Landing On Your Feet - Landing On Your Head

No that is not just an excuse to use another Etihad MC airplane picture. It describes what has been going on all month. The sensation will probably be familiar to a lot of photographers.

During this time I have had the printer go seriously bad overnight...black ink not printing...and seen it condemned by the repair agents as a dead head. This involved a quote for $ 1100 repair. I reluctantly decided to decline this and to take it home to save up for a new one. When I hooked it up at home just to see if it could be coaxed to print red or blue ink I was interested to see that it was back to printing perfect blacks. I've since completed a dozen and a half wildly colourful A3+ prints for an exhibition. And all this on just the quote fee and a cup of coffee.

Next, I found that the main house computer had quit dead. A grey sad screen and forlorn question mark were all that was left of the hard drive. The Apple people were sympathetic and made $ 2000 sympathetic noises. Not surprising then that I listened carefully to an authorised repair shop when they told me that it could be re-drived ( re-driven...? ) for a modest sum. And with more memory than before. From the depths to the heights.

Finally, the sure fire backup computer that was to take over when the main one failed....failed. It is being repaired at the same time for a modest fee by the same shop.

In the meantime I have canvassed the opinions of very experienced digital photographers about the next move and will follow their advice. It is good to have consultants who do the business but are not in the business of giving you the business. If they were, I'd give them my business...

Note to the curious - the printer is an Epson, the computers are iMac and Macbook Pro. This post is being typed on a Macbook pro lent to me by the IT department at the shop. Nice device, but a lot newer and not equipped with my normal editing programs - the images may be a little jumpy.

Were we always as dependent upon the careful meshing of the cogs in the analog photography days? Possibly - if you burned out an enlarger bulb on Sunday night you were not going to get any more printing done until Monday. And running out of dev/stop/fix/paper/film/water/clothespegs/patience was always a possibility. Summer heat did no good for a darkroom worker, much as it does no good for the average computer. But I cannot remember a single month when 3 major systems went ker-phut all at once.

I've checked all the mirrors in the house and they are all intact. And the neighbours are all alive, so it can't be that. I'm going to look under the car for traces of blood and black cat hair...

Expert Dummy

We've all seen those books in the stands - the yellow and black ones refer to us as dummies and the orange and blue ones are aimed at idiots. In some cases they say they are for complete idiots - a degree of excellence that seems a little disturbing to aim for.

I must take a second to say that these books are adopting such a disdainful attitude with the view of correcting our faults. They may sneer at us but they try to teach us - by the end of the book we are probably going to be familiar with the basics of hydraulic engineering or Sanskrit or whatever was printed on the cover. We can even get dummy and idiot books that deal with photography...

I've bought 'em, and can pronounce myself competent in a seven year old computer program. Competent, but not expert. By the time I get to expert the computer will have died and the program lost in history. I might as well study how to punch index cards for UNIVAC.

The popularity of the books is not surprising - we are all unsure about so many things these days and long to have the " official " " expert " " explain " " the " "" correct "" way " to do anything. If your eyes feel a little funny it is because of all the quotation marks. Close them for a minute and it will all be better.

This works pretty well when the subject is 15th century flax weaving as most of the bugs have been ironed out of the looms since then. There aren't a lot of developments in reed-filled marshes and what worked last century will work now. Such is not the case with electronic and optical technology. As I write this and you read it someone else is writing yet another set of computer instructions and the Fruit Company is set to release their next $ 1300 invoice loose on the world. I suspect the Dummy and Idiot press is never going to be able to keep up with the pace of the business and that idiots and dummies will be left stranded by the roadside.

Constant daily combing of the internet, supplemented by weekly seminars and meetings, trade fairs, university courses, and insider bulletins delivered through Facebook connections seems to be the way to go. Of course one must not neglect the artistic connections through galleries, movements, collectives, and societies. Professional organisations deserve careful attention, if only for an insight into the lives of other artists. This should probably occupy no more than 16 hours of the day, leaving an easy 8 more for work, study, home life, sleep, and natural functions. Prospective students should remember the phrase " I owe it to myself "  but make positive plans about what to do when yourself comes round to collect the bill.

