Category Archives: Photography

Desperation Purchases

Photography

When you like to pay retail.

For all I know, the retail photography hardware business of Keeble and Shuchat (“Shuck-It”) on California Avenue in Palo Alto has been around for ever. I know I have been an occasional visitor for over two decades now, but it’s not because I like to pay full retail and it’s most certainly not because I like paying an additional 10% to be squandered by California’s politicians, in the guise of sales tax.

No. The only time I visit K&S is to make what I call a Desperation Purchase.

You know the sort of thing. It’s Friday evening, you have to dash off some big prints and, bother, but the printer just ran out of yellow ink. Amazon will not deliver until next Wednesday. Or that 18″x24″ paper of which you laid in a good supply from Atlex just seems to have mysteriously run out. And you absolutely must have those prints made by Sunday night.

That means a trip to K&S is called for. Gritting your teeth and grasping your credit card, you set off, assured of two things. One is that you will be totally hosed down on the cost. The other is that there’s a fair chance K&S might actually have what you need. After all, generations of wags have referred to the store – actually stores, as there are two opposite one another – as Kostyou and Suckit or some variation thereon. But when it’s Saturday or Sunday, they are the only game in town. Sure, there’s Adolf Gasser in SF, dead on its feet and seemingly going out of business for a decade now, and Kaufmanns on 25th Street in San Mateo for the develop and print set, but when you want pro choice, Kostyou & Suckit it is.

Two other parts to the ritual of visiting K&S involve visiting their large gallery above the ‘retail’ store (the one across the street is the ‘pro’ store) and checking out their Leica collection.

The visit to the gallery has but one goal, which is to fulfill the forlorn hope that the display of prints in there will have none of the following features:

  • Monochrome
  • Yosemite
  • Big mats signed ‘3/500’ in pencil

Well, it’s been two decades now and I have yet to succeed. Quite why anyone bothers photographing Yosemite any more beats me, and why they do it in monochrome will remain one of the great mysteries of life. Buy an Adams poster, for God’s sake. Kitsch is cheaper that way and he was a better snapper than you. As for the mats – that’s all do do with being an ‘artist’. You couldn’t possibly understand.

The other reason, checking out the Leica collection, never disappoints. K&S has but two things of real value – its buildings on prime real estate which they really should sell to a developer. And its Leica collection in the Processing shop above the retail store which is probably worth even more.

So while my latest trip this last Sunday complied with the routine – tired Yosemite pictures and a goggle at the Leicas – my real goal was to get some air. No, not the hot kind the sales clerks were busy spouting to prospects. People who shop here are either making a Desperation Purchase or are from the wilds of the Amazon and have yet to hear of the other Amazon. I didn’t need any hot air. I needed the compressed variety. Yes, another Mac hardware failure was forcing me to pony up at full retail. You see, one of the great features of the ventilation design of our MacMini – used as a TV server and DVD player – is its ability to suck up every mote of dust in the environment and deposit most of its catch on the laser beam sender in the DVD player. This means DVDs will not play and it happens every 4-6 months.

You have too options.

Open up the Mini, extricate the DVD mechanism and clean it. This is the Looney Option. Your chances of opening the Mini without major damage to it or yourself are slim. And the possibility you might actually reassemble the thing in working order slimmer still. Plus the visits to the nut house after doing this will cost you dearly.

The second is the Genius Option, so named because an Apple Store Genius clued me into it. You get a can of compressed air (no, not Contact Cleaner, guaranteed to destroy your laser sender, which is why Radio Shack would not be a good place to shop), stick the red wand in the spray orifice on the can, ram the wand into the DVD slot and blast around in all directions. Ten seconds later and your Mini is fine again …. for the next six months.

And that is what found me at K&S on a sunny Sunday afternoon, buying a can of compressed air. They had no fewer than four brands to choose from (premium air, regular air, discount air and the one I bought) on the basis that There’s One Born Every Minute and, air being air, I did the mental math and bought the one with the lowest unit cost. Even so, I felt I overpaid.

Enough compressed air for ten MacMini fixes.

