is still a great little device where ultimate portability is key and it’s made plane rides much more bearable, but it’s not ideal for a good, immersive web experience. However, the iPad has its limitations too, the key one being the lack of Adobe Flash support, which would kill my kids and their penchant for going to kids’ gaming sites where Flash games rule. Most of the sites I frequent are low in Flash content, so I don’t think this will impact me to any significant degree.

While my former 13-inch MacBook is nicely sized for leisurely web browsing, the heat eventually means it can no longer rest on top of your lap and the keyboard gets in the way when all you want to do is some surfing. The iPad’s size and touch screen UI is ideal for the couch-potato surfer, but, of course, there’s pluses and minuses to this too.

No keyboard makes for an excellent, in-the-hands control, but it also means that you really can’t do much serious work. Apple does offer productivity apps for word processing and number crunching in a spreadsheet, but let’s get real, you don’t buy an iPad to do the heavy lifting that a real notebook or desktop is meant for. I have no intention of using the iPad for typing up web updates, because I know the on-screen keyboard would have me screaming after a short while and, no, I don’t plan to get a Bluetooth keyboard, because, like I said, I don’t intend to use the iPad for serious work. And really, if I take the iPad and an external keyboard with me on the road, well, why don't I just get a real damn notebook in the first place.

Thoughts of editing photos with the iPad, I think, is wishful thinking for serious work. While it’s speedy for web browsing, email and even some highly detailed, animated games, do you really think it can handle editing and rendering a RAW file from a Canon 5D2 or Nikon D3X? Hell, even my big 8-core PC lags when I’m working on those large files in Lightroom, so what is a device using a smartphone's processor going to be able do?

I’m definitely of the opinion that the iPad is primarily an adjunct to complement an existing computer system and not a replacement. However, I also don’t want to sell it short for the things that I think it does very well.

In addition to web surfing, the iPad is for a multimedia experience, whether it be for viewing photos, watching videos or listening to some music. I’m also stoked that there is a way watch live TV through one of the many thousands of apps available for it – now I gotta figure out how to do it wirelessly through my home network.

This is all good, but it’s too bad that Apple chose not to include a USB port to the iPad. I get that the iPad is not a replacement for a notebook, so much as a complement to one, but I would prefer a bit more computer usability than as a gloried iPhone or Touch experience.

For example, if I want to purchase something online, it would be great to be able to print a receipt right after the transaction by connecting the iPad to a printer – not all web stores send you an email copy of a receipt. More appropriately, it would be nice to be able to wirelessly print the receipt via a networked printer. I don’t know, maybe there already is an app for that and I’m just being ignorant.

Having a USB port would also be great to supplement the limited memory of the iPad. 64 GB is not too bad, but if you start packing it with movie and music files, it will be eaten up very quickly. Being able to attach a 1 TB portable drive would be great, but more appropriately, a high capacity USB memory key is a better match for the compactness and elegance of the iPad.

Apple does have the Camera Connection Kit, which provides a USB adapter and SD card reader, but it appears that these are merely a means to ingest image files into the iPad, which is fine, but it’d be really sweet if that USB adapter can be utilized for more things.

I’d love to be able to able to bypass the iPad’s internal audio DAC and output music files to an external DAC via USB. My assumption is that the USB adapter from the Camera Connection Kit won’t allow that. My assumption is also that the iPad’s OS won’t even recognize an external DAC even if you could connect a device. However, I could be wrong and there seem to be some hints on the net that it's possible, but I'll know for use when I buy my own kit and try it out.

I thought that I could at least use an existing ALO line out docking cable to connect the iPad to an external headphone amp. Unfortunately, for some reason, the ALO cable does not work to output audio to an external amp. I know the cable is fine, because it works with my iPod Touch and I know the iPad's docking port is fine, because it connects to the MacBook Pro just fine for syncing and data transfer via iTunes, so I don't know what gives. All I get is audio through the tiny speakers from the iPad or the headphone jack.

The other revolution that the iPad promises is with the way we will read newspapers and books. As with the iPod, Apple is not first in this arena, but as with the iPod, Apple could very well end up dominating the market and Kindle and its ilk may suffer the same fate as the Rio brand of MP3 players.

I never experienced Amazon’s Kindle or Sony’s eBook readers and didn’t have much interest in something so specialized and dedicated. If that’s all a book reader can do then I might as well just have the real book. Okay, okay, there’s a space and expense benefit with having a single-purpose, electronic reader, but I really like that the iPad can do so much more, and so it should for an f’ing 800 quid.

There’s the other rub about the iPad, the cost. While somewhat reasonable for an Apple product, you can buy very capable and more powerful PC notebooks for less money. There are already cheap tablets available and you can be sure that the major PC brands are paying attention and readying their own copycat tablets.

Back to the reading experience…thus far, I’ve only limited experience with some free book downloads from the iBook store and trying the Globe and Mail’s app to demo one issue of one of Canada’s national newspapers.

The reading experience seems quite fine and I don't have any issue with the free books I've downloaded thus far. Reading a newspaper reminds me of the iPod Touch experience: lots of scrolling and two-finger expansion to get the paper a nice, readable size. But, that's to be expected when trying to fit a broadsheet newspaper into a 9-inch screen dimension.

More to come after I buy the Camera Connection Kit and upload some photos to create a gallery and maybe even a slideshow.

June 10, 2010 - Here we are, nearly into summer and the hockey season has only just wrapped up with the Chicago Blackhawks winning the fabled Stanley Cup, the most awesome trophy in professional sports.

I'm of two minds about the Blackhawks winning the Cup. On one hand, it's great that so many players from British Columbia won (five players), but on the other hand, those Blackhawks dispatched my beloved Vancouver Canucks from the playoffs nearly a month ago.

However, as much as I hated the 'hawks for a while, I was largely indifferent to the championship series, because I really don't feel much of anything for the 'hawks or Flyers.

It's nice that Chicago has won the Cup after nearly 50 years of waiting (49 actually), but the Flyers have not won in something like 35 years, so either team winning would have been a good story. And, it's not like either city has not experienced championship glory in recent times.

Sure, Chicago has those cursed Cubs thanks to a smelly billy goat, but recall that the windy city had a glorious dynasty with the Bulls in the 1990s thanks to a transcendent Michael Jordan.

Philly very recently won a world series with the Phillies and they picked Toronto's pocket by luring Roy Halladay (Mr. Perfect) to the team.

So, neither city qualified in my eyes as an underdog city that I could root for and at least both cities have tasted the thrill of a Stanley Cup championship in their history, whereas we in Vancouver continue to wait, hope and exclaim, maybe next year...

June 8, 2010 - You know, I like the iPhone, but never quite warmed up to the first few generations, but the new iPhone with iOS 4 looks pretty smashing! It almost makes me want to go out and buy one, but since we have such brutal data plans in Canada and since I prefer blowing my few discretionary dollars on other things, I won't really go and get one. Much rather put the $60 per month extortion otherwise known as a data plan towards something more useful...like an iPad...Okay usefulness is relative and I admit that it's more of the toy and gadget thing that makes me want an iPad.

I usually hate when the TOP gets too political, if only because my leanings swing the other direction of Michael Johnston, but he's got a set of three postings that are must reads for those of us who care about photographer's rights and where the US (and the world) is trending:

1. Life in the World, Part I
2. Life in the World, Part II
3. Life in the World, Part III

If you read Thom Hogan on a regular basis (and he’s been very regular the last couple of months with multiple postings per week instead of maybe a posting per month, as in the past), you know that he gets a lot of communication with Nikon users who bitch and whine about Nikon’s lack of new gear. Or, as is the case recently, the lack of availability of even current gear as Nikon seems unable to meet the demand for its cameras and lenses. Blame it on a lost or stolen shipping container on the high seas or on poor management, but Hogan is right to point out that even in tough economic times, Nikon is leaving millions on the table because it cannot supply product.

Nikon’s best cameras and lenses are produced in only one factory at Sendai, Japan, and one has to wonder if this is really feasible. It seems that products are made in set runs and when one run finishes, another product is brought to the fore for production. If a given product is a hot commodity, well too bad, it had its run and will have to wait its turn again. It would seem obvious to this non-business person that Nikon needs to upgrade its production capabilities by expanding Sendai or building a whole new factory in Japan or elsewhere.

However, Nikon’s supply problem is not what I want to discuss. Reading Hogan, you will find that Nikon users whine at regular intervals, such as in between product cycles, that Nikon is not keeping up with Canon or whoever else and that this will affect them to such a degree that they just might switch brands.

Horrors!

Before going further, let me admit that I am one of those whiney, and times, bitchy Nikon users wailing away at the lack of products. I am also an adulterer and have no shame in using Canon cameras and lenses – look, I’m as human as the next person and when an opportunity arises that allows me long-term use of the gear, I ain’t about to turn it down.

I haven’t switched brands nor do I threaten to. I let out an occasional whine here and there to reflect frustration at not having the kind of cameras that I’d like to buy. At various times over the year, I’ll have some money burning a hole in my pocket and yet, I’ve got nothing compelling enough for me to spend some of that burning money. So, what the hell do I do, I buy some nice headphones.

Maybe why I’m being rather antsy about not having good choices right now is because I know the end is near. No, not the world, I mean my spendthrift ways in photography.

I’ve discussed previously how I would be very happy to be have something like the following:

• D700 form factor and speed with the sensor from the D3S for low light and/or sports photography
• D700 form factor with the sensor from the D3X for landscapes, portraits and other photography where a large, quality print is the desired output
• GH-1 form factor with a decent sensor and a decent complement of lenses for travel, family snaps and video use – oh wait, I already have this…
• GF1 form factor with a decent sensor and a very good, compact lens for travel and everyday use – hey, wait a minute…

Well, 2 out of 4 ain’t bad and when I really look at this objectively, I actually do have the first two covered to a large degree with the Canon 5D2.

The 5D2 has decent low light capability up to ISO 3200 and the 21 MP resolution does allow for a decent sized print. Where it falters is in the robustness of build compared to the D700 and the speed for sports. Oh, it’s also not a Nikon.

Here’s the rub, I’ve got some nice Canon gear available anytime I want to use them…and I do, but at the end of the day, I’m a Nikon guy. I like the Nikon feel and ergonomics. As much as Hogan disses the Nikon menu system, I find it easier to understand than Canon’s menu system.

Just as Sting sang that he wants his MTV on Dire Strait’s Money for Nothing, I'm singing the tune, I want my Nikon, but Nikon won’t deliver and there’s a very real fear that when it finally does, I won’t have the damn money to buy it, because I'll have moved on.

However, since I’m a glass-half-full kinda guy, let’s say Nikon delivers and I somehow have the loot to seal the deal. I think I’m good for at least five years, maybe more.

Digital, at the higher end, is maturing or has matured to the point that I think it’s realistic to think of a DSLR purchase like we used to with film SLRs. That is to say, in five to eight year cycles, which will be a big relief to the wallet from the 2-3 year upgrade cycle.

With the D3S being so good in low light and the D3X offering great quality at low ISO, the next generation of cameras would have to offer really innovative and compelling technology to crack open the wallet.

Would it really mean an end to my spending…honestly, and knowing myself too well, probably not. If not cameras then there are lenses and accessories to buy, as well as computers to upgrade. However, it’s a nice excuse to practice for that inevitable explanation to the wife about why the Visa bill is so damn high.

Also, it will take a little while for all that good image quality to filter down into the cheaper, consumer arena, so for those not wanting to spend D700 kinda money, you're probably still on that 2-3 year upgrade path.

June 7, 2010 - Couple of quick comments to start the week:

• hoping to get my hands on an Olympus E-PL1 this month and compare it to the Panasonic GF1
• it's back to the audio future and I also work on borrowing my former Benchmark DAC1 so that I can try its balanced outputs for driving the HD800 with the new Cardas balanced cables

Thanks to readers' comments and suggestions on amp and additional headphone choices. It's nice to know that more than three people care about the audio asides I take now and then when the photographic side is slow (such as right now). However, as we head into summer, there should be some more interesting gear coming my way for trial - unfortunately, they won't branded with a big N...you can make your own guess as to which brand it is ;^)

June 2, 2010 - Reader's comment:

Saw your posting about the recent column re: Habs fan and in vitro fertilization attempts and was quite moved.  It was not the usual entry I expect on your website...but it was a very poignant story that made my day in a melancholy sort of way.  For those of us who have fathered/mothered children on our first or second tries - it seems quite an easy and natural thing to do...but this story reminds us of the travails and frustrations of many of our own friends and families who have difficulty conceiving.

Could you tell me which paper it was in Vancouver?  I'd like to find it online to read.

It was an article by Mireille Silcoff in last Saturday's National Post.

Reader's comment:

I am also a headphone man. I have all the headphones you mention in your review except for the AKG ...just knew they would be wrong for me. Still the Grado 325i  is probably the closest. Anyway, I thought you should know about two other headphones that have given me a great deal of pleasure.

The Denon AH-D5000 is just a terrific headphone that I would've never anticipated enjoying so much. In truth, I use this exclusively on my computer now. Yes, I have the HD-800 on my primary system with an XCAN amp, great CD Player, etc. However, the Denon is just sooooo great. It sort of takes heat for being "bass heavy" but I haven't found it be be a problem. Rather, the balance is closer to what actual loudspeakers sound like in a good room. I have Magneplanar / subwoofer speakers for my main listening system. These Denon's are priced at US $443.83 on Amazon and are the bargain of the century (IMHO)! Driven by a good headphone amp like the very affordable Music Hall amp, they "sing."

The other great headphone "deal" out there is the Audio Technica ATH-AD700 at US $86.63 ...truly amazing headphone for the money. Maybe the best "value" in electronics in a very long time. They get almost everything "right" and have become a permanent fixture on laptops and ipods in my family. No, they are not small, but they are very light and comfortable.

Just wanted to give you more options to review ...sorry!

Ah well, I don't "think" that I'll be in the market for another set of headphones anytime soon...at least not for me, but I've got kids getting to the age that they want to listen to their own music with some privacy.

I gave my oldest son my old HD580s, but it seemed silly to give him headphones with nothing to use them with, so I also gave up my iPod Nano (don't shed any tears, still have my old style iPod and iPod Touch).

For my girls though, the ATH-AD700 might just be the ticket...that or some Grado SR-60s, which are also raved about as an excellent budget choice. If I recall, the ATH-AD700s are the ones that Tom Gillet (aka Sam Tellig) of Stereophile have raved about several times in the last year or so. Sam's got a pretty sensible (cheapskate) head on him, so I'll have to consider them on the short list.

I know someone with some Denon cans, but not sure if they are the AH-D5000s. I'm hoping to get a chance to listen to music with them and try some closed-back cans.

I pretty much have my computer-based headphone system worked out, but will need to do some upgrades to the main rig before I move the MusicStreamer+ and HeadRoom Micro Amp downstairs. Pretty certain that I'll go balanced with the HD800s - only because I have the Cardas balanced cables on the way now, but no damn balanced amp yet. Still trying to figure out if I want a HeadRoom Balanced Ultra Desktop or a HeadAmp GS-X, or some other amp that has come to my attention yet. I know about Ray Samuels amps, but not sure I can swing that kind of cash for his better models.

And, yes, this spending on headphones and amps is taking resources away from photography, i.e. Nikon, if it don't get itself in order soon and produce a camera that I want to buy.

Finally, let me throw a headphone back at you. 6moons reviewed the Beyerdynamic T1 and the reviewer, who has the HD800s too, now considers them the king of headphones (he's tried quite a few of the high-end models).

June 1, 2010 - A reader sent along a tip about a research project out of Vancouver's biggest university, about studying Rembrandt's lighting technique.

Reading about scientists trying to unlock various secrets is quite intriguing to me. For example, can we define human aesthetics scientifically? After all, isn't beauty in the eye of the beholder and therefore subjective?

However, if you look into the Golden Mean, the Golden Ratio and Fibonacci Sequence, you will find, essentially, a mathematical look at a particular ratio and a particular sequence of numbers that speak to humans in a fascinating way.

Just starting to get around to using the 17-inch MBP for some work and testing to see how some web edits fair under Snow Leopard and CS4.

Going through Photoshop CS4 to find the web gallery function turned out to be fruitless, because Adobe removed this feature. Adobe does offer a web gallery output function in Bridge and it offers the same kind of web gallery function as Lightroom. For personal galleries, perfectly fine as I do like the look and feel of Lightroom galleries, but for my website galleries, not so good.

I've been using the old school Photoshop web gallery for years because it offers direct access to the HTML page for easy insertion of my own headers and footers. With the other, more advanced galleries, I simply don't know enough about HTML to work my way around inserting my own headers and footer tables. If it ain't broke...

I thought I would have to keep CS3 installed on a PC in order to keep creating the readers and users galleries at this site and at NikonLinks, but thankfully, those old galleries are available with a download from Adobe and a quick copy and paste of the automation into the appropriate folder gave me back my old school web galleries.

Which is great on the one hand, but ended up being a wasted effort on the other, because for some reason that I cannot fathom, the Photoshop web gallery on a Mac, will not allow for file names longer than 32 characters. Longer than 32 characters and I end up with some hex code jibberish in the last six or eight characters of the file name, which is cut off at 32 characters.

Maybe it's a 32-bit thing since CS4 on a Mac is still a 32-bit app, but it's curious why this problem does not occur on my PC running 64-bit Vista and the elderly CS3. I'm hoping that when I move to CS5 (probably around summer time) that this problem will finally go away.

On another note, I can finally copy the content from a Mac Word document into Dreamweaver CS4, which was not possible with Dreamweaver CS3.

Man, and people gripe about Windows functionality...sheesh!

But, don't get me wrong, there are things about the Mac that do make life easier for me. The USB ports are nicely powered and I get good transfer speeds from them. Even better, the native FW800 port is just awesome - keep in mind I'm coming from the experience of FW800 being grafted onto a PC by way of an expansion card and I've never seemed to get the max from those FW800 ports. On the MBP, I've seen transfer rates of over 50 MB/s. I can't wait for USB 3 to finally become adopted by everyone for even better speed.

May 31, 2010 -The full Sennheiser HD800 review is now posted on its own page.

On a related note, a reader sent me word that the founder of Sennheiser, Fritz Sennheiser, passed away on May 17. Professor Sennheiser died just a few days after celebrating his 98th birthday. In some ways, we might regard Prof. Sennheiser as the "Carl Zeiss" of the headphone and microphone world.

Other notable recent passing aways: Gary Coleman died at age 42 after suffering a fall and Dennis Hopper died from cancer at age 74.

Gary Coleman is only a few years older than me and his show, Different Strokes, was a staple of my childhood. It's difficult to imagine the tough times he and his other child co-stars suffered after the show ended. His television siblings, Todd Bridges and Dana Plato, had problems with drug addiction with Plato dying in 1999 from a drug overdose.

Coleman also had problems with his kidneys, which left him diminutive even as an adult. His parents and advisers misappropriated the money he earned from Different Strokes, which at its peak was earning Coleman $100,000 per episode. The gall to have one's own parents spend away your nest egg, resulting in Coleman having to take demeaning jobs and guest roles that lampooned his child stardom.

A bit more photography-related, who can forget Dennis Hopper as the idealistic photojournalist in Apocalypse Now. The long-haired hippie PJ with the multiple Nikon F's hanging from his neck probably inspired a great many towards a similar look and vocation.

It was great seeing Hopper make a comeback of sorts in the 1990s in Speed and Waterworld (I know, I know), but I think his redemption started earlier in the mid 1980s as the alcoholic, basketball loving father in Hoosiers.

From one melancholy theme to another...

For those that pay attention to hockey, you know that we're nearing the end with the Stanley Cup championship underway between the Chicago Blackhawks and the Philadelphia Flyers.

Flipping open my Saturday newspaper, there was a feature essay from an occasional contributor to the National Post about her life as the wife of Montreal Canadiens fan. As you may know, Montreal's fairytale season came to an end in the Eastern Conference final against the Flyers.

I thought the essay was going to be another one of those sports widow wives' lament about losing a husband to the madness of the playoffs and the essay did start that way, but it ended with a jolt along the lines of an M. Night Shyamalan movie, i.e., an unexpected twist.

As I read through the essay, the writer discussed how she and her husband had tried to conceive a child and seen many doctors and specialists to help. Somehow though, against the odds, they succeeded the natural way and the pregnancy coincided with the dramatic success of the Montreal Canadiens against the Washington Capitals and Pittsburgh Penguins.

Every time I read about couples trying desperately to have a child, I thank myself for the four kids I have. When my wife and I were expecting our first so quickly after we married, her younger sister joked about my "super sperm," but I tell people it's not so much me as it is that my wife is as fertile as the Saskatchewan prairie.

For the writer, things were looking great until the Flyers series and then something felt odd. An ultrasound showed the fetus normal sized, but with one big problem...the heart stopped beating. By the time the writer was in recovery after removal of the fetus, the Canadiens' season had ended.

I had to pause and reflect on what I just read. From the initial humour and complaints about hockey and the playoffs gripping Montreal, to the tremendous loss of a much-desired baby.

Hockey, photography, audio, gear...what irrelevance compared to such a devastating loss.

May 25, 2010 - I spent the long weekend being an unrepentant geek. I reorganized various external data drives to split them between a PC-based system and the Mac-based system. With the 17-inch MBP offering native Firewire 800 support, I could finally designate the FW Drobo unit to the MBP while the older USB version continues to backup the big PC system.

I reformatted the FW Drobo to Mac HSF+ and then copied over all the files from the USB Drobo to the FW Drobo - while you cannot write new files between a Mac formatted drive and a PC formatted drive, you can copy from one to another. 30 hours later, the copying and backing up of all my files to the FW Drobo was finished, which surprised me as to how slow and long it took, because we're only talking about 2 TB of data. I was thinking 20 hours based on about 1 hr per GB of data transfer, but for some reason, there seems to be a lag moving data from USB to FW.

After finishing the backing up process for the new MBP-based system, I did a Time Machine backup and then mirrored the drive using SuperDuper, to an external OWC FW800 portable drive. Now, I'm ready to replace the original hard drive in the MBP (a Fujitsu 500 GB, 5400 RPM unit) for a Seagate 500 GB, 7200 unit. The Seagate drive is about middling for performance, as there are several other drives that are markedly better, but the one I chose is the one that I could actually buy immediately at my local computer parts shop, whereas the better drives would have to be ordered in. Middling it may be, but it's also markedly better than the old Fujitsu.

Speaking of the old Fujitsu, I kept on hearing clicks from it on a regular basis while still in the MBP. Could it merely be the MBP parking its heads or is it an indication that the Fujitsu is soon to be resting in peace in that wasteland of a graveyard for old hard drives? Incidentally, I hear no such clicking from the Seagate drive, so my suspicion is that the Fujitsu does not have that many hours of life left in it.

With my older MB, which also underwent surgery to replace its original drive with another 500 GB, 7200 RPM Seagate, the original drive died soon after. Very loud and very bad clicking sounds would emanate from it when trying to access it via external cases or connections. Now that I think about it, my first notebook, a Toshiba P4, also had its original drive go on the fritz shortly after I replaced that drive. A rather curious run of bad luck that fortunately did not occur while the drives were still inside the notebooks.

Replacing the hard drive in the MBP is quite easy. Using a 00 Philips screwdriver, you undo the ten tiny screws that hold the bottom plate in place - I laid out the screws on top of the MBP in the same order as they came out.

Once the plate is off, you have access to the hard drive, which sits beside the large battery pack. Using the same 00 screwdriver, you unscrew two screws used to hold the drive in place with a long plastic bar.

Lift the drive out from its cradle and undo the SATA connection. Using a #6 Torx screwdriver, you undo the four Torx screws from the drive's side - these are used to cradle the drive in place. Screw the four Torx screws into the sides of the new drive and then reverse all the steps to remove the old drive. This was about a 10 minute job from start to finish, but it took me another 15 minutes longer, because I dropped one of the back cover screws on the carpet and had to search for it.

For the MB's surgery last year, I went to the Source, an electronics chain usually found in shopping malls and bought the screwdriver kit seen below, which provides me with precision Philips, Torx and flathead screwdrivers. About $25, give or take a couple of bucks.

With the surgery complete, now is the time to mirror the external SuperDuper drive back to the MBP's internal drive. You can also recreate using Time Machine, but the SuperDuper method seems easier.

Holding down the Option key while powering up should bring up the ability to boot from the SuperDuper external drive, but I had a bit of a moment when doing so did not give me any option at all. Doing it a second time worked and I guess the first time, I did not give the MBP and external drive enough time to connect, or maybe I powered up too quickly after firing up the external drive. No matter, I was able to boot with the SuperDuper drive, which gave me a mirror of exactly what was on the MBP prior to the hard drive swap. I called up SuperDuper and proceeded to "restore" the MBP's new drive.

This only took about 25 minutes because I kept the system clean with no extraneous data to clutter up the drive. Total restoration was less than 40 GB of data. After SuperDuper finished, I powered down, disconnected the external drive and the booted up the MBP on its own. I had another moment, when it seemed to take a bit longer than expected, but finally, the Apple icon showed up on the screen and I could see that the MBP is indeed booting up. A quick check of some of the key apps (Entourage, Photoshop and Bridge) confirmed that the mirror is fine.

I have a little bit more file organization to do with some of my external drives, but once that is finished, I will be able to put the "new" MBP through its paces with some harder tasks than email or web surfing, e.g., Lightroom and Photoshop editing.

My 17-inch MBP offers some key advantages over my older 13-inch MB:

• faster processor - 2.8 GHz versus 2.4 GHz
• Snow Leopard 10.6 OS versus Leopard 10.5 OS
• 1920x1200 screen resolution compared to 1280x800
• Firewire 800 versus none on the MB
• ExpressCard slot versus none on the MB
• 3 USB 2.0 ports versus 2 ports on the MB

While the screen resolution is greater, the pixel pitch is smaller, so text is natively smaller than with the MB, which might lead to some eye strain. However, it's nice being able to watch some HD video files without Quicktime consuming more of the screen than is available to accommodate the video resolution. This is specific to some Luminous Landscape tutorials I have that are available in HD, but when playing back on the 13-inch MB, the Quicktime window is so big, I cannot access the lower right corner of the screen to make the window smaller. This restriction to only be able to resize a window via the bottom right corner is idiocy and would appear to have Steve Jobs all over it, but if there is another way to resize windows on a Mac, please let me know.

On the topic of backups and external drives, how many of you have a collection of external hard drives of varying sizes and capacities?

Over the years, I've gone from using single drive enclosures to dual-drive enclosures in order to provide more capacity and convenience. As you can see in the photo below, I have three dual-drive VanTec cases - two are 1 TB in capacity (two 500 GB drives) and the third is 600 GB (two 300 GB drives). One is used as the Time Machine backup and the other two store multimedia files such as music and movies. The 4 TB capacity FW Drobo beside the VanTex cases, also has backups of all those files.

With four external drives, there's a rat's nest of cables, because each drive needs its own power cable and all four enclosures have fan units to keep the drives cool, but emit heat and noise into the room. Is all this really necessary?

A few years ago, I would say yes, you must suffer the cost, the space, the heat and the mess of cables in order to ensure that your files are safe and redundantly secure. However, today, we have portable drives from Western Digital offering 1 TB of capacity. Being notebook drive sized, the WD Passport line of drives are quite compact and thanks to their size and low power draw, are bus-powered from the computer - provided that your computer has fully spec'ed and powered USB ports; Macs are fine, but some PCs are not and you may need a dual-head USB cable to provide enough juice for the portable drive.

Compare my current collection of external drives with the stack of portables I have and you tell me which one you'd rather deal with. I would still have something like a Drobo or NAS to provide comprehensive backup, but for everyday use, these little Passport drives are hard to beat. With 1 TB of capacity, that should be plenty for most of us for everyday, practical usage. For those needing a bit of performance (at the cost of a bit more bulk), you can get FW800 and eSata capable portable cases from OWC.

May 24, 2010 - It's Victoria Day today, which means that we Canadians get to sleep in and take an extra day off - precisely what I intend to do today, so see you tomorrow.

May 21, 2010 - DPReview has a post about DxO Labs poo-poohing Adobe's new Lens Profile Creator that goes with the new Photoshop CS5. No surprise there since Adobe is encroaching on turf that DxO has spent several years developing.

DxO's profiling is quite good even though the application itself is rather inelegant and does not offer Adobe Lightroom's straightforward workflow. What would be ideal is DxO profiling quality mated to a Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw workflow and interface; however, Adobe has obviously chosen to develop its own profiling module rather than license someone else's technology. I wonder if Adobe could buy DxO with its petty cash fund - I have no idea how big DxO is, just a tongue-in-cheek, throwaway comment.

While Adobe likely has a few things to learn about lens profiling, long term, I can't see Adobe not improving the Lens Correction filter and eventually becoming dominant just like it became dominant in the world of image manipulation (Photoshop), RAW conversion (ACR and Lightroom) and desktop publishing.

I can definitely understand why DxO would want to instill some FUD now.

May 20, 2010 - I was asked, jokingly, by a reader if I'm still a Nikon user, what with all the Canon references the last little while.

It's a good point and one wonders if that charcoal sketch looking image of me, at the top of the page, wearing a Nikon hat should be changed to me wearing a Canon, or even a Panasonic hat.

My response is the same as what I have posted in the past: I'm waiting for Nikon to produce a camera that I'm willing to spend what little money I have, on. The D3S is most certainly what I really desire, but that's over $5k that ain't gonna go over well with my better half and really, it's more camera than I need for my weekend warrior status these days.

As mentioned many times before, what I've been waiting patiently for is a D700S and if Nikon could also see about producing a D700X, I'd even let Nikon touch my monkey (SNL circa 1990> Mike Myers> Dieter Sprockets) while I do my dance 8^)

In the meantime, I use what I have available, which happens to be a Canon 5D2 and my two Panasonic cameras. However, I still do consider myself a Nikon user, because I have a drawer full of good Nikon glass (and a D2X) that's waiting to be used with a future Nikon SLR. It's just a waiting game and for anyone else who wonders and asks...your narrative has become tiresome ;^)

In another interesting price-reversal situation, I've been researching aftermarket cables for my Sennheiser HD800 headphones, specifically, Cardas balanced cables.

HeadRoom, the high-end headphone amp pioneers, lists a 10-foot run of Cardas balanced cables for about USD $350, but I found a Canadian retailer selling the same cable for less than CAD $300. If I were to order the cable from the US, I would probably end up paying around CAD $450 after currency exchange, S&H and taxes. That would be over $100 more than the Canadian source after adding in S&H and taxes too.

What the heck is going on that Canada is a better deal than the US? First the HD800s can be bought for less than the USD price and now the cables. I only wish that there would be a high-end headphone amp maker based in Canada, so I wouldn't have to go searching in the US.

Speaking of the HD800, I hear that the price at Axe Music is still marked up enough that the retailer still makes a profit, which only means that the other retailers selling in the $1800 range are really raking in the profit - can you say gouge?

I either read or heard from someone that in the high-end audio world, manufacturing costs are about 1/5 of the retail price and that the difference is eaten up by distribution, wholesellers and the retailers. Using the 1/5 gauge, the HD800 cost less than USD $300 to actually make.

May 19, 2010 - So, I'm finally able to sit down and start configuring the 17-inch MacBook Pro the way I want and installing some software that I need. However, since this MBP is a long-term loaner that I didn't know all the specs on, I started digging around to see what kind of hard drive is installed. While the Fujitsu drive is good sized at 500 GB, it's slow at 5400 RPM and its performance is amongst the worse of notebook hard drives.

