About taking pictures
DxO Optics Pro has been upgraded to 3.55a as a free update.
Most of the new changes are cosmetic/UI changes:
In order to get the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX1 (or Leica DIGILUX-2) to work in Aperture you first have to convert it to DNG using Adobe DNG Converter. Then you follow these directions which a commenter provides the trick.
Now you can import the DNGs into Aperture or iPhoto and the previews will now work.
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Here is a small Aperture tip I forgot to mention.
I work on Aperture on two machines, my Powerbook G4 and my girlfriend’s PowerMac G5 when I can sneak in some time. One problem I ran into was finding that the keywords (and also various export settings) I have set up in Aperture are not carried with the Aperture Library.
The trick is realizing that they are stored in your home directory in: “~/Library/Application Support/Apertureâ€
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I received an e-mail today about a new camera purchase. Here is an excerpt:
About the camera stuff, I am in the market for a “prosumer” digital camera and considering the Canon Rebel XT (350D). I think it’s quite a bit lower level than the D70 but do you have any thoughts on the camera or Canon’s SLR in general? Any recommendations you have for a different model/brand in the 800-1000 range would be appreciated as well.
What follows is my relevant response.
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Today, I saw a poster next to Michael Rowley’s desk and I asked if any of the baseball fanatics at Plaxo knew which stadium it was of.
Nobody did.
I mentioned that I thought that it looked like Forbes Field to me. Given what I remember of the remains of it (the right field wall and home plate), it looks like the Cathedral of Learning would have afforded exactly this sort of view.
(When I was a kid, I used to point at the Cathedral of Learning, “the tallest schoolhouse in the West” and say “my mommy works there” (she actually worked nearby). My mom said that when I was younger I thought it was the Washington Monument: “Whenever we passed it, your eyes would get wide and you’d say reverently, ‘Washington!’”)
It turns out that stopping following baseball after the 1994 strike and being a die-hard Pirates fan had its advantages—it is a view of Forbes Field from the Cathedral of Learning.Continue reading
Aperture 1.1 was released as a free update today. If you own Aperture, see Software Update. (My comments about it are here.)
In my original review of Aperture, the only real complaint I had was the price, which was too close to PhaseOne CaptureOne. I felt that Apple should undercut them like Final Cut Pro did to Avid. Well, if you own Aperture 1.0 like I do, you can get a $200 coupon good for future Apple Store purchases (Academic users get a $100 one).
By the way, this also means a $200 price drop to Aperture to $300 from $500.
Now how is that for service?Continue reading
In light of my last post, I thought I’d bring up that while those people’s bashing of Caitlin was ill founded, they are expressing an underlying problem that exists in any endeavor based on technology or science.
Too often, people use technical mumbo jumbo to cover a basic lie.
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I recently purchased a picturewall in order to add some accents to my otherwise boring apartment. It’s been on my to do list forever and now that I own a couch, hanging up some “fotografs,” as Caitlin puts it, was my next priority.
A quick run to Costco today allowed me to add a few photos.
Someone on flickr decided to engage in a smackdown of the APS-C format.
The problem with these is that they often parrot experts who don’t really remember their history. I’m sure when these experts were young pups, they defended their 35mm film cameras against the old codgers doing medium or full-frame photography. They miss the reality that they’ve become the old codgers themselves.
I’m not claiming that they don’t have a valid argument. I’m just claiming they’re a guilty of hypocrisy: They diss another format as being the “one true format” implicitly exposing own bias in their own format as the “one true format.”Continue reading
Flickr a few months ago created a good idea: they inject a div into the landing page of login that allows them to send arbitrary messages to you that you can dismiss. I definitely think more websites should do that.
Imagine my surprise when I found this notification today:
Umm, guys according to your records and mine, my Pro account won’t expire until June 6th. It’s March 22. This isn’t exactly a good thing to be sending to your paying customers. A two word change would do wonders: “…your Pro account has expired†to “…your Pro account will be expiring soon.†As it is, it appears your messaging system clearly has the wrong Type II type error in it (erring to your advantage instead of mine).
What sort of impression does that give me of Flickr’s priorities?