Back from my vacation and Yosemite trip. It was, in a word, awesome (except the food at the Yosemite Lodge food court is still very expensive and kinda sucks, and you don’t have many options, but that’s nothing new….)

As usually happens, I came back to a huge block of stuff that needed my attention. I’ve gotten my inbox at work down from about 600 emails to around 250, and if you haven’t heard back from me at work, I’m sorry — working on it. At home, it’s down to about 30, and ditto.

The time off gave me a chance to completely get away and shut down and unwind, and do a lot of thinking and planning, so hopefully soon there will be new and interesting things happening. it also really recharge the personal batteries, which I desperately needed, so I feel like doing something more than site and stare at the screen in the evenings. I’ve spent the last few days reworking my disks and backup strategies because it was clear I was going to run out of disk space sooner rather than later (and you can read more about that here); and I’m spending a bunch of time in Lightroom working through photos and cleaning up my library.

I’ll talk more about the trip as I have time to write it up — but until then, I’ve put some of the photos up on my new Smugmug site, which is where I’m going to be building my professional portfolio (which I’ll write more about as I have time to write it up…).

I did what I honestly think is my best photographer EVER. I still have a bunch of photos to process and upload, but the best of the ones I’ve done are now online. Here’s a sample:

and I’ve also set up the best images in a slideshow:

My complete set is (or will be, when I finish catching up) over on Flickr, but I haven’t had time to put them into sets or organize them yet..

Enjoy!

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Back from vacation…. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. 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. Back from vacation…

One of the things that became painfully obvious during my trip to Yosemite was that I was rapidly running out of hard disk.  Being out on the road is not a good time to realize you need  a bigger disk, s when I came back, I decided to fix things before it became a real problem. Here’s what my overall “bits on things” setup looked like:

Now, there’s one obvious problem there that I hadn’t thought about — the backup disk is smaller than the main disk. I knew about that, knew I needed to fix it, and forgot. Not a huge problem, but one of those details you need to keep an eye on or they’ll bite you at an inconvenience moment. Even though I had 3/4 of a terabyte for my backup disk, Time Machine was only storing backups for about 3 weeks, which means it was no longer large enough. It was time to update and grow and upgrade.

The biggest problem — the new Canon 7D creates much larger images. That’s good, but creates ripples. It also does video, which I’m starting to experiment with. By the time I convert the 7D RAw image to DNG and store it on disk, it grows to about 49 megabytes in size. Pile up a few hundred of those, and “Hell, disk is cheap” starts ringing a little hollow. To give an idea of the change going from the 30D to the 7D, on the 30D I use a 4Gb memory card and get 400+ images on it. On the 7D, I upgraded to 16Gb cards, and I get 500 images on one. Moderate upgrade in number of images, big upgrade in amount of disk taken. Also, since the 7D shoots 8 frames a second sustained where the 30D shot 4FPS with limited bursts, the opportunity to generate LOTS MORE images quickly exists. And it definitely happens, so at the end of the day, I have more, larger images to store. This is, as they say, a good problem to have.

The easy answer — upgrade the laptop to a bigger disk — won’t work here. The biggest laptop disks now available are 500 Gigabytes. Larger than my 320Gb, but not by that much. Upgrading delays the problem by a period of time, but it doesn’t solve it. I considered doing that, then decided to bite the bullet and shift into the “it no longer fits on the laptop” universe.

I mumbled about this on Twitter, and immediately got back the “install a NAS!” response. NAS (or Drobo, or RAID, or name your favorite disk packaging setup) isn’t a solution — it’s a technology. You don’t start by choosing a technology, you start by figuring out the solution and then choosing things that implement them well.

I’ve written about backups and my philosophy on how to do them before, check out this piece as well as this followup, as well as this piece where I talk about why I stopped using an online backup solution in favor of sneakernetting an offisite backup somewhere. I am, for the record, looking forward to when the price/performance and the network broadband make this worth doing again, but not right now…)

So for me it’s time to shift my data into a multi-disk environment. I live on a laptop, which gets carried around. If your data no longer all lives on the laptop disk, then when you need that data, you have a problem. It behooves you to then think about your data and how you use it, and figure out how to store your data across your disks so that you have access to what you want when you want it.

For my purposes, “data” can be defined as “everything on your disk”, but in practice, I see no reason to think about shifting apps out of the Application folder or similar “optimizations”. You might be able to free up a gig or two of space, but why? That’s not significant, and it can lead to potential complications later, especially if you start mucking in your Libraries, preferences, caches, etc. The savings aren’t significant — or worth the future hassles or possible compatibility issues. So for me, unless you’re a font geek with 50 gigs of fonts or something like that, just worry about the data folders: Documents, Pictures, Music, Movies. (in case it’s not painfully obvious: this info is Mac specific. General concepts work for Windows as well — the nutty details are your problem on that platform).

A few key goals

Here are a few key goals of all of this:

• Scales infinitely. Or close enough I don’t have to go through this again for a while
• My data is available when I need it, wherever I am
• Easy and intuitive. I don’t want something that’s difficult to do, or I won’t.
• Reliable and easy backups: if your backups are difficult, you won’t. Keep it simple. Make it reliable.
• Fast catastrophic recovery. I don’t want to spend days getting my data usable again
• Recover a file or a disk. Some backup schemes work best for a crashed disk, others for a lost file. you really need both.
• Backups on the road are even more important, not less. So make sure you can do them. And do.

Here’s what I ended up with. It’s not hugely different than before, but the changes create significant challenges to understand:

I took the bus-powered disk and upgraded it with a 500 gig drive. This means that instead of having 320Gb available, I now have 3/4 of a terabyte I can carry around and use without needing an electrical outlet. This is a significant detail: you really mess up the concept of a “laptop” if you have to plug it in to use it… Or worse, can’t because the data you need is inaccessible because you didn’t bring it.

Digression: for those of you about to tell me “just live in the cloud”, plesae don’t. The dataset we’re talking about is measured in gigabytes trending to terabytes, and it’s not practical. In reality I am using Google Docs and Dropbox more for some things, but for the set of things “the cloud” solves for me, they also live happily on my internal laptop disk. This is about figuring out now how to scale from having 1,000 photos in my portfolio and 10,000 in my collection to having 20,000 photos in my portfolio and 100,000 in my collection without everything collapsing in a heap, and those kind of data sets aren’t going to live online any time soon, nor do I particularly want them to.

So anyway, I now have three drives going. The internal laptop drive (320Gb) is where everything I need 100% of the time has to live. The external bus powered drive can store other files that I need access to on the road — but which I probably can live without for more casual usage. And my desktop drive (AC powered) stays at home and holds the data that I need easily accessible but don’t need to travel with.

I went through all of my data and figured out where it needed to live. There’s also an unlisted “fourth category”, which is data that lives offline, or on a disk that I maybe need access to once in a while but not keep plugged in, and I spent some time pulling all of that data off my disks and sticking it in a corner to archive into a drawer. (one could also say there’s a fifth category, the “why the hell am I hanging on to THIS?” category of things that ended up in the trash. Things like the Parallel’s virtual image of Ubuntu I haven’t booted since I installed it five months ago, which deleting freed up multiple gigabytes. And why did I feel the need for an Ubuntu disto in Parallels on MacOS, which is just a different flavor of the same thing? I don’t remember, but it seemed a good idea at the time…)

I can hear some of you groaning at the thought of sorting through all of your data. I sympathize. If you don’t want to commit the time to that, I understand — but — putting some time and energy into it now helps you understand what you have and how to organize it. It also means that moving forward you’l have a good sense on where stuff belongs, meaning you’ll spend less time thinking it through and organizing on the fly. And if you do it now, you probably won’t need to do it again for a few years. It’s little more than virtually filing everything in your office, and it never hurts to do that every so often.

It shouldn’t be assumed that you need to turn “Save File” into a “Getting Things Done” adventure — I’m definitely not interested in being that anal about all of this, but it is important to understand how you want to manage your data well enough to know if it’ll do what you need it to do and how well it scales. Scaling was the big issue for me. If I’m seriously having to worry about data in terms of terabytes, I’d just as soon not have to architect this all out again in six months. Once it’s settled down, it’s back to the “that pile on the desk is in the way, let’s put it in the files” mode again…

So here’s how I finally settled on filing things. My internal laptop disk:

And here’s what my secondary disk looks like. Note that it only has Music and Pictures folders.

The Music folder is where I’m storing the video files in my iTunes library. The audio (aka “music”) lives on the main laptop disk.  As my creation of video grows, I’ll add a “Movies” folder and split it up the way I do photos, but right now, there’s not much there.

And finally, my third disk, the one that stays at home:

The blue highlighted folders are folders on that disk that I exclude from the Time Machine backup:

which is an option more people should think about if they use Time Machine (or other backups) — some stuff you can live without if you need to, so why back it up? All it does is make it harder to do backups reliably. I flag them with color labels so I don’t forget which ones were excluded — I did that once and had to restore a disk, and spent half a day freaking over “missing data” until I remembered I’d excluded that data from the backups. Oops. It goes without saying, of course, that you should only exclude stuff you really don’t need back if there’s a failure, don’t exclude it because it’s large…

A big part of how this works (or won’t) is splitting up the photo library. In general, I split up my photos into four big piles:

• flickr or better:  images I liked enough to post to my Flickr account (and the subset of those I think are good enough for my portfolio, which I’m starting to build on Smugmug)
• 2nd tier: photos which are technically fine, but which aren’t something I think should be posted on flickr. Most of these are effectively duplicates of ones that go on Flickr (think “eight frames per second burst rate”); you want them around in case you want to use them; you stick them somewhere out of the way because you have no plans to actually do so. In theory, these photos are all good enough to publish, except I have some other photo I think is better — but yo never know when you might want some specific expression or a left profile instead of a right profile, and so they’re here if you need it.
• archive and forget: photos that are clearly not as good as the candidates I’d publish, but not bad enough to throw away. To be honest, as I’m getting more comfortable about my abilities as a photographer, I’m doing less keeping photos around that “someday I might try to fix this”. Instead, I ding them and throw them out. These are flagged to be taken offline and stored, and I fully believe I’ll never look at them again and some day throw them out. More and more, I’m comfortable with my choices and simply throwing them out and saving a step…
• dings: And finally, the dings. As I do edits, the ones that are clearly flawed get thrown out and deleted. There are people who tell you to keep everything. I’m not one of those people. Disk is cheap, but it’s not free. Maybe some day those images will be usable (or fixable in photoshop, or whatever), but the reality is I have thousands of BETTER images I could spend that time on, so why bother? So count me in the camp of tossing the crap, especially when it quickly starts turning into gigabytes and terabytes of crap. Why make it harder to find the good images by having to wade through crap, or worse, create a filing system for offline images to keep around stuff you know in your heart you’ll never use? Let it go. Just because you CAN keep everything doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. It’s not.

