Well, on further review….

In discussing the bird with one of the senior birders, he pointed out that this species is quite rare at that location. We talked over why I made that ID and what field marks I used for the identification. Since I have no photo of the bird, field marks are crucial as a way to help other birders accept your call as the eye witness. I went and did more research on the species and alternatives last night as well.

I’ve decided that given the species would be a special find there and that it’s a lifer bird for me (officially, my first ever confirmed sighting), I don’t think the sighting meets the burden of proof I’m comfortable with to make that call. I’ve removed the bird from the list and left it identified as a nuthatch, but not as either a Pigmy or as a White-Breasted (the likely alternative).

This is obviously a compromise position — I feel comfortable with the call, but in describing the bird last night, I found I couldn’t describe what I felt was the absolute required field mark (the black mask across the face and eyes); all of the other marks (lack of red around the vent, relative size) to me left the bird ambiguous. Since I didn’t get an extended look at the bird, it’s possible I didn’t see the marks properly. Since it’s a lifer, I can’t claim familiarity with it, and I try to be really strict about declaring a lifer bird. If this had been a more common bird in the area, I’d accept this ID; since it’s not, I don’t feel like I got a good enough look at it to make the call against the historical evidence, but I also don’t feel that it’s clear I made a mistake and mis-called the white-breasted as pigmy.

If I’d realized the bird was a potential rarity, or even if I’d realized it was a life bird for me (I didn’t), I would have stopped and tried to chase it down for an extended look and photos. Since I didn’t, it’s going to remain ambiguous and anonymous. this is actually a part of birding I really enjoy — the challenge to get it right. and the more I work at my birding, the more I realize just how complicated it is to do well — if it was easy, we wouldn’t bother…

So I’m off in search of #250 again. And I feel good that this is the right call and right decision…

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Back to lifer 249. This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

I took some time to tweak a few things here on the blog and my photo sites. Here’s a quick summary:

First, I’ve spent some time setting up some things over on my smugug photo site. you can now purchase prints or downloads of images.  I’ve also created a gallery of free downloads sized for use as wallpapers for your computer; these have a small watermark but are licensed via Creative Commons. I’ll try to add images to that collection every week or two, and if there’s one you’d like to see available as a watermark, feel free to ask. A few of the images currently available:

I also decided that Google Buzz has none, and so I’ve removed references to it from my site. The content that I used to point you to (primarily the shared items from Google Reader) are now being posted to my twitter feed via twitterfeed. That’s one less place I have to worry about trying to convince people to subscribe to, and it seems the appropriate place for this. Since twitter gateways into facebook, that content also ends up there as well. The big trick in trying to figure out where to put stuff is how to allow people to get access to the parts they find interesting without shoving lots of duplicate entries into their faces or making it an all or nothing situation for them. I think the current setup (Blog for longer form writing, twitter for casual, short form chatting and “hey, this is interesting” linking) makes the most sense.

I’ve also started hanging out in a couple of new places, and so they’ve been added to the site in the About Me areas: I’ve liked JPG Magazine for a while, and now that it’s back moving forward and I have some photography I think is good enough to share, I’m starting to dip my toe into the community there. And there’s a new photography discussion forum sponsored by the Stack Exchange folks, and it seems to have good content and conversation, so I’ve started following that and contributing a bit as well. You’re encouraged to check them both out and maybe decide to join in the fun there with me…  I’ve cut back some of my activity on Flickr, but I think that’s temporary while i figure out how much time I want to spend there and what I want to do while I’m there. We’ll see.

I’ve also made a slight change to the “Stuff to Read” section on the blog, it now has a listing of the most popular pages on the site over the last 90 days; since those are the pages most people are coming to see, I think it makes sense to promote them a bit, so that section is now showing the pages you find most interesting as well as the pages I think are worth reading.

The new blog design is now about 2 months old, and I have to admit I still like it and I think it’s accomplished the goals I set out to in the redesign. I like how images are displayed a lot better. The number of people subscribing to the blog hasn’t changed (but I didn’t expect that), but page views are up about 14%, while number of pages read per visit is up almost 20% and the time spent on the site per visit is up about 6%. Since I felt the big issue with the old site was that people showed up ti see a specific page and never saw any other content (and therefore had no reason to consider subscribing or reading any other items), these are all good indications that the new design is helping people see some of the other content and some are exploring a bit. I’m also quite happy with the increased views of images both on flickr and on smugmug. the real draw is always good writing (and good images), but neither does you much good if it’s hidden from sight by a bad site design, so I think this is a nice step forward.

And onward into fall!

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at A few site updates. This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

Why now? I’m looking to move forward on some projects and the iPad will make doing those a lot easier. And in some cases, they wouldn’t be possible without. What are those projects?

Well first, a quick side trip:

Anonymous offscreen voice: Chuq! Don’t you work for that company that said it was going to build it’s own tablet?

Why, thank you Anonymous offscreen voice. Yes, in fact, I do. And yes, they did. And no, it’s not announced or shipping yet, and I have things to do and people to see.

In all honesty, the reality is this — everyone in the industry owns stuff on multiple platforms. If you aren’t seeing what the other guys are doing, you’re going to miss important stuff. I think the record at work is someone who carries (CARRIES, not “owns”) four platforms: webOS, Android, IOS and a Treo. I still have my iPhone, and it sits mostly in my backback and gets used as an iPod, it has it’s phone number forwarded to my main phone, and it carries the few apps that I can’t yet find an equivalent on webOS. But I dogfooded my Pre long ago, and I use the apps on it if they exist — because if you don’t dog food your own stuff, you can’t live through the pain points that need to be fixed. So I do, happily, and I think we do a pretty good job (and it keeps moving forward).

But there is no webOS tablet yet, at least not that I can admit to, carry around in public or use on a daily basis. When there is, I’ll dogfood that, too. Until that happens, I need something now that does stuff, and the iPad makes sense.

I figured I should just be up front about this, because we all know there are folks out there who look for things to take out of context and push as negatively as they can. And they probably will anyway, but I felt I could either pretend I didn’t have one (which only works until the first time someone sees me with it, and then I have some explaining to do), or I could just explain up front. So I am.  Heck, I could actually be working on some fascinating cross platform thingie that causes sparkling ponies to fly across the room, and if I am, I couldn’t tell you. In any event, the bottom line is the addition of an iPad to the family doesn’t imply anything about anything else other than the iPad is a useful tool, and when I have other useful tools, I’ll get those, too.

So, why did I buy an iPad?

At the start of the year, I made a decision to stop buying dead trees, and I shifted almost all of my book buying electronic. That’s worked out pretty well — I love the Kindle format and I’ve been doing some interesting research into e-publishing myself. It’s really clear that the iPad is a tipping point in the publishing space and I’ve been doing some interesting research into epublishing (more on that later) and I’m at the point where I needed to be able to try things out to mvoe that research forward further. But mostly, it’s because I wanted something more convenient than a laptop to carry about for my reading, and something with a bigger screen than a phone (and my 50 year old nearsighted eyes thank me!).  I like getting away from the desk, away from the keyboard and yet more and more of my “downtime” and research time is spent online. The iPad allows me to nicely sit on the couch with Laurie, or pretty much anywhere, and do that.

Another thing I’m looking to investigate is using tablets as part of my photography. I have a number of things I’m considering, but the one that’s intrigued me a lot I wrote about a few months ago. I think the iPad would be a nice way to do keywording and annotation of pictures, and I want to start prototyping up some options and see what happens. I think you could do a lot using a combination of a Lightroom plugin to handle migration, Dropbox and some custom code on the tablet to enable browsing and curation through updating the EXIF. Still a bunch of details to work out, but I’m ready to go work them out, and I can’t exactly do that without a tablet.

Finally, Project management. I’ve started doing some planning on a few fronts, trying to get back and moving on some things I’ve let sit fallow for a few months, and I needed something to help me get and stay organized. I grabbed a copy of Things, and I’m starting to figure out what I need to figure out about the projects I’m trying to reboot.

And yeah — the iPad is a damn good piece of work. but man, I miss multi-tasking of applications already.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at I have committed iPad.. This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

That’s easy to say. Making it happen? That’s the hard part. but when I sat down to figure out a path between that starting point and making the decision to make it happen, I came up with a long list of things that needed to be done.

But if you think about what the critical path is, it’s simple: until the craft you want to build the business around is good enough, nothing else matters. You can build the worlds best website, you can market the hell out of your work, you can promote and twitter yourself until you’re blue in the face, but if the photography isn’t good enough, it doesn’t matter.

So job one was to become good enough — and that’s been my focus. Every few months I’ve sat myself down and evaluated where I stand and my decision has been that I still have work to do to get where I believe i need to get to be successful.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t made progress; I thought I was a pretty good photographer when I started this (and I guess I was at some level), and along the way I’ve become a much better photographer. Many times I look back at my older images that I thought were pretty good and wince; some are salvageable through what I’ve learned about post-processing — many are being retired and put into storage. the more I learn, the more I study — the more I realize I need to be able to do to be successful at this.

Earlier this year I made a winter trip to Yosemite. That trip was (among other things) a test — to put myself into a situation well outside my comfort zone, to create a list of images that I needed to create and do so under deadline conditions, implement that plan when I get on site and adapt to the conditions and situation to see if I could still accomplish the goals (and to see what else was available when I got there, of course), and then see if  I could reliably create quality images to the plan. It was a conscious attempt “on assignment” under conditions that weren’t fully under my control and see if I could turn out work that I felt met the requirements of the assignment at a quality I was satisfied with — and most importantly in some ways, that the images were “made”, not just taken.

That latter point is crucial in many ways, because being pro isn’t just about being able to produce an image, it’s about being able to produce the images that are needed and produce them when needed and reliably. It’s about making images, not just taking them. Anyone can get lucky and take a publishable shot. you can’t build a business around getting lucky — you have to make your luck, so to speak, and be able to produce reliably.

I felt that I succeeded at pretty much all levels. I was quite happy with the images, and the images were what I envisioned and planned. Feedback on the images was positive. All of the challenges I put in front of myself to “prove” I was ready to go pro were answered. So a back in April, I sat down and started planning what my next steps were going to be.

And a funny thing happened on the way to going pro….

One of the realities you have to understand about running a photography BUSINESS is that it takes time and energy; you have the bureacracy of running a business (paperwork and taxes, business licenses, managing finances, etc, etc…). You have to spend time and and energy soliciting business and supporting your customers, fulfilling requests, billing, managing inventory, marketing and promotion… Businesses aren’t magic. Things don’t happen, you have to make them happen.

The time to do those things has to come from somewhere. Since I have no intention to “give up my day job” any time soon (if for no other reason I’m enjoying what I do for a living. And there’s this thing called a paycheck) where is the time to start the business going to come from?

Yup. The most likely place that time will be sucked from is the time I spend doing photography. Physics wins, folks.

So I made the decision – surprising to myself at the time — that the best way to guarantee my long-term success as a professional photographer was to wait and leave it to a later time. It’s better for my to put my time into continuing to take photos and work on improving my craft (and especially working to widen my portfolio into areas I’m currently not strong at). I worried that my photography might stagnate if I put cycles into marketing instead of shooting — at the least, I’d be complicating my life, and the reality is, I don’t NEED to create an income stream right now, and it just doesn’t seem to make sense to try to force it to happen now.

My life priorities have changed in the last few years. there have been some speed bumps in my life the last few years — health issues, my dad dying, the hysical realities of middle age — but I seem to be beyond that, I feel better and I feel healthier than I’ve been since probably 2003 and except for my weight there aren’t any life complications I have to worry about. I do, however, have to worry about the weight and focus on getting it off, and the things that have happened the last few years has changed my attitude somewhat, and I am trying to live a little more for now and a less for someday — in the last two years I’ve lost two friends to cancer, my dad to his heart problems and I’ve had other friends my age have major cancer or health scares. It’s made me realize that my situation (diagnosed with diabetes almost a year ago but well controlled, and the joy of middle-age — arthritis) isn’t all that bad. But it also reminds me that you can’t always assume for tomorrow, either.