Now, the 17-inch MBP is Apple's flagship notebook, so why in the hell did they ever offer a consumer grade drive option? A 5400 RPM drive in an f'ing computer that probably cost around $3000 new? Good God man!

I can sort of understand why Apple would not offer slightly more expensive 7200 RPM drives for its entry level MacBook - most purchasers are probably buying this unit for budgetary reasons and an extra $50 or $100 can make or break the purchase. However, when we get into the upper end of Apple's notebook offerings, who in the hell is going to skimp on $50-$100 and not get at least a 7200 RPM drive. Dump the 5400 RPM option for the MBP line (it's still a current option available when configuring an MBP).

Now, I'm going to have to get myself a decent 7200 RPM drive. The one silver lining in this is that I can follow pro photographer, Lloyd Chambers' advice and do a custom install to strip out a lot of the extra crud that isn't necessary with a standard OSX install.

Otherwise, the big MBP seems like a pretty nice machine, even with the glossy screen - something I got used to with the older and smaller MB. The pixel pitch of the screen is smaller than the lower resolution 13-inch MB, so that will take some adjustment, especially with my less than stellar eyes. But, I have to say that it's delightful having the same resolution as a 24-inch external monitor in a notebook package.

While certainly a large notebook, it's so slim and elegant looking that you don't really realize how big it is until you open the lid/screen and marvel at the real estate that a 17-inch screen offers. Sweet!

This is also my first use of Snow Leopard, but at this early going, there's not much that I can say about it compared to Leopard, which is still running on my older MB.

May 18, 2010 - So, did anyone catch the season finale of House (I missed it)? You know, the one that was shot entirely with the Canon 5D2? Care to see what kind of kludge accessories are needed to actually use the 5D2 for recording a network TV show - it ain't exactly how you would use a video cable DSLR to record your home movies.

Check out this music video link posted at ScottKelby. An unexpectedly very good amalgamation of Metallica and Journey - you gotta hear it to believe it. To quote the lead singer: "OH, YAH!"

To look at the lead singer is to imagine a brunette version of Dee Snider (of Twisted Sister).

May 17, 2010 - Another busy week and weekend, so not much to say to start the week off. However, I am putting the finishing touches on my next review, which, to let the cat out of the bag, and in case, you hadn't noticed given how often I've been talking about it, is the Sennheiser HD800 headphones.

It's taken almost three weeks to ensure that they have had an appropriate amount of break-in time (over 300 hours) and now it's time to do the critical listening sessions and compare with my other headphones.

I finally got my hands on a MacBook Pro, a 2.8 GHz, 17-inch model. Not the latest model, but decently equipped and specified (finally, native Firewire 800). We'll see how I take to it compared to my old 2.4 GHz MacBook. It should lessen my Jones'ing for a quad-core iMac for a little while, but it still won't satiate the desire for a Mac Pro 8^)

May 13, 2010 - Was checking out Canuck Audio Mart, a site for Canadians to sell their used hi-fi gear. Out of curiosity, I checked the headphone related listings in the faint hope of finding a good deal on a great headphone amp. No such luck, but I did see a listing for the Sennheiser HD800 for CAD $1450, and this was already a "reduced" price from the original listing.

So, that indicates that CAD $1800 is probably a pretty typical price for new HD800s across Canada and it makes the $1320 price at Axe Music a killer deal. Just how in the hell can Axe Music sell the HD800 for so far below the regular retail price?

May 12, 2010 - As long expected, Sony has its own EVIL camera to compete against Olympus, Panasonic and Samsung, and once again, we have to ask, why are Nikon and Canon AWOL from the party?

I'm sure most of you have seen the Sony NEX-3 and NEX-5 product photos and I'm sure more than a few have seen how ridiculously small the camera looks beside the 16mm pancake lens. However, it's impressive that Sony has managed to fit in a DX sized sensor in a camera slightly smaller than a Panasonic GF1. If Sony's processing is up to snuff, the NEX series should be capable of producing better high ISO quality than the M4/3 cameras with their ISO 3200 limit, whereas the NEX goes up to ISO 12,800. (12,800? From DX? Bloody hell - I mean the image quality, not the epithet)

The NEX cameras also do HD video with the NEX-3 offering 720P and the NEX-5 offering 1080i. Styling wise...well, it's kinda...fugly. Sorry, what can I say, but it's looks like a kludge of a camera with those lenses looking so massive, however, it does remind me of the old style Sony digicams from the early 2000s, the ones where the lens rotated around the camera base (F7xx series).

You know, back in the day when DSLRs first offered video recording (not that long ago actually, because the first, the Nikon D90, is still a current camera), everybody and their grandmother was talking about how this is going to lead to a new convergence of media and that we still photographers would need to develop video skills. Couple this with the Red system of modular cameras offering super-fantastical imaging sensors that would blow everyone out of the water - by the way, we're still waiting to be blown out of the water, like you know, anytime now...

So, you're thinking, well gee, I don't want to get thrown off the bandwagon before it's even moving, so let's see what this video fuss is all about. You look at those early video DSLRs like the D90 or the Canon 5D2 and you wonder, well, how the hell am I suppose to take a video? There's no record button like on a camcorder...isn't that how you would record video?

Then you hear about LiveView mode and non-existent focusing (well, it did exist, but it was so slow, you'd never know it) and you wonder, what the f@#$? Who's the blooming genius that came up with this f'ing brilliant way to take video? Convergence my ass!

I've been using a 5D2 since it came out and I've never used the video mode once. Not even to test the damn thing, because, to quote the awesome Clint Eastwood, it's an ergonomic clusterfuck. The 7D is better, because low and behold, there's a dedicated video mode button to provide easy access for video recording. Bravo and something that Panasonic got right from the get-go with the GH-1 and GF1.

Yah, I know the 5D2 is being used in some high profile video situations such as Saturday Night Live and that oft mentioned season finale of House (since I'm dropping the f-bomb a few too many times, let's keep it going and state that the show is f'ing brilliant). However, with the major video makers, including Canon, readying large-sensor, video cameras, how quickly are video capable SLRs going to be yesterday's news?

Now that real video cameras are coming, suddenly people are starting to state the shortcomings of SLRs for video use. Small viewfinders, non-articulated LCDs, lack of ergonomics for good video control, short video duration limits, slow AF, etc., etc.

Hello?! These are still camera meant for photography with video grafted on like Frankenstein's brain. Of course they're going to be lacking, but that didn't stop people from overstating how the marriage of photography and videography would be a game changer.

There are some very talented people out there who can do both video and stills very well and create great content, but I'm not one of them and I have no desire to learn video. I'm not saying I hate it, because the two times a year that I might shoot some video, I very much like the convenience offered by the GH-1. Hell, it's what attracted me to the GH-1 in the first place, but then, the GH-1 is also not the camera I reach for when I want to do quality photography.

I'm quite happy to see Panasonic, Sony and Canon develop the next generation of large-sensor video cameras, because I hope the products will lead the video guys away from photo cameras and I can wish and hope that it also give Nikon a headshake to stop the move to implement video into every damn camera it produces. Unfortunately, I think the horse is already long gone from the barn...

For those with an intense desire to multitask or for daytraders (do people still do this, because it's so pre-tech bust now), here's a snazzy six-screen display system. Nothing like pretending to have a little bit of NORAD or NASA on your own desktop.

A while back, I was reading a post by Johnston over at TOP about how he was grousing about not ever wanting a huge house and how so many houses waste space. He was particularly scornful of huge bathrooms with massive bathtubs and other space wasting features. (the post would seem offtopic for a photography-related site, but it's nice to break things up now and then)

Now, I certainly don't have massive bathrooms with huge jacuzzi tubs, but I do have a big house (with lots of bathrooms) and I'm a little self-conscious about discussing my house and how big and expensive it is, because my city is rather overpriced compared to just about everywhere else in North America except for San Francisco, which is probably even more insane than Vancouver (probably New York too).

But, when you have as many little kidlets as I do, plus some elderly parental units to look after, there ain't no way that we could continue living in a small house of about 2200 sq ft. Before, we avoided inviting people over to our overcrowded and congested home, now my wife is starting to volunteer to host family gatherings - if we aren't already volunteered by the family. When we have a dinner gathering, we can have 30-40 people come over and having a large home allows everyone to find several areas to gather and be comfortable without bumping into someone or something.

Just this past weekend, we had a combined Mother's Day and birthday dinner and like I said, we could accomodate everyone relatively comfortably. The kids were playing street hockey or riding their bikes in the back car park or alley and since it's even quieter than my old neighborhood for car traffic, I had a lot less to worry about even with my youngest out there learning to ride his tricycle.

All in all, life is good in the new house and I certainly don't consider all the extra space to be a waste. However, if I were in Johnston's shoes, with only one child to rear, I would probably blanche at the thought of having to live in and maintain a massive home too.

May 11, 2010 - Psst, hey buddy, gotta spare Cray supercomputer you can lend me? See, I got this 45,000 MP photo I gotta process.

One thing I forgot to mention with yesterday's brief post about high-capacity USB drives; they can now replace iPods for car use.

My cousin bought a new Hyundai SUV - in case you hadn't heard, Hyundai now makes very high quality vehicles that are a quantum leap from its earliest days in North America and having to live down the infamous Pony. Anyway, the new Hyundai's console has a USB port that hooks up to the stereo system. So, you can plug in your USB key full of MP3 files and play them back through the car's deck. Sweet, and no need to fuss around with an external iPod and line-in cables and jacks, which is just as well, because in British Columbia, handheld devices are a no-no while driving, e.g. no talking on the cell phone while driving.

Any of you readers hardcore head-fiers with good technical knowledge of balanced headphones? I'm wondering if it's safe and feasible to drive balanced headphones via the balanced output of a preamp. I don't mean a hybrid headphone/preamp, but a traditional line stage preamp that has balanced inputs and outputs.

I know that some with Benchmark DAC1s have successfully driven balanced headphones via the DAC1's balanced output, so I'm assuming that this should also be possible with a balanced preamp.

A really good preamp has all the makings to be a really good headamp too, so I'm wondering...

May 10, 2010 - The iPad is finally available for sale in Canada with delivery by the end of the month. Unfortunately, gotta pay for the kid's hockey registration, which will forestall the iPad purchase - also have bills coming up paying for summer hockey and hockey camps, so it's not the best time to be splurging on personal toys. Yes, we're so hockey-mad in Canada that we can barely stay away from the arena for a few weeks 8^)

I don't know about you, but I have not paid much attention to the size of USB keys, aka jump drives, but I hear that they will soon, if not already, hit 128 GB and 256 GB is not far behind. Wow, how soon before we hit 512 GB and 1 TB. Perfect for travelling and protecting data with non-volatile memory.

Remember a few posts ago, I was wondering about when some relatives would get married and perhaps ask me to take a few snaps? Well, I got a better sense of timing and there's no pending rush for both of the possibilities, which means no pressure to get myself equipped this summer.

Just as well since I've pretty much blown the budget already this year on non-photographic stuff. One of those items will be reviewed here in due time here after being broken in for a few hundred hours ;^)

May 7, 2010 - With the iPad becoming another runaway success for Apple, I wonder how soon before we see third party devices for it? Is it feasible or desirable to produce an audio-based speaker/docking station for an iPad? A bit of overkill maybe compared to using a much smaller iPod for audio? 64 GB capacity is also a bit small for audio use.

How about a carseat harness so that you can use the iPad as a video player to entertain the kids on long drives. While the iPad's size is easy enough for one kid to just hold it in the hands, when you have multiple kids, the best solution is no kid gets to hold it. Then again, don't dedicated car video players sell for a lot less than an iPad. On the other hand, one multifunctional device is better than having to haul a bag full of specialized gear.

I have a Blackberry Bold now and it has a video and still camera built in. It even has a tiny flash unit. It's utterly ridiculous, but I'm curious about the quality, so I'll toy around with it and write about the experience in the weeks ahead.

May 5, 2010 - Last week Terry White had a link to the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, which made fun of Apple due to the fallout from a police raid of the home of a Gizmodo blog editor. If you follow the tech news, Gizmodo apparently paid $5,000 to obtain a prototype of the next generation iPhone that had been left in a bar. Although the Gizmodo editor returned the prototype, it was not before the scoop was posted on the Gizmodo website. Apple, i.e., Steve Jobs, was apparently not pleased and the cops, post return of the prototype, busted down the editor's door, as if he were running a crack house.

Stewart pokes fun at Apple and Jobs and wonders, has Jobs become the "man," the establishment that Apple use to poke fun at way back when it pioneered personal computing in the early 1980s. Meanwhile Bill Gates is going around using his immense wealth to better humanity. As Stewart wonders, is this is not the opposite of what we expect from Apple and Microsoft? Indeed!

This week, Ellen Degeneres apologizes on her talk show for lampooning an iPhone commercial. Apparently, Apple, i.e., Jobs, was not pleased and Ellen was compelled to apologize. Lame!

As Jon Stewart suggests, Jobs is going around showing why it is he has a reputation for being a big time "apphole."

Back when Jobs sold Pixar to Disney, he apparently walked away with some $2 billion. While he was already an immensely wealthy man prior to that deal, the sale gave Jobs, f-you money. Jobs elevated himself to the super elite wealth level that allows him to tell everyone else to f-off with near impunity. But, at the end of the day, I'm left with an impression that Jobs is a grade A "apphole" while Bill Gates is using his wealth to create the largest charitable foundation in the world, with a promise from Warren Buffett that when Buffett dies, his Berkshire shares will go to the Gates foundation.

By the way, I love Apple products... ;^)

May 3, 2010 - Recently, a co-worker (the same one that loaned me his father’s Leica M3 several years ago) dropped off some very old brochures and catalogues that he found while cleaning out his late father’s belongings.

The documents date from the 1950s and 1960s and in looking them over with an historian’s eye and interest, I could instantly tell how dated they are without even looking for the dates. One, a Kodak newsletter for amateur film recorders, has the telltale color signature of the 1960s. It’s like watching a TV show from an earlier era, when the film stock and the techniques used feel completely dated, yet when the shows were current, they never felt that way.

As an aside, during my most recent time off due to eye surgery, I relaxed and lounged around the first week watching my Magnum P.I. DVDs. Up to that break, I had only found time to watch the first four seasons sporadically, so I settled in to watch the last four seasons. On a technical basis, the conversion to DVD is poor, with grainy video quality and while it’s not as bad as 1970s video quality, the 1980s era video does not hold up all that well.

The human models in the Kodak newsletter are clean-cut, wholesome and all-American; a visualization of living the American dream of having a home, a spouse, a kid or two, a car in the garage and a chicken stewing in a pot. In other words, not too far off from the idealized life depicted in the 1950s sitcom, Leave it to Beaver. Kodak is clearly appealing to middleclass America of families that are not rich, but are successful enough to have enough discretionary income to take vacations and buy Kodak film cameras and projectors to capture and view memories taken during those vacations or at family get-togethers.

The equipment being promoted by Kodak has only mild interest for me, because they are long gone and obsolete, plus, I’ve never been a video guy. But I did have an interest in reading them to see what they told me of the era.

Another piece of nostalgia from 1953 was more interesting photographically, because it’s a Canadian Leica catalogue. This catalogue shows off cameras and a lens from just before the fabled M era and the key cameras are the Leica III variants.

The prices are intriguing with the Leica IIIf listed at $210, which after using an inflation calculator, comes out to a 2009 value of nearly $1600. While I’ve no doubt that $210 is a very large sum of money in the early 1950s, $1600 in 2009 does not seem nearly as dear.

To provide some perspective on that $210 value (forgiving some of the dates I use below, which come after the time of the Leica catalogue)), I remember talking to one retired gentleman in the mid 1990s, who told me his first house in Vancouver cost a princely sum of $6,000 in the early 1960s. Assuming that the $6,000 house is likely to be what the average cost would have been in the 1960s, spending $210 on a camera represents about 3% of the cost of a 1960s era Vancouver house.

Today, in 2010, the average cost of a house in Vancouver is now $1 million and 3% of that is $30,000, which will still get you a Leica camera (barely), but now we’re talking about the medium format quality S2 instead of a 35mm based format M camera.

Interestingly, the Leica M7 rangefinder is about CAD $6,000. So, an amount that fifty years ago would have bought you a house in Vancouver, now gets you an anachronistic relic of a bygone era of photography. Extrapolating the $6,000 value to 3% means a house value of $200,000, which is laughable, because that amount will just get you a tiny condo in the Vancouver burbs.

A while back, a cousin asked me to pick up a new “fatman” rocker-recliner armchair at a warehouse in Burnaby and deliver it to his condo in Richmond – the perils of owning a minivan that everyone else thinks can be used as their personal u-haul. Dropping off the chair was my first visit to the condo and when I finished the one minute tour, all I could say was that it was “cozy;” I was too polite to say small. It made the condo I lived in before buying my first house, feel palatial even though it’s only a couple hundred square feet bigger.

However, I do need to point out that Vancouver is somewhat unique when comparing real estate prices. It has a mild climate, which makes it a popular end destination for many coming from Eastern Canada. It’s the gateway to the Pacific and Asia, which means a lot of Asian money funnels through the city with the large expatriate community of Chinese from Hong Kong, China and Taiwan. And, perhaps most importantly, there is a limited amount of land available for development, which can lead to short supply for all the demand by new people continuing to move to the city.

Vancouver is pretty much fully developed. To build new homes, older ones have to be torn down. Young families are finding it difficult to afford to live in Vancouver proper and move eastward to the suburbs.

You only have to look at minor hockey to understand the demographic shift away from the city. While Vancouver still has a very large minor hockey presence, it’s not like in the 1970s when each major neighbourhood had its own independent association and sets of teams because there were so many kids available. Now, there are only two, citywide associations in Vancouver and I only know of one private club (for very wealthy residents) that can still be looked at as an independent neighbourhood association. Meanwhile, the suburbs of Richmond and Coquitlam are thriving because so many young families have moved to those cities.

Anyway, I thought you'd get a smile from seeing those historical documents and what prices were like for top-end photographic gear from the 1950s.

April 30, 2010 - If you follow the Engadget technology blog, you may have already seen the photo of a modded Canon AE-1 Program SLR that can take digital photos and videos. The modifier, Luis Diego Monge is a Canon tech from Costa Rica and he also sent me some photos and basic details of his Frankencamera. Basically, a functioning digicam installed into an AE-1P shell to create a very cool looking, very custom, digital camera with old school charm.

What came to my mind is how so many people would love for Nikon to produce a digital version of the classic FM/FE series of SLRs. My thanks to Luis for sharing his creation.

April 28, 2010 - Wow, the rumor site got one right with a new 200-400mm f4G AF-S VR II lens being announced by Nikon yesterday. Per Thom Hogan, the new lens gets a refresh with the latest Nikon technologies such as the nano crystal coating and VR II, but it otherwise appears to be the same lens. Will it be enough to correct the one significant flaw that Thom Hogan discusses in his review, mainly that at moderate to far distances, this zoom lens produces soft images. You wouldn't think that lens coating alone could correct such a significant flaw, so here's hoping that the Nikon engineers tweaked more inside to ensure that the new version produces distance photos every bit as good as near distance photos.

The price is sobering at USD $7000, but it's one of those lenses that I'd give my left family jewel for. After four kids, I think my wife would also give away my right family jewel just for the hell of it...happily too.

A D3S and the 200-400 lens would be my ideal hockey photo kit when sitting up in the stands, but that's about $12k worth of kit that will only be the stuff of (wet) dreams.

Adobe announced that it will include the lens correction filter in Lightroom and Adobe Camera RAW 6.1 - CS5 will ship with ACR 6.0 and Adobe will very quickly make ACR 6.1 available for updating.

I'm blown away that Adobe is doing the right thing by making the very useful and long desired lens correction filter available during the RAW editing process, because there seemed to be no indication that it would do so. It certainly seemed to me that Adobe wanted to keep Photoshop relevant for Lightroom users by not having the filter included with LR3.

Awesome!

For those of you that actually find my comments about audio of interest (all three of you :^), you know that I've been interested in quality headphone listening since 2005.

If you follow the headphone scene, you know that Sennheiser has fired off its nine 16-inch guns in an all out assault on the state of the art for dynamic headphones with the HD800. (nine 16-inch guns of the Iowa class of battleships, the last of the great dreadnoughts)

Sennheiser's previous top-of-the-line was the HD650, which was about a $500 set of cans in its heyday. However, the HD800s will set you back USD $1400, which is a huge step up in price, and one would assume, in sound quality.

In Canada, the HD800s retail for CAD $1800 at a major Vancouver-area audiophile store, so after taxes, that's a cool two grand...for a set of headphones. With such a pedigree, the HD800s are not likely to sound their best with average quality amplification and source material and like an exotic sports car, needs the best fuel to run at its best. That only adds to the cost of buying the HD800 if you do not already have excellent ancillary gear.

I didn't think I would seriously be able to consider a set of HD800s for at least a few years, when prices might fall to a slightly more affordable level and when I might also be able to afford a better amp and source. So, imagine my surprise when by chance, I found them for sale at $1320...Canadian. In other words, less than US retail and nearly $500 below what a local store is listing them at. Even better, by finding them at a Canadian retailer, you can avoid the stinking provincial sales tax, you get free S&H via a good courier company, and you don't have to bend over and take it by paying any border charges and tariffs (UPS anyone?)

It seems too good to be true, but I'm in a position to confirm that Axe Music in Alberta is indeed selling the HD800 headphones for CAD $1320. I can vouch for Axe Music because I have made a few purchases from them in the past, including a big ticket item of a Fender Stratocaster electric guitar and Fender guitar amp.

CAD $1320 is not exactly chump change and it's still an extravagance to spend that much on a set of headphones, but is it really all that much to get something that is near universally regarded as being the best in the world (for dynamic headphones)?

April 26, 2010 - With the lack of newsworthy events and activity on my part, I thought I'd show you my home office as it looks now. Regular readers will know that I moved house at the end of summer 2009, which resulted in providing everyone with more space. My home office in the old house was a squarish bedroom, about 10x11 feet and it was stuffed with all my miscellaneous paraphernalia - actually, overstuffed would be more accurate.

My home office always seems to be in a state of flux, at least according to my wife who says that I seem to reorganize on a monthly basis. I have to admit to some truth to that accusation, but it has to do with seeking efficiency to accommodate all the equipment while still providing a usable working environment.

Below is a photo of the home office at the old house, which you can see is cluttered with computer and audio gear and you're not even seeing the bookshelf and cabinet which are located beyond the right edge of the frame.

After the move to the new house, I took over an approximately 8x19 foot room that was rather awkward for regular family use due to its shape and darkness even during the day. If I did not turn it into my home office, it would have been either a glorified storage room or a relatively bombproof kids' playroom (would also have made for a nice exercise room). Dark as it is, it actually makes it ideal for use as a digital darkroom, because the lighting is always consistent with the use of overhead pot lights whenever I'm working in it.

Below is what the office initially look like using the same desk system as in the old house. While the space is greater, the desk and storage system still results in a lot of clutter, which I actually really hate, because I like my things to be well organized.

Thanks to a relative doing an office move, I was able to make off with his unwanted office desks and cabinets and redo my home office. There were enough pieces that I could try a couple of different arrangements before I arrived at the setup seen below. The modular nature of the desks allowed for some customization to not only suit my needs but also fit within the dimensions of the room. It's also nice to have a consistent color scheme instead of a mish-mash of different colored woods.

Below at left is the main three-desk system. A five foot desktop is supported by three drawer cabinets and provides a rock-solid platform for the Epson 4800 and R2400 printers. Beside the printer desk is a narrower seven foot long desk (also supported by three drawer cabinets), which is where I sit to do computer work. Beside that desk is a four foot long desk, which is supported by metal poles to provide an open area below the desk. This is where the computer is situated as the open area provides ventilation for the hot air coming out of the computer's exhaust ports. The four foot desk also provides an open desktop to work with prints (trimming, cutting, etc.) or other items. That's 16 feet of desktop space, which just happens to fit perfectly along that wall.

Below at right are the filing cabinets (four units) that allow me to hide away all the things that were difficult to pack away in the old home office. One of the filing cabinets has a different top surface, which is much longer than the cabinet needs, but allows me to configure it to create a narrow desk. You can see the Epson Artisan printer at the left side and on the right side are four external hard drives. These are all for the MacBook whenever I bring it downstairs for some work - the MacBook otherwise resides in my upstairs audio room to act as my music server. Eventually, I'd like to have an iMac or another MacBook located permanently in that space as my everyday computer.

Below is a closer look at the computer system. You'll excuse the warm white balance of the room as I was trying to get a proper WB for the main monitor. You'll notice a lamp on the left side of the main monitor, which I discuss in the next section below.

I used to have an old style desktop lamp with a daylight balanced fluorescent bulb that I used to view prints and compare to the monitor. I replaced that old lamp with an Ott-Lite lamp seen below.

The Ott-Lite is a portable design that can be powered by AC or DC via an internal battery (good for blackouts or for camping). The lamp folds down when not in use and to turn it on, you simply pull the lamp head out. The head can be pulled out and up to 180 degrees, but for my use, slightly below 90 degrees is the best angle.

You can see a small lip at the base of the Ott-Lite, which is perfect to place a letter-sized print and make a comparison to the monitor. Based on the comparison shot below, you probably won't believe me, but there is a very good match between the print and the monitor's image, as seen via Lightroom 2.7.

The Ott-Lite provides a light that is 5000K while the monitor is referenced to 6500K. I don't know enough about the science of light and color management to understand why there is a good match with such a discrepancy in WB between the two sources, but it works for me. But, do note that my monitors are calibrated to a brightness of 215 cd/m2, which allows for the comparison to the Ott-Lite. Such a high brightness level flies in the face of conventional wisdom, which would recommend a brightness of between 120 to 140 cd/m2 for LCD monitors. However, lower than 215 and in my room, the monitors would be too dim to provide a useful comparison.

You know, as much as I have stated over and over again that a D700 is not in my future, by the summer, I might have to eat my words. While there is some warranted speculation that the D700 is now discontinued and rumors float around about new SLRs are coming from Nikon, I fear that if new cameras are indeed coming, the timing will be too late for me.

This is a Photokina year, so all the major brands are sure to have product announcements leading up to the late September show in Germany. Unfortunately, a September announcement means that the new cameras won't be available until nearly Christmas. Obviously that blows for hockey photography, because the season begins in October, but this is not the reason I'm thinking about the D700 again.

I have some younger cousins who are making obvious moves that indicate that they are preparing to settle down and the nuptials are when and not if. It's presumptuous of me to think this, but I expect that I'll be asked to do some photography for them.

If the weddings are planned for this summer it means Nikon has to announce something now for it to be available in the distribution channels. Alas, Nikon does not march to the beat of my drum and if I want to use Nikon kit for these jobs and assuming no announcement in time for summer, the D700 is the only option that makes sense to me.

The alternative is to use the Canon kit, which is no hardship, but as I've indicated before, Canon is not as familiar to me as Nikon and I do prefer Nikon flash capabilities over Canon. I would also need to get a second body (the 7D is no longer around) and the obvious choice would be to buy the 5D2 so that I'm using two of the same cameras.

The 5D2 and D700 are fairly close as far as high ISO quality is concerned, but the D700 is a "pro" quality camera with its build quality, AF and frame rate, which makes it more suitable for hockey photography. The 5D2's major benefit is the resolution, which certainly helps when one must do some cropping - especially with the loss of the 1.5x DX crop view when photographing hockey.

If I end up buying my first Canon SLR, does it make sense for me to continue having Nikon gear...

Consider all this just idle speculation, because until things have been formalized, I'm just letting my thoughts run ahead of reality.

Somewhat related to weddings, if I were to use a 12 MP SLR, I could almost photograph the entire wedding day with a single 32 GB flash card.

A few weeks back, I mentioned that a local drugstore emporium had Sandisk Extreme compact flash cards on sale. I followed my own advice and bought one each of 16 GB and 32 GB capacity. Inserting the 32 GB card into the 5D2, the capacity available is more than the 5D2's three-digit counter, or just over 1,000 full resolution RAW files. That translates to over 1,500 12 MP RAW files. Whew!

Another note somewhat related to weddings, I was cruising through the Vistek website and found that Ilford now offers 12x12 inch, double-sided paper with a lustre finish. Sweet!

Previously, the only quality, double-sided paper with a lustre finish that I knew of was Moab Kokopelli, which is long discontinued - I still have an unopened box of 11x17 paper for future use in Unibind albums.

The annoying thing about using Kokopelli is that I have to manually crop the sheets to fit the albums and frankly, my manual cutting ability blows with the sheets being off by a mm here and there. With pre-cut 12x12 sheets, I can just print and then bind them into the 12x12 size Unibind covers, making life much easier.

And, of course, Ilford also offers the paper in letter sized sheets to fit into the same sized Unibind covers I also have on hand. 13x19 inch size is also available for the Ilford Galerie Lustre Duo Smooth paper.

April 22, 2010 - I've been thinking about the M4/3 cameras, such as the Panasonic GF1 and Olympus E-Px variants. Specifically, I've been rueing why these cameras continue to have shutter noises when they are mirrorless cameras, but then it kinda dawned on me that mirrorless may mean no mirror slap, but the cameras apparently still have mechanical shutters, hence the shutter noise. Well, duh!

I was fixated on the erroneous idea that mirrorless would also mean noiseless like digicams. It's too bad that no one has come out with a completely silent, large sensor camera with great high ISO quality, because it would be a fantastic wedding photography camera.

While wedding photographers can never be completely discreet, because of the nature of the work, using tools that don't call attention to themselves would be highly beneficial. No more loud thwacks of a pro SLR's shutter jarring a quiet ceremony and excellent high ISO quality means no more flash bursts popping off and distracting and blinding everyone.

Coincidentally, while I was giving some thought to what is missing from the new class of EVIL cameras, my friend Oleg was commenting on what kind of ideal compact camera he desires.

What Oleg desires does not exist, but the Panasonic GF1 comes closest to matching that desire. Added to Oleg's list, from me, would be in-camera image stabilization and my much desired silent operation (or at the least, more quieter than currently available).

With the new firmware from Olympus that improves AF performance, the E-P2 and E-PL1 might also be contenders, as DPReview's tests now show that the E-PL1 with the new firmware is equal to the GF1. The firmware also improves AF with other brands' lenses, e.g. Panasonic, and DPReview hints that one factor for the repuation of slow focusing with the Olympus cameras might actually be the design of the Olympus lenses and not the camera (especially with the new firmware).

With much time on my hands the last couple of weeks and with photography being limited, I've been spending quality time with my headphones - well, as much as possible with a rambuctious two and a half year old following me around everywhere in the house.

With that time I've been thinking much about audio and what I need versus what I desire and what ultimately can be afforded with limited bucks. The more Nikon delays in getting out interesting and relevant cameras to market, the more likely I'll end up spending money on something else.

It will come as no surprise for regular readers that what I desire are D700 versions of the D3S and D3X on the basis that it's within the realm of possibility for me to spend somewhere around $6k for two cameras instead of the impossibility of me spending $13k on two big pro SLRs. There's also the lack of need for the bulletproof build quality for the big units and I like the ability to add or remove the vertical grip, depending on what it is that I'm photographing.

Going back to Oleg, his post about the ideal compact camera is inspired by the realization that even his D700 is too big for certain trips or outings; a not uncommon criticism by many who desire uncompromising image quality in a much smaller package. Thom Hogan has long lamented that pro-quality SLRs are getting bigger, heavier and more complicated with each generation.

