October « 2009 « Photographs, Photographers and Photography

October 31, 2009

The Oakland Bay Bridge

Filed under: Photographs — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:31 am

An engineering marvel.

While it lacks the fame of its neighbor, the Golden Gate, the Oakland Bay Bridge is, if anything, a greater engineering marvel. Sporting a double deck it has a far greater span and carries more traffic daily than the Golden Gate, if with less drama. Both were completed in the mid-1930s at the height of the Great Depression and probably should be repaired right about now by putting some of those who recently lost their jobs in construction to work.

G1, kit lens @ 24mm, f/4.8, 1/800, ISO 100

Snapped from the Embarcadero, the toning and vignette were added in Lightroom 2.

Comments (0)

October 30, 2009

X-Rite Eye-One Display 2 colorimeter

Filed under: Displays — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:30 am

It just works!

A while back I sold my Monaco Optix screen profiling colorimeter in dismay at its inability to properly profile my iMac’s screen for good color matching with prints from the HP DesignJet 90 large format printer. Further, I have abandoned my 24″ iMac which was on the verge of failure, replacing it with a MacPro and two Dell 2209WA monitors with far better adjustment controls.

Since then I have profiled by eye but it’s been a bit of a hit and miss affair, and gets pretty tedious after a while. Monitors drift over time so they need to be re-profiled occasionally.

After some online research, the decision to get a new colorimeter came down to the Pantone Huey Pro ($80 at Amazon) or the much costlier X-Rite Eye One Display 2 ($201). My ill fated Monaco Optix and both these two devices are made by the same company – X-Rite – which makes a host of other color measurement and profiling tools.

Three things pointed me to the X-Rite device – one was the excellent review at TFT Central; the second was the fact that Martin Evening, whose book on Lightroom I strongly recommend, uses one. And, finally, the Huey Pro has so many simply awful reviews on Amazon that I decided that life wasn’t worth the aggravation of saving $120 for a compromised device.

Once you migrate to two displays as I have, you will quickly find that any difference in color rendering between the two will drive you up the wall. A professional quality colorimeter is the answer. Before starting profiling, turn off any screen saver to avoid having it kick in part way through the process.

The software, which comes on a CD, installed quickly on my MacPro and for the first pass I used the quick method which does not permit user adjustments of display contrast, brightness and the red, green and blue channels. While the printed instructions are cursory in the extreme, the on screen guide provided by the software was all I needed – I’m running this with Snow Leopard 10.6.1. I use two Dell 2209WA displays which have a broad range of user adjustments but I thought it would be interesting to try the ‘quick and dirty’ approach first, my manual efforts having failed to provide a half decent match between the colors rendered by the two monitors.

The software installs quickly and instructs you to place the puck, with its suction cups, on the display. As the thought of suctioning anything to the delicate surface of an LCD display fills me with terror, I simply angled the display back a few degrees and let gravity take its course, like so:

Eye One Colorimeter puck in place

Suction cups you definitely do not want to use on your LCD panel.

To force the software to read the left or right display you have two choices. The first, which is dead wrong, is to switch the cables plugged into your graphics card. It’s wrong because you are assuming that the profiles of the two outlets are identical, which is impossible given normal manufacturing tolerances. The right way to do this is to go to System Preferences->Displays->Arrangement and drag the menu bar to the display you wish the software to profile. It will appear on the display to which you have dragged the menu bar.

System Preferences->Displays->Arrangement. In this example, with the white menu bar dragged to the right, the right hand monitor will run the X-Rite software for profiling. To profile the left monitor, drag the white bar to the left.

From starting the process through generation of the display profile took all of 5 minutes on my first monitor using the basic method, though I did take the precaution of turning the displays on some 30 minutes ahead of time to allow them to stabilize. The Dell 2209WA seems particularly poor in this regard and needs quite a while to stabilize. I profiled the second screen in under 4 minutes.

The software can send you a periodic profiling reminder – the choices are none, 1, 2, 3, or 4 weeks. This makes sense as all monitors drift with age. I set mine for four weeks – whether that is often enough time will tell. Click here for the first four week update.

Here’s a photo of the two displays side by side after calibration – close, but you can see the difference. Having made a note of the names assigned by Eye One to the two profiles, I went to System Preferences->Displays and selected the appropriate one for each display. OS X does a really nice job of supporting dual displays and presents the user with a profile chooser for each.

Two profiles selected – one for each display

This first quick pass was very encouraging and presented a closer match between the two displays than I had managed with any amount of manual effort with those frustrating front panel switches. The quickest way to gauge the accuracy of the match is to drag a photograph with flesh tones of someone you know so that it splits across both displays. All I had to do was reduce the brightness on one display a tad and the match was fairly close, and certainly better than I had managed trying to do this by eye.

