Now that this site has been down for a month (Thank you, SARSxSW), I tried to see restart this blog with a deep thought.
I couldn’t come up with anything.
So instead, I’ll talk about the tech news. Recently a lot has been going on about Steve Jobs latest missive: “Thoughts on Flash” to which, Adobe’s CEO quickly responded to in the Wall Street Journal.
Instead of rushing to Apple’s defense here, I thought I’d provide some thoughts on these “thoughts.”
“Supposedly, this guy is the Korean Usher.”:
Me: “Maybe Usher is the Black Sol?”
…
I’m just saying, don’t mess with Taeyang or he’ll cut you
…with his hair!
…
When I was in the third grade, my house got a sample bottle of Prell. I did the same thing as Taeyang to my hair—I’d put it in and not wash it out. Who knew I was ahead of my time?
…
My Prell mohawk lasted only a day: 1) I ran out of Prell; 2) the thing flopped over by the time I got to school and made me look like a really greasy Adolf Hitler. (Yes, I spent recess with my best friends saluting me with a “seig heil!”)
If you are attending confoo this year, I’ll be giving a talk at the beginning of the conference. Even if you aren’t a PHP developer, I think you’ll find the talk useful—as there is no language religion in it. I’ll be pleased if you attend.
It’s going to be a little different from my recent talks (less cussing). Believe it or not, there was a time I used to be a speaker who didn’t resort to scatalogy to get my point across. 🙂 In fact, George once told me that his favorite talk of mine was the first one I gave—nary a cuss word to be found because I was so nervous! This talk is an attempt to return to the more-focused application of philosophy that I had done starting out.
Since my session is in the beginning of the conference, and I’ll be there until I have to leave for SXSW, I’d appreciate it if you still came up to me and talked to me about anything on your mind. Don’t worry, like a terrier (terryer?), I’m all bark and no bite.
I’m trying to reset the way I approach web development and so this may very well be the only conference I’ll be speaking at this year. I’m sure any discussion you have will be worthwhile—even if it isn’t about my talk or web development. Confoo this year is going to be about so much more than PHP, and I’m very interested in new developments on the web, even if it is happening in the Rails community. ;-). Besides, PHP gets nowhere without stealing from our betters. 🙂
See you there!
Continue reading about the post presentation stuff after the jump
While going through the MacHeist nanoBundle 2 purchase, that one of the items was MacJournal. I already own it, so I gifted it. But it caused me to take a peek again at the application—the last time I used it was back when it was freeware and had a taco.
It occurs to me that it might make a useful reading notebook to complement my Kindle (and my iPad next month). I haven’t been keeping track of the copious clippings and notes I take with it. Here is my first attempt:
Here is the process I am trying to use:
We’ll see how it goes. I made out some stubs for other ideas for journals.
For most notetaking, I’m still happy with opening an RTF, dropping it into a folder, and using Spotlight (via Leap) to find things. This just formalizes a fraction of it.
Purchase MacJournal with 6 other applications on MacHeist (2 days left!).
A lot of people are complaining that the flickr sharing feature in Aperture 3 is missing geolocation data (Places).
This is not true, all you have to do is go to Aperture > Preferences… > Web and check the box to “Include location information for published photos.”
Then click on the “radar” buttons to the right of the Flickr sets in Aperture to force a resync. Your image geocodes will be re-uploaded (I noticed in my case, it re-uploaded the images instead of just resyncing the metadata, but that bug may have been fixed in Aperture 3.0.1).
Here is a photo I uploaded via Aperture 3’s flickr sharing:
Sony DSC-WX1
1/30sec @ ƒ2.4, ISO160, 4mm (24mm)
I was so tired after the run, I could shop no longer…or rather, watch my friends shop. I decided to hang outside and take photos of the curvy escalators in Westfield San Francisco. And I actually needed to buy a suitcase from the Tumi store, too.
You can see it has been placed on the map automatically.
One thing a lot of people don’t realize is the flickr sharing is a synchronization, not an upload. This means that edits you make on flickr appear as metadata modifications in the original file. (I think it does not sync down changes to the image, but new images in a set do get brought down.) It also means you can’t do an upload without creating a set. It also means you are limited in the tags by what tags you explicity upload (instead of tag hierarchy). It also means you are limited to the amount of resizing you can do on export. It also means you can’t do things like add a watermark on your export. It also means you can’t batch add to a group, or another set, or anything without using flickr’s online organizr.
If you don’t like that, then that’s why Frasier Spears is still selling FlickrExport and has recently updated it for 64-bit. I own it, and use it.