When Nikon simultaneously released the D3 and the D300 and then followed up with the D700 sooner than expected, it gave me a lot of hope that Nikon finally "got it" that it can produce similar, but different SLRs to cater to a much larger group of photographers. However, there are some who suggest that producing cheaper, but excellent SLRs will cannabilize the sales of the pro SLR. I think this is completely backwards looking.

Producing one $5k pro SLR will certainly ensure higher sales for that one camera, because there is no other option, but the sales numbers will always be small, because there are only so many pros and rich amateurs that can afford to spend $5k on a camera. However, producing the D700 at $3k allows a larger subgroup of pros and amateurs to able to purchase into the brand. Producing a D300 at below $2k opens up the market to even more photographers. The nice thing about the choice is that the feature-set is so similar amongst the three cameras, e.g. 12 MP, 51-point AF, weather sealing, etc. It comes down to price and specific features needed, such as DX for those need the cropped view, FX for those that need excellent low light capabilities, and size and weight for those that need smaller and lighter cameras than a D3.

There will always be certain photographers who need all of the quality of a D3 and are willing to spend the money, but again, the numbers are just too limiting to rely on this group for sales. I suppose that I'm making these comments out of selfishness, because I'm wondering where that D700S is. A D700X would be very welcome, but for my needs, the D700S is more important and relevant.

April 20, 2010 - News that only a computer geek will love, a test between two three-way video cards. These are not three-headed video cards (one video card with three monitor ports), but are three physical video cards ganged up to provide some incredible graphics performance, not just for games, but also for Photoshop performance. The astonishing thing is that a 1,000 watt PSU is not enough to juice the three-way setup. Egads! Pretty soon, a really high-end desktop that's all about performance is going to need its own dedicated circuit, or even an upgrade to a 20 amp circuit from the 15 amps and 1800 watts of a standard household circuit.

There have long been stories of people being mugged for their iPods, but this story takes the mugging to a new level - the loss of a finger during the mugging for a new iPad.

April 19, 2010 - Almost a week after the surgery and on the road to recovery, but still unable to see clearly through the right eye.

Didn't really miss much as far as news is concerned, as nothing interesting seems to be happening for new and/or interesting gear.

April 12, 2010 - A few weeks ago, my wife called me up from my dungeon, otherwise known as my home office. Unfortunately, she didn't tell me that she wanted me to come up to see the rainbow, so I came up without a camera in-hand.

After seeing how vivid it was, I ran down to grab a camera and snap a few shots. However, I found that the Canon 24-105 was not wide enough to capture the entire rainbow, so I ran back down to get the 17-40 lens. Unfortunately, in the short time I left to grab the wider lens, the vividness of the rainbow had waned enough that a picture of the entire rainbow was not so good. Only one end of the rainbow continued to be vivid while the arch and the other end were fading fast.

I ran back down again to grab the 70-200 lens for some tight crops and ended with the photo at left below, when I noticed a small cloud floating towards the rainbow. Compare that to an old rainbow and cloud photo I took several years ago, which is at right below.

A TOP post about troublesome recommendations had me think about recommendations I’ve made in the past, as well as my own experience with printing.

The TOP post is specific to the HP B9180 printer that Johnston was quite favorable on a few years back. It seemed to have occupied pride of place in his office and produced prints of high enough quality that I recall him selling some prints. However, at some point, the usage relationship soured and the B9180 is now a banished child in casa Johnston.

Exactly what the issues are, Johnston does not specifically say, but after reading some readers’ comments, I can surmise that after a year or so of good use, the B9180 began to act up and eventually became a useless printer. The ongoing automated maintenance procedure of the B9180 likely sucked up a large amount of ink, the inks might have also spilled inside resulting in scuffed and marked prints, and ultimately, the print heads might fail. According to one reader, who went through two B9180 units, both became troublesome after the one-year warranty period expired. Going bad after the warranty period expires is a running joke, but truthfully, I don’t think I would be able to recall all that many items that have gone bad almost exactly after the warranty period expires.

It’s interesting to me, as someone who has been printing digitally since 2000 (sheesh, a Goddamn decade already!) that what was once seen as a solution to an Epson problem eventually becomes one of the banes of the B9180’s existence. The maintenance procedure of the B9180 requires it to be left on all the time, for which, the printer will self-monitor to ensure that its heads are not clogged. Whether you consider it to be an intended consequence by HP, or not, the result is that a lot of ink gets used up over time to maintain the printer’s heads and keep them clog-free. However, I believe that the HP print heads can be user replaced, unlike Epson printers, which use permanently mounted print heads.

Another brand, Canon, uses a print head that has thousands and thousands of nozzles. The pro Canon printers also self-diagnose when a clog has occurred in the nozzles, but instead of clearing the clog, the Canon printers map the ink output to unclogged nozzles. Eventually, depending on usage, all the nozzles will be clogged and mapped out and will require an expensive replacement.

The Epson R2400 that I’ve had in-house for a number of years now is what the HP B9180 competed against directly back in the day when both were current products. However, unlike Johnston’s experience with the B9180, my R2400 has been just fine in operation. An occasional clog here and there, but never more than a simple cleaning cycle to clear up. Although I leave it on for very long periods of time, it never makes a noise or goes through any ink-wasting, self-maintenance procedure. However, the R2400 is certainly not without faults, chief among them the need to swap out the black ink when switching from matte to glossy or vice versa. That definitely wastes ink, but compared to its bigger brother, the 4800, the R2400 is the model child whereas the 4800 needs attention to keep the heads clean and/or air pockets to a minimum. Most users seems to have adopted a daily printer procedure to help keep the larger Epson printers in top printing shape.

As for recommendations, I remember years ago making a recommendation of the Epson 2000, the first pigment ink printer. Unfortunately, the person that bought the printer became very disappointed with the metamerism issue plaguing and I’ve no doubt that my status as someone who can be trusted was heavily diminished.

Those early years in digital printing were tough ones to get through. If you went with the bleeding edge of long-lasting pigment inks, you suffered through green shifts. If you stuck with dye ink printers, you suffered through orange shifts because certain colors were not stable when the prints are exposed to air. Even if you did not suffer the orange shift, your print life might be as short as a few months instead of being measured in years. It’s no wonder that during those early transition years from analog to digital, so many refused to be swayed by digital until things settled down.

With the way digital continues to improve and resolution continues to increase, creating ever more pressure on lens quality, I wonder if lens makers will now have to think of lens upgrades measured in single digit years instead of decades.

With film, a lens maker could take a design from the 1960s and merely refresh it with new glass elements or coatings, but the basic design would not be much different than the original. However, digital seems to have changed the game and designs from the 1960s or 1970s no longer cut it.

Both Nikon and Canon have recently come out with new versions of that pro mainstay, the 70-200mm f2.8 zoom lens. Canon implemented IS in its 70-200 lens about a year before Nikon came out with the first generation 70-200 VR version, but now, less than ten years later, both lenses have been redesigned.

Nikon’s need for a redesign is well known amongst its users; the first version of the 70-200 VR is effectively a DX format lens even though it is supposed to work with the FX format. While I’m sure the coverage with the D3 and D700 was a factor, I have to think that the very demanding D3X is what really compelled Nikon to get a new version out sooner rather than later.

While the Canon 70-200 IS remains a good lens, I wonder if Canon introduced a new version to better mate with the Mk IV version of the 1Ds, which is rumored to have a 32 MP sensor.

While the new lenses offer better quality with the current high resolution SLRs, if resolution continues increasing, how long will those lenses remain of suitable quality? Will they last even two generations of pro SLR cycles (about six years)?

A thought came to me last week while I was busting my back doing yard work; using third-party plug-in apps with Lightroom really blows. The only reason I can see with using plug-ins with Lightroom is to keep the edited image within Lightroom’s Library. Otherwise, the process seems no better than exporting a TIFF or PSD file into Photoshop and then using the same third-party plug-in or filter.

If you use Lightroom, you are actually exporting a TIFF file too, into the third-party app for editing with an automatic re-importing of that file back into Lightroom. Unfortunately, you don’t have access to the full editing power of Lightroom once you re-import the edited file back.

What’s needed is a “true” plug-in that allows you to edit the RAW file in Lightroom (of course, I know that the edits are actually just instructions to be applied to an exported image).

With the noise reduction feature apparently being significantly improved in Lightroom 3, the remaining tool needed is for Lightroom to be able to correct lens distortions (barrel, pin cushionand others ) on the RAW file.

I found it curious that Adobe would not implement this feature in Lightroom when competitor RAW convertors such as Bibble and Capture One offer it, but after reading about what's coming in Photoshop CS5, it now makes sense. Adobe would definitely like you to continue spending big bucks to upgrade Photoshop and likely won't include any lens correction feature in Lightroom, because Photoshop CS5 will include what sounds like a very good and powerful lens correction filter.

It's exactly what Lightroom needs, but I don't think we'll see this in LR4 or even LR5, if ever. I suppose that now, I'll "just have to" upgrade to CS5 too ;-)

I’m signing off for about a week. I’m going in for what will hopefully be my last eye surgery. If everything goes well, I’ll check back in after the weekend. Take care.

April 7, 2010 - In addition to the audio/solitary comments, Brooks Jensen had another podcast last week that had me thinking about my old photos.

Brooks commented that much of the photos he produced as a younger man are works that he would not be happy with today. That there are few works that he would be proud to say, I made that. This despite the countless hours he spent immersed in photography, from driving around looking for subjects, reviewing equipment and all the work done in the darkroom. After 20 years, you would think Brooks would have a body of work to be proud of, but apparently not. Now that he's older and wiser, Brooks is more in tune with completing a task to produce a final product rather than going through the motions of being a photographer and not producing much in the way of final, finished photos.

I don't have twenty years of photography yet and while I would certainly not put myself at the same level as Brooks Jensen as a photographer (even in his earliest days as a photographer), his sentiment is something I have sympathy for.

A couple of hours before I started typing this up, I watched a slideshow of old weddings I had photographed, as well as a "portfolio" show covering my first eight years of photography.

Looking at those photos with much time between producing them, I can clearly see weak photos and where I would change things to stregthen the wedding shows. For my personal stuff, most of it made me cringe at the mediocrity and the embarrassment that I could think such crap would be worthy of a "portfolio."

Maybe a tiny handful might be considered good enough that I could proudly say, I made that, but too many belong in the trash heap. It's rather depressing.

There used to be a time when news like this would get me really excited and eager to haul out the credit card for a little spending spree. But, today, a 600 MB WD VelociRaptor hard drive that offers the fastest speed for old style drives, is passé. As I've stated a few times in the past, SSDs are the only choice now when seeking performance.

I was thinking about a true, three-color sensor, like the Foveon and wondered if it would be feasible to have color compensation similar to exposure compensation.

How many times have we read of a particular scene causing a particular channel to blow out while the other two are okay? How many times have we read about the blue channel being particularly difficult to work with?

With a true, tri-color sensor and color compensation, we could adjust the individual color channels to suit a particular scene in order to capture as much color information as possible, just as we expose to the right in order to retain as much bit-depth information as possible.

On the topic of new ideas, I wonder how feasible it would be for X-Rite to work with the camera manufacturers to incorporate its ColorChecker process in-camera. Instead of using a white or grey card to create a custom white balance, what about using a ColorChecker card to create an even better custom camera profile for the specific lighting we photograph in?

Have you ever walked by someone doing a particular job and scoffing to yourself, that's not hard work, or for us desk jockeys, we might arrogantly thing, that's not intellectual work.

You know, having a big house is really nice...until you have to clean or maintain it. Looking over the lawn of our house, my wife and I knew that it would need some work. The previous owner probably never did much more than mow and water it, which is why a significant percentage of the lawn is infested with moss.

Professional landscapers and yard workers would probably charge us $400 or more to de-thatch it. My wife, the accountant, noticed a de-thatching machine on sale at a hardware store and prompty bought it. Guess who had the task of actually using it...why pay $400 when a machine can be bought for significantly less and a husband is available to provide free labour. And, with a machine, how hard could de-thatching a yard be?

Thus, my Easter Sunday was spent:

1. mowing the lawn
2. de-thatching the lawn once
3. raking up the detritus
4. de-thatching the lawn a second time
5. raking up the detritus, again
6. de-thatching the lawn a third time (four times for one bad section)
7. raking up the detritus, again (ten bags worth by the end)
8. seeding the lawn
9. watering the lawn

Eight hours later, I was beat, stiff and sore all over and I hadn't even finished all of the work yet. I only did the lawn that's within our property lines, but there's a big chunk of grass on the other side of our fence that falls on municipal property, which we would normally look after. It's quite common in Vancouver that a lawn crosses the technical property line to the sidewalk and that the homeowner that has access to that lawn would maintain it. However, I was too beat and it was starting to get dark so the other side will have to wait until next weekend.

The yard looks like crud, because de-thatching left chunks of bare dirt here and there, hence the need to re-seed. Hopefully, in about two weeks, the grass seed will grow and I'll have what resembles a lawn again. Unfortunately, as my wife reminds me, I'll probably have to de-thatch every year in order to keep the moss at bay.

I used to have this annual battle against moss at our old house. Every spring, I would spray the lawn with moss killer, rake it out, re-seed and then hope that I would end up with a nice looking lawn. It was not too bad during the summer, but when fall arrived, so would the moss. I eventually gave up and surrendered to the moss and the old lawn is now more moss than grass.

Looking back, I know now that I did not look after the old lawn properly and that having a healthy lawn means more than just spraying a bunch of chemicals on it. De-thatching is important to remove the excess and dead grass and allow the stronger, remaining grass, more space and literally, more air for healthier growth. Moss is a symptom of poor maintainence, although, in the wet northwest, even healthy lawns can be afflicted with moss on a regular basis.

The eight hours of physical labour make me appreciate how much work landscapers and yard workers do and why it is that they charge a handsome rate for their work. It also made me realize how soft and flabby I am as an office worker and how much I need to work out when summer arrives.

April 5, 2010 - Last week, Brooks Jensen posted a podcast that discussed how he liked to be alone when he’s immersed in listening to music or looking over photographs in a serious way.

There was also a trip down memory lane at the beginning of the podcast when Brooks discussed how he and his friends would lust over a stereo system and would save their money in order to build a decent component system. However, times have changed and one friend has an iPod-based system and Brooks doesn’t even have a proper hi-fi anymore, favoring a headphone-based system.

Brooks mentioned that even as a young man, he always favored headphones, because they allowed him to isolate himself from the outside world and just let him be fully involved in listening to music. Doing so meant that it became a solitary pursuit, but that suited him perfectly. Likewise, when he is reviewing photographs, he wants to pay full attention to the photos without anybody bothering him.

Boy, could I relate to this podcast...

First, audio. Just like Brooks and his friends, when I was a younger man, having a component hi-fi was a mark of status. In university, the majority of students had ghetto blasters and cassette tape was the medium of choice. So much so, that when I finally had the money to buy a real component system of my own, I bought a Nakamichi cassette deck, the acknowledged best brand in hi-fi for cassette recording and playback. For people of my age, the cassette allowed the portability of music and the Sony Walkman was the iPod of my generation. CDs became the dominant medium for us in the later 1980s and early 1990s, but portable CD players did not become a mass consumer item until the mid 1990s and until then, tape was it.

The few students with their own hi-fi systems were admired, even if now, I chuckle with my audiophile arrogance at the mass-market brand names, such as Yamaha, JBL, Boston Acoustics, Bose, Sony, etc. It wouldn’t be until graduation that I could finally indulge and get myself a system that eschewed the mass-market brands and had some audiophile pretensions.

Until I bought that system, a Sony CD player fed my music listening via headphones. Music is very much a solitary thing and headphones are a natural. Tastes can vary, as can volumes, but with headphones, you can crank up that Metallica without worrying about breaking the lease, or listen to Samantha Fox without embarrassment…not that I listened to Samantha Fox…all that much J

Back then, while I really enjoyed my headphone listening sessions, I knew nothing of quality and while I did purchase some good Sennheiser HD580 cans in the mid 1990s, I didn’t have a proper amp to drive them. I still have those HD580s and they are a lot worse for wear with torn inner driver liners and headband foam that have long been compressed to nothing, but they still get used from time to time when I’m in my home office.

In 2005, I was tuned into the world of serious headphone listening and it was amazing and great to discover so many people passionate about listening to music via headphones. It can be as crazy and as expensive as regular speaker-based audio – okay, maybe not quite as crazy expensive, but still quite dear if you really want to pursue headphone listening at a high level (quality, not volume).

Today, the acknowledged best dynamic headphones are Sennheiser’s HD800, which will set you back about USD $1400, but such quality also demands excellent amplification to get the most from them. Buying a suitable amp can easily double the price (if not more, depending on what you want).

I have a couple of HeadRoom headphone amps, but both are from the Micro series instead of from the higher end Desktop series, which is what I’d really like to get my hands (and ears) on.

Since, I’ve been in the market for a decent preamp the last little while, being able to use a HeadRoom Desktop amp as a preamp is rather appealing, because it offers so much functionality. The Desktop amp is of course a headphone amp, but can act as a preamp and it comes with a built-in DAC, which allows for up to three digital sources to be connected, including USB.

For USD $2150, you can get an Ultra Desktop amp with external PSU and a set of AKG K701 headphones. For this price, the K701s are basically free. Intriguing, but for a little more money, the PS Audio PerfectWave DAC beckons. Decisions, decisions…well, actually, no decisions, because the money’s not there anyway.

Continuing the theme of solitary enjoyment, or, put another way, the need for minimal distractions when trying to accomplish something, I also like being alone when I’m writing, like right now, as a matter of fact.

Writing is most fluid for me when I have little to no distractions. It’s very personal in that my mind’s voice is speaking and reading back what I’m writing. It’s part of the thought process of what I’ll write, what words do I use, what quotes or phrases come to mind. What nugget of memory will be jarred loose from the rubble of ore in my mind?

When someone is around, I stop writing and have to wait to be alone again before resuming. When my wife tries to stick around and find out what I’m typing up, I save and close or minimize Word. It’s not that what I write is anything secret, because you’re reading the end result; it’s just the process itself that needs to be a certain way for me.

I also find that I’m task-oriented.  I like writing when I have a nice block of time to set aside just to write, or to edit and print photos, or whatever else I need to do. I like starting a task or project and seeing it to as near completion as I can before I stop, whether for dinner, or because I’m just too tired to continue on. I just don’t find that I’m productive when I can only put 30 minutes into something and then need to stop. For which I delay and procrastinate until I can get that block of time to see the job done.

That Brooks guy is pretty darn interesting to listen to. Lots of experiences and lots of common sense and at times, lots of similarities to how I am.

Also, last week, TOP posted a question about what’s up with the missing Sony SLR to bridge the gap between the full frame A850 and the mid level A550. Sony did have an A700 that was contemporaneous with the Nikon D300, e.g. late summer 2007 is when both cameras came out. However, while Nikon refreshed the D300 with an S upgrade to add video and tweaks and image quality improvements upon the D300 in the summer of 2009, Sony allowed the D700 to lapse into obsolescence.

TOP wondered what Sony is up to and why it would allow so much time to pass from producing such an important part of its lineup, e.g. a top of the line DX format SLR to keep up with the Nikon D300S and the Canon 7D.

It’s a good question, but if you’re into the oracular reading of tealeaves by Thom Hogan, Sony is working on a new sensor worthy of an A700 replacement. For that matter, so is Nikon (waiting for Sony to hurry up), which is waiting in the wings to produce the D400 (assumed speculated name of the D300’s replacement, which given the past naming convention, would seem to be a safe bet).

What the sensor will offer can probably be guessed at by looking at Sony’s sensor patents and past announcements for sensor technology. I haven’t kept current, so I cannot recall what Sony’s last sensor announcement had to say. One would expect the resolution be north of 15 MP, but as much as the Canon 7D’s 18 MP, only Sony knows.

For me, budget wise, a D400 is what I “should” be interested in, but I have an unrequited desire for the goodness of the D3S’ sensor and nothing less will do.

For local readers, London Drugs is having another sale (starting April 6) on compact flash cards. Sandisk Extreme cards are available at:

• $150 for 16 GB – usual retail price is $220
• $220 for 32 GB – usual retail price is $350

These are not the high-end Extreme Pro cards offering 90 MB/s speed, but are still pretty speedy at 60 MB/s. By comparison, the previous generation Extreme IV series offered 40 MB/s speed.

March 31, 2010 - Okay, forget about a measly 6-cores for your next CPU. If you're anyone, you gotta go with either AMD's 12-core or Intel's 8-core CPUs. These are the latest CPUs introduced by the bitter rivals embarking on a major performance war.

AMD figures on its CPU being used in dual and quad core machines - 48-cores! But, not to be outdone, Intel's looking at supercomputer-like configurations of 256 processors. Yikes! Me thinks you'll need more than a liquid cooling system for that beast.

Neither is gonna be cheap though, with the AMD chip going for $1200 per...in quantities of 1,000 chips. Intel's is double the price for a single chip...also in quantities of 1,000. In other words, neither is coming to a consumer computer anytime soon.

Info obtained from Engadget.

March 30, 2010 - I hate it when I mangle my writing by leaving out words here and there as I type up my posts. Alters the intent and meaning to not be what I want. I had to re-edit yesterday's post with some minor corrections.

Better late than never; here are some quick comments on the Epson Artisan 800, multi-function printer. This printer is now superseded by the Artisan 810 is typically priced in the CAD $250 to $300 range.

The Artisan 800 offers scanning, copying and printing capabilities. It can also act as your fax machine thanks to a telephone jack at the back. The Artisan 800 is also network capable for multi-computer access, or theoretically, even wireless printing. Fax is now obsolete (never really need one in the first place) and I don’t need wireless printing, but both are nice to have, just in case.

Scanning is straightforward, with either placing the original on the scan bed, or using the auto document feeder (ADF). I’ve look long and hard for an all-in-one device that offers double-sided scanning, but at the consumer price level, I’ve had no luck finding one. Considering that dedicated portable scanners that can do double-sided scanning cost around CAD $400 (Fujitsu models), I think it would be impossible to try and find an all-in-one that has such a feature for under $1000 and it would likely be a business oriented machine. However, having a ADF is a nice feature and very convenient for those types of jobs (loose stacks of paper instead of bound or stapled).

Printing is via six Epson Claria dye inks, which is a back to the future moment for me, as my first Epson printer was the 1270 and it used dye inks. Actually, all consumer photo printers from that era (circa 2000) used dye inks until Epson led the way in 2002 with the 2000P and pigment inks. The pioneers that bought the 2000P were buying into the future of photographic quality inkjet printing, but alas and with some hindsight, the 2000P seemed more beta than final production and the Epson 2200 is what the 2000P should have been. However, to be fair, pigment inks seem to work best with matte papers whereas many photographers like to use glossy and semi gloss papers, which can result in bronzing and metamerism issues with the early generations of pigment inks and printers.

Today, pigment ink printing is mature, stable and capable of outstanding quality. Epson really nailed it with the K3 generation of inks and printers (R2400) and now Epson is pushing the color gamut boundaries with the HRD inks used in the x900 series of printers.

I didn’t think I’d ever go back to using a dye inkjet printer again, but in looking for the right combination of features, price and familiarity, the Artisan 800 seemed like the best choice for an office printer, which is what I was seeking, not another photo-quality printer. The fact that it can also print on CD/DVDs was the clincher.

It’s a good sized unit, bigger than my old Epson CX4800, which is a cheaper all-in-one but lacks the ADF and disc printing capabilities of the Artisan 800. The CX4800 uses a variant of Epson’s pigment inks called Durabrite.

Pigment ink printers are notorious for clogging, which require many head cleanings to get a color, or two (or three) back to printing status. However, I wonder if it’s really the print head and not the long ink feeding tubes that cause the clogging, which if my suspicion is true, is not actually a clog, but an air bubble problem. With the R2400, clogged heads are infrequent and rarely, if ever, require more than one cleaning cycle to clear. I’ve gone long periods of time with no printing, fired up the R2400, did a nozzle check and found it to be fine. Not so with the much larger 4800, which nowadays requires multiple head cleanings to get two or three of the colors back again after a long break between printing (I tend to print in spurts of activity or projects).

The R2400 has the small ink cartridges sit right on the print head, whereas the 4800 keeps the much larger ink cartridges stationary and uses very long tubes to feed the ink to the print head. I have seen a few large air bubbles in those tubes in the years I’ve owned the 4800. I believe the 24-inch and larger Epson printers use pressurized lines to reduce or eliminate air bubbles.

Anyway, that was a lot of words to indicate that pigment ink printers can require a lot more maintenance than dye ink printers. I have not gone through a cleaning cycle since I bought the Artisan 800. Other than maybe one or two prints that were noticeably bad, everything else has been good (we’re talking a few hundred sheets by now).

However, printing with dye ink has other issues, namely more ink being sprayed out than with a pigment ink printer. A print from the old CX4800 generally comes out okay using cheap plain copy paper. Printing the same job with the Artisan 800, using the same paper will result in a rather soggy feel in the paper.

To counteract this, I’ve been using thicker, heavier weight plain paper, which does the job to absorb the ink better without it feeling like it will sag from the weight of the ink. Unfortunately, this workaround costs more money for the higher quality paper.

Another quirk of the Artisan 800 is that when printing multi-sheet jobs, the printer has a habit of pulling an extra sheet from the tray and feeding that blank sheet to the last page of the print job. Doesn’t happen when doing single sheet print jobs.

While the Artisan 800 is an attractive looking printer, parts quality is not all that robust. The quality of the plastic has a decidedly flimsy feel to it, especially for the paper tray and the disc loading tray. It’s not fair to compare a $250 printer to one that cost 10x as much in its day, but the 4800, while also predominantly plastic, is much better built. Even the R2400, not known to be all that robust either, feels better, which it should since it cost 4x as much in its heyday. However, it all works and I haven’t broken anything yet.

I have not done much photo printing with the Artisan 800, just a few test 4x6 prints at the beginning using Epson Premium Photo Paper. They look really nice just using the standard Epson driver and settings – no custom profiles or anything fancy-schmancy. Actually, I’m kinda afraid to do any custom profiles with the Artisan 800 since it services my MacBook instead of my Windows PC. Right now, Apple has dropped the ball with the way its latest OS deals with custom profiles via Photoshop.

Printing on discs is also good and the look sure as hell beats the monochrome output of the Lightscribe process. I mean, come on now, creating a Lightscribe label takes 30 minutes at the highest quality setting, whereas the same kind of label is whipped out by the Artisan 800 in just a couple of minutes, and in color to boot. I’m pretty much set to punt the Lightscribe process into the trash heap the next time I do a big PC (or Mac) upgrade. I’m already halfway there, as I recently discovered one of my two Lightscribe burners is nearly kaput.

Printing speed is also pretty good for an inkjet unit, but I cannot say this with that much confidence since I only have experience with Epson inkjet printers and older HP laser printers. I should also add the caveat that printing speed is good only when the Artisan 800 is actually printing. Sometimes, after I have clicked print on the MacBook, the Artisan 800 takes an interminable amount of time to process the job and actually start printing. I’m not talking about trying to print War and Peace, but a typical one page job that I usually send to the printer. Most times, there’s no wait and the printer wakes up, processes and starts printing quickly, but the odd occasion where it does delay, it can be four or five minutes before it begins to print.

I don’t have much comment on the scanning quality since most of my use of the scan bed is for copying of documents. Even the cheapest flatbed scanners have long been excellent for document scanning quality. I cannot even recall the last time I needed to scan a photograph for anyone.

Overall, the Artisan 800 is an okay printer, but with enough quirks and niggling issues for me to consider it as average instead of great. Definitely look at competing brands before you plop for the Artisan series.

March 29, 2010 - Over the weekend, I began burning DVD-Rs of hockey photos and while I'm no stranger to burning multiple discs for projects (past hockey seasons and wedding photography history), it had been a while since I've burned multiple discs. Last hockey season in fact, when I did the same for that season's collection of photos.

It's a freakin' tedious process having to burn the same disc over and over again, one-by-one. What a useless waste of time having to babysit the chore and feed the burner every 10 or so minutes. It's so 20th Century.

Thinking about the waste of time and old school media brought to mind some comments made by a photographer on a Nikon pro list when the Apple iPad was announced.

The photographer thought that the iPad would be an awesome way to have a portable portfolio with you all the time. No need to handle delicate prints, albeit with digital printing, making a new print is so fast, easy and convenient for consistency of quality.

What really intrigued me though, was a comment that an iPad could be packaged with a wedding job and be the proof album for the couple. Obviously, you price the package high enough to cover the cost of the iPad and you would only buy the capacity needed, but the iPad serves the dual purpose of not only being the album, but also as the archive of all the full resolution files. With JPEG being the preferred way to distribute such files, you would not have to buy the largest capacity iPad.

Quite an intriguing thought and with the solid state nature of the storage device, fairly secure and resistent. However, I think I would still offer a portable hard drive with backups of the files. A WD Passport is just the ticket for the portable.

Speaking of weddings, it's come up a couple of times recently, where people ask me if I'm still involved in photographing weddings. The question is not from prospective clients, just from acquaintances wondering if I was, how I could ever find the time to do so given that I have so many kids.

My response is typically that it's because of the four kids that I don't do weddings. Well, that's not entirely true for the real reason, but with hindsight, I realize that I could never go back to the number of hours needed to finish a job and basically, not seeing my family for about two weeks, until I finished all the editing, burning and printing. Love using the gear during a wedding, but hate all the work that comes afterwards, which is probably why the most successful wedding pros hire others to do all the tedious work for them.

HTC has new cell phones with 8 MP cameras. 8MP?! In an f’ing cell phone?! Good lord, when will the madness end? I think Hogan commented that Apple’s iPhone will have a 5 MP camera in its next generation release.

Now, I have little to no experience with cell phone cameras. My work Blackberry does not have one, but I’ll be receiving a new model soon, so maybe I can get some experience with this in-vogue way of taking photos. My wife’s cell phone has a camera and I’ve used it two or three times and deplored the uselessness and futility of trying to take photographs with it. However, her phone is at least two years old, so it’s not like the camera is anything special to begin with.

With iPhone photo-snapping the flavour du jour, maybe I’m missing something here. Maybe the technology has improved significantly. Maybe the response time is no longer measured on a geologic scale. Maybe the output doesn’t suck like a porn star…

I’m still highly sceptical, but I should keep an open mind about what camera phones can do. I mean, if Chase Jarvis is doing it, it can’t be all that bad, can it? But, 8 MP! Jeez, throw in the technical mumbo jumbo about pixel pitch, quantum physics and approaching the limits of light as particles or waves, and lens limitations.

What’s that saying, about being a jack of all trades, but master of none? Smart phones are great. It’s much nicer being able to carry a modestly sized phone that can do email, access your calendar, and even do some web browsing. The Blackberry with its real keyboard is fantastic for being able to communicate by email and it’s a decent phone, but web browsing blows due to the small screen. The iPhone is great for many functions, especially web browsing, but I wouldn’t want to do long emails with it. And, of course, neither is going to offer the quality of a real camera for photography.

What the world needs is a credit card sized camera with a sensor large enough to offer good ISO 3200 quality so that it doesn’t need a flash unit. No viewfinder, just a really high quality, one-inch OLED to take the photo and view afterwards. Not being technically minded for optics, I’d imagine that there’s going to be an issue with trying to fit a good piece of f2.8 glass in a camera that’s maybe ½ inch thick at the most. I’m thinking the old Coolpix design, like the CP 9xx series with a rotating lens section makes the most sense, utilizing the folding lens technology used by Sony and Minolta.