So my priorities are different now. When I redid my blog in July, it was to bring my photography more front and center in the design and make it a better showcase for my images, but I consciously decided not to try to put out a shingle and creating a business around it. that doesn’t mean I won’t license something if it comes along (I need to work on my smugmug site to make that possible), but that’s different. My attitude today is about simplifying my life and enjoying it more, keeping the stress manageable (and cutting stress out where  can), more living in the moment instead of investing for someday. And doing really good photography and continuing to expand my skills instead of marketing and selling it. Letting someday happen and see what it is rather than always pushing to make it be something. Because you never know whether it’ll be there.

I don’t regret the goals I set along the way — and in fact, especially when I was dealing with dad and all of that entailed, my photography was sometimes the thing that kept me centered and sane — but you can’t be afraid to re-evaluate your goals and change them when circumstances change. I still think “going pro” is something I want to do, but later, when I’m thinner and older and ready to step away from silicon valley. But I’m not — it’s way too much fun these days. So while I still want to make this happen, I want to make sure i do it in terms that it the quality of life I’m trying to maintain today as well.

And that means sometimes the answer is a surprising “not now”…..

(and now, the camera is calling…)

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at A funny thing happened on the way to going pro…. This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

In lieu of a more traditional blogroll, I thought it might be useful to talk about what’s influenced me  and why. If nothing else, Consider this my way of saying thanks for what they’ve brought to my work.

So here are some of the people I feel have helped me become who I am today as a photographer, and are photographers I hope to emulate as I become what I believe I can become.

Some of these names you are going to be familiar with. Some aren’t. Some would be on your list. Some won’t be. It would be interesting, actually, if others also created their lists and we link to each other and see who the most common names are — and identify the interesting names others have found that we haven’t. If you do that, link to this list and I’ll link back and we’ll see if we can create a mega-list that way.

I’m willing to bet I’m going to see a number of “but what about <fill in a name>?” to which my answer is going to be “they aren’t on the list”. I don’t have any intention on talking about why someone DID NOT make the list, I want to stay away from real or inferred negativity. I will say that if I’d done this list a year ago my list would have been somewhat different, and that a few of the “what about?” names would have been on that list. There are some photographers out there doing a good job of teaching that are oriented more towards the newer and less experienced photographer;  that’s not a criticism, that is actually a very important niche and one I’m glad they fill.

Who got me started?

John Shaw: The first photographer that made me go “who is this? and where can I find more of his photography?” was John Shaw. His nature work, especially his macro work, really caught my eye and fascinated me.

In high school, I shot primarily black and white, primarily sports and yearbook stuff, spent a lot of time in a darkroom, which I loved. When I graduated I let my photography lapse. In the mid-80′s, I picked it up again with a Minolta 5xi, then a 7xi, shooting a lot of Velvia. Looking back at what survives of that phase of my shooting life, some of it actually isn’t bad. I’ll rate it as “has potential”. John Shaw’s work and books was what aimed me at nature photography and really got me interested in working with the camera again.

His books, especially his macro work, were the foundation I’ve built everything else on. I still have them in my collection, and while some of the technical discussions are outdated in a digital world, I’ve gone back to them recently and they’re still a fascinating read with some amazing photography.

Galen Rowell: Then I discovered Galen Rowell, probably in Outdoor Photographer magazine. He was the photographer that taught me the power of emotionally connecting with the viewer and turning an image into a statement, of having a message.

At some point I put the camera down again; a combination of time and money and too many things in life and setting priorities. And then digital photography happened. I actually owned a first generation Apple Quicktake, which was an interesting toy, but not much more. Some time later I bought a little Canon Elph. And suddenly I was hooked again. The Elph begat a Minolta Dimage, and the Dimage begat…

Well, it begat all of this.

For someone who I’ve exchanged maybe half a dozen emails with over the last 25 years, it’s amazing how much Bill Atkinson‘s affected my life. He wrote QuickDraw and MacPaint, which hooked me on Macs early on (my first was a Mac 512K). He wrote Hypercard, which convinced me to go from being a Mac user to being an Apple employee, where I worked for 17 years. Hypercard convinced me about the advantages of scripting languages which pushed me from being a C programmer to a Perl programmer (and later a PHP programmer). And then I found out he’d shifted out of high tech and into photography, and happens to be one hell of a nature photographer. So is Dave Cardinal, another apple alum I know from my six color days.

And seeing that those two had already done it made me think that I could, too. And so in 2005 I made a decision to work towards the idea of going pro. It’s now 2010 and I’m still haven’t pulled that lever — but that’s a discussion for another time.

Interesting side note on this. When I finally got serious about my photography and started working on the craft, I went and started photographing birds. Which neither Rowell or Shaw are particularly famous for. The things that really drew me into photography were not the things I did when I started doing photography myself. Typical? Not? Weird? Normal? I dunno. I don’t particularly care, but I do find it interesting that I set off on a completely independent path from day 1 of the journey. for whatever that might mean.

Who do I  judge myself by?

What do you want to be when you grow up? But it’s a question I’ve pondered a lot recently while formulating what my goals are and how do I judge whether I’m getting closer. Ultimately I decided to judge my work against the work of two photographers, because if I can make my work as good as and as popular as these photographers I’ll know I’ve succeeded. Those two photographers are George Lepp and Art Wolfe. They are both successful professional photographers who’s work is in the style of photography I want to become known for, and who are technically very good — and not coincidentally, they are both committed teachers of the craft. I will know I’ve “made it” when I hear the phrase “his work reminds me of….” from someone other than my mother.

One thing that attracts me to these two photographers specifically is how they work to inject the life and emotion of the animal into the image — to tell the story of the animal — not just the image. This is something I’m consciously trying to do in my photography now, and I use these photographers as examples to study as a guide for learning how to go from the “senior portrait” style of photography to something more dynamic and emotional and involving.

And sometimes I think I’m starting to get it…

I was lucky to hear Lepp speak at the Morro Photo Expo last year. He’s back this year, and giving a private class for a few attendees. Very, very tempting. His lecture really helped push my photography by resolving some questions I had about his work I couldn’t figure out, especially with his landscapes. It turns out he was doing a lot of multi-image panorama images and stiching the pieces together, which is why I couldn’t reproduce his work with my lenses. In retrospect — duh — it was painfully obvious, but even though panoramas were on my “experiment with this” list, I didn’t make the connection. His work with extended depth of field also fascinated me (but I still haven’t gotten to experimenting with that). That lecture, and the couple of days I spent at the expo in general, really pushed the quality of my own photography forward in a short time through a combination of some focussed teaching (on HDR and NIght photography) and sharing and talking with the other attendees.

Taken during Morro Photo Expo, pre-dawn. single shot exposure, no HDR.  One of my favorite image of all time, and one I donated to Images without Borders to support Doctors Without Borders in Haiti.

This was taken on my most recent trip. It is a three image HDR which really brought up the fog. I love how the clouds are wrapping themselves around the rock.

x

Taken during Morro Photo expo, about an hour before the pre-dawn shot of the rock. VERY early in the morning.

Also taken at Morro Photo expo in the early dawn, just as the sun was coming up and touching the water. Five minutes later, everything was gray. I’ve been experimenting with silhouette as a way to abstract and create interesting imagery, and this is one of my favorites.

Who do I consider my peers?

If Art Wolfe and George Lepp are the photographers I aspire to become, it’s also an interesting exercise to consider the photographers who are currently doing what I am trying to do. I want to be careful not to use the phrase “as good as” here, because at the very least, professionally, I’m not. Nor is that the kind of evaluation I’m doing here.

By calling them “my peers” I’m saying that these are photographers who are all doing the kind of work I feel I am capable of (and am, or am trying to do) today. These are all California-based photographers who I feel are similar to my work in terms of subject matter and style. They shoot the same locations I do (or shoot in locations I want to shoot) and shoot in ways I look at and study and want to emulate. So when I’m looking for inspiration (or ideas of locations to go and explore), these are the photographers I tend to turn to and study, and as I work to improve my own images and work practices, these are photographers I look to for ideas to adopt.  Thanks, guys.

• Jim Goldstein
• Gary Crabbe
• G. Dan MItchell
• Mark Williamson

Who instructs and inspires me?

When I started down this path in 2005, I thought I was a pretty good photographer. Today, in 2010, I’m a much better photographer and most of my work from 2005 embarrasses me. That’s fine — this is normal in these situations, where the less you know, the better you are. Part of progressing is being honest about your progress without beating yourself up as you figure out what you don’t know.

But the more I learn and study, the more I find I still need to learn. The internet is a wonderful thing, in that it makes massive amounts of knoweldge avaialble to be studied, and gives you access to people who are happy to share and to teach. I’m always on the lookout for people I can listen to and learn from. This list changes over time, but here are the photographers who’s writing I pay attention to and who’s work I study to improve my own. (This list is oriented towards photography as opposed to geeky things and workflow and tools — that would be it’s own list, which I should do some time).

Mike Johnston: If  someone were to ask me the question “What web site do you recommend reading to an intermediate/advanced photographer?” my answer would be The Online Photographer (TOP) and Mike Johnston. It’s hard to say what this site is about — it’s about the kind of stuff` you probably want to know about photography, but it doesn’t really focus on any specific topic. And perhaps that’s part of the attraction, a well-written generalist blog is hard to find, and this one is definitely that.

Michael Frye: Frye is a nature and landscape artist who has photographed Yosemite for years. As a lover of Yosemite who’s been trying to photograph the park over the last couple of years, his work fascinates me. He’s also doing a regular critique of other people’s work that I find a very insightful and fascinating read.  Watching how he images the park and then trying to see the park the way he sees it has been an interesting exercise in learning to understand how to represent my vision within my images.

William Neill: Another very good and long-time photographer of Yosemite and the eastern Sierra. I find his work interesting for many of the reasons I find Frye’s work interesting, but while there are similarities, they also see the same subjects in different ways. Neill is also doing some interesting work publishing his material as ebooks for online sale, and that’s an area of great interest to me right now. I’ve purchased and read a number of his works, and they’re quite well done and I think he shows that this format is going to be an interesting and viable alternative to paper-based publishing. They are highly recommended.

Chase Jarvis: You can not learn if you only study what you already know. Jarvis is a photography who’s portfolio consists almost entirely of photography that I either don’t do at all, or that I suck at. He is also the photographer behind the iPhone’s Best Camera app, and someone who shows that photography is about passion as much as it is about technology or skill. But he can get geeky when he needs to, and his writeup and video of how he manages his image library and backups is awesome and everyone should be paying attention to this issue (and for smaller environments, his solutions scale down nicely, too!) He is in many ways the embodiment of all of the photographer pieces I am not, and he makes a wonderful resource to study as I try to integrate those things into what I am becoming. I owe him a couple of beers already….

David Hobby (Strobist): I am a natural light photographer. I am very uncomfortable shooting with artificial lights. I’ve done some, I’m rarely happy with the results. David Hobby’s Strobist web site and practice time will be my salvation — when I finally bear down and actually dig in and put the time in.