So now, getting ambitious, I decided to try the Advanced mode, as used by Martin Evening and explained in his book on pages 230-233. This requires the user to adjust Contrast, Brightness and Red/Green/Blue during the calibration process – options largely unavailable to buyers of Apple’s displays, whose LCD panels are made by the same company making Dell’s – LG Electronics in Taiwan. Apple Cinema displays (and all their other computers with built in displays) only allow the adjustment of Brightness.

The Eye One comes with an Ambient Light Attachment which clips on the base of the Eye One and measures the light falling on the screen – mine measured at 6500K and 970 Lux on the right display – I work in a bright room by noon light. The clips on mine were far too tight but a few moments with a fine file applied to the attachment’s three retaining tabs fixed that. My left monitor, which is slightly more shaded, came in at 6400K and 815 Lux. The Ambient Light Attachment, if left in place, has the additional advantage of protecting the device’s sensors when the colorimeter is stored in your desk drawer. Reusing the maker’s packaging is anything but easy and, in the event, unnecessary.

Eye-One with Ambient Light Attachment in place.

The Advanced mode takes full advantage of the Contrast, Brightness and RGB controls on the Dell. The process takes 20 minutes per display and here are my results:

Dell 2209WA settings after Advanced calibration

The Xrite result after profiling using the Advanced method

A couple of points. As you can see there are significant differences between my two Dell 2209WA displays, both bought at about the same time. The Right one had to have Brightness reduced to 0 and I still could only get Actual Luminance down to 140.3 – Martin Evening states that that is the maximum you would ordinarily use for an LCD display. My Right display is visibly brighter for a given Brightness setting than the left – witness that the Left display is set to 18 versus 0 for the Right. Gamma is set at 2.2, which is the PC standard. If you use the Apple standard of 1.8 your pictures will look too dark on 95% of the world’s computers, all of which run Windows and use 2.2. Finally the lowest luminance of 0.2 speaks to the outstanding rendering of blacks by the Dell monitor.

In practice, because I like a really bright display (my eyesight is not the greatest) I simply increased the Brightness on both monitors by 30 to 48 and 30, respectively, from 18 and 0. That works for me and the color match is unaffected. If my ambient lighting were dimmer I would simply turn brightness down on both displays.

The Contrast setting of 100 for both places the calibrator dead center to where the software dictates.

Color variations are low (look at the R, G and B settings) but noticeable if not adjusted, and can be fine tuned with exquisite accuracy using the X-Rite software and Dell controls, which make a just a wonderful combination in this regard. My Eye One software version is 3.6.1 – Martin Evening used 3.6.2. The current version is 3.6.3 and claims Snow Leopard compatibility, though I have had no issues using 3.6.1 with Snow Leopard version 10.6.1. I have also downloaded 3.6.3 from X-Rite (who may well have the world’s slowest file server – it takes ages to download) and it works every bit as well, but seems no different.

So how do the two displays compare after calibration using the Advanced method?

Absolutely dead on identical to my eyes. Well worth the additional effort involved using the Advanced method. This is money very well spent.

Users who are in the habit of processing and printing their pictures under various light conditions (say by noon daylight and by incandescent light in the evenings) may like to generate display profiles for each set of lighting conditions. This will be important for the best print/screen matching. In this case, the Brightness, Contrast and RGB settings for each lighting condition should be noted and input when profiles are switched in System Preferences->Displays->Color.

I have lost count of the number of times that I have read ‘experts’ pontificate how you should always look at your prints in 6500K light and how your work room should emulate that color temperature with special light bulbs. This, of course, is pure nonsense. If color fidelity is your goal, you must adjust for the light conditions in which the print will be viewed. So if your client proposes to view your artwork by incandescent room lighting, that’s what you should print for. Period.

In Part II I will take a look at how the display profiles match up with printed output from my HP DesignJet 90 large format dye ink printer.

Meanwhile, based on this first experience, the X-Rite Eye One Display 2 (which could use a simpler name) is highly recommended and for those wanting the broadest range of adjustments I strongly advise against buying Apple’s overpriced Cinema Displays, only one of which, the ridiculously costly 30″ model, comes with a matte screen. Any photographer interested in proper color profiling using a glossy screen for processing is simply wasting his time.

As for the 22″ Dell 2209WA, this has to be one of the greatest bargains on the planet – an IPS matte screen for under $300, including a three year Dell warranty which provides for delivery of a replacement before the user has to ship his faulty monitor back. No need to blow more money on the insurance scam known as AppleCare. You can buy two of these Dells and still have $300 left over for a professional colorimeter and a top class meal, had you purchased one of Apple’s 24″ versions with the mirror-like surface which will reflect your ego, if not your work.

