All posts by Thomas Pindelski

About Thomas Pindelski

The author

Mac OS X is Ten years old

Software

The OS that made me switch.

Say what you may about Mac hardware (I’m in the ‘overpriced, poorly heat managed, form-over-function-even-if-gorgeous-to-contemplate’ camp) the compelling reason for switching to the Mac today is the same as it was ten years ago when OS X was launched, replacing OS 9. I had long thought about switching from Windows by that time, but was aware that OS 9 was every bit as buggy and unstable as Windows ’98, so when OS 10.0 (Cheetah) came out, I decided to wait a while for the bugs to be worked out. But early trials set the heart racing – clean, quick, logical, uncluttered and with readable fonts.

So when OS 10.3 ‘Panther’ arrived and with it the first LCD iMac came out, so did my credit card and the new iMac was soon at work. (I skipped OS 10.1 ‘Puma’ and 10.2 ‘Jaguar’, as the original iMac hardware with its luridly colored translucent shell was ghastly to look at and had very modest specifications for the price). The excellent Epson 1270 ink printer plugged in and ‘just worked’, all sorts of other peripherals did likewise, and as a photographer I have never looked back. The first task was to start scanning all my negatives and slides using a Nikon Coolscan 2000 scanner. After connectivity agonies with Windows it was an unforgettable experience to plug the Coolscan in and find it was ready to go. Thereafter I simply had high quality scans made of all my negatives when they were processed and dumped them on the iMac’s hard drive.

My first Mac – $2,632.79!

At today’s prices, using the US CPI, that comes to $3,149.39, almost twice the cost of my quad core, three screen, SSD equipped Hackintosh! But it was worth every penny and more.

I bought the iMac for the OS, not the OS for the iMac though, strangely, that G4 iMac ‘screen on a stick’ continues to be the only one that has not failed and works to this day. It’s called proper heat management.

There’s an argument to be made that OS X saved Apple from oblivion and for the whole fascinating story of its development, chronicled by estimable British journalist Leander Kahney at Cult of Mac, click the picture below. Leica used to design a camera like this – prototype after prototype – until it worked right.

Click for the story.

The latest changes to OS X are at the margin and mostly icing on the cake, as the primary effort must go where the money is, meaning iOS. But while desktops and laptops are in inexorable decline, I expect that future versions of OS X will build on the iOS experience and only make things better. And as my quick check of the latest version of Snow Leopard the other day confirms, Apple is not letting code bloat slow things down. Indeed, Snow Leopard appears to be the fastest version of OS X yet.

Here’s to the next ten years. Well done Mr. Jobs and the whole team at Apple.

SOMA

Architecture

One of SF’s most photogenic areas.

During the dot-com boom, the area South of Market Street (SOMA) in San Francisco saw rents skyrocket as legions of code monkeys sought to become the next Google. Most crashed and burned spectacularly in April, 2000 and the tech stock market has not remotely recovered in the decade since. Such are speculative bubbles.

Not that this was bad. The San Mateo bridge to Oakland is once more drivable thanks to the lane added too late for the boom and rents in SOMA have come back down from the nosebleed levels seen during the bubble, allowing artists and sculptors and generally creative people to once more return and make the place what it is. There are lots of great print and machine shops here, serving all needs from large posters, custom furniture, metalworking and photographic printing.

And what most typifies SOMA is a vital mix of old buildings made to look new again, vibrant colors, murals, local eateries and all of those great things that constitute a neighborhood.

You can get some sense of what I’m going on about by clicking the picture below, which will download a 3.2mB PDF to your computer. Suffice it to say that all the 22 snaps included were made on one dreary morning between rain showers earlier this week.

Best viewed on an iPad or in Preview on a Mac.

HP DesignJet monochrome printing

Printing

Using the right profile.

I’m really not a black and white guy, having last seriously used the medium in 1979. Still, now and then I make a monochrome print from a color original, using the ‘B & W’ option in Lightroom’s Develop module. This is well engineered as you can still vary the mix of the original colors using the sliders for each, and can easily alternate between color and monochrome renditions to gauge the effect.

The dye ink HP DesignJet printers are renowned for the outstanding depth of their black inks with no bronzing on HP Premium Plus Satin Photo paper. Read on to get the best black and white rendition possible, short of paying up for custom profiles.

Using the stock Premium Plus Photo Satin color profile a monochrome print from my DesignJet 90 is too cold. I mostly prefer a slightly warm rendition, so I set about finding dedicated monochrome profiles for this fine paper.

HP still offers free downloads of icc paper profiles from its website for black and white printing and warn that these should not be used for color prints as the results may be unpredictable.

Click below to download these:

Click to download HP monochrome profiles.

