• 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

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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.

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

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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

• 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

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(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.

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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…

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• 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

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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…

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…

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…

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..

• 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)

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• 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.

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• 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

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1. Mike Baird
2. Ashok Khosla
3. Howard Ignatius
4. Hal Schmitt
5. Steve Berardi
6. Rick Sammon
7. James Duncan Davidson
8. Moose Peterson
9. Jerry Ting
10. Bryan Oleson

Photographers that influence my photography

1. Art Wolfe
2. John Shaw
3. George Lepp
4. Galen Rowell
5. Jim Goldstein
6. Michael Frye

Five Photographers that I’m currently studying to become better in 2010

1. David duChemin
2. Harold Davis
3. George Barr
4. David Hobby
5. Joe McNally

Ten most popular postings at chuqui.com in 2009

In 2009, 17,000 people visited chuqui.com about 35,000 times to view 49,000 pages. Overall traffic was up about 20% over the year. The ten most popular pages for 2009 are:

1. And the answer to the question is… — in which I announce I’m taking a job at Palm.
2. More than you wanted to know about backups (also see Some More Thoughts and Following my Own Advice)
3. This iPhone App is truly for the birds
4. Santa  Clara County Salt Ponds and Bay Area Birding
5. Some of my Past Fades to Black
6. Photo Links (and more photo links!) — early versions of what became “stuff you’ll like“
7. MobileMe Renewal? Yes or no?
8. Calaveras Bald Eagles (was out visiting them this weekend!)
9. Apple Drops hints about netbooks (which is only tangentally about an Apple netbook)
10. Some  more thoughts on weight (which is way overdue for some updates…)

My ten favorite posts of 2009

1. Three Rules “they” tell photographers, and why “they” are wrong
2. A teachable moment (or why I love birding even when I make a fool of myself)
3. 50 Reasons why I haven’t been blogging
4. On Paying Forward
5. Understanding the Starting Point
6. More than you wanted to know about backups (also see Some More Thoughts and Following my Own Advice)
7. In Search of Winter Birds
8. The Summer of Hockey’s Discontent
9. Some More Thoughts on Weight
10. 25 Things about me

My ten best photos of 2009

My favorite fiction of 2009

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via Final Notes on Obama’s 2009 « Whatever.

I normally avoid talking politics here, mostly because it tends to attract the loonies and trolls like the plague (and who really cares what I think, anyway?) — but John Scalzi waded in, and honestly, it deserves a “what he said”, because if I were to write about this stuff, this is what I would have written. Only not as well.

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• X-Equals: Survival kit; what keeps the studio functioning.
• Virtual Photography Studio: Three Ways to stop quitting
• Jeff Lynch: A tale of two images
• Sherry Osborne: Photography in Extreme Cold
• Brian Auer: 60 second Post-Processing Technique
• Michael Johnson: The Tenset
• Dan Mitchell: Congrats to Stephen Oachs and Aperture Academy — Aperture Academy is a new gallery and training center in Campbell, near my house. Need to go in and take a look, but their training sessions look really interesting. Reminds me of Light Photo Workshops in Los Osos, where I took the HDR class at the expo this fall — both places are teaching things I’m looking for the time (and money) to take…. Scary feeling — all the places they’re going on workshops are favorite places of mine to shoot…
• Andy Long: Capturing birds in flight
• Art Howard: Keep your sock drawer straight. (chuq: amen. not there yet, of course)
• Zack Arias: Controlling the work you show
• Moose Peterson: High Noon in the Old West
• Harold Davis: Kiss from a Rose (chuq: studio and macro work needs to be a focus of mine in 2010; Davis impresses the hell out of me with his technique)
• Barrie Smith: tips on early morning photography

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Art Wolfe: now available, “stuff” from Art Wolfe via Cafepress. a good example of one of the sets of ‘tangibles’ I think is important to bring into the mix.