Trey Ratcliff: I’ve been dipping my toe into HDR for a while, and I’ve leaned heavily on Tret Ratcliff and his Stuck in Customs website as a resource for understanding this. I am very much in the photo-realism side of the HDR world (but — ssshhhh — don’t tell anyone, but I sometimes see why photographers like to dabble over on the dark side). It’s a controversial technique with some right now, but HDR to me is clearly the future of really expressive landscape photography. I have gratefully stopped carrying my collection of graduated ND filters in favor of HDR. I wasn’t always convinced about HDR, until the day I realized that most people who criticize HDR are doing so because they only recognize the BAD renderings as HDR and aren’t seeing the good ones. I hope most of mine fall in the latter category…

David duChemin: Like Chase Jarvis, David duChemin is a photographer who shoots the kind of photography I can’t really do today.  He’s a humanitarian photographer who sees his images as a way to inform us and to help improve the world around us. He’s also someone who’s photography is driven by his passion and his writing on teh subject is about vision and seeing, not aperture and ISO. He’s a fascinating writer and a damn good photographer. He’s also another photographer doing significant experimentation with the ebook format and has created the Craft & Vision imprint that he uses to publish and sell ebooks writing by himself and others. I’ve purchased and read a number of them and they are quite good; one innovation he’s experimenting with is the short form ebook, smaller, focused topics that can be produced quickly, sell for a lot less than a traditional photography book and look to me to fit in well with the e-publishing model I see emerging and at a price point that makes the purchase within range of the impulse buy, which I think is going to be a key success point for ebooks moving forward, especially on new platforms like the iPad. duChemin seems to be ahead of the pack here, and I’m watching his success closely, because I think this is a model others should be studying and looking to adopt as the ebook market matures into a viable publishing medium for more people. (I know I certainly am watching….)

Zack Arias: Arias is a photographer for which it’s hard to explain exactly how he impacts my work. He’s a music photographer who refuses to let his work be easy or safe or commercial. His writing and his photography show him to be driven by his passion, and someone who wears his emotions very close to the surface. He gives a damn, and that giving a damn is what drives him in his work, and that is an esthetic I am trying to embrace in my own work. His guest blog on Scott Kelby’s Photoshop Insider just blew me away, because of how much I saw of myself in it and how he was talking about things I was struggling with at the time. if I owe Chase Jarvis a couple of beers, I probably owe Arias a couple of cases.

George Barr: George Barr is another photographer who does really good photography about things I feel massively incompetent at. He’s a fine art photographer who’s work include some nature photography, but a lot of urban architecture and photography that I call industrial abstract — shapes and textures and patterns found within larger items or scenes. I picked up his book around christmas and found it fascinating, interesting enough that I went and re-read it a couple of weeks later, and then sat down and re-read it again very slowly and spent a lot of time studying the photographs to try to understand his sense of pattern and flow. He’s not a frequent blogger, but one who’s writing I find very much worth the time. He’s another one of those photographers I study because it stretches me and helps me understand a style of photography I find very foreign and uncomfortable, which helps me wrap myself around it and figure out how to do it well.

Harold Davis: I ran into the work of Davis fairly early on in my explorations, and I’ve been fascinating by it ever since. He is a very strong photoshop technician and does a lot of interesting work adapting photography in post-processing. He’s a strong nature photographer but also an exceptional studio photographer. His skills and writings align very closely with my interests — and yet his post-processing moves him far away from the photo-realistic results of most nature photographers and shifts his work into very different areas. All in all, someone who’s writings I follow closely, and as I plan to actually get my act together and start shooting in the a studio, his work will be a model for my experimentations here.

Joe McNally: Force of nature. Or something like that. McNally is another photographer in the “there isn’t a scene I can’t improve with a couple of speedlites. Or 20″ school of photography. He does a lot of innovative lighting and really pushes the edges in adapting a space to his vision. As a natural light photographer, what he does many times seems like magic, but as someone who knows he needs to understand and acquire artificial lighting as part of his skill set, McNally’s work is part of my education. It doesn’t hurt that he’s very willing to explain what he does and what the rationale was….

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at My photographic mentors and inspirations. This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

So it was now time for me to explore Morro Bay. But first, a digression.

Why Morro Bay?

I live in Silicon Valley, and have for for over 25 years, but I grew up in Southern California and my family still lives down there. This implies I’ve travelled the roads to LA a few times. I long ago got over feeling like the hour I save by driving down I-5 is “worth it”, so my preference is to head up and down 101 along the coast. A bit slower, but worth it.

In 2008, Dad got sick. Went into the hospital. Didn’t come home. Between Christmas 2007 and October 2008 when we finalized all of the details on the estate, I logged about 12,000 miles on the car JUST driving back and forth across the state. I honestly can’t tell you how many trips I took, 2008 was and probably always will be a grey blur. But a lot of those trips were long weekends, and on a lot of those trips, I started doing short side trips on the way home to unwind. Occasionally my “weekend” consisted of driving a couple of hours out of my way and seeing what I found (sometimes up highway 1, sometimes crossing from 5 to 101 through one of the passes like 198 or 46 — just checking out different parts of the state. Driving, far away from people, responsibilities and cell phone towers — was a bit of an escape.

I also started stopping in Morro Bay, because (among other reasons) it’s about half-way between the two ends of this journey. Drive four hours, stop for a couple of hours, grab a meal, then carry on. Many times, that was my weekend. I first visited Morro Bay when I was trying to decide how serious I was about birdwatching as an avocation, and hit a point where I wanted to get out and on my own and explore a bit and see if this really was something I wanted to commit myself to; I chose Morro Bay because it’s a major birding area with a great diversity to it — and I loved the trip and the location. Ever since then, I’ve used Morro Bay as a stopping off point on trips up and down state or when I need to get away. It’s close enough that I can daytrip if I really want to, but it’s a perfect place for an overnight trip or weekend to get away and unplug.

It’s no secret Laurie and I have talked about retiring (or relocating) out of the valley at some point. I’ve wanted to move to the Oregon Coast for years, and we have a great love for cities like Seattle and Portland and Vancouver. I could settle in to a city like Newport or Astoria quite happily, though, and some day, we might. Morro Bay, I found, embodies much of what attracts me to the Oregon Coast, and that became a great attraction. The town is small and friendly; it’s casual and has a nice, slow pace, but it’s close to civilization with San Luis Obispo within reasonable drive. It’s a great outdoor town and I’ve come to learn it’s full of really interesting people — many of whom used to work in Silicon Valley and fell in love with the area and moved down there when they could. There’s a very active birding culture, and there’s are a number of very good and fun photographers that I’ve come to know either in person or in email. It’s very common — almost every trip — for someone to wander up if I’m shooting around the harbor just to say hi and talk photography for a bit, or to offer suggestions on interesting places to take pictures or find an interesting bird. it’s just one of those places you occasionally find that you visit and it makes you feel like you’re home (or want to be).

So Morro Bay became my escape, and as I visited it, I learned more about it and I found new and interesting things to do there, and now it just seems weird if I don’t spend some time around the town if I’m in the central coast. When I need to crawl into a cocoon for a bit, it’s a great place for me to do it. And because it’s like that (Victoria, BC is another town like that for me) that’s one reason I was careful to make sure I stayed in Santa Maria and explore new locations — it would have been fine to just stay in Morro Bay for the weekend, but I wouldn’t have really pushed myself or done anything new, and I needed the break, but I needed to push myself, too. This trip succeeded at both.

I have a few standard visiting places in the Morro Bay area. I normally start at the sweet springs preserve in Los Osos:

It’s a small area, a freshwater spring that feeds a pond with some nice tree habitat, mud flats and wetlands that open up on the Estuary. In migration, it can be a great place to bird. Off season, it can be dead, but it’s always tranquil and I can go there and offload whatever stress I’m carrying, so even if I don’t see a bird, I enjoy the trip. But it’s a neat birding area, from peregrines and red-shouldered hawks to warblers and hummingbirds and woodpeckers and sparrows — and I’ve had lots of fun photographing a couple of family of quail that live there.

I love that place.

After that, it was time for lunch. Over in Baywood, across the estuary is the Good Tides Coffee house, a nice cup and a pastry, and the ability to sit and watch the estuary for a while (in the same location is Maya, a nice mexican restaurant I like to eat at; in fact, I came back to it for dinner that night).

I then drove up into the estuary and towards Morro Bay proper. I usually stop at the bayside marina because it can be a good place for otters to hang out, And then the Cormorant Rookery near the golf course in Morro State Park.

I’ve been experimenting with shooting that rookery a few times now. I must admit that for the most part, the rookery is winning. it’s a freaky place; you hike out to it along the water (hope for low tide). It’s up on a bluff a bit, and the cormorants are nesting up in the trees, so it’s hard to get good angles that show off what’s going on up there. I had fog this trip (of course), and that complicates it further. I’ve been there at times where the fog’s been heavy and turns the area into something really spooky — if you’ve never heard a rookery’s noises, you can’t understand what it’s like being near it in the fog.

And occasionally you see something you aren’t expecting:

Double-crested cormorants, egrets and herons all nest there. Pelagic and Brandt’s cormorants nest on the rock with the western gulls and peregrines. it’s both very accessible and difficult to photograph well, and I guess I’m going to have to keep trying…

After the rookery, I stopped at tidelands park; the main harbor was really quiet, so I headed over to the rock, where it was pretty quiet birding but there some otters hanging out. As it turned out, I ended up hauling out my camp chair and sitting down and watching and photographing the otters for about three hours. there were three hanging out and mostly sleeping, a young male, a mom and her young pup.

To sleep, Otters wil wrap themselves in a kelp plant because they use that as an anchor. It prevents them from drifting off as the tide changes.

Like Pelicans, I can sit and watch otters forever. I never get tired of photgraphing them, and they never disappoint.

After that, I was beat. 11 hours on the road, over 1,000 images taken. I headed off to the hotel room to check in and put up my feet and start importing the images. Importing ended up taking over 7 hours — one reason I decided it was time for that new laptop. I crashed early, got up early (but slept through my alarm) and headed out to the rock again to see if there was anything interesting to photograph. Other than a small flock of Brant Geese on the far side of the harbor, the answer was no. I did get a chance to say hi to one of the local birder/photogs who was out early as well, and we chatted a bit about the upcoming Morro Photo Expo and whether we were going, but that really needs to be its own posting.

After that, I headed north on highway 1 looking for things to shoot. What I mostly got was fog, I admit that the previous day had worn me out and I was looking forward to being home, but there wasn’t a lot that really caught my eye. what did — a few vistas around Big Sur — were out in the sun, but mid-day and flat lighting made those things to come back adn explore more some other time.

Point Lobos was encased in a fairly heavy fog, so I bagged it and drove in. Some days it’s just not worth it to fight for an image.

One lesson learned: I’ve lost enough hair that I can no longer pretend I can get away without a hat (and sunblock). Sitting out along the harbor for hours with the otters, even under a heavy fog/marine layer and no real sun, left me nicely sunburnt. Which, being a southern california boy, I don’t feel like it’s summer without one good sunburn, but I spend the next week or so doing a great imitation of a bad zombie movie as everything flaked and peeled, so before I do that again, I need to get a good hat and some good sunblock, and I just have to get in the habit of using it.

I do, actually, have a birding hat, a Tilley’s I’ve worn for years. But it’s getting a bit long in the tooth, and it’s a bit — informal — for general wear. And the reality is, like my dad, I need a hat I wear habitually when outside, and I have to find one I will wear that doesn’t (as Laurie has so described my Tilleys) make me look dorky. Okay, dorkier. So off to REI I go. (there’s a practical reason fo rthis beyond sunburn; my dad had multiple class one melanomas in his later years; that puts me at about 20% higher risk of melanoma than the normal population; my history as a bit of a sun hound in my SoCal youth doesn’t help that, either — so I need to get serious about protecting myself outside more than I do. That, and when I peel, I itch…..)

