Remind me not to get a lawyer trained at Tennessee

Glenn Reynolds suggests that the U.S. treasury defaults on its debt, Bruce Bartlett trashes it, and Glenn’s defense?

Well, I was hoping for a thoughtful email from an expert, but instead I got a typically intemperate blog post from Bruce Bartlett. Bruce, I’m not trying to turn the United States into Zimbabwe. That would be the guy in the White House, whom you seem surprisingly anxious to defend.

It amuses me that Zimbabwe had a $100,000,000,0000 (that’s one hundred billion) bill before they finally gave up on the currency. In storage somewhere, I have a 1 million mark bank note.

I’m surprised nobody noticed the racist undertone in this response. Bruce Bartlett brought up Zimbabwe because defaulting on the debt was the direct cause Zimbabwe’s economic collapse. The analogy Glenn sets up is: Barack Obama is America’s Robert Mugabe and he’s going to take all the land away from you White people!

While that was most likely completely unintentional, the only adequate defense is that Glenn Reynolds, a law professor and premier conservative political pundit, is both socially insensitive and politically ignorant.

The irony amuses me with the obviousness of it all. (NB Title: Glenn Reynolds teaches law at the University of Tennessee.)

Posted on by tychay 2

Macbook stickers

A while ago, when I saw Mark Kater, he showed me the vinyl sticker he got for his Macbook Pro. The next time I stopped by, I remembered to photograph it.

Mac am Ironman

Mac am Ironman
Tagged, Financial District, San Francisco, California

Leica M8, Cosina-Voigtländer NOKTON 35mm F1.2 Aspherical
1/30sec, ISO160, 35mm (47mm)

The processing is pretty much the Toy Camera preset in Aperture. Pretty powerful huh?

He got it from some place on etsy. It turns out die-cut vinyl Macbook decals that incorporate the apple logo are hugely popular—there are literally hundreds of them.
Continue reading about Stickers and such after the jump

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How (I purchased a kit) dSLR [The entry kit dSLR Part 5]

(Article continued from part 4)

The big C and the Big N

The Nikon D3000 ($450 from Adorama, B&H, Amazon)
The Canon EOS Rebel XS (1000D) ($500 from Adorama, B&H, Amazon)
The Nikon D5000 ($690 from Adorama, B&H Amazon)
The Canon EOS Rebel T1i (500D) ($770 from Adorama, B&H, Amazon)
The Canon EOS Rebel T2i (550D) ($900 from Adorama, Amazon)

Canon kits

The Canon 1000D and Canon 500D
Nikon D5000 and Nikon D3000

The Nikon D5000 and Nikon D3000

Even though I’ve tried to encourage you to buy a Pentax, Sony, or Olympus, I know most of you are going to be going to buy a CaNikon anyway. *sigh*

First off, debating between Canon and Nikon is like getting into a Mac vs. PC flame war. And like modern day Macs and Windows PCs they share more in common with each other than differences. Let’s disclose our biases up front: I’m a Nikon guy. If you’re going to buy Canon the only redeeming thing about me is that I’ve probably sold as many Canon cameras to friends as Nikons.
Continue reading about About entry level Canons and Nikons and what camera I purchased after the jump

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Posted on by tychay 6

Black and White film effects

The film effects section of my last article on Aperture presets reminded me that I really like the film effects in nik Color Efex Pro and nik Silver Efex Pro.

I thought I’d try to emulate them in Aperture with a set a presets, starting with black and white film.

Download the presets here. Current version at time of this writing is 0.4.

(Note that my friends of Aperture Users @ Flickr are thinking of creating a website to house presets so I don’t know how long I’ll keep updating this. In the meantime, I added Pavel Sigarteu’s SinCity, El TiDY’s presets, and Ian Wood’s Aperture 2 Image Presets Project to the download.)

In order to show the B&W film effects, I hacked in an extension to my IMG Mouseover plugin. Above the image there’s a control panel where you can click to see the effect of the preset (and compare it to Silver Efex Pro):


Mark Kater

Mark Kater
Tagged, Financial District, San Francisco, California

Leica M8, Cosina-Voigtländer NOKTON 35mm F1.2 Aspherical
1/30sec, ISO160, 35mm (47mm)

Click on the controls above to test the different film presets. Mouse rollover contain images processed in Nik Silver Efex Pro.

(Note that Aperture has decided to have a brain fart and replace all my photos even if they haven’t been changed at all. This breaks the images in Flickr. I tried my best to fix this. If any are broken or incorrect, please tell me in the comments below and I’ll fix them.)

Continue reading about How to use Aperture presets and about black and white film after the jump

Posted on by tychay 11

More Aperture presets

More Aperture presets

Aperture Presets are not new to Aperture 3. Before this however, you had to apply them by using the lift-and-stamp tool and share them by generating an Aperture project. It was never a very good solution. But my recent post on presets, made me look into our archives for some Aperture 2 settings to add to my Preset Library.

Download the presets here. Current version at time of this writing is 0.3b.

Without further ado, here they are: (Remember to mouseover the images to see the pre-preset versions…)

Sky Enhancer

The Bay Bridge — Graeme's Sky Enhancer

The Bay Bridge — Graeme’s Sky Enhancer
Embarcadero, San Francisco, California

Sony DSC-WX1
1/320sec @ ƒ7.1, ISO160, 4mm (24mm), panoramic video

This photo was a sweep panorama of the Embarcadero to the Bay Bridge was done by the amazing Sony WX1 on my walk home from the San Francisco Farmer’s Market.

Graeme Smith came up with this setting darken and saturate the sky. When coupled with a brush and other enhancements, this should be a pretty good start for landscape photography.