Is there an alternative? Yep. Shoot Photography Workshops runs a number of fairly up-to-date events throughout the year. They are conducted by fairly well-known photographers and are fairly successful. The are pitched at a fair price.

There's not a heavy level of selling - goodness you probably do more of that to yourselves when you surf the net and agonise over camera specifications. There is sometimes a surprising level of art and contentment. You should ring up, get a schedule for the next few events, and give on a try.

So why be a dummy?

To check out all the courses Shoot Workshops has to offer please click on this link.

Are There Too Many Bags?

One of our staff members asked this the other day as we were pulling him from under the display pile that had collapsed. It was a good thing that he made a noise under there or we would have left him for another night...

Apart from this, the question has been raised in a retail and a photographic sense - and I think we can say a definite "No" to both cases. If it looks as though there are too many on the sales floor the answer is simply to sell them to customers...or get a larger sales floor. In the case of the working and enthusiast photographers, they can never have too many bags.

To prove this point we have hauled out the purple Superior backdrop paper to pay tribute to one of the little heros of the Vanguard range - The Oslo single-strap sling pack. This one is the perfect choice for an active mirror-less fan.

It is small as packs go but very well built. Note the padded sling, the stabilising strap, and the accessory loop for a tiny tripod. It is a side-opener, and you swivel it around to your front when you want to dive into the camera compartment. Figure one body and three lenses in there - or ditch one lens and pack a flash gun.

The camera you see in the illustration is a Fujifilm X-Pro1 with additional cage grip - it slides in easily. The woman on the LCD screen is an Amazon firing a French fusil. As you do, as you do.

The top compartment is designed for a small tablet -my iPad Air Retina 2 is a little wide for it - and a couple of Eccles cakes and a bottle of Tizer. The zips are sturdy and duplicated on this compartment.

It is an inexpensive and lovable answer for your smaller outfit.

Take a look at our online bag section.

The Cross-Eyed Shuffle And The Body Slide

No, it is not the horrors of the dance floor. You can do what you wish at the disco without my let or hindrance.

I refers to weekend experiments with stereo shots using the Fujifilm X-E2 camera. They are on-going , so you'll need to follow them on the wordpress site:

frontierandcolonial.wordpress.com

The preliminary trial involved seeing whether a Cullmann Concept One tripod quick release plate - the medium ones - could be used as a stereo slide. It did work when sliding in a Cullmann Concept One head but not quite enough for normal interpupilary distance of 66 mm. You could get a bare 50mm for the medium plate. This, of course, was more than enough for macro stereo.

The answer will be the 200mm Cullman Concept One OCX388 plate - this will leave more than enough slide for regular work and can be extended for hyper stereo trials.

You need still subjects for two-shot stereo - the garden plants were cooperative. It was easy to shoot left then right with a slide between them and the exposures on the Fujifilm X-E2 are the same every time.

Opening the files in Adobe Photoshop Elements is easy, but it took an hour of experimentation to find out the optimum size for the images themselves when they were butted against themselves and presented on a computer screen. The heading image shows a sort ofd fake stereo card effect but when opened in PE, I can do a free-view and get a clear stereo window in the middle.

It is tiring to do free-viewing for a long time so the next experiments will be on how to adapt modern commercially-made items like the Hoodman Hoodloupe 3.2 to viewing a computer or iPad screen. Even the big mobile phones may be a vehicle for displaying the stereo shots if this idea works.

One thing missing - I wish I had access to Edmund Scientific Supplies - they were the treasure trove for experimenters in my youth. I coveted a set of vernier rockets from them but could never afford them...

Losing It - Exporting To Nowhere

Novice computer users have it good. They do not know what they are doing and anything that works is a victory - even if it is occasionally a pyrrhic one. As long as the screen does not go solid blue all is good.