My next trip? hopefully up to Bodie, Mono Lake and Tioga pass for 3-4 days or so. We’ll see. I’ve been doing a bit more research and have a better feel for what I want to accomplish up there, and it’s an area I really want to see soon. But honestly, it’s been a few years since I’ve made it up into Oregon and the pacific northwest, and that would be nice, too… but that’s a more extensive trip, and I’m not planning more than a long-weekend kind of thing for the next few months. And honestly, I keep thinking that if I can get a longer trip organized somehow, it sure would be nice to get back to Yellowstone… (but that ain’t gonna happen this year…)

View central coast trip in a larger map

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at road trip — california central coast (part 2). This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

So a couple of weeks ago, I went down to SoCal to visit family and spend a few days at the old homestead. I arranged things so that I could take a couple of days on the way back and go a bit of a road trip and relax and do some photography.

I’m trying to turn these trips into challenges, to use them to stretch my photography and to explore new areas or new techniques (or preferably both). One thing I’ve realized is that I’m very comfortable (and pretty good) at shooting the type of work I normally shoot but really uncomfortable away from those specific styles. Not a huge surprise, most folks are like that — but I feel that to really take my photography to the next level, I need to widen the types of photography I do and become capable and comfortable in a much more diverse set of photography formats. Push myself way out of my comfort zone, and then get comfortable there. (at the SAME time, honestly, photography is still one of those things I do to relax and recharge the batteries, and so there’s a tension here between never relaxing and never growing. These days, with everything that’s been going on, the needle is pointing further towards relaxing, but I need to change that up a bit).

I purposefully didn’t plan the photo trip until I got to SoCal, because I wanted to spend some time researching options and deciding what to do on the fly. With only two or three nights in a hotel, the options were somewhat restricted (no Bryce or Zion, for instance, because I’d spend too much time traveling and too little time on site). Part of the exercise here was to treat this as a photo assignment and do the research, choose the venues and the shooting plan — and then do it and see how the plan and the results match out and how well I adapt the plan to the conditions. It’s an attempt to simulate getting an assignment and then being able to understand how to carry it out.

I ended up having to decide on two ideas. One was to work up the 395 along the eastern Sierra and explore the Bishop to Bodie region (tioga pass, mammoth, bodie, etc). The other was to head up the coast and do some coastal shooting.

I ended up opting to stay on the coast for two reasons; first, I felt that a couple of nights in the eastern sierra was just too short for what I wanted to cover and I reducing the scope to fit the time available just made no sense. Since it’s been decades since I’ve been in that area, I’d need time to explore and scout as well as shoot, and I just felt I was trying to cram too much in (instead, I’m hoping I can take a trip out there for a few days after labor day. maybe. we’ll see. If not, it’s on the short list. But then, a birding trip to Salton Sea has been on my short list since 2006 and I still haven’t gotten there…)

I didn’t, however, want it to turn into another trip to the same places in Morro Bay, I knew there was a place in Pismo I wanted to go back and shoot, so I decided to overnight further south on the coast and then spend a full day shooting from the starting point into Morro bay, and then a second day in Morro and then take highway 1 home and stop in Point Lobos for a few hours of shooting.

One complication — a feature — is that along the coast, this time of year, it’s often foggy, grey and misty. In all, potentially a challenging shooting environment. That sealed the deal, let’s go find new stuff and go shoot it in the fog!

I ended up holing up for the night in Santa Maria, which was far enough north to minimize the travel needed before I started shooting, but far enough out that I was able to cover a fair amount of ground I’d never explored before hitting Morro Bay and more familiar territories. I chose two locations to explore: Guadalupe Dunes park for the possibility of some interesting dune formations, and Oso Flaco lake, because it’s a fairly well known birding site and I could accomplish a couple of things at the same time (perhaps). Adding in Pismo, that gave me two areas I’d researched but never visited, a third I knew about but had only visited for a short time a few years ago, and whatever caught my attention in the meantime.

I arrived near dinner time in Santa Maria and checked in and grabbed food — Santa Maria isn’t the most diverse culinary city in the universe, so I ended up at a Red Lobster (perfectly acceptable) followed by the starbucks for a coffee for dessert. And then went on a scouting drive. I drove about 40 miles E up the 166 towards the central valley looking for interesting stuff. One project I’ve been thinking of kicking off is a series on the california oak, looking for especially interesting trees and the remains of the fallen warriors. I’ve done a little shooting towards this, but haven’t really dedicated a lot of time to it. the trees on the 166, to my eye, were younger and just not very grizzled and not really all that interesting. One or two possible candidates but nothing I’ll prioritize going back for soon. Perhaps the 95 degree weather affected my judgement (it being a major heatwave in the state at the time….). Still, it was an interesting drive and exercise to explore for a purpose. But I really need to start keeping a formal scouting journal and a list of candidate locations for variious projects and potential shots…

Next morning I got up really early and got on the road and drove into Guadalupe and off to the dunes. I arrived — to fog.

Expected, but heavier than I had hoped. Guadalupe dunes looks like a fascinating place, but at 7 in the morning in the fog, it was me, a ranger, some really insane surfers and the sand. I spent some time trying various things, but ultimately, I wasn’t really happy with the results. the fog was heavy enough that the surf was effectively invisible (did I mention the surfers were insane?), and shooting birds in the fog just makes them look grey and uninteresting, at least with fog that heavy. I spent most of my time looking for interesting shooting options with the dunes, but just not finding many. My entire results from my time in Guadalupe:

The sand just didn’t have much in the way of interesting textures for close up work, and the wide angle stuff in the fog was just — boring.

I do feel like I continue to struggle with this type of shot in general; there are a couple of things I need to focus on here. My lens setup doesn’t go wide enough for my tastes (I’ve talked about that previously here) but rather than blame it on “not the right gear”, I’m trying to push myself to figure out how to take interesting shots with what I have before succumbing to the “new toys” syndrome, because I really see this as a lack of technique and what I need to do is force myself to practice and work on this; if I did buy a wider lens or two, what I’d end up with are boring pictures set at 10mm instead of 28mm.

After that, I drove up highway 1 to Pismo, where things got better.

Laurie and I discovered Margo Dodd park in Pismo a few years ago when we were looking for a place to take a break during a drive back from visiting my family. It’s right on the water, a small grassy area with a few picnic tables — but it overlooks a wonderful rocky area, tidepools and some interesting vistas. I’ve always meant to go back and photograph there. it’s next to a rock where gulls and cormorants nest (and it turns out pigeon guillemots!) and I thought there were going to be some interesting opportunities. I also knew I’d run into brown pelicans, and if you haven’t figured it out by now, I can watch (and photograph) pelicans forever…

So I did. The fog was much lighter. it was late enough that the cormorants were fledged, but a few were still feeding young. I found a couple of fairly young gull chicks, but very little in the way of active nesting, it was all later than that. And pelicans flying everywhere in formation…

But that location was more than birds. Instead of closing off photography, the fog here gave me opportunities to create some interesting images. I especially like this one. If the fog were lighter, I think it would have been boring, it gave the tree just that right tough of mystery. If there were more fog, well, it just turns into a grey blog. This was what I was looking for when I decided to go up the coast and shoot in the fog.

Well, that and kayakers:

Eventually it was time to tear myself away from the pelicans and carry on, so I packed up and headed north.

Oh… astute readers will realize that I haven’t talked about Oso Flaco at all. When I arrived there, I realized that the location left my car a bit too exposed for my comfort level; with it fully packed and full of “stuff” and gear, I really wasn’t hot to let the car out of my sight to go hiking, so I aborted and filed it away for another trip, later. Especially given how foggy it was there…

So onwards towards Morro. And I’ll talk about Morro and the rest of the trip in the next posting.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at road trip — california central coast. This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

The full source of this is about a 1 gigabyte file. I’ve been experimenting with ways to put it online in a format that people can rationally see, and ended up making three versions:

Small: 864x114m 500K

Medium: 7200×953 33Mb

Large: 14,400×1906 135Mb

Why? Why not.. I’ve wanted to experiment with panoramas after seeing how George Lepp did some of his work at the last Morro Photo Expo, and I wanted to test out the performance of the new laptop. How best to do that? With a stress test, and mucking around with a 1Gb PNG definitely stresses things… This kind of work was practically speaking impossible on the old laptop, yet it was able to crunch this out in the background while I was doing other things without any significant lag. That’s nice… The hardest part was figuring out the best way to upload, and I finally decided just to SCP things up to my own server….

This really needs to be done on a levelled tripod, but with some care, you can do it handheld. For this, I metered in aperture mode, then switched to manual and set the shutter to match the metering. Using AF I refocussed for every segment. Where it finally failed is where I got a bit sloppy and missed a segment overlap by a bit and then lost my horizon and started leaning too much. But this is pretty good for a quick simple test.

Panos are one of the few things I still end up working on in photoshop (lightroom 3 with my plugins make photoshop almost unnecessary for my work. yippee!), so this was stiched in Photoshop, then I applied curves to clean up the exposure and contrast a bit, and then did some sharpening with unsharp mask, then exported in the three sizes.

Why is knowing how to manage this technique useful? More on that soon….

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at experimenting with panoramas. This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

The first thing I needed to do was install the upgraded hard drive (500 Gig, 7200 RPM). thanks to some very nice instructions from Other World Computing (where I bought the drive) and the fact that Apple made the unibody Macbook Pros easy units to swap drives in (Thank You Apple!) that took all of ten minutes.  I’ve done that enough times by now I could pretty much do it in my sleep, but it’s not always easy.

Once I did that, though, a bit of a quandry. I now have a Mac with an unformatted drive, a drive attached to nothing with MacOS X on it, and a need to get MacOS X on the new drive somehow. There are all sorts of ways to do that; I ended up using the recovery DVD and simply booting it, formatting the drive, and installing fresh from the DVD. That took about 30 minutes, very painless.

Other options: I could have wired the original drive into a housing and booted the mac onto it, then cloned the drive (or cloned the drives via my old Mac, or… or… and in reality, all of the other ways to do it would have been more complicated and taken longer, IMHO. That’s why the recovery DVD exists…

First thing I did: Cloned my old laptop drive (via Superduper) and then put that boot drive far away from potential chaos. I also took my old backup drives and put them far away as well. Before I started, I had THREE current, bootable copies PLUS my Time Machine backup. I took my secondary firewire drive and turned it off and unplugged the firewire so I couldn’t accidentally trash it (there was a 2nd current copy of that data in Time Machine). More copies a good thing when it comes to backups.

Once the OS was installed on the new drive, I booted onto it and it ran through Apple’s standard setup process. Put my old mac in firewire target mode, connected the two, and let Apple’s software copy the data. 4.5 hours later, data is copied and my new mac looks like my old Mac (except where it doesn’t… there are a couple of things to remember here….)

Then you fire up Software Update and let it download all of the updates. That took about an hour.

Then I fired up the Application DVD and fired it up (it is also the hardware test DVD in this generation of new-machine disks) – since I never upgraded to iLife ’09, I needed to restore the applications that were on the disk I didn’t use, and I couldn’t do that until after the migration was done. That took another 45 minutes or so.

One thing that isn’t done by the migration assistant is XCODE; if you have the Apple developer environment installed, it won’t migrate it. That’s not a big deal, and there was an update I needed to install anyway, so the last thing I did before crashing was start a download of the latest tools from the developer site. And then I crashed.

Started about 5:30PM, crashed at 1AM with the migration complete and the system fully functional (minus XCODE). And almost all of that time was doing things I wanted to do while the system was doing whatever it was doing. I probably spent an hour total actively working on the update, the rest was the computer doing things while I waited.

I know some people still prefer to move stuff over manually and don’t want to trust the migration assistant, and I suppose if you’re someone who’s off hacking the guts of the system, you might need to. My view is “have fun. let me know when you’re done”, and I long ago learned to trust Apple knowing how to do this better than me. I also learned long ago not to hack the parts of the system that Apple “owns” — if I need a custom version of Perl or want to run an Apache server, I create a user and install the software into that user and build my own custom versions and run those instead. That does two things: it isolated the installed system from breaking because I inadvertantly step on something it depends on, and it isolates my custom stuff from being broken at a bad time by a software update that steps on my customizations. Everyone wins — and since it lives in a user account, it’s compatible with the migration assistant. (this was a trick we learned to figure out how to build custom hacks into Perl and Apache while still being generic and compatible inside the Apple data center, so the data center could maintain the boxes and OS without impacting production systems, and we could build the tools we needed without the data center staff having to be involved or approving stuff. works great, once you get in the habit of doing it).