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• Scott Bourne: Five reasons why photographers should build a blog rather than a website.
• Smashing Magazine: Styling HTML Lists with CSS (jCarousel looks like exactly what I want for something I’m planning)
• Gizmodo: how to overhaul your phones with google voice. Since I’m now carrying multiple phones, Google Voice has been a godsend for centralizing voicemail across them. Great overview of how to take advantage of this service…
• Lightroom Labs: Keyword Sets simplify your workflow
• Michael Frye: Digital Graduated Filters (or why I don’t carry them any more).
• Pictory: The first photo essay from Pictory is out, and it’s on San Francisco. This is just so beautifully done. Awesome.

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• You Must Shoot Every Day. You Must Carry Your Camera Everywhere
• You Must Shoot in Manual Mode (and turn off autofocus, too!)
• You must shoot early in the morning or late at night, not in the middle of the day

And they’re wrong.

Okay, they’re not completely right — cliches are cliches because they are truths spoken until you’re tired of hearing them. These are truths that aren’t really true any more because they need to be updated to the current state of the art in photography. And so I will:

You Must Shoot Every Day. You Must Carry Your Camera Everywhere

This rule has a good intent — to get you in the habit of taking photographs and learning to see with your camera. In the day when people shot film and sent their film off to labs to be developed and printed, this rule mostly made sense.

Today, the photographer is also the lab; to be a really good photographer, you have to not only be strong behind the camera, you have to be strong behind the monitor; you have to work on both your capture skills and your processing skills — and because of this, telling people that they have to shoot images every day is a bad idea. It sets the mental mindset that the capturing of images is what matters, not the creation of the best possible images (this is, by the way, my only possible criticism of The Best Camera, and it’s a minor one as its strongest).

What we should be telling photographers is not to shoot images every day, but to work on their craft every day — although even that bothers me, because if you turn this into a grind, you’re going to turn people off on it. Weekends exist for a reason, and you shouldn’t be setting tasks that remove the joy from it.

What this rule is really trying to do is create the habit of thinking and acting like a photographer: that means spending the time to improve your skills and learning to see and think through your photography, to build the habits that allow you to be ready when a photo opportunity happens — and have your gear handy so you can capture it.

And THEN go back to the digital lab and create the best possible image out of that capture.

The core of the rule is good: becoming a better photographer takes time and commitment, you must be willing to invest in improving yourself, and that takes time behind the camera — but it also now takes time in the digital darkroom, and in many ways, the darkroom can be more important to taking that step from “pretty good” to “wow” as the capture.

Don’t just carry your camera around and take random pictures of random things and think that’ll make you a better photographer. Honor the intent of the rule, which is to commit the time and energy to your craft, both in the field and in the lab. Time spent taking pictures outside of your comfort zone and of subjects you don’t normally shoot is a good idea, but spending time honing your photoshop skills is at least important, and honestly, I think it’s more important to shifting the quality of your images to that next level.

You Must Shoot in Manual Mode (and turn off autofocus, too!)

The intent of this rule is good — if you just stick your camera in “P”rogram mode and let it make the decisions, it will save you (mostly) from taking really crappy pictures (mostly), but it will also prevent you from taking really great pictures, because it’s going to navigate the capture into the safe, conservative areas. As good as digital imaging is getting these days, no camera can make decisions that lead to the best possible images — not without help.

But the idea that photographers have to shoot in manual mode comes from the days when cameras were stupid; that’s far from the situation now, and if you follow this advice blindly you will be hurting your ability to take the best possible images because you will be cutting yourself off from taking advantage of the intelligence being built into modern digital cameras.

The more I read the writings of today’s top pros and the more I hear them speak, the more I realize that THEY are spending less and less time in manual mode. This rule isn’t wrong, but it needs to be updated.

The core of this rule is this: you can’t be a great photographer on autopilot. If you don’t let the camera control the capture, it will not try for a superior image but to avoid a disasterous one; you’ll get mediocrity. This is less true with every generation of digital camera coming out, but ultimately, it’s about who’s in charge.

If you let the camera be in charge, your images will be “safe” and safe images are rarely great.

This does NOT mean you have to shoot in manual, though. What it means is you have to spend the time and energy to learn what the camera can do — all of it. And then take advantage of what it can do and adjust it to make it do what you want. That doesn’t mean shoot manual, but it does mean know WHEN to shoot in manual. It also means knowing when to shoot in Aperture mode, or Shutter mode, or using exposure compensation or bracketing.