Further on, when we get to our digital adolescence and the html hormones start to surge, we get more adventurous. We load our computers with a bazillion files and then try to save them, export them, or back them up somewhere. We would, in many cases, be better backing up an articulated bus through the back streets of Balga. At least when it all went pear-shaped the bus would be wedged into someone's lounge room - not vanished into the aether...never to be found.

I still do this - the files, not the bus. While the makers of the computer and the various programs are experts and provide clear questions and instructions about where the files will be going to...sometimes they use words differently than I do, and I fail to understand what they mean. Sometimes I also fail to see some part of the specifications and it results in me launching a file to nowhere. I can only assume it reaches this destination, because I never find it again.

The iMac computer at home does have one little section that seems to find things. I can ask the hard drive where a file is and eventually it will report a location. The macBook Pro here at work may have this facility as well, but I haven't found it yet. As a result, when I lose a bit of work that I have just saved, I resort to the trick of making another one of the same sort and then watching it step-by-step as it is exported. Frequently I can find where the first stray has gone - and almost always it is because I failed to specify the right target before I pulled the first trigger.

Please note: If things go wrong for you, it is sometimes because your computer has mutated all on its own in the night. The simple pathway you learned to take when you did your first work has been changed by secret command from the computer manufacturer or the software company. They do this after you have gone to bed at night. It's best to unplug you computer entirely after use and put a tinfoil hat over it to prevent alien cosmic space commands from doing this. Also wear one yourself. I favour a metallic pie plate strapped to my head in summer...

Uncle Dick

It's All Fun And Games Until Someone Loses An iPhone

I noted recently that there are services that let you track your iPhone when it is stolen. You are not allowed to go round to the druggies gaff with a fire axe and get it back and the police are far too busy to do it for you, but at least you have the satisfaction of being able to bleat about it on Facebook. With a bit of luck you will get an emoticon.

There are more practical ways of dealing with this -amongst which is making arrangements not to have it stolen in the first place. And while you are at it, not to have the rest of your gear stolen.

My house is no more secure than any other - it has fly screens, door locks, deadlocks, and window locks, which deter moths and me, but would present no barrier at all to thieves. What does present a barrier is a large metal safe bolted to the wall and floor - a relic from the days when I kept firearms in the place - legally, I might add* Now it keeps family papers, cameras, old broken watches (sentiment...) and the occasional memory card for a job that is under way. It could be broken into but that would take time and machinery and noise - so currently it is secure.

Also secure is the Drobo hard drive array that holds my pictures - buried deep a cavernous drawer of a large metal desk, it gets enough air to stay cool and enough protection to avoid thieves. The monitor that sits above it is secured with a steel cable Kensington lock - enough trouble to deter the casual juvenile. I have no fear of thieves stealing my books - Plato or Michael de Montaigne rarely attract the sort of people who ransack houses. Indeed, I would welcome them taking some of the stuff on the shelves as I hate it but cannot bear to part with it.

Moral of this tale? There is no moral, other than lock up your hard drive and computer. Let them have the iPhone - then you can live free of the damn ring tone and will not spend the rest of your life looking at it in shops. Your thumbs will thank you.

* Found something better...

Uncle Dick

Curing The Group Portrait Blues - With DXO

We all love doing group portraits. Not.

Whether it is an undisciplined family group at a party, an overly-disciplined regimental portrait, or just wedding guests gathered around the wreckage, the shoot can be difficult to do, and the results patchy.

The family party is composed of people who will not obey - the relatives and children. They will be difficult to marshal into one area, will insist on changing places continuously to gain precedence, and will never ALL be looking in the same direction.

The regiment or ship's company CAN be compelled to sit or stand in order - correctly - and can be ordered to all look toward the camera with no-one making Indian feather fingers. But you won't be the one doing the ordering. For that you need the senior warrant officer. Contact him early on, do as he says, and he will deliver the goods.

The wedding group includes the bride and groom and their parents - who are paying you to be there. Put them in the center, expose so that they look good, and let their relatives fall as they may.