This setup looks like it’ll scale for a good long time; I can, if I need to, move some flickr or better onto the 2nd disk and prioritize the internal drive to active projects; 2nd tier data easily moves to the “live at home” disk when I need to. I can subset my itunes library the same way if I want to, and the rest of my data isn’t going to grow faster than disk technology seems to be progressing, and as long as I keep my folder structure sane, I can tell at a glance what’s going on, both within the Finder and Lightroom. I can use Lightroom and Spotlight searching to find things if I need to, but with a bit of care the naming structure will let me browse into it quickly as well. It looks pretty solid.

I’ve spent the last couple of days migrating the data to this new setup and I’m now happy with it, at least for now. As I’ve settled in, I’ve made some changes – originally all three disks had Documents folders, I finally realized that either a document lived on the internal laptop or it lived on the “stay at home” drive; no need for a middle phase, it just complicated things. You’ll notice there are folders on the travelling disks to act as placeholders for the stay at home disk. This makes staging stuff to sweep over there easy, so I can stuff files places on the road and then go home and move them off of the travel disks. It may seem unnecessary or trivial, but I’ve found lots of peopple don’t think about that kind of detail, and when I explain it, they love the idea — it lets me make a filing decision at the time I’m using the data, and merely shove it into the file when I get home and not have to “remember” what needs to be filed days later. Make those decisions while you’re using something and then forget it — it’s a great hint for simplifying things.

And once my backups finally sync up and my data is fully redundant again, I’ll be happier. Currently, I have my superduper backups in place, I’m letting Time Machine sync up now. It can be butt slow at times…

Some technical details on implementing this

The drive I bought for the bus powered disk was the Hitachi Traveler 500G. I’ve been using Hitachi drives for my laptop drives for a while and find them pretty reliable. That doesn’t mean others aren’t, it means thse have worked well for me, so I continue to use them. The bus-powered enclosure I use is the Mercury On-The-Go Pro from Other World Computing. I’ve bought RAM and disk from OWC for years and have been very happy with their price, quality and service. I’ve used that enclosure for a long time with never a failure. Their stuff is well-engineered and solid and I feel it’s well priced, and I haven’t been in the mood to explore other vendors because this one works for me.

For my external drives, I use the OWC Mercury Elite-Pro housing. it’s solid, it’s build like a rock, it works reliably. As part of this rework, I’ve retired the last of my IDE systems and I only buy/use drives that have SATA interfaces.

Digression: Every so often, it makes sense to see how technology is moving and migrate away from stuff that’s aging and heading towards end of life — if you refresh your data onto modern storage, you won’t go looking for it some day and find out you no longer have a way to access it. I’m a big fan of refreshing all of my offline storage every couple of years so the chances of having a stored drive failed is minimized. I’m also a fan of keeping two copies of all offline data, preferably one offsite — just in case. Since I’m also a fan of refreshing my active drives on a regular basis (because the best way to never need your backups is to never run your disks until they die!), a nice way to do this is to replace your active drives every 18 months or so, then use the retired drives and copy all of your archived data onto them, and then take the oldest drives and stick them in your files somewhere.

Digression on the digression: I see no reason to ever give a used drive to someone else, either by selling, giving, or donating. I pull the drives out of computers and housings and file them with my tax papers and other files. Once in a while, I pull the really old mechanisms and “retire” them with a big hammer. That way, there’s absolutely no way someone can recover files off of a drive they bought in Goodwill and end up with your data — because it never leaves your hands. If you trust seven-way zeroing and are willing to spend the time to do so, bless you. I jut don’t think a used disk drive is worth the time and hassle to recycle for re-use…

The drive I’m using as my backup drive now is the 2Tb Western Digital “greenpower” Caviar Green with 64 Mb cache. There are cheaper drives out there, but this one has good reviews and is built for server service. In all honesty, there’s nothing quite so painful as finding out your backup drive has failed, especially if you find out while trying to restore something. I don’t want to overpay for this stuff, but cheaping out bites you down the road.

My backup drive is living in a NewerTech Voyager Hard Drive Dock, which allows you to insert and eject SATA drives easily. This means if I want to I can easily pull this mechanism and replace it with another if I need to “do something” with another disk. I’m just starting to use it so I don’t have reliability data on it, but so far, I like it. It’s solid and well-built at first use. I plan on using it for managing my offline archives as well, saving me paying for multiple enclosures down the road.

Geeky details on backups

The 2Tb disk is split into two partitions, one 500Gb and one 1.5Gb. I use two backup technologies, SuperDuper! and Time Machine. I love Superduper for system backups because it makes bootable clones. That makes catastrophic recovery a lot simpler: take your backup drive, plug it into a Mac, and boot from it (then make a backup of it before something bad happens!). Superduper runs nightly and refreshes copies of my two travel disks, which is why the 2Tb is split into two partitions. The 500Gb syncs up the 500Gb external disk, and the 1.5Tb is the clone of the internal boot disk and also is where my Time Machine backups live.

Superduper doesn’t do versioning or archival over time, it makes a snapshot of now. For the “I need that file I threw out two weeks ago” problem, I use Time Machine. It backs up all three disks (minus the exclusions I mention above) to the 1.5 Terabyte partition of the backup disk. Time Machine is useful for casual backups (it’s better than nothing and pretty good for get-single-file recoveries) but I don’t like it for complete disk recovery and after working with a Time Capsule for a while, I really don’t like Time Machine over a network. If anyone really cares why, that’s a whole different blog posting.

The good news is that SuperDuper and Time Machine co-exist nicely on one disk (thank you, Dave!) so I can do both easily, so I’m set up to clone my two key disks onto the backup disk, and then do a time machine backup onto it for incremental backups as well. If my boot disk crashes, recovery is (almost) as simple as booting the backup disk. Wonderful, since crashes almost always happen on deadline…

What this doesn’t cover yet…

There are a few details this new setup doesn’t cover yet. None of them are time critical, but all of them need to be considered and solved, and it’s important you know how to solve them before you implment (lest they blow up your work when you go “oh, damn, didn’t think of that” later). Fortunately, they all are solvable…

• The new setup doesn’t include “on the road” backups. Since I no longer can carry a bus-power drive big enough to back up my systems, the answer is to carry a bigger, plug-in drive. I’m not worried about Time Machine backups on the road, so the easiest solution is a 1Gb external drive in one of my Elite-Pro housings. Even better, that’s cheap, and if I set it up, gives me an easy “spare backup” setup, because I love having a set of backups I only update every week or so, just in case something corrupts that I don’t recognize right away. So that’s probably what I’ll do. The other option would be to carry the 2Tb backup disk with me in the Elite-Pro housing, which also works, but which limits the number of redundant copies I end up having. I don’t like carrying my backup on the road if I can help it, I’d rather carry a “road” backup and leave the main backup at home. But both are options.
• The new setup doesn’t make explicit the off-site backup storage. What I’m doing in the short term is taking my old backup disk offsite. In 4-6 weeks, I’ll buy a 2nd 2Tb disk, plug it into a dock, build it the same as my new backup disk, and run backups onto it, and then swap between the two (the other going offsite) every 4-6 weeks. That’ll fix this for a good while at reasonable cost.
• The setup for moving files onto offline disks (aka “in the drawer”) isn’t spelled out, but is pretty simple: buy a pair of 500Gb SATA drives, plug them into the dock, copy the files to each, carry one offsite. Iterate until full, and then either start another set or decide some of the files can be deleted (or both). Every couple of years, take all of your offline disks, copy them to new (fewer, bigger) disks, and store them again.

But what about “install a NAS?”

I have to admit I’m not a huge fan of NAS in my environment, but I also realize that over time, the amount of data I’m storing on my “stay at home” disk is going to grow without bounds. My plan at this time is to convert that into a Drobo at some point, but not until I need to, so I’ll hold that off until later this year. I realize that at some point the percentage of data I can keep local to the laptop, even with 1 terabyte (500gig internal + 500gig bus powered) is finite, but I’m only using about 275Gb on those two combined right now, so I have some time before I have to worry about that…

Things like Drobo and a NAS add some capabilities, but they also add complexity, cost and new ways for interesting failures, which always seem to happen on deadline when you least can afford the issues. A NAS works best if you’re sharing data among multiple machines, since I’m not, it adds more complexity than it solves problems. Drobo is different being locally hooked up (and there’s a NAS enabler you can buy for it), but adds its own set of complexities and administration — so as long as (a) a single disk works and (b) I can back it up reliably, I’ll stick with a good single disk. Once you start getting into multiple disk environments and/or your backups start being tougher to keep reliable, the addition of mirrored RAID and some of the other features of NAS or Drobo become good to have, but again, I’m not at that point yet.

Finally — speaking of Terabytes

I’ve been around long enough that the thought of buying disk in terabyte sizes amuses me. My first hard drive was ten megabytes — MEGAbytes, not GIGAbytes — and I remember a time when a terabyte would probably store all of the data at Apple, and perhaps all of the data in the state of California. Today, I’m using it for backups of my personal data set. That amount of scaling in the last 30 years or so amazes me when I step back and consider it. But then, my phone has a lot more processing power and memory and disk than my first Mac did. I think my KEYBOARD has a more powerful CPU than my first home computer did….

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at What to do when you realize you’re running out of disk…. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. 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. What to do when you realize you’re running out of disk…

A weekly compendium of stuff I found I thought you’d like. If you do, let me know, so I know to find more of it for you.