It means knowing when to adjust white balance and when to leave it alone, it means knowing how to take advantage of autofocus and when to shut it off and use manual focusing. It means understanding aperture and depth of field, it means knowing the noise characteristics of your camera so you use the proper ISO setting to eliminate that noise — or accentuate it.

There are a lot of capabilities in that camera body — learn them and learn how to take advantage of them. If you are shooting in manual mode, you are making your job harder than it has to be, and in fact, you aren’t putting yourself in control of the camera.

“shooting manual” is the code for telling the camera what to do. Today, there are many ways to do that beyond turning off the camera’s brain and doing it all yourself. If you aren’t taking advantage of them, you are hurting your ability to create the best possible images. In some ways, this makes your job more complex, because there are more variables and options to learn and consider. In practice, once you understand what those options can do and how to take advantage of them and once you learn the quirks of your specific model of camera, many things open up and your life as a photographer becomes easier.

What’s important is that you teach yourself how to take advantage of and control the features, so they don’t control you, and to do it so it becomes part of your habits of creating good images. It’s not enough to be able to think about how to take the next image, you have to just know and do it — otherwise, images will be lost before you get the camera set up.

It’s not about manual mode any more, it’s about not being in that green P of Program mode, and it’s about knowing how to adjust how the camera thinks so it does what you want, not what it thinks you want. Once you and the camera learn to think together, though, you’ll make many beautiful images.

Me, personally? I spend 95% of my time in Aperture mode, and 90% of the adjustments I might have used manual mode for five years ago I do via exposure compensations instead.

You must shoot early in the morning or late at night, not in the middle of the day

This is “the golden hour” rule; that time just before and after dawn, and before and after sunset when the light when you avoid the worst of the glare and shadowing and the oblique angle of light brings out the colors of your subject.

The reality is this: the golden hour can definitely enhance photos. If you can shoot then, do so. I certainly do. That’s assuming you don’t get up at 4AM to find your dawn shooting fogged out or a lack of any cloud cover giving you — well, blah, boring dawn sunrises.This also presumes THAT YOU CAN re-arrange your schedule into the golden hour.  If you are a photographer who isn’t a full-time photographer, that’s not necessarily easy and sometimes not possible.

I take a different view. For many of us, simply being able to go out and shoot is sometimes a challenge. I’m lucky to get to the Grand Tetons, spending a week of dawns and sunsets there waiting for the “right moment” is practically speaking impossible; in fact on my yellowstone trip, we got down to the Tetons for a partial day starting mid-morning. If you follow the “golden hour” rule, I might as well have not brought the camera.

Yeah, right. Fat chance.

So I turn this rule on its ear. It’s not about shooting only during those golden hours. Instead, I think of it in terms of what can I shoot that is compelling when I’m able to shoot. As it turns out, I think my Teton landscapes turned out pretty well, but there were other shots I was hoping for — especially the fall foliage aspens — where it simply didn’t work; in fact there was only one shot I took I felt worth keeping:

And that’s the key to rethinking the “Golden Hour” rule: don’t lower your standards because of the timing of your photography; instead, find the photography that works given the timing. Maybe that means going into the trees and shooting macro instead of landscape, or focusing on animals or birds instead of trees or mountains. Maybe it’s using a different filtration to cut the glare, or a different look to the location, such as my “blue” shot where I went for the distant hills and emphasized the blue haze instead of fighting it. For my Mt. Moran shots, I not only added both a polarizer and an ND, which allowed me to go with a slow shutter speed, which cut much of the ripples and accentuated the reflection — moving the emphasis away from the mountain with the fairly flat lighting. Is it a killer photo? It’s not Galen-Rowell-Alpenglow killer, but I rather like it (although I overdid the sky in post and want to fix that some day, a bit too much polarizer), and I really like the blue photo as probably my favorite of the day’s shoots.

I think they hold their own, even if they were taken mid-day in the glare of a full sun. And it sure is better than not taking the photos. This rule teaches the mindset that if you aren’t doing it “by the book”, you might as well bother. And some days,  that’s true. If I’d visited this spot in mid-June instead of late september, the lighting would have been a lot harsher and it probably wouldn’t have been worth pulling out the camera.