All this said, there is one problem if you have a large group to photograph that spreads wide in front of your lens - you will be forced by the geometry to use a wide-angle lens and that in turn will force you by the nature of optics to get distorted faces on the outer edges. Faces that started out round end up flattened like pumpkins. Grins become maniacal.

If you can get the group to curve round you like the horns of a buffalo, you can reduce this. If not, try getting one of the DxO Viewpoint 2 programs - you can plunk it into a number of Adobe photoshop programs - both regular CS. PSE, and LR, as well as Aperture 3.

It will perfectly correct the distorted faces at the edge of the frame without narrowing to ones in the middle. If you have jiggered up architectural shots it will straighten and correct the distortion. You'd be surprised just how much better this makes even studio shots when you are using extreme wides but have let you camera deviate from the horizontal ever so little...

No Need To Be Gloomy - Buy An EIZO

There I sit in my dark little room - drinking. Alone. With nothing but my memories to comfort me...

This would be a very sad post unless you realize that I am writing about sitting in my former chemical darkroom - long converted to a computer and printing room - with the lights down low, drinking espresso and editing photos on my iMac. And happy as Larry.

Well, perhaps not Larry - Moe maybe, or Shemp. Now, I love my iMac, because it is simple to use and I understand where the controls are located. I use it for blogging, surfing, FB'ing, and editing. But it has one small flaw - the screen in glossy and it reflects everything that it sees - including me peering into it*. hence the darkened room - I keep the lights low and diffuse so that I get a little more accuracy in what I see on the screen.

If I was honest with myself I would admit that it is time for a second screen - a dedicated monitor for the editing tasks. The EIZO are the best choice - they have a matte surface that does not reflect the surroundings. They have a warranted 5-year even illumination behind that surface - and their consistency in this is the best in the industry - and they have the correct circuitry to maintain the colour accuracy that you set.

It would mean being able to raise the general level of illumination in the room. Of course it would use up a bit more desk space, but the iMac keyboard is pretty small and the Wacom Intuous tablet can be shifted sideways.

And the espresso comes in tiny little cups anyway...

* A startling thing if you are not accustomed to it.

iSee You And iHear You

iHave recently purchased an iPad for use in travelling and am undergoing instructions from my daughter in its operation. iAm not quite the dinosaur she thinks me, and have been able to switch it on and off quite unaided. You just whack it on the edge of the table and it goes off.

For those of you who are also on the road and are using the iPhone we have a number of Røde accessories that might assist you.

1. iGrip - this is a metal bracket that grips the iPhone securely and lets you hand hold it or attach it to a standard tripod. This means you can record sound without picking up shuffling fingers.

2. iGrip and lenses  - here is the iGrip with additional supplementary lenses to fit the iPhone. more options for camera reportage.

3. SC2 patch cable to let your iPhone take the audio from your DSLR camera.

None of these will help me attach my new iPad to my Linhof Kardan E monorail camera but I am going to ask Ernest to make a special fitting. He's good with engineering solutions.

iCan look forward to his response.

Gapping The Generations - Or Not Poking The Bear

I was scrapping for a topic this morning until I talked to Ernest, our chief technician. He mentioned that he had read a request from me for information - I had put it out on the internet. When I expanded on what I wanted to know and why, he had a word of caution for me.

I tend to take Ernest's words of caution seriously. I remember he once advised me NOT to stick my fingers into a live light socket and this proved to be quite correct. I wish I had listened then - at least I can listen now.

The question I posed was what the new operating system for my Macintosh computers was like - I was looking at the advertisement for the OSX Maverick. It seems to be three steps on from the one that is in the computers now. The underlying reason for this is the advent of some new cameras that attract me - if I am to use RAW files from them I need to upgrade the ACR rating...and in turn this means a later operating system.

At this point the image of a beagle chasing its tail in a circle comes to mind, but read on...

Ernest mentioned that the newer operating systems are now involving themselves with information storage elsewhere in the electronic universe - the "cloud" system. Call me paranoid, but by accepting the benefits of the new software I think I might  be sending my images who knows where and in turn they might not come back to me. They might come back to other people. Hmmmm.