Unfortunately, we’ve all heard or read about the reports of the digicam market being fully saturated and while millions are still being sold every year, the numbers are in decline. If you read the tealeaves, the digicam market will give way to cell phones with built-in cameras, because while the digicam market is measured in millions, the cell phone market is measured in billions.

March 26, 2010 - I've been emailing with a reader in California (hey Joe!) and my last message included a short snippet of my lens upgrades over the years. Looking at the progression surprised me for how much has been spent on those lenses.

We had been talking about a zoom telephoto lens and Joe mentioned how he had been using primes so as to get fast lenses at decent prices, whereas fast zoom lenses would have been too expensive. I responded that primes for shorter lenses is okay, but gets tougher to do with telephotos due to the big increase in price.

I mentioned that I use zooms to keep things simple and that's when I outlined my lens upgrades and admitted that I had not saved much money due to the regular upgrades.

• 18-35 to 17-35 to 12-24 to 14-24
• 35-70 to 28-70 to 17-55 to 24-70
• 80-200 (one touch) to 80-200 (two ring) to 70-200 and hopefully, to the new 70-200 soon

That's eleven lenses just for three types of zoom lenses since 1997, and no, I don't want to know the damn cost ;^)

I was cruising along my usual suspects of websites I follow for NikonLinks, when I noticed that one blogger is online in just about every popular way. He's online with his:

• main website
• blog website
• Facebook account
• Twitter account
• LinkedIn

It's enough to make me wonder where he gets the time to update and follow all the personal and social networking sites. Then, yesterday, he posted a blog entry about how he's used some new features on Facebook to keep his personal updates for only friends and family while leaving the main Facebook page for everyone else (such as followers of his technology blog) impersonal with infrequent updates.

I just kept on thinking that it's possible to be too connected and wired and that really, people don't need to know every darn thing about me every single hour of the day.

Coincidentally, there's a National Post column describing the wierd Twittering of disgraced baseball player, Jose Canseco. There are just some things that I don't need to know about other people.

March 24, 2010 - Since the beginning of winter, I've been on a bit of a journey reading books by Canadian authors of Chinese origins. I'm intrigued by the notion that my upbringing and cultural identity is not unique and that there are thousands in Canada with similar upbringings. A reader on the other side of the country emailed me his thoughts and some family history of his father struggling to make ends meet as one of the few Chinese in Prince Edward Island. His father's struggles in the 1950s sound much like my father trying to eke out a living in the interior of British Columbia in the 1960s.

However, the world is a big place and there are many other cultures and customs. A reader from India sent me an article he wrote about the Bishnoi of Rajasthan. As I read the article, my eyes perked up when I read about one of the old customs that did not end until as recently as the 1920s, but more on that later.

The Bishnoi date from the 15th Century and are named for the number of principles espoused by their founder, Lord Jhambheshwar. The principles are similar to the Judeo/Christian Ten Commandments, but are stricter and are more in tuned with harmony with nature. The principles include no killing, no drinking of alcohol, no killing or eating of animals and no cutting down of living trees.

The Bishnoi have such respect and devotion to nature that 363 sacrificed themselves in 1847, to protest and protect the forests around their villages from the axes of the King of Jodhpur, who had sent a party to cut down green trees for his new palace. How the protest started is rather grisly, as a Bishnoi woman met the tree-cutting party and protested them to stop. They refused and ultimately, she offered her own head to the tree cutters as a means for them to stop. The tree cutters took her head, as well as the heads of her three daughters, who followed their mothers example and offered their own heads. However, the tree-cutting continued until more and more Bishnoi sacrificed themselves to save their forests. When word reached the King of Jodhpur of what had happened, he put a stop to the tree-cutting, apologized for his actions and decreed that no more trees would be cut.

This Bishnoi sacrifice and protest inspired the more modern Chipko movement in India, when in 1974, female villagers surrounded and embraced trees to protect them from loggers. As you might have guessed, the embracing of the trees eventually became known in western society as...tree-hugging.

The other custom of the Bishnoi that caught my attention is rather more lascivious in nature. Up until the 1920s, the Bishnoi had a custom where a young, handsome and virile man would be chosen to be the "shaand" or breeder in the village.

The shaand would wear wooden shoes and just as western culture uses various things to hang on door knobs to warn off room mates of carnal activities, the shaand would place the wooden shoes outside a woman's home to warn other men to go away.

The shaand is expected to breed with every woman of child-bearing age, so as to improve the genetic stock of the village. Now, if you're a man, you might be thinking that it can't get any better than this, to legally be able to sleep with most of the women of the village, but there is one rather severe downside risk. You only get to be a shaand for one year and at the end of that year, the shaand is sacrificed.

The custom came to end in the 1920s as even the Bishnoi had to modernize, and, oh yes, the habit of the shaands deserting their position before the year was up.

Fascinating stuff!

March 22, 2010 - Busy weekend! My oldest's hockey team did well enough in the playoff round to play in the championship game for their peewee tier (there are four tiers within the peewee house league, so four championship games).

Our team dominated most of the game and went up 2-0 heading into the third period. There was about a five-minute lapse in the third period when the boys let up a bit and let the other team score a goal to make it a 2-1 game. However, the team regained its composure and dominated to the end and kept the puck out of our zone despite us being a man short due to a penalty called near the end of the game.

The boys counted down the seconds and threw their gloves and sticks in the air just like Canada's mens Olympics hockey team when they won gold a few weeks back. A championship is not like the Olympics, more like the Stanley Cup and you couldn't wipe the grins off their faces when they received their championship banner. As is tradition, the team skated around the rink with the banner, just like Stanley Cup champions skate around the rink with the cup in the air.

It was a thrilling and a fantastic way to end the season. It marks the first championship my son has won in the three years he's played hockey and he was giddy with delight.

For me, it's a vicarious thing to celebrate a penultimate victory through my son, but I also knew that I would have a busy Sunday trying to finish editing the photos for this game and a few previous ones that I had not had time to catch up with. As is my usual tradition, I give all the players copies of the game photos at the end of season, so I have some work ahead of me to render RAW files to JPEGs and burn DVD-Rs.

For the championship game, I did not have the Canon 7D available, so I made do with the Canon 5D2. I did miss having that DX crop and the speed capability of the 7D, but I didn't miss the noise though. I found myself liking the 5D2 all over again due to the smoother looking files at ISO 3200 compared to the 7D. I find that even though I use plus 1 compensation, I still have to open up the exposure a bit more. With the 7D, that runs a big risk of increasing the noise, whereas with the 5D2, I'm still getting a smooth looking image. That's a big reason why I want a FX sensor in my next Nikon SLR instead of sticking with DX, even if I do lose the 1.5x crop view.

As the team did their celebratory skate around the rink, I found myself smack in the middle of their path and had to make myself as small as possible for they skated around and by me after I took a series of photos of them coming towards me.

March 19, 2010 - Reader's comment:

Another take of DX versus FX as brought up by the previous comment: I've been using 35mm since the 1990s. When I bought my first digital SLR in 2005, I kept on using 35mm film in addition, right up through now. 35mm is the same format as an FX sensor, so it serves that need for me even if I can't purchase a D700 or D3 series body due to cost.

For a while, I preferred the 35mm format over the DX format, hands down. For PJ/people photography, FX is the most desirable format. But lately I've been shooting sports, and I'm thrilled with the 80-200mm on DX. The other day, I shot a roll of film alongside the digital at a hockey game. And I found that the 80-200mm lens was too short on FX!

My 80-200mm lens on DX now has the same reach that my 300mm prime had on 35mm...and the 80-200 is one stop faster than my 300/4 prime, and it also has the option to zoom out when the action comes closer. No more chopped bodyparts!

It would take a very expensive and weighty Sigma 120-300/2.8 to duplicate this effect in the FX format. While FX is still better in my opinion for PJ type photography and general shooting, I've found that DX my preferred format when it comes to many sports.

Yes, that's a good point that for as many photographers that desire to go FX, just as many are happy to stick with DX because of the crop factor. Plus, with the tighter packing of pixels, you end up with more detail in the photo than with an equivalent resolution FX camera, e.g. the 12 MP D300 versus the 12 MP D700.

However, my thinking is: yes, I will lose the focal length reach that I had with DX and yes, I will lose speed due to either using different, slower lenses, or having to use a 1.4x TC, but the gain in being able to boost the ISO compensates.

I've not used the D300S, so I can't say how good the high ISO quality is compared to the D300, which I did use for a while. However, I would not expect to be able to use it above ISO 3200 and still get good quality photos, whereas the D3S appears more than capable at ISO 12,800.

But, who knows, maybe the sensor that Nikon finally gets to use in a future D400 will surprise us with its quality and would make the choice between DX and FX very tough to consider. I just wouldn't bet the farm on it though and I think we can look at the Canon 7D as an example of what kind quality we could expect from a future, higher resolution DX SLR from Nikon. With that in mind, I would still go with a D700-esque camera that uses the D3S' sensor.

My friend Oleg has posted some comments on a little printing experiment we tried to do around Christmas time. Unfortunately, since Oleg uses Mac computers running Snow Leopard and Adobe Photoshop CS4, our efforts got flushed down the toilet. Read more at Oleg's website under his March 17 post.

Probably most of you are not so geeky as to drool over a motherboard, but I came across this new one that is a geek's delight.

The mobo supports the new six-core Xeon CPUs coming from Intel - two of them in fact for 12 cores total and 24 threads for some extreme multitasking. It's just freaking nuts, but gives you an idea of what Apple should have in store for its new Mac Pro computers.

Reading Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle by Dan Senor and Saul Singer, was quite an eye-opener for revealing some of the fundamental technologies we take for granted. Did you know that the original 8080 series of Intel processors were developed by Intel’s lab in Israel. You may recall the minor little revolution in personal computing that got started when IBM chose the 8080 series to power its original PCs.  Intel’s people in Israel also developed the Centrino processor, which effectively put a halt to Moore’s Law and the punishing power requirements that would have been needed had Intel decided to continue with Moore’s Law for development of new processors.

Photographically, you may have heard of Leaf, which is a maker of digital backs. It’s now owned by Phase, but it was owned by Kodak, which picked it up through its acquisition of Creo. Creo was a huge, local success story in my neck of the woods. It became a world leader in digital pre-press printing technology and started acquiring companies to expand its digital product line, including Scitex for scanners and Leaf for digital backs. Those Leaf backs were (are?) developed in Israel.

Israel has a vibrant venture capital community and per capita, is a world leader for R&D and patents. The nation’s people, due to culture and due to geopolitical situations, don’t have time for bullshit and train their young to be innovative, adaptive and improvisational. This is developed during an Israeli’s mandatory military service and carried through to the business world when the young soldiers complete the military service and go to university and onto careers.

When an Israeli tries to make a go in business but fails, there is no stigma or shame. He or she is expected to get back up and try again. Failure is regarded as a learning experience towards success.

It was this attitude of accepting business failures with no stigma that intrigued me, because it runs counter to the attitude of Chinese and other Asian cultures where failure is considered a loss of face and dishonour.

Reading Denise Chong’s, the Concubine’s Children, right after Start-up Nation, gave me the impression that avoiding the loss of face and trying to maintain family honour back in the old country led to much turmoil and hardship for Chong’s grandparents in Canada. Chong’s book is quite divergent from Start-up Nation and you would not think that there is much in common and admittedly, my discussion about the cultural attitude towards success and failure is tenuous and thread thin.

At the advice of another Canadian of Chinese origins, I bought Denise Chong's the Concubine's Children. It dovetails nicely with the books I read earlier this winter by Wayson Choy about the Chinese experience in Vancouver's Chinatown; however, Chong's perspective is primarily from the female perspective of her grandmother, who came to Canada to be the second wife for her grandfather.

Chong writes in a straightforward manner that lacks the literary style and quality of Wayson Choy, but I still found it a very interesting read and just as with Choy's books, I devoured it in a matter of days.

Since Chong's book came out before Choy's first novel, I wonder if Choy found some inspiration from Chong, as he seems to have borrowed some of Chong's devices, such as throwing in Chinese words with the English prose.

While Choy hints at the hard life of his older characters living in the old country, Chong reveals just how hard that life is in her biography of her grandparents' and mother's lives. Her grandfather is already a widower at a young age, so he marries again while still in China, because that is the sensible thing to do. Unfortunately, after leaving China for Canada, he is unable to bring this wife over to Canada. He decides that he will marry another wife to live with him in Canada, which requires the buying of papers for a real Chinese Canadian woman (much younger than his wife in China) to use to bring his purchased wife over, the concubine.

Having a wife in Canada allows him to start a family, which he was unable to do with the wife in China. Unlike the wife in China, the new wife in Canada is headstrong and obstinate and is not exactly the model wife that Chong's grandfather expected. However, from the wife's perspective, coming to Canada to do as her husband's bidding must have been shameful and humiliating for her.

On her first day meeting her new husband, after getting off the ship in Vancouver's harbour, she's taken to a restaurant in Chinatown for a dim sum lunch. Normally, this would be a good start to a relationship, but it sours when her new husband advises her that this same restaurant is where she will work for the next few years to pay off the husband's debt to the restaurant owner. It turns out that the restaurant owner is the one who loaned the money needed to buy the concubine's papers and passage to Canada. Being a waitress is not regarded as being an honourable job, even for a former servant girl such as the concubine; it's akin to being like a prostitute, which many of the waitresses are in the evenings, as they give into the advances of their male customers. The young wife has lost face.

Loss of face is the theme that seems to pervade Chong's book. From her grandmother losing face by having to work as a waitress in a dim sum teahouse to eventually prostituting herself so that she can fund her husband's grandiose dreams of being a big shot back in China.

Before the lives of her grandparents start to get really bad though, Chong describes how her grandfather returned to China with his concubine and two young daughters in tow. He brings all manner of Canadian goods back to his village, to his "official" wife. He savours the praise from the villagers who are proud that he has not forgotten his wife back home and how he must be rich due to all the gifts he brings back. The truth is that Chong's grandfather is anything but rich and has always struggled to make ends meet in Canada, having to work at whatever job he can find and coming to rely heavily on his second wife to earn the real money in the family.

When the second wife becomes pregnant for the third time (with Chong's mother), the wife insists on returning to Canada so that the baby can be born in Canada. However, she agrees to allow her first two daughters to remain in China under the care of the first wife, because it's custom for Canadian born Chinese children to return to China to begin their formal education. Little would she know that her two daughters would never leave China and she would never see them again.

In the years that follow that trip to China, the grandfather desires to build a grand house for his first wife and two daughters. He also wishes to return to China so that he can father children with the first wife. The second wife grows weary of the husband's controlling ways and eventually encourages him to return so that she can have some freedom for herself and her third daughter. She agrees to finance the building of the grand house of her husband's dream. She can afford to do this because, as a pretty, young woman, she can command good wages in the tea houses as male patrons wait for one of her tables to become available. Knowing that her husband is away only makes her that much more attractive and desirable...

Chong's grandfather returns to China alone to begin construction of his dream house in his village. Over two years, he builds that house and without any shame, writes regularly to his wife back in Canada to send more money as his ambitions grow ever larger. Unbeknownst to him, his wife in Canada has taken to welcoming other men into her bed, because they can offer money and temporarily take care of her gambling debts.

The husband eventually returns to Canada after seeing his dream house completed and having his first wife and two daughters settled in. He even has the satisfaction of fathering a son with his first wife, albeit, it's not entirely joyful due to the son having disfigured feet.

Returning to Canada means leaving the idyllic life in China and having to deal with his young but troublesome wife. He eventually hears rumours of his wife's conduct and how she has taken to one particular man who operates gambling dens in Chinatown. The husband obviously is not pleased and even involves Chong's young mother in the affairs, by taking her to the door of the wife's lovers and asking the daughter to ask her mother to come home. A major loss of face for the husband to first hear the rumours and then to have them confirmed so disturbingly in front of his young daughter.

I won't continue to ruin the book for those that have not read it yet, but I was intrigued by the notion of losing face in Chinese and other Asian cultures. Towards the end of Chong's book, she describes the family reunion between her mother and her older sister and half-brother. The second sister that had been left in China had died many decades before after being sexually and physically attacked as a youngster.

In one of the last conversations Chong's mother has with her long-lost older sister and brother, the China relatives praise their father for building the magnificent house and continuing to provide for them until the end of his life. Chong and her mother bite their tongue to not reveal that the father was far less successful than the China relatives could have imagined and that their home and sustenance during the harsh times of famine and war was principally from the efforts of the concubine, toiling away in tea houses in Vancouver and Nanaimo. Chong and her mother decided not to let the China relatives lose face with just how poor Chong's grandfather had really been and that it had all been a facade all those years.

For the grandfather to have given up on Canada and returned to China as a failure was not an option. So much so that he accepted that his second wife would actually be the real money earner. So much so that he accepted that she would welcome other men to her bed after their own relationship as husband and wife had soured and become a charade. Again, a constant theme of not wanting to lose face and honour to the family in China even if the grandfather had to accept the loss of face and honour in Canada.

I'm not sure I'm making much sense with this comparison of cultures and for sure, loss of face is not just a Chinese phenomenon, as many other cultures place great importance to personal and family honour and not being publicly embarrassed or humiliated. No one likes being dressed down publicly, but personally, loss of face and family honour are not things that consume me like they do with older generations of Chinese in Canada.

March 18, 2010 - Reader's comment:

I reached my photographic limit years ago. I am still on my D200 waiting for a used D3 or a D400 to come out. I am at a cross road as to FX or DX and the next D400 will decide that for me. Once I make that decision, there is no looking back. Like you, a D3S is absolutely  out of the question. Two kids will do that to a man’s budget.

I can barely remember what it was like "only" having two kids and not needing a minivan in order to drive the whole family around 8^)

If you believe Thom Hogan, there's no imminent release of the D400 because Nikon is waiting for Sony to produce a suitable sensor for the D300S' replacement. I'm sure Sony will eventually come up with a nice 15 or 16 MP sensor so that Nikon (and Sony) can keep up with the Joneses offering 14, 15 and 18 MP in their cameras.

However, I don't think there will be too many more cameras of the level of the D300S and Canon 7D, because FX is where it's going to be for those of us with serious pretensions. There's more room to grow for resolution and high ISO image quality than there will be with DX, which is why I've tried to move away from DX, although, I have accepted M4/3 as my counterweight to my FX desires.

March 17, 2010 - The perfect is the enemy of the good – Voltaire

The idea behind the quote by the French philosopher and writer is that at some point, we should be satisfied with what we have and stopped pursuing perfection, since perfection is impossible to achieve in an imperfect world.

While I have photography in mind, it’s an idea that can applied to just about anything of human endeavour. You would think that NASA would seek perfection from its suppliers on something as important as human space travel. After all, NASA is asking men and women to sit atop of a massive amount of liquid hydrogen, which is the fuel that powers the rockets to lift the shuttle into space. There is a huge amount of risk involved, as the Challenger and the Columbia shuttle disasters have proven, and you would think that all those billions spent would go a ways to ensure the safe return of those astronauts. However, that notion was succinctly thrown asunder decades ago by Alan Sheppard, one of the Apollo astronauts, when he quipped:

“It's a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realize that one's safety factor was determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract.”

Sobering indeed when you consider that the Saturn V rocket is essentially an oversized ICBM and the astronauts are sitting atop of a controlled explosion to blast them into space.

On another front, you would think that Steve Jobs and Apple strive for perfection (at least according to diehard Macheads), but why is the printing chain broken in Snow Leopard when one tries to use a custom printer profile with Adobe CS4? Sorry, that was a gratuitous shot, and it does nothing to stop my desire to own some more Mac computers J

Photographically, I want a D3S, but my budget won’t allow for that kind of camera, so I pine away for Nikon to come up with a D700-esque camera that I hope to be able to afford. Mind you, we’re still talking about CAD $3,000 or more, which I’m soberly reminded, used to be what a top-notch pro film camera cost back in the day and if you bought one, you were good for up to eight years before the replacement would arrive. Now, $3,000 just gets you second best, but for me, that second best is good enough. For many others, second best is still way too good, read too expensive, to consider and for them a D300 is good enough, and so on down the chain based on your photographic needs and budget. Reach down low enough and you will get to the consumer who buys a $100 digicam and says, good enough.

As a co-worker reminded me recently, we all have our own priorities for what is important and what takes precedence. For the co-worker, it might be new tires for his BMW rather than a Panasonic GH-1. For me, depending on my mood and what’s happening at any given time in my life, it might be that hoped for Nikon SLR, it might be a new computer, it might be new piece of hi-fi, or it might be as mundane as a new couch for the living room so that I have somewhere to nap before dinner (I’m getting to that age now that I need those naps to get through the evening, ugh!)

Since, I and probably most of you, are not flushed with cash, actually buying something means compromising on something else. Buy a new camera and lens this year and the computer upgrade will have to wait at least a year. Doing this means that I’ve decided that my existing computer is still good enough, because I decided that the camera and lens I’ve been using before is not good enough and that I need better. Or, maybe more accurately in my case, the cameras and lenses I may have been using (Canon) may have to be returned, which would force the issue if I wish to continue being a photographer.

Not that losing the Canon gear means that I’m hard done by, because I still have a couple of Panasonic cameras to use, which I consider as good enough for general, everyday photography. However, neither Panasonic camera is good enough for using in very low light and for action.

Unfortunately, the D40 sized, 24 MP SLR that can shoot at 5 fps at full resolution, but can ramp up to 10 fps at half resolution for sports, all for less than $1,000, does not exist. In other words, as I’ve reminded my co-worker and others, there is no one camera that can do and be all that you want for as cheap as you want to pay. That’s why those who take photography seriously and passionately, understand the need for multiple cameras in the kit. However, even this requires compromise when funds are limited.

Who wouldn’t want that awesome 60 MP Phase digital back system, provided of course that you could afford the kind of bucks that would get you a nicely kitted BMW X3. For me, reality means that a Canon 5D2 or a Sony A850 is good enough instead of going for a digital back or even a Nikon D3X (and as I mentioned previously, before I buy a D3X, I'll buy the Pentax 645D instead).

At some point, everyone reaches their limit, whether it be due to fiscal restraint or just practical reasons. An 8x10 large format camera may still be the ultimate in image quality for a field capable camera, but unless you’re using a pack mule to haul that gear, most of us would likely prefer a nice high resolution SLR kit instead.

March 15, 2010 - Continuing on a theme from my last post, where I discussed that I'm in no particular rush to buy new gear and will bide my time to buy the "right" camera and lenses, I thought I'd add some more thoughts to this idea.

My attitude towards buying new gear has often been about maximizing value for my money. There's not that much of it, so those meagre dollars have to be stretched to the maximum. One way to do this is to buy quality right from the start so that I don't have to replace it frequently.

This is hard to do with cameras, especially at the enthusiast and pro level, because there have been very good qualitative jumps with each generation, so it's been hard to buy for the long term like you could with film cameras. Consider how significant the jump in image quality was when Nikon replaced the D2 series with the D3 series. Even at a lower price bracket, the D300 was a nice jump up over the D200, which itself was a nice jump up from the D100.

Biding for the right buying time means that the D700 is now, finally, reasonably priced, but that's only because it seems obvious that it will be replaced by a new model. Do you spend good money on what is now three year old technology, or should you wait a bit longer and spend more to buy the replacement that will utilize current technology? Like I said before, something newer is always around the corner, so you could wait indefinitely if there's no pressing need to buy right now.

A while back, I came pretty close to pulling the trigger on the D700, but the D3S's improvement over the original D3 is compelling enough to make me want to wait it out a bit longer. If Nikon does come out with a D700S that uses the same sensor as the D3S, I think I can honestly say that buying it will result in a longer term of usage and satisfaction than has normally been the case for me in the digital era.

Biding time and desiring quality is also something that applies to computers. There's no secret to my desire to make my next big computer purchase an Apple Mac Pro, but here, timing is actually key, because you can do some research and come up with some logical speculation about what's coming down the pipe.

Six-core CPUs are coming and if you're going to blow four or five big ones on a computer and if you're not in dire need to upgrade now, might as well wait it out. Other trends to watch is the use of SSDs as OS/system drives, which might finally free us from the shackles of mechanical survivorship of traditional hard drives. Getting a significant boost in performance is just the icing on the sundae. The only question is how quickly will prices come down as SSDs become more mainstream.

At this time, I can easily see that my next computer will use SSDs for the OS while large capacity HDDs will still be used for data until the price-to-capacity ratio comes down on large capacity SSDs.

Also on the computer front, I would love to add another 30-inch monitor to the system and while I can do so for a little over $1000, I don't want to do so just for the sake of having dual 30-inch monitors. I want that next big monitor to be a really high quality unit capable of at least Adobe RGB gamut. I'd love a pro quality Eizo, but I know that fiscal reality will likely mean a pretty good NEC unit instead. However, we're still talking well over $2k, so again, it's biding time and taking stock of which pieces of gear I place priority on, e.g. do I want that new Nikon SLR and 70-200 lens more than I want a Mac Pro?

Ultimately, I may end up with no new photo or computer gear in 2010, as our new house still needs furniture. It's kinda hard to sit down and relax on a pile of camera and lens boxes... 8^)

There's also the notion that gear that's "good enough" should be all that I need...more thoughts to come on this.

March 12, 2010 - A co-worker asked about the new Panasonic G2 and G10 and wondered which would be more suited for him. This is the same co-worker who likes the GH-1 concept and size, but not so much the price. With this in mind, I suggested that the G10 is the one I'd bet money on him buying, because it offers most of what the G2 offers but for less money. I also threw in a little dig that I wouldn't be holding my breath on him buying one anytime soon. He shot back that photography doesn't have the same priority for him as it does me.

I had to chuckle at that, because times have changed and if anything, I'm more like my co-worker than I am to myself circa three or four years ago. In reviewing my recent history, I really have not spent a whole lot of "new" money in buying gear. The D300 was bought from proceeds of selling my two D200 cameras. The Panasonic GF1 was bought from proceeds of selling gear from my last garage sale. There's nothing on the market that has me excited enough to want to part with "new" money just yet.

The Pentax 645D is a product that once it ships, would qualify, but the price, even if much nicer than other digital medium format offerings, is still too dear. The Nikon 70-200 Mk II lens is something I desire, but not on its own. I want to see what Nikon has to offer in the way of new SLRs before I make that plunge. Having access to Canon cameras and lenses also help significantly to keep my spendthrift ways in check at the moment.

I don't know if it's just merely because we're in between major product releases (for Nikon), or if maybe I'm finally feeling satiated and don't have that consumer spending drive anymore. Is it a sign that digital is maturing and that new product cycles will no longer offer significant improvements in image quality, e.g. the new Panasonic cameras don't seem to offer anything meaningful over the older existing cameras. Yes the G2 has video whereas the G1 did not, but then the GH-1 still has superior video resolution over the G2/G10.

I'm not exactly at the point of being one those consumers who always talks about wanting to buy a new camera or computer, but never does, because the next generation is always just around the corner, so might as well wait it out just a bit longer...

Which means never buying a thing due to a fear of buying at the wrong end of the cycle.

No sooner does the thought of consumer satiation come out of my mouth do I start thinking about a lens that I think is missing from the Panasonic and Olympus line up for the M4/3 format: a super telephoto zoom lens.

Panasonic does have a 45-200 lens and Olympus does have a 70-300 lens, but those are for the older 4/3 lens mount, not for M4/3 unless you use an adapter. I would like to see something like a 100-300, a 100-400, or even a 100-500mm lens that will focus properly with the GH-1. Somehow, I think I'll have to count on Sigma to come through by adapting one of its existing super zoom lenses to M4/3 mount (Sigma makes the 50-500 lens available for the regular 4/3 mount).

Mike Johnston has done it again with another brilliant post at the TOP about Leica and its current ownership. A while back Michael Reichmann and Thom Hogan offered their thoughts on where Leica should be headed for future M cameras, but Johnston rebuts them by suggesting that Leica's time is now and that it has the ideal owner in place to see it through any rough patches.

I've been one of those that Johnston scoffs at for suggesting that Leica should sell itself to a larger company able to keep it going, e.g. Panasonic, which has an existing partnership with Leica. Johnston makes a valid point that huge companies may not have the patience to allow Leica to develop and flourish within its niche, whereas the current owner, a wealthy enthusiast, does and will.

What Johnston's article serves to remind is that we all have our biases and thoughts on how companies should operate and what they need to do to make their products even better. No company can operate to serve the individual needs of all its users.

I might have a thought or two about Nikon for example, as do many others, but catering to my whims would not necessarily make Nikon a better camera and lens maker...well, it might for my specific needs, but who's to say my needs are the same as yours.

March 11, 2010 - Came across this interesting article about lens testing and lens quality at Lenswork Technology blog (Brook's Jensen's paean to those wanting his thoughts on technology and gear).

March 10, 2010 - I hate spring! It's the most brutal season for me. While others are looking forward to the end of winter and the snow and the darkness, I dread the arrival of the next season because of my allergies. Sometimes, the allergies start later and sometimes sooner. Some years are bad and other years are mild, but I'll still be affected in some way until well into summer. Adding to my misery this year is a cold that masks the hayfever; I'm not sure if I'm sneezing and having a runny nose because of the pollen or because of the cold. Having kids just makes spring that much more worse to bear, because kids get sick and when the kids get sick, I get sick. Humbug to spring!

With that mild rant out of my system (if only the allergies could be so exorcised), I'm intrigued and delighted that Pentax has finally seen fit to produce the long awaited digital 645 camera. It's been an on and off tease from Pentax for too many years, but finally, there is a real camera instead of a mockup and the specs don't seem too bad for the money.

$10,000 USD gets you a 40 MP SLR. Considering how pricey some 35mm format SLRs are, that's a veritable bargain. The downside is that the digital sensor is integral to the camera, so upgrading means buying a whole new camera, just like with the Leica S2 system. However, at $10,000, that's significantly cheaper than the standalone digital backs, so it seems to me that you still come out ahead with the Pentax 645D system. And, Pentax lenses are certainly more reasonably priced than from Hasselblad or Leica and perhaps, even from Mamiya/Phase.

This is very promising and kudos to Pentax (and to the parent company, Hoya) for sticking to the dream, even if a few years late to the party.

The one potential sour note is talk that the 645D is only going to be available in Japan, which would be a shame not to make it more widely available. The price is kickass and if the image quality is there...

As a Nikon guy, I'm hankering for a D3X in a lower cost body a la the D700, but as it stands now with no such camera available, if I had to choose between the D3X and the 645D, the D3X loses and that's considering the extra cost in having to buy Pentax 645 lenses.

Unless something really exceptional comes out of the Nikon/Canon camps, the 645D already looks like the camera of the year.

March 8, 2010 - Moose Peterson always talks about wanting clouds in his landscape photos, because clouds add drama and spice. I'd read his advice and then slot it away in my memory without really thinking about it, but when I took the sunset photo above a few weeks back, I realized how right Moose is.

Compare the one above to the one below, taken about a week after from a slightly different location (but still the same scene). Not a cloud in the sky and while the color is there, there's no drama to let the colors dance in the sky.

Panasonic announced two new M4/3 cameras on the weekend. The G2 is the successor to the first M4/3 camera, the G1, while the second is a more basic version called the G10. I think Panasonic is taking a cue from Olympus, which has the E-P1, the original catering to enthusiasts and the newer E-PL1, which caters to those wanting a more simple camera to use.