Which is my point. What I don’t like about this rule is that it’s defeatist. My rule is different; it’s that you should pull out the camera whenever you can, and then go find the pictures that are worthy of being taken. This rule is, in fact, in direct conflict with the first rule, which says you should be shooting every day, because it’s telling you not to shoot unless conditions are perfect.

Me? I shoot whenever I CAN shoot, given I have a “real” job and a life and all of the complexities that keep me away from the camera. I’ve been trying, frankly, to get to Mono Lake for three years now and still haven’t seen the damn thing, much less photographed it. Maybe in 2010. Think I’m going to only take the camera if I can do the golden hour dance? Fat chance. If I can get there, I’ll have my gear in hand and find shots worthy of being there for.

Or maybe not. Some days it happens. But as in my Teton’s trip, if I’d followed the common wisdom of only shooting in the edges of the day and avoiding the glare of mid-day, I’d have zero shots of the Tetons. I broke the rules going for my aspen foliage shots, too, and while I threw out almost all of the shots, I kept one, which is better than ZERO.

So here’s why these three rules are wrong: it’s not about shooting bad shots every day just to be shooting, it’s about working on your craft on a regular basis to become a better photographer, but not working so much you grow to hate doing it. It’s not about “shooting manual”, it’s about being in control of your camera and bending it to your will to get the image you see, not the image the camera wants to hand you. And it’s not about the Golden Hour (although, dammit, if you can do it, do it!), because if you wait until conditions are perfect to shoot images, you own’t shoot very often. It’s about thinking about how, when you do pull out the camera, to take images that are up to your standards.

The “Golden Hour” rule really bothers me, because there’s an implicit “it’s okay to not bother” approval given. It’s never okay to not try; it’s okay to fail, it’s okay to throw out 100% of the day’s shoot if what you try didn’t work — but it’s never okay to not try.

So here are my three rules, the ones I think “we” should be telling new photographers instead of these three rules:

• Commit yourself to being the best photographer you can be. Spend as much time as you can with a camera in your hand, but spend what time you have on practicing creating the best photo you can at that time.
• Learn as much about your gear as you can, and understand how to use the capabilities to create the image you want to create.
• There’s always something worthy of a photograph if you choose to look for it. It is better to take photos at a “bad” time than take no photos waiting for a “good” time. When you take photos, take the best possible shots available rather than bad photos of what you planned to shoot. Flexibility and an open mind wins out over giving up.
  

I mean, seriously, who in their right mind does bird photography in a white-out fog, anyway? Wouldn’t it be better to head for the Starbucks and wait for better weather?

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Three rules “they” tell new photographers — and why “they” are wrong.. 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. Three rules “they” tell new photographers — and why “they” are wrong.

Therefore, we should focus on just some initial goals that will work right now, and keep in mind that these will need to be constantly tweaked and worked on as the spammers evade the measures.

• If given the choice between restricting free speech and preventing unwanted communication, free speech always wins.
• The system should increase the quality of discourse for any project, regardless of human language used.
• It should never give a small group the ability to hide communications from others.
• It should be implementable and not have high hosting costs.
• It should not rely on a dedicated person’s constant intervention.
• It never gates email through system before sending it, but rather allows initial emails with moderation after.
• It should use information from people’s rating habits to classify them as “ratings trolls” to prevent abuse.

With those goals in mind I’ve teased out two potential list quality strategies that might work.

via Proposals For Librelist Moderation Strategies.

Someone I work with turned me on to Librelist because they knew me interest and history with mailing list systems, and I find it interesting that some folks have decided it’s time to rethink the mailing list again.

They’re right. When I faded to black on the mailman project, it was at least in part because many of us felt that mailing lists were a technological dead end, and that deliverability issues because of anti-spam systems made the “personal mailing list” an increasingly difficult thing to accomplish.

Both are — for the most part — true. I certainly would never run my own mail server again, because the advantages of doing so are far outweighed by the time and hassle of trying to manage deliverability and reputation to make sure mail it sends gets accepted, and the constant onslaught of incoming spam turns them into a permanent infinite time sink. That’s why I either retired our lists or moved them to Yahoogroups (which I personally think is a pretty good system).