Personal data? I don't mind mine going everywhere, except I don't want people to know exactly what I think in case I don't agree with me. I had a garlic curry that didn't agree with me and that was unpleasant enough...I think I have come to terms with the thought that whatever I write or look at is noted down in Langley, Virginia or somewhere in Russia. I can only hope that when I become feeble-minded with age they can send some of it back to me.

Ernest said it best - if what I have now does what I need now, I would be a fool to chase the electronic rainbow on the basis of a colourful advert from Apple or the pressure of the next camera. If I change my computer to a new one, I can go in clean with a new system and all the current ACR keys will be good - and a considerable number of ones for the future. But if what I got ain't broke...don't fix it.

Shades Of Grey - A Modest Proposal

Life is very strange these days. I was discussing shades of grey with a chap who makes model battleships and we were able to classify them into various navies, time periods, and such and it was an interesting historical discussion - we got to 50 of them. Perfectly amicable conversation.

Yet when I asked a lady whether she knew all 50 shades of grey she coloured up, started sweating, and slapped me. I have no idea why  model battleships should provoke such an unusual response.

I am now hesitant to raise the subject here in the shop, yet I can anticipate the customer who tries to get a swingeing low price for a camera or lens by quoting the internet price from an eastern states dealer. In some cases it will be cheaper than we can buy from the Australian importer - so much cheaper that it immediately alerts us to the colour of the deal.

I've already mentioned in previous posts the business of the warranty - or not, as the case may very well be with the super-low pricers. As far as warning against disaster, I could just as well stand outside the casino with a sign board and a calculator and shout the odds. No-one would turn away. Neither will they from their computer screens - but the first time they buy a dud the story will change.

Please do not think that I am accusing the Greyhounds of being deliberately dishonest. They don't go down the warehouse shelves with a hammer and smash the lens boxes. They don't pour glue in the bodies. Any dents or glue you find has most likely come direct from the factory, or the cousins, uncles, and other relatives who have transported the items over the various borders. Some items are pristine. Some items work fine. You could be lucky.

And after all, even if you are not, remember if you save enough on repeated grey market purchases of a lens, you can accumulate the price of a real one from a real dealer. And you'll always have the dead ones to make a nice border in the garden...

Wham Bam, No Thank You, M'am...

So I arrive at work and put my satchel onto a wheelie bin, preparatory to taking in all the emptied bins from the curb-side. As I work there is this almighty crash, and when I look around, the satchel has fallen onto the concrete driveway.

Anglo Saxon, Anglo Saxon, Yiddish, Anglo Saxon, Western Canada....

Having relieved my soul for a few minutes I hauled it up here to the editorial desk and opened the thing. It has some internal padding and the editorial camera and computer seem to have survived the impact fine. The editorial Nokia phone is dead. The editorial apple was not squashed, so all in all it seems to have been a light blow.

My complements to the makers of Macbook Pro, Fuji X-10 and apples. Also my admiration for the Crumpler people for a fine satchel - it is the Boston Heist, if you want to go buy one.

What if it had been an expensive professional camera that hit the deck?
They do, you know - we can introduce you to a man who dropped on off Bluff Knoll, and another man who dropped one in a volcano. You might meet the chap who crossed a river and opened his backpack in the middle and....

Disasters happen. If they happen to your old camera we can fix it - that's what we have a repair department for. If it cannot be repaired we have a sales department and sympathetic faces.

What if it is a new camera...the manufacturers honour warranties that cover internal failures and material flaws for one to two years - and as we source our cameras from the proper Australian distributors, there are no problems getting the warranty repairs. But they aren't liable for you dropping it off Bluff Knoll or a council rubbish bin....

Here is where the Mack Warranty system comes in shining. When you buy new cameras and lenses from us you can buy extended warranty coverage from us with Mack. They have pure extension policies and also what they call " Diamond" policies.

