Monthly Archives: January 2012

Kate O’Briens

Dining

An Irish pub.

579 Howard Street, SF.

Kate O’Briens is your basic Irish boozer, located opposite the massive TransBay construction project, the latter a great source of photographic inspiration. There’s seating outside, but it was a freezing day when I visited, hence the deserted look.

It’s dark and quiet inside, a couple of TVs playing English Premier League soccer games:

Regulars enjoy a pint.

You aren’t going to come here for gourmet fare, but I left happily sated after the meat loaf special and a glass of draft Smithwicks (the ‘w’ is silent, if you want to get it right).

Tuesday special – meat loaf.

Sorry about the blur – it’s dark inside and I forgot to switch the G3 to 1600 ISO.

$17 was the tab. Suits are not welcome here, it’s strictly a jeans place for working men. With the Transbay construction likely lasting another decade, the pub will be doing good business for a while yet.

iBooks Author

Software

Roll your own.

[column width=45% padding=5%]

iBooks Author is free OS X (Lion only) software from Apple which makes it relatively easy to create ebooks with interactive content. The user interface will be familiar to anyone who has used iWork’s Pages or Keynote with content easily added using drag and drop.

I wrote about how easy it is to create ‘flat’ PDF photobooks using Pages here and if you want to see the difference between a flat book and an interactive one, take a look at Al Gore’s excellent offering on global warming. That one took a large team of programmers and is full of very high quality content. iBooks Author (“iBA”) makes it simple for anyone to create something almost as polished, in a fraction of the time.

For traditional novelists, this is a waste of time. There are multiple self-publishing services like Lulu and Blurb which do just fine with text and a modicum of pictorial content, though the latter quickly becomes price prohibitive. And for most photographers iBA adds nothing that cannot be done as well, or better, on a web site. But if interactive content is your thing – touch a map, see a picture, hear sounds, look at graphical data and so on – then iBA is an appealing offering.

I downloaded the app and found it easy to use. There are only six templates provided but you can bet that number will grow quickly. Adding movies and touch-interactive content is simple. Best of all, you can simply attach your iPad to your Mac (iBA is for iPad output only, no iPhones) and preview your work in the iBooks iPad app. This works well.

iBooks Author outputting a draft to the iPad.

Economics and Marketing:

In exchange for making the app available at no cost, Apple dictates that any sales be made through its AppStore, meaning they keep 30%. If your product is free, you can distribute it either through the AppStore or directly. While this has caused much protest from the brigade of wooly thinkers who dominate the blogosphere, there is nothing wrong with this. If you don’t like the exclusive distribution model just wait a few months for competing products for Android to come along, as they surely will. Or simply create a web app where updates require no new app downloads. So such criticism misses the point. The AppStore is not a marketing medium, any more than Blurb or Amazon is a marketing medium. It is a distribution mechanism. Without marketing your one book is lost , buried in one million apps in the AppStore or five million books at Amazon. It will sell to friends and relatives only and to you as a ‘vanity’ sale. When was the last time you found an app by looking in the mess that is the AppStore? Chances are that, like me, you heard about it by reading a blog or newspaper of interest. [/column][column width=45% padding=5%] Without that sort of exposure it doesn’t matter what percentage Apple monopolistically commands, as your income will be precisely zero. So iBA does not take away the need to market your product. It’s a creative tool, not a selling one. Absent marketing, your presence in the AppStore is worthless and Apple’s claim to exclusive distribution is meaningless.

For photographers, iBA is a mixed picture. For traditional still makers it adds little and takes away much from what can be done with a traditional web site. Your display is limited to the small confines of an iPad’s screen and moving around content can be made far easier in a web site. But for photographers who need the interactive capabilities, this could be a powerful creative tool. One reader suggested this would be an ideal mechanism for making his forthcoming book of flower pictures, a variation on the traditional travel book. Touch the snap of the location and you get a map. Touch a flower in the snap and you get details and close-ups. Generally, tour books, be they of cities, art collections, geographies and so on are ideally suited to this presentation. But for the traditional high quality print maker, a web site remains superior.

Apple’s intended market:

Apple is targeting iBA at books for US high school students. Good luck with that. First, America is a nation which denigrates education. Look at any political campaign and the educated candidate will be accused of elitism. God help him if he also happens to speak French. It’s an attitude which has taken US public schools from first to worst in the Western world in a generation, aided by corrupt unions who prevent dismissal of illiterate teachers and school book publishers who rape the system with $75 text books whose production and distribution cost is $5 at most. It’s a $20bn annual revenue business. Their sole marketing costs are the occasional bribe/political donation to make sure their book is accepted by the system. So getting these entrenched interests to budge is a Sisyphean task, the publishers’ promises to make iBooks text books available for $15 notwithstanding. Finding the money in the public school system for all those iPads is likely impossible, compounded by high theft and damage rates. This will simply widen the gulf between private and public schooling. Private schools will require parents to provide iPads to their children, or will do so from endowment funds, while public school students will continue with 15th Century technology while political debate rages. And simply moving to a better area to avail your child of better public schooling will not cut it. The system will never permit one school to have the technology denied another. By definition, a system which refuses admission to no one will always cater to the lowest common denominator. Further, pandering by politicians to minorities with the resulting corrosive effects of biculturalism (my son needs to learn Spanish why, exactly?) will only see a broadening of that gulf. Sorry, but I don’t recall Spanish being spoken in America’s boardrooms, which I have frequented a good deal, other than by the cleaning staff.

Value for photographers:

So iBA has a place for photographers seeking an interactive presentation for their work. For all others, be they public schools or traditional print workers, there’s nothing here to look at. The print worker already has superior tools available, and the public school is beyond saving.