But there’s still room here to rethink the concepts and the Librelists seem interested in trying, and I think that’s great. Email and mailing lists are far from dead — but instead of stand alone delivery tools, they really shine as part of an integrated web strategy; Yahoo groups is a nice first generation of that, although there’s a lot more Yahoo could do if they decided to.

Message moderation really breaks down into two big problems:

• “Subscribe spam” where spammers sign up to the list to spam it.
• “Member warfare” where existing, approved members get into fights and they escalate into unacceptable territory.

The first is really simple to solve: new members are moderated, and messages aren’t posted until reviewed by someone to vet their content. Simple implementation; Yahoo Groups does it today, and on the lists I still manage, it works well to keep the spammers at bay. The way I manage it is all members are moderated until their first post. if their first post is acceptable, I turn off the moderation bit. To minimize delays in propogation of new member messages, simply choose a moderator pool large enough to guarantee held messages get reviewed and approved in a timely manner — you could even make that moderator pool all members in good standing if you want, because all you really need is someone you’ve trusted to post vetting that someone new is trusted to post.

Member warfare is trickier. I hesitate to call it trolling because the pure troll is a subset of the larger issue of two (or a small group of) people getting pissed off and going at it. A troll is simply one person going off on the rest of the list.

I’m more and more convinced the answer here are reputation systems, where over time a user’s membership in a group is used to define their abilities and restrictions. The longer a member is in the group in good standing, the more often they contribute material, the higher their reputation goes and the more the can do and the more sway they have on the decisions of the reputation engine. You can tweak the details of the algorithm almost any way you want, but if you define it in terms of “how long they’re a member” and “constructive contribution to the community”, you can come up with a metric on how valuable that member is to the community, and then use that to rank that member’s contributions and recommendations.

Here’s one rough view of how to build this. Please note that I firmly believe karma rankings are private and users have no way to see what their ranking is or compare it to others, except in really broad user categories (“member”, “senior member”, “top contributor”, “advisory board member”). As soon as you create a list of any form, you will attract people who see it as something they can game, and so they will.

User Karma is a value between 0 and 1, which starts at 0.5. Every time a user contributes to the system (a posting, a reply, a moderation recommendation, etc), the number gets bumped by some value. How much the value is incremented or decremented depends on how it’s rated by other users — so if User A posts a message, User B flags it as spam, but 80% of the membership feel that was a bad decision, User B’s karma is reduced in future decisions, they lose influence. Over time, the system self-corrects by giving increased influence of those who’s decisions match the community consensus and reduced influence to those who’s postings and recommendations don’t match up well.

The system can then choose whether to accept or flag for moderation a posting based on a poster’s karma score. You could potentially reject outright users that have karma scores below some value, or allow other members to choose not to see messages by users with karma scores below some value. Over time, users who are disruptive to the community will get karma’ed into the moderation queue (or out the door), and users who are seen as top contributors will have stronger influence.

My goals:

• A system like this can be built nicely with a good SQL backend and a bit of horsepower. I’ve actually done a detailed design and schema on this before, and it’s a fascinating thing I’ve always wanted to implement.
• It enables the power of individuals to police themselves.
• It limits the ability of an individual to harass or cause problems.
• It doesn’t lend itself to people playing the game of gaming the system by not exposing the details of the system (slashdot karma whores need not apply).
• Trolls get edited out of the system because the community will quickly recognize them for what they are and trash their karma, causing their postings to disappear to the bottom of the list.
• Cliques and Mafias have to be large to influence the results significantly. You don’t completely avoid the clique/mafia problem, but you can severely limit it’s ability to wreak havoc.
• It doesn’t require a lot of manual handholding or babysitting. Admins end up stepping in only in extreme cases.
• Because trolls tend to get edited out of the system quickly and automatically, they tend to go elsewhere because without feedback and controversy, they wither and die. And by editing them out of the system quickly, you avoid the whiplash and fighting that happens when people start fighting with the trolls and the wars break out.