Essentially, the " Diamond" covers repair or replacement for whatever specified period that includes ALL forms of disaster. Drop, boil, bake, douse, ignite....The only thing they will not reimburse you for is theft - you have to keep your cameras and lenses safe from other humans.

I wonder if there is a warranty for computers? Or mobile phones? Or apples?

You Say Potayto - I Say Potahto...

Speaking with the members of the Bussleton Camera Club this weekend alerted me to the interesting fact that a lot of people have a lot of programs on a lot of computers ...that they do not use. Oh, they know that the programs are there, and they paid money to put them there, but they don't go there.

Of course this is perfectly legal - you don't have to use every steak knife in the drawer every meal - but sometimes I wonder if some of the digital photographers are trying to eat a wonderfully elegant electronic meal with the equivalent of a hatchet and a coffee stirrer.

I was like this at the first - my old government-surplus PC ran a Windows program that was so old that the registration code was in Roman numerals and the word processing program in it still used Liquid Paper to correct errors. I installed a free copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements 3 and commenced my digital adolescence. It was remarkably like real adolescence - I broke out in pimples and girls wouldn't talk to me.

Times have changed. I run two Apple products - an iMac and a MacBook pro - and there are a bevy of high-powered programs in there churning the electrons to good effect. I have selected the Apple Aperture program and the Adobe Photoshop Elements 10 as my image handling tools and am awaiting some plug-ins from Alien Skin to fiddle with the black and white conversion and art effects.

So apparently do a number of the club people - they run a mixture of Photoshop CS products of all numbers, some Elements, a few Apertures and a number of versions of Lightroom. But they sadly confess that while these competent programs sit dormant on their computers, they still just wipe the backsides of their jpegs and slap them onto discs - they are afraid to use the capabilities that exist in the electronics.

People, take heart. Get in there and poke those buttons. You will get some dreadful results, and some of your images will go to electronic heaven and never come back, and occasionally your screen will go blue - as will your language - but all you have to do is turn it off and on again and generally things come right. All that the image programs do is fiddle with red, blue, and green pixels and you can't kill the computer if you get the saturation wrong. The Aperture and Lightroom programs will adjust most of the pictures that you'll want to show off, and if you need to lie shamelessly you can bounce the file over to a PS product and it will abet you in your sin - then bounce it back to Aperture or Lightroom. The chiefest thing to remember is either to admit to everything - like Christian Fletcher and I do - or deny it absolutely.

Try it. You'll like it.

The Linked Rings

Those of you who own a television set might think that the title of this post refers to the current athletic contest in England - not entirely. There have been a number of linked rings connected to photography in the past - the Linked Ring group of impressionist photographers at the turn of the last century comes to mind, as well as the photographers of the Auto Union racing motor cars in the 1930's. Older readers can remember the linked rings around the barrels of  Contarex and Contaflex cameras as well as the linked rings still possible with Hasselblad C and CF lenses.


The reason these historic memories come up has been the extraordinary interest expressed over our shop counter regarding the photographic coverage of the London Olympics by photographers using cameras other than the expected Nikon, Canon, Pentax, or Sony. One chap seems to be doing it for pay using a micro-4/3 camera to the delight of the camera's manufacturers, and one chap seems to be doing it with an iPhone.

In the case of the former I suspect the manufacturers nudged him into it, and with the latter...well...a pub bet comes to mind. Perhaps he will achieve success, or art, with it - let us hope he does not use too many Instagram filters all at once. We still want to see who wins the race. Perhaps we should ring him on his camera and ask.

Of course we all remember the photographer who shot at the Atlanta Olympics with a Graflex. His photos are easy to find on the net and there have been travelling exhibitions. I admire the fellow, as large format is a demanding discipline and I trained on a Graflex, and thus have an affection for them. Had he used a Linhof Master Technika with a 400mm lens attached to it he could have been a serious threat to every Olympic weightlifting competitor ever after, as he would have developed arms like Popeye.

Those of you who may have seen Riefenstahl's coverage of the '36 Olympics in books may have seen a giant Sonnar of some description operated by a white-coated technician on what looks like a naval gun mounting. For all we know, it might have been just that...