Nikon D3, 24-70mm f/2.8G, SB-800
1/30 sec @ ƒ/2.8, iso 1000, 24 mm
Fraser Speirs with some of my friends. I got really shit-faced that night (it was my birthday so I was making everyone buy me drinks).
I believe I uploaded this image with his software. 🙂
Oh yeah, the “check mark” you see next to the image in Aperture’s Flickr albums is the image actually uploaded/synced with flickr. I have no idea how to change it other than deleting it and dragging a new one. This is a major bummer for me.
Faces are synced back in Aperture. You can tell because Facebook added faces are now searchable. Right now, getting the Facebook Faces back into your Aperture faces is a little buggy. The only way to do that is to go to the set, click the “Name” icon, and manually go through each image confirming the facebook entries by clicking the “f” icons and hitting return. Still it does guess faces well.
Basically click on the “f” and then hit return and those names will be synced back. Notice that even though Alicia Kenworthy has only been tagged in a different Facebook photo, it guessed the face here.
I hope they fix that.
Buried in a previous article, instead of carrying the paper manuals around, I mentioned that you should download your manufacturer’s camera manuals onto the iPhone for reference. But I didn’t explain how this could be done or why it is useful.
Here are three applications I’ve used that render PDFs:
I’ll be talking about Air Sharing, Dropbox, and GoodReader. If you want to know the solution I use for camera manuals, skip to the section on GoodReader.
Continue reading about reading PDF manuals in Air Sharing, Dropbox, and GoodReader after the jump
Ken Rockwell goes on a tear with his new camera, a medium format digital.
As his habit, Ken Rockwell exhibits a bad case of selection bias. For example, let’s take this quote from the first article:
All the 35mm rangefinders and DSLRs look pretty much the same, and the point-and-shoot is the worst.
I’ve also shown the fallacy of falling for claims of 12-bit, 16-bit or 24-bit image processing in-camera.
As those of us who have done this for a living since the 1980s know, the noise level of any of these sensors is much larger than even 12-bit processing. Throwing more real bits at the ADC only serves to quantize the noise more accurately; there isn’t any meaningful image data needing that precision.
Well anyone can see from his sample the 35mm cameras are not the same: the Nikon D3 exhibits tonality better than the Canon 5D Mk II and the Leica M9, as it should. And those aren’t even the right 35mm cameras to be testing against—I will bet you’ll get nearly the same result as the Mamiya DM33 in the Nikon D3X (with a Zeiss ZF optic on it). He does similar manipulations of outcome bias in order to get the result he is wants to get before hand in his high ISO test.
Now that my E-P2 has finally found a jacket-pocketable lens, the 20mm f/1.7 pancake from Panasonic (purchase from Amazon or Roberts Imaging), I’ve been carrying it a lot more often.
Nikon D3, 50mm f/1.4G
1/50 sec @ ƒ/2.2, iso 2500, 50mm
A 20mm f/1.7 lens and a Hirano case make the E-P2 an effective kit. If you want to pocket it, just unscrew the case and pop out the EVF.
One curious behavior I noticed while shooting is that the aperture is electronically controlled to make the CCD’s life easier in the camera live view—since this is an EVIL camera, it always has live view. When it’s quiet, you can hear the aperture click as you move it around to different lighting conditions. Furthermore, it never seems to set the aperture wider than about ƒ/2.8 unless you are autofocusing. This means when night shooting in the dark with this lens, it’s brighter than your eyes, but not as bright as the lens is actually capable of. Not only that, but the depth-of-field you see in the live view is independent of the final output.
I decided to take a video of the behavior with Marie’s D5000. Since I accidentally hit the shutter button while focusing, here is a still:
Nikon D5000, 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 DX VR
1/30 sec @ ƒ/7.1, iso 560, 55mm (78mm)
To get this photo, I jury rigged my D200 RRS L-bracket onto the D5000 so I could tripod mount it.
and here is the movie:
The overexposure was the camera’s decision. I didn’t have time to figure out how to keep the Auto ISO from overcompensating my setting.
Do any of you notice this behavior on the Panasonic GF-1?
Camera Labs compares the Canon 550D (Rebel T2i) to the Nikon D90 at high ISO.
I’ll give you the summary: at high ISO in JPEG comparison, the Canon delivers similar performance but with higher resolution.
This may sound like a surprise, but let’s look at was buried in my article where I mention the Rebel T2i.
Not only that, but the newly minted Canon 550D has nearly the same ISO performance as the Nikon [D5000] and 20% greater resolution—the cost of that resolution is a one stop worse dynamic range
(The Nikon D5000 and D90 have the same sensor design.)