Weaknesses:

• Any community tends to turn into an echo chamber. Automated systems like this encourage this because “different thinking” tends to get rated down.
• That’s usually a lesser evil to letting the trolls run wild.
• To my knowledge, nobody’s ever solved the problem of the conflict between the group-mind reinforcing the echo chamber and allowing the free thinkers to poke at the community’s comfort level by pushing them to think about things that make them uncomfortable. One person’s rebel is another person’s troll, and that’s not solvable in real life, much less in automated life like this…

These techniques are all based on (or stolen from) things that are in use around the net, with Amazon’s review feedback being one I really respect; while trying to avoid the pitfalls I’ve seen around the net (yes, I’m going to keep bashing on Slashdot’s karma system, it’s way too easy to game and always has been). It also (I believe) avoids the nasty politics that have made Digg a bit of a pesthole. And it’s also pretty lightweight and low-key, or at least it should be. The implementation details will be crucial, as will be tuning how the karma values adapt…

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Proposals For Librelist Moderation Strategies. 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. Proposals For Librelist Moderation Strategies

When the winter birds arrive, it’s time for some special photography. Special and sometimes challenging. For me, the special winter bird is the Sandhill Crane, which winters in various locations along California’s central valley.  We also get large numbers of geese, including Snow, Ross’s and the Greater White-Fronted as well as our dear friend, the Canada Goose (aka “Flying Pig”), as well as a few zillion ducks.

But it’s the Cranes that I find most fascinating and challenging to watch and to capture. This is my third winter photographing in the refuges in the central valley, and this is the first year I’ve really gotten photos of the Sandhill Cranes I like:

It was also the first opportunity I’ve had to get some really good shots of the greater white-fronted goose, because at Los Consumnes I ran into a small flock that was close to the trails and not overly freaked at having people nearby.

So by all accounts, the trip was a success. When I was at Merced I got some nice flock shots, but to date, getting up close and personal with Sandhill cranes has been a real challenge, especially since I’m only shooting at about 400mm (plus crop factor) and not someone who carries around one of the 500/600/800mm behemoths with me. Anyone who wants to donate a 500mm lens to the cause, feel free to drop me email…

What you don’t see if you browse through my flickr sets from the merced and lodi/galt trip is how many images got thrown away….

I ended up throwing out every image taken at Woodbridge Road and Isenberg Crane Refuge because they were flawed. Every damn one.

When you go through your day’s shoot, one part of the processing workflow is rejecting dings. All photographers have dings, and I’ve found as my eye has matured my percentage of dings actually goes up, because I’m fussier about what I keep than I used to.

When you’re editing your photos and tossing out the dings, do you ever sit down and analyze why they’re dings? understanding what’s failing helps you understand the weaknesses in your technology and technique, and through that learn how to improve yourself as a photographer. Photos aren’t “magically” bad, they’re bad for a reason, and a little analysis and introspection can help you understand how to make better pictures.

The first time I raelly sat down and analyzed my failures in detail instead of just tossing them was during a winter trip to Yosemite. Yosemite Falls had some interesting ice formations, and about every 20 minutes, chunks of ice would break loose and create an ice fall — I spent a wonderful couple of hours watching and shooting.

And 99% of the images were crap. unusable. Almost a “toss the camera in the river” moment, because I had no idea why, but I sat down and started going over the dings in detail looking for insight, but after about 30 minutes, I came to realize what I was seeing was camera shake — despite being locked down on a tripod like a good photographer does. It was one of the first times I’d done winter photography, and while I did most of it right, I neglected to use a remote shutter, and it was cold, so I was wearing gloves, which were thick enough that handling the camera and pushing the shutter button was causing me to bounce the camera around, causing motion blur; what finally caught my eye was that the blur was vertical — artifacts were in focus, but elongated.

I’m very good at using a remote shutter release now, and this is frankly one of those things where if you’re used to hand-holding a camera and shooting moving things, and you shift to tripod work shooting relatively static things (especially through ND filters for motion blur) you have to rethink your technique, because what makes it possible to freeze a goose in mid-air also protects you from motion blur and camera shake by freezing the motion of the camera; with really slow (10-30 second) exposures minor shake issues tend to disappear as well, but when you get in that middle ground around 1/4 second, it can be brutal. And the first time it bites you, it’s probably going to be a big surprise…

And that’s part of what happened to me last weekend. I made a couple of mistakes in my technique, both of them quite avoidable. The first was immediately obvious on edit: it was brutally cold (36 degrees) on site when I got there, and what was I doing? Driving around in my nice warm car with the heater turned up, rolling down the window and doing the car-blind thing taking photos of sandhill cranes, through a lens that immediately dewed up with condensed moisture when the nice cold air hit it from outside. oops.

