More of the same, really.

For my demanding Studio Dogs project big prints were de rigeur. The project took most of the year to complete, concluding with thirty-six large prints, all made on the excellent Epson ET-8550 printer, as frugal as it is reliable. After one year and over 400 13″ x 19″ prints I have had but one paper jam, probably my fault as I may have overloaded paper in the feed tray.

The Epson ET-8550 photo printer.

More software than hardware, the later images were printed on Canson paper from France and that paper is proving superior, as regards gloss retention, to the many sheets of Hewlett Packard dye ink paper which preceded it.

Canson high gloss printing paper.

Those Studio Dogs were all photographed on a Nikon D800 whose over ten year age makes it ancient in these digital times, yet there’s no improving on the images it delivers at a fraction of the cost of Nikon’s latest hardware. As for triggering the strobes, a remote strobe trigger, now almost two decades old, makes for a wireless connection.

The Nikon D800, introduced in 2012.

And if you think 2012 is old, how about the Novatron studio flash outfit I continue using, manufactured over a quarter of a century ago? Sure it has wires not rechargeable batteries (ugh!) but it’s as reliable as a hammer and puts out a lot of light.

Novatron outfit with Bert the Border Terrier.

And speaking of the Nikon D800 and its splendid 36mp sensor, another major project in 2024 was the re-digitizing of old film images at a quality level significantly superior to that obtained with dedicated Nikon film scanners. And we are not talking about a handful of scans here. How about over 2,200 in a matter of a few short weeks? This setup is not only good, it’s also spectacularly fast.

Inexpensive and outstanding film scanning setup.

The biggest hardware change in 2024 involved migration from the behemoth 2010 Mac Pro with its seven cooling fans and vast bulk to a minuscule single fan Mac Mini M4 which is a fraction of the cost of the oldie, confers the latest security updates via the Mac OS and delivers performance which is …. identical! Sadly the old Mac Pro will have to go to the recyclers as selling it with attendant shipping costs and transit risk is not a viable proposition. It is, in other words, worthless and I hate Apple for forcing me to upgrade from a bulletproof machine by obsoleting it with its truly useless annual OS upgrades.

And the Mini ‘upgrade’ with its Apple Silicon CPU/GPU meant that my old non-subscription Lightroom and Photoshop processing applications would no longer work and I am now on the hook for $10 monthly to Adobe for Lightroom Classic until I croak, and even my heirs will likely see these greedy bastards continue to make money off my estate. As for Photoshop, fughedaboutit. I bought Affinity Photo 2 which does every thing I need for a one-off payment.

On the movie display front I added a second ancient Intel Mac Mini to the living room TV to permit routing of movies, stored on hard drives in the remote home theater, to that TV. You would think the existing AppleTV 4K attached to the TV would suffice to do this but Greedy Timmy in Cupertino sees to it that routing of content from hard drives attached to remote Macs is impossible with the AppleTV puck. He wants you to buy more hardware and a sub-$150 ancient Intel Mac Mini is more than up to the task.

As for the Home Theater with its 120″ screen and LG UST projector, allied to a fine Sonos sound system, all is sweetness and light. The Theater continues to show a movie every night, the hardware has proved to be robust and fault free and the recent addition of a magnificent 1955 Rolleiflex 2.8D to the display of photo hardware adds that special touch.

The Rolleiflex 2.8D, manufactured
between Aug 1955 and Sep 1956.

The Home Theater with the LG Ultra Short Throw projector.

So 2024 paid homage to the old belief that buying the best is consonant with a long life, along with some ingenious gadgets which cost little but truly deliver. I only regret being forced to remainder that great Mac Pro and having to give Adobe more of my hard earned money.