This is the problem with reviews snippets taken in isolation: the Canon 550D and the Nikon D90 are nearly the same (street) price so it may seem that the Nikon D90 is a bad value but this isn’t the case at all. The Nikon D5000 is much cheaper than the Canon 550D and delivers the same ISO performance as the D90, are we to say the 550D is a bad value then? The Canon 550D has the same sensor as the Canon 7D are we to say that the Canon 7D is a rip off?
No. Because the Nikon D90 has a much, much brighter viewfinder and better dynamic range than the Canon 550D—in turn the Canon 550D has a better video mode and higher resolution than the D90. And the Canon 7D tops the D90 with even all-metal construction and a 100% viewfinder (both notoriously expensive to manufacture). Here is a small table:
| Cheaper | More expensive | Pros (upgrade) | Cons (upgrade) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nikon D5000 | Nikon D90 | higher res LCD, pentaprism,backward compatible AF motor,flash commander mode | $250 more, lose articulation |
| Nikon D5000 | Canon 550D | 20% higher resolution, higher res LCD, better video | $350 more, loose dynamic range, lose articulation |
| Nikon D90 | Canon 550D | 20% higher resolution, better video | $150 more, lose dynamic range, lose pentaprism |
| Nikon D90 | Nikon D300s | 7fps, metal body, 100%viewfinder, two card slots, advanced AF, meters old lenses, pro setup | $700 more, lose scene modes |
| Canon 550D | Nikon D300s | 7fps, pentaprism, 100% viewfinder, metal body, two card slots, advanced AF, dynamic range,pro setup | $550 more, worse video, lose resolution |
| Canon 550D | Canon 7D | 8fps, pentaprism, 100% viewfinder, all metal construction | $650 more |
| Nikon D300S | Canon 7D | 1fps faster, 20% higher resolution, better video | $100 more, lose dynamic range, lose 2nd card slot |
(My street prices were rounded to the nearest $50.) Plus there is a $100 – $200 rebate if you purchase Nikon bodies with a lens: as I noted earlier, the street price of Canon tends to drop faster and Nikon tries to maintain the price longer but offer rebates instead.
(As for JPEG, that’s a post-processing design decision. Did you know that Nikon’s tend to be undersharpened and have more faithful red channel color? So what.)
The table shows you that basically these cameras have a price interleave that is nearly exactly right. The D90 is the 550D with different tradeoffs; the D300S is the the 7D with tradeoffs. The D90/550D give up similar things to the D300S/7D. I mentioned this before. When it comes to sensors, Nikons tend to have better ISO and dynamic range but at the cost of resolution. I also mentioned this before.
This sort of pixel peeping is going to give you the exact same result that a Nikon D3000S/Canon 7D comparison gave you last year. I bet if I tested resolution at low ISO the Canon would win; if I tested dynamic range, the Nikon would win. Yawn!
(Article continued from part 6)
Recall the story of the enthusiast and the entry-level dSLR photographers trading cameras. While I admonished against the danger of buying too much of a dSLR, I glossed the obvious problem: the entry-level photographers had a problem shooting the professional dSLR. How do you get there from here?
The answer is simple: learning.
Inside every dSLR is a complex computer and that computer makes decisions for you. This is true in both the entry and pro dSLRs: the difference is the entry-level cameras are configured to make more decisions for you. The trick is to realize that the entry-level cameras give you access to the pro-level settings, but you have to be willing to leave the safety of automation in guides, scenes, and McDonald’s-style graphical menus.
I’m not a snob. There is nothing wrong with those features and the computer makes some pretty smart decisions. It’s just unless you are bumping your head against the decisions it makes, you’re limiting yourself in the sort of photography you can do.
Nikon D3, Nikkor 50mm f/1.4G, SB-800
1/20sec @ f/3.5 iso3200, 50mm
This series had an inside joke. While it is a discussion of dSLR cameras, every photo was supposed to be taken with a non dSLR camera. Unfortunately, this photo is simply too difficult to be taken by anything other than a SLR.
In this case, you can’t take this photo with the scene modes in your dSLR. Yes, the “night portrait” mode might get you close, but you’d need to pump the ISO even further, drag the shutter even more, change the white balance to incandescent, and set the flash curtain to front.
If you mouseover the image, you’ll see the original. My camera broke and decided to only record in TIFF that day, so I couldn’t have even depended on the RAW mode safety net for dynamic range and white balance recovery.
Even if we restrict ourselves to discussion of the same composition in the same camera, we are still left with setting shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. These three have a complementary relationship and are associated with different tradeoffs. Scene modes in your camera make the decision for you, but unless you know what that decision is and when it is wrong, you can’t really grow as a photographer.
Continue reading about books, videos, and classes after the jump