Category Archives: Photography

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.

Two bargain classics

Canon 5D, Nikon bodies, Photographs

From the Big Two.

Now that digital bodies seem to arrive almost quarterly from the big manufacturers – and seemingly weekly from the tedious ‘instant obsolescence’ Sony which still gets very little right – it’s interesting to look back on the early days of full frame DSLRs. I was lucky to own both of the models mentioned below and would unhesitatingly buy used ones today.

My first serious DSLR was the Canon 5D and lightly used bodies now sell for under $500. Though the modest sized 12.8mp sensor is small by modern standards it’s hard to beat the color rendering and unless you need video or truly enormous prints (of course you don’t – face it, you put your stuff out on the web) the 5D cannot be beaten when it comes to price:performance today.


The outstanding original Canon 5D.


Barn. Templeton, CA. Canon 5D, 24-105mm f/4 Canon L.

Nearly every Canon lens is excellent and of the fixed focus ones the 35mm, 50mm and outstanding 85mm f/1.8 are recommended and very inexpensive new or used.

Nikon was slow to the FF game and its first affordable body was the D700. It came with a 12.1mp Sony sensor which was exceptional in most regards but especially when it came to low noise at higher ISOs. Those large pixels helped with that and, as with the 5D, low noise prints up to 18″ x 24″ were par for the course. $800 gets you a good one but insist on a Nikon USA model (distinguishable by the small ‘USA’ sticker on the inside of the body when the battery is pulled) because that’s the only kind Nikon USA will service in the USA. Alternatively, if you have a good aftermarket Nikon service shop available, provenance is of no consequence. There is a truly vast array of Nikon lenses from 1960 on available, MF, AF, fixed focus, zoom, you name it, any price point. The superb 50mm MF f/2 Nikkor-H can be found in mint condition all day long for $60 or less and you can take it from there.


The immensely capable Nikon D700.


Baby carrier. Nikon D700, 180mm f/2.8 AFD Nikkor.

The D700 is usually reckoned to have a shutter life of 150,000 – and replacements are cheap – with lightly exercised bodies a dime a dozen. Again, as with the 5D there’s no video, and the build quality is excellent.

No one needs more than 12mp in a DSLR as no one prints any more (well, I do and 12mp is just fine; heck the iPhone6 is good for 18″ x 24″) and both these cameras’ sensors boast excellent dynamic range, low noise and outstanding color rendering.

Windows on the Mac Pro

Mac Pro

Hold your nose.

For an index of all my Mac Pro articles, click here.

I have long used a single CPU 2009 Mac Pro – upgraded by me to a 3.46GHz Xeon 6-core CPU for speed – as a machine for delivering streaming quotes and financial news. It uses Mavericks, OS 10.9 and is reliable as a hammer. However, my application of choice is poorly supported on the OS X side and after many frustrations I decided to install Windows under Bootcamp to allow the better supported Windows variant of the software to be installed and used.

I opted for the 64-bit version of Windows 64 Professional Service Pack 1 as it’s well regarded and stable. Win XP is 32-bit, ancient and buggy, Win Vista is a disaster of epic proportions (can you say El Capitan?) as is Win 8/8.1. Win 10 is too new to trust and appears to add useless interface gloss on a Windows 7 base much as the asinine LaunchPad does nothing for OS X.

I paid all of $58 at Amazon for a plain wrapper version which comes with this dire warning:

Follow my instructions below and you can disregard the above, saving $50-100 over the fancy box version, and there are no issues with activation, provided you enter the 25 digit activation code correctly.

Users of the new Mac Pro (‘trash can’) cannot install Windows 7 using Bootcamp as Apple dropped support for anything earlier than Windows 8. Yet another reason to stick with a well upgraded classic Mac Pro.

I opted for a Bootcamp installation as that allows the OS to run at maximum speed. Bootcamp does not use OS X, addressing Windows 7 natively, much as a PC does. I have no need of the added expense or performance hits from virtualization technology (Parallels, VMWare or VirtualBox). But it’s important to use the right version of BootCamp and this advisory from Apple will allow you to download the right drivers for your Mac which will enable your keyboard, USB devices, wifi, display (if you are lucky), you name it.