I have to admit to some disappointment with the Panasonic offering, as neither seem to be of interest to those of us with a G1 or GH-1. The G2 does offer ISO 6400, but come on, does anyone really expect it to be of any use? The touch screen LCD is not enough either to garner my interest.

Resolution wise, both Panasonic cameras offer the same 12 MP as the G1/GH-1/GF1, which indicates to me that both Panasonic and Olympus recognize that 12 MP is a nice sweet spot for the M4/3 format. Either that or else Kodak has not come out with a higher resolution sensor yet. However, I like that neither brand is chasing MPs like Canon is doing recently.

I was down in Seattle for a couple of days last week. I like Seattle, as it's quite similar to Vancouver, which is no surprise since it's only a three-hour drive away. Meaning that it's overcast and it rains a fair bit during winter, because it's in a temperate rainforest region. Here are a few snaps from walking around the downtown core:

This rather non-descript building has some historic significance for coffee lovers all over the world...

It's the very first Starbucks store, located across the street from the Pike St. Market - note the original logo is rather more revealing than the current one (the boobs, for those that don't know)

Inside the original Starbucks

My usual order from any Starbucks, a Grande Pike - Pike as in Pike St.

Across the street is the Pike St. Market, where the fishmongers are famous for tossing the fish around

Chili peppers and garlic

The view from the waterfront beside the market

I was trying to get some God-beam action happening in this photo, but didn't quite nail it

Qwest Field, home of the Seahawks - I used to go to a game every year, but ever since the Seahawks made it to the SuperBowl back in 2006, it's been difficult to get tickets

Interesting architecture and an interesting and very well stocked bar, where I had lunch

March 3, 2010 - Oh Canada, Our home and native land…

We heard the opening lyric to Canada’s national anthem 14 times during the Vancouver Olympics. 14 times – that’s a record for the most gold medals won by a nation’s athletes for any winter Olympics and redemption for our poor showing the last time we hosted in 1988 with the Calgary games (Canada also did not win a gold medal when we hosted the 1976 Montreal summer games).

As seems to be the norm, every Olympic Games, whether summer or winter, seems to be surrounded with controversy. Typically, the controversy concerns the astronomical costs spent to host a two-and-a-half week extravaganza. New sporting facilities have to be built along with an athlete’s village and infrastructure capable of supporting thousands of athletes, officials and fans pouring into town. There is also the now immense cost of security due the current geopolitical climate – no host city wants a repeat of Munich 1972, or even Atlanta 1996. No final figures are out yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the cost for the Vancouver games hits over $6 billion mark with $1 billion spent on security alone.

In the years leading up to the Games, Vancouverites had to put up with constant construction in the downtown core. There was already a building boom for other projects but adding the Olympics-related projects led to many inconveniences for downtown workers.

Then there is the new light rail commuter train line to connect downtown Vancouver with its suburb of Richmond and the international airport. Definitely, a need for the city, but economically devastating for so many small businesses along the Cambie St. corridor that found customers staying away due to the long-term construction project.

There is also the new convention centre that was home base for the international media during the Games. A gleaming wall-to-wall glass structure that is a beauty, but was fraught with cost overruns.

The original budget for the Vancouver games had to be revised a few years back when the building boom (pre 2008 economic crisis) in Vancouver led to a spike in wages paid to trades workers. However, remarkably, the revised budget did not become a revised-revised-revised budget, as has happened with other Olympic games. The facilities were completed on time or ahead of schedule and on (revised) budget. This allowed athletes an opportunity to train and familiarize themselves with the runs in Whistler and the Oval in Richmond.

The kind of money spent is something that sticks in the craw of social activists, who can only dream of what that kind of largesse might accomplish to reduce or even eliminate poverty, drug abuse and prostitution while being able to provide shelter for the homeless. Protestors tried to make their mark on the games and while they did receive some attention in the lead up to the Games, they were largely ignored once the games began.

On the last Saturday of the Games, as I waited outside of the Canada Pavilion with my napping toddler for my wife and our older kids to finish their tour inside, I observed protestors putting up banners around the pavilion to create a red wall. There was a large police presence on foot and bicycle around the pavilion and, as I assume, on the protesters side, there were orange-shirted “legal observers” watching the interaction between the police and protestors. Nothing happened, as the protesters were allowed to erect their red wall and the police merely observed. I did see one police officer ride around with a camcorder, which I gather is for intelligence purposes to get the faces of the protestors.

In the downtown eastside, where many of Vancouver’s homeless and drug addicts congregate, a tent city sprung up on a vacant lot to protest the lavish spending for the games while the destitute receive nothing. This neighbourhood, Canada’s poorest, has long been an embarrassment for Vancouver and its citizens. Vancouver, being the terminus for the national railway and Trans Canada Highway, attracts many from all over Canada who like the mild winters. Unfortunately, they also bring all their problems and make them our problems.

How can we continue to claim that Vancouver is one of the best and most liveable cities in the world when we have an area of the city that looks like a third world slum? Where drug deals occur in the open around the clock and the back alleys are strewn with used needles and condoms. Surely, reasonable people would not allow such a blight to continue?

Well, Vancouverites are reasonable people and no one would claim not to care, but past experience with spending large amounts of money for various programs have not worked. No one has come up with a solution that can comprehensively deal with all the issues confronting the downtown eastside. If someone could, I think Vancouverites would be quite willing to spend the money, but we won’t accept throwing money at the problem willy-nilly just because the activists demand it.

You can take the homeless off the street and put them in government funded housing, but what ends up happening is within months, the housing units are damaged and filth ridden. You can have safe injection sites so that addicts can shoot up with clean needles. It helps to reduce the spread of HIV and Hepatitis, but does nothing to combat the actual problem, the addiction to drugs. You can try and help until your heart bleeds, but not everyone wants to be helped due to mental illness.

One promising initiative that may revitalize the area is to redevelopment. The epicentre of redevelopment is the old Woodward's department store, a former Vancouver icon. The original front facade made of brick has been kept, but everything else behind it has been rebuilt to accommodate new businesses and residences in the form of two connecting towers. In a few years, the streets around Woodward's could be the new "chic" for yuppies, but what will happen to the poor that used to live in the area? Probably pushed further east if they cannot get into some of the social housing units within the new Woodward's complex.

On the topic of money, Canada spent a fair bit of it on a program called, Own the Podium (OTP). Through most of Olympic history, Canada has had some success, but for the most part, we’ve been a mediocrity, because successive federal governments have never taken sports seriously. I think the turning point for the change in attitude was with Sidney 2000, when our fellow Commonwealth nation (former colonies of the British Empire) of Australia showed off what can happen when a government and nation stand behind its athletes. The Aussies had smashing success with their summer games and if and when Vancouver won the right to host the 2010 Winter Olympics, there was no damn way that we could accept the mediocrity of the past.

The OTP received over $100 million to help our athletes prepare to compete in their home country and the results speak for themselves. Canada won more medals in Vancouver than in any past winter games that Canada has participated in and we won the most gold. We didn’t win the overall medal count, as we came in third, but I think we can walk with some deserved swagger in our step.

The results and incredible pride felt by Canadians all across the country has led many to decry this newfound attitude of ours. How un-Canadian of us to not rollover like doormats in the face of tough competition. How un-Canadian to be so fervently patriotic that Americans of all people, were chiding us for our attitude.

One American journalist tastelessly described the Vancouver Games as if it was Berlin 1936, when the Nazis tried to show off the superiority of the Aryan race and swastikas were everywhere. Imagine, the red maple leaf of the Canadian flag akin to the swastika; it defies imagination that some people can so easily forget how truly repulsive, repugnant and evil the Nazi era is. The journalist is an ignorant boob for making the analogy, but it’s not because it insults Canada, but because it insults the memory of all those that fought and died in the battle against the Nazis, and that includes a great many Canadians and Americans who fought together in both world wars.

Other journalists, especially those from the UK, also battered us during the first few days of the Games. Some even called it the worst games ever before a single day of competition had concluded. To be sure, the death of the Georgian luger is a horrible and tragic way for the Games to have begun and the Vancouver games will forever have that mark against it. However, the UK press seemed hell-bent on dismissing these Games no matter what the slight, including, irony, the weather.

I talked to a co-worker who is originally from the UK and he says that this is normal of the UK press to complain and piss on everyone. No wonder Prince Charles was overheard muttering how much he despised the media to his two sons during a ski trip. One wonders if this is a pre-emptive assault to mitigate any potential shortcomings for the London 2012 Summer Games.

Athletically, Canadians did start slow and it was not until the second week that we found consistent success culminating with the climax of the men’s gold medal hockey game that pitted Canada against the US on the very last day of the Games. A game won in overtime by the Next One, Sidney Crosby. A goal that all Canadians instantly gave an uproarious cheer for yet silently let out a sigh of huge relief that our men’s hockey team did not let the biggest gold medal of the Games slip out of their hands.

I don’t want to take away from the other sports and the excellence that those athletes showed during competition, but in Canada, hockey is the game and if we did not win this gold, despite all the records set by Canada, Vancouver 2010 would be marred. Instead, we won and over 100,000 fans celebrated in downtown Vancouver, joined by thousands more in cities across Canada celebrating the same victory.

Hockey matters as much to us as football does in Texas. It unifies us as a nation. As our prime minister, Stephen Harper, remarked in an interview, hockey is a sport that brings new and old Canadians together. When new immigrants discover hockey and bring their kids to the rink to play they will mix and mingle with other parents who are similarly sharing the delights of early, pre-dawn hockey practices and a cup of Tim Horton’s coffee. It doesn’t matter if you’re French, English, Jewish, Chinese, Punjabi, African, whatever you are and wherever you’re from, playing hockey is a rite of passage for our kids.

My son’s team has a mix, a mosaic of Canadians from varied communities with Italian, German, Croatian, Scottish, Chinese, Korean, East Indian and mixed ancestries. The income levels vary too with private school kids playing on the same team with public school kids, but none of this matter, because hockey is the passion for the kids and their parents.

it matters to us that we win at our game, that we're not afraid to get rough and muck around in the areas that others dare not skate into; that we play with every ounce of our heart worn on our sleeve.

Brian Burke, the general manager of Team USA, is a tough son-of-a-gun. A big bear of an Irishman who loves Canadian style hockey and built his team to reflect toughness and truculence, because he knows the way to beat Team Canada is to play a Canadian style game. As much as I was happy that Team Canada won, I could not help but feel sadness and sympathy for Burke when I saw how dejected he looked sitting on the player's bench. Before the games, he had the task of burying his son, who died in a car accident. To have won gold would not have changed anything, but it would have been a small salve to a wound that no parent should ever bear.

I have a lot of admiration for Burke, because he has significant ties to the Vancouver Canucks as first an assistant GM in the early 1990s and then as GM in the late 1990s. His wife is from Vancouver (his second marriage) and those Canadian ties weighed heavily in his decision to leave the Anaheim Ducks to join the Toronto Maple Leafs as their GM.

Burke is not the only one that had to face tragedy during the games. As mentioned, Nodar Kumaritashvili, the Georgian luger died during a training run the day the Game's opening ceremony was held.

Then there is Joannie Rochette from Quebec, who was fulfilling a lifelong dream to skate for Canada in the Olympics. To have that dream occur in Canada is pure icing, but all of those dreams shattered when Rochette's mother died of a sudden heart attack soon after arriving in Vancouver to watch her little girl skate her dream. Rochette carried on and skated for her mother and won bronze. She carried Canada's flag during the closing ceremony, which is as it should be for showing us courage in the face of tragedy.

For three weeks, downtown Vancouver has been party central. We embraced the Games, we welcomed the world and we were unabashedly proud to show our red and white colors. Canadian flags were everywhere, hanging from office windows and apartment balconies. Canadian Olympic clothing sold as quickly as could be stocked. The official Canadian hockey jersey became the unofficial uniform on the street. Needless to say, Hockey Canada made a fortune on all those $150 jerseys sold.

After the closing ceremonies on Sunday, I wondered what it would be like coming into work on Monday morning. It was surreal to suddenly go from seeing thousands of people on the street to seeing nearly empty streets. It’s relief from one perspective because it means a return to normalcy, but it’s also sad that the good times suddenly came to an end. However, the greater legacy of the Vancouver Games is that it awoke Canadians to realize that we don’t need to be happy with second or third (or fourth or fifth) best anymore and that there’s no shame in wanting to win and clearly stating that goal too for all the world to hear.

Canada has a bit of a fractious history between the majority English and minority French from Quebec. Two referendums have occurred to decide if Quebec should secede from Canada and while somewhat dormant, there is still a strong nationalist movement in the province. However, during the games, every French Canadian athlete unambiguously declared their pride in representing Canada.

For Canada, the hero of the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Games is Gaétan Boucher, a speed skater from Quebec who won two gold and one bronze. After the games, when he returned home to great fanfare, the nationalist movement tried to recruit him for their cause. But, he refused and he declared that he did not compete for French Canada or English Canada, but for all of Canada. I think the Vancouver Games will create similar pride in our French athletes. The incoming chair of the Canadian Olympic Committee, a Quebecor, said of the Vancouver Games, "This was nation building at its best."

Oh Canada, we stand on guard for thee!

The Team Leong Bob Sled Team

March 2, 2010 - Excuse the tardiness. Between work, family and, oh yes, a little thing happening in Vancouver the last three weeks called the Winter Olympics, I've been a bit busy.

The Olympics have been a blast for us living in Vancouver and despite a bit of a wobbly start, we've ended with a huge bang and pulled off what I think is the best Winter Olympics ever. Years down the road, when Canadians look back at our nation's history, these Olympics games will be regarded as a defining moment. A moment when all Canadians took immense pride in being Canadian without apology and without stepping aside, as has been our wont (or how we've been regarded by others).

I have a lot more I want to say about how these games affected us, but I need another day or so to gather my thoughts, so bear with me.

February 22, 2010 - Reader's comment:

You know what POs me about DPR? They take the Pop Photo "everything's wonderful" attitude with viewfinders. I read a comment in the D3S review that really blew me:

"The D3S shows approximately 100% frame coverage in both the viewfinder, and the LCD screen in Live View mode. Because of the smaller tolerances necessary in creating 100% viewfinders, they are typically only found in high-end DSLRs, where a price premium is already expected."

So the D700 with a 95% finder @ $3300 (introduction) is just a cheap camera to them? But then I carry a grudge from when they called the D70 finder ($1450) "Excellent". I still suffer when processing several year old files from that camera. I swear the chip was mounted crooked.

Anyway I'm passing on a tidbit from my old friend who has already ordered a 1Ds MKIV. Seems like it will be 32MP and out Tuesday for June delivery. We'll obviously know more next week. 12MP is looking a bit silly these days, need it or not. Remember those DX crop options only yield about 5MP. Fine for one inch magazine spreads.

So that's the news. You may want to have a look at the new Sigmas on DPR right now. A few actually look interesting.

I came across the 32 MP Canon rumour a little while ago and it won't surprise me if it comes to past. Canon took a brief break from the megapixel wars with the G series, but is full steam ahead with the SLRs. I suppose someone's going to do it, so it might as well be Canon since it has traditionally pushed the edge of the art for resolution for 35mm format SLRs. I suppose a 5D Mk III won't be too far off (2010 Xmas season rush) and will offer the same 32 MP resolution.

At 32 MP, that should be about 7,000x4,500 pixels (or thereabouts) and would mean being able to print 20 inches at the long end at 360 dpi or 24 inches at 300 dpi. Sweet, but is Canon going to introduce revised lenses that can keep up with that kind of resolution, e.g. like the new 70-200 f2.8 IS lens?

As for Sigma, I have to say that Sigma has got some nice lenses in its line now and as long as the QA is there, the line is a very real alternative to the main brands. I'll be quite curious to see how its new 70-200 f2.8 OS lens compares to the new Nikon and Canon versions. I also hope that Sigma will introduce OS versions of its super telephoto prime lenses, which will be more price friendly than the main brands.

Sigma is also showing up Nikon with that 85mm f1.4 HSM, because it's long been rumoured that Nikon is going to come out with an AFS version of its highly regarded short telephoto. Nikon had better get on it before it starts losing sales to Sigma.

The new 14 MP Foveon sensor in the SD15 should also be interesting to see how it will compare to 12 MP cameras such as the D300S. Remember, Sigma is adding the three RGB layers to come up with 14 MP, so the single layer resolution is actually a bit less than 5 MP. Is the sensor still a 1.7x crop factor, as that's kind of lame not to be at least be 1.5x sized.

Olympic fever is upon us in Vancouver. Coming into downtown on Friday morning, the day of the opening ceremonies, the excitement was palpable. People were rushing to Seymour Street where the Olympic torch relay was going along in the downtown core. Everyone asked each other if they saw the torch and the symbolic flame. I did from a distance when I walked up Granville Street and noticed the torch coming down parallel along Seymour. The flame was probably a good two feet high above all the spectators’ heads. My kids also saw the flame as it came by only a couple of blocks away from our house when it was coming through Burnaby. We let the kids skip school Thursday morning so that they could watch a piece of history go by.

People kept asking me if I’m going to go to any events for some photography, but what’s a working stiff to do with kids to feed and a mortgage to pay. Ticket prices are sky high. A hockey game between the second tier teams will set you back something like $150 each, but I have to acknowledge that going to an NHL game to watch the Canucks can be just, if not more expensive.

Which is why I haven’t paid to see a Canucks game in many years and have only gone when I’ve been able to get free tickets. The last Canucks game I attended, my brother-in-law gave me two tickets to take my son to see the Tampa Bay Lightning, my son’s favourite team. He knew my son loves the Lightning and gave him the tickets as a Christmas present. Face value, $150 per seat.

In the seats below us during that Canucks game, was a young family of four. One of the kids had a Canucks jersey and they all had meals, drinks and snacks at the game. If the family really paid for those tickets, I wouldn’t be surprised if the game cost $700 or more for them. That staggers me and involves the kind of discretionary spending I can only dream of. It’s not that I don’t spend that kind of money, because I obviously do, but I want something back for that outlay instead of just memories of a regular season hockey game between two average teams.

However, I don’t want to let my fiscal depravation be a downer, because as much as the Olympics are a hassle for Vancouverites (commuting headaches with street closures, security helicopters buzzing overheard non-stop and immense crowds of people), it’s going to be an awesome time. The kind of buzz takes me back to 1986 when Vancouver hosted the World Exposition, which was a coming out party for the city. No surprise that Vancouver has boomed mightily since that summer-long world’s fair. The Winter Olympics will introduce Vancouver to the next generation of the world’s travellers.

After watching the opening ceremonies and seeing Wayne Gretzky light the outdoor cauldron, I’m thinking, yah, I gotta take a photo of that.

I didn’t venture out to the outdoor flame until the following Wednesday after the opening ceremonies to scout out the location. When I arrived at the location (beside the new convention center), I discovered that the cauldron is surrounded by a mesh wire fence and that you cannot get closer than about 50 feet to it.

Vancouver's new convention center - very sleek and elegant compared to the old center with its white sails

The fence is about ten feet high, but at around the five-foot high level, the mesh wire fence has about a five-inch gap to allow unobstructed photographs to be taken. Luckily for me, Wednesday happened to be the day that officials moved the fence in from about 100 feet away to 50 feet and is also when the gap was cut out of the fence. If I had arrived earlier than Wednesday, I would have had to shoot through the fence from quite a distance. All this due to fears that rabble-rousers will protest and do something to the cauldron.

Barricaded behind a wire mesh fence with only a small gap to take unobstructed photos - lame!

The location is quite nice with a view of the harbour, Burrard Inlet and the north shore mountains, some of which are barren of snow, a bit of a sore spot for organizers and the events being held at Cypress Mountain in West Vanvouver; however, that damned fence...

Also starting Wednesday, Olympic officials allowed public access to the roof of a side building to the west of the cauldron so that you can photograph it at a good height without a fence being in the way.

My Wednesday, lunch time visit was a scouting trip to find out where the cauldron is located and see what kind of vantage point is available. While I did take some photos with the Panasonic GH-1, the photos taken at high noon are not the ones I wanted. The photo that I really want to take is a twilight photo when the sky is a deep blue, which will provide a nice contrast to the orange flame.

I returned the following morning, around 6:30 am, with the Canon 5D2 and 70-200 lens to take some photos before coming into work. After taking some photos, I initially considered this outing to be another trial session, because I wanted to take more photos with my tripod.

The flame is far too bright to expose properly and still get the blue twilight in the background. It’s a classic catch-22 of exposing for the highlights or exposing for the shadows. I wanted a tripod to ensure proper registration for a multiple of photos for an attempt at HDR compositing.

Although 6:30 am is quite early, it was not so early for several other photographers wanting to take photos of the flame. A few were smarter than me and brought along their tripods and one fellow even had a 4x5 view camera.

I returned the following morning with my Gitzo tripod and tried again with the Canon 5D2 and 70-200 lens. I even brought along a Canon remote cable so that I can avoid manually releasing the shutter. I shot in manual mode, bracketing the shutter speeds from 1 second to 1/2000 at f8 and at varying ISO settings from 100 to 400. Combined with the Thursday session, I probably took 150 photos, hoping to get the right combination of composition (without the damned fence being seen) and right amount of blue sky with detail in the flame.

After I finished on the Friday morning, I noticed another photographer with a great setup to work around the fence problem. He had a Manfrotto tripod with a horizontal side arm, which allowed him to place his camera and lens past the fence and photograph unobstructed. Sweet setup, but not likely to be the most rigid and stable for the heavy combination of 5D2 and 70-200 lens – this photographer had a compact, lightweight SLR kit.

As with everything with an Olympic theme, the flame is very popular. I even saw police officers posing in front of the flame for photos. However, I heard and read of a few comments about that blasted fence. One visitor quipped that it was like Berlin, as in the famous Cold War symbol of oppression that divided Berlin in half.

Another paraphrased Ronald Reagan’s cry, of, Mr. Gorbachev, take down this wall! Yes, please, Mr. Furlong, take down this wall! Pink Floyd’s the Wall also came to mind when Roger Waters plaintively responded to his mother’s words of “Mama’s going to build baby a wall,” with, “Mother, did it need to be so high?”

Yes, did it need to be so high? Does the fence really need to be ten feet high? Wouldn’t a four foot fence have been enough to keep civic minded visitors from getting too close while still providing a much better photo opportunity? As it turns out, the organizers finally did take down the wire mesh fence, but replaced it with a plexiglass fence. As of this writing, I've not seen it yet to determine how well one can photograph the cauldron now.

Back at home, I tried the HDR process, but alas, those flames are not static and presented too much of a contrast range to work properly. I had to compromise and find an image where the flames are not wholly burnt out, while still being able to tweak the details of the cauldron and a bit of the background blue tone that I wanted.

I finished taking my flame photos as the sun was rising

Speaking of Olympics and photography, as you would imagine, Vancouver has thousands of visitors with most carrying cameras to record their time in the city. I’ve never seen so many SLRs on the streets of Vancouver. Most are of the consumer to enthusiast level with varying degrees of quality for the lenses, but it’s been a wonderful sight to marvel for this photographer and I’ve enjoyed seeing them take photos of all that Vancouver has to offer.

I did manage to attend one event, a hockey game between Switzerland and Norway and found it to be an entertaining game even if these are second tier teams compared to Canada, Russia, the USA and Sweden. And, for the record, I did not buy, as a cousin invited me to the game.

Getting into the arena was like going through airport security. You have to empty your pockets of all the contents and then walk through a metal detector. However, the security made no fuss of the myriad of cameras I saw used by the fans inside, many of which were SLRs, albeit with shorter lenses. The only pro quality lenses I saw were used by the PJs covering the game.

While I think most of the fans had Team Canada jerseys on, there was an even split between the Swiss and Norway fans. These fans are genuine Swiss fans from the country rather than just Canadians of Swiss origins.

The arena was packed to near capacity for the game and it had an NHL game feel to it

Robson and Granville Streets - completely packed with people - it was difficult to weave your way through the crowds, with the most popular corners almost impossible to get through when my cousin and I walked around after watching the Saturday afternoon hockey game

Is this art? Is below art?

February 20, 2010 - Reader's comment:

I had the exact same reaction to the DP review. Do these guys ever review what they wrote in the past. Unbelievable! The difference between 12 and 24 megapixels is pretty irrelevant for most of us. My bias here is as a recent D3S owner, but still, I think Lloyd Chambers has it correct. He has always liked the "high-res" stuff. But, when he got super excited about the D3s ...it had a lot more to do with what the files looked like at all ISO's. The real advantage of the D3s is at ISO's of 800 - 3200. These files simply look amazing at these settings. Yes, the camera is capable at stratospheric ISO settings, but that isn't why I bought this camera. The files at "real-world" ISO's is simply amazing ...simply outstanding. The files shot at 800 look like 200 or BETTER! This is the real advantage of the camera to NON-PJ's, in my opinion. It's surely nice to be able to go up the ISO ladder, but WOW ...the files at 3200 are just stunning.

Also, my initial issue with purchasing this camera (the most expensive I have every bought) had to do with the size. What was I thinking? This thing is a tank. What I have found is that the best low light shooter is one that is very steady. I can shoot this at low shutter speeds because it just doesn't move. With just basic good low-light technique, you can hold this puppy very steady. The mass of the camera is a huge benefit. This is a great revelation ...I always wanted the smaller, lighter DSLR's when I was "street shooting" because of the walk. No more. BTW: most people don't know what camera you have when the light is really low, so the issue of having "too nice a camera" is not very problematic when it is really "dark."

Nothing like these kind of comments to get the green-eyed monster in me glowing with envy.

You know, I like DPReview because they have a consistent way of writing reviews and offering various crops so that you can objectively compare one camera to another, but they do seem to live in the moment and, as you said, seem to forget about what they wrote in the past.

Take the Canon 7D. A nice camera and all, but what I recall DPReview saying about it is that it has the same noise characteristics as the Canon 50D. This is considered a good thing given that the 7D offers another 3 MP of resolution over the 50D, so Canon was able to increase resolution while keeping the high ISO noise at the same level as a previous generation camera.

However, the 50D was essentially trashed for high ISO noise compared to its predecessor, the 40D. So in essence, the 7D has worse noise than a camera two generations older than it, which should not be the way it goes when cameras are retired and replaced. You expect succeeding cameras to be better.

And, while we're talking about the megapixel wars, looks like Canon has broken the cease fire and gone ahead with a full bore assault now that its higher end Rebel model offers the same 18 MP resolution as the 7D.

Do the people Canon expect to buy the new Rebel really need 18 MP? I've made no bones about being a resolution whore myself and I usually, but not always, think that more resolution is better, but you need to accept the baggage that comes with more resolution.

More powerful computer, more storage space, more editing time, more flash memory cards, etc. When I upload 7D and 5D2 files into Lightroom for some editing, my eight core Xeon box barely keeps up. It's very zippy when crunching through 12 MP files from the Panasonic cameras (or my old 12 MP Nikon files), but it drags when it comes to browsing through the Canon files.

I accept that computer performance hit, because I desire the flexibility that a higher resolution file offers for producing up to 16x20 inch prints. But, do consumer photographers need that same flexibility? If all they do is snap sRGB JPEG files and then have those files printed at a quick printing station for a stack of 4x6 prints, they'll be throwing away nearly 90% of the resolution available from an 18 MP camera. Or worse yet, if all they want to do is post their photos on a social networking site or public gallery site, they'll throw away even more resolution. It's nuts!

You may recall a project I tried when I had the D3X last year, which was to digitize a bunch of 35mm and 120 format slides with the D3X and 105mm f2.8 AFS VR Micro lens. The results did not satisfy and $10,000 worth of camera and lens did not match the quality provided by a $500, dedicated film scanner, when I did some comparison of the files.

I was kicking myself for delaying this project until the last evening I had the D3X and not trying it sooner to see the initial results and then tweaking the setup to try and get as good a quality as I could. I wondered when I would ever have such an opportunity again to use a high resolution SLR in this manner.

Stupid me, I already have a high resolution SLR available in the Canon 5D2 and now that I have the 100mm f2.8 IS Macro lens and a Canon cable release, I have all the time that I need to try again and tweak the setup to optimize the quality.

Over the next couple of weeks, as time permits, I'll be digitizing the slides again. I know it's a compromise in not having all the right equipment, e.g. copy stand and high quality light table, but it's just not fiscally prudent to spend $3,000 on a Nikon CoolScan 9000. There are much better ways to spend that kind of money these days.

February 19, 2010 - Remember when Nikon was praised for sticking to a conservative resolution of 12 MP for its landmark SLR, the D3? Remember when Canon was praised for taking a step backwards with resolution in the popular G series digicams? Remember when many were praising the camera brands from continuously upping the ante in a resolution war?

Well, DPReview recently posted their Nikon D3S review and one of the main criticisms they throw at it is that it does not offer enough resolution now. It almost seems like they were grasping at something, anything negative to make themselves look more objective. Doing so now makes them hypocrites since DPReview was a leading complainer about the megapixel wars.

While the D3S is a versatile camera used by many different types of photographers, I think it's pretty safe to say that like the D3, Nikon is primarily targeting photojournalists. This generally implies speed, which the D3S has at 9 fps and very good low light capabilities, which the D3S is unmatched by any other brand at this time. I think PJs have it easier nowadays with internet access readily available in major cities, so it shouldn't be that big of a deal to upload files to their editors, but you still don't want to be trying to upload large files. 12 MP files are still a lot easier to upload than 16 MP files from the Canon 1D4.

You would also think that DPReview would appreciate that sticking to a conversative resolution allows Nikon to obtain more low light quality than trying to add in another four or six MP of resolution. But, they seem enamoured with the Canon 1D4's 16 MP resolution, even though it clearly does not match the quality of the D3S at high ISO settings. DPReview even seems to pooh-pooh the notion that anyone really needs to use faster than ISO 3200 or 6400.

Oh, I beg to differ and clearly, DPReview don't hang out in dark and dingy hockey arenas or other venues where the light is meagre and photographers would give the left family jewel for want of a D3S.

And, if you really want to get into a megapixel war, how about Dalsa's new 196 MP sensor...

February 18, 2010 - Thom Hogan recently posted his review of the 200-400mm f4 AFS VR lens. This is a lens that has garnered near universal praise since it first came out and I wonder how some users will react to Hogan’s review. Basically, Hogan states that the lens is awesome at close distances, but not so good at far distances, which is surprising since this is a telephoto zoom lens that you would think should do very well for distant subjects. However, it’s not actually Hogan’s opinion that caught me by surprise, but the realization that the 200-400 lens is already seven years old.

Where did the time fly by? When Nikon introduced (or is it reintroduced, since there was a manual focus version from years ago) the 200-400 lens, I really wished that I had the money to buy one. Not withstanding Hogan’s review, I still wish I had the money to buy one, because one never knows how long good lenses will last in Nikon’s stable of lenses.

A good lens will go along for a number of years and then all of sudden, it’s gone with nary a word or warning from Nikon. Once gone from the line up, used lens prices trend upwards until the ridiculous occurs of the used price being more than the new price. This is what happened with the 28mm f1.4 lens, but one wonders if this will hold once the new 24mm f1.4 lens becomes available in the retail chain. Other examples of coveted lenses that sold for more than their new cost are the 300mm f2 and 200mm f2, both old style, manual focus lenses from decades past.

The current 200mm f2 AFS VR lens is another that I wish I could afford, perhaps even more so than the 200-400 f4 lens. It’s not all that long, but it’s fat and stubby and while handholdable, should really be used with a mono or tripod. It’s another lens that has been universally praised since it was resurrected from Nikon’s glorious past.