Apple’s screens are intended to do but one thing – scream “Buy Me” at you in the store where, like that cranked up stereo system with the big bass in the music showroom, they seem so much better than anything else. (”Gee, Mabel, that iMac screen sure was impressive in the Apple Store. It just jumped out at you, didn’t it?”). Of course, once you actually start using the equipment and the headaches begin, things are a bit different ….

In his book, Martin Evening states (p. 229) “…. it is possible to buy a good colorimeter for under $250 …. and when you consider how much you might be prepared to spend on camera lenses, it really is not worth spending any less than $1,000 on the combination of good-quality display plus calibration package.” Prices have dropped since Evening wrote that and the Dell 2209WA, as the cheapest IPS panel on the market, now makes it possible to spend just $800, for which you get not one but two displays and a crackerjack colorimeter (the same he uses) into the bargain.

Follow up: Someone at EyeOne, ever grateful for free publicity, has seen fit to reference my review on their US home page for the device. Setting aside the fact that they got the URL wrong, the reader should be assured that there is no gain of any sort for me in this sort of thing.

Feel free to refer to my Code of Ethics to see what I am talking about. It will be a desperate day indeed which sees me trying to make chump change from my hobby of photography.

Comments (0)

October 29, 2009

The mendicant of today

Filed under: Photographs — Thomas Pindelski @ 5:05 am

How times change.

It is truly impossible to be destitute or without a meal in today’s America and while the results are not always praiseworthy, today’s social society has a lot to be proud of compared with that of of the Victorians or America’s Robber Barons, though many of the latter did a far better job of reallocating vast sums of capital to help the poor than ever did a politician.

At the 16th Street BART, San Francisco.
G1, kit lens at 14mm, 1/500, f/6.3, ISO 100

This chap, none the worse for wear after a bottle of hooch, was holding forth happily at the entrance to the BART station in one of San Francisco’s poorer areas in the Mission District. A fun guy and not the least down about his status or circumstances. The last thing I saw him do was pull a cell phone from his pocket to make a call ….

I can only think that the great humanitarian John Thomson would be amazed at the changes the pioneering work he and like minded photographers did 150 years ago has wrought. However we got there, it’s change for the better.

Comments (0)

October 28, 2009

The Madwoman of the Haight

Filed under: Photographs — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:28 am

Happy in her own world.

Even one of our more common definitions of madness is becoming invalidated.

You see them everywhere and of all ages. Adults walking along the street speaking to no one in particular. A moment’s examination confirms that they are speaking into a cell phone microphone and doing so invariably loud enough for all to hear, the way the English speak to foreigners on the assumption that volume will conquer any lack of comprehension.

These people are not mad. Just dumb as a brick.

However, the subject of today’s snap is most assuredly crazy but her insanity is a far gentler presence than that of the cell phone prattlers, reassuring their honey that they are about to come home with the groceries. You can see her on Haight Street in San Francisco most days, merrily reliving past lives at sufficient volume to be heard and enjoyed.

The Madwoman of The Haight. G1, kit lens at 30mm, 1/1250, f/5.3, ISO 100

I feel far closer to her than I ever will to the fools with their cellular toys.

Comments (0)

October 27, 2009

New puppy

Filed under: Photographs — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:27 am

Reporting home.

This loving owner was reporting home on his new puppy’s first street outing into a very big world.

G1, kit lens @ 14mm, 1/800, f/5.6, ISO 100

On Haight Street in San Francisco,

Comments (0)

October 26, 2009

John Thomson

Filed under: Photographers — Thomas Pindelski @ 9:53 am

A nineteenth century Scottish photographer.

“The monkeys persisted in shaking the branches of the trees every time they saw me emerge from my tent to expose the plate, and during the exposure …. kept chuckling and dancing about the branches like black fiends”.

“A Coolie, of artistic taste and oily fingers, had opened a plate box during my absence to examine its points. The firm hold he had taken of the plates left two indelible greasy thumb-prints on each, which came out (on account of the presence of animal matter) with great intensity when the pictures were developed with pyrogallic acid,”

Next time you are in some remote corner of the world with your four SDHC postage stamp-sized cards capable of retaining tens of thousands of pristine images in glorious color, ready to be sent by internet to any place on earth in seconds, think of the privations experienced by this master photographer as he spent ten years wending his way through the far east on a pioneering trip to record its land and peoples.

John Thomson (1837 – 1921) was born in Edinburgh and found his life’s calling in his pioneering work in the orient. His equipment required a donkey cart and two full time assistants to move and dictated that the large glass plate which passed for film be coated with the light sensitive emulsion in darkness. It didn’t stop there. While the wet collodion process he used was a huge improvement on the Daguerrotypes which preceded it, the plate had to be expose while still wet for the image to be recorded. The amazing thing is that many of Thomson’s pictures have an almost photojournalistic quality as he ventured into the streets to capture these early snapshots on his cumbersome gear.