• Photocritic: Visualising Studio Lighting.
• Read/Write/Web: first look at snapgroups. I’ve been waiting to see what Mark Fletcher (Bloglines and Onegroup, which became Yahoo Groups)  had up his sleeve. It’s SnapGroups, which is a fresh take on community/group/forum/list type setups. At first glance, looks very interesting. This looks like it might give Yahoo Groups a run for its money. Already beats the hell out of Google Groups, but then, so does a hit to the head..
• Jeremy Pollack: 5 Lightroom Quick Tips
• George Barr: One in a Hundred
• Michael Zhang: Time-Lapse of the Milky Way over Hawaii. Awesome.
• Jim Goldstein: Gates of the Valley, Yosemite National Park
• David duChemin: Confessions of a So-Called Pro
• Michael Johnston: National Geographic ten top photos of 2009. there’s been some grumbling about NatGeo’s choice of photos here. I think photographers need to step back a bit and see that these were chosen as much for (if not primarily for) the story they’re telling as the photo and quality itself. Great NatGeo work, but the photo is the vehicle, not the purpose.
• Rob Knight: unclutter your library with lightroom’s stacks.
• Joe Pelletier: Trail of the Stanley Cup. One of the rarest and most sought after hockey book set. Laurie owns all three volumes as part of her collection. Her collection is around 500 volumes, not including media guides (more or less complete back into the 80’s and other volumes earlier) and programs (a few thousand, something like 20 linear feet of them going back into the 30’s) or my collection of rulebooks (including ones going back into the 40’s). At one point when we were actively collecting we kept hearing about another collector in B.C. we kept hearing about in various stores — one store told us he wanted to meet us as he was buying for the Hockey Hall of Fame and wanted to buy our collection. No idea how true it was, nobody ever followed up with us on it. Most of that was “before eBay”, today, anything worthwhile ends up online there or on abebooks or one of the other used services, and it’s almost impossible to find really rare stuff at non-insane prices, so mostl we don’t… but while we were building this collection, we sure had a lot of fun wading through dusty bookstores…
• Juan Pons: Favorite Images from my “Winter in Yellowstone” instructional photo workshop. (sigh. jealous).
• Mike Panic: 7 things photographers should never do

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Stuff You’ll Like. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. 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. Stuff You’ll Like

A weekly compendium of stuff I found I thought you’d like. If you do, let me know, so I know to find more of it for you.

• 10,000 Birds: Inaccessible Island Rail. excerpt: The Inaccessible Island Rail is perhaps the coolest bird that neither I nor anyone I will ever meet will ever see.
• Audublog: Klamath settlement could benefit habitat for California migratory birds.
• Google: Google Voice, explained. I’ve been using Voice for a while to manage the fact that I deal with multiple cell phones now, and I’m happy with how it centralizes and simplifies my telphonic life… Which is way more complicated than I ever expected “a phone” to be…
• PDNpulse: dining room/studio in Brooklyn. Because Im’ looking at how to set up a home studio area I’ll actually be able to use….
• Strobist: it’s time for the PC jack to die.
• Rick Sammon: Quick Tip on Fill Flash
• Michael Zhang: Use Bicubic Sharpener for web resizing
• Chris Brogan: attention as a currency and noise
• Mark Williamson: They closed Death Valley
• Jim Goldstein: Mavericks — impact of scale
• Scott Bourne: better skies with lightroom’s graduated filter
• Alan Murphy: Using a water drip to attract birds
• Rick Sammon: Q&A on color space
• Kent Newsome: how to vastly improve your Facebook experience with filters and lists
• Trey Ratcliff: Trey Ratcliff Speech at Google (I had a chance to see Trey speak at Apple on this trip, and had to cancel to go to a meeting I ended up not needing to be at. oh well)
• Trey Ratcliff: how to make a web portfolio (the joys of Smugmug)
• Syl Arena: Speedlighting — learning Canon Flash Photography
• Merced Sun Star: San Joaquin River National Wildlife Refuge. This’ll give you a feel for what it’s like being at a fly-in. Until you experience one, though, you don’t really understand just how it affects you at a visceral level…
• Adactio: testing huffduffer’s sign-up. Interesting rethink on a signup sheet. The A/B test is intriguing.
• Digital Photography School: Taking Stock of your own photography
• Michael Frye: Oaks. (going to look for this tree next week…)
• Brian Auer: Tone Curves: final tips, tricks and things to avoid.
• Outdoor Photo Gear: Setup Heaven in South Texas
• Michael Zhang: Stop Motion Post-It Animation by Disney

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Stuff You’ll Like. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. 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. Stuff You’ll Like

As part of prepping the images I donated to Images Without Borders, I decided to reprocess them from scratch and see if I could make them as good as I could given what I know about post processing in Lightroom and Photoshop — consider it a pop quiz on how much I’ve learned in producing quality images in the last few months…

I find some of the differences fascinating. My image of Morro Rock at Dawn, which is one of my favorites (ever!) got a major makeover. Here’s the image as I originally processed it, literally on my laptop in the auditorium at Morro Photo Expo waiting for George Lepp to talk:

I like that version a lot (except for the bird dots in the sky; I later removed them for the version I used to print out for christmas gifts), and the glow on the rock well simulated what I saw when I took the image; I felt I could do better now, though.

So here’s the new image:

The glow on the rock isn’t as noticable, but the coloration is more the golden tone that was evident that morning, and I much prefer the coloration of the water and sky and the better detail in the boats. And there are no bird dots or other junk in the sky…

If nothing else, it’s a very vivid example of how photos may look “photo realistic” but really are heavily tied into the interpretation of the photographer in post processing. it’s always been that way, by the way — the tools in a wet darkroom were just different ones.

Which one do I like better? I like aspects of both, actually, for different reasons. I’d kind of like at some point to take the rock in the original and move it into the image I just finished. Maybe some day I will — but to be honest, I like the new version of the rock as well…But I definitely — today — prefer this new one and how the boats have some detail visible. I was for some reason doing a lot of sillouette imagery last october when I was in Morro Bay…

Another image I redid today, the night herons, better shows how much better I am at this than I was when I originally did it (about 8 months ago):

To me, it now looks soft and grey. The new version of the image has whiter whites, better contrast and stronger blacks, and is much sharper and generally an improved image.

All in all a muc superior image, and I think in this new one the eyes really pop, and they really are the focus of this image, where in the previous version, I now think it came across rather muddled.

To me, it’s good to sometimes go back and re-vision your previous work and see what you can do with it; it can be a really positive way to see the progress you’re making in becoming a better photographer. The bones of that night heron image were always there, I think. Now, I think, the rendering I did allows you to see them.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Re-visioning an image. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. 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. Re-visioning an image

A project I’ve been working on in the background for a while has finally all come together and I’m thrilled to be able to talk about it. After the Haiti earthquake I donated some funds to support the rescue efforts there but I realized there was going to be a long-term need there and started looking at the right ways to get involved. One of the organizations that I’ve considered donating to for a couple of years is Doctors without Borders, which fits the kind of organization I look to put my donation money into (low bureaucracy overhead, low marketing expenses, high percentage of revenues “on the ground” and not in the home office, etc..).

Then I ran into another organization trying to create a place where photographers could donate images for sale to generate revenue for Doctors Without Borders. Images Without Borders seemed like a cause I wanted to get behind, so I did some research, decided it was doing the Right Things, and contacted them to see if I could donate some images.

I’m happy to announce that five of my images are now available for purchase through Images Without Borders, and all profits for their sale will go to Doctors Without Borders. Each image is limited to ten prints and will then be retired. I want to encourage everyone who reads my blog to support Doctors without Borders, either by going to Images Without Borders and buying a print (mine or one of the other donating photographers), or by donating to the organization directly.

I will sweeten the pot further — if you buy one of my prints via Images Without Borders, I will send you a free 11×14 signed print of any image in my portfolio as my thank you for doing so. Simply email me a copy of the receipt on the purchase and we’ll work out the details.

Here are the images I’ve made available:

To help spread the word, I’ve created some free mobile phone wallpapers of these images. You are welcome to make copies of these and pass them around or install them on your phone. I will also be doing desktop wallpapers of some of my images, including these, to help support this cause — stay tuned for that.

I hope you all will consider supporting this organization and cause, either by buying a print, by donating directly, or by publicizing this and spreading the word to others. Haiti needs our help, and this organization is there on the ground trying to make a difference, and it deserves our help.

Thanks,

Chuq

(p.s. observant geeks will probably notice that my photos are being hosted on Smugmug and not flickr. I’ve been working towards creating a portfolio site where I can start selling prints and licensing images, and Smugmug was the site I decided to use for this (Photoshelter, the site hosting and donating its services to Images without Borders, came in a close second). I’ll be using Smugmug as the site for my professional portfolio the way I use (and will continue to use) Flickr to distributethings more casually and socially. I’ll talk more later about my plans for Smugmug and how this all ties together, but this situation was a great opportunity to fire up the new site and get this next phase of my photography going….)

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Supporting Doctors without Borders through Images without Borders. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. 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. Supporting Doctors without Borders through Images without Borders

One of the reasons I’ve been somewhat missing from the blog is that my photo processing workflow imploded — I came to realize it was broken beyond repair, and I didn’t know how to fix it.

That’s not a fun place to be.

The final straw was trying to integrate some more complicated processing techniques into the workflow, specifically handling multi-image processing for panoramas and HDR. The way I had everything set up in Lightroom just didn’t work for managing all of the pieces well, and everything I tried — well, all of the solutions were ugly and I realized they wouldn’t scale.

Ultimately I came to realize a decision I made when I first migrated to Lightroom was the failure point; I made a decision to use collections to store groups of photos instead of folders. Collections are a virtual grouping, folders are a physical grouping. I felt it made sense to import into a YYYY/MM/DDDD folder, and then use collections to pull related images together. Overall, that worked well (for a while).

Lightroom, however, has a — quirk — a design decision that is impacted by this, and that’s how sets can be used. Sets is another virtual collection that work within folders, but sets are incompatible with collections. that means when you pull everything together, you have to chose collections or sets (but not both). I chose collections. That works, until you need sets. Then all hell breaks loose. It really does make sense to use a set to pull all of those pieces together and tag them with the resulting image as the top image.