And speaking of dusting off, the first thing you have to do when you make your way up the stairs to Processing is to dust off the lone sales clerk you will find there. It’s the same guy you saw 11 years ago when he joined from Adolf Gassers, which had started going out of business back then and is still working at it. You will find him asleep at his 11 year old iMac (the one with the mushroom base and screen-on-a-wand), dreaming of the old days when film was grainy and darkrooms were red. We get to chatting and he regales me with how some jerk at Stanford is teaching a summer photography class and has told all his students they must learn traditional ways and expose 50 rolls of TriX (fifty!) during the week. Must be on sales commission. Unfortunately, the class is massively oversubscribed so K&S has to go to Kodak for more after they run out. Of course Kodak, being a few weeks away from bankruptcy, doesn’t have anyone to answer the phone. We reminisce about the good old days, how these young people all want instant gratification rather than selective depth of field and generally bond while he loses his train of thought a couple of times.

Anyway, as I’m making my way out to get seriously depressed by the execrable black and whites (“All fiber paper, no RC here” I am told) in their gallery, the man shouts to me “Hey! I sold an enlarger yesterday!”. They have seven on display – six ‘new’ ones and a very used and very corroded pre-war Leitz Focomat IIa for which they are asking the silly sum of $700. “No kidding!” “Yup, had it here on display for 10 years. Sold it to some kid at that Stanford class for $160.” The others? They have been on display 10 years too. Look hard and you will see wear marks from all those years of dusting.

Leitz Focomat IIa – 60mm and 95mm lenses for 35mm and 6×6 film.

Well, never let it be said that a visit to K&S is not entertaining, perhaps the most amazing thing being that it’s still there. And it’s a great place for air – hot or compressed.

Olympus gets serious

Micro Four-Thirds

Two new lenses.

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I have but three lenses for my Panasonic G1 and that’s pretty much all I need.

Two are from Panasonic, with OIS built in – the stellar 14-45mm kit lens and the wonderfully compact 45-200mm. The third is from Olympus and it’s the ultrawide zoom, the 9-18mm MFT.

While the Olympus zoom suffers from barrel distortion to varying degrees, click this link and you can download my profiles to remove these distortions in LR3 or in Photoshop. Unlike for the Panasonic lenses, the G bodies do not correct distortions from the Olympus lens range, so if it matters you have to do it manually. It takes seconds for the occasional architectural snap which requires such correction. That apart, I have found the 9-18mm to be an outstanding optical performer, indistinguishable in practice from the excellent Panny 14-45mm kit lens as far as definition goes.

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The Olympus 9-18mm is an indication that Oly is getting serious about making better lenses for its underwhelming Pen MFT bodies. I write ‘underwhelming’ as any camera whose primary mode of viewfinding requires the user to hold it arm-outsrteched, inches from his face, is not a serious camera for this photographer. First, I like to actually see what I’m viewfinding. Second, adding Oly’s clunky clip on EVF makes the whole thing bulkier than any G-series Panny with a built-in (and outstanding) EVF. Third, I prefer to remain unobtrusive. And last, I would rather not look like a dork. The sole advantage I can see to Oly’s bodies is that OIS is built into the body, meaning it works with any lens, whereas with the Panny lenses, selected lenses have OIS built into the lens. The Oly 9-18mm has no OIS but it is hardly missed at those focal length on my G1.

Now Olympus has announced two very interesting lenses for MFT – the 12mm f/2 (24mm FFE) fast ultrawide and the 45mm f/1.8 (90mm FFE) portrait lens.

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Priced at $800 and $400, respectively, and available in July and September 2011, these fill two important niches, but it’s the latter lens which especially interests me. Since selling my 5D outfit, which included Canon’s simply superb 85mm f/1.8 portrait lens I have lacked a wide aperture portrait lens.

Sure, I can emulate shallow depth-of-field by selectively blurring details in Photoshop, when they are rendered too sharp with the Panny kit lens at 45mm. At 45mm the Panny kit lens is a modest f/5.6 and often has too much d-o-f for head-and-shoulders portraits. But using PS in a studio portrait to keep the eyes sharp and the ears blurred is not so easy. The Oly 45mm is a full 3.5 stops faster than the kit lens at 45mm so will afford far greater control over (shallow) depth of field. Thus it interests me greatly.

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It remains to be seen whether these new Oly lenses are up to the performance of the 9-18mm, but at the prices asked I would guess that the quality will be fine. Obtrusive chrome finish? Who cares what color it is in the studio? Size? The Panny kit zoom at 45mm protrudes some 3.4″. Best as I can tell, the 45mm f/1.8 is much more compact, protruding maybe 2.5″ or as much as the kit zoom at 14mm, its smallest size. So this promises to be a truly compact portrait lens but with enough barrrel to permit support from underneath the lens. Lack of OIS? I’ll be using it with my Novatron studio flash outfit so camera shake is not an issue.