One thing to realize when you upgrade your computer is that a few things are going to change. In my cast, the necessary changes were that my old laptop had a DVI video out, and my new one has this new mini-video plug thing. Also, my old laptop was Firewire 400, the new one is Firewire 800. That meant a trip to Fry’s for a new video dongle and cable, and some replacement firewire cables with the new plug types. While there, I realized they had a 2Tb drive for $110, and that solved my backup problem. This all happened while my data was migrating, so it was all ready when the new machine was ready…

Next morning was installing the dev tools, upgrading a few apps I realized needed patches (especially Parallels and the XP partittion), and then setting up backups.

These things are easier if you’re careful how you store stuff on disk. Over the years, I’ve gotten pretty careful about where I put my data — yes, I use Documents and Pictures and Music and Movies and I keep stuff where it “belongs”, and I limit what lives on my Desktop to active files and projects. That REALLY simplifies major migrations like this. Times like this ARE a good chance to go through your files and identify stuff that you can throw out or archive offline, and in fact, I did take about 250 Gigs of data (mostly low-quality pictures) and copied them to two separate drives, one which will live in my desk, one which will live offsite. Next time I do this kind of archiving, I’ll buy a couple of new drives, copy the data from this archive onto it, add the new archived data, and then store a copy offsite. One way to limit the “I can’t read my only copy of this” is to keep two copies, and the other important way is to refresh the archive every so often. Given you can buy 2TB drives for $110 today, there’s really no reason not to simply replace your archives with a new, really larger drive every couple of years. And so I shall. And remember, THIS is the data I never expect to ever need or touch again, but am keeping around in case I’m wrong. So I’m comfortable only keeping two copies of it…

I plopped the new 2Tb drive in the dock. I ALSO took the old 2Tb backup drive and stuck it in a static free envelope and it and the offsite copy of the archive data and my old laptop then were put far away from my working area so I wouldn’t accidentally do something to them. In the morning, when I go to work, the offsite data will go with me. In a week or so, once i’m absolutely sure I have everything I need off of it, I’ll wipe the disk on the old laptop, and then it’ll go to a friend who refurbishes them and lends them out to underpriviledged kids that otherwise wouldn’t have computers.

Backups… When you’re schlepping around half a terabyte of data, it takes time. I fired up Superduper to clone my new boot drive to the 2TB drive and set up a timed refresh for every night at 1:30AM. Once that was done, I fired up Time Machine and got it started.

DAMN but Time Machine is slow. It copied data at maybe 40% of the speed of SuperDuper, and SuperDuper is pretty much as fast as you can get. I keep finding reasons not to like Time Machine in large data environments, but not enough that I’m ready to turn it off. Just don’t depend on it as your primary backup, folks, not if you do large data sets  like this. For my mom — it’s great. For me, I get annoyed a lot.

Once my boot disk was copied (twice — once cloned, once Time Machine) I plugged in my secondary firewire and turned it on. And then fired up the backups on IT. And timed them, because I was now annoyed at Time Machine and wanted to make sure there wasn’t a performance problem with the dock. It took me 2 hours to finder copy 280 gigabytes to a 5400RPM drive in the dock. It took me over 5 hours for Time Machine to back up 165 gigabytes from that same source drive to that same dock with a 7200 RPM drive in it.

DAMN but Time Machine is slow.

And once that was done — I was done. Total time invested: about a day and a half of clock time. 7.5 hours of upgrade and migration, of which my time spent actively involved was about 1 hour. Getting backups set up and all of the data backed up? About 12 hours, of which I probably spent 2 hours actively involved and the rest of the time puttering. And about 2 hours involved in getting XCODE re-installed and doing the various updates I did (most of the time updating was getting XP patches up to date and getting the anti-virus stuff updated…)

Not bad.

Pretty much everything went as planned. there was one thing I did I want to do differently: I bought a VGA dongle and a VGA cable to replace the DVI setup I had. I don’t think it’s as crisp as the DVI was, so I’m going to go get a DVI dongle and go back to the old cable. I do need the VGA dongle as well, but it’ll live in my bag and get carried around for when I need to wire into a project for a presentation… All in all, not bad at all.

I also need to find and invest in a few really short (1-1.,5 foot) 800-800 firewire cables for neatness sake. Maybe a firewire hub; and clean up my cable monster behind the desk, now taht I know where everything needs to go…

When doing something like moving everything to a new laptop I find it’s a good time to reconsider how you use the system and what needs to be fixed or changed or upgraded. There have been a couple of projects I’ve been meaning to get to — and this seems to be a perfect excuse to actually get to them. One is that my contact list/address book has become a complete shambles; some of you are in my gmail lists, some in my Mac Address book, some in my entourage book at work, some on my phone and nowhere else. That’s long-term untenable and potential disaster, so I’m merging everything into a single list again (using gMail, and that syncs to my mac address book, and THAT syncs onto MobileMe and back out onto my phone), That’ll at least get the chaos under control for  awhile, and keep it organized to the degree that I’m smart enough to only add data to the primary address book (but don’t bet on it…).

the other is that it’s well past time to get more paranoid about online accounts and passwords and get all of that data out of the way too useful but not terribly secure browser autofill and into something a bit more — discrete. And that is 1Password, a secure wallet that can keep a set of data and make it available on my Mac and iPhone/iPod_Touch (and there’s a way to sync data out to webOS via Dropbox). I’m going to be installing it tonight and as I start hitting up sites setting them up in 1Password, changing all of the passwords (way overdue) and getting that data out of the browser. If you haven’t done that yet — you really need to think about it. Just for peace of mind, if nothing else.

The new box? awesome. Spent some time in Lightroom 3, and rendering of images is a LOT faster, which makes me happy. I haven’t done a test import, but I can definitely feel the speed difference, so I’m hopeful. We’ll see, I’m going to head out and shoot monday or tuesday and see how import speed goes.

All in all, I don’t miss the larger screen or faster CPUs at all. At this point, that seems like money well not-spent.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at New Laptop Time revisited — aftermath and more thoughts. This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

So a few weeks ago my laptop started giving me hints it was thinking about retirement. It’s given me yeoman service — it was given to me when I left Apple, so it’s had a nice, long, fruitful life. It was clear, however, that I was heading towards a badly timed breakdown and I wanted to avoid that. It started with rendering glitches that indicated problems in the video RAM when I ran the thing hot for a while (lots of video, or playing Civ IV for instance). No data issues, but it was obvious that as the box heated up, a video ram chip was getting flakey.

This has been slowly progressing. I had my first random reboot while in SoCal, and I’ve had two in the last four days while working in Lightroom. No data problems, but terribly inconvenient, and I don’t want to be importing photos if the box resets. So I decided it was time to upgrade the laptop.

My current laptop is a 2.16 Core Duo laptop, 2 gigs of RAM (max possible). The upgrades to the Mac lines since this came out (late 2006 model) mean just about anything is going to be a nice improvement. So what to get?

After chewing on the options for a while and considering my options, I ordered the new laptop today, and it’ll arrive in time for me to spend the weekend migrating. I thought it might be interesting to discuss why I made the choices I made and how I think they’ll compare to what I have.

When I worked at Apple, my traditional decision for buying a new computer was to get whatever the top end was (like that’s a surprise), although I had a tended to buy the N-1 generation on closeout unless there was some key technological shift that I wanted (like the switch from ADB to USB. For you youngsters out there, Apple used to have a non-standard connection setup for keyboards before they used USB, which was before we all started using Bluetooth…) — it was a way to leverage pricing but get powerful boxes.

In all honesty, though, these days, I rarely see people using most of the capabilities of their computers — and I don’t see the logic in paying extra so my idle loop can finish sooner. I also don’t see logic in spending money on extra computing hardware that can be spent on other things, like camera gear or an iPad, and a set of smart decisions on buying the laptop could save enough money to almost pay for an iPad (or a lens, or…) — so I didn’t want to overbuy.

In analyzing my existing setup, with a few exceptions, I was pretty happy with performance. The exceptions were becoming significant, though, and the big one was image processing in Lightroom. Upgrading from Lightroom 2 to Lightroom 3 helped in a lot of ways (but not all), and most especially, importing a day’s photo shoot was getting seriously painful. My central coast run I recently did generated 1,000 images in a single 14 hour shooting day, and then took over 6 hours just to import into Lightroom. The large size of the Canon 7D RAW file really slowed down processing on the old CPU and made some operations difficult. I did some investigation, and from all indications, the primary limitation was the CPU, not memory and definitely not I/O. The upgrade from 802.11g to 802.11n is going to be a nice plus.

In the past, I’ve always bought the 15″ Macbook pros. My current work setup, however, tethers the mac to a large (27″) monitor at my desk at home so I was tempted by the smaller 13″ screen for weight and portability (and price). I simply don’t need the larger 17″ screen much and I prefer portability over screen size here. Besides, if I’m road tripping and I want the screen horsepower, I don’t mind stuffing a display in the back of the car for the hotel room…

So the choices were 13″ Macbook, 13″ Macbook Pro, and 15″ Macbook pro. I decided against the Macbook; it’s cheaper, but not by that much and the lack of Firewire and the lower performance video wasn’t worth the saving. I ended up deciding against the 15″ Macbook Pro — while the shift from Core Duo processors and the upgraded video would definitely have been nice, it would have added $500-600 to the final price, and I finally decided that the performance boost from my old box to ANY current laptop would be significant enough that the added boost to the faster CPUs wasn’t as important, and I really was finding the idea of the smaller form factor of the 13″ units. It oversimplifies the decision, but it wasn’t lost on me that the price of the 15″ Macbook Pro was close to the cost of the 13″ Macbook pro AND a low-end iPad, and was the speed boost of the more expensive unit worth that price?

I went back and forth — and ultimately went for the less expensive 13″ macbook. Tough call. Your mileage may vary, but realizing how much faster even the low end box was from what I currently had made the decision easier. If you look at Macworld’s historical benchmark numbers, They show the photoshop benchmark as taking about 1:45 on my current laptop, and 0:48 on the 13″ Macbook Pro, and 0:43 on the 15″ (there are more significant differences between these two current models in other benchmarks, but the speed difference between what I have and where Im’ headed is even more significant)

Final decision: which speed of the 13″? I finally decided on the low end (2.4Ghz) — I decided again the cost different wasn’t worth it for my situation, and I decided I’d rather upgrade the disk than go with a smaller, slower disk and faster processor. I’ve also ordered (from Other World Computing, where I buy most of my disks and RAM upgrades) a Seagate 500Gig 7200 RPM drive which I’ll install and clone the data to, replacing the stock 250Gig 5400 in the new unit.

I’m currently running with a 360Gig 5400 + a bus powered 500Gig 5400, (plus a desk-bound terabyte drive) and moving to a 500Gig internal will let me shift my data around and put all of it back on the 500Gig internal, use the 500Gig bus powered as a cloned backup (via SuperDuper!) and keep my secondary data on the external firewire, simplifying my life a bit and adding another redundant copy of my portable data, making my backups more robust. Never a bad idea. I never take backups for granted, in case you haven’t noticed.

I considered the new internal 1Gig drives, decided that I didn’t need the space that badly (I’m starting to like the 500gig bus powers more and more as flexible and stable and convenient), and they’re new enough I’lll let someone else field-proof their MTBF stats. I also considered SSD for the internal, but again, price won out over maximizing performance; and I can make that upgrade later if I want to.