Unfortunately, you can’t do that if you use collections. sigh.

In researching options on how to do this (and more importantly, how to do this without tearing it down to ground zero and starting over), I finally decided the workflow I liked best was one outlined by Hal Schmitt at Digital Photo Experience as part of his Panorama screencast. But that meant — of course — starting from ground zero.

So I finally decided I needed to, and I’ve been spending my evenings recently taking everything in my Lightroom libraries and converting all of the collections to folders, one at a time. Of course, once you decide to open up the hood, you don’t just fix what’s broken, you start tinkering, and I did, restructuring my keywords, rethinking a few things in my metadata presets. Little things that flit in and tweak everything to some degree.

This, by the way, makes Time Machine crazy. That reminds me that I need to start planning to upgrade my disks to larger sizes soon. This means I have to think about my backup policies, and… and down the rabbit hole we go again. Fortunately I have a couple of months before I have to worry about the disks, and I’ve got everything back under control (well, mostly. I have a couple of thousand photos flagged with special keywords defining various “needs to be looked at and fixed” to-dos). It seems to work with panoramas:

I’m happy with the structure of the files on disk and how the workflow gets me from import to flickr, and with the keywording and metadata (to a point; there’s more detail that I’m still thinking through and implementing, that’s the “to do” on a bunch of images…).

And I’m pretty happy with the quality of the end image now, but that’s a different blog post. That also wasn’t true recently…

What I haven’t yet done is take it from “post to flickr” stage to the full portfolio, but that’s the part I’m starting to work on now. Most on that, hopefully soon…

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at When your workflow implodes, bad things happen…. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. 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 your workflow implodes, bad things happen…

So having mentioned it was time for vacation a couple of weeks ago, I’ve actually done something about it. I was able to grab three nights at the Lodge on the valley floor, so I’m taking the week of March 1 off and heading off to Yosemite in about a week to get away from email and everything else, and just unplug and unwind and focus on recharging the batteries and taking some photos.

It’s still a ways out, but the ten day forecast for that period (3/1-3/4) is encouraging: maybe some overnight snow but temperatures above freezing during the day, and it looks like a storm will roll through during the trip, which I’m hoping for. Nothing scary in the forecast, and encouraging for landscape potential. So we’ll see.

What’s not settled is what to do around those days. I sat down and wrote up all of the things I might want to do and then started pruning out stuff that didn’t seem to make the cut from a time/energy/interest level:

• Grand Canyon (too much driving, too little time actually there)
• Bryce/Zion (ditt0)
• Vegas for birding and hiking in Red Rock (intriguin, but.. not this trip)
• Disneyland (I don’t want to “go urban”)
• San Diego Zoo (ditto)
• Salton Sea and wandering the deserts for wildflowers (tempting on any number of levels; ultimately more driving than I wanted to do)
• Carrizo Plain wildflowers and then SLO/Santa Barbara/Morro Bay (too early for Carrizo by a couple of weeks, and a bit of been-there-done-that on the central coast. It’s been where I’ve gone to hide a lot the last couple of years, so time to do something different…)
• Out to Tahoe/Reno, then down the 395 to Morro lake and Bishop and out the other side (ultimately, it’s too early in the season for some things I want to do in the Eastern Sierra like Bodie, and just way too much driving, much as I’d like some winter time with Mono Lake; Devil’s Postpile is also buried right now…)

As it turns out, I got invited to go birding with a group down in Monterey on the 7th, so that was encouragment to stay a bit more local. Much as I’ve wanted to get down to Salton Sea to bird for a while (it was the trip that got canceled by my dad’s final hospital visit), I find myself interested in driving less and “doing” more. I’m not making final decisions about what I’ll do until I leave Yosemite, but I’ve got a few informal plans I’ve framed out depending on what I feel like and what the weather dictates.

• Plan A: overnight near Galt so I can spend more time with the cranes and geese at Woodbridge and some of the northern Sacramento flyway stops and do some birding photography and try to observe one or two fly-ins and a dawn up there, then home.
• Plan B: go home (but don’t tell anyone), and daytrip. Lots of things I want to do, from the SF Zoo and the aquarium to exploring the marin headlands and presidio or even play tourist from Pier 39 to Ghirardelli… tempting.
• Plan C: change my mind and head down to Morro Bay (because ultimately I really love it down there…)
• Plan D: who knows? I’m open to suggestions…

In any event, I’m really ready and looking forward to this. Definitely planning a busy week, just a week doing stuff I want to do… Blogging may continue to be light as I get things prepped at work and here at home for the trip; then again, maybe I’ll just start a cube sabbatical and get my blogging caught up…

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Yosemite on the horizon!. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. 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. Yosemite on the horizon!

A weekly compendium of stuff I found I thought you’d like. If you do, let me know, so I know to find more of it for you.

• Dak Dillon: A Photographer’s Guide to Working with Magazines
• Jeff Revell: HDRSoft makes HDR easier with Photomatix Light
• Ed Finkler: We are the stupid ones.
• Heather Morton: Doug Menuez and his new Stock Site
• Peter Carey: How to control multiple flashes wirelessly with a Canon 7d [[ good timing!! ]]
• Kirk Tuck: My idea of a great workshop. Collaboration is key
• David Hobby: After the Light: High Pass Post Production
• Kurt Repanshek: 15 years into the wolf recovery program
• Moose Peterson: What’s the best investment
• 10,000 Birds: Help! It’s raining Brown Pelicans!
• Jeff Atwood: Cultivate Teams, not ideas
• Michael Frye: Coyotes
• Juan Pons: Recording Audio with your video
• Brian Auer: Nonlinear Curve Adjustments and histograms
• Round Robin: We Love Birds launches
• Matthew Ingram: Don’t let the Good Become the enemy of great
• Harold Davis: Split toning in a winter vista
• Paul Burwell: top ten ways to make sure you’ll never be a pro

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Stuff You’ll Like. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. 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. Stuff You’ll Like

A weekly compendium of stuff I found I thought you’d like. If you do, let me know, so I know to find more of it for you.

• Carolyn Wright: How to deal with infringements.
• Kevin Marks: Standards are the Links of the Social Web
• Tim O’Reilly: Google Buzz re-invents gmail
• Don Dodge: Google Apps Developer Blog
• Matt Kloskowski: Four Signs that  it’s time to start from scratch in Lightroom
• Jeff Revell: Tips for better zoo photography
• Rob Sylvan: Customizing your Camera Raw defaults in Lightroom
• Steve Berardi: What went wrong with this sand dune photo
• Greg Russell: Shooting Panoramas with minimal equipment
• Rick Sammon: Crop my pictures and you’re a dead man
• Sean McCormack: LRB Exhibition
• Images without borders: Welcome to Images with0ut borders
• Louis Gray: Low Quality Offensive Ads degrade the web experience
• Nick Nichols: Full Disclosure
• Hal Schmitt: Stitching Together Your Panoramas using Lightroom and Bridge/Photoshop

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Stuff You’ll Like. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. 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. Stuff You’ll Like

A weekly compendium of stuff I found I thought you’d like. If you do, let me know, so I know to find more of it for you.

• Vincent Driesen: A successful GIT Branching model. (via Jeremy)
• Michael Frye: Photo Critique, Subway 1
• George Barr: Yours, Mine and History
• Naturescapes: 2009 Images of the Year. (wow).
• Jeremy Pollack: Pre-Travel Research Tips
• Audubon: Reintroducing Wolves could rehabilitate ecosystems.
• Steve Berardi: how three bananas can improve your photography skills
• http://moosepeterson.com/blog/?p=12203#mce_temp_url#: Wildlife Photography — Your cup of tea? (yes!)
• Jim Goldstein: 10 tips to managing social media productivity
• Rick Sammon: On Creating a Photo with Emotional Impact
• Michael Frye: Waterfalls in Winter

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Stuff You’ll Like. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. 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. Stuff You’ll Like

The fun guys at Precentral have done an article where they all talk about the apps that live on their Pre or Pixi, so I figured now was a good time to chip in and do the same.  Do I need to attach a disclaimer here? Nah. you all know the drill — and I pay for all my apps, no freebies out the side door on weekends…

Here are the apps I keep close and handy:

• To Do Classic — relatively new to the catalog, but I like it because it’s simple. I’ve used a number of other to do apps but this one is my current favorite because I don’t need the extra power some of the other apps have. I also like GroceryList.
• gDial Pro and Visual Voicemail — connects me to google voice, which connects me to the thirty-seven-gazillion phone numbers I seem to own now.
• TVMCalc — my current favorite calculator
• Twee — my current Twitter client. Because I know you folks can’t survive without constantly hearing what I have to say, even when I’m at a hockey game.
• FourSquare — who knew? people volunteer to be stalked! (but it’s fun!); I’m also starting to experiment with FourSquare as a location tool for birding, and it looks promising.
• Where I’m At — I’m experimenting with location based services and the GPS as tools for my birdwatching. This one is my current favorite tool for grabbing location data and archiving it.
• MediaClock — my travel alarm. One less gadget I have to carry in my bag!
• StopWatch — which I use primarily for timing captures for night photography.

Below the fold, where you can’t see them:

• textPress, because a way to quickly take free form notes is amazingly useful
• Evernote, because you need a place to store your stuff. Having your stuff available on all of your devices rocks.
• The Weather Channel, because when it rains, you get wet. So go inside.
• TealTime, because when you work with people in five different timezones on a regular basis, knowing when they’re at lunch or asleep rocks.
• Parking Place, my current “where in the HELL did I leave my car this time?” app. Now, if I could just teach it to automatically figure out it needs to take a location, I’d be really happy.
• Preware and AppScoop, because we aren’t afraid of homebrew here.
• SuperSudoku, Free Klondike, and Mine Search because, well, sometimes those important staff meetings run a bit long. I’m glad my boss doesn’t read my blog.
• OpenTable, because dinner isn’t just a good idea, it’s the law.
• Flashlight, because I don’t see those funky menus as well as I used to. Isn’t middle age fun?
• DOF Calculator, because I’m a photo geek.
• Yelp!, because I need to know where to get a good plumber who makes lattes.
• Tip Em!, because the pre can never have enough Tip Calculators and this is my current favorite.
• Backgrounds, because plain and grey is boring.
• Sunrise Sunset, because knowing when it’s dark is useful for a photographer for some reason….
• Friendsbook, my current favorite Facebook app
• DirecTV, so when I remember I forgot to schedule that show, I can fix it.