I do not expect ever to be called upon to cover an Olympic event, but if they are ever held in Perth, or Northam, or Wongan Hills, I know exactly what to do. I shall leave the scrum and flurry of the big white and black lens coverage to iconic legends and award-winning masters and take along my old Etch a Sketch machine. It has operated flawlessly since 1954. If you are careful not to shake it too much you can show many of the pictures for hours afterwards and no-one has stolen the copyrights for any of my work.

Been There, Done That, Making Money From It

That, in a nutshell, is the experience I had with the time I spent at Shoot Photography Workshops next door to our shop.


Last year I attended a course run by Mark Wagenaar that comprised three evening lectures over a three-week period. The subject was the Aperture 3 program for the Macintosh computers. I had just installed it into my iMac and was unsure what it could do.

Mark is an accredited Apple lecturer and uses the entire system himself - to do photography as well as writing and other computer tasks - so he is not only academically qualified to show, but also to tell. As well, he is a wonderfully patient man - some of my questions needed that.

The Aperture 3 program is a very similar thing to the Adobe Lightroom product - but not entirely so. In some areas it goes far away and far above this. As it is unique to the Mac platform, all the users will be on the same computer page, but it also works in as a partner with any number of other programs that can be accessed. Plug in is not a dirty word.

Mark's lecture is illustrated by real-time work on the projection screen at the front of the room. He brings in files, catalogs them, stores them, then brings them out for modification right there in front of you - no guessing or trying to read down through a page of  > and  +  symbols and arcane commands. If you bring your laptop or iMac with you you can follow along right then and there and finally understand what is happening.

Note that I said I am making money with this experience? Yes - Mark showed me how this program can batch process and re-process raw and jpeg files in a fraction of the time that was formerly required using just a picture editing program. Computer room time has dropped, productivity has soared, and more profit returns to me. 90% of this additional profit is spent on whiskey and women of the night and the other 10% is wasted.

But do not waste time - contact Shoot Photography Workshops right now on their website or by telephone and book in for the course. There'll be three lectures  - one each on the 3rd, the 10th and the 17th of August. The cost will be $ 350 dollars and it will be money well spent. It is one of the few instances I have ever seen of being able to by time with money - and happy time too.

World's Wildest Cable Release

I am at a halt. I have a product in front of me that seems to defy me - not that it would be a daunting affair to a younger person. Let me elaborate.

Do you own an iPhone, and iPod touch, or an iPad? Do you own a Canon DSLR camera? Do you want to control the camera with any...or all...of these devices? Apparently you can with the ioShutter. It connects between the two devices ( camera, phone or pod) and the computers inside them talk to each other. You can interrupt with suggestions and they will respond - I have been involved in these sorts of things at cocktail parties.

You download the free ioShutter app from the iTunes app store, whatever that may mean, and connect the cable. Then away you go.

The camera will fire off if you make a loud noise - " Clap To Snap ". It will operate if you belt it - " Shake To Take ". It will speed up life with repeated time lapse exposures. Quite a departure from the cloth-covered cable release of olden days, though I bet it will still get kinked and grubby at the bottom of your camera bag, so there is a little tradition in there after all.

Any road, if you want 'em, we've got 'em, and they are only $ 89

Faster, Faster, Pussycat!

And if you remember the rest of the title to that motion picture, you wasted your time in the cinema as much as I did. At least in them days there was popcorn and Jaffas that you could afford to buy...

Nowadays you can afford to buy a lot more for your home computer - and it looks as though the Apple people are going to make you do it by increasing the speed of their new devices. The new Apple Macbook Pro will have a USB 3.0 port in it at last. This is great - we've had USB 3.0 card readers in the shop for some little time now and finally you can take advantage of this improvement.