The speed makes it fairly versatile, because with the triplet of Nikon teleconverters, you can go from 200mm to 280mm to 340mm to 400mm, while still being able to auto focus at full spec (slower than f5.6 and AF can get iffy in low light). At around CAD $4500, it’s possible for me to realistically think that I can afford one if I had enough discipline to save my discretionary bucks for a couple of years and not get caught up in the SLR upgrade wave. I keep thinking I gotta do this sooner rather than later, because who knows when Nikon will decide to pull the plug and stop production for another two decades.

That same attitude extends to the new 24mm f1.4 lens; how long will Nikon produce this lens and will it end up being like the 28mm f1.4. If you want it and you can afford it, better buy it in the early years.

Speaking of the new lenses, I think I’m going to end up buying the 16-35mm f4 lens. 16mm is plenty wide for me and the lens’ more svelte dimensions will make it easier to pack than the 14-24mm lens with its massive front element. Doesn’t mean that I plan to sell off the 14-24 in the next garage sale though, so don’t bother asking J

Some lenses will never disappear, being such core elements of a stable of lenses and while important, are not what defines a line up of lenses. It’s the exotics and special purposes lenses that tell a user that the brand is committed to providing its users with some serious tools, even if those special lenses are not big sellers. These include fast, prime super telephoto lenses (400mm f2.8), tilt/shift lenses, very fast lenses (24mm f1.4, 50mm f1.2). telephoto zoom macros (Nikon 70-180), etc.

Every so often, I throw up some comments about what I think might be coming or what I would like to see come from the camera makers. There’s no crystal ball, there’s no inside information, it’s just some extrapolation based on what’s happening now.

I don’t know what the next big thing will be, but my guess is that it will have to be sensor-based. How much more can the engineers continue squeezing the current technology and Bayer interpolation process? How many more pixels can we fit onto a given sized sensor? The way cell phone cameras are going with increasing resolution, we’re approaching the theoretical limits of the physics of light.

Those in-the-know keep talking about how the Bayer interpolation degrades resolution and how a true RGB sensor (Foveon anyone) can capture more detail. Throw in the effects of anti-aliasing filter and are we really getting 24 MP from the Nikon D3X? Maybe the D3X only gives us the equivalent of a 6 MP, RGB, non-filtered sensor.

Maybe what we’ll eventually see is the pro line SLRs use new sensor technology while the consumer line continue using the old Bayer interpolated, anti-aliased sensors. How about a 24 MP FX sensor in a $500 SLR while the pro camera uses a new 12 MP RGB sensor that provides more detail and superior color fidelity than the consumer 24 MP camera, while also providing ISO 1 million…Mechanical shutters go the way of the dodo because the astronomical ISO capabilities require commensurately fast shutter speeds. Imagine the kinds of high-speed photography that will develop.

Dropping back down to earth and looking at things from an evolutionary instead of revolutionary way, there are still a few things camera makers can do to enhance the tools and none are ideas that have not been mentioned before.

Focusing points covering the entire viewfinder and/or like the Panasonic cameras, a focus point that can be positioned just about anywhere in the viewfinder. All points should be cross type for best focus acquisition and speed.

Improve electronic viewfinders to the point that we can dispense with optical viewfinders. This can be huge, because it will eliminate the mirror box and prism hump. Designers can come up with new shapes. Lens makers don’t have to deal with retro focus limitations (think Leica M lenses). Shutter speeds can easily sync with flashes at the highest speeds; the limitation will be the flash speed and power instead of the shutter.

Improve the algorithms for tracking moving subjects, something that will never be good enough for sports pros.

In short, there are a lot of little tweak things that camera makers can do right now to make our tools better, but I can't wait to see what kind of whiz-bang stuff Nikon or some other brand is gonna come up with next.

February 17, 2010 - Brooks Jenson recently posted an audio blog about a gallery exhibition of photographs taken with cell phones.

He is less than impressed at the idea that a gallery would actually go to the trouble of exhibiting such photographs. He’s so mocking of the notion that he offers an idea for some intrepid photographer to apply for a grant – to take landscape photographs using the backup camera in his car.

Now, we need to ensure that you, dear reader, understand that when Brooks refers to his backup camera, he is not discussing an extra camera that he keeps in the trunk in case something happens to his current camera, the Panasonic G1. No, when Brooks mentions the backup camera in his car, he really means the camera built into the back of his car that displays a video view on the dashboard’s LCD. The car’s camera is, I suppose, a safety feature so that you can better see as you backup the car – something that I wouldn’t mind having actually.

So, we’re clear on which camera Brooks is discussing right? Then, once he’s composed the view with the car’s backup camera, he’ll take a picture of it with his cell phone’s camera. And, assuming he gets his grant, he’ll have a nice gallery show of such images.

If we’re talking about the art world, like Brooks, I would not be surprised that such a vapid idea will find its fans and supporters. Exactly what the message would be about such art, I have no idea and I won’t even try to pretend to come up with some pseudo mumbo jumbo…okay, let’s just call it what it is…bullshit…to justify its existence.

Given what has passed for art, I don’t see why Brooks’ idea wouldn’t pass muster. After all, there’s guy from New York, who took pictures of magazine ads and claimed it as his own original art. Yes, a picture of a picture is “art.”

The particular picture is of a cowboy for a Marlboro ad and the original was taken by former National Geographic staffer, Sam Abell. The “artist” is Richard Prince and if I recall correctly, what Prince did is known as “appropriation art,” which seems like a polite, art society (read, cowardly) way to say theft.

So, if a picture of a picture can be art then why not a cell phone picture of an LCD’s display of a landscape depicted by a car’s camera?

This whole cell phone camera craze is a bit weird for me, because I’m just not into any of this social networking fad. Now, writing and posting on my website can be considered a form of social networking, but you know what I mean, as in MySpace and FaceBook, et al.

It’s been quite incredible to see the explosion of digital imaging from its nascent stages in the 1990s to what it is now in 2010. Cameras in cell phones mean that most people have an imaging device immediately available almost all the time. Images and videos can be emailed and/or uploaded to a social networking site for immediate gratification. The numbers must be in the billions of images taken each year.

So many photos are taken that I think we’re at risk of losing the meaning of a fine photograph, because too many are taken with crappy cell phone cameras or digicams. When I say fine photograph, I mean that from a technical and aesthetic basis. Technical in using good gear to ensure the upmost in quality and aesthetic in subject matter and composition. It’s not impossible to do with cell phone cameras and digicams, just not as easy and capable as with better cameras.

However, others would counter that cell phone cameras are the great liberators in democratizing photography. Also, that with most people having a cell phone with them, they will always have a camera with them. This is the Chase Jarvis model.

Jarvis is the Seattle-based commercial photographer who has in the last couple of years, really seen his “brand” skyrocket with his early adoption of the convergence of videos and stills. He does shoots for Nikon and Hasselblad because he favours those brands. More recently, Jarvis wrote a book about using the Apple iPhone as your always on hand camera and even created an app for the iPhone to edit the photos taken with it.

Is it the influence of Jarvis and his evangelism that has led to a gallery offering to hold an exhibition of photos taken with cell phone cameras? Does it matter? How many times have we heard, it’s not the gear, it’s the person using it? If a photo is really good, does it matter what kind of camera was used?

I suppose too that how big the photos are displayed in the exhibition will be a factor for how well people accept them. Print too big and we’ll see all too clearly the limitations of tiny pixel pitch and everything else inherent with cell phone cameras. Print too small and, well, what’s the point.

Art can be a strange thing. I think it was Brooks Jenson again who brought to our attention the exhibition of photos taken by a meandering feline. The cat’s owners outfitted the animal with a digital camera that took snaps at regular intervals and after a year, accumulated enough photos for an exhibition. Prints could be bought for a few hundred bucks each. I think, at the time, I wondered out loud if I could do the same by outfitting my toddler with a digital camera, or maybe I offered up the scribbles of my kids for a token $50 per sheet.

There’s always something happening in the art world that make absolutely no sense to me (or to Brooks Jensen).

February 15, 2010 - Vistek in Toronto sent an email ad with prices for the new Nikon lenses:

• $2,349 CAD for the 24mm f1.4
• $1,399 CAD for the 16-35mm f4

Also, caught this little Freudian slip by the Vistek copywriters for the ad posted below that also came in the email. Maybe what they say about the convergence of the big two brands into Canikon will come true 8^)

At first read, my hopes were raised at a new "tweener" SLR from Nikon, but alas, this is merely the Canon 7D. A fine enough SLR, but I would really, really like to be shooting with a new Nikon SLR come next hockey season (with that new 70-200 lens too).

Freudian slip by the Vistek ad writers for the ad above

I’ve recently started using a feature on my cameras that I’ve never used before. It’s a feature that if you have never had to use it before, you would never think twice about it unless it had been accidentally adjusted and you suddenly wonder why you cannot see anything with proper focus in the viewfinder.

I’m talking about the dioptre adjustment for the viewfinder.

As you may recall, I had some “minor” issues with my eyes starting last summer, which has left me wanting for seeing clearly. On an everyday basis, I don’t really need my new eyeglasses and I certainly don’t like wearing them when I’m photographing something, so what to do?

I kept on photographing without the glasses and while I could see acceptably well through the viewfinder, it certainly did not have the crispness that I had prior to the eye problems. However, with auto focus technology and focus confirmation indicators, I placed a lot of trust in the camera’s decision.

This seemed to go okay until one day, I remembered about the dioptre control available on the all the cameras I use and wondered, hmmm, what happens if I rotate the dial one way (minus)? Not so good with everything going really soft and fuzzy. How about the other way (plus)? Hey…HEY!

Set to the maximum (plus) available on the Panasonic and Canon cameras, I’m now able to see quite well and can easily forego the glasses. Of course, people who borrow or use these cameras might be wondering why they cannot see clearly through the viewfinder J

It’s a small thing, but when you need it, it can make a huge difference. It also cuts me back down to earth, because before I had my own eye issues, I was dismissive towards others who complained that the dioptre adjustment on the camera was not enough and that they needed accessory viewfinder lenses or adapters to get the proper correction.

I suppose we could all just learn to photograph with glasses on, but I cannot imagine that it’s much fun if you need bifocals. And, I should consider myself lucky that for the time being, I don’t need any more correction than what the cameras offer.

I seem to be in a rut lately for writing anything interesting. Part of it is has been due to, until recently, a lack of interesting (to me) news that don’t get the gears going inside my head. Part of it also is a lack of interesting writing from other photographers, which also has the same effect to get me thinking and wanting to post comments.

I’m not one of those people that can write for the sake of writing, although, as with photography, if you want to be good at it, you need do it regularly and consistently. However, I do find that I write by rote, my comments are lacking in fluidity and humour. I’m more of the type that writes when “inspired.”

An idea may pop into my head and germinate for a while before I sit down to type out my rambling thoughts. Or, as is often the case, I may read something that provokes me to write. This is similar to how columnists in newspapers and magazines will cite and reference the writings of other writers as the basis of their column. In good spat or peeing contest, there is often a back and forth exchange as one writer responds to the other and then responds again. The National Post newspaper does this on occasion when two writers discuss a really topical and contentious issue and publish point/counterpoint essays with follow-up responses afterwards.

With that out of the way, let’s discuss something a bit more interesting (to me).

A little while ago, the TOP offered some perspective on the high cost of Leica cameras and lenses. Yes, within the realm of photography, Leica products are priced rather extravagantly, but when compared to other high end pursuits, are they really?

I’ve made my own comments before that compared to high end audio, photography, even at its most expensive, has nothing on audiophiles. High end audio is the world of speakers and amplifiers that can cost well over $100,000 per component. Stereophile recently reviewed the top of the line digital playback system from British firm, dcs. The cost? Nearly USD $90,000…for a fancy CD player!

Mikie Fremer, one of Stereophile’s lead reviewers, went into debt to finance the purchase of an Aussie made turntable that cost something like USD $150,000 retail – and remember, pro audio reviewers enjoy accommodation pricing, which could mean 50% of retail, but even at this level, accommodation pricing is still staggering.

Now, it’s one thing to spend six figures on components. Those are tangible. Those you can at least pry open and marvel at the technology, the expensive parts quality, and the craftsmanship in putting it all together. You’re paying for the genius of the designer who poured all his energy into the product. The pricing is still ridiculous, but at least tangible.

Now consider wires and cables.

This is the comparison that the TOP used when discussing the Leica’s price. TOP mentioned cables made by long-time cable maker, Nordost, and while I don’t recall the exact prices quoted, rest assured, they are astronomical even by high-end audio standards. It makes the Leica M9’s price look like chump change and if you were to outfit your entire hi-fi with Nordost’s top line cables, you may even make a Phase One digital back look cheap. It’s bloody scary to think that a full complement of cables should approach six figures, but who ever said high end audio is about rationality.

With cameras and lenses, we have tangibles that can be measured, viewed and compared against others. We can look at a camera’s or lens’ build quality and determine whether the price asked justifies the cost. We can look at the images taken by a camera on a monitor and print and compare to other cameras and also determine if the price justifies the cost. We can post comparisons and reviews online and while imperfect, they do allow for many armchair photographers to view and come to their own conclusions (assuming the test was done fairly and objectively).

Not so with audio. While I don’t think it would be that difficult to determine if one component lets you hear more than another, that’s maybe as objective as we get, because music is subjective and what we listen for with the hi-fi is also subjective.

Getting back to cables – yes, they do make a difference and sorry, that old lamp cord you’re using to connect the speakers to the amp simply won’t do. More expensive cables do offer more than the throwaway pieces of junk that come with mass consumer electronics. As with anything, at a certain point, you will reach a point of diminishing returns where you will have to spend extraordinary sums of money to get incremental improvements in sound. Where that point is, is again, subjective based on how far you want to go, or perhaps, where you can afford to go. For some of us, that could well mean blowing as much as what a full load BMW X5 will cost to wire your audio rig. Nothing wrong with that at all.

In the same way that photographers should not begrudge those that can afford to use the best cameras and lenses, the same goes for other pursuits, whether it be audio or exotic cars, or pleasure yachts; whatever turns your fancy.

What makes us the way we are is that desire to seek out the best, to push the boundaries in every field. That competitive spirit is all around us and is why capitalism triumphs over socialism and communism. Pursuing the state of the art has costs, for sure, but there will always be people who seek the best, which keeps the cycle going.

At the end of the day, whether that Leica M9 costs $9,000 or $5,000, makes no difference to me, and it may as well be priced like the Nordost cables for that I can afford to buy these days. It might make a difference to me if it costs $2500 and if the lenses could be had for under $2,000 each, but as Buddy Holly sang, that'll be the day...

Leicas (and other big buck gear) are something I can appreciate from afar, but won’t ever venture towards. Note though that respect towards the normal M9 does not mean that I have any respect for Leica’s penchant to come up with anniversary and special edition versions of its cameras, for which, Leica richly deserves all the scorn hurled its way.

Friday, before the Valentine’s Day weekend, I wandered off to Chapters, Canada’s big chain of bookstores, similar to Barnes and Noble in the US. I was in search of a present for my wife, a biography about her favourite pop singer. Since the singer is a very well known Canadian chanteuse, I figure that there must a few biographies written about her already and that it should be quick and easy to buy one at such a last minute, especially in the biggest bookstore in town.

I was sorely mistaken. When I searched the store’s inventory for anything they had about the singer, I came up with zilch even though the database had several entries. All could be conveniently ordered, but nothing was in stock.

When I was browsing the biographies, I came across one that I wanted for myself, so I grabbed it and even though there was no sale price, I decided paying regular price was okay for the convenience if I could also find the book for my wife. With no luck on my wife’s book, I put back the book I wanted and departed the store. I later checked Amazon Canada’s website and found the books I wanted, with the usual Amazon discount off regular price and immediately ordered them. Because the value is above $35, I get free shipping, so I paid less than what I would have at Chapters. Too easy!

Yes, Chapters has the cost of books and mortar stores, but if they don’t stock the books you want when you want them, useless. Plus, I don’t need to leave home to shop. While this is an example about books, the same can be said of photographic equipment. Chapters also has a online store, but I'm pretty much sold on Amazon, because they offer other products not available from Chapters.

My favourite shop in town does not carry Panasonic cameras, so anything I want for my two cameras, I may as well order from out of province and save myself the provincial sales tax. If I bundle an order large enough at my usual out of province outlet, Vistek, I get free S&H.

Most of the local shops in Vancouver don’t carry big dollar cameras and lenses. You want to even see what a 300mm f2.8 lens looks like, you’ll have to buy one. Don’t even think that you’ll ever see a 600mm f4 lens in stock. The one exception is Leo’s where they used to (maybe still do) have a Sigma 800mm f5.6 lens on display.

It might seem strange that a city of 2 million, large enough to host the Winter Olympics, does not support big buck photographic equipment, whereas Toronto can. Of course, Toronto is at least twice as big and since all the big advertising work is done from that city, there’s more of a need for the big dollar gear used by the city’s commercial photographers.

February 11, 2010 - As we gear up for the Winter Olympics, beginning this Friday, a reader sent along a link to this cool panorama of Vancouver.

February 10, 2010 - Some new lenses from Nikon and they aren’t 18-XXX kit lenses. The 24 f1.4 and 16-35 f4 are significant, quality lenses that help patch a long seen hole in the line-up and harkens to the start of a new series of lenses catering to enthusiasts without the pro lens budget.

The 24 f1.4 answers the call for those that have long lamented the demise of the fabled 24 f2 manual focus lens. It not only meets those demands, but also matches Canon in producing the fastest, true wide angle lens, and thirdly, I think it also settles whether Nikon will produce a new version of the 28mm f1.4 lens (no).

It’s an obviously premium lens and as such, it has a premium price of USD $2200, however, like the price of the new 70-200 Mk II lens, that price may not stick. Where the 70-200 zoom lens was once priced at CAD $2700, it is now available for CAD $2400, and with some negotiation, the actual buying price should be less. But, I have to acknowledge that the 70-200 lens is a workhorse that “has” to be in the camera bags of many pros and amateurs alike, whereas the 24 f1.4 is specialized and is not going to sell in the same numbers.

The 16-35 f4 is hopefully the first in a series of f4 lenses that, like Canon’s f4 L series, will provide enthusiasts with all the quality of Nikon’s pro lenses without the pro price and compromising only in that last stop of lens speed. At USD $1260, it comes in significantly more than the old 18-35 f3.5-4.5, but less than the also old 17-35 f2.8.

With the 14-24 lens available, will Nikon replace the old 17-35 with a 16-35 f2.8, or is this it? I’m thinking this is it. You want f2.8 speed, you pony up for the big 14-24 and live with the consequences of having such a massive and bulbous front element. Or, if you want a normal sized lens that can use filters, you buy the 16-35 f4. You don’t get f2.8 speed, but then neither do you pay for it, so to me that’s acceptable compromise. You also get VR with the new wide zoom, which is another first and I hope a trend for Nikon to implement VR in as many lenses as possible, even for those that don’t seem like obvious candidates, such as wide angle or fast lenses. I’m all for getting as much technology, benefit and edge as possible.

Next up (in my opinion) should be a replacement for a lens universally regarded as being the worst in the current line-up, the 24-120 f3.5-5.6. A 24-105 or even another 24-120, but done properly, would be welcome. Finally, the 70-200 f4 to complete the trifecta of f4 lenses.

A well-known Nikon commentator lately seems to lace his comments with cynicism and sarcasm whenever Nikon introduces new products, but I like looking at the positive. It’s a good sign for Nikon to be introducing new lenses and I don’t have an issue with all those 18-XXX lenses, because it indicates that Nikon is selling shiploads of consumer SLRs that will turn into profits, which in turn will help pay for R&D into the gear that I really want to buy. What I would prefer is for the lens announcements to come out more frequently so that the entire lens line-up is updated to 21st Century standards. Unfortunately, we have to recognize that Nikon is a small company without the resources of Canon or Panasonic – even as big as Panasonic is, it could not keep up with North American demand for the GH-1 and GF1 M4/3s cameras.

As the Nikon USA news release hints, this is the just the start for Nikon introducing more FX lenses this year. Sounds damned good to me!

When I was surfing through some business news last week, I came across a series of articles about Apple’s new iPad. As I read them, I also clicked on some related articles, one of which was an interview with an executive at a regional newspaper publisher in the US. The part of the interview that got my interest is when the executive discussed putting up pay walls to access the publisher’s content.

He gave an example of an online asset owned by his company that was originally setup as a pay wall site. The site established a following and generated X amount of revenue behind the pay wall, but when they decided to take down the pay wall down, the traffic and revenue increased well beyond X.

It made me think of various photographers’ website where they put the most interesting and useful content behind a pay wall. There are also forums that require a membership to access the content, with some being successful and some not so.

Contrary to my personal politics, I guess I lean towards a more socialist attitude towards online content, the freer the better. I don’t begrudge the photographer from wanting to monetize all the hard work and effort that has gone into producing a first class review, but if you’re good, word will spread and people will visit, which will ultimately attract advertisers. Think of the Strobist blog, which while not a review site per se, has done so well for David Hobby that he decided to take a sabbatical from his day job as a photojournalist and see if he could support his family from just his website. So far, he seems to be doing well enough to not venture back to his old job and he has expanded with producing tutorial videos for sale to supplement the web revenue.

I recall that Michael Johnston of the TOP considered making it a pay-for site in which he would allow access to his interesting (and at times, infuriating) commentary on the state of photography to those willing to pay for the content. While I’ve no doubt that he would make some money, I do doubt that he would receive as much traffic and advertising as he does now with a free access blog. Advertisers like traffic and the more traffic, the more valuable your site to sell the ads.

Another model is to offer free content, but also develop significant, standalone products for sale like the Luminous Landscape with the video journal and tutorial products. While he seems to have tailed off in the amount of reviewing he does, Reichmann is still an intriguing read and his ability to access some big dollar, much desired products on a regular basis, makes him a must read no matter what one might think of him. For the record, I like my fellow Canadian and have followed his website since inception. He’s got money and he’s not afraid to spend it to pursue his passion and I’ve stated before that I would be doing and spending the same as him if I were so fiscally fortunate. I’m not about to call the pot black when my pan is crispy fried and burnt.

Probably the best-known photography review site that offers no other free content is ReidReviews, where you must pay to access the highly regarded reviews by Sean Reid. Lloyd Chambers has a hybrid site where he blogs and offers commentary on mostly Canon and Nikon gear, but the most detailed and best content is behind a pay wall. I’ve not read either site’s pay-for reviews so cannot offer an opinion on whether the reviews are worth the toll charged.

It’s quite interesting to see how people continue to try and find ways to monetize the internet. Prior, the only way a pro wanting to be compensated for reviews would be from a magazine, but the internet now allows anyone with a connection to post reviews and opinions. While there’s a lot of noise in amongst the quality signal, thankfully, there’s still enough good, free content that I’ve never felt the need to pay to read an online review.

It’s a little ironic that I don’t have qualms paying for magazine subscriptions, but balk at paying for an online subscription or access to online reviews. Part of it is that some reviews cover equipment that mostly do not interest me (ReidReviews) and the other is already mentioned, that there is already a significant amount of free content, that together, will give you a good idea of how good or bad a prospective piece of gear is.

February 8, 2010 - Apologies for another lame post. Between getting sick the past weekend and Super Bowl, I've been laggard and haggard. We'll see how this week goes for anymore new Nikon gear to be announced and if there's anything to be said about them.

You may recall that after I finished reading all those Wayson Choy books about the Chinese experience in 1930s and 1940s Vancouver Chinatown, that I had an idea for a photographic project. The photo of the Birks store in downtown Vancouver is the first photo in this longish term project, which is to photograph some of the significant parts of Vancouver writtened about by Choy in his books.

The Birks stores is mentioned as a source of cherished dishes for Choy's mother in his first memoir, Paper Shadows. Birks is an old name and store, as can be seen in the classical architecture of the store and women of all races and classes love to receive a gift that come in the famous Birk's blue box.

I see this store every work day, because my downtown bus stop just happens to be right across the street from the store. In the morning, it is bathed in the glowing blue lights and is what attracted me to it photographically (that and the coincidence of the Wayson Choy project).

February 5, 2010 - After nearly two years of service, a hard drive has died in my first Drobo storage robot. I’ve had the first Drobo for three years, but after the first year, I swapped out the original four 500 GB drives for four 1 TB drives. It is one of the 1 TB drives that has failed. The way I use the Drobo is not to have it on continuously, as the Drobo has always been a device used intermittently to backup my files stored on the computer’s hard drives. Thus, I would say that the hard drives have had a relatively easy life in my system.

A quick and simple recap, a Drobo storage robot is like a RAID without being a RAID. There are pluses and minuses to either approach. A consumer level RAID is often a network-attached device, which generally means pedestrian speed for access to data. A RAID 5 is the most common structure for an external storage device that uses more than two hard drives. In a four-drive array, three of the drives are for actual storage while the fourth is used as a parity drive to ensure data integrity if one of the drives goes bad.

A RAID 5 array is usually built and then left alone, as upgrading the capacity would take a long time. For example, if you built a four-drive array using 1 TB drives, but wanted to upgrade the capacity to all 2 TB drives, you would have to replace one drive then allow the RAID to rebuild itself before replacing the second drive, and so on and so on. Depending on how much data needs to be rebuilt, the completion time can be significant, as in many days (weeks?) of continuously rebuilding of the array. Given the time and expense of buying four new hard drives, it would be much easier just to buy a new RAID box to create a whole device.

The basic Drobo looks like a RAID, because it allows up to four drives to be mounted. Notice I said “allows” because you do not need to use four drives all at once. You can start with two and then add more capacity as needed. Just like with a RAID 5, the Drobo uses a large chunk of the overall capacity for a proprietary way of keeping parity. That’s the biggest knock against the Drobo, that if something happens to the Drobo itself, all of your data is at risk. You would need to repair the Drobo or replace it with another Drobo in order to access the data on the old hard drives. RAIDs follow a standard convention so in theory (as far as I know) you should be able to rescue your data in another RAID, however, I think either process is going to be expensive and time consuming and don’t see all that much advantage with a traditional RAID device.

The Drobo offers some conveniences over a network-attached RAID, with USB, Firewire, eSATA and iSCSI interfaces available (depending on the model). The faster connections provide better speed than over a network. While not cheap, I think the really fast RAID devices are still quite a bit more expensive than the basic Drobo.

My first Drobo is the original USB 2 version whereas my second Drobo is the Firewire 800 version. Both have four 1 TB drives mounted to provide 4 TB storage devices. Of that 4 TB of capacity, only about 2.7 TB is available for storage. As I understand it, a multiple drive failure would result in a major if not total loss of data (same risk with a basic RAID 5). The new Drobo Pro and Elite can handle multiple drive failures.

The brand of hard drive that failed in the USB Drobo is made by Seagate. Curiously, when I removed the faulty hard drive from the USB Drobo, it felt odd in my hand, as if the innards had shifted to create an unbalanced load.

I cannibalized a 1 TB Western Digital drive from another external storage device and mounted it in the USB Drobo. The Drobo allows for easy and fast hot swapping of drives. After a few minutes, the red light blinking to indicate a drive failure turned green to indicate the new drive is okay. After recognizing the new drive, all four hard drive lights started to blink from green to orange continuously, indicating that the Drobo is incorporating the new drive for storage.

I checked the Drobo dashboard on my computer and noted that the estimate time to complete the rebuild is 40 hrs. 40 hrs! Sheesh! The rebuild process began around 11 pm. When I checked again eight hours later, the estimated time jumped up to over 50 hrs. When I came back home from work and checked again at 5:30 pm, the hours declined to 27 hrs. As I work on this update, it's close to 8 pm and the hours remaining is 19 with the progress bar close to, but not quite indicating halfway done. As you can tell, the estimated time indicator is useless.

That would be another knock against the Drobo, that it’s too slow when you replace a drive and the Drobo needs to rebuild the data. I have no idea how long it would take a RAID to do the same, but I don’t think consumer RAID devices are much better for rebuilding an array.

So, after three years, two Drobo units and 12 hard drives, there has been one hard drive failure. With my belts and suspenders approach to backup, nothing was ever at risk, because the drives in the computer had the original data and the second, Firewire Drobo has an up-to-date backup of the primary data. And, the data from the USB Drobo could still be accessed despite the drive failure, so I still had three sets of data.

Over the many years of computer ownership, I cannot recall very many hard drive failures in my first decade of computer use. However, the second decade seems to be punctuated with regular drive failures. There’s no consistency per se, as failures have occurred across brands, across capacities, across ages of drives, across 2.5 inch notebook drives and 3.5 inch desktop versions. The only way you can protect yourself from loss of data is to expect that hard drive failures will occur, often without warning and that you need to backup regularly (with some religion) and to have redundancies.

Speaking of hard drives, it would seem ideal for us to move towards the solid-state drives. SSDs are still pricey on a per GB basis, but as with anything technological, the price will come down as SSDs penetrate more of the market. The performance benefit is already intriguing for those that demand the best speed, but the niggling issue is how many write/erase cycles can SSDs handle, e.g. if an SSD can handle 10,000 write/erase cycles, how long is that under typical usage? However, I don’t think that’s going to stop me from wanting the expected 12-core Mac Pro fitted with an SSD for the OS – probably still have to use the old school drives for storage due to SSD capacity limitations and cost.

February 4, 2010 - The E-PL1, another M4/3 camera from Olympus and yet another indicator that the maybe the original E-P1 is more a beta product from Olympus, because it probably felt pressured to do something, anything, to meet demand and expectations after Panasonic’s success with the G-1, which is the first M4/3 camera.

As some are indicating, the E-P2 is what the E-P1 should have been, but it’s still not considered the Panasonic GF1’s equal for auto focus speed. However, to be fair, the Olympus cameras do have in-camera stabilization, which is a significant, deal-breaker feature for some.

The newly announced E-PL1 looks…well, it looks like a GF1 with its coincidentally similar pop-up flash unit and a dedicated video recording button to allow for easy video recording. The price is nicer though at USD $600 and hopefully, this is the start of a trend to push down the cost of the M4/3 cameras and its future competitors. And, I'll be honest, the GF1 is a great camera, but it's annoying to know that entry level DX SLRs are still better for high ISO image quality.

So, let’s see now:

• Olympus with three M4/3 compact cameras with interchangeable lenses
• Panasonic with three M4/3 compact cameras with interchangeable lenses (with strong hints that another is on its way this year)
• Sigma with a fixed lens camera offering a large Foveon sensor – Sigma is the pioneer of this movement to large sensors being deployed in compact cameras
• Leica with the fixed lens X1
• Samsung with an announced proprietary lens mount camera that’s similar to the GH-1
• Sony hinting that it will be offering its own competitive camera

Who’s missing…oh, yes, that’s right, Twiddle-Dee and Twiddle-Dum, otherwise known as Nikon and Canon – I’ll let you decide who’s Dee and who’s Dum J

By the time these two get around to producing their own cameras, most of the market will be satiated with the earlier and, more importantly, actually available products. I’ve not heard about Canon doing much for this new class of camera, but there’s some rumour that Nikon is working on something and some speculate that this is the so-called “surprise” that’s been generating some buzz in Nikon world.

If the rumours are true that Nikon designed the Leica X1, then don’t too surprised if what Nikon has to offer is looks remarkably similar. Much like some older Leica products were merely rebadged Panasonic cameras and lenses.

I’ve belatedly realized that I have not produced many photo albums the last few years. It used to be that I would regularly work on printing sheets of family photos and putting them into binders to create albums.