What’s NOT on my Pre? As most of you know, before I came to Palm I used “that other phone”, but I believe in eating my own dog food, and I’ve been chowing away. But there still are a few things on that other phone I can’t do yet. Here are things I really wish I could do on my Pre, but nobody’s written them yet:

• BirdsEye and iBird — my birding field guides. We just don’t have these resources on the pre (yet).
• Best Camera, Focalware, Magic Hour – Photography apps I use once in a while.
• Darkslide — there just isn’t a Flickr browser as good as Darkslide yet. Ditto one for Smugmug.
• TideApp — another useful thing for a nature photographer and birder, because it sucks to get your feet wet for the wrong reason…
• Sirius/XM Radio – 24 x 7 hockey sports talk, baby!

Given I own about 100 apps for “that other phone” (yes, I’m an app slut), that’s actually not bad for a new platform out less than a year. I figure it won’t take too long because I’ll have alternatives. Right, developers? RIGHT? Don’t make me hurt your dog… (and if you think about it, all but Darkslide are what you can charitably call “niche” apps for a specialty audience. they normally trail in availability while we build the audience for them…. ). My “other phone” now lives in my bag, relegated mostly to iPod duty and when I need one of the specialty apps, and if I wasn’t so lazy about it, I could move the music onto the Pre, but I just haven’t bothered…

Of course, I’m constantly trying out new apps and shifting stuff around, but isn’t that half the fun? These, however, are the ones I lean on and use on a regular basis these days.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at What’s on my Pre?. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. 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. What’s on my Pre?

I’m a bit surprised, but my lens is repaired and back in my happy little hands. Total turnaround time is under a week. Tota cost was about $115 including diagnosis and shipping costs. According to the return info no new parts were needed so whatever broke was likely a screw that came loose and let everything slide out of position, and the tech pulled it apart, put it back together and did a full optical alignment and cleaning.

Hopefully will get out a bit tomorrow and take some test shots and see how it goes…

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at The lens is back... This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. 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 lens is back..

Ben Long talks about using a Hackintosh (a netbook hacked to run Mac OS X).

For the last year, I’ve been using a hacked MSI Wind as a netbook, but its keyboard played havoc with my repetitive stress injuries. Something about it made me hold my hands in a way that ultimately caused pain. I recently had the chance to type for a while on a Dell Mini 10v and found that I had no pain issues at all, so I sold the Wind and picked up a Mini 10v on sale for only $275.
Compared to my 13″ Macbook, the Mini 10 is considerably smaller and lighter, making it very usable for backcountry trips – something I would never do with my Macbook. With it, I no longer need to carry my Digital Focii FotoSafe for offloading, and I’m not stuck trying to type emails on my iPhone keyboard.

Obviously, if you’re a Windows user, you can use the Mini 10v right out of the box. If you want to use the Mac OS, though, you’ll need to perform a quick and simple hack.
NetbookInstaller is an application that will take care of the hack for you, and using it is very simple. You’ll need a copy of Snow Leopard, and a USB stick with at least 8 gb of capacity. Detailed instructions on the NetbookInstaller site will guide you through the installation. You’ll image your Snow Leopard disk onto the USB stick. and then boot off of that. The NetbookInstaller application will modify the installation to allow it to work on the Netbook.
When you’re all finished, you should have a Mini 10v running the latest Mac OS (at the time of this writing, I’m running 10.6.2). The trackpad supports tapping and two-fingered scrolling, and sleep, restart, shutdown, the web camera, and SD card reader all work fine. The model I got has a gigabyte or RAM and a 160gb drive, though both of these are upgradable. The computer weighs in at 2.6 pounds.

It’s definitely a viable option if you want to depend on an unsupported computer environment, but he neglected to mention a couple of important points:

1. If you  don’t buy a copy of Mac OS X or have a family pack, you’re pirating the software. Photographers need to be really sensitive about violating the licenses of others, or else we should shut up when people ignore our copyrights and rip off our photos. Can’t have it both ways, folks, although I know a lot of people who try.
2. Even if you do buy a copy of Mac OS X to run on your Hackintosh, you’re putting it on hardware that isn’t allowed by Apple’s EULA for Mac OS, so you’re violating their T&Cs, which depending on how you want to rationalize it means you’re pirating the software whether or not you have a paid license for it.
3. If neither of those keeps you up and night sleepless over the moral quagmire of violating Apple’s legal agreements while being hard-ass about protecting your own, it’s still an unsupported and mostly untested hardware/software configuration which may break at any moment (or which at any moment Apple might choose to “make no longer compatible” with a software update, and no matter what breaks — you have no tech support except your own sweat equity and whatever friends you can buy pizza for. And you’re using this computer in a production environment on deadline?

Wherever your choose to draw the lines in the sand in the great “How dare you do that with my photos; but I”ll do what I want with this software!” moral quagmire, you should at least stop long enough to think about it so you know how to explain it if it gets brought up by a client — or by the other party if you happen to end up in court fighting a copyright and this is mentioned to the judge. Whatever you think of them, these EULAs have been mostly upheld by courts. How are you going to react if someone uses the same rationalization for using your photos that you used for choosing to build a Hackintosh?

But I’m not judging. I have enough challenge manging my personal ethical compass, I don’t need the karma of managing yours. But I felt it was important to point these issues out so that photographers understand that this is more complications than “this is unsupported hardware”.

I, personally, would hate to be in a conference room negotiating licensing terms with a client and taking notes no a machine that has unlicensed software on it, or is running software that I knowingly installed in violation of the licensing terms. That to me seems like I’m tempting the karma gods, and they already have me on speed dial, they don’t need excuses to ring me up. You know?

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Mac Netbooks. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. 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. Mac Netbooks

A weekly compendium of stuff I found I thought you’d like. If you do, let me know, so I know to find more of it for you.

• Wildbird: Bolsa Chica footbridge being installed. This will really make Bolsa Chica even more interesting to explore. (this is good)
• Oregon Live: Brown Pelicans are lingering on the Oregon Coast. (this is bad..)
• Rick Sammon: When you are through changing, you are through
• Terrie Eliker: Beating Lens Fungus
• Daniel Jalkut: Can’t Catch Me
• Grant Brummett: 400mm birding lens comparison (I use the 100-400 IS a lot, plus the 300mm F4 IS with a 1.4x tele. the 300/1.4 is definitely crisper than the 100-400 at 400mm, but less flexible, so it depends on what I’m trying to do. In general, I shoot the 100-400 when I’m handholding and walking around, and the 300/1.4 combo on a tripod. Don’t forget to turn IS off when attached on a tripod)
• Fraser Speirs: Future Shock.
• Steve Frank: I need to talk to you about computers.
• Moose Peterson: This Unsettling Thought Might Bring some Comfort. (moose writes on something I’ve written about also)
• Audublog: A whole bunch of reasons why birds matter
• Alan Hess: Off to the Zoo
• Cats Who Code: How to easily create a Thematic child them. (it’s time for me to get butt in gear and start the blog redesign seriously…)
• Greg Russell: Evolution of an image, and the value of critique forums

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Stuff You’ll Like. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. 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. Stuff You’ll Like

One of the memes I’m seeing in the discussion of the iPad is that the Apple TV is one of Apple’s failures. It seems to be a common idea and an easy target, but I think that idea is dead wrong. Yes, it hasn’t sold 800 billion units like the iPod and the iPhone, but that it hasn’t been an insanely successful product doesn’t make it a failure.

(quick digression; when people decide to go talking about “apple’s failures”, the common commentary is something like ‘Apple’s failed products like the Apple TV and the Cube’ — when you realize that the Cube was released in 2000 — that’s ten years ago — and people looking for anything to criticize in Apple’s product line can really only come up with two examples in a decade, well, that says a whole lot about Apple’s success, no? )

I’ve got two arguments why the Apple TV isn’t a failure. It’s subjective and certainly open to discussion, but hopefully this will cause you to stop and consider…

First: Apple doesn’t consider it a failure. If it did, Apple would have dropped the product and moved on by now. They’re still selling it, supporting it and enhancing it — so Apple clearly sees a future to it. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be available to buy.

Second: I’d argue that for a product to lose, some other product has to win. The product that beat the Apple TV is…. It is… Um…

See? The answer is “nobody”.

And that’s why Apple still has the Apple TV and what gives the people who like making immediate judgements on things the quivers. The market the Apple TV is in is still forming. Nobody has won. Nobody has lost. The fight is still in the early stages.

I’m frankly a little surprised at this, I thought the market would mature and mainstream faster than it did. One component that has slowed it down is the lack of standardized interconnects — i.e. the failure to launch of the Cablecard. It’s not clear to me if Apple was ever really looking at the Cablecard as a solution here, but if they were, it didn’t happen and it never really became an option.

So Apple’s real solution here is downloadable content, and that’s dragged by the relatively slow adoption of fast/cheap broadband in the states. It’s also dragged by the owners of the video content being in no super hurry to hand over control of the market to Apple the way music was handed over to it. the music studios hate how Apple can dictate business to the studios instead of the other way around, and so there’s been this deadly and slow dance for control between the studios and Apple, and since the volume (i.e. “money”) isn’t there, the studios can take their time and push for better deals and hope for alternatives so they can play someone off against apple for leverage. So far, nobody’s really come up with something that remotely competes with iTunes in numbers and scale, though.

What can push this market forward is a change in the dynamic. Apple TV wasn’t the product to drive adoption of iTunes for video on a mass scale, so there’s no strong incentive for studios to buy in and get on board. Because of that, it’s been a slow and steady grind to get content into itunes, so things move in slow motion.