Given I’ve been living in 2Gig forever and this box comes with 4Gig, I saw no reason to spend money to bump it to 8. I’ll leave that upgrade to later if/when I decide it’ll be worth upgrading, so there are options here down the road to boost the computer a bit along the way if I find I need it.

So my bottom line — I’m spending about $1300 (including the upgraded disk) and also a new bluetooth keyboard and a monitor dongle, and I think I have a good overall compromise among the various factors. It’ll handle my Lightroom processing and importing much better, and honestly, I don’t need an ego computer (“look! it goes to TWELVE! and belches steam!”) and other than my imaging, my processing needs are fairly modest. This should fit my needs well for a few years and then we’ll see.

Oh, one other thing. I did not buy AppleCare. I have some time before I have to make a final decision on that, but I haven’t bought AppleCare on my last three computers and I’m not leaning towards doing it here. If you do the research on extended warranties and what the margins are on them for all products, you can see why manufacturers really want you do buy them, and that’s a good reason why I don’t. So far, I haven’t regretted it; and I’ve saved enough cash on NOT buying them to probably pay for whatever goes spung when it finally does happen to me. If your computer survives the warranty period, the most likely problems you’ll have with it (he says, IMHO! IMHO!) are things that may be challenged under your extended warranty anyway, like dumping a glass of wine on the motherboard or damage to the LCD screen, so I’m just not convinced I need it. Your mileage may well vary, and if you prefer the comfort of having it, be my guest.  And to my friends in the AppleCare group back at Mama Apple, well, sorry…

So tonight I’m migrating data around to make the transition easier, and everything should arrive tomorrow. Sometime over the weekend, I’ll hopefully be on the new system, and I’m looking forward to seeing how Lightroom works on it. And when I know, I’ll let you know.

Hope this helps if you’re trying to think through the options on a systems upgrade; there are many options, and the price points are set up to make sliding up the pricing scale easy to convince youself (“hmm. For $200, I get the faster CPU, and it comes with that bigger disk. Oh, and for $200 I can go to the 15″ screen. And for $200, I can go to the faster CPU AND get 500 gigs of disk. And… And… And suddenly your $1200 computer is a $2300 computer, one upgrade at a time. So you can look at it and as yourself how much to spend to get what you want, or how little you need to spend to get what you need. And don’t forget, if you end up spending $2500 on a laptop, it’ll be a lot harder to upgrade to the NEXT one than if you can convince yourself you ONLY spent $1200 last time..Are you better off with a less expensive computer you are comfortable upgrading in two or three years or a more expensive one you think you have to hold onto for five to get the investment back on?)

And to think I once spent $2800 on a Mac IIfx. How things change..

(p.s: nope. no magic trackpad in today’s order. But it’ll be coming, don’t worry…)

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at new laptop time….. This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

I’m sure my camera hates me for it, too. In reality, these birds are tough to do well, especially in bright, glaring light. you need to avoid blowing out the white highlights and give the feathers some texture — but you can’t let the black areas turn into featureless masses of dark.

it gets worse. In many cases, the eye is resident in a dark patch, and is usually black. If you can’t create some definition in the eye, the image just looks weird.  

It’s important to try to bring get a catchlight in the eye. That’s one way you can create some definition and depth to it. You almost want to HDR every image (but that would be wrong) to try to extend the dynamic range to cover the light to dark transitions.

here’s one where the eye disappears. I like it otherwise, but the eye really isn’t visible, and because of that, this image isn’t quite right.

Compare that with this image. See how the eye makes a difference in the image? At least, it does to me.

it’s the difference between a nice image and one that really makes an impact. That takes some careful exposure and being mindful of your lighting to get that catchlight, and being thoughtful about your post processing as well. but when you do, it’s really worth it.

Heck, if it were easy, we’d be doing something else, right?

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Photgraphing black and freaking white birds.. This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

And I watched the photographer show a bit. As the afternoon progressed, in they came. At 3:30 there were maybe four or five of  us wandering the preserve looking for shots. By 5PM, there were easily 20 photographers, all lined up on the boardwalk. Lots of chatter, it was clear many of them saw each other here and around the area regularly. Lots of high end gear — Canon 5Ds on 500mm and 600mm lenses all on gimbals on hefty Gitzo tripods. Serious hardware. Reminded me a lot of one of the busier nights up an tunnel view in Yosemite when the photography clan gets going.

And pretty much every one of them did the same thing. The boardwalk runs SW to NE. Everyone plopped down facing NE, so the sun was behind them over their right shoulder and waited for the birds to fly by. Lots of chatter, very little shutter pushing. Every so often a bird would fly in and the machine guns would go off, but it was slow going.

It seemed to me everyone was going through the paces; taking images, not making them. I’m sure if I showed up at 7AM in the morning, there’d be 15 sets of hardware on tripods, all facing the opposite direction with the sun behind their left shoulder. But they seemed basically to be waiting for an image to come to them.

And not many were;  for the most part, the birds were flying N to S towards the tern island, that meant mostly what the cameras were seeing were bird butts; 80% of the birds were coming in over our shoulders and flying away. There was also a fairly brisk wind, coming almost directly into our faces. That meant that birds that were flying towards the cameras were wind-aided, and they were fast — the average time (I timed it) that a bird was in camera range was maybe a second and a half, assuming to saw them coming and got the camera on them and in focus. Very little real chance of interesting imagery.

I went with that for a while and decided it simply wasn’t working. The best birds were coming in the other direction. Which of course meant they were backlit.

Or were they? I ended up shifting right near the end of the boardwalk near the parking lot, and trying to shoot on the sun side of the boardwalk. That gave me only about 30 degrees of shooting angle to avoid significant backlighting, but it also meant the birds were flying into the wind, so their net speed was slower and therefore I had more time to frame and finish my shots.

that was enough to give me the opportunity for something like this:

if you look as the shadowing, the light is hitting the bird from behind; but it’s still nicely lit and I think it’s a great shot.  Here’s another shot where if you look you can see the bird is well lit, but the light source is at an extreme angle from where I was standing. A slight shift of the bird, and major pieces of it are shadowed by its wings (and don’t ask how many images I dinged because of that).

On the other hand, I got some really nice images, and I seemed to be catching many more that most on the boardwalk yesterday. I say this not to criticize them; the way they were set up was the optimum way to use the light for that location — it’s just that the bird behavior and other conditions meant that what was best for the lighting wasn’t the best for gettting images; if you’re there a lot, you can afford to be patient and wait for images to come to you.

Or should you? It seemed to me people were mostly going through the paces, sort of like the fishermen you see at piers spending more time talking and if a fish hits, great. For me, I couldn’t come back tomorrow and hope for better luck; I was trying to get my images now.

That, to me, is the difference between taking an image and making images. Taking images is lining up with the light and waiting for an image to show up. Making images is analyzing the situation and the conditions and putting yourself into a situation that makes images possible. it’s one of the things I’ve been consciously trying to do with my photography the last few months — not just show up and push the button and load the card and see if anything is interesting.

it’s about figuring out how to guarantee there are interesting images on the card before you even take a look, and maximizing your field time by adapting to what the situation gave you. In this case, the light, the wind and the birds behavior were all somewhat in conflict. But by moving off to the side and shooting as they went by, I could take advantage of the wind to enhance their time in a shootable position, and with some careful framing and a bit of luck, get them lit without unfortunate shadows or significant backlighting. Actually, I think, easier pickings that trying to catch a full-flight tern coming at me with a 15MPH backwind pushing him by…

and in some cases, it almost looks like I put a rim light on the bird. I really like how the light on the wing edges pulls the bird out of the surrounding sky here:

Part of this, I think, is peer pressure; when you show up and there’s $50,000 worth of camera gear visible and it’s all pointing in the same direction, I think the tendency is to set up the same way because you believe they’re the experts. and they are — but in this case, they were experts in auto-pilot. And I’m sure they get images that they’re really happy with, too.

But when you’re in auto-pilot, what you don’t notice is the images you don’t get. And for me, I don’t feel like I can afford to be, or want to be, in autopilot behind a lens…

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Making vs taking photos... This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

Because of the heat I’ve mostly hid in the house with the airco on, my original plans to do some birding and exploring died with the triple digit heat. I did, however, take an afternoon and evening and wander down to the coast and spent a chunk of time at one of my favorite soCal birding spots, Bolsa Chica in Huntington beach.

You go to Bolsa Chica for  a couple of things: black skimmers and terns. Neither disappointed. It’s one of the places the skimmers hang out in southern california, and this area is one of the major nesting sites for Least Terns and also a nesting site for a number of tern species, as well as Snowy Plover — but in Mid-July it’s late for nesting but not late for loud, cranky, whiny juveniles demanding to be fed and adults running around trying to feed them or convince them to get their own damn fish.

Black Skimmers are an east coast bird. A population was blown to this coast in a storm, and they survived and started breeding, so we now has a resident population both in SoCal and in the Bay Area. You’ll see them along the coast at times during migration as well. They are, honestly, really weird looking birds, which is part of their attraction. They feed by flying right at the surface and dipping the lower beak down to scoop up fish and other things. The beak is large and rather ungainly, so it’s not uncommon for skimmers at rest to be splayed out on the sand resting their beak on the ground and looking vaguely like roadkill. In the air, however, they’re a rather glorious bird to watch in action.

Terns are — well, terns are born grumpy and stay grumpy until they die. The sound of a tern rookery is amazing — to sit in Bolsa chica and listen to Tern Island half a mile away with a few tens of thousands of terns all yelling at each other — just be glad they’re half a mile away. It’s loud, and wonderful energy. I knew I’d see Least Terns and Elegant terns here,  and was hoping for some others. As it turns out, I caught five species: Least, Elegant, Common, Forster’s and one lone Caspian that flew through — unmistakeable with the larger size and the banana sized beak compared to the other birds.

and, of course, some of the usual suspects. No reddish egret this trip, though.

you can see the best from this trip’s photography over on my Smugmug site:

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Bolsa Chica Natural Preserve. This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

It’s not just a photography issue. These situations come up in birding a well; once or twice a year here on the west coast I here of a situation where a notable bird is run off by a birder who gets too enthusiastic and encroaches on its territory enough to scare it away (ruining it for everyone else); it’s fairly common to see both birders and photographers go out of bounds — over fences, into restricted areas, blazing “new trails” in fields of wildflowers, etc — in an effort to get the shot or see the bird. Nests of notable species like owls get popular, and sometimes they get too popular and problems happen; sometimes the nest is abandoned.

What to do? Whenever these situations occur, the debate springs up. In reality, in birding, the debate was over long ago; the senior birders have learned over the years to be careful about being too disclosing about sensitive birds and habitat. They self-edit public disclosure to protect senstive birds and locations from being pounded to pieces by popularity — which occasionally creates debates about whether they have the “right” to not disclose these things by the folks not “in the loop” (short answer: of course they do. it’s their information. they’re under no obligation to share; get over it, and earn their respect and get involved enough in the community to be part of those private discussions. hint: I’m not yet; and I’m in no hurry).

What I wonder abut here is how technology is affecting this. Do sites like Flickr and ebird make it harder to be careful about these areas? Well, more and more of us carry phones with GPS in it; more and more cameras are coming with GPS chips in them, automatically encoding location in great detail, and sites like flickr will automatically disclose that data for you. Location-based sites like Gowalla and Foresquare are building businesses around this data, and I admit I’ve been exploring and experimenting with Foresquare and mobile GPS data as a way to help networking among birders — but this issue is one that’s made me go slow and try to think through not just how to use these new techie toys, but when, and why.

We haven’t yet STARTED the discussion of the ethics of these capabilities, or created some kind of standards to help people know when to publish that data and when to hide it. Who makes those decisions? Right now, it’s the elders in the group making judgement calls informally, but that model is going to fail over time as technology automates disclosure of this info. Is part of your instruction at a photo workshop going to be telling students to disable the camera GPS?

