Yearly Archives: 2016

Mediocrity

Hardware

Tim Cook’s Apple.

Along with blazing innovation – a larger iPad, the failed Apple Watch – what lands in my inbox the other day?

There was a reason Steve Jobs famously remarked that Apple did not do focus groups or customer surveys. The company was not Procter & Gamble, selling dish detergents. His company was in the business of innovation, meaning it told people what they needed – iPods, iPhones, iMacs, Mac Pros, MacBooks – not asking what they wanted.

Now we have a CEO focused on trying to thwart the US government’s attempts – marketing disguised as customer protection – to keep Americans safe while making ever fancier watch bands, as Apple becomes just another mediocre non-growth business.

Pierre Bonnard

Paintings

Rich and good.

The oft held belief that great painters have to suffer great poverty on the road to success is at best a poor generalization. None of the greats of the Renaissance were exactly struggling to put bread on the table, for they were busy turning down commissions. Jump to the late nineteenth century and for every starving Monet or Renoir you will find a wealthy Degas or Bonnard painting with genius and abandon while enjoying a life of comfort and plenty.

San Francisco’s Palace of Legion of Honor is holding the first west coast show of Pierre Bonnard’s (1867-1947) paintings and photographs in fifty years and it’s a fine summary of the artist’s best work, many pieces plucked from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

The canvases are well lit and captioned in something approaching readable font sizes, and while the miniscule photograph reproductions really should be larger (they are from Bonnard’s Kodak Brownie) they convey the sense of experimentation which is often seen in the paintings, limbs cut off at the edges of the canvas just as in many Degas works, the latter also a keen photographer.

It’s a fine show of beautiful work and strongly recommended.

iPhone6 snaps.

NIK collection now free

Lightroom

From Google.

Google has announced that the excellent collection of processing plugins from NIK for Lightroom and Photoshop is now free. Click the image for the download site:


Click to go to the download page.

While this probably means that development of the code has ceased, who cares? They are great now and are not about to get any worse. If you use the desktop versions of LR and PS like I do, preferring not to pay rent to rapacious Adobe for its CC cloud versions, then you will not have every upgrade breaking your plugins’ functionality.