I now have thousands of images taken, but never seen or displayed. All are stored on the various hard drives (principal and backup storage) and by this point, the task of editing and printing them into binders is monumental.

During the house move last September, I also realized just how much space the existing albums take and how difficult it is to store them properly and securely – as in away from the destructive hands of my kids. My girls like looking at their baby photos, but they’re not all that careful with handling the albums, so it’s always with a bit of cringing whenever I see them with the albums. Those albums also weigh a helluva lot, as my back discovered from moving the boxes around during the move.

Other than for the occasional burst of interest, how often do we actually look at photo albums? Some people have not looked at their wedding photos since the blissful day and same with other significant events. Yet, we still feel a need to document moments visually with photographs for future posterity. I pity the historians and archivists of the future having to sift through the billions and billions of photos taken yearly since digital became viral around the world.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do with my images, because creating physical albums does not interest me due to space and weight consideration. I would need a large, heavy-duty wall sized shelving system to accommodate everything that needs to be printed. I’m thinking much more convenient slide show DVDs, but that also requires time, which is in short supply, as readers will have noted with the dearth of postings in recent weeks.

I think ultimately, I’m going to take the lazy man’s way out and output my RAW files to HD resolution JPEGs for storage on a portable hard drive and access them via my WDTV for display on the TV. Maybe that iPad might be useful afterall...

February 3, 2010 - Nikon has announced some new Coolpix models. For those that like to follow the rumours, this is no surprise as the model numbers were even known well in advance.

What I find amusing is how some sites and some well known personalities seem to be trying to out do each other for who posts the more accurate rumour or who has the more accurate leak/source. Pissing contest anyone?

We still have a ways to go before PMA, so we'll see if any of those new SLR and "surprise" announcements come to fruition. BTW, what happened to the new lenses some of the rumour mongers were so sure about... ;-)

February 1, 2010 - The new Apple iPad looks snazzy, but given its price and specs, it's not a stripped down MacBook made to look like an iPhone or Touch, so much as it is an iPhone or Touch made larger to look like a tablet. What I mean is the USD $500 starting price indicates that there is not that much power behind the iPad and I doubt that you’ll be wanting to run Photoshop or Lightroom on it. As an aside, Brooks Jensen made several references to using a NetBook running Adobe Lightroom on a big trip to Japan and China last fall, so I'm kinda curious how much power these little devices actually pack.

Not that you could run Lightroom or Photoshop even if you want to since the iPad uses a variant of the iPhone’s software, which is not OSX for regular Macs. However, if the iPad takes off, I don’t see why Adobe would not want to leverage the platform and come up with a Photoshop and/or Lightroom app for it. I like it and immediately want it even though I’m not exactly sure what I might use it for J

Well, maybe I do know what I would use it for…

I can already see the iPad being the control station for computer-based audio with the iPad taking the place of my iPod Touch as the remote control. With only 64 GB capacity in its most expensive configuration, that falls well short of what I need to store all my AIFF files, so it won’t be a source in itself.

As for a reader, well I like reading the newspaper while having lunch and there’s something about the pleasure of unfolding the newspaper for a leisurely read. A newspaper is highly portable and you won’t be crying about dropping it like you would a $500 iPad. However, if my favoured newspapers and magazines get in on the iPad action and make it a seamless transition then I might be amenable to switching from print to electrons. Currently, I don’t like the software used by many magazines for their electronic subscriptions and have thus far eschewed them in favour of the actual print version even if it does cost me more. It would be so nice to just have a magazine come to me as a PDF, but I’m sure why they don’t is to protect the contents from mass distribution that a PDF would allow.

Although I wouldn't mind having one now, I think I'll wait out the generation two model to see if Apple listens to the critiques and makes some improvements (processing power, storage capacity, more inputs). The much larger screen over the Touch will make it a much nicer surfing and reading experience, because I find the constant need to make web pages larger for comfortable reading annoying. I also find it annoying having so little text available on a screen that I could not fathom how others can put up with reading novels on the Touch or iPhone.

I also wonder how soon it will be before we see a host of third party accessories for the iPad. First idea is a car seat harness and adapter system so that the iPad can be a multimedia device to entertain kids while on a long road trip. Or, as a huge GPS system, but that might be that practical given the size.

I’m surprised at sticking with USB 2 instead of going with USB 3, as the new standard would eventually allow for fast data transmission to and from the iPad to external devices, i.e., files from a high resolution SLR.

As others have noted, the iPad will be a convenient way to store a portfolio of photographs to show others. Is this yet another nail in the coffin of that 20th Century medium known as the photographic print?

Two weekends ago, I was at a cousin’s place, helping him out by picking up his new rocking recliner and then delivering it to his condo – it seems, when you own a minivan, many weekends are spent being the extended family’s delivery service. Anyway, I was able to pick up the chair and deliver it with time to spare before the big Vikings/Saints game, wherein my cousin could sit back and now be another armchair quarterback - that Brett Favre, geez, talk about the real "Wild Thing" that you live or die by.

I sat back in the new chair and took in a bit of the Jets/Colts game on the 50-inch LCD with an HD cable feed. I could immediately tell that the HD feed provided an immensely superior quality than regular cable. To be sure though, my cousin flipped to the non-HD channel for me to do a direct comparison. No contest whatsoever even to my less than perfect eyes.

What does this have to do with photography? Bear with me…

A couple of weeks ago, I received a 15x20 inch print from my friend Oleg, a Russian ex-pat living and working in Shanghai. China. Oleg is an accomplished photographer and travels often into the Chinese landscape for photography. On one of the recent trips last fall, Oleg had an opportunity to borrow a Hasselblad CVF-39 digital back to use with his classic V system 503 SLR.

The CVF-39, as the name indicates, is a 39 MP back offering a tiny bit more than 5400x7200 pixels. It costs a substantial USD $14,000, but that’s a lot less than what you will pay for the higher resolution backs from Phase, Leaf and Hasselblad. By comparison, the Nikon D3X offers a tiny bit more than 4000x6000 pixels (24 MP) for USD $7500 and you get the camera thrown in free, unlike the CVF-39 (tongue-in-cheek). The Canon 5D2 is about USD $2500 and offers around 3700x5700 pixels for 21 MP. The Sony A850 offers 24 MP for USD $2500.

Oleg prints with an Epson 4880, which like my older 4800, can print on cut sheets up to 17x22 inches. An image taken with the CVF-39 will produce a 15x20 inch print at 360 dpi. In other words, at native resolution, using one of the optimal print resolutions for Epson printers, the smallest Oleg can print is 15x20 inches. Going smaller would result in throwing away resolution.

Using another common Epson printer resolution, Oleg can produce a 22x30 inch print at 240 dpi without having to interpolate the image file. That’s a lot of sweet resolution to work with!

Like other medium format digital backs, the CVF-39 has no anti-aliasing filter, so there’s no need to do a capture round of sharpening as is required with 35mm based cameras, because all of those cameras use an anti-aliasing filter. Needless to say, Oleg is mightily impressed with the quality of the image files from the CVF-39. He sent me a print to see if I might have anything to say given my experience (short and limited) with the D3X and (longer and less limited experience) with the Canon 5D2.

At 360 dpi print resolution, the 24 MP D3X produces an 11x17 inch print. To produce a print that is 20 inches at the long dimension requires either interpolation of the file or reducing the print resolution to 300 dpi. That’s not a stretch by any means for the D3X, but I do have some difficulty in making any quantitative comments about Oleg’s print, shown below:

Certainly, the print is sharp from foreground to background. The colors are boldly saturated and the geography looks very arid, almost a desert-like region. Oleg’s composition shows a road that meanders through the arid hills and it reminds me of landscapes that have old river systems in them, because old rivers similarly meander in big S curves. The print shows off details in the many little rocks and pebbles outlining the road.

In short, it’s a fine looking print, but as to whether it is markedly superior to something that would be produced from a D3X or even a 5D2, that I cannot state with any confidence. Without having a print taken by one of the 35mm systems and then comparing it alongside Oleg’s print, it’s just pure speculation, but I suppose you still want that speculation.

My speculation is that at 15x20 inches, I am not going to see meaningful differences between a $15,000 digital back and an $8,000 SLR, or even a $2,500 SLR. The 15x20 size is not large enough to allow the qualities of the CVF-39 to shine through. Maybe even a 20x30 might not be big enough, but at 24x36 or bigger, I’ll bet that there will be a clear difference that favours the CVF-39.

I base this thought on that somewhat infamous test by Michael Reichmann at the Luminous Landscape to compare the output of a Canon G series digicam to his huge dollar Phase One digital back. Up to a certain size (maybe 8x10 inches) even experienced professionals could not reliably tell which print was made with which system.

So, I've taken the safe, easy, sit on the fence way out, but for Oleg, who has experience with scanned medium format film and has compared those files to that of the CVF-39, there's little doubt that the digital back offers cleaner and sharper image quality. And, I fully trust in Oleg's conclusion that the CVF-39 produces wonderful image quality.

January 26, 2010 - Posted some thoughts (scroll down) on Wayson Choy's All that Matters. This will be my final book review for a little while and although it initially had nothing to do with photography, reading all of Choy's books has given me an idea for a little photo project. Stay tuned...

Remember that Hermes Leica? Well that famed German camera maker is at it again with another special edition camera specifically catering to the Chinese market and gaudy Chinese tastes. I'm not even going to touch the politics of commerating the anniversary that Leica is celebrating.

January 25, 2010 - Sorry folks, was kept busy last week with work and family demands. Also kinda slow for news anyway. Will try to get back at it this week with some more X-Rite ColorChecker usage and comments on a print made with a 39 MP digital back - a friend sent me a print he made after using said back for to look at and comment on. I'm also working on a review of the last of Wayson Choy's four books, All that Matters (for the few of you that may be interested).

January 19, 2010 - As I just finished updating NikonLinks, including a link to a review of the Coolpix S1000pj, I was reminded that, hey, I've seen this camera before and some of the image files from it.

I'm thinking the quality sucks so badly that I must have quickly compartmentalized the memory of seeing those files into the deepest recesses of my mind 8^)

Seriously though, the Coolpix S1000pj is a one trick pony with that gimmicky projection feature, because as a camera, well nothing to see here folks, just move on along.

My brother-in-law bought one and tried to used it during Christmas, but soon gave up after realizing that the camera offers sluggish performance and poor quality in the low light of our house. Lots of motion blur due to the slowish shutter speed and a decidely soft, crunchy look to the photos - I hesitate to even call them "photos."

Now, to be sure, most (all) digicams perform very poorly in low light with a high ISO setting. My Sony W170 digicam offers similarly poor quality when the ISO is pushed to ludicrous speeds - ludicrous for such tiny sensors, e.g. ISO 1600 and 3200.

The world can still use a digicam that doesn't suck past ISO 400. While some cameras, such as the Canon S90, seem to offer good ergnomics, I would still consider them crippled if used in low light settings. Hell, even very good SLRs can be challenged in low light, so why would we expect a tiny sensored camera to come up with anything other than mush.

January 18, 2010 - A look at the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport is now posted.

January 15, 2010 - I've posted more comments about my reading of some more books written by Wayson Choy, but since these have nothing to do with photography, I'll spare everyone from having to scroll through all that stuff on this page. For those interested, you can read my thoughts on this page.

I'm currently working with the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport and should have a first-use review posted by the weekend.

Over at the TOP, there’s been a couple of interesting recent posts. One is the camera of the year, as selected individually by most of TOP’s regular contributors – each person made his own selection and wrote a brief piece as to why. The other post noted that the Canon 5D2’s retail price has dropped to USD $2500, which calls into question the motivation of Canon for doing so.

In the first, camera of the year, post, the telling thing, as noted by some readers’ comments, is that no Nikon or Canon camera made it to the list. Not even the D3S, which is significant given how it changes the way we think of photography in low light. I guess the original D3, with its groundbreaking extreme high ISO has already conditioned us enough that a once impossible ISO 100k does not surprise and thrill as it should. Not too surprisingly, two of the contributors name the Panasonic GF1 as their camera of the year, because it best meets the need for a compact, yet high quality producing camera. The GH-1 and Olympus E-P2 also made the list, which makes it a clear win for the Micro 4/3 format in 2009 and again, no surprise, because M4/3 cameras are addressing and fulfilling a niche market long demanded by serious photographers. Again, where the heck are Nikon and Canon in this new horse race?

Surprisingly, one film camera still made it through, the Fuji GF670 (aka the Voigtlander Bessa III), which would have interested me a decade ago, but no longer, even if it offers the ability to take 6x7 medium format sized photos in a compact package. Too little too late and too much of an anachronism.

If I were to pick, the Nikon D3S is my pick on sheer technical prowess, because its incredible high ISO liberates us from always having to compromise noise versus freezing action with a high shutter speed and makes expensive, fast glass that much less of a necessity. On a more realistic level for all of us that have to work for a living, the Panasonic GF1 takes the nod, because while it’s not perfect, it comes closest to embodying the concept of an SLR in a (largish) digicam size. If the Olympus E-P2 offered better AF and other improvements over the E-P1, it might have won me over even though I’ve not touched either of the Olympus cameras in person. That in-camera IS can be (and has been) the clincher for many choosing between the GF1 and the E-P1/E-P2.

The second post I found of interest about the 5D2’s price drop makes one wonder if Canon is clearing stock for a replacement or if as the TOP speculates, is a strategic move to mitigate the rumoured announcement Nikon will make in February for their next FX camera (D900 appears to be the moniker).

Some readers’ comments dismiss the 5D2 as being nothing special, so no loss if Canon is indeed replacing it. But, really now, is that fair?

The 5D2 is in that awkward position of, as the TOP accurately described in a previous post, being second best in most categories.

It’s second best for resolution because the Nikon D3X, Sony A900 and A850 offer 24 MP resolution compared to the 5D2’s 21 MP. It’s a nearly meaningless quibble, because practically speaking, it amounts to a one-inch difference in print size, e.g. if I can print a 14x20 from 24 MP at 300 dpi print resolution, I’ll get 13x19 from 21 MP at 300 dpi.

Amongst the reasonably priced FX cameras, the 5D2’s build is also second best compared to the tank-like build of the Sony SLRs. The D3X has the best build, but it’s not reasonably priced.

For frame rate, it chugs along at 4 fps, which really, when you consider the amount of data it’s gotta process, is okay.

For AF speed and quality, it’s definitely consumer oriented with only one good AF sensor in the middle with all the other AF points being nearly useless in very challenging situations. I have no experience with Sony SLRs, so can’t cmment on how good or bad the 5D2 is compared to them, but I don’t hear high praises about the Sony AF either. But then, if you’ve used Nikon and Canon’s best AF systems, that will spoil you for any other brand’s AF module.

What the 5D2 is about is high resolution in an average body at a reasonable price. It’s not a speedy sports camera, nor is it a rugged camera to be beaten up in the bush. It’s a generalist camera for people like me who are not going to pound nails with it. While I’ve used it for sports, it’s not my first choice, but consider that based on the choices I had in early 2009, between the Nikon D300 and the 5D2, I chose the 5D2 for hockey photography.

I went with the 5D2, because the resolution is very useful for certain types of shots I needed for the end of year posters I created (think heavy cropping), and because the full frame sensor allowed for cleaner ISO 3200 photos than the DX format D300 at ISO 3200. While that’s all good, the bad of the experience is that I threw away thousands of photos that were not in focus, because the 5D2’s AF module is not meant for fast action.

With the 7D available in my camera bag, I’m in a comfort zone where I can use different cameras for their appropriate capabilities. The 7D is the obvious sports camera, although, I admit that I still need to learn how to use all the various AF capabilities to their best advantage. The 5D2 sees less use now, but it’s the first one I grab when I need quality and enlargement capability. It’s telling that I have a Kirk L bracket for the 5D2, but nothing for the 7D, because the 7D is always used handheld whereas the 5D2 is most often used on a tripod.

I don’t like to discuss pie-in-the-sky products, because it depresses me that I cannot ever hope to afford them. I would love to shoot with the ultra high-resolution medium format backs, but given that they cost as much as a nice car, it just is not going to happen. Then there’s the cost of the camera and lenses to make use of that digital back. By the time you’re finished, you will end up shelling out what a young couple might put down on their first home.

Surveying the scene with some semblance of reality, the Canon system, at this time, represents a compelling system that is hard to ignore. There’s the big dollar, pro-oriented 1 series that offer speed in the 1D or high resolution in the 1Ds. This is mirrored at the enthusiast level with the 7D offering speed and the 5D offering high resolution.

Sony has the high resolution covered, but there’s no 7D or D300 equivalent that a user can invest in to mitigate the speed shortcomings of the A900 or A850. Although, the replacement for the A700 might fill that gap, we shall have to wait.

On the Nikon side, the D3S and D3X provide the same two-camera speed and resolution punch as the Canon 1 series. The D700 provides the speed in the enthusiast category, but thus far, there has not been a resolution equivalent to match the 5D2 or A900/A850. February may change that.

The D700 appears to be on the way out and the question is, what is Nikon’s game plan to replace it? Will a D900 offer a compromise of near 20 MP resolution coupled with the D700’s speed to offer, essentially, an FX version of the 7D? Or, will there be a D700S/D800 offering the same sensor as the D3S with a D900 offering the D3X’s 24 MP?

January 12, 2010 - In case you’ve spent the past year doing a Rip Van Winkle, you know that smartphones are the next big “thing” following on the success of Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s various Blackberries - actually, I might suggest that smartphones are already yesterday's big thing given that now, everyone and their grannie is trying to cash in on the action. The next big thing might actually be 3D HDTVs coming soon from Sony, Panasonic and others.

I love the concept of the iPhone and I’m immensely jealous of all those that have and use one. My green eyed envy is mitigated a small bit by the iPod Touch, which is essentially an iPhone without the phone. However, because of the lack of instant cellular access, the Touch is a Wi-Fi only device when you want to check email or do some quick surfing.

In Canada, until recently, the cost of using an iPhone was a princely CAD $60 per month for the lowest cost package available from Rogers. Rogers is no longer the only source for the iPhone as the other two major cell carriers, Telus and Bell, also offer the iPhone with some cheaper (but more limited) packages than Rogers. If $60 per month made you gag, that's because Canada has some of the most expensive wireless rates in the free world thanks to the oligarchy of Bell, Rogers and Telus controlling almost the entire Canadian market.

I won’t be rushing out for an iPhone of my own as I already have a Blackberry for work. While the good old Blackberry looks staid and old compared to all the newcomers with their fancy touch screens, if email and texting are your thing, I’d much rather have the Blackberry than the iPhone or any of its imitators without a real keyboard.

Having used the Touch for some typing, I can resoundingly declare it as a piece of tactile doggy doo. The touch screen technology of the early 21st Century aint’ nothing like what you see on Star Trek where the actors’ hands fly on those touch screen consoles.

I initially though the real keys on the Blackberry were too small and would make it too hard to type quickly and accurately. How wrong I am, because I find that I can type quite quickly and accurately. No, I would not want to try and type a very lengthy email or article, but neither would I fear it if I had to. I wonder if Twitter’s 140 character tweet is a recognition that so many of today’s wireless messages come from cell phones with their ganged up three letters per button keypad or the aforementioned dysfunctional touch screens.

However, I have to recognize that the dysfunction might be entirely my own in not warming up to typing on touch screens. There are plenty of people out there using touch screens for typing, tweeting and even blogging and I don’t mean small postings or short sentences. But, I have also read blog entries by a Blackberry user and was astounded at how much and how quickly he could type, as he followed and reported on a human rights tribunal case as it was being conducted (he had to use the BB because he experienced a laptop malfunction on the first day of coverage).

On the topic of smartphones and texting or emailing, I have to shake my head at some users and their addiction to the instant communication capabilities. Yesterday, while walking to the bus stop to go home, I had to stop an intersection. The intersection is a busy one and before pedestrians can cross, there is an advance left turn for cars to make the turn first. Standing beside me was a tall lady with umbrella nestled against her chest, shoulder and crook of her neck while both hands were holding up a Blackberry. When the light turned green with a clear signal for the cars to make their left turn, she casually strolled across the street without looking up or behind her; oblivious to the fact that she put herself in harm's way.

I shook my head and made some comments inside my head about her idiotic behaviour. When the light signalled for pedestrians to cross, I made it halfway across and noticed another woman angling right at me from the opposite side. Her umbrella was angled down so that she could not see me and I had to step out of her way. As I did so, I noticed that she was texting on her cell phone and she only noticed that she was walking like a zombie as we walked by each other. I made some additional choice comments inside my head.

Being able to stay connected is a nice convenience, but sheesh, some people just don't seem to understand that the rest of the world does not care what they did on the weekend or what they're going to that night, as I hear too many times on the bus with people conversing on their cell phones for the entire duration of the bus ride. At least texting and emailing are quiet.

In BC, we will soon have a new law coming into force that will make it illegal to use cell phones normally while driving. Cell phones must now be capable of hands free operation, which makes Blue Tooth connectivity a hot item and makes one of my brothers-in-law quite prescient when he purchased a new SUV a couple of years ago specifically because it allowed him to converse on his cell phone, hands free.

There's no question that cell phones are invaluable during an emergency, as there have been several instances of people using them to guide rescuers to their location. However, I find so much of cell phone conversations to be mundane and unimportant in nature and I wonder, did they really need to call me and tell me that right at that moment, because it really could have waited. Ah well, I better get used to it, because it's only gonna get worse.

First Sunrise of 2010

January 11, 2010 - Okay, I'm a liar. The photo above is not the first sunrise of 2010 for Vancouver; it was actually taken last week shortly after arriving at work and looking out the window and noticing the colors in the sky. It's merely the first bit of sun seen in this new year, because Vancouver has either been overcast or raining since the year started. Par for the course for Vancouver.

The colors in the above photo are not the ones that caught my eye though. The colors in the photo at right are the ones that made me take notice and take out the GF1 for a few snaps.

I had to stretch to get the shot, because my view is largely blocked by buildings. I then went looking for a better vista of the eastern sky to take the photo above, but by that point, the dramatic colors were starting to go.

Both photos had some judicious minus compensation to goose the saturation in-camera with additional goosing in Lightroom 2. However, while there is some mild additional saturation, I mostly left it alone with the main edit being to boost up the black to turn the buildings into silhouettes.

I've been thinking of audio gear in recent times due to the tube in my Sonic Frontiers preamp starting to go. I'm wondering, do I spend $100 and replace the tube and continue using my old, but still okay preamp, or do I take the opportunity to get something different and more with the times?

One idea is to get a HeadRoom Ultra Desktop headphone amp to use as a preamp. This amp has a volume controlled set of output jacks to allow use as a preamp. Plus, it also has a decent DAC with optical and coaxial S/PDIF inputs, as well as USB jack to allow a computer to be the source component. The HeadRoom Ultra is a Swiss Army knife kind of component and the price is reasonable for what it offers. HeadRoom has a nice package that includes the amp, an external PSU and set of AKG K701 headphones. The package price almost makes the K701 a freebie.

However, I think the option that I would really like to pursue is to get a PS Audio PerfectWave DAC. This DAC can act as a preamp and has a number of inputs and source options, such as a NAS thanks to the network connection option. It has the same kind of filters seen in much more expensive DACs and CD players and it's much more functional than the Ayre QB-9 that I've also had thoughts about.

Before I figure any of this audio stuff though, I think I'll wait to at least the end of February and see if all those rumors of pending Nikon announcements come true ;^)

January 7, 2010 - For BC-based photographers, here's some news to pass along about a call for photographic submissions by the Immigrant Services Society of BC:

Immigrant Services Society of BC (ISSofBC) is now accepting entries for the New Faces of British Columbia photography exhibit, to be held in Prince George, Abbotsford, Nanaimo and Vancouver.

Whether you are an aspiring photographer or a seasoned professional, we invite you to submit photos that reflect on your view of British Columbia’s changing demographics. This event will celebrate our province’s multicultural spirit and will bring together new Canadians with long-term residents. As people make up the beauty and diversity in Canada, the photos should reflect the many people that call British Columbia their home.

In the spirit of sharing British Columbians’ stories, we encourage you to include a description of your photograph. We will accept a wide variety of write-ups, including anything from lengthy descriptions of the stories behind photographs, to a brief write up of the photo. Although story-telling is the ultimate goal (so a write-up is great), submissions without write-ups will be accepted.

Your photos will be viewed by a panel and those selected will be included in a travelling exhibit to be held throughout the province in March, and in Vancouver in May. Photos will also be featured in ISSofBC’s print materials and website.

Official call for submissions at the ISSofBC website

New Faces of BC website and PDF of the New Faces program

So, after playing around with Bibble 5 and Lightroom 3 Beta, and despite not intending to, I decided to look at other RAW conversion possibilities just to see if I’m missing anything spectacular out there. Normally, I don’t like to download trial software and bloat up my primary editing computer, but since I’m hoping to do a Windows 7 upgrade soon, I’m going to nuke the OS hard drive anyway for a clean install, so I might as well play before going all Zen-like again with the new OS. It’s also a good time to clean up my file structure for the photo files, because I’ve been a bit sloppy the last few months. Although I use Lightroom as a library of sorts, my primary organization is still folders based in Windows Explorer (or Finder in Mac OS).

One downside to the way I organize my files and in not having access to the latest version of Adobe Camera Raw is that I have to import temporary, one-off RAW files into Lightroom in order to edit and convert them to JPEGs for posting on the website. Back in the day when I used cameras supported by CS3’s ACR, it was very convenient and efficient to work on those one-offs with ACR and then dump them when I was finished. My Lightroom library would be uncluttered and only have files that I want to keep long term. However, this kind of convenience, on its own, does not warrant an upgrade to CS4.

What prompted a look at some other converter options was a time-limited discount on DxO 6 for Windows. Instead of the usual USD $300 price, up until January 5, it could have been bought for USD $200. Since I was checking out other options, I might as well download the trial for Phase Capture One and see what it’s like too even though I’m not thrilled with the USD $400 price.

The older I get, the more I abhor trying to learn new software, but the recent experience with trying to correct lens distortion made me realize that Lightroom is not perfect and that maybe I should not be so blinkered and blind to what other apps can do.

Looking at Bibble, DxO and Capture One here is not about trying to learn every facet of their operation within the 15-30 day trial period. My look is more a quick and dirty with some test files to check for three primary things:

1. Noise reduction quality
2. Lens correction quality (if offered)
3. UI for ease of editing and efficient workflow

DxO
It’s taken a long while for me to get around to looking at DxO again, but it’s always been in the back of my mind due to the camera and lens correction capabilities offered by this converter.

DxO can be used as a standalone RAW converter, but DxO also offers some integration with Lightroom; however, I don’t find the integration as good as it should be. While an image can be exported out to DxO from Lightroom and then roundtrip back in, any edits you may have applied in Lightroom first, are ignored by DxO, which seems to defeat the purpose of having a plug-in to Lightroom. You may as well start in DxO alone and then import the files into Lightroom for additional editing and archiving into the library module. Unfortunately, when you roundtrip a file from Lightroom, it does not come back as a RAW file, but as a TIFF file, which may limit what you further do in Lightroom.

What DxO offers over Lightroom is an automated correction routine that applies DxO’s specific camera and lens calibrations to the RAW files. The files can be corrected for lens sharpness (or more accurately, lack of), barrel and pincushion distortion and light fall off in the corners. DxO also has a noise reduction feature that can work quite effectively. The question for me is how effective is the noise reduction and lens correction capabilities and is it worth the cost.

DxO has a different workflow then is typical of other converters such as Lightroom or Bibble. You browse for a folder of images, which is fine, but then you need to select the images you want to work on further into a “project,” which is separated from the thumbnail view of the folder by a bottom-oriented thumbnail section that shows the project images.

After selecting the images for a project, you select one from the bottom thumbnail section and DxO will do an automatic correction to the image. The corrections can be manually overridden through the tools found on the right side of the DxO work area.

Processing an image in DxO is not very speedy and while the lens correction process can be effective that’s only if your particular camera and lens combination is supported. Each camera and lens profile has to be created by DxO and if you use a newer camera, such as the Canon 7D, it may take a while for profiles to be created even with popular lenses. After installing DxO, I was prompted to download the appropriate camera and lens combinations relevant for me and I found that there are a number of combinations that I have that are not supported and probably never will be, as some of the cameras are now discontinued models. A similar problem exists with Bibble 5, in that you need Bibble to create and provide newer camera and lens profiles for its lens correction feature. Lens correction is a fantastic feature in both DxO and Bibble, but only if your camera and lens combinations are supported.

Another knock against DxO is that it does not support the Panasonic GH-1 or GF1. Only the FZ30 is supported at this time, which I find ridiculous given the popularity of Panasonic’s G series. Since I find myself shooting at high ISO quite often with these two cameras, they could definitely benefit from DxO’s noise reduction feature, but it would seem silly of me to spend money on a RAW converter that cannot covert files from two of the four cameras I use regularly.

I still find it quite an interesting application, but the workflow with Lightroom is not ideal for me.

Phase Capture One
If you read reviews and user comments, you may find that Capture One is considered to be best RAW converter when purely discussing the quality of conversion. For USD $400, which is twice as much as Lightroom or Bibble, it had damn well better be the best not only in RAW conversion, but also in the user experience and other features.

While it does have two of the key features I desire (noise reduction and lens correction) I dislike the UI and the floating editing windows; however the editing windows can be locked in place on the left side of the Capture One work area. The UI is a matter of taste only, but it is more straightforward than DxO.

I found Capture One slow in applying an edit but what it can do for quality looks very promising. There's a handy "Auto" mode edit that's worth trying out to see what it can do. I used the Auto mode on the team photo above and it gave me a great looking image and damned if I have to admit, better than what I produced via Lightroom and Photoshop. That really annoys me ;^)

However, the UI, speed and cost won't have me splurging to purchase it. I fully admit that my look at DxO and Capture One are short and cursory and specific to certain features. My rationale being that if one offers “knock me off my feet” capabilities, then I could make an investment and learn to use the application at my leisure. That did not happen (closer with Capture One than DxO), but the experience did make me appreciate that the software engineers at Adobe really nailed it for the UI and providing an efficient workflow for processing a large number of files.

I would still prefer being able to customize the Lightroom work area to move the left and right file access and editing sections off to a second monitor, but on the whole, the way those sections are laid out has thus far been the best of the bunch. However, I recognize that I have an inherent bias towards Lightroom since I’ve been using it for a few years. It could also be speedier in handling the large files from the Canon 5D2 and 7D, but I still found it faster and less frustrating than working with DxO or Capture One.

I also took a closer look at how Lightroom 2 deals with noise reduction compared to Bibble with Noise Ninja and I found that I could reduce the noise almost as effectively. Lightroom 2’s noise reduction is not considered state of the art so when Lightroom 3 moves onto production release, there should be some promising capabilities. However, stupid me, I keep on forgetting that I actually do have Noise Ninja available for Lightroom, as Noise Ninja offers an external editor compatible with Lightroom.

This just leaves the issue of correcting lens distortion using a Lightroom workflow and stupid me again, but I’ve just discovered PTL as a plug-in for Lightroom.

The edit will be subtle in these screen shots, but above is pre-correction and below is post correction for barrel distortion using PTL's external editor for Lightroom 2.

I'm repeating myself here, but a plug-in for Lightroom is a misnomer, because it’s not like the typical plug-in or filter for Photoshop. Just as with the Nik ColorEfex plug-in for Lightroom, you need to render a TIFF or JPEG file for exporting to PTL as an external editor to Lightroom. After finishing the edit, external editor will send the rendered image back into Lightroom’s library for any additional editing that needs to be done. It breaks the RAW editing workflow, because now, if you continue with the edits, you are no longer working with the RAW file. Ultimately, it would be nice if Adobe would license (or buy) PTL technology and incorporate it right into Lightroom so that roundtrips are no longer necessary.