Outdoor Contrast

Everybodys Happy Man — Bakaris Outdoor Contrast

Everybody’s Happy Man — Bakaris Outdoor Contrast
Chinatown, San Francisco, California

Sony DSC-WX1
1/250sec @ ƒ7.1, ISO250, 4mm (24mm)

On a street corner in Chinatown there’s a guy yelling, “Happy! Happy! Happy! Everybody’s happy!”

Bakari finds this levels tweak adds some much-needed contrast to outdoor photos.

Cross-Process

Music at the Ferry Building Farmers Market - heber's Cross Process

Music at the Ferry Building Farmers Market – heber’s Cross Process
Ferry Building, Embarcadero, San Francisco, California

Sony DSC-WX1
1/125sec @ ƒ4.5, ISO80, 18mm (100mm)

These band was playing at the Farmer’s Market. I think they’re from the Haight normally.

Aperture now has two cross-process presets, but I thought I’d bring in the one created by heber vega also. Cross-processing probably started with a mistake from dipping films in the wrong chemical bath during development… now it creates an interesting recognizable effect.

Film Look

Scott Beale - Film look

Scott Beale – Film Look
Varnish Fine Art, South of Market, San Francisco, California

Nikon D3, AF Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D
1/60sec @ ƒ1.8, ISO800, 50mm

Scott Beale, a fixture of the art, culture, and technology underground scene of San Francisco back when it really was underground decided to celebrate adding cloud hosting services at Varnish when I took this photo of him. Varnish Fine Art was recent victim of eminent domain.

This is an old trick from the video camera world. One way to get video, in Final Cut, to get a look resembling a movie was to adjust the output curve of the finished video to resemble film’s characteristic curves. You do this by creating an slanted S bend in the curve. Since Aperture 3 finally has curves, it was time to create a “film look” preset, which I did.

Hope you enjoy the presets, and contact me if you have other suggestions for more.

Keep shooting.

Posted on by tychay 11

Preset looks

After a year of bouncing rumors and requests among friends and watching Adobe erode Apple’s marketshare, Aperture 3 is finally out. As far as I’m concerned, the people who are disappointed in the update probably shouldn’t have bought Aperture in the first place.

One of the things in the new Adobe Lightroom that is implemented (and improved on) in Aperture 3 is the concept of presets. This is one step closer to having me abandon my insanely slow Photoshop workflow for something that is fast, can be undone, and doesn’t chew up disk space. But the thing that was bothering me was, will it blend? Can I really get away with not leaving Aperture unless I really, really have to.

Let‘s see what I can create in a few minutes of fiddling around.

Vintage Film

The Fallout75’s Vintage Film effect tries to mimic the fading that occurs when a photo starts to fade over the years: the process is outlined here. Here is what I get in Aperture when I try to follow the same rules:

Paul Kim - Vintage Film

Paul Kim -Terrys Vintage
Automattic, Embarcadero, San Francisco, California

Leica M8, NOKTON Classic 40mm f1.4 S.C.
1/750sec, ISO160, 40mm (53mm)

This is my Vintage Film preset. Mouseover the image to see the original.

Here is the output in Adobe Photoshop CS4 when the action is run:

Paul Kim - Fallout75 Vintage Film

Paul Kim -Fallout75 Vintage Film
Automattic, Embarcadero, San Francisco, California

Leica M8, NOKTON Classic 40mm f1.4 S.C.
1/750sec, ISO160, 40mm (53mm)

This is Fallout75’s action. Mouseover the image to see the original.

You can see that Fallout75 has two undocumented effects: a brightening of the center region and a vignetting on the edges. I can emulate this, but I didn’t know what I created the current version of the action. I suppose that’ll be for later.
Continue reading about One more preset and downloads after the jump

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Unsupported RAW workflow in Apple Aperture revisited

Now that Aperture 3 is out, I need to update one area of my previous article.

No, Aperture 3 doesn’t support the Olympus E-P1/E-P2/E-PL1 or Panasonic GF-1 RAWs (yet).

There is a workaround, however, for doing sorting, selecting, and metadata in Aperture 3.

  1. Select un-viewable RAWs in Apple Aperture 3’s thumbnail view
  2. Cmd-click to get a contextual menu and choose “Set JPEG as Master.”
    Aperture 3: Setting JPEG as Master

    Mouse over the image to see what happens after “Set JPEG as Master.”
  3. Do work to create a select, rate images, and the like.
  4. Catapult workflow with some adjustments. You’ll now need to be in 32-bit mode on Apple Aperture 3 to use it.
    Aperture 3 in 32-bit mode

    How to open Aperture 3 in 32-bit mode (always).

    Trying to return to “Set RAW as Master’ and then Catapulting yields and “Editing Error” as the backdoor used by Catapult is now closed. 🙁

    Editing Error in Aperture 3

    Therefore, you must export masters manually to the drop folder, generate RAWs, and then Catapult. If you do so, you can’t reimport the sidecar xmps, currently.

Here is some proof:

_2050608

The House
North Beach, San Francisco, California

Olympus E-P2, Cosina-Voigtländer NOKTON 50mm f1.1
1/8sec5, ISO200, 50mm (100mm)

Image processed from ACR in Aperture. Try as you might, you can’t recover clipped highlights.

(BTW, the images were uploaded with the new built in Flickr support, so we’ll see how good sync is—it appears to be uni-directional. For instance, I just found out movies aren’t supported in Flickr sync, so videos are synced back as stills.)

Mushroom rice with grilled prawns looks like it’s alive
The House, North Beach, San Francisco, California

Olympus E-P1, Cosina-Voigtländer NOKTON 35mm F1.2 Aspherical
00:15, 1280×1070, 30fps

Posted on by tychay 4