Getting ready for a ’shoot’ – Manchu c. 1868

I became acquainted with his work through Stephen White’s monograph on Thomson (Thames & Hudson, 1985, now out of print) and if pioneer photographers interest you it is very much worth your while tracking down a copy.

Later in 1876-77 he followed up on his work in China and Vietnam to open the eyes of the monied Victorians to the poverty and depravity their industrial revolution had wrought, by documenting the poor and destitute in London. These images have an exceptional immediacy and always reflect Thomson’s studied and balanced compositional sense.

Take this picture titled ‘The Crawlers’ – the story behind it is simply heartbreaking, as related by the author:

The Crawlers have not the strength to struggle for bread, and prefer starvation to the activity which an ordinary mendicant must display. ‘Crawlers’ were women too proud to beg. Weakened by hunger and lack of sound sleep they literally crawled on hands and knees to fetch hot water to make the weak tea that was their chief nourishment. The crawler photographed with a small child was keeping it for its mother who had found a job in a coffee shop. The mother returns from her work at four in the afternoon, but resumes her occupation at the coffee shop from eight to ten in the evening, when the infant is once more handed over to the crawler, and kept out in the streets through all weathers with no extra protection against the rain and sleet than the dirty and worn shawl which covers the woman’s shoulders; but as she explained, ‘it pushes its little head under my chin when it is very cold, and cuddles up to me, so that it keeps me warm as well as itself’.

The Crawlers, London, 1876

Thomsons social conscience work is contemporaneous with that of the more famous Jacob Riis who documented poverty in New York, and no less powerful. Both did more to grow awareness of the awful poverty in our affluent societies than any amount of vacuous talk from elected leaders.

His candid work was no less impressive, as witnessed in this snap of two sailors on a barge on the Thames – The Silent Highway of Victorian England.

On the Silent Highway, 1876.

For whatever reason, Thomson’s work never became as famous as that of other pioneering photographers, yet few can claim to have done so much so well with so little. Highly recommended.

Comments (0)

October 24, 2009

The HackPro and obsolescence

Filed under: Hackintosh — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:24 am

A follow up.

HackPro builder FU Steve set forth how to build a high performance desktop computer running Snow Leopard for less than one third of the cost of a comparable MacPro here. His intent was to craft a cool running machine for reliable photo processing. That’s cool as in temperature not cool as in Apple Hype. The two are diametrically opposed concepts. In the event, his HackPro turned out to be exceptionally speedy – see his benchmarks at the end of this piece. I asked him for his thoughts on obsolescence with specific attention to the HackPro. Here they are.

* * * * *

It may seem premature to address the HackPro’s obsolescence, but I always like to think ahead.

In terms of life expectancy, the video card is one of the best there is – it’s now rebranded as the GT150 but that’s the same as the nVidia 9800GTX+. You can get versions with 1024mB but I don’t know how that would make any difference for Lightroom and Photoshop users. GPU development has hit a wall and the one I used should last quite a while.

The RAM is DDR2 800mHz. The mobo will support up to DDR2 1333mHz, so lots of room for upgrades if it makes sense and when the price falls. Meanwhile, 800mHz/DDR2 offers the optimal price/performance mix.

The CPU is the 2.83gHz Intel Core2 Quad Q9550 at $220. You can upgrade to the 3.0gHz for $340 – lots more for little more. Alternatively, you can crank up what you have to 3.4gHz (or more) and simply add a bigger cooler for $30 – there’s lots of room in the box for one and there’s a large community of users doing this reliably. I have not bothered with any overclocking tests as what I have is fast enough. Current CPU designs are peaking as the 45nM component separation is getting close to the wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum, which limits further size reduction. Heat management will improve with the newer Nehalem CPU but it’s not an issue in the HackPro, only in laptops.

The motherboard uses the Intel 775 socket, meaning you cannot fit the latest Nehalem Intel CPU (i7 socket). The Nehalem’s advantage is better multi-threading but while Lightroom can run in 64-bit mode it does a poor job of using all four cores; until that’s fixed by Adobe the Core2 Quad will be far better than the software I’m asking it to run. If I get the craving for an i7 for some reason, the motherboard will have to be changed. $140 + CPU cost. Easy to do but makes no sense today for the applications I use. Even Apple’s Final Cut Pro for professional video editing and Photoshop CS4 are still only 32-bit applications, so software has a lot of catching up to do before today’s quad core CPU designs are over the hill.

The display is independent and you can use/spend what you want. The Dell 2209 I use may hold value well as it has no competition at its price and attracts users with specific needs – meaning photographers who cannot tolerate color shifts as the viewing angle changes. Its IPS panel is the best display technology there is and there are no signs of new revolutionary designs on the horizon.