But just suppose Apple were to come out with another product, one that hooked up to iTunes, was a good experience to watch video on, was priced in a way that the general consumer would buy it — and sold a zillion units? Suddenly the studios are going to hear cash registers, and more importantly consumers complaining loudly about the things they can’t watch because they’re not in iTunes. And that creates incentive to cut deals to make it available, because now there’s demand (and revenue). And that demand (and revenue) puts titles in iTunes, so suddenly the iTunes/AppleTV option is a viable alternative to Netflix or pay per view.

So my argument isn’t that Apple TV had failed, but it was waiting. Waiting for something to come along and do what Apple TV alone couldn’t do, which was drive demand and sales and rentals via iTunes to generate revenue which attracts the studios which brings in the titles which generates more sales of units which an Apple TV can leverage because the consumer wants ot be able to watch their movie both on their — device — as well as their TV without buying it twice.

And it seems to me Apple just announced that device. And that device has the potential to create the environment where Apple and the studios can sit down and work out getting all of the content into iTunes for consumers to consume. And when they do, suddenly people will realize Apple has this device they sell where that content also will end up on their TV’s!

And gee, Apple just happens to have it sitting there, waiting for consumers to discover it. And because Apple, unlike the pundits, realized the market was still creating itself and was willing to be patient, it has a product there and ready to succeed when the market matures enough to allow it to. That’s a LOT easier than trying to create a product to catch a market as it explodes any day…

So if you ask me, Apple’s stupid like a fox here. It knew that sooner or later, it’d need the Apple TV. It put it out there, it learned from it, it let it help Apple figure out how to create and own the market and bootstrap the functionality they needed to do so (like video rentals, which now exist and are sitting there waiting for the tablet. That wouldn’t have happened without Apple TV being there to implement it for). And when the market starts to grow because tablet sales drive content sales whichget the studios on board which drives consumer interest (and tablet sales which drive content sales which….), Apple can introduce an updated Apple TV to take advantage of it and start the buzz and hype to push it into the success curve — and because they started the process years ago and were patient and didn’t cut off support of the device when it wasn’t an immediate insane success, they’ve made these next steps a whole lot easier for themselves…

Apple TV isn’t dead. It’s in make up waiting for the second act to begin.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at The Apple TV has not failed…. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. 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 Apple TV has not failed…

Just a few quick notes on lenses, I finally sent off my broken Tamron 28-300mm f/3.5 off to the recommended repair depot. I’ll let everyone know how fast they turn it around and what it costs and all of those sordid details. Since I wanted a wide angle (you can’t shoot christmas with a 100-400 as your widest lens!) I rented a Sigma 18-200mm from the folks at Borrowlenses.com to give it a try. My experience with Borrowlenses was frankly awesome, and I plan to continue using them in the future.

I didn’t do a lot of work with the lens and I certainly didn’t do the kind of work that would let me make “scientific” evaluations. If you want lines per inch geeking, there are places for that.

Here, just opinions. Maybe even somewhat informed (maybe not).

The reason I bought the Tamron was that I wanted a big zoom ratio and a compact footprint so I could use a single lens as a carry around street camera. It normally lives on my Canon Rebel, and my Rebel lives in the Tamrac 3385 I use as my haul-around to and from work, or in a little Tamrac 3536 I use as a city bag. For this purpose, the Tamron is a nice lens. Given my propensity to photograph small things that fly away if I move in their direction, the extra zoom oomph of being able to get to a 300mm magnification helps.

But the lens has some tradeoffs, and I’m starting to really understand the compromises using it brings. For one, I’m constantly fighting the fact that (for me) that a 28mm on an APS sensor (1.6x magnification, 44mm equivalent) just isn’t wide enough. I want wider. (WIDER! WIIIIDDDDDEEEEERRR!!! BWAHAHAHAH!); by cutting off the wide aspect to get the long aspect, I’ve limited the utility of the lens for what I’d like to do at the magnification end that is the lens’ primary purpose. that’s enough of a mistake that I found myself quietly thinking to myself that the Sigma 10-20mm f/4 lens looked intriguing…

But that really defeats the purpose of having a single lens, no? (not that I’m complaining about having more lenses!), so that made me sit back and rethink the problem from the start not as a “how do I patch what I have” but “what is the right answer?”. Renting the Sigma 18-200mm was an experiment in alternatives.

I was right, the difference between the 18mm low end and 28mm low end was significant. I much prefer the wider available angle. I also prefer the Sigma build quality. Ignoring that I broke the Tamron (hey, it happens), the Tamron has the heft and feel of a consumer lens (plastic construction, light weight) while the Sigma lens feels more “professional” — I’d call it more of a prosumer style lens. It and the other Sigma I own (the 180mm macro) both impress me with the quality of the build and their heft, they feel sturdier and stiffer and generally come across to me as more able to take the kind of banging lenses that live with me sometimes go through. The Tamron is a nice lens — but I like the Sigma lenses better. The Sigma lens seems (subjectively) crisper, but I need to also remind myself that it’s not trying to be such a mega-zoom. the two lenses aren’t directly comparable in performance or intent in simple ways. But all in all, I like the Tamron, I like the Sigma more.

But having played with the 18-200, that made me ask myself how to ‘fix’ my dilemma. Replace the tamron? Supplement it? Something else? SO MANY QUESTIONS! No easy answers.

What I decided, though, was that the idea of a “street kit” made a lot of sense and the Tamron is a good lens for the street kit, but for my “serious” kit, that lens has compromises I’m not really satisfied with; it’s not wide enough or sharp enough for things I’d like to do. So I think it makes sense to plan for an upgrade to the “serious kit” to live full time with the big lenses and make the Tamron a full time street kit lens. Since I think I’m close to buying a 7D, this seems to make sense. (yes, I’m using “seems” a lot tonight, because these plans aren’t final. your feedback welcome).

One change I’d make in buying a lens to fit this need is to do away with the mega-zoom; that causes compromises in the optics that I can accept when I’m carrying a low-profile camera around a city in a walk-about, but I’m not so happy with those compromises when I’m taking landscapes on a tripod in the middle of Yosemite. I can also go wider, but if you push the zoom on the wide side, you start forcing those compromises in the other direction (and besides, I need an excuse to BUY THE SIGMA 10-20! MORE GLASS! NEED MORE LENSES!) — so I’m considering a lens with a more “normal” zoom ratio, and one that’s got a high sharpness and quality.

I’ve been researching lenses that the photographers I follow are using, and one that seems to keep popping up is the Canon EF-S 15-85mm f/3.5 and so that seems to be my leading candidate. I need to rent it and take it out for a spin and see what I like. it gives me a tiny gap in zoom coverage (15-85, 100-400) but that’s more than acceptable to me. It’s also something I can find used if I want to. Dave Cardinal has a nice piece on the Sigma 24-70, and that looks interesting as well. If the Tamron isn’t back for my next trip, I’ll likely rent that and take it with me to try it out.

So we’ll see. No need to make this decision right away or in haste. The fun part of these challenges is that you can solve a problem in a number of different ways.

But right now, if I were to make these decisions again, I wouldn’t buy the Tamron again — I think there are better options. If I wanted to do something similar I’d use the Sigma 18-200 and give up that last ounce of zoom capability, but my general feeling now is that a better option for that street camera is the Canon G11 and not use a DLSR at all and then buy a wide angle lens just for the “serious bag” — or use the Panasonic Lumix DMC line of cameras. Laurie’s used those for years for her hockey photography because they have a great zoom and they’re compatible with the Sharks camera policies, and they really are nice units that live somewhere beyond point and shoot but aren’t quite DLSRs — but they do have two things that help them disappear from the prying eyes of the “camera hesitant”, which is they do not have removable lenses and the lenses don’t pop out far and scream “this is a serious camera” nearly as much as a DLSR, and that’s allowed her to take photos in situations where other cameras have gotten challenged. Sometimes, that’s not a bad thing to have handy…

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at A few thoughts on lenses. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. 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. A few thoughts on lenses

A weekly compendium of stuff I found I thought you’d like. If you do, let me know, so I know to find more of it for you.

• Caterina Fake: Participatory media and why I love it (and must defend it) — and while she’s absolutely correct, she also without realizing it shows the flip side of participatory media (the abuse of it), when she has to point out “Sadly, it’s true. All my archives have been taken offline so I don’t have to spend hours clearing out comment spam with horrifying subject matter. I’m sorry.” — every system needs to understand how it’s going to enable people who embrace the community values, but exclude those that only see the value as something to acquire. That’s why historic villages had walls and gates — not to keep villagers in, but to keep them safe. Sad that it’s necessary, but necessary it is.
• Mike Chen: I’ve been traded to SBN — congrats to Mike, a good move by SBN to bring him on.
• Scott Bourne: A simple primer on photographing birds in flight
• G Dan Mitchell: Photographing Death Valley
• Flickr Blog: FlickrTab — (chuq says: one thing I haven’t found a solution to that I liked was integrating my flickr photos with my facebook page. FlickrTab looks like what I’ve been looking for)
• Harold Davis: Creating HDR Images by Hand
• Brian Auer: Photo Editing with Histograms
• Hal Schmitt: Stitching Together your Panoramas using Lightroom and Bridge/Photoshop
• Kurt Repanshek: Wintering In Yellowstone — Logistics (on the list — I want to do this even more than go to Churchill for the polar bears)
• Jim Goldstein: Dawn at the Racetrack; death valley
• Scott Bourne: the HDR Wars
• Audubon Magazine: A couple of thoughts on the Magazine’s Photo Awards
• Tom Stienstra: opening gates for Sweeney to sea hike

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Stuff You’ll Like. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. 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. Stuff You’ll Like

Or the night after the Apple tablet…

I thought my view of what was coming that I posted last night was pretty darn close, if I do say so myself. With great amusement I’ve been watching the usual suspects say the usual things; the people who live inside the geekdom echo chamber forgetting there’s a real world out there, and Apple tends to build products for the real world, not the self-appointed geek universe.

A few themes within the critics caught my eye, all of them (I think) incorrect. One are the people who really want the tablet to be a replacement for a laptop, and because this isn’t that, it sucks.