There are many to choose from. Basically you experiment until you find the profile that suits your tastes. The download includes instructions for Photoshop but you can readily adapt these to Lightroom.

After downloading, I installed the HP neutral profiles by dragging and dropping the downloaded folder to Username->Library->Colorsync->Profiles. I printed the test print (named Neutral_Profiles,jpg and to be found in the ‘Index_profiles’ folder in the download) using Snow Leopard and Lightroom, and telling LR to use the Neutral 0 profile.

As luck would have it that one gave me the result I wanted, viewed by daylight, warmer than the stock color profile and just right for my taste, so I renamed the Localized Description String as explained here in the ‘Neutral 0’ profile to HP 90 Neutral 0, and checked it off, along with the regular color profile in the Print module of LR (you can also see the other B & W profiles which I did not rename in this screenshot):

Now when I go to the profile selector in LR I see:

It takes less time to do than to explain and is a worthwhile step for best black and white print quality. You can use any one of the many profiles to suit your preference. I like life simple, so I only use the two profiles above with HP Premium Satin photo paper.

Snow Leopard 10.6.7

Hackintosh, OS X

The latest release.

Snow Leopard 10.6.7 came out yesterday, with bug fixes and security enhancements, and before you could say ‘Hackintosh’ I had it installed on the HackPro.

It’s worth the upgrade. Running in 64-bit mode here is the Geekbench (OS performance as reflected in CPU and RAM throughput – no disk factors, so the SSD I have recently installed is irrelevant to comparisons) report:

Snow Leopard 10.6.7

Here is 10.6.6 with the same configuration:

Snow Leopard 10.6.6

That’s 2.4% faster. Not enough to notice, but nice to know that the newer version is not the victim of performance drag from code bloat. The biggest component of the overall change is in the memory performance result which is 8.0% faster. Nice code optimization, Apple!

On the 2010 MacBook Air (mine is the 11″ with the base spec and minimum RAM) the change in speed is +5%. Once again, not noticeable but nice to know.

Goodbye, Canon and Thank You.

Canon 5D

The end of a beautiful friendship.

My Canon 5D and its collection of Canon lenses are for sale.

5D and friends.

You can see all the journal pieces I wrote on this transformational camera by clicking here.

The decision to sell was not an easy one, but I am a user, not a gear collector. In my book, it’s a crime to have equipment of this quality sitting around unused. Simply stated, when the 5D, with its full frame sensor, came out it instantly obsoleted all the 35mm and medium format film gear I owned. A short time thereafter my Leica M bodies, used by me for 35 years, my Mamiya 6, Rollei 3.5F and Rollei 6003 Pro were all gone, along with their lenses. Such was the quantum leap in image quality and versatility offered by this magnificent camera. My Canon 5D journey commenced over five years ago and as my first serious digital camera I thank Canon for its 5D, which revitalized my interest in taking pictures, while simultaneously obsoleting the sheer drudgery of film processing. I have always preferred pressing the button to time in a darkened room with smelly chemicals.

But a couple of significant changes have occurred in my life since the 5D was purchased. First, we sold our vineyard in the country and moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area. It was a fun experiment, my zinfandel grapes won a lot of prizes but the whole farming thing started to get old. Plus, we wanted our son to grow up with all the diversity and distractions offered by one of the world’s great cities. And, from a snapper’s perspective, being close to the City by the Bay meant a return to my first love, street snaps. So while landscape work was fun and my one man show of landscape snaps was a success, my heart remains on the streets, a genetic code inculcated during a youth in London. And a street snapper the 5D is not. It’s not that it’s a big camera, it’s that it’s simply not the best instrument for my way of working on the street. I tend to get really, really close to my human subjects and the 5D just is not right in that context. Yet whether it’s outdoors for infinite vistas, QTVRs with a fisheye, bugs and birds, or in the studio, I have yet to use a finer instrument.

Other things changed in my life. Testifying to the abuse of my hands over many years of tinkering with cars and engines and woodworking, I started to develop tendonitis in my wrists. Make me lift a heavy weight and it’s not a lot of fun. Further, with age, my back has started to give out and carrying heavy gear compounds my problems. Canon 5D gear is built like a tank; it is not featherweight.

I still believe that in a world where very few prints are made, there’s simply nothing like a large print to do justice to a great photograph. For those, the 5D is unbeatable. Photo exhibitions still favor mounted, framed prints, not LCD screens. The 5D is crazy sharp and grain free, at any rational enlargement size. Want prints over 36″ on the short side? The 5D Mark II is for you.

Update 4/23/2011: All my 5D gear has been sold. I hope the new owners will enjoy this superb equipment as much as I did.

Thank you, Canon, and Goodbye.