It will be a long wait to September for my 45mm f/1.8!

Curiously, the machining of the Oly’s focus collar is identical to that on my first portrait lens, bought in 1972, the estimable 90mm Elmar f/4 for my Leica M3:

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The Oly’s technology is just a tad more sophisticated. The Elmar was f/4, manual focus, manual aperture (the aperture ring rotated with the focus collar!), was twice the length of the Oly and the lens head unscrewed for use on bellows and close-up devices. There were no electronics in sight and construction was serious chrome coated brass. A fine optic which ran me £32 or $492.61 in today’s money. So the Oly is almost 20% cheaper!

SSDs and TRIM

Hackintosh, Hardware

Easily added.

Snow Leopard users should be aware of Apple’s latest sleight of hand.

TRIM – garbage management for SSDs which maintains their performance – has been added in Snow Leopard 10.6.8, the last version of Snow Leopard before Lion comes to market in July, 2011.

But that’s not all good news. You see Apple, in its greed for every penny they can squeeze from buyers of its overpriced jewelry passing as computer hardware, has made sure that TRIM support will only be available if you bought your computer with its SSD from Apple. Meaning you were well and truly hosed down at a 100% premium compared to what you could have bought an SSD for yourself. Or, worse luck, maybe that SSD option was simply unavailable when you bought your hardware so now you are forced to use an aftermarket SSD to upgrade. No TRIM for you, my lad. So much for backward compatibility and planned obsolescence.

Apple has made it extremely easy to replace HDDs in MacBook Pros and MacPros (and extremely hard in iMacs and Minis) but if you slot that nice new SSD into your MBP/MacPro/Mini, TRIM will not work. Upgrading your HDD to an SSD in your MBP, a plug-and-play operation which does not invalidate the warranty, is the single best thing for the performance of your laptop. However, when you do so, this is what OS 10.6.8’s System Profiler will report:

No TRIM for you, sucker.

Mercifully, there are many smart people out there who believe in freedom of speech and refuse to be stolen from. Hop over to the good people at Groths and you can download their utility and have TRIM up and running on your aftermarket SSD in no time at all. My SSDs are recent Intel X25-M 120gB models, and this fix works perfectly on both, after a restart.

As usual with these things, I suggest you try this on a bootable backup drive first, to be on the safe side. After you complete the installation, your System Profiler->Serial-ATA->SSD should look like this, and your SSD’s performance will be enhanced for the long term:

TRIM enabled on the HackPro.

As you can see, the fix uses no space, merely modifying existing files, speaking loudly to Apple’s increasingly cynical attitude toward its customers.

If you have been using your SSD without TRIM for a while, as I have, Lifehacker has information on how to clean it up here.

Moom

Software

Fixing the green blob.

One of the weakest features of Apple’s OS X operating system is the Finder. It has never supported split windows, though that was put to rights with Total Finder which I have been using for six months now and recommend unreservedly. True, it’s $15 for something which should come with OS X, but the makers do a stellar job of keeping it updated for each new OS major or minor release and once you have used it there’s no going back if smooth file movement between drives and directories is your thing. TotalFinder addresses one of the few remaining shortcomings of OS X.

As for the other major one, well, it’s a ‘feature’ which didn’t work in Cheetah, OS X 10.0. And it has continued broken in all of Cheetah’s successors – Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard.

And I’ll bet you it will not work in Lion.

I am talking, of course, about the wretched green blob. It’s the colored ball toward the top left of every window you open in OS X.

Clicking it is meant to expand the window to full screen. What could be simpler? .

Except that clicking it has results about as predictable and consistent as the pronouncements of your elected representative. Meaning it simply cannot be trusted as what it does seems to vary with the day of the week, the weather and the demeanor of your dog. Maybe it needs a good bribe, like your Congressman or Senator, to actually do what it’s paid for?

And if, like me, you have no fewer than three displays with multiple windows attached to your computer, then moving windows around is a real pain. But I know better than to complain to a company which rarely listens to its customers and curse quietly every time I try to grab the window size repositioning area at the lower right of an open window, miss, try again, then curse some more when moving the window into place, only to find that I have to resize yet again.

So I have given up complaining about the green blob, having long ago assumed that it’s just one of those non-facts of life like US military intelligence (MIA), US Energy policy (none) or the US electoral system of one-man-one-vote (in the US we have one-dollar-one-vote).