This device is a new category, aimed not at the people who spend their life madly typing in their blog while watching a video AND listening to Pandora and madly checking ot see whether their deathless prose is being appropriately retweeted by their adoring followers. It’s aimed at people who — believe it or not — actually want to sit down on the couch or in their hotel room after a long day at work and…

gasp.

RELAX. They want to read their email. They want to browse a few web sites, check the scores of their hockey team, maybe read a book, maybe watch a movie. Take it easy and — do what people did 20 years ago before the velocity of life ratcheted up to the point where some people think that if you aren’t doing 30 things at once you’re lazy.

Well, hint: in the real world, where most people actually live, people do still sit down in the evening, unplug, and read a book or watch a movie. And actually feel guilty doing both at once. There’s a whole bunch of folks within the geekdom echo chamber who’d be a whole lot happier and less stressed if they figured this out, too. But they’re too busy blogging while watching a movie they’ll only half remember a month from now.

This is a device not for geeks, but for consumers. It’s for people who use devices, not hack them. It’s for people who consume content, which is actually most people, as opposed to geeks who want it to be something it wasn’t designed to be. So lots of geeks are disappointed and blogging about it, while I expect this thing will sell many, many copies, mostly to people who won’t blog about it, but merely use it.

Another theme I’m seeing tonight is the lack of flash on the device. No surprise. If you really want to know why, think back a few years when Apple was trying to get back on its feet, and Adobe made a decision not to support its video products on the Mac, and instead tried to convince its mac customers to switch to PCs. Apple’s response then was ultimately to bring out its own video products — final cut — and ultimately ate the market out from Adobe. Later, when Apple was making the conversion to the intel platform, Adobe’s enthusiasm for bringing out Photoshop and its flagship products was most noticable — by how late they were and how uninterested Adobe seemed in actually trying to help Apple succeed. So now, when Apple has these really successful platforms and Adobes wants a piece of them, and yet Apple shows no real enthusiasm or hurry to cooperate? Well, folks, payback’s a bitch, and if you only see your partners for what they can do for you today, well, don’t whine when they choose to return the favor when the shoe is on the other foot. Burn your bridges with thought, folks, because you never know when you might want them back. And they’ll remember.  Apple sure does. And wouldn’t it be great irony if Apple uses its platforms to turn Flash from a success to an also-ran by supporting HTML5 on platforms that are in enough demand that people who currently are building flash-based things end up recoding those things away from flash to support the platforms people are demanding? Just like — oh, say — Youtube just did? Hmm.

A final theme I’m seeing is the geeks defining products as successful or failure. The Apple TV is being tossed about as a failure, even though, every time I look at estimates on unit sales, it’s still outselling Tivo and has been almost since launch. Yet it failed, Tivo is what the geeks keep saying the Apple TV ought to be. Hmm. Apple could use a few more failures like that. Especially given that I agree with most of the geeks that much of the potential of the Apple TV line of products is still ahead of it. Maybe the Apple geniuses were busy on some other product line. Like, oh, maybe a tablet…

Finally is a recurring theme with some that Apple didn’t “blow them away” (and therefore, I guess, this sucks). Folks, you all need to reset your internal adrenalin meter back from 11. Some of you would take anything less than being personally tasered by Steve himself as “boring”. One word: decaf. Not all products and not all announcements have to be over the top. There merely have to be damn good products.

This one is. To me, it’s a perfect device for my mom, who lives and dies by email, yahoo, access to recipes on Food TV, wants her audiobooks and to read Stephen King and Jean Auel novels and watch the occasional movie (and Emeril). THERE is your target audience.

Me? I like the idea of having one. It won’t replace my carrying my laptop on the road, but it’ll give me something I can use while my laptop is processing photos in Lightroom or crunching away at some compile for a program I’m writing. I doubt I’d write a novel on an iPad, but I’d sure write a blog entry and catch up on email. It supplements why I need a laptop wonderfully, and means I won’t need to worry so much about bad cable TV in a hotel room or hauling books around when I travel. It’s a nice supplemental device for my life. For a traveller who’s content creation issues aren’t so — intense — this very well could replace carrying a laptop. If your job is about writing email, memos and presentations instead of Ruby, HTML and Photoshop, you’re probably already ragging your boss to get approval to get one. Or should.

Nope. This isn’t a sexy repackaging of a laptop. It isn’t a tablet-PC. it isn’t a “netbook done right”. It’s an entirely new type of device, and I think it’s going to be rather successful. now, two or three generations down, it well COULD become those things; I could see down the road these things having the potential to make Mac OS X obsolete and running whatever Lightroom becomes and doing the heavy hitting, but right now — it is what it is, and what it is is very good if that’s what you need.

I think it blows away the Kindle, and I wouldn’t be suprised if Amazon doesn’t quietly breathe a sigh of relief that this lets them get away from building devices and go back to what it’s really good at, which is distribution. And I think it effectively kills “unitaskers” like the Epson P-4000 and digital wallets. Why buy that when you can buy an iTab that does it ALSO? Maybe not for the high end user, but for most of the market, definitely.

All in all, I’m impressed. and looking forward to getting my hands on one. One thing I’m going to be curious to see is whether this thing is going to be allowed to take on the Mifi. If I could use it to wire up a wireless network to 3G in a hotel room (even if I can’t use the iTab for other things!) to handle the work to the office, that’s gravy. Then unplug the laptop for the night and use this beast for recreation (and to prepare tomorrow’s presentation for the sales meeting!)…

All you folks dissing the device, I think you’re looking at it wrong. Here’s a hint: Steve’s not stupid, and knows what real people want. And isn’t afraid to offer it. And this is, I think, it.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Some thoughts on the iPad…. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. 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. Some thoughts on the iPad…

The best laid plans… I have a bunch of blogging stacked up, none of which you’ve seen yet. Just as the New Year kicked in, so did a bug, which struck both myself and Laurie, and after a few rather grumpy days as a head cold, it headed to laurie’s chest and off camping in my ears, so I started off the new year under the weather and on deadline with both the CES announcements and our newly refreshed developer portal and blog.

Thank god for Sudafed, that’s all I can say, even though they make you sign 37 forms to get the damn pills now. I do not, for the record, recommend the sneezing, Sudafed and Starbucks Diet, but it does seem to work. After one last “battle of the bulge” over the weekend, I seem to have fought the bug off for the most part and the energy levels are returning, so the ability to string words together and have them make sense seems to be back. you really didn’t miss anything — insightful — the last week or so, anyway. Trust me.

But if you’re wondering why I’m just getting to looking back and setting goals as we roll into February, that’s why. So 2010 is off to a rousing start…

But it’s time to get back on the horse and start riding again, and I’m thinking through the next couple of months and one thing I’ve decided is it’s time for a damn vacation. I went looking, and I’ve suddenly realized that in the last

• 2009: 2 days (an extended weekend in Morro Bay for Photo Morro Expo
• 2008: 5 days for the trip to Yellowstone
• 2007: 3 days for my aborted research trip for Dare2Thrive after leaving strongmail, 5 days into the Northwest after leaving Laszlo, and 2 days for a spring trip into Yosemite
• 2006: 2 days for a christmas jaunt into Yosemite, and the 8 day summer celebration into the Northwest celebrating leaving Apple and moving on to whatever was going to be next…

The trip to Yellowstone (after spending most of the year dealing with Dad’s illness, death and the estate with my mom) seems like forever ago. Because to some degree it was. My moving to Palm was on a tight schedule so no time off, and this last year has been  an amazing year that I’ve loved just about every minute of (the minutes I didn’t love were the ones I was considering throwing myself, or someone else, off a roof…) — but it’s time for a break, so I’m starting to plan out some time off. Not sure what, or where yet, but I know I need to get in the car and take the camera and mostly unplug for a bit.

I’m guessing late february or early march. have to figure out what the work and hockey schedules are, and of course get Laurie’s thoughts and permission (shh.. I haven’t mentioned this to her yet… literally just thinking this through tonight after she’s gone to bed). The obvious ideas come to mind, which include Yosemite (too late for serious winter work(?), too early for waterfalls and WAY too early for spring and dogwood), but also to finally get to Salton sea and maybe spend time in Joshua tree and Anza/Borrego and the deserts — I had a trip planned for Salton Sea when dad got sick, and it got blown up and I’ve never gotten it rescheduled. But I’m hearing other things whispering also, whether it’s Grand Canyon or Bryce and Zion, or even shooting up the coast into the Northwest (but I’m likely to hold that off for a summer trip with Laurie…); some other venues come to mind like an extended visit to the San Diego zoo (I haven’t shot at a zoo in a while) or Disneyland or Vegas for the kitsch.

Dunno. Have to think. Have to make sure I don’t overschedule and spend too much time travelling and not enough time visiting. Maybe define a starting point and then see what happens. Right now I can definitely feel a tug between revisiting comfort zones (disneyland, yosemite) and pushing into fresh territories. I think I need to lean myself towards the latter, this feels like it’s time for some exploring.

I’m definitely open to suggestion. Feel free….

(and I think I’m going to try for a long weekend or a mid-week jaunt to Yosemite for the dogwood this year, if I can. But I’m always up for more than one trip to that place, especially in times when it’s relatively quiet. It’s been probably 15 years since I’ve visited at a time when Tioga was open…)

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at A great way to start the new year…. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. 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. A great way to start the new year…

I tend to shy away from talking about Apple much these days because of the possible conflict of interest issues, but I wanted to say a couple of things about the announcement tomorrow.

Derek Powazek sums up my — anticipations — of the product very well.

The typical run-up to the announcement, with the leakers and the guessers hyping each other into a frenzy until people start trashing the product before it’s even announced (because they’re basically tired of hearing it) is in full force. I’m glad I don’t have to deal with all of this stuff any more, except as an amused outsider. But as an amused outsider, I count myself amused, but frankly, I tuned it out days ago because it’s so over the top and silly, after a while, it just stops being interesting.