We've got card readers from Lexar, SanDisk, and Hoodman that will do this right now. They are very reliable and from the sounds of the tech specs, will materially improve the rate of data transfer for users of newer large-file cameras. Just looking at the front of the SanDisk ImageMate reader, it says it will go up to 500 MB/ second interface transfer speed. This is nearly as fast as a Siamese cat waking up when it hears you open the refrigerator door...come round our house and do a time trial.

An Eye Opener in A4

My birthday rolled around and my friends wanted to get me a present. Passing up the hints I sent them - the advertising flyers for the Nikon D4, the Maserati, and the weekly special at Dan Murphy's - they chose a gift voucher for an online photo book publisher. It has turned out to be the best present yet, and a real learning tool.

Prior to this, like many analog photographers, I had tried my hand at calendars, posters, and self-printed photo books, and like many had found a basket of problems. Difficult to incorporate text or tables, difficult to position images, difficult to get consistent results. The cost of printing paper and chemistry made it comical rather than economical.

All changed. This latest experience was easy, seamless, and far more successful than ever before. I elected to make a book of my "Hot Rod Honeys" in 300mm x 300mm form, and downloaded the free software from the publisher to do it. Fortunately the firm that does it realizes that most people are duffers when it comes to this so they also set up a couple of instructional videos. I looked and learned.

First problem was the format that they advocated was square, not rectangular. I had to revise the cropping on some images though fortunately I tend to leave enough air around my main subject when I compose. In future I will probably opt for a different format so that I can do the landscape stuff - it is do-able but you have to do your own positioning.

Second problem - if you want a full bleed you have to get your margins out a decent way past the on-screen guide lines. No trying to squeeze that last millimeter into the square - you'll end up with a white flash at the edge of the page. See, I am learning.

Third problem: Printing is good but the paper seems thin - particularly compared to the double-sided matte or lustre paper we get for our inkjet printers. We'll have to see how well it holds up with time.

But here is where the good part starts. You choose your pictures in jpeg or tiff form, position and crop them as you will - then put on drop shadows or other frippery, and start to review your work. Look very carefully, as you get tired and miss things on the first run. I proof-read, if that is the word for a non-verbal book, at least 4 times before I picked up my obvious mistakes.

Uploading it to the firm is easy - the 60 page book with 260 Mb of info tootled off in 15 minutes and 10 days later a well-wrapped parcel dropped at the door.

I am thrilled - the pictures from my Nikon D300 that I have really only seen on screen or through my Epson printer are far more detailed than I imagined when spread out on a printed page. Even better is the realization that the screen image and the commercially printed image are the same - that time spent calibrating the screen with the little Spyder Express is well spent. The choice of colour space - Abobe RGB 1998 is also fortuitous.

Next experiment will be to search out files and images for further photo books - perhaps exotic dancers or railway locomotives - and try out two different on-line publishers. The birthday gift was a credit with a firm that operates in Melbourne so it will be interesting to see how their product compares to printing from the USA or China.

Conclusion: I thoroughly recommend that you try some of your own images in book form. You will be thrilled and you can bore the socks off your friends and family without needing to carry a laptop!

Apple OSX Lion Upgrade

The much anticipated upgrade to the Apple operating system has been released in the form of OSX Lion.  Apple certainly has come a long way since OSX Kitten.......sorry couldn't help myself!

But seriously, the introduction of the system has not come without it's issues with compatibility with other programs.

At this stage we are aware that the following programs are not as yet compatible with the new upgrade;
X-Rite
Datacolor
Photoshop CS3 and earlier
Some issues with certain interface features of CS4 and CS5

Nik Software has proven to be fine with the upgrade if you had it installed prior to upgrading, however the Nik plug-ins will not work if you try to load them after upgrading to Lion.

Epson engineers have advised an update for printers requiring Rosetta will not be available until mid-September, early-October.

Our advice is to carefully check the compatibility of your current programs before upgrading.  Most "bugs" are ironed out within six months so to save any issues, hold off upgrading until all patches/drivers to match have been released by manufacturers.

OWLE Bubo Video

Further to our post yesterday about the OWLE Bubo, if you have an interest in checking out its features and functions further, here is a great video that explains it all!