Well, with Moom, the green blob finally works. And it works as well with multiple displays as with one.

Moom accomplishes what none of the alternatives does. A simple and intuitive way to make any window full screen, properly positioned. Or half-screen come to that, which is even more useful. For real masochists, you can even go to quarter screen or any rectangle or position of your choice. Moom allows you to program any shape and position you like and those will be added to the pop-up-on-hover, below. The implementation could scarce be improved upon. Just hover your mouse cursor over the green blob and this is what you will see:

The rest is self-explanatory.

It works perfectly, and the download gives you 100 free goes. Thereafter it’s $10.

Click the picture below to go to Moom’s web site:

Click the picture for Moom’s web site.

And as for you, Apple, you can kiss my Moom.

Another SSD for the HackPro

Hackintosh

Gearing up for Lion.

As OS X Lion will likely involve the usual amount of experimentation to get it working properly on the HackPro, I have added a fourth drive to the computer and its second SSD, so it now contains two SSDs and two HDDs.

The SSDs act as OS and application drives (boot and back-up) whereas the HDDs contain data and back-up data. They also contain OS Snow Leopard as EyeOne Match, the profiling utility for my EyeOne colorimeter, will not work with Lion.

In addition to having an SSD for experimenting with Lion, I also gain a super-fast back-up boot drive. On monthly testing of the HDDs as boot drives I have been increasingly struck by just how slow these are when booted from. After four trouble free months with my first Intel SSD it made sense to add a second. For the test phase I will partition it into two partitions, using Disk Utility; one will contain a straight clone of the existing SSD boot and application drive, and Lion, once released, will reside on the other until fully debugged. Thereafter both will be converted to Lion and Snow Leopard will remain on the HDDs for use with EyeOne Match.

The second SSD will continue to act as a low risk testbed for any new software changes or upgrades.

This is how things will look:

Drive topology after adding the second SSD to HackPro.

I strongly recommend you add an SSD to your work computer. Once you have experienced the speed there is no going back. I paid $230 for each Intel X25-M 120gB SSD.

The HackPro with two SSDs installed.

The incremental heat output and current draw of the second SSD are so low that no additional cooling precautions need be taken in the exceptionally well ventilated Antec Sonata III case with its generously spec’d 500 watt power supply. Installation, which means attaching the SSD to the provided mounting plate and the plate to the Antec’s slide in carrier, plus the connection of power and data cables took FU Steve all of twenty minutes. Carbon Copy Cloner took 27 minutes to clone the existing SSD Boot drive to the new backup SSD, and it needed but two more minutes to verify that the backup was bootable and to add the backup job (Boot->SSD Bak) to Carbon Copy Cloner’s list of automated, nightly backups. You really don’t want to forget that last step!

Partitioning:

As the new backup SSD will also be used as a test bed for OS Lion, to be released next month, I first partitioned it into 90gB and 30gB partitions, using Disk Utility. The latter partition, named ‘Lion Test’, at 30gB, will be more than large enough for OS and selected application testing.

Partitioning the SSD Bak drive to make space for OS Lion.

TRIM:

TRIM is the software code which helps manage garbage on an SSD drive. Apple’s just enabled it in OS Snow Leopard 10.6.8 (the last release before Lion) and it will be included in Lion. At this time the OS will only permit TRIM to be used on Apple installed SSDs. Let’s hope that changes, as many Mac users will be replacing the HDD in their MacBook Pro with an aftermarket SSD to avail themselves of the enhanced speed and lower power consumption. Even if Apple does not step up to the plate here, hacks already exist to make TRIM in Lion work with non-Apple installed SSDs.

Meanwhile, is there anything useful to be divined by comparing the space on the 3 month old SSD in my HackPro with the newly installed backup SSD?

Here’s are the drives inside HackPro as reported on the Desktop:

HackPro drives before partitioning SSD Bak.

In the case of the SSD drive pair, the base drive reports a little more space than the backup one, but not enough to make any difference. Both the backup drives, which include a full Snow Leopard OS, are bootable. So after three months of intense use of the first SSD (top of the above screen snap) there seems to be negligible difference in available space, suggesting that the absence of TRIM has made no material difference. However, be assured I will be looking into adding TRIM support once Lion is installed and will be explaining how to do that in these pages.

Update June 2012: For data on the newer, faster SATA 3 6gd/s SSDs, click here.