I think we need a dialog on this, and an understanding of disclosure vs. protection and how precise. Right now, since I geoencode my photos manually, I can choose just how precise my location is going to be; I have consciously chosen at times not to be TOO specific about the location of something, especially if I’m shooting a nest or working in sensitive terrain.

For that matter, the fact that I DO photograph nesting birds is controversial in some parts of photography, and I’m sensitive to that; I try to work under very specific rules when I work near nests, the first of which is simple: any time I get any hint I’m interfering with the nest, I leave. Immediately. I might try again at some later time and be more careful about distance and approach, but if I see any sign the birds are stressing, I get the hell out, now, and figure out next steps after they have the ability to settle down. I feel that way about any animal I’m photographing — if I flush a bird while trying to set up a shot, I slow down. If I flush it twice, I stop trying.

Unfortunately, not all photographers worry about their subjects enough, whether it be animal or a pristine location. And this is nothing new. I remember reading one of John Shaw’s photo books from the 80′s on macro photography in which he complained about witnessing another photographer take macro shots of a flower, and then destroying the flower to prevent any other photographer from shooting it.

Unfortunately, some people are jerks, some simply don’t care, and many are simply well meaning but naive. And I think we need to figure out how to teach those that are teachable to behave, and how to protect what we cherish from those that aren’t — especially since our tools are creating solutions that make it easier to show everyone where images were made and where birds were found, and in many cases, those tools are going to be doing so in an automated way that we may not remember to turn off (or strip), and that many others won’t even realize is happening…

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at How Much Information is Too Much?. This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

Personal Favorites

I keep a set of the 50 images that are my favorites. the good news is it keeps getting harder to keep this to 50, but I’ll make the sacrifice — just for you.

Most interesting

Flickr has a secret algorithm called interestingness. They don’t explain how they generate it so people don’t game it (but that doesn’t keep people from trying!); it is a good way to see what the people of flickr think are the best images.

Most Favorites

Another way people show what they like is to favorite images, flagging them as something they think is special. I keep a set of the images that have been favorited at least twice to date.

I also keep sets of what are my favorite images every year, one for my Best Birds for 2010 and another for my Best images of 2010 that aren’t birds. There are similar sets for previous years as well if you’re interested….

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Some flickr notes. This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

When Time Machines first came out, I bought two, one for myself, one for my mom. I’m very happy (so far) with the Time Machine with my mom, and she seems to be the appropriate use case for this product: fairly light duty user that doesn’t generate a lot of data and has modest backup/recovery needs. It’s worked wonderfully, and the couple of times I’ve had to hook in remotely and recover files for her, it’s done the job well.

My personal experience wasn’t quite so successful. I don’t like the Time Capsule in a multi-mac environment because it doesn’t seem to do well as the different macs need access to disk space; if one mac allocates disk into its backup, there seems to be no way to recover that data for use by a different mac. That means one mac could find itself with a four month set of backups and another with two weeks (as happened with us), and no way to balance that out. That seems to be a really basic flaw, that there’s now way for the system to tell time capsule to garbage collect disk out of one time capsule dataset and shift it to another that needs it more.

A bigger flaw, however, came when Laurie lost a hard disk. First thing I did was clone the Time Capsule data onto anotehr disk, not only to give me a redundant copy (“just in case!”) but because I wanted to plus that disk into the computer directly to do the restore so I didn’t have to slog it all across the much slower network. Which I couldn’t make work.

I ended up dragging out a long ethernet and wiring up a temporary physical network and doing the restore across that — which took bloody forever. The backup worked flawlessly, and the restore came back fine, but the process of restoring all of that data over the network was painful and caused a long delay, even over physical ethernet to avoid the slower WIFI/wireless. Too painful for my tastes, and there were just too many compromises, so I retired the Time Capsule as a backup device and went to a new backup system that depends on directly connected disks and a combination of superduper as my primary backup and Time Machine as the backup I use in ccase I need to restore an individual file. I don’t like Time Machine as a primary backup  for systems with heavy data requirements (i.e. anyone doing photography, video, audio or any other large data files). I’ve written about backups a number of times, and you can see more details on what I do by looking here, here, here,  and here.  And yes, one of these days, I’l consolidate all of that into an ebook and publish it in a single document that’s easy to keep updated…

But overall, I think if you fit the presumed use case for Time Capsule, it’s okay. But for many of us, our data needs stress it and I don’t want to depend on it as my primary backup in those cases. Time Machine on a directly-wired disk is better, but still, I think there are better options. It is a good way to create a set of backups to do individual file recovery, but I’d rather use a different backup setup for ercovering of a failed disk (and so I do…)

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at My trip through Time Capsule Hell leads to a different backup approach. This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

it’s way too early to do any significant analysis on the new blog design but I did a quick comparison in google analytics against some prior weeks (all of them mon-thurs and designed to avoid the holiday) to see how comparable dates differ. The early numbers are encouraging:

Total visits up 102% on average. Pageviews up 136%. pages per visit up 17%. average time on site up 81%. All really good changes. If there was one metric I wanted to change with this new design, it was the low pages-per-visit number and I looked for ways to encourage people to sample other parts of the site while they were there. It looks like I succeeded, at least initially. Whether that’s because the site is new and the regular visitors are curious or whether it’ll continue, I don’t know. I’m also seeing nice traffic on the Smugmug portfolio, much higher than I was seeing on flickr. Flickr traffic seems to be about the same, but I didn’t make it nearly as prominent on site as Smugmug, so I’m not too surprised.but I expect over time to see it increase traffic there.

all very early, but encouraging.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at early stats on the new chuqui.com. This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

But my goal was the animals.

Every zoo is different and some exhibits are more photogenic than others. Ultimately it’s about the animals, though, and whether they’re active and putting themselves into a situation where you can take an interesting photo. I know this zoo fairly well, although I haven’t visited since the tiger got loose. There have been (not surprising) major changes to the big cat exhibits which render them practically useful for photography (and honestly, they seem more designed to keep idiots out than cats in, but maybe that’s just me). The cats were also doing what they do best — sleep — so I didn’t spend much time there. With the exception of the snow leopard.

This cat was behind a heavy chain link netting. The trick to that is a small aperture and get as close to it as you can. I’m very careful to stay in bounds — no sneaking under barriers in my world — but that doesn’t mean you can’t lean. Just don’t break the rules; it’s not necessary with some care and luck.  The cat was on a perch front and center and grooming, for about a minute. After that, it took off and wandered into the back of the exhibit. Sometimes timing is everything.

It helps to do some research on the facility and animals and try to plan which ones you want to focus on — and then adapt when you get there based on which animals are cooperating and active. Getting there early or late helps. Animals tend to be more active at the edges of the day and tend to sack out in the mid day heat. If you can time visiting an exhibit when they’re fed that can be a big advantage, but if the feedings are advertised to the public, it can turn the area around the exhibit into a, well, zoo and ruin your access and sightlines. I tend to avoid those events on busy days, but mid-week visits they can be effective.

In the san francisco zoo, I wanted to try to focus on certain animals in exhibits I knew could be very photogenic, including the gorillas and patas monkeys and the mandrill. The patas monkeys cooperated nicely, sitting up in a bush and preening.

The mandrill was another matter. It was active — and it is such an expressive face — but it was hanging out along the walls and in the back of the exhibit. He’s such a distinctive animal I wanted to see if I could make the shot happen. Ultimately, it took over 20 minutes of watching and waiting and keeping an eye on where he was pacing — some animals tend to wander their exhibit in a habitual pattern, and you can take advantage of that to plan and frame a shot. There’s a judgement call to be made: do you wait and spend time hoping to get the opportunity, or do you see what the other animals are doing? For the Mandrill, I waited. I think it was worth it.



Other animals I knew were worth some time — the river otters are always fun, true clowns. Their exhibit isn’t great photographically but if you pick the right place and they cooperate a bit, you can do some nice images. Watch out for those teeth if you meet one in the wild.

And the gorillas. They have a new baby, and it’s amazingly cute. Cooperative? No. Cute? Definitely. This was the only shot I got where it didn’t have it’s butt facing me. Seriously.

And dad. What can I say. If you look in the eyes of a gorilla, you see humanity. Wonderfully regal, expressive beasts. The silverback at this zoo is a true patriach and a wondeful subject when he chooses to be. When I was there, he sat himself down on a rock in the enclosure, folded his hands, and just watched everything going on around him. His hands just made this for me. What you do not see is me leaning over a barrier and into a bush to get an unobstructed view of him, so this wasn’t exactly his sitting for a portrait — but it looks like it, so that can be our little secret (but again, never leave the public areas. In reality, you don’t need to, not with a little planning and some patience — and a little luck).

Sometimes it doesn’t work. The penguins are a favorite of mine here — and this trip, they were all in the water, more or less doing nothing. So the other secret to successful zoo photography — keep going back, because next time, the gorillas may be sleeping in their rooms and the penguins all out hooting and hollering. You never know.

check out more images over on smugmug:

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at making it work…. This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

Hope everyone had a safe and happy fourth of July. Here in silicon valley, we wandered out to see the fireworks at th Santa Clara central park and hung out with the neighbors watching other neighbors shoot off an impressive display of very illegal mortar rockets while waiting for the official show. Which didn’t disappoint.

My full set of pics from last night are now on flickr, and here is (I’m experimenting to see how this works!) a slideshow of them. First time I’ve shot using the Canon 7D like this and I have to say I was impressed with the results.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Fireworks!. This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

I’ve been researching this refresh for a couple of months as part of a larger look at whether I felt it was time to take the next step towards shifting my photography towards my goal of going pro — in fact the short answer for that is no, because I don’t want to take the time and energy away from the photography to work on the business, and there really isn’t any overriding reason why I should now (there’s a longer version of that answer, but it’ll have to wait for another time).

Goals for the redesign

Coming out of that research I came up with some goals for this new design. I felt my old site had a number of problems, it wasn’t a good design to show off photography, the design in general seemed dated, having the entry page also be the front page of the blog limited my flexibility, there really wasn’t a good way to integrate in other things I do or create ways to help people find the other places I’m active or connect with my via social media, and the old site had the remains of at least three previous blog designs and none of that content had ever been cleaned up or properly integrated into the site, leaving me with what can be described charitably as a chaotic mess with a horrifically bad taxonomy.

I decided if I was going to fix this, it was time to fix it right, and not just layer a new pretty theme on top of eleven years of blogging crap, so I did.

The new design

The new design uses the Clean Modern Simple theme, available from Themeforest. I spent a lot of time thinknig over what I wanted and ended up choosing a premium theme because it was well worth a few dollars to not spend tens of hours creating my own from scratch (although the geek in me wanted to). I chose it because it was light, open and modern looking, not heavily ornamented, and it seemed to present photographs pretty well but was still a good design for text-oriented material. That latter was a problem with many photoblog themes that seemed to presume only visual content and for more traditional blog themes that really didn’t handle large imagery well. This one does both without any significant compromises, which I like.

I expected to do some customization to the theme, but in fact I ended up making only two changes: I swapped out the front page image area with a gallery system from my smugmug account that will dynamically pull from my portfolio for images, and I wasn’t completely happy with how widgets laid out on the front page so I tweaked it so that the three columns all flowed separately so I could better control the look of the page. All in all, that was a very minor change.

I set up a custom front page that is designed to bring all of my activities together — not just the blog, but my photography, my various social media outposts and the other places where I create content like Google Buzz and Twitter. If you view the front page of the site as your “business card” — which makes sense if you think about that URL being the one most likely on your card that you hand out as a “drop me a line” contact — then I think this new front page does a good job of showing who I am and what I do while creating opportunities to connect and interact. It creates easy access for my two photographic activity points (flickr and smugmug) and provides easy ways to locate my blog and my social networking hotspots as well as aggregating some interesting content back from them so people get a sense of what’s there and why it might interest them.