The Snow Leopard OS seems very robust and as it’s an enhancement to Leopard and not a new design, you would expect that. That very fact tells you that the rate of improvement in Apple’s operating systems has slowed dramatically. There’s not a whole lot that needs improving. Subsequent releases seem to be minor bug fixes and when 10.6.2 comes out (imminent) you will be able to run the new Apple Magic Mouse with its touch sensitive surface if that’s your thing. There is no Magic Mouse driver in 10.6.1 though the newly introduced iMacs have it installed.

Blu-Ray will fail, in my opinion and my HackPro has none. Too costly, needs new, expensive gear to exploit fully (big screens, etc.) and introduced right into the teeth of a shot economy. Sales remain flat despite the failure of its only competitor HD DVD. Plus Blu-Ray’s huge file sizes with the US’s slow broadband invalidate the format for transmission. Still, I expect Apple to add it shortly (Yuppie and Joe Sixpack demand) and once the drivers become available you can simply install a Blu-Ray drive in the HackPro in one of the 5 1/2″ front bays (3 remain available). The cost is closing in on $100.

The HDDs are traditional 3.5″ SATA 7200 rpm with a 32mB cache, a technology that shows signs of peaking. There are 10,000 and 15,000 rpm designs available but they are smaller in capacity and run hot. I question their life expectancy. On the other hand, flash drives will come to the fore over the next few years and I expect we will all be using 1tB flash HDDs in a decade, costing under $100 and the size of a postage stamp. They will run cooler, though HDD heat is not of concern in the capacious Antec case. Meanwhile, their prime use is as a boot drive in 32mB or 64mB sizes at under $200, where they are affordable, but it’s hard to see the need for a fast boot if you never switch your machine off. I leave mine on all the time, arguing that thermal cycling from switching on and off is far more destructive to life expectancy than a permanently ‘on’ state. Think light bulbs.

Wireless 802/11n can be added for $50-125 but I see no pressing need for it in a desk top computer unless you cannot easily run a broadband cable to the case. I have no wiring issues so I did not bother with wireless. Not really an obsolescence issue.

Windows 7 has, as even members of obscure Amazonian pygmy tribes know, just been announced and is opening to favorable reviews from every magazine which derives advertising revenue from Microsoft. Time will tell if it is fast and robust (there’s zero basis for trusting MSFT on anything given the company’s record) but in the spirit of keeping an open mind, let’s assume it offers things you cannot live without. Well, it’s a moment’s work to partition the HDDs into two partitions, one with Snow Leopard, the other with Windows 7. You can then choose whether to boot from one or the other. Alternatively, you can use Apple’s Boot Camp to accomplish the same (one advantage of using Boot Camp may be the ability to see data across the partitions – Windows files from the Mac side and vice versa, but I have no idea if this works) or, smarter, use Parallels or VMWare ($50 or so + Windows 7 + applications) in your existing partition to load Windows in its own window without the need to reboot, if the performance drag is acceptable. I used Parallels on my dying iMac with Windows XP for a while and it works fine if not very quickly. Maybe, in the interest of keeping Windows as remote as possible from your safe OS X environment, it’s best to load it on a separate drive and boot from that.

Finally, resale value. The picture is very bright here. My cost, excluding peripherals, is $815, which gets me the case ($100), CPU ($220), GPU ($120), RAM ($100), motherboard ($130), DVD burner ($30), Card Reader ($15) and HDD ($100). A like configuration from Apple, Dell or HP runs $3-5,000 using the exact same parts. I can sell the machine as either an OS X or Windows box, or both, focusing on its top-of-the-line components. I should get a good price even three years hence, and have no need to sell my monitor and peripherals. Or if I upgrade piecemeal, I can simply sell the components for even better prices.

What about the greatest threat of all? Say Apple decides to make future Snow Leopard revisions run only on Macs? Well, they have a lamentable history of failure in this regard. Take the iPhone. Try as they might, the hacker community breaks each attempt within days of introduction. It’s a red rag to a set of very smart and dedicated bulls. And let’s say they succeed. Heck, I would be happy running the HackPro on Tiger, let alone Leopard or Snow Leopard. These upgrades really do very little for a working still photographer. Arguably the only value added by Leopard compared with its Tiger predecessor was the Time Machine backup utility which makes for seamless file backup. Other than that it’s a lot of fluff. Lightroom can run in 64-bit mode fine in Leopard and does not need Snow Leopard to do so.

