Monthly Archives: September 2009

Lone worker

Photographs

Burning the late night oil.

G1, 24mm, f/6.3, 1/30, ISO 400

Spotted late evening in Carmel, CA.

The G1’s iISO feature (intelligent ISO) determined the ISO 400 setting, presumably predicated on using a shutter speed no slower than 1/30 to avoid camera shake at the 24mm focal length. I was using aperture priority and chose the f/6.3 setting. iISO seems to settle on shutter speeds no slower than 1/30 at medium focal lengths, unless the light is so poor that an even slower shutter speed is called for. At 24mm (48mm full frame equivalent) the 1/30th is like 1/125th with the two stop gain in shake reduction owing to the OIS feature built into the lens. I have the ISO limit set at 800 as at 1600 the image really starts to break up.

The bottom line is that iISO does an excellent job of mitigating camera shake by adjusting ISO, to the extent allowed or possible.

Lightroom wins

Lightroom

Aperture is dead in the water.

Having started serious volume digital photo processing with Apple’s Aperture and finally made the switch to Lightroom almost two years ago, the following data recently released by Adobe hardly surprise me:

Clearly, I’m not the only one making the move, especially if you take into account the large increase in Mac sales in the past few quarters. Forget the upper table – Aperture does not run on Windows so it’s not a fair comparison. The lower table is.

When did you last hear of a meaningful update to Aperture or see any advertising for the product?

Those still using Aperture should be getting worried and would do well to consult my earlier piece on abandoning that major stress source for Mac performance. Aperture is another orphan application which couldn’t handle the heat in the kitchen. It’s future is …. well, what future? Have you noticed how Aperture does not even support Panasonic G1/GH1/GF1 RAW file import – maybe the most signifiant camera design to hot the market in the past year? That makes me think it’s a dying application, starved of capital as Apple concentrates on making …. cell phones.

It bears repeating – the user interface in Lightroom is not only logical and linear, it actually makes photo processing fun. That’s not something I thought I would ever write. And you don’t lose track of originals or accidentally erase them, either.

Spam in the RSS feed

Software

Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam eggs and spam.

Putting aside the Monthy Python quote, above, readers using an RSS feed (such as Google Reader, NetNewsWire, Vienna, etc.) will have noticed that yesterday’s postings had summaries inundated with spam. This spam appears to advertise stimulants which readers here have no need of, this blog offering a natural high.

This is what it looks like:

Mercifully, my RSS feed only contains a brief extract of the posting so the schmuck who did this doesn’t get his click-through link to show up. I reposted the piece under a different name but no joy. The same spam in the summary field showed up.

Some very smart people are on to this and I found the fix on Anwyn’s Blog which I recommend if your blog is similarly afflicted.

Suffice it to say that the problem is fixed and the revised posting of yesterday’s piece now looks like this in the RSS reader:

Unfortunately, there’s no way of deleting individual articles from the RSS history but at least newer pieces are now shown without spam, viz:

CA fixer, ocn vu

Photographs

Realtor talk

Seldom has a subset of the population charged as much or added as little value as the US realtor (translation: real estate broker or shill). A ‘profession’ which charges 5-6% of the selling price for showing you where the bathroom is. It is some testimony to the power of this corrupt lobby that it has survived in a world of internet databases.

Here’s an example of what is known in California as a ‘fixer with an ocean view’ – likely $1mm:

Spotted on Highway one (yes, with an ocean view!) the other day.