My other problem? It was early morning, heavily overcast (and cold). I’m shooting at 400ISO, about as fast as I want to push the 30D, and I’m shooting my 300F4 plus a 1.4x, for 420 F5.6 before crop factor. And in the low light, I’m seeing shutter speeds of 1/250 to 1/400. It’s going to be tough getting really sharp images at that speed handholding that lens under the best of circumstances, and in this case, I was sitting in a running car, meaning the entire foundation of my shot was vibrating underneath me, and I was facing forward and shooting out the passenger window, meaning my ability to stabilize the lens was lousy. Bad shooting hygiene on a number of levels.

My worst mistake here? Not reviewing the early shots and catching the mistakes in the field. That’s why tools like the HoodLoupe exist and why I carry one in the bag with me. You can chimp this problem in the LCD, but I find it much better to use the loupe to get a good view of an image without glare. Only in this case, I just chimped and missed the problems until I got home.

In retrospect, pushing to ISO 800 and accepting a bit more noise would have helped, but being more careful about holding the lens, or being more persistant about shifting the shot to the driver side and using a beanbag on the doorframe would have helped a LOT. As would have being less interested in warm than good photography. And in this case, I forgot my gloves and was wearing a jacket that wasn’t heavy enough for the weather — don’t neglect the details of comfort, because they can make or break a trip; and the condensation issue would have gone away if I wasn’t trying to keep from freezing my fingers off between shots…

These are all learning tools if you choose to make them so. Was the trip a failure? Far from it; I did get some nice shots of the cranes, and I got some really good shots of the geese, and even if i wish I’d gotten more (and better) shots, there’s always next time. And now I have a better feel for what I need to do to shoot well in those kind of field situations.

And that’s never a bad thing; and there’s always next trip.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at In search of winter birds…. 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. In search of winter birds…

I actually just had a quick random question about your Contact Us page on chuqui.com

I agree about not putting a phone number on a personal or small business site unless you are prepared for the idiot factor.

Since yourself and of course myself too are all too familiar with the world of spammers I was wondering why you don’t obfuscate or somehow protect your mailto: link?

It’s a serious question, as I am actually wondering if you do want to see how much spam will come to it and which types of spam?

good question, complicated answer… Part of it is that my email addresses have been “out there” for so long — I’ve owned plaidworks.com since 1995, for instance — that I assume I’m on every spam list in the universe, because, from what I can tell, I am. So why hide when it’s too late already?

I also think those obfuscators are fake-security. Anything you can build programmatically, they can unbuild programmatically. All they have to do is care enough to try. They really don’t fix things, but they make you feel better, and over time, they get compromised — so you add complexity to things and in the long run, it doesn’t really solve the problem. Or it does, for a while, but how do you know when it stops working?

I don’t see any purpose in having an arms war with someone who can out-gun you from day one. I’d rather put my time into useful things.

So here’s what I do:

I hire someone else to worry about it.

I don’t believe it’s possible for an individual to “win” a way with the spammers. Or even “break even”, or even stick with “moral victories” for long. Even if I could, I’d much rather put my time and energy into other things.

So that means having your email hosted by someone who does have the resources to fight spam. I currently have three email hosts: gmail/google, mobileme/Apple, and my personal ISP (plaidworks.com/chuqui.com). Of the three, the personal ISP has the most leak-through, but they honestly do a good job and I have no complaints, given the complexity of the task.

Apple/Mobileme uses Brightmail for filtering (unless things have changed), and Google uses Postini, which they bought a few months after I turned down a job at Postini to work for Strongmail instead. Both groups have organizations individuals can’t hope to do better than (IMHO), no matter how much the geeks think they can “better mousetrap” the problem. My experience shows it to be a situation with rapidly diminishing returns for constantly increasing resource commitments.