But I don’t think Apple will do something so foolish. First, desktops are a falling part of their profit picture as Apple is rapidly becoming a cell phone company. It’s where the money is and in the iPhone they have a superb product with no real competition. Second, the Hackintosh adds value to Apple rather than taking it away. Most Hackintosh builders either could never afford a Mac or are simply making something not available from Apple – a reliable desktop with low entry and repair costs. Many Hackintosh builders are future Apple customers, so it’s foolish to write them off, and most – like me – still buy the OS where otherwise there would be no sale. And, in the grand scheme of things, sales lost to the Hackintosh are a rounding error to Apple. How many people can be bothered to a make the modest effort involved in building the best desktop for photographers on the planet, especially when uninformed comments on chat boards policed by Apple zealots consistently proclaim that the Hackintosh is junk? Still, I do love those fools as they just help my Apple stock position along!

Before I show you the comparative performance data from Geekbench, it’s worth adding a few words about the extraordinary degree of failsafe redundancy built into my HackPro. The following functions are duplicated so if one fails, I simply switch to the other and all have been tested:

Dual BIOS on the motherboard
BIOS level and application level CPU high temperature warning buzzers
Dual video card outlet sockets
Dual video card motherboard sockets
Matched memory pairs allow the system to run with 4gB almost as well as with 8gB should some memory fail
Dual case fans – if one fails the system temperature rises just 10F
Dual boot drives – my 1tB internal drive has a matched one in the case which is fully bootable and is backed up daily. Further I run Time Machine on an external drive which is kept in a remote location.
Finally – dual monitors – I bought two of the Dells!

I don’t recall seeing the word ‘redundancy’ in any Mac specs. Maybe you have.

Here are the data comparisons:

MacPro with 2.66gHz Core2 Quad Nehalem
and 4 gB RAM rated by Geekbench in 32-bit mode

FU Steve’s HackPro with 2.83gHz Core2 Quad Yorkfield
and 4gB RAM rated by Geekbench in 32-bit mode

By the way, the just introduced 27″ iMac (C2D) scores 4650 on Geekbench, making the HackPro 25% faster than Apple’s latest offering.

Finally, a few words on opportunity cost. Many comments on chat boards addressing the economics of constructing a Hackintosh wrongly attribute high opportunity cost to the process, arguing that time spent in research, procurement, construction and testing makes the whole thing uneconomical. This is not a correct understanding of opportunity cost. Time spent only has economic opportunity cost if it displaces time which could have been spent on activities providing a positive income stream. In the event, the Hackintosh builder is using time which would likely have been spent in such unproductive activities as watching sports or playing computer games or whatever. In that sense, the time invested in the Hackintosh is free and the true economic cost is purely that of the components used.

* * * * *

Thank you, FU Steve.

Only a fool would make long life claims for a computer but I think FU has constructed something with a decent life expectancy at very modest cost and with exceptionally low repair costs. Using the MacPro (an excellent machine) as a reference, the rate of change in its components has been positively glacial in the past couple of years, suggesting most of the technologies used are very much at the point of diminishing returns. The retail technology business is focusing much more on smartphones, handheld devices and small laptops. FU’s HackPro should last a while. The HackPro is the Elitist’s choice. The Macpro is for the snob.

Comments (0)

October 23, 2009

Minuet in Green

Filed under: About the Snap — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:22 am

My favorite color.

Green

G1, 45mm, 1/80, f/5.6, ISO 100

Date: July 28, 2009
Place: Nob Hill, San Francisco
Modus operandi: Light and lively with the Panasonic G1
Weather: Typical overcast San Francisco day.
Time: 11:20am.
Gear: Panasonic G1, kit lens at 45mm, f/5.6, 1/80th, ISO100
Medium: Digital
Me: Just timing it right. Easy, really.
My age: 57
Green, green and green.

It was nothing but a conditioned response that had me raise the camera to eye level and snap this picture.

Comments (0)

October 22, 2009

Apple announces toaster

Filed under: Macintosh — Thomas Pindelski @ 8:43 am

Get ready to fry.

Earlier this week Apple announced the new iMacs in 21.5″ and 27″ screen sizes. The usual Cupertino Hype tells us there’s lots to like – bigger screens, slimmer, faster, etc. So it has an unusable high gloss mirror for a screen. A minor inconvenience for jewelry buyers.

But a moment’s review of the internal design gives one pause – and I’m speaking from expertise gleaned from having lost one iMac (a 20″) and almost lost another (24″) to bad thermal engineering.

Here’s how the new iMacs look under the skin:

The new 27″ iMac’s guts

Even those of you reading this without an honors degree in Mechanical Engineering (yes, I have one of those) who did not graduate at the top of your class (I did that too, around the time I took yesterday’s snap) can see the obvious design error in the older iMacs has been carried over to the latest iteration. The hot running CPU (because it is from a laptop, not built for desktop use) and the fan below are circled in red. The direction of the blast of superheated air emanating from this assembly is indicated by the green arrow. That hot air toasts the motherboard which is a seriously cramped and compromised design lifted from a laptop to ensure everything fits with Mr. Jobs’s thinness obsession.

