HDRI images

Nothing new to many photographers, but I've never really done more than use "Bracketeer" to balance out bracketed photos in bad lighting conditions. With Photoshop CS5 there are still limited but much better options for some interesting effects. My new Nikon really helps out by giving me quality images to start with.

Above:a sample of a standard shot and after the HDRI treatment.

Does I-tunes Suck?

Of course anything involving Apple software/hardware gets people’s panties in a bunch for some reason but i-tunes has crossed platforms and is no longer a «which is better» discussion. As the sole software to control your i-pod or i-phone (I-pods take a HUGE 60- 75% of music players depending when/where you find you research) i-tunes has a bigger than normal affect on how people buy and organize their music and video on portable devices. The shear amount of control this gives Apple is, I think, basically unfair, but that doesn’t mean i-tunes sucks as many would claim, nor does it say it’s the best way to do things as Apple would like us all to believe.

Many of the complaints against i-tunes I hear are extremely outdated and basically false as are many of the anti-Apple claims that never seem to die and are passed down person to person without anyone actually doing any fact checking. You can, for example, put music, movies etc you buy from other places into your itunes controlled device and it’s pretty darn easy. No, all formats are not supported, but no device supports all formats and itunes does slightly more than Zune, to name a competitor, though maybe not all the ones you are used if you are on a PC.

There are plenty of real reasons to not like this software, however.

1) It’s way too big, takes up too much space and uses too much ram.
2) The store component is too in your face. Not everyone wants to buy from Apple directly and the store itself lacks, even in the music department, a decent selection of musical tastes. While this is slowly changing, I am very wary the Apple’s prudishness with the app store doesn’t actually extend to all areas of itunes departments.
3) The app store.... I don’t think it can mentioned enough that Apple should not be telling end users what they should and should not be using the item they paid a hell of a lot of money for.
4) The censorship of the app store can easily be avoided if you could just make your own categories and could put password protection on them. If I or you or anyone else wants to watch porn, keep confidential documents secure or keep R-rated movies from the reach of their kids, it’s their right and easy enough to do. Frankly, it’s a feature that would drive even more people to use Apple’s portable devices. I’ve never understood why everything on the planet earth needs to be kid friendly to the exclusion of adult needs and sensibilities.
5) No plug-ins.... a great way to get programmers on your side and add functionality Apple mat not want to take responsibility for. Granted Apps do some of this in the i-pod touch, pad and phone, but not everyone has those things. I don’t for example.
6) This is my pet peeve with most software... too much useless «functionality». I can choose my own songs to play thank-you very much.

None of these limitations make i-tunes suck, but it does leave much room for improvement. On the competitor’s side, there isn’t much. Very few of the alternatives can provide the integration and ease of use of i-tunes and they also lack crucial features, many of them the same ones i-tunes is missing. overall, it depends on your needs whether something "sucks" or not unless the software just plain doesn't do the basics it needs to or crashes all the time etc. Many people wan to make playlists on the go, which would certainly make i-tunes suck for them. I on the other hand, could care less about that, so it's not an issue.

Low light photography

Still slowly going through the functions of the new camera. With an ASA of 3500 + I was curious how concert shots etc might be.

Current work

I am working on a retouching project not finished so I can't post anything yet, however I did finish a total redesign of the BADA (Boston Art dealers Association) site after doing the original a decade ago.

more photos _ Art's farm

Took some photos while visiting a friend's new farm. I am pretty happy with the quality of b&w I can get from images with this new camera and some camera RAW tweaking. Click photos to enlarge.

quick fixes

Recently I've had some success with my Dreamweaver font issues. Adobe, who has been basically doing its best to make me come into their main office and bitch slap each person working there (maybe they are into that? who knows?),started to personally call me about the problem. Once I spoke to a programmer, the almost year long saga ended, for the most part, pretty quickly. There are still issues, but easier to deal with ones and they don't halt work completely on any projects coming up.

The invisible text boiled down to 3 fonts that were not being seen by dreamweaver (cs4 or cs5... cs3 could see them no problem)
I was told to copy the fonts off the hard drive, delete them from the font folder and from the font book application, do a permissions repair with disk utility and them put them back on the font folder. It did work, but i've had to re-do this one extra time already for one font. I still had to play with spry menu items to get them show text as well. It did make life a little easier again, however.

It did not fix the times problem in Pages... "fl" combinations still turn into a symbol i've never seen before.

Backwards Compatibility

What ever happened to idea of backwards compatibility? You know that the new version of software will open in an older version or you can save as an older version so clients and other people not yet up to date, or even in the case of the page layout, printers can still work with you without paying for expensive software upgrades or you having to keep 100 versions of the same software on your system.

This seemed to be the standard not so long ago, but more and more software companies seem to be forgoing this very useful feature to force upgrades. Pagemaker, for example could save to quite a few older versions, while Indesign can only save one version back. Photoshop, on the the hand is pretty good at opening files whether they are older or newer than what you have. After Affects and many others don’t even give you the “one back option”. I now have version 6.5, CS3, 4 and 5 on my system... a huge waste of space. I have to keep Indesign all the way back to CS3 and still save those files to CS2 for a couple printing places.