My assumption is someone arrives at the front page of my domain because they were given the URL and are looking for something — a way to contact me, one of my photos, something. The front page is designed to make it easy for them to find whatever they came to the site for if they didn’t have a deep link directly to it, while also maybe encouraging them to check out some of the other stuff I do.

In researching blog/site designs and deciding what worked on other blogs and digging through the analytics on my site to see what worked and what (most of it) didn’t, it became obvious that visitors to a site generally do not explore it. They hit a link, they browse whatever is on that link, and they leave. The implication of that is that if there are other things you want to get them interested in, they have to be there on the page when they arrive. I’ve tried to create sidebar designs for different types of pages that reflect that. By splitting the blog front page from the site front page I can target them diffferently. The blog has the pointers to the archives and category pages (useful mostly to make sure the detail pages exist to the search engines) — which means I do not need to give up page space on the front page for those items. I also made a decision not to ppush any photo links or galleries on the blog page to keep it from getting too cluttered; there’ll be images in the blog entries and if that interests someone it’ll be easy enough for them to switch off and explore.  Same rationale for the blog detail page and the supplementary pages (about, contact) and the photography page, although on the latter, I added in two small galleries to give visitors a jumping off point to my photo sites.

The RSS feed is a full feed. The politics of full vs. partial is it’s own extended discussion; suffice it to say I’m not trying to force people to generate revenue by forcing them to come to my site to be forced to see advertising, so I see zero advantage in partial feeds for my situation. And since I’m now explicitly using a Creative Commons license on the site that removes the other reason not to do full feeds; in reality, the pirates will do what they damn well want anyway, so gutting functionality to stop them is a stupid tactic, and given these choices this made sense.

Advertising and Revenue

My old design had Adsense advertising on it, which did very poorly, and I occasionally experimented with Amazon affiliate links that did surprisingly well given how rarely I used them and how little work I did to promote them. It’s my opinion that Adsense works better when your audience is a non-technical crowd (i.e. “my mom”) and since my audience is heavily skewed to high-tech and photography types, it’s not a good match. I won’t miss it, and I won’t waste screen space on something that performs badly for me.

One of the things I argued with myself a lot over was just what my proposed revenue model was. Was it trying to create content that I generate revenue with on advertising? Or is my site about me creating things that have value that I can sell? In my view, it’s very hard to do both at the same time: if the purpose of the site is to sell my images or to sell what I do, then advertising distracts from and dilutes that and confuses the message.

My long term plan is to create content and imagery that people want, and then sell them products based on that. Because of that, I’ve taken a very low profile on advertising. Doesn’t mean I won’t take on a sponsorship or sell advertising if the right situation happens, but I’m not pursuing it or encouraging it and I don’t expect it to be a focus down the road.

My long term revenue potential right now looks to have two aspects:

• Photography: The industry is still in the midst of a major transformation because of the online and digital revolutions. Some traditional revenue forms (like stock) have been devastated and aren’t coming back — or more correctly, will stabilize in some new form that will benefit some but many that depended on it will have to adapt. I’m waiting and seeing before trying to step in here. But I still think that there is a continuing market for quality images for both licensing and through prints, and so I continue to work to refine my craft to allow me to enter those markets.
• Writing: I think there’s a fascinating future shaping up here in ebooks and in writing. There’s a transformation just starting towards the electronic book (thanks in large part to the iPad, but also to people like Tim O’Reilly who has been fostering this form for years with things like his Safari Bookshelf); we’re just starting to see a revenue market and a mainstream audience being created for this form. I’m particularly taken by what David duChemin is doing with this in his Craft and Vision line of books, and I think there’s a lot of potential in the “short form” inexpensive ebook that he’s championing.

It takes a long time to write and produce and publish a 300 page traditional photography book that costs the consumer $40 and may be obsolete with the release of one key piece of software; that’s a main reason why I’ve never gotten into computer book writing, even though I’ve had opportunities.  I do think there is a definite market for these traditional books in electronic form, both instructional and visual, and I’ve spent a couple of evenings with some of the work of William Neill who’s published three of his classic imagery books electronically, and I think that form works well. How it’ll make the transition and be priced and whether it’ll transform, I don’t know (but I believe so, and again, I think you’ll see a move to the shorter, less expensive form that is more of an impulse buy and easier/faster to produce. We’ll see.

The short form ebook at an accessible price looks like a great opportunity here. If you haven’t read any of duChemin’s books, they’re well worth the $5 just to see how he’s experimenting with the form. The iPad and the Kindle and other e-readers and the emerging market that is just starting to emerge for “consumption-oriented” devices like tablets or slates will accelerate this, and it’s definitely something I think has potential and I want to foster.

Needless to say, there are synergies possible between those two, and I also think that good imagery and well-written content on a nicely built site can help create opportunities to write for other venues down the road.

I am not a huge fan of online advertising as the core of a revenue model; the internet is littered with sites who are so desperate for every ad dollar that they abuse their readers in search of any revenue they can get. I am not a fan of sites that hold my eyeballs hostage and make me jump through 30 hoops to see their content — and in most cases, I leave without actually seeing it and rarely come back. I’m also not a fan of sites that load themselves up with every possible ad and every possible sponsorship and end up looking like cheap callgirls in a biker bar looking for some action, and I think ultimately people view the content on those sites that way, and I think my content and my audience deserves better. So I’m happy to not have to go down that path, and I hope that never changes.

Other stuff that finally got fixed

As I went over the old blog, I realized I really needed to fix some things. There was a lot of crap content in it, from the days I was convinced it was better to post content free messages than not post, so there was a lot of two-line postings, and a huge number of them had broken links to whatever I was originally pointing to. There was also a lot of — crap — that I just didn’t want to have published on my site any more, because it was simply irrelevant, uninteresting or no longer reflected a position I wanted to reflect. The old screwed up categorization and taxonomy needed fixing, too, badly. over 2/3 of the messages posted to the blog were sitting in an “uncategorized” category feeling bored and unloved.

So I did. I read every posting in the blog, all 2,600 of the 11 year history of my blogging past. And I deleted the crap and I restructured the categorization and I fixed the links and I polished the brass and I painted the trim, and now, honestly, I feel like the content might actually be interesting and useful. It can be tempting to edit history, of course, and I don’t promise that I did NONE of that, but my focus was on preserving the message that including significant material by me, and I was a lot less interested in keeping a post from four years ago that included a link to some random internet meme and a message from me that said “funny”. I think the universe is a better place for this editing.

And a fair amount of editing it was – about 40% of the messages in the blog went away, but maybe 25% of the content, and none of it will be missed. I’ve spent some time analyzing how people visit my old site, and to be honest, 95% of the visits went to the home page or to about 5% of the pages, and 75% of the pages got visited zero times in about 9 months of data.

Moving forward

It was interesting going back and reading what I was thinking along the way, especially given my view of those years and how I see things today. Most on that some other time. And it was interesting to dig into the details of the last design and see just how — unsure and chaotic — it was. Lots of stubs I never filled in, lots of mixed messaging, lots of confused thoughts and frankly, a pretty poor design. I intended at the time for it to be a relatively temporary placeholderr. I didn’t expect it to be three years to finally deal with it. In all honestly, it fairly represented what was going on in my head and life at the time, and no, that wasn’t a necessarily a fun and happy place to be.

But now I’m feeling healthy for the first time in a while, life is going pretty well, and I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand what I want to do and where I want to go; when I left Apple it wasn’t on a real positive vibe and it showed. Now I understand things a lot better, and I think that’ll show, too. So since the 5th is my birthday (#52), I decided to give myself a present, and one I want to share with all of you. And so, a couple of hundred hours of sweat equity later, here it is.

Let me know what you think, and let me know what you think it could be. I’m all ears and open to your ideas as well as mine…

And thanks for reading this stuff. There are a lot of voices and a lot of sources out on the net. I’m thrilled to know some of you think mine is worth investing some time and energy in.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Announcing the new!improved! chuqui.com. This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

Short answer: thank you, but no.

Not quite so short answer: I’m honored. I’m amazed anyone actually CARES what I think. I really am. Heck, I’m actually amazed anyone remembers I used to work for the big fruit company.

However, today I work for a direct competitor, and I plan on working there for a while, because I’m having fun and surrounded by lots of fun and interesting people. I feel it’s inappropriate for me to make comments about or do analysis of a company my employer is competing with — ethics are a bitch some day, but I sleep well at night — and therefore, when I took my current position, I decided to keep my big mouth shut for the duration. I do not regret that. The potential issues of a conflict of interest (real or perceived) just make this kind of discussion difficult at best and an absolute disaster a real possibility, and I just don’t feel comfortable risking that, so I choose not to.

Believe it or not, my not talking about Apple has not caused the sun to go nova, has not solved the middle east crisis, nobody has grown a third eye and to the best of my knowledge, it had no bearing on BP’s decision to poke a hole in the earth and attempt to let it bleed to death (we need a bigger band-aid here!). So I don’t feel like the universe is missing much here. The sun still comes up in the east every morning somehow.

This policy will stay in place until I stop working for a competitor of Apple, or until nobody gives a damn any more what I think, or until I change my mind and decide to write my own book about Apple, or until the sun does in fact go nova. In case of the latter, I’ll be available for interviews somewhere in the third circle.

I appreciate your understanding in my wish to actually not talk about something. I realize it’s a rare thing for me… But we all need to sacrifice for the greater good.

Thanks,

Chuq

p.s. This is not my employer’s policy, this is mine. It will not change July 1 when my employer magically changes, because they didn’t set it. (in reality, my policy is more restrictive than theirs, since they wanted me to clear requests through them. They were, though, happy to hear I’d chosen to turn them all down for the duration).

p.p.s. Yes, I did just slyly admit that I am in fact staying with Palm after the merger with HP. I have the paperwork and anything, and to be honest, I’m looking forward to it.

p.p.p.s. Shh. Don’t tell anyone I told you that, okay?

p.p.p.p.s. Since about half the time the next question is “will you talk off the record?” let me answer that, too. No, I don’t talk off the record, either. I am not a fan of anonymous sources because they lead to stupid and lazy journalism, so I won’t be one.

p.p.p.p.p.s You’re welcome, Steve. I’ll buy the coffees next time.

p.p.p.p.p.p.s You’re still reading? Slow news day, isn’t it… Go outside and play already…

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at My policy on interviews/comments about Apple and Steve. This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

He does, I think, reinforce one thing I tried to push: helping teach people about your licensing (whatever choices you make) is crucial to get away from the “if I can copy it, it’s okay” mentality, and to me, that acknowledges my view that you can’t just stuff licensing info into EXIF and expect it to work in the real world. You need to make sure people know your material is licensed, even if you make that licensing free, and you need to support that license with documentation on what it is and what it means…

What You Don’t Know About Creative Commons Could Kill You- Going Pro 2010:

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at What You Don’t Know About Creative Commons Could Kill You. This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

How Not to Fix Soccer | Freedom to Tinker:

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at How Not to Fix Soccer. This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.

Agreed completely. I was  bit surprised that they let Nabby go, because I don’t see that improving goaltending is going to be easy here. But clearly Wilson has a plan, and to be honest, as big a supporter as I’ve been of Nabokov, he’s getting on in years, and he perhaps someone like Leighton could be successful in this system at a cheaper pricetag. If you think of cap limits being the reason and if you could only keep Marleau or Nabokov but not both — then Wilson made the right decision.

I’m not, however, comfortable going into next season with Greiss as starter. I can’t see Wilson is, either, so I’ll be curious what his plan is to fill the void.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at “We would like to thank Nabby for the time he has spent in San Jose. Nabby has been a big part of…. This article is copyright 2010 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license. See the web site for usage policies. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words.