[/column]

[end_columns]

Add the PP&P icon to your iOS device

Photography

For easy access.

This is my iPhone’s home screen – you can see the icon for ‘PP&P’ in the third row.

To add it to your mobile device, go to my blog in Safari by clicking here, touch the rectangle with the arrow in Safari, then touch ‘Add to Home Screen’.

Touch the circled icon on the iPhone.
On the iPad it’s to the left of the site’s address bar.
Then touch ‘Add to Home Screen’

You can name the icon whatever you want – I call it ‘PP&P’ for brevity – and move it wherever you want in the usual way.

Thereafter, touching the icon will take you directly to this blog’s index page on your iDevice.

The design of the logo is addressed here if you want to make your own for your site.

Marlowe lives

Architecture

Film Noir at its best.

I have been watching Howard Hawks’s ‘The Big Sleep’ (1939 – but check the Comments) for decades now and have long ago given up trying to figure out whodunit. The plot is so many layered, so vastly complex, that I prefer to luxuriate in Humphrey Bogart’s and Lauren Bacall’s acting while enjoying my favorite city in America, Los Angeles. The movie is one of the rare cases where monochrome trumps color.

San Francisco has done a far better job of preserving its inter-war buildings than either LA or New York. The atmospheric Bunker Hill of Philip Marlowe’s day has long been torn down, replaced by soulless glass and steel buildings and Frank Gehry’s execrable Disney Concert Hall, an eye sore of rare foulness. New York also gives short shrift to historical preservation as the world’s center of greed abhors space that cannot be developed and rented for top dollar. Whether it’s the lighter touch of commerce in San Francisco or the fact that the big bucks reside thirty miles south in Silicon Valley, I do not know, but the city is brimming with gorgeous buildings from the ’30s and ’40s.

This one was spotted on Howard Street and the threatening shadow suggested nothing so much as the office space that a gumshoe of Marlowe’s persuasion would have occupied. Marlowe, for ever down on his luck, would have been in one of the smaller offices on a low floor. Not for him the high rent suggested by the magnificent double height windowed floor. As is often the case, the backdrop is a modern building presumably designed by a structural engineer, because architecture is nowhere to be seen. Here it only serves to heighten the beauty of the older masterpiece, caught in a shaft of late afternoon light on a freezing winter’s day.

G3, 45-200mm @ 103mm.

Here’s one of the many posters for that cinematic masterpiece:

A more recent version of the LA ’40s crime mystery, no less well made or acted, gains from a simpler plot compared to The Big Sleep what it loses to color – L.A. Confidential.

For those preferring San Franciscan detectives, Dashiel Hammett’s Sam Spade is as good a stand-in for Marlowe as any.

One of my commitments for 2012 is to publish more architectural photography and, checking this blog, I see it’s a subject I have addressed on many occasions, so I have added an Architecture category. You can access this by clicking here or by diving into the drop down menu under ‘Categories – Photographs’ at the bottom of this screen.

Snapseed for OS X

Photographs, Technique

A great effects app comes to the desktop.

I wrote about the use of the iOS app Snapseed here and have had lots of fun with it since on my iPhone 4S. Nik Software has now released a like-featured OS X version, althjough it’s four times the price of the iOS version at $20. Go figure.

Snapseed in the Mac AppStore.

It’s 57mB (twice the size shown above) and downloads in a couple of minutes. As I catalog all my snaps in Lightroom, I went to LR3->Preferences->External Editing and added Snapseed as an export option. Thereafter it’s a simple matter to export a RAW original to a JPG in Snapseed – Snapseed does not support TIFF or PSD files, so exports to it are converted to JPG. Likewise, it can save in JPG only, albeit respecting the full size of the original – meaning 3056 x 4576 for a RAW file from my Panasonic G3.

The timing of the app’s release could hardly have been better as I had just snapped a worker at the Transbay Terminal construction site on Howard Street in San Francisco with a backdrop of massive I-beams and the original needed a little something to confer the industrial feel I wanted. An export to Snapseed saw the original thus:

Original exported into Snapseed.

A few quick tweaks in the ‘Grunge’ panel were followed by a touch of CenterFocus/Vignette/Blur, and with the addition of a Grunge Frame I had what I wanted. Saving the file seemed to place it in the Lightroom directory, judging by the filename, but I could not see it in the Lightroom Grid view, so decided to save it to the Desktop and import it thence to LR3. I suspect I’m doing something wrong and will look into it – with PS CS5, for example, a ‘Save’ places the file right next to the original in the LR3 Grid display.

Here’s the result:

At the Transbay Terminal site, SF. G3, 45-200mm @ 78mm.

The simple user interface, the quality of the many effects and the general speed and ease of use make this a bargain, even at $20, compared to $5 for the iOS version. Sure, you could do all of this in iOS, laboriously exporting and reimporting the picture, but life’s too short for that. This is no substitute for the industrial strength of Photoshop, but try doing all of the above in under one minute in that behemoth of an application. Snapseed is proof that a few carefully selected effects in a well engineered product suffice most of the time.

Here’s another before/after of an image also snapped yesterday.

The original:

The shoe. G3, kit lens @35mm.

After:

After Snapseed.

In this example I used the ‘Tune Image’, ‘Drama’ and ‘Frames’ settings. ‘Tune Image’ includes selective options, though I did not use those here. Snapseed has done a great job of enhancing drama and bringing up detail in the bricks, highlighted by the setting sun.

Update March, 2013:

Sadly Google, which acquired Snapseed along with Nik Software, has discontinued the OS X version. Quite why not keep it available, when the support and development costs are zero, beats me but doubtless Google is Doing Evil, consonant with its missing moral compass:


Recent App Store search for Snapssed for OS X.