Category Archives: Photography

Mac Mini M4 after one month – Part VI

Mac Mini M4, Macintosh

It will do, and is fine with LRc.

In Part III I set forth some technical measurements which indicated that the performance of the 2024 Mac Mini M4 was pretty much on a par with that of the 2010 Mac Pro fitted with dual 3.46gHz 6-core Intel CPUs, 80gb of memory and a speedy Nvidia GTX980 GPU. By contrast the M4 Mini has a single 10 core CPU and just 16gb of very fast memory. This testifies not only to the great performance gains realized by Apple with its in house Apple Silicon M4 CPU with its integrated GPU, but also shows just how awfully good that old behemoth, the Mac Pro tower was almost 15 years ago. Sadly, Apple’s planned obsolescence strategy, which saw to it that the Mac Pro was now six generations of MacOS behind, forced the upgrade. Well, that and the aggressive pricing of the new Mini, and my electricity bills will fall!

I now have a month of heavy daily use with the M4 Mini under my belt, much of that with the Apple Silicon optimized Lightroom Classic (LRc – v14.1.1), an upgrade from the prior Lightroom v6.4), so the following observations are mostly subjective.

Start up is much faster at 4-6 seconds compared with 20 for the older version, if I get a beachball it’s maybe once or twice a week, and with previews enabled image-to-image flipping is instantaneous. There’s the very occasional delay of 3-4 seconds for the image to render in full definition but that was also much the case with the Mac Pro.

More significantly, the latest version of LRc adds significant functionality in terms of localized image adjustments with both the Remove and Masking tools well implemented and easy to use, largely obsoleting the more complex variants in Photoshop. Indeed as I hate paying rent I dropped PS all together and made a one-off purchase of Affinity Photo 2 which does all I need on those rare occasions where LRc cannot do the trick.

A good example of the use of these new to me tools is in this night snap of a retailer’s window in Carmel, CA. The host of images I took in that setting all have a common factor which is that the dynamic range is very high, necessitating exposure for the highlights, to avoid burn out, with a post processing need to bring up the shadows. In the case of these ‘before’ and ‘after’ images not only was the shadows slider used to bring up the shadows across the whole image, I then selectively masked the fountain at the lower left to bring the sparkle in the water to life. The difference is, err…., night and day:


Before.


After.

In learning some of these new features I invested in Scott Kelby’s book. It does not cover the recently added Remove/Generative Fill functions but is an excellent learning resource, greatly superior to any video I have seen.

Returning to the Mac Mini M4, it never gets more than a tad warm to the touch, is small enough to nestle at the back of the keyboard tray and performs equally to the old Mac Pro at a fraction of the cost. While there were many frustrations regarding application incompatibility when switching from Intel to Apple Silicon CPUs these are now behind me, though I still hate paying Adobe $10 monthly in rent for LRc. Otherwise, what’s not to like?

Networking Macs

Macintosh

How to do it.

While the Apple TV 4K is a very capable streaming device, Greedy Timmy in Cupertino has seen to it that you cannot make it stream content from hard drives connected to other Macs in the home. Yes, Greedy Tim wants to sell you more hardware. Imagine!

This is irksome as my home theater has some 40tb of movies stored on hard drives connected to the Mac Mini in that location but the fact that I have an Apple TV 4K connected to the OLED TV in the living room does not mean I can access those movies for display on the TV. Frustrating.

However, there is a cheap solution which takes advantage of the very low used prices on 2014 vintage Mac Minis which are renowned for one thing. They are bog slow. You would not want to have to process your photographs on one of these tortoises, let alone manipulate much larger video files. But for my purpose, the streaming of movies, these machines are ideal and typically sell used on Amazon for $135-200.

I have two of these machines. One is in the home theater upstairs and has all those hard drives connected to it, routing the video and sound signals to the large projection screen using HDMI through an UST projector. It’s controlled using a Bluetooth mouse.

The second 2014 Mac Mini is connected using an HDMI cable to the downstairs OLED TV, and has nothing else connected. It’s also controlled using a Bluetooth mouse. While this second machine is the faster of the two shown above, the slower model is perfectly adequate for these purposes.

The third Mac, my workhorse Mac Mini M4 is the current very speedy device which took the place of the behemoth Mac Pro of 2010 in the home office. In the context of movies it’s used to rip DVDs for storage on those hard drives in the home theater, with the ripped movie conveyed to its destination over wi-fi.

You can see all three computers in the sketch at the introduction to this article.

While networking computers can be a black art (I really would rather not think about doing this with Windows) with Macs it’s relatively easy. The key is to set up the Sharing settings correctly – these are in System Preferences on the older Minis and in System Settings on the current Mac Mini M4.

Again, in my configuration I have three Mac Minis:

  • The Server Mac (2014 vintage) in the home theater where all the hard disk drive boxes are connected
  • The Remote Mac Mini M4 (2024 vintage) in the home office where DVDs are ripped and sent wirelessly to the storage drives in the home theater
  • A second Remote Mac Mini (2014 vintage) connected to a TV in the living room used solely to watch movies on that TV.