I don’t think I need say more, even to readers who don’t know Farenheit from Celsius.

But wait, you exclaim. You said something about a toaster?

Why, yes. The bread goes in the right hand side, denoted by the yellow arrow. It has to be super slim, of course.

Comments (0)

October 21, 2009

Highgate

Filed under: Photographs — Thomas Pindelski @ 12:49 pm

One of the world’s great cemeteries.

Arlington, Pere Lachaise and Highgate – these are the world’s greatest cemeteries.

Taken more years ago than I care to admit in Highgate Cemetery.
Leica M3, TriX, 35mm Summaron.

Comments (1)

October 20, 2009

Phil Brown revisited

Filed under: Photographers — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:20 am

A fine English photographer.

I had the pleasure of showcasing Phil Brown’s work some sixteen months ago. I strongly recommend you check that piece where Phil had the startlingly original idea of photographing the scenes of urban violence and death after the bodies and indicia of mayhem had been cleared. Compare his approach to Wegee’s slap in the face approach, with blood and guts strewn on the sidewalk. The only thing Phil’s work shares with that master of the macabre is that the pictures are monochrome. The shock of the events now in the distant past is much deeper when you are simply presented with a bland picture of where a murder took place. It makes you think.

Touching base with Phil the other day to catch up with his latest work I learned that he has moved to New York, the cultural, artistic and commercial center of the world, to further pursue his photography studies. A couple of emails later and Phil had provided me with a narrative and some of his more recent work where he documented the hell on earth that is Newark, New Jersey, a city which personifies urban blight. So here, without further ado, in Phil Brown’s own words, is his recent Newark project. Phil has asked that I not deface these with the usual Copyright tag line so as not to spoil the effect. As he says, if people are going to steal they are going to steal.

Being in NYC … and Newark.
Phil Brown

I arrived in New York on a semi-permanent basis in the middle of August 2008, to take the photojournalism program at ICP. That finished in June and for my main project whilst I was there I documented the city of Newark, New Jersey; simultaneously a half hour train ride from Manhattan, and a million miles away in terms of pretty much everything else.

The basic premise of this work was that I wanted to see what one of the notorious failed American cities was like – emphasis on what it ‘was’ like, rather than what it ‘looked’ like. I really wanted to communicate how it felt to walk the streets of Newark, because I really believe that our immediate environment conditions our existence way more than is acknowledged. What I did not want to do, much to the dismay of my teachers, was narrow this down to a story about one particular person or situation.While that may have served as a metaphor for the entire city, if I was lucky, it could also just have become a story about a singular aspect and not given me the freedom to really explore. And so I went there and I walked around.

It’s not clear to me yet what influence New York itself has had on my work, but I do know that the break from London, and getting out of the corporate environment, has given me the time and space to see if I can do anything with photography. The most transformative period so far has been since the beginning of the year when I really started waking up, thinking for myself, questioning the validity of school and the nature of the industry I was trying to get into. As conventional photojournalism seems to have finally collapsed in on itself I maybe should be feeling confused and lost having ‘graduated as a photojournalist’, but instead I think it’s the most liberating thing that could have happened. Now I can strive for what I really wanted in the first place which is simplicity. Just to observe and document, think less, shoot more and take it all way less seriously than I’m supposed to – I’m not there yet, but I’m working at it.

More of my Newark pictures can be seen here.

To see some of my work in progress click here. (Do stop by and take a look – some thought provoking work. Ed.)

Comments (0)

October 19, 2009

Old Farts

Filed under: Photographs — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:19 am

To be found at any public display of memorabilia.

Go to any public show of old stuff and you will find them. A bunch of old guys in GM caps sporting beer bellies, beards and boring.

Ready to regale you with tales of how much better it was in the old days (it wasn’t) and how their old car runs so much more reliably than your new Honda (it doesn’t) and how politicians used to be trustworthy (they weren’t) these senescent bores really need to be put out to pasture. Whatever you do, show no admiration for the objects of their worship, for you will be lectured at great length as to why the 1929 model was so superior to its 1930 successor.

These Old Farts were spotted at, where else, a display of old cars.

Lumix LX-1, auto everything.

Snapped through the rear window of a Ford Model T, undoubtedly one of the worst cars ever made.

Comments (1)

October 18, 2009

Tax scam in blue

Filed under: Photographs — Thomas Pindelski @ 3:29 pm

You are paying for this.

One of the least remarked scams foisted by American cities on their taxpayers is the ‘Handicapped Parking’ scam. As scams go, its a slick one. How dare anyone be so churlish as to criticize the creation of umpteen designated parking spots for the handicapped at any place where parking is available?