With having Noise Ninja already available (I bought the license years ago so I get to enjoy using it as a standalone, as a plug-in to Photoshop, and as an external editor with Lightroom), all I need to do is spend $25 for a PTL license and I'll have what I've been seeking to adapt to my Lightroom workflow.

No, it's not as ideal as it is with Bibble with everything built-in so that you always work with RAW files, but it's more wallet friendly and it means not having to dramatically change the way I've been working the last three years.

January 5, 2010 - As referred to in yesterday's post, the other book that I read over Christmas was pure pleasure; Wayson Choy's The Jade Peony.

I have at times wondered if I could have ever been an author, but knowing myself, I'm just not that creative that I would have a good story to tell. However, if I were so talented, The Jade Peony is the kind of book I would have loved to have written.

Celebrated authors write about what they know best. Mordecai Richler wrote about the Jewish experience in Montreal; Dan Brown writes about the Catholic Church; Tom Clancy writes stories woven with military influences; and Wayson Choy writes about the Chinese Canadian experience of the 1930s and 1940s in Vancouver's Chinatown.

Choy was born in Vancouver and grew up during the aforementioned decades in Chinatown. Although Choy is of my parents generation, I found so much that I could relate to in his first novel. It does not matter that his stories are of the big city from decades past whereas my own experience is of the small town in the 1970s and 1980s, the culture is palpable across the years. Despite the age difference, our experience are much more similar than you might think.

Choy was born to immigrant parents, just as I am and we are of the transitional generation that bridges the old country with the new one. We experienced some existentialist angst trying to figure out if we are Chinese, Canadian, or Chinese-Canadian. In some ways, we don't belong to either, because we have one foot straddling the old culture and one foot straddling the new one. These days though, I unambiguously identify myself as Canadian; I am not a hyphenated citizen of this country. It does not mean that I ignore the old culture, but Canada is where I live, grew up and developed into the person that I am and there's nothing in the old country that I can identify with other than ethnicity. I do not have the ability to speak or write Chinese and my values are based on Western liberalism. I'm also a spendthrift compared to the stereotypical frugality that Chinese have - old school Chinese don't crack open their wallets very easily, unless they're trying to save face and impress friends and relatives by fighting over the dim sum bill.

I have an oldercousin who would always pay the bill when going out to dinner with his family. Even when I made it clear that I would be paying for the meal, he would sneak ways to pay the bill, including feigning going to the restroom. At the end of the meal, we waited for the bill to come but none ever did, because my cousin paid it while "using" the restroom. Another time, another cousin visited from out of town. Being a college student, he didn't have a lot of bucks, so I gave him some money to pay for the dinner in front of the older cousin. But, when the bill arrived, the older cousin immediately grabbed the bill and paid it before my younger cousin could even reach for his wallet.

Being Cantonese is another shared experience with Wayson Choy. Vancouver's Chinatown is populated with and visted by immigrants from China's Guangdong province (formerly known as Kwangtung), which has as its capital city, Guangzhou, formerly known as Canton. Not very far away is Hong Kong, a westernized business Mecca for Cantonese speaking Chinese.

Although, one can generally state that the citizens of Kwangtung province speak Cantonese, the reality is that there are many dialects and that only the people of Guangzhou and Hong Kong speak "proper" Cantonese. The rest speak a variation or a dialect based on which village they are from. The number of dialects spoken in Chinatown is mentioned regularly in Choy's book and the key dialect is from the city of Taishan, better known as Toisan.

Toisan is the origin of most North American Chinese, many of whom will have roots going back to the building of the transcontinental railways in the USA and Canada during the late 19th Century. The people of Toisan are like the Scots; there are more Toisanese living outside of Toisan than are in Toisan.

My family is not from Toisan, but I can confirm that the Cantonese I grew up hearing is not quite the same as spoken in Hong Kong, which is more nasal and higher pitched in sound compared to the flat tone of my parent's village dialect. As a child, my mother explained to me that some of the Chinese friends in my BC hometown came from other Chinese villages and would say things differently than us, but they all seem able to communicate with each other without difficulty, much like the grandmother in Choy's book, who could praise you in one village dialect and then insult you in another.

Some of the phrases used often by Choy are all a part of my own history (my spelling is not necessarily the same as used by Choy in his book):

• "Dai-ga Hong yen" - we are all Chinese people, with the "Hong" being the Cantonese pronouncement for "Han," which refers to the ancient kingdom and dynasty that united China (also the ethnic origins of the Chinese people)
• "Ai-yah!" - I don't think there's really a translation for this, as it's more of an expression of surprise and shock; the utterance of a Chinese mother discovering that her toddler has just taken off his poopie diaper and has proceeded to spread his messiness on the floor (written with a recent experience of mine in mind 8^)
• "Hum Sui Fawl" - Salt Water City, which is what Vancouver is called by Chinese Canadians - Choy at first uses the English "Salt Water City" and when I read it, I knew that it was very familiar, but couldn't quite place it until Choy used the phonetic Chinese words that I remembered that this is what my parents and their friends called Vancouver when I was a young child. Given how long it's been since I've heard this phrase, I'm not sure that it's in much use, but since I don't visit Vancouver's Chinatown at all, I cannot be certain.
• "Mo no" - No brain or mindless; a phrase I've heard a few times in my youth as my parents would admonish me if I did something silly or stupid. The phrase is used to describe Choy's youngest main character, who cannot get straight the proper way to address his elders, because in Chinese, there seems to be a specific term to describe just about every relative and non-relative relationship.

In proper and respectful addressing of elders, a younger person never calls them by name; it's always a title of some sort. An older brother is "dai goh," which is simply, bigger brother. Uncles on the mother's side are referred to one way and uncles on the father's side are referred to another way. Same with grandparents, which caused me some confusion when I read of Choy's children character's referring to their grandmother as "poh-poh."

Poh-poh is what my children call my wife's mother, whereas the kids call my mother, "ma-ma." When I read "poh-poh" in Choy's book, I automatically associated her with the mother's side of the family, but as I read further it was made clear that the "poh-poh" is actually the father's mother. To confuse things further, I never understood the distinction between poh-poh and ma-ma until I had my own kids, because these are not the ways I addressed my own grandmothers. Yes, it's a bit of mess probably due to village differences and the fact that one of my grandmothers was actually a step-grandmother.

Other information gleaned from Choy's writings that I found interesting is the old custom of digging up the bodies of deceased Chinese seven years after the original burial for reinterring in the old country. I know some European cultures request that at death, the body be shipped back to the old country for burial, but I had never heard of this custom in Canada (likely because it must have stopped many decades ago). It would make sense for this to be requested by those born in China with no family and ties to Canada, that the final resting place should be in the old country. However, I know within my own extended family that the opposite has occurred, that ancestral bones have been exhumed in the old country and brought to a new final resting place in Canada.

Other tidbits that I recognize are the arranged marriages, multiple wives and adoption of children. It may seem odd and anachronistic in 21st Century Vancouver, a city teeming with Chinese, that some people still return to the old country to find spouses, but it continues to happen for men and women alike. I also remember as a child, hearing my parents talk about one of their family friends wanting a little sister for their son. A little while later, we visited those friends and there sitting in a chair, quiet and shy, was a little girl, perhaps two or three years old. Being a "mo no" kind of kid, I didn't think it remarkable that one day, out of the blue, my childhood friend would all of a sudden have a little sister without having gone through the baby stages. But, then, you didn't talk much about the girl's past before the adoption, because once she arrived, she was treated like she had always been there by family and friends.

The secretive nature of Chinese is a theme that permeates Choy's book and it's another experience that we Chinese know oh so well. Chinese do not seem to like to talk about their own personal histories, especially in front of the children. Some basics can be found out over time, but I know from my own history that there's been a secret that my parents kept from me until I was in university. Without getting into the details, it's another thing that I have in common with Wayson Choy.

The Jade Peony is a beautifully written book, but then I'm biased, because it speaks to me and my identity. I read through it voraciously and finished it much sooner than expected, because the stories nourished me.

If Evelyn Lau's brutal teenage experiences speak to the dark side of Chinese culture, Wayson Choy speaks to the romantic, nostalgic side that tries to dig into what it means to be Chinese in Vancouver. This is a changing position in Vancouver, for while the Chinese are the largest visible minority in the city, no longer are the Cantonese dialect speaking Toisan the most dominant group within the Chinese Diaspora.

In the 1990s, leading up to China reclaiming Hong Kong, many Hong Kong citizens immigrated to Canada. Having that valuable Canadian passport was a huge mitigation of the risk of what might happen when Communist China took over. Since 1997, with China taking a fairly hands-off approach to Hong Kong's dynamic capitalism, Hong Kong immigration has relaxed. However, immigration from Taiwan and mainland China has increased significantly. Where once, the only Chinese spoken in Vancouver was Cantonese, Mandarin is quickly catching up and I notice that Chinese salespeople must be able to converse in both dialects to be competitive in the stores.

Chinatown itself is still primarily a Cantonese stronghold, but we're talking about old generation Cantonese, like my parents. As far as I know it, the new immigrants eschew the old, rundown looking Chinatown for the shopping district in the suburb of Richmond, where Chinese are likely now the majority of the residents.

After finishing Lau's book, I had enough of her, whereas I immediately ordered the three other books written by Choy (two memoirs and a second novel that continues the story from the first book).

Xmas Lights

January 4, 2010 - I waited too long during my Christmas break to take the Christmas lights photo above. Everytime I wanted to go out and take a photo, something came up and pushed back my outing. By the time I finally had a day open, it was already January 2 and while I waited for the sun to set, the rain started coming down moderately hard.

I made it no further than two blocks before turning back to get an umbrella. After restarting the walk, along the way, I could see the sunset peaking through the clouds, giving the surrounding clouds a magenta tint:

On the way back, the rain stopped (Mr. Murphy and his law striking at me again) and I walked by a school that had a view of the distant clouds parting to let the last slivers of sunlight to show:

As you may have guessed in looking at the above shot compared to the Xmas lights photo, I tweaked the white balance in the lights photo to make the sky bluer. I also took the photo from an angle instead of head-on because of the utility pole seen 1/4 of the way in the frame.

Xmas Excesses and Three Cameras
Now that we have welcomed the start of a new decade, I hope Santa has been good to you and brought much merriment to your homes and your families.

Since my family happened to have the newest and largest house in 2009, we were "volunteered" to host the Christmas day get together and dinner. We had the usual group of my wife's siblings and all the kids plus many more extended family members coming by for dinner. In all, we had close to 40 people for dinner and it made for a loud and boisterous house with younger kids playing computer and video games upstairs and older kids watching movies downstairs while the adults conversed on the main floor. We barely had enough dishes and utensils to accommodate everyone.

The usual frenzy of exchanging gifts continued this year and the recent recession seemed like a distant memory. The extended family did its part to help spend Canada out of the economic downturn.

The major gift for me this year turned out to be very photographically relevant with the Panasonic GH-1 I've been using since September 2009 now officially mine thanks to the family. I couldn't acknowledge it until now, but it's one helluva present, which I used to record our Xmas gift opening session.

I can now look towards expanding the Panasonic-based system a bit more now that the GH-1 is mine to keep. I would love to add the Lumix 7-14mm lens to give me a two zoom lens combo that can handle a very wide range of everyday photography (and videography), but given its cost, I won't be rushing to buy this lens just yet - especially since I still need to see my wife's Christmas shopping bills 8^).

However, one of the first accessories that I have bought for the GH-1 is the Panasonic DMW-FL220 flash unit. The FL220 is a very compact flash that takes two AA cells for power. Being compact, it will not have a large amount of power and it does not offer a tilting flash head to bounce the light for better looking flash photos. However, it does allow for flash photography without being forced to use the GH-1's otherwise useless built-in flash and size-wise, it matches the compactness of the GH-1. When I describe the GH-1's flash as "useless," it's because the 14-140mm lens is almost always mounted and it's length creates a shadow when using the pop-up flash.

As far as the FL220 flash is concerned, there is not much more to say about it for features (minimal) and use (TTL Auto mode). It behaves like any other camera-mounted flash unit in that flash output is dependent upon on distance of the subject. Focus on a subject six or seven feet away, but with a foreground object in between and the flash will provide proper lighting for the focused subject but the foreground object will be overexposed. Using a higher ISO helps to burn in the ambient light so that the flash photos don't take on the usual and brutal looking deer-in-the-headlights look (bright, flash lit subject surrounded by black).

Depending on how well I get along (or not) with the FL220, I may have to get myself a more serious Panasonic flash that offers tilt and swivel for the flash head, which will alleviate the shortcomings of the FL220. As I hear it, the more expensive Panasonic flash units may actually just be re-badged Olympus flashes. Or, I may seek out a cheaper, third-party alternative, e.g. Sunpak or other (assuming that one can be found, as most third-party flash brands fully support Nikon and Canon with a smattering of support for Sony and Pentax and thus far, nothing for Panasonic or Olympus).

With two Panasonic cameras in tow, the GF1 with the fast 20mm lens is my ambient light camera, especially since now that I have the DMW-LVF1 external EVF, it becomes inconvenient to constantly swap out the EVF for the flash and vice versa. Besides which, the slow 14-140mm lens on the GH-1 practically forces the use of flash indoors.

The FL220 is appropriately sized for the GH-1 and is absolutely puny compared to a full sized flash, such as the Canon EX580 II

Being able to do video so easily make the two Panasonic cameras very convenient and I'm pretty happy with the video quality (being a video nube), but in looking at videos from the GF1 versus the GH-1, the image stabilized 14-140 lens helps with smoother looking videos. Technique also helps to remain steady, but I'm going to want to do videos with the GH-1 more than with the GF1.

The LVF1 EVF on the GF1

Interestingly, the LVF1 EVF can be tilted upwards to a 90-degree angle, but it does not mean that you can use it for some surreptitious shooting, as you still need to peer into the EVF to frame properly. Compared to the GH-1, the LVF1 presents a smaller, dimmer and coarser image. It's not even a close contest when compared to side-by-side and going back and forth, but on its own, I find the LVF1 to be acceptable.

It presents the same bottom row of data as the GF1's larger LCD, but not the top row, which is fine since the bottom row is the important one that shows the shutter speed, aperture, exposure compensation and remaining shots. You can use the LVF1 in the same way as the GF1's LCD to make camera and menu adjustments and to review images taken.

It does make the GF1 less pocket-friendly though as the GF1/LVF1 combo now barely fits into the pockets of the jackets I wear during Vancouver's wet winters. However, I like it because it gets me back to using a camera the traditional way instead of a foot in front of me, as is the case when using the GF1's LCD.

Moving onto the Canon 7D, I am finding a little more respect for what this camera can do (subject to change if and when I get around to doing more anal retentive comparison photos). The focusing quality makes it difficult to go back to the 5D2's consumer quality AF engine when shooting action, but all is not perfect with the 7D. Either I expect too much or my technique is too sloppy, but I still find myself throwing away a lot of hockey photos because the camera could not achieve focus quickly enough. When it does acquire focus, the 7D does seem to have a very good ability to recognize when another subject has temporarily passed in front of the main subject, which happens often in hockey. The 7D will maintain the correct focusing distance for the original subject and not automatically try to acquire focus on the new, foreground subject that passes by.

For high ISO quality, if you can dial in the right exposure, the 7D can produce nice looking ISO 3200 files. But, there's the rub, dialling in the right exposure can be a tricky thing in the poor lighting of hockey arenas. Lighting is not necessarily even from one end of an arena to the other and where on one side, I end up with overexposure, at the other end I may end with the right or underexposure. You need to get to know an arena intimately and understand its lighting so that you can compensate accordingly. For the time being, I've been dialling in plus 1.3 compensation in my son's home arena and accepting that in a small number of photos, I'm going to end up with no detail in the ice surface, even after editing in Lightroom.

With all this talk of Panasonic and Canon, you would think that I've abandoned Nikon, but not so. I'm merely waiting out Nikon to see what it has in store for future FX cameras. The D3S has made it clear to me that the D700 is not in my future and while I would very much love to see that D3S sensor in a D700S (or D900 anyone?), that's speculation that no one outside of Nikon knows anything about.

Sensor or lens limitations
A while ago, a reader asked me about whether I think we're sensor limited or lens limited for digital photography. I kept meaning to respond, but kept on forgetting due to daily emails pushing the reader's question lower and lower in the inbox.

I'm going to answer, but cheat by merely passing on another person's opinion. I recently watched the latest edition of the Luminous Landscape video journal (#19) and this same question was posed to Norman Koren, a scientist and software programmer who created the Imatest package of lens and camera testing.

At the highest and most expensive levels of photography, we are sensor limited, meaning the best of today's lenses from the likes of Leica, Zeiss, Schneider and Rodenstock, will out resolve the sensor. For the rest of us that cannot afford such brands, we're lens limited in that the sensors can resolve more detail than consumer brand lenses.

The interesting aspect of this lens versus sensor debate is that the best lens brands are confident with sensors that have five micron sized pixels. Smaller than five microns and the current generation of lenses won't be able to keep up, but remember, we're talking about the best of the best in both lens and sensor technology.

Real world implications? Beats me, because I'm one of those luddites that ultimately judges by how good the print looks. I've not really tried to wrap my head around the idea that the smaller pixel pitch of a sensor will lead to diffraction limits sooner than expected, e.g. instead of resolution limiting diffraction setting in at f11 with say a 12 MP DX sensor, we may be hitting diffraction at f8 with 18 MP on a DX sensor.

Xmas Photo Project
My photo projects have been few and far between, but one recent one that I enjoyed working on just before Christmas was to take a team photo of my son's hockey team at the coach's request.

The concept is quite simple: the coach wanted a dressing room photo of all the players sitting on the bench with shin pads, socks and pants on but no elbow or shoulder pads. The jerseys with the numbers showing would hang on the wall behind the players.

I agreed to take the photo and we discussed which dressing room would be the best for this concept. As it turns out, within the local arenas the team plays in, only one arena has a long enough bench to accommodate all the players and as luck would have it, along the long wall are exactly the number of hooks needed for the number of players on the team. As luck would further have it, our team would play its last game before the Christmas break in that arena.

I brought out my 600 w/s Visatec mono lights to fire into my 60-inch umbrellas and at maximum power, they gave me f8 light at ISO 100 using the Canon 5D2. Usually, you angle the lights inwards towards the subject, but because the subject is a long row of 16 hockey players, I had to angle the lights out slightly in order to even out the spread of light. Even so, I still did some vignetting edits in Lightroom and Photoshop to even out the lighting a bit more - software technology is just so f'ing brilliant these days!

I took the photo three different ways:

1. Traditional, straight on using the widest lens I had available for the Canon system, which is the 17-40mm f4,
2. Panorama style by taking several sectional shots from the same tripod location, for later stitching in Photoshop
3. Sectional style by moving the tripod to three spots in the room with the idea of manually merging the photos in Photoshop

I think number 3, the sectional style, could have been the best solution...if I had the space to do it properly and if I had the time to prepare and measure out exactly where the tripod needed to be placed in order to ensure the proper scale and perspective. This was the last of the three types I tried and I was a bit rushed and lacking in space to properly position the tripod. When I opened up the files in Lightroom, I could tell that the positioning was off and did not even bother trying to manually merge the three sectional photos into one long panorama in Photoshop.

Number 2 was a wildcard attempt to see what Photoshop could do. My primary concern was with how Photoshop would merge human subjects and would I end up with Picasso style distortion in the faces. What I received is very unexpected.

The tripod was in the same spot and I took six photos from left to right. After merging, the photo looked like it had been taken with a fisheye lens with a severe curvature of field that I could not do anything with. As far as the human subjects are concerned, Photoshop did an exemplary job in the stitching.

Number 1 is the photo that I ended up having to use. In the narrow confines of the room, my rear end was jammed up against the wall and I a barely had enough room to peer into the viewfinder. The 17-40 lens set to 17mm was barely wide enough to cover the entire length of the bench and although I had levelled the tripod, the room's floor was not entirely even and there was a slight levelling issue to correct, which resulted in having to crop the outer legs of the two players bookending the bench. There is also the unfortunate by-products of using a very wide angle lens with those two same players being broadened laterally.

The rationale for trying 2 and 3 was to try and avoid the lateral distortion that a wide angle lens would impart at the edges. I also had some grand ambition to create a really high quality panorama photo instead of merely upsizing the photo, but really now, with 21 MP, I admit that I was being too grandiose for my own good.

At 17mm, the 17-40 lens exhibits pretty nasty barrel distortion. There's not only the usual straight lines being bowed inwards at the edges, there is also a curvature of field problem - I hope that I'm using this term correctly. When you look at the photo, you get a sense of some distortion at the edges, that you're not looking at a perfectly flat subject, but that the ends have been curved, just like with linear barrel distortion affecting straight lines but in the third dimension of depth instead of just the vertical and horizontal lines. Another way of describing it is to take a photo in your hands and curve the edges of the photo slightly away from you.

Lightroom 2 can straighten a tilted subject and it can do some correction of light fall off in the corners, but it does not have the ability to correct for this kind of lens distortion. Photoshop has a lens correction filter, which can correct for the obvious barrel and pin cushion distortion, but it's not effective for the curvature of field. Belatedly, I did find an application that can correct for this distortion during the RAW conversion (discussed in the next segment below).

What I should have done is use my Nikon 14-24mm lens on the Canon 5D2...that is if I had bothered to have learned to use my Nikon to Canon lens adapter in time for the project. Even if there's still some wide angle distortion, the wider view would have allowed for more cropping leeway and not force me to put the two end players so close to the edge of the frame, as with the 17-40 lens.

However, I'm reasonably happy with the photo I took and knowing that it would be a panorama look due to the heavy cropping of the top and bottom, I came up with the idea of creating a calendar poster. You can get a sense of the image I took in the next section below.

On a 17x22 inch sheet, I sized the photo to be almost 21 inches wide (to the maximum allowed by the Epson 4800's printing ability on this sheet size). The photo takes up about 1/3 of the width of the sheet with the bottom 2/3s taken up by two rows of six months for the 2010 year. It should make for a nice wall display to remember the team throughout 2010. And, yes, the coach is very happy with the results.

Bibble 5 and Lightroom 3 Beta
I briefly played around with the trial version of the new Bibble 5 and Lightroom 3 Beta. Bibble has undergone a dramatic revision and upgrade in looks and user interface. The black and grey color scheme definitely borrows from Lightroom and gives Bibble an elegant look. You can check out the Bibble website to see all that's new in this RAW converter.

The new Bibble 5 interface with the (heavily cropped) hockey team photo I took - the thumbnail segment is set to the largest size possible, something I would not normally set it to

After having used Lightroom for a few years, I've grown accustomed to its UI and having now taken on a policy of simplification for my workflow, I'm not really looking to switch RAW converters. However, I was curious to see how Bibble has evolved in the years since I used the previous version.

The familiar and largely unchanged interface of Lightroom 3 Beta

The previous version allowed for the tool windows to be moved around and onto a second monitor, although doing so seemed to make Bibble unstable, as I found that taking the tools apart and creating my own custom set led to too many crashes. Since I did not get very deeply into all that Bibble 5 can do, I did not see an option to utilize a second monitor as Lightroom allows. However, how Lightroom allows you to use the second monitor is still not as functional and customizable as I would like for moving tools off of the main screen. As with Lightroom, Bibble 5 allows for hiding the left and right tools sections.

Some of the best features of the previous generation have been carried over to generation 5, such as the Noise Ninja noise removal plug-in and a lens correction module. The previous lens correction module was based on PTL, but I'm not sure if the current module uses the same correction.

While you can expect older, popular lenses to have been profiled, newer lenses may still be missing profiles, such as the Nikon 24-70mm f2.8 AF-S or the Panasonic 14-140mm f4-5.8. While disappointing that these lenses are not available for correction, the lenses that are profiled can lead to some great results.

I opened up the hockey team photo that I discuss in the section above and applied the lens correction and was very happy to see an immediate correction of the barrel distortion and field curvature. I also adjusted the vignetting caused by the light fall-off in the corners. It's too bad Bibble 5 was released after I had finished my hockey team photo project, because it would have made for a better photo than what I got via Lightroom2/Photoshop CS3.

Lightroom 3 is supposed to have a newly refined noise reduction feature, but unfortunately, the luminance noise reduction is disabled in the Beta version, so I could not see how good noise reduction is in LR3. Bibble, with Noise Ninja built-in, produced good looking TIFFs that do not need filtering in Photoshop. Applying Noise Ninja to the LR3 file in Photoshop still did not produce as nice a looking image as Bibble and its Noise Ninja plug-in.

One of the really irksome things about previous versions of Bibble had to do with the way highlights would be rendered when using the Highlight Recovery tool. In the older versions of Bibble, using the tool could result in blown highlights coming out pink or blue instead of remaining featureless white.

Only one of my test images had blown highlights useful for testing the highlight recovery tool, but I'm pleased to not see any noticeable pink or blue in the highlights. However, when doing pixel-peeping viewing, I can still see some color artefacts compared to the LR3 sample.

From my limited look at the two next generation converters, I see Bibble 5 being quite similar in conversion quality as LR3, with differences primarily coming down to how you seasoned the image in the RAW converter. When you include the Noise Ninja and lens correction, the results may be even better, but no final conclusion can be made until the production version of Lightroom 3 is released. Assuming LR3's noise reduction is up to snuff, it is still missing the more capable lens correction feature in Bibble 5. This omission is why I've been toying with the idea of buying DxO to use in conjunction with Lightroom 2, but as mentioned earlier about a desire to keep things simple, I have thus far not made the DxO purchase or looked at other RAW convertors, such as the latest Phase Capture One (which also appears to have a better lens correction module than Lightroom).

Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid
From the personal files: I finished off two books during the Christmas break, both of which were of interest to me and my Chinese identity and culture. One turned out to be a difficult book to finish while the other surprised me with how well it captures the experiences of Chinese Canadians. One book is autobiographical while the other is fiction, but both have been critically acclaimed.

Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid by Evelyn Lau has been much discussed in the 20 years since it was first published. It is a journal of Lau's experiences after running away from home at 15 years of age. For two years, Lau moved in and out of various homes and shelters and on occasion, she did spend some time on the actual streets of Vancouver. It's a tumultuous two-year journey that Lau takes us on; a journey marked by alcohol use, drug addiction and ultimately, prostitution, as ways to abuse herself physically and psychologically.

It's remarkable that Lau survived the physical and mental journey, as prostitution in Vancouver can be very dangerous. Some 60 women have disappeared over the years with many of them meeting a very grisly end at a notorious pig farm in a Vancouver suburb. Lau also had to work out much mental anguish towards her parents and her relationships during her two years under the care of the provincial social system.

I found the title to be a misnomer since, as mentioned, Lau did not actually spend all that much time actually living on the streets, although she certainly did spend a significant amount of time working them. What surprised me from Lau's journal is the amount of social services that were available to her, as a minor, by the provincial government. I wouldn't suggest that the services are perfect, but there was enough that if Lau had wanted to utilize them, she could have. She had access to social workers, foster homes and psychiatrists, all paid for by the taxpayers of British Columbia. As a minor, there are more services available than if she had been an adult. However, she spurned much of the efforts of those services by running away from the province three times.

As I kept reading, what initial pangs of sympathy I had for her at the beginning when I only knew a little bit about her history, began to whittle away, as she kept on rebelling and abusing herself.

Before reading the book, I knew of Lau from news stories and the occasional articles she had published in newspapers. I knew that she ran away from home because her parents were demanding and had metaphorically suffocated her. As she described, her parents are always criticizing, always demanding that she do homework, study and bring home straight A grades. And, when there was no more homework or studying to be done, to practice the piano or to do chores around the house. Friends were not encouraged and needless to say, there was no social life for a teenager yearning to just be a regular teen during a very critical time of development.

As an adult, Lau had a rather notorious relationship with another celebrated BC author, W.P. Kinsella. Kinsella wrote Shoeless Joe, which was adapted into the Hollywood movie, Field of Dreams. Kinsella is old enough to be Lau's father and it's been noted that Lau seems to seek out father-figure men for relationships to make up for her own weak and cuckolded father. After Lau's relationship with Kinsella ended, she wrote about it and I remember being surprised at her description of Kinsella being essentially, and I paraphrase here, a stinky old man, literally, smelling like shit (Lau actually used "fecal" in her article). Kinsella was not amused and sued Lau for bringing ridicule upon him and I cannot say that I disagree with the man.

In a lot of ways, I could relate to Lau and her suffocation under the influence of a domineering mother. If you're Chinese, you know exactly what I mean by that comment. There's some irony in knowing people that my parents would consider as model children. Always on the honor roll, working after school or otherwise being home bodies doing homework and mostly doing what their parents wanted or expected. Unfortunately, some of those kids grew up into adults that never married and still live at home with the parents. Behavior that my parents would once praise is now behavior that they would consider unfortunate. Oh look at so and so, in his thirties with no marriage prospects - completely oblivious that the parents led to such a result because they could not cut loose the apron springs and needed to control most aspects of the child's life. They wanted perfect kids and ended up with monks and nuns and this may have been Lau's fate if she had not run away.

My own parents were always fearful of me being badly influenced by the kids that smoked, drank and took drugs. After school socializing was considered a waste of time, time that should have been spent doing homework or working in the family's convenience store. My parents were indifferent to sports and playing high school sports was something I did almost entirely on my own by taking the bus to weekend practices and games or, when I had use of the car, driving myself. I was only allowed to play one year of football because my parents requested that I be available to work after school in the family restaurant during my senior year. It was stifling at times, but not suffocating and going away, out of town, to university led to a measure of independence and learning how to take care of myself while still having a parental safety net.

Over the years, I've come to understand that my parents did the best they could and that their values were instilled in them in the old country and that they lived through some of the most challenging times in modern history. They were children during the Great Depression, growing up in a country rife with civil wars, and external threats and occupation by Japan. They've complained any number of times that I had it too easy and that I would never know the poverty and hunger that they did when they were children. It's these experiences that shape their attitude towards frivolity and having fun; because they didn't have much of them when they were children growing up in war torn China. It's also these experiences that have shaped their attitude towards money and not wasting any of it or throwing things out when they might still serve a purpose later on.

One thing that I have no sense of from Lau's book is if her parents had similar experiences as my parents. There is no mention of their history and if they were born in Canada or are immigrants. There's no discussion of Lau trying to understand what it is that made her parents the way they are, they are merely mentioned as being the source of her problems (she's obsessive compulsive towards not returning to her parents) and the cause of her running away.

I cannot help feel that she brought on much of her suffering by her own hand and actions. She had choices, she had resources available to help her, but she chose poorly and/or disdained the help offered. As I neared the end of the book, I felt weary of her overwrought angst and inability to get a hold of herself and get her life back on track.

My thought was that a lot of us have demanding parents and lived lives not that much different than Lau's before she left home, and a lot of us wished for more understanding and patience. However, we didn't run away to live life in a drug-induced haze and sell our bodies on the streets of Vancouver; we got through the teenage years and grew up. Thus, I had to remind myself that I was reading the words of a 15 and 16 year old, a girl still developing in her adolescence and therefore prone to natural self-absorption as most teenagers are. Lau wanted to be a writer from a very early age and she is certainly a talented writer for the book is incredible to have been written by a teenager.

Tomorrow, a look at the second book I read over Christmas.

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