You will need either a 16GB USB flash drive or an external USB SSD/HDD. These must be formatted as FAT32 drives using OS X’s Disk Utility; the drivers are copied by Bootcamp to this drive for subsequent installation to your Windows partition on your OS X drive.

Installation:

  • Start up Bootcamp (in the Applications->Utilities folder in OS X) with your USB drive connected to the Mac Pro.
  • Insert the Win7 disk in the Superdrive.
  • Check the Custom Installation (not Win7 Upgrade) box in Bootcamp and tell it to assign 60GB to the Bootcamp/Windows partition.
  • If the installation fails, click the small ‘Format’ icon with the Bootcamp partition highlighted in the scrolling list of drives/partitions. This reformats the selected partition from FAT32 to NTFS (you cannot use OS X’s Disk Utility to do this), which is what Windows needs to permit installation. It takes a second or two to execute.
  • Let the installation proceed – it takes for ever to get off the 0% reading and there is no progress report other than a few blinking dots. Microsoft at its best.

Now here’s the secret sauce.

As each step completes a green check mark will appear to its left. When the last row is checked, pump the Eject button on your keyboard and prepare to grab the Win7 disc from the DVD drive before the drawer shuts again. Fail to do this and the automatic restart will leave your machine with a black screen and a blinking white cursor.

Installation will now proceed and you will see lots of these:

When you are done you will be asked to activate Win7; I had to use a magnifying glass to make out the tiny serial number on the product label. Then it’s likely you may still need to install the proper display driver. The generic one in Win7 was useless for my 30″ Apple Cinema Display so I downloaded the right driver for my EVGA Nvidia GTX680 GPU here. The installation took at least a couple of hours – just leave your machine alone and do something else. There is very little indication of any progress in the Nvidia installer’s progress bar for much of the time.

To enable the numeric keypad on extended keyboards, hit the NumLock key. It works obverse to the way in OS X.

Now install the endless Win7 updates (definitely an overnight task) – as you can see there are many:

This is Microsoft so some will not take on the first try – try again:

Finally, be sure to install the free Avast virus/security software, the same you are already using on your Mac, right?

Now you should be happily (?) starting up in Windows – OS X restarts from the last partition it started from; if you want to revert to OS X hold the Option key through the chime and you will be able to elect the startup disk of choice.

Before installing my investment apps I noted that only 2GB of the 60GB I had set aside in the Bootcamp partition remained available. After downloading the free WinDirStat the app disclosed that two huge files existed on the Windows partition – hiberfil.sys and pagefile.sys at 20+GB each. Pagefile.sys is virtual memory swapping which is unnecessary unless you have less than 4GB of RAM, so I turned down the 16GB default to 6GB – right click on Computer in the Start menu->Properties->Advanced system settings->Advanced->Performance Settings->Advanced->Virtual Memory Change->5000-6000MB. Phew! That recovered over 10GB. The other file stores the Sleep image and is best left alone – it means that any mouse movement after sleep returns you to your previous place.


WinDirStat shows a tamed pagefile.sys, freeing up disk space.

Now I could install my investment app, and all looks well:

Time to do all of this? Maybe 2 hours at the keyboard and 5-6 hours of the Mac Pro grinding away while files were downloaded.

As for the user interface, everything Steve said here about MSFT 20 years ago remains true. A tasteless product for a tasteless consumer. “Microsoft is McDonalds”. Too bad I had to install it.

Ecco Ristorante

Dining, Photographs

Superb!

Ecco Ristorante in Burlingame has been around since 1986 with the same chef and owner, Tooraj Sharif, a charming man and a great cook. The food is distinguished by subtle flavors and sauces, always beautifully served.

It’s an occasion place, and you mostly see besuited gents eating here, spending someone else’s money.


Click the image for Ecco’s site.

We always ask for our favorite waiter Paul, not just because he is a warm, effusive individual, but also because he runs a racing motorcycle accessories business and always fills us in on the latest dirt!

The other night saw my boy Winston and I celebrating his splendid boarding school entrance exam score and Paul took an absolutely lovely snap of us, which I felt I had to share:

Snapped on my iPhone6.