Yet, go to one of those public spaces and, time and again, you will find full parking lots except for, you guessed it, the many unoccupied handicapped spots. The number of such special spots vastly exceeds their use.

The reason is not hard to divine. Someone is making good coin from painting these spaces and cities can further clean up by levying egregious fines on taxpayers who actually work for a living and make the unforgivable error of parking in one of these. There was an oft quoted statistic when I lived in NYC that it would be cheaper to provide a chauffeur driven car service to all the handicapped residents than to build all those special bus and train entrances and attachments for the few who actually use them. The argument for parking spaces is little different.

Still, this blatant fraud does make for a nice snap, now and then.

Lumix LX-1, auto everything.

Comments (0)

October 17, 2009

Faces

Filed under: Photographs — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:17 am

These fell out of the sky.

At the Embarcadero, San Francisco. G1, kit lens.

Comments (1)

October 16, 2009

A face in the park

Filed under: Photographs — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:16 am

On Nob Hill.

G1, 35mm, f/5.6, 1/100, ISO100

Spotted in Huntington Park the other day.

Comments (0)

October 15, 2009

Oceano Dunes

Filed under: Photographs — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:15 am

At the beach.

Oceano Dunes, near Grover Beach in central coastal California, is most famous for the great work done there by Edward Weston in the first half of the twentieth century. It’s a fine beach which, of all things, allows cars to enter for a small fee. Odd.

Oceano Dunes. 5D, 15mm Fisheye.

Comments (0)

October 14, 2009

Random posts

Filed under: Photography — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:14 am

Fun reading.

Have time to read and want to feed that photography thing in your head?

Look to the right and check out Random Posts which highlights fine posts, chosen at random, from the history of wonderful writing on this blog ….

No picture today – just a lot of great history!

Comments (0)

October 13, 2009

Sunset rocks

Filed under: Photographs — Thomas Pindelski @ 12:51 pm

At the beach.

5D, 100mm macro, ring flash

It’s good to return to photography after all that recent tech talk!

I used that really clever technique Martin Evening illustrates in his book where you drag the Target Adjustment tool button to the area you want affected then simply drag it up and down on the picture until it looks right, like so:

Target adjustment tool in Lightroom

In this case I used it on the highlights.

See page 285 of his splendid book.

Comments (0)

October 12, 2009

Snow Leopard coming around

Filed under: Snow Leo — Thomas Pindelski @ 4:12 am

Compatibility issues are quickly disappearing.

Six weeks ago I cautioned against an early upgrade to Snow Leopard largely on grounds of its lack of compatibility with many common applications.

Having tried SL 6.1 on my iMac I can report that most of the most commonly used applications I use now run fine. It’s especially satisfying to see that legacy PPC applications (ones written for the old Macs using the IBM G3/4/5 CPUs) run really well under Rosetta, though why on earth Apple makes Rosetta an optional install which you have to search for (under ‘Customize’) beats me. Most specifically, Photoshop CS2 runs perfectly and I have no need or desire to pay Adobe for a later version given my limited PS use. And yes, I still run ancient versions of Microsoft Word and Excel as they do all I need and I simply hate paying Microsoft for anything.

Lightroom in 64-bit mode runs fine and, once again, it’s a wonder to me Adobe doesn’t simply detect 64-bit systems automatically rather than insisting on installing in 32-bit mode by default. The switch is beyond obscure – right click on LR in Finder and uncheck the ‘32-bit’ box. Jeez! To confirm you are running in 64-bit mode, switch on the splash screen to make it show when LR starts (it’s under ‘Preferences’) and you should see the ‘64-bit’ narrative there.

Why switch to Snow Leopard at all? Because sooner or later it will be mandatory as older OS version are supported less and less. Do it now and it’s easier. Do it later and lots of things have to be fixed all at once. And Apple does a decent job in major OS revisions (Panther->Tiger->Leopard->Snow Leopard) that once they are past the first or second version things tend to run pretty well. They have for me.

Now if we could only get the likes of Adobe to rewrite their applications to properly use multi-core CPUs and all that 64-bit goodness, wouldn’t life be sweet? Unfortunately, one of the sadder aspects of the gradual demise of Aperture is that Adobe has less competition. Would that Apple bought Adobe (chump change to Apple) and brought some modernization and proper user interface design to Photoshop, though why anyone would want the aggravation of all those angry help calls from Windows users beats me.

But look, I’m not grumbling. Lightroom 2.5 runs just fine with Snow Leopard. For that I am sincerely grateful.

There’s actually some pretty interesting technical information on 64-bit technology and related developments to be found on Apple’s site which those so inclined can find by clicking the picture below.