There are three steps to allowing files on one Mac (the “Server Mac”) accessible by another (the “Remote Mac”).

Step 1: On the Server Mac you need to make the drives visible on the network:


This is the (Server Mac) Mini with all the attached hard
drive storage in the home theater. You must give
access to those hard drives to other Macs in the
File Sharing panel. See “Shared Folders”.

Step 2a: On the Remote Mac you need to tell that Mac to join the network:


This is the (Remote Mac) Mini attached to the TV set.
It simply needs File Sharing turned on.

Step 2b: On the second Remote Mac which is used to rip DVDs:


This is the second (Remote Mac) Mini M4 in the office
used to rip movies and send them to the hard drives
attached to the Mac mini in the home theater.
Yes, the new interface is an abomination.

Step 3: Next you need to make those drives attached to the Server Mac visible to the Remote Mac(s):

To connect to the movie hard disk drives from a Remote Mac (meaning one not connected to those hard drives), on the Remote Mac open Finder->Go->Connect to Server and choose the remote disk drive(s):


Connecting to the hard drives from
a Remote Mac using Finder.

After choosing the Server Mac and clicking Connect, you will see all the drives connected to the Server Mac (the Mini to which all the hard disk drives are connected), thus:


Shift-click to choose all or
Command-click to chose individual drives.

Once you click OK all those drives will be accessible on your Remote Mac. This setting is non-volatile. Restart any of the Macs involved and the setting is preserved. Nice.

As having the home theater (Server Mac) Mini go down through a power cut risks corruption to the hard drives, that computer and all the hard drive boxes are connected to an APC UPS.

All the Minis and the Apple TV 4K streamers use either RF or Bluetooth for communications with peripherals like remotes, mice and keyboards so they can be hidden out of sight, so long as they are afforded adequate ventilation. In the case of the TV devices they nestle comfortably under the TV screen.


The Mac Mini and Apple TV 4K under the TV screen.

Those old Minis may not be speed demons but for routing video they are excellent and reliability is high. And if you power them through an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) they rarely go down.

The DVDpedia application used to catalog and run all those saved movies was profiled here. While Conor, the developer, has taken a hiatus he has nonetheless updated the application to run on Apple Silicon and you can download it here. I can confirm it runs fine on my Mac Mini M4 though the movie count flags are incorrect. Not a big deal. When first starting DVDpedia on a Remote Mac be sure to hold the Option key down before double clicking on the local (meaning on the remote Mac) DVDpedia application. When DVDpedia starts you will be asked for the location of the DVDpedia database and you should point to the database on the Mini which has all those hard drives connected. It’s under Library-> Application Support->DVDpedia->Database.DVDpd. That way any changes you make to the database either on a Remote Mac or on the Server Mac will be applied in the correct place. You only have to do this once.

Canson Infinity ink jet paper

Printing

French and best.

The French company Canson claims it has been making paper for artists for over 450 years, so you would think they have got it down by now. And my experience with Canson Infinity Photogloss Premium RC paper suggests they have.

Long time readers will know that I used an HP DesignJet 90 printer for many years. The long lived dyes in that paper mean I have prints made 20 years ago, hanging in bright sun, which remain fade free. When HP discontinued their DesignJet printers many years ago they remaindered supplies of their branded swellable paper (meaning the surface swells to absorb ink dye) and I bought some 600 sheets at a few cents a sheet. That supply lasted me for the best part of a decade until my studio dog project which between free prints to owners and further prints for local display used up some 150 sheets and printing of archival images for placement in large format albums accounted for 250 more, and counting. My dirt cheap supply of HP Premium glossy was done.

There’s a lot of clap trap surrounding fancy printing papers. Some of the worst, as my extensive tests disclosed, come from the vaunted Hahnemüle every one of which was marginal to very poor. This only went to prove just how good the HP branded product was, though I never did discover who actually made it. Most certainly it was not Hahnemüle.

I only print on high gloss paper as anything else destroys definition and dynamic range. Glossy also produces the deepest blacks. You pay thousands for your gear and then destroy definition by printing on fancy schmantzy matte paper? No thank you. Sure, matte will hide blemishes and mounting errors the answer to which is that you need to fix your technique and use glossy.

If I had a complaint about HP glossy it was that heavier areas of ink would reduce gloss locally and overall gloss would drop a tad once the print/mounting tissue/board went through the Seal dry mounting press. Also, the print needed a good 24 hours for the ink dyes to dry thoroughly.

Well, I’m happy to report that none of these issues plague the Canson paper. The gloss is very high, is not remotely reduced after laying down ink (I am using an Epson ET8550 dye printer) and, better still, is full preserved after dry mounting at 190F for 75 seconds under pressure. (Interestingly, Canson makes specific reference on its site to the surface maintaining its high gloss even after being subjected to heat). Whereas HP paper would emerge tacky from the printer the Canson product comes out dry. Obviously I cannot speak to longevity – which is largely attributable to the ink not the paper, but Epson has been in the printing business a long time so there’s reason to think they have got the ink design right.