So let the experts handle it. Then, realize it’s never going to be 100% perfect, and don’t get your knickers in a knot when it really IS imperfect. A few pieces of spam sneaking through won’t kill anyone; the stress you get spazzing out over the spam just might.

Right now my final mailbox lives on gmail, because it works best with my webos/Pre phone. When I was living on an iPhone, I used MobileME’s mail server. Depending on where I live, I have the other servers set to auto-forward to the final repository, and everything works pretty well.

In reality, the anti-spam aspects of email work pretty well now if you’re involved with a mail host that has their act together. Many corporate environments don’t. Most geeks fighting this battle on their own don’t (and complain about it loudly, so I think the general view is it’s a lot LESS solved than it is). Living on a mail host run by pros costs a few bucks (well, it doesn’t on gmail, but you get ads. I would happily pay a few bucks to do away with them..) but I’m a lot more worried about spending time than money in most cases.

Things like mail obfuscators never really worked well; they might have been ignored by spammers, but if the spammers decided they were worth investing in cracking, they got cracked. Very few geeks who installed them actually did any kind of scientific testing on how well they worked, they noticed no spam in their boxes for a few days and declared victory. A month later? three? six? Compared to non-obfuscated control addresses?

shrug. very little science here. Including myself. What science I do have is a couple of years old and pretty thin as well, so I don’t declare myself an expert, but when I did experiment, I just didn’t see anything worth the time investment, not compared to just putting my email on a server where a staff was in charge of solving the problem for me.

The proper place to solve the spam problem is on the incoming connection; even if you do obfuscate, all it takes is one mistake to leak, or someone else to leak it FOR you (and I found those leaks everywhere when I was tracking this stuff; painfully sad) to require having to do the incoming filtering as well. If you have to do that anyway, isn’t the proper answer to focus on doing that better and not do things that ultimately don’t really help solve the problem?

My bottom line: you aren’t going to keep email addresses away from the spammers. Trying to do so is a false security solution, and ultimately a waste of time and energy. Instead, it’s keeping spam out of the incoming email stream, and if you do that well, you don’t need to worry about the addresses leaking. So I don’t.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Protecting mailto links (my advice: don’t). 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. Protecting mailto links (my advice: don’t)

Oh well. it’s going to have to go off for repair. I’m tempted to open it up myself, but I think I’ll restrain myself and let the experts fix it. But this leaves me with a little problem — my widest lens is my 100-400; not a good lens for family photos for christmas.

So I think I’m going to rent; I have to decide what to take with. My as well use the time as an excuse to scout the replacement, or at least potential.

Do I like this lens? Absolutely. It fit exactly the needs I defined and wanted when I bought it. It’s a bit soft at 300mm, but that was expected and for my use is acceptable. I wanted a general “carry around” lens with a wide range that wasn’t too large and bulky and “obvious” — something I could put on the Rebel XT and carry around with me on a day to day basis with flexibility, but without screaming EXPENSIVE CAMERA everywhere I went.

It fit that role perfectly; now, if only I spent more time outside of my cube where I could take advantage of having a camera with me… (a quick hint to computer geeks with cameras, make your next computer bag a camera bag with room for your laptop. I replaced my laptop backpack with a Tamrac 3385 and I love it.

Having said that, would I but the Tamron lens again? No. Not because it broke, not because of any flaw with the lens itself, but because I’m finding there’s one aspect of it that I’d do differently. it’s not wide enough. I was too worried about getting the extra magnification in the zoom (the bird photographer in me) and not enough about the other side of the zoom range.

So if I were to do this over again, I’d choose a wider lens with a shorter maximum zoom range, because it fits the rest of my gear better. When I’m out shooting I usually hit a point where I want something wider than I have, and while the Sigma 10-20mm is on my list to get, I’ve come to think a better “street lens” for me would be in the 20-200 range instead of the 28-300, and my initial thought there is the Sigma 18-200mm f/3.5-6.3, although I haven’t tested it yet. So maybe that’s what I’ll rent and see if I like it…

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at I guess I’m a real photographer now…. 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. I guess I’m a real photographer now…