The tablet looks to be the creation of a new market segment, and I’m going to be fascinated to see how it’s positioned and how well it does — not to mention how well Apple does it. Right now, we have these broad usage capabilities:

Life in your pocket — your phone, which increasingly allows you to carry your essential stuff around without hauling a huge beast to try to manage it. That this data syncs up to other places where it’s available on your other electronic environments is great, but ultimately, this is about managing who you are and what you do in a portable format. We’ve made great strides at turning these pocket devices into information consumers as well, but the small screen makes that a set of compromises. They are also — bluntly — pretty crappy at content creation because of the compromises needed to fit in your pocket. the thought of blogging via my phone doesn’t intrigue me. The thought of writing a novel on my phone scares me.

Portable content creation — your laptop. Carry your office with you. I remember long ago when I got my first PowerMac Duo, which in many ways was a netbook 15 years before anyone thought to invent a netbook. Loved that machine, and the docks, because for the first time I could carry my life with me and turn it back into a desktop when I wasn’t mobile. I still strive for that model today, rather than keeping multiple computers and trying to keep the data in sync. Today’s laptops have enough power and a good enough screen than you really CAN turn one into a portable office with few (if any) compromises.

Desktop content creation — the iMac, the mini, the mac pros. We’ve seen this class of machine shrink out of prominence over the last few years because, frankly, laptops have replaced them for most people. Plug a laptop into a monitor and you have the best of both worlds, large screens AND portability. iMacs continue to have some popularity because there are times and situations where portability isn’t a feature (kids being a big part of that). Mac Pros exist, but are clearly a power user (or ego user) niche now; few of us really need that kind of oomph.

What’s missing here? There’s a huge class of user that’s never had a product designed specifically for them. Tomorrow we’ll see the first one.

That’s the content consumer.

Laptops are aimed at creation, they  carry a lot of “stuff” with them that are underused by a lot of people, starting with the keyboard. If your primary use of a keyboard is typing in URLs or emails, you don’t need all of the bulk and mechanics a laptop keyboard bring along (not to mention weight and power consumption and…). The iPhone model (software keyboard, etc) work fine here, but the iPhone form factor for the screen creates other compromises that make the phone tough for these people (but great for the “life in the pocket”).

The thing that kept me from buying a Kindle was simple — it’s a unitasker, and while it does it quite well (and I have the kindle software on my iPhone), I don’t want multiple devices to do the different things I want in this usage space. The reason I think the earlier attempts at PC-based tablets didn’t take off was because they were really “laptops in a tablet”, not tablets designed for content consumption — and just created a new set of compromises that most of us realized made them — compromised.

That’s where I think this tablet lies: content isn’t “books” or “newspapers”, it’s web, it’s video, it’s audio, it’s games, it’s text and content. And this device is going to be all about consuming content, and all of it in a single device.

If it is, it’s going to sell zillions. It’s going to cannibalize laptop sales to some degree, but that’s a good thing. It’s the kind of device that I have wanted for my mom, who’s primarily a consumer of infomration and doesn’t need the complexity of a Mac (much less a windows computer).

Would I buy one? Depends. I’m a content creator, and I’m rarely without my laptop. A device like this isn’t going to be optimized for the kind of things I’m doing (especially my photography, I don’t see this as a device particularly interesting for serious photography geeking), so it’s interesting only to the degree I can’t also do these things on my laptop; it’s not a replacement device, but a supplementary device. But then, I bought an Xbox 360 for gaming as a supplement to my Mac for computing, so who knows….

To the degree that this device makes using your content as painless as your phone makes managing your email/contacts/calendar, it’ll be a huge success.

One thing I’ll be fascinated to see, perhaps not tomorrow: how much of what they do on this device also ends up on my Mac. the closer they come to a “virtual tablet” on the mac (via iTunes?) the less I need one, but I can believe ultimately I’ll have one because I do like to sit down on the couch with a good book, and I’ve never really found a way to do that comfortably with a laptop.

I don’t think tomorrow’s device will solve the final problem — taking a good book with me into the bathtub for a soak. But who knows? maybe that’s a third party opportunity.

What my gut tells me: tomorrow’s announcement is going to change things significantly, is going to be hugely successful, and many people are going to trash it because they don’t get it.  This may turn out to be the biggest thing yet. And given the things that have come from Apple (and Steve) over the years, that’s saying something.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at The night before the Apple Tablet…. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. 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 night before the Apple Tablet…

I’ve been dinking with the guts of the blog a bit. There’s one big change, but you won’t see it unless you visit on a mobile phone. If you do, tell me what you think.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at updating the blog format... This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. 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. updating the blog format..

A weekly compendium of stuff I found I thought you’d like. If you do, let me know, so I know to find more of it for you.

• National Geographic: Quashing Kudzu.
• Engadget: AT&T pricing changes. If you’re an iPhone user, make sure you’re set up with your new, improved, lower prices. It probably also doesn’t hurt to review your plan and see if you can change features to save money. Same with your landline, cable, sat-TV, DSL, etc, etc etc, because the companies rarely seem to remember to give you the better rates until you remind them…
• Michael Frye: Snow. Frye now has a blog talking more about the environment than about the photography, and it looks like a real winner with some nice stories and thoughts about Yosemite.
• Audubon California expands Kelso Creek habitat protections in Kern County
• DC Birding Blog: What makes birds cooperate against predators?
• bbum: solar install on an eichler (Part 1). I love owning an Eichler — but they definitely come with challenges, the best being a house with no attic OR crawl space, meaning stringing cables is a challenge and a half. Ours fortunately doesn’t have electrical strung across the roof. We also don’t have foam roof; when we reroofed, we stripped it and had R14 rigid laid down and then tar and gravel over it, and it’s made life much nicer here. Except the garage, which turns out to be a faux savings, because the garage is now horribly cold or horribly hot depending on the season, and really should have been insulated as well. oh well, live and learn. (memo to self: ask Bbum for the name of his electrician. a guy who ‘gets’ Eichler is gold).
• Jolie O’dell: There’s no such thing as free content. (TAANSTAFL – ultimately, someone is paying for it).
• Round Robin: Godwits go Missing on Chloe Island. (hmm. maybe they’re visiting the Pier 39 sea lions)

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Stuff You’ll Like. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. 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. Stuff You’ll Like

A weekly compendium of stuff I found I thought you’d like. If you do, let me know, so I know to find more of it for you.

• Brian Auer: How to read histograms
• Michael Frye: Talking about photos. Frye has started a blog where he talks about the story of making the image. Looks to be an interesting set of discussions
• Michael Johnson: Canon 5D Mark II Price Drop…. and Why. — my first reaction; if you’re someone (like me) thinking along the lines of a new 7D body, the price difference between the 7D and the discounted mark II make this an interesting option. And perhaps this price drop might cause adjustments in the used market that bring the price of a good full-frame body even closer to the 7D. Something to keep in mind if you’re body shopping right now.
• A Photo Editor: good news in photography
• Joe McNally: Dang. (I was discussing sports with a friend the other day and trying to explain why I’ve become so uninterested in baseball, and really couldn’t articulate where my loss of interest came from. Oh, yeah. Barry Bonds. Mark McGuire. Baseball’s complaceny about steroids adn the rampant abuse because it led to lots of home runs and fan interest coming out of the work stoppage. And now the fallout as the sins come home to roost. Now I remember… Sympathy for McGuire? None. chances I’ll support him for the hall of fame? None. Interest in baseball right now? Still — basically none.
• PhotoWalkPro: new signature worthy papers from Epson. Have to try these out. I’ve really liked printing on some of the Hahnemuhle papers (especially photo rag bright white, german etching and Pearl 320), but still looking for a killer  glossy paper to fall in love with.
• Jim Goldstein: Best Photos 2009.a nice collection of “best of” resources, including mine. Some very study-worth portfolios here.
• Sean McCormick: Practical Presets (for lightroom)
• Marco Arment: Don’t be a hero. (amen. I did the same thing in my job search. Too many companies take advantage of someone’s enthusiasm and build their businesses around burning out their people by creating chronic schedule death marches, but far too often, the people who burn the candles at both ends don’t get a cookie for doing so, they get laid off. So why do we keep buying into this? This is a part of silicon valley (and tech industry) culture that the geeks have to stop accepting so willingly. There’s a time and a place for long hours and deadline crunches, but they shouldn’t be 24×7x52 environments.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Stuff you’ll like. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. 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. Stuff you’ll like

A weekly compendium of stuff I found I thought you’d like. If you do, let me know, so I know to find more of it for you.

• Tim Bray: After Branding. In 2010, you are whatever the Net says you are. Deal with it. (good advice for anyone living in the public eye online, and if you’re online, you’re in the public eye)
• Scott Bourne: Traveling? Better get a UPS account. If you ask me, the terrorists are winning here, by convincing us to destroy our transportation system FOR them.
• Lighting Essentials for Photographers: 8 Essential Sites for Emerging Professional Photographers
• Brian Auer: My Favorite Photos from 2009
• Jack Hollingsworth: Twitter Mantras from Twitter Monk
• Michael Zhang: Interview with Laura Brunow Miner of Pictory. Pictory is impressing the hell out of me so far. It looks like it could really shape how we build online publications moving forward. (“I also felt there was a need for more online publications with the care and intention of print magazines, but also the practicality of the web.” agreed!)
• Virtual Photography Studio: The Real Reason more photographers can’t break into the destination market
• Steven Snell: 10 Keys to Growth as a Designer — and all of them relevant to the photographer and most creatives.
• Active Light Photography: The only time for Yosemite
• Hal Schmitt: Basic Stitched Panorama Guidelines
• Sean McCormack: Action Keyword List
• David duChemin: Sustaining the Practice of Art
• Rick Sammon: Great Day for the Fox, not so much for the squirrel
• Rick Sammon: Become a conservation photographer in 2010
• Chase Jarvis: Create. Share. Sustain.
• Trey Ratcliff: HDR, it’s about the light
• Rick Sammon: Envision the HDR End Result in your Mind’s Eye
• Rick Sammon: Create an HDR Image Even When the Subject is Moving
• Jeff Revell: The HDR Debate: What’s All the Fuss?
• Trey Ratcliff: Just Find Some Beauty (to some degree, this is the piece that triggered much of the current HDR ‘debate’)
• Lighting Essentials for Photographers: Branding your Photography Business, a Realistic View

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Stuff You’ll Like. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. 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. Stuff You’ll Like