Based on my experience Canson Infinity Photogloss Premium RC paper is strongly recommended. It weighs 270g, just a tad less than HP’s 280g, no that any of that matters if you end up mounting the print on mounting board. It costs around $2 a 13″x19″ sheet and B&H has it.


Gorgeous Hazel in the studio, my first Canson candidate.

Canson makes a broad variety of icc paper profiles including one for the Epson ET8550, and it’s what I use with Lightroom Classic.


The cryptically named
Canson icc profile in LRc.

The Rolleiflex 2.8D

Cameras

Not cheap, but most special.

The one thing the nutty retro film movement has succeeded in accomplishing – and it’s not great photography – is the wild escalation of the prices of some of the classic cameras of the 1950s and 1960s. Quite why anyone would waste time processing film with its poor quality and great fragility compared to digital images beats me. Yeah, I know. And LPs sound better too, right? Uh huh. Just go easy on the funny cigarettes.

The two ‘go to’ makers of the time were Franke & Heidecke – Rolleiflex – and Ernst Leitz – Leica. Both were German, needless to add, and that’s a good thing as the last thing you want in your camera maker is a sense of humor. (If you wanted large format the maker of choice was Linhof, sharing roots in the Fatherland).

When the highest quality images were required without resorting to cumbersome plate cameras the Rollei, with its large 6x6cm negatives (over 3 times the area of the 35mm alternative) was the choice of the most famous photographers of the time. Beaton, Capa, Lee Miller, Avedon, Arbus, Adams, Erwitt, Vivian Maier all used Rolleiflexes. Heck, Fred Astaire, trained by none other than Richard Avedon, used no fewer than three in Funny Face, and if you have not seen that then your have little interest in photography.

So my small Home Theater display of the great classics could not possibly be complete without a Rolleiflex from the peak film era and I opted for a 2.8D made in 1955. This took a good deal of searching as most cameras of that era have been beaten to death. Not this one:


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

It’s as near mint as these things get right down to the dual lens cap (bayonet the top part, snap closed the lower one), pristine leather case and the original instruction book. And the latter is wonderful. Read it without knowing anything about picture taking and you will be half way there by the time you are done. Why, even the self timer works, reflecting a repair by the previous owner.

Having offered supplication to the Market God (he responded favorably) I laid out a not inconsiderable amount of cash and the Rollei now adds a touch of class to the Home Theater which includes a Nikon F, a Minox B, a Contax II, a Bolex H16, a Calumet field camera and …. my first camera, the 1959 Kodak Brownie Reflex 620, given me by my parents when I was 8.


Alongside the Kodak Brownie.
The only thing these two share is the 6×6 film size.
Note the Leitz table tripod supporting the Rollei.

In operation the Synchro Compur shutter (1-1/500 and B) is almost silent, much quieter than the one in the contemporary Leica M3. You are limited to 12 exposures on a roll of 120 film which will ensure you waste none. And the exposure guide on the rear of the camera is beyond ingenious, far superior to the near useless ones which simply recite exposure values in later models.


The intuitive exposure guide.

You can couple the shutter speeds with the aperture values by a 90 degree twist of the front right dial between the lenses, or uncouple them if you want to separate the setting of the two variables. EVs never really caught on because 1 second at f/2.8 is a whole lot easier to remember than the fact that it’s EV3 at 100 ASA. Still, they are there if you want them, but you should probably dress eccentrically and affect a German accent when using them.

The Rollei is one of the truly great exemplars of the film era.

Valoi easy120 film scanning device

Film

Nice but way overpriced.

There are four key reasons why the inexpensive 35mm film scanning device from JJC was such a success:

  • Under $100
  • Assured parallelism of camera sensor and film planes
  • Superior definition to that from flat bed or dedicated scanners
  • Fast

Checking my LRc catalog I see that I ended up scanning 2300 35mm negatives and slides over an 8 week period working 2 hours or so daily (a rate of 20.5 scans per hour, including processing time at a cost of just 4 cents a scan) and were I using a traditional flatbed scanner I would still have another 12 months of wait time ahead of me …. and with lower definition results. How about 1 hour per high quality scan using a flat bed? Talk of using the wrong technology.

Now a 120 version of the JJC device has been announced by Valoi, using identical design principles but with one big if. It’s very expensive. By the time you add a film holder, duster and the advance mechanism you are looking at $750. Checking my physical albums I count 28 rolls of 120 film negatives and slides, or 336 images which works out to $2.26 and, no, I will not be taking any more film snaps on 120 or any other format, despite the imminent arrival of a gorgeous ‘display only’ Rolleiflex 2.8D from 1955. All this extolling of the purported superiority of film over digital is straight out of Pseuds’ Corner, attributable to people who (rightly) place a very low value on their time. If that’s you and you want to pay twice as much, one of these is just the ticket.


The Valoi 120 film scanning device. Click the image for their web site.

The specs state that 6×4.5, 6×6 and 6×7 (no mention that I can find of 6×9) film format masks are available, each at an outrageous $75 each for a simple piece of plastic.

If a Chinese copy comes along at $200 or less I’m a buyer. Otherwise those 120 film originals can wait. Meanwhile, if you have thousands of originals to scan the Valoi might make better economic sense for you than for me.