I don’t get it... back compatibility is a great feature, it allows you to update and promote new features to reluctant clients while still being able to service their needs. I’ve found it actually encourages people to upgrade since they know they can still do business with those who haven’t.

Of course some features won’t work and there will be some cases where it just isn’t possible to go back even one version... but I think that is very rare. I say let’s bring back the past a little and add this feature back into the standard of every new upgrade. If you MUST rake your customers over the coals more than you normally do, proved a plugin for older versions at extra cost.

Nikon D5000 SLR

Having been a photographer most of my life, the last few years have been tough, my Nikon prosumer point and shoot model basically died a slow death and with little work coming in, there was no way to replace it. Recently a couple of good contracts allowed me to think about getting a new camera and finally this past weekend, I did.

Bought at L.L. Lorzeau (which had a great deal and as a serious camera only store, incredible selections and service) I also bought what I consider essential extras. Remote shutter release, extra battery and polarized lens filter. The kit came with 2 lenses, 18-55 and 55-200mm with an anti-shake feature. I also got a superb macro lens. Yes I went over the budget I had set, but it was worth it, I am the sort of person who might sell his house before going without a camera.

So far, I am over the top happy about it. The images are really good and it's a gi-normous upgrade from the other digital cameras I've been used to using. Looking forward to some portrait shots to see how it fairs in that department. I also have been excited to do some time lapse stuff and long exposure work that the other camera and even past cameras just could not do. According to the specs this one should handle it all very well.

So far the video function is not very impressive. The quality isn't that great, but good enough to not take a video camera on vacation, but not film anything serious with. At least not without a lot of post work.

Click on images for larger versions.

Adobe CS5 Master Suite test

Though only using a testing version and not having the chance to look into everything in detail, I have been playing around with the CS5 suite and getting to use some software I was curious about but never touched before. Overall for those who don’t like to read through an entire article. Some welcome changes but not worth the huge price to upgrade in my opinion. Basically you seem to be paying mostly for more stable software, which for the most part it is. Stability should be a bug fix for free, not a paid upgrade.

The biggest disappointment is Premiere Pro, it had issues with sound, rendering, exporting you name it. I was hoping to use it in place of updating Final Cut Pro. I like some of the new ways things are set up and the media exporter integration is very nice, but if the final product is missing sound or if it takes 5 times as long to edit something because of render issues, it’s a step back not forward. Soundbooth was a new one for me and it’s excellent, though I was hoping for better ability to make music from clips like sound track pro has. Could just be unrealistic expectations on my part. After Effects is fine, I haven’t had any footage to try the new rotoscoping features. So far I haven’t had reason to switch from my CS3 version. That could change if I get deeper into it. EDIT: many of these issues did not appear when I started a project from scratch as opposed to importing an older project. Many of the issues may be a result of importing older versions that already have rendered files associated with them.

Photoshop, as usual, gets the best updates, the content aware fill is nice but not perfect, a good start for a complicated fill job. Like content aware scaling, I suspect the feature is less useful than it is impressive (when working on an ideal file for that feature) in the real world. The new paint brushes and colour mixing features are quite amazing, many artists will really profit from them. Best thing is the constant crashing seems to have stopped from CS4.

Dreamweaver STILL has the same text not visible issue I’ve had since Apple updated to Snow Leopard and Adobe has not been able to do anything about for over 8 months. Dreamweaver CS3 does not have this problem. Indesign is nothing to write home about and frankly, it’s a shame, not because adobe doesn’t have a great layout program, bit more because it’s almost impossible to get printers to update the software. Many are still on CS2 and you can only save to one version behind. So no matter what Adobe does, unless you work with all up to date print companies, the latest version sits on computer opening any indesign file you click on despite telling the finder use an older version. (A very annoying bug!)

Fireworks, finally stable, Flash... like the Flash Catalyst idea except that older versions of Flash did this very thing with components in effect, without having to leave Flash. Illustrator has some nice updates, but the main one, the perspective drawing is a little premature.

Encore I like a lot, it’s got a learning curve if you are used to other similar software but the end product was really professional.

Not sure I’d pay the upgrade of close to 1000$ (canadian) for what amounts to a few new features and one additional software I’d like to have (Encore).

Is the world still in world wide web?

More and more when I search for things on the www I find myself locked out. “Sorry, this video is not available in your country” sort of messages appear more and more. I am sorry, but don’t put your info on the world wide web if the world can’t see it. I am in Canada, virtually all the clips I want to see are shown here, just at times I might miss them. I can watch them on TV, copy to see later even, but not on the “information super highway”. The weird thing is, these clips are shown for free in any case, so what’s the harm?

It seems the web, which once promised a free flow of information to anyone anywhere is pretty much under the control of whatever corporation decides what it wants you to see or not. I am all for protecting your copyrights and all that, but once something is on the airways, copied to millions of videos, Tivo’d and put on the web (in the USA) for free, you’ve really no reason to restrict it from being seen online. No wonder so many people illegally download stuff... it’s easier than seeing it legally!

It’s just sad to see the internet going this way, we had a good thing for a while, but as they say, good things don’t last!