Category Archives: Photography

Recent Nvidia cards in the Mac Pro

Mac Pro

Catch 22 lives.

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

To apply for a job, you need to have a few years of experience. But in order to gain experience, you need to get a job first.

Like logic applies to the dilemma of installing the latest Nvidia GPU drivers in your Mac Pro.

Here’s the background. The GTX680 GPU came from EVGA and was made for the PC, along with like GPUs from many makers including Nvidia, Zotac, PNY, Gigabyte – they all worked well. Typical port configuration was one DVI-D, one DVI-I, (both DVI ports limited to 2560 x 1200), one DisplayPort (4k and down) and one HDMI 1.2 (limited to 1080p).

The last Nvidia card sold as ‘Mac compatible’ was the EVGA special version of the GTX680. That one showed the full Apple boot screen on cold start.

Thus you had three choices when buying a GTX680:

  • Buy the EVGA Apple certified one and pay through the nose
  • Buy a PC version, save $150, and get no splash screen during a cold start
  • Flash the card’s ROM or have it done for you to restore the boot screen

Who needs a boot screen? Only those poor unfortunates who insist on running Windows under BootCamp. You install OS X on one volume of a drive, Windows on another then when cold starting, hold the Option key on the keyboard and the spinning cog (through OS Mountain Lion) or progress bar (Mavericks and later) changes to a display of all bootable drives. You elect the BootCamp drive and proceed in your misery. Want to revert to sanity? Reboot holding the Option key and select an OS X volume as the one to start from.

Users who merely need to choose between different OS X boot volumes or drives can do so in System Preferences->Startup Drive. Rebooting will make the volume or drive chosen the new boot drive.

The snag is that if you boot into the Windows volume, you must have a working boot screen to see other volumes if wanting to revert to OS X (or Linux or Ubuntu or whatever). If you can’t see the boot screen because your GTX680 is an unflashed PC variant you cannot get back into the OS X volume.

Things get worse. After the GTX680 was discontinued Apple ceased marketing ‘Apple certified’ Nvidia cards as they stopped making the classic Mac Pro at the same time, so there was no need in their cynical eyes to allow classic Mac Pro users to stay current with the rapidly evolving field of ever faster and more capable GPUs.

With the Nvidia GTX7xx generation you could still use the native drivers which came with OS X but you could not get a boot screen unless the card was flashed.

Then, with the current, and exceptionally capable GTX9xx generation of GPUs, not only did you lose the boot screen, you also needed to use Nvidia’s own drivers to make the card work as the GTX6xx/7xx ones were no longer compatible. To get there, while still using an older card, you would download the Nvidia drivers, which install as a preference pane, and then go into System Preferences->Nvidia and choose the Nvidia driver in preference to the OS X one. Reboot and your old card would continue working fine. Now power down, swap to the latest and greatest GTX960/970/980 and all was well.

Here’s where the Catch 22 comes in. Apple decides to release an ‘improved’ OS X – minor or major release. Chances are it breaks the driver so after a few days, Nvidia releases the upgraded driver. They are very good about this as it means continued sales of their latest cards to the Mac Pro set. But you cannot wait or, worse, have set your Mac Pro for automatic updates of software. You come in in the morning , OS X El Crapitan has been installed unknown to you overnight and you are welcomed with a black screen, as the OS is no longer compatible with the previous generation Nvidia driver on your boot drive.

There are several ways to exit this dilemma:

  • Keep an old Nvidia GT120 card installed if you can spare a PCIe slot – any slot. They can be found for $50-75, typically come with one DVI and one mDP port, include a boot screen and 512MB of vRAM, and will even drive the excellent 30″, 2560 x 1200 Apple Cinema Display. Mine does. Not much use for video but it fixes the problem. It’s single width, needs no auxiliary power cable and uses very little power. It’s also dead silent. You transplant your DVI or mDP monitor cable to the GT120, the display comes to life, you update to the latest Nvidia driver, switch the data cable once more and all is well.
  • Unplug your GTX9xx card and replace it with an older card which delivers a boot screen and allows you to update drivers. A real pain but it gets you there if you kept that old card handy.
  • Boot from a backup drive which has the older working OS on it, update drivers and clone over to the regular boot drive. This will leave you on the older OS but at least you will be functional.
  • Do it the smart way. Get hold of a Mac laptop, and set up your Mac Pro for Screen Sharing in System Preferences->Screen sharing thus:


    This is how you want your Mac Pro – not your laptop – to look.

  • Now go into your Mac laptop’s Finder and you will see your Mac Pro listed in the left hand column – red oval (don’t ask me why it has that cryptic description):

  • Click on ‘Share Screen’ – green oval. You will have to login using your Mac Pro’s username and password. Now you can see the Mac Pro’s display feed regardless of whether the Mac Pro’s screen is black or working properly. Download the latest Nvidia driver, install it, turn off Screen Sharing on the laptop, reboot the Mac Pro and you are up and running again.

Some architecture

Nikon lenses, Photographs

A great way to end the year.

Few things beat a crisp, sunny day in San Francisco, and the city’s propensity for preserving its old buildings means more subject matter for an itchy trigger finger.

These were all snapped today on three classic ‘metal era’ MF Nikkors from my copious inventory on the D3x – the 35mm f/2, the 85mm f/1.8 and an all time favorite, the 200mm f/4, an outstanding optic for picking out gorgeous period details.

The absence of autofocus for this type of subject matter is anything but a hindrance. If anything, the more contemplative approach required is a benefit.

Processed in LR6, some verticals straighened in PS CS5, some juice added here and there in Snapseed.

Nikkor 20mm f/2.8 AiS lens

Nikon lenses

Still in production.

The most remarkable thing about the Nikon Nikkor 20mm f/2.8 AiS lens is that Nikon continues to make it. It’s available new for some $650 – not cheap – and will work on just about any Nikon body, film or digital, since the groundbreaking Nikon F of the 1960s. This example belongs to a friend of the blog for whom I volunteered to create lens correction profiles for use with Lightroom or Photoshop to correct linear distortion and vignetting. As a general rule, the wider the lens the greater is the incidence of these aberrations.

My 20mm Nikkor of choice is the original and massive 20mm UD f/3.5 Nikkor which is nearly a half century old. Mint examples can be found for around $300; many are available and there is no excuse for buying a ‘beater’. It has outstanding center resolution at all apertures, with the edges catching up by f/8. You can read about it here. The current 20mm AiS is much smaller, and both lenses are manual focus only:


The old UD Nikkor is on the D2x at left.


The current 20mm AiS optic is on the D3x at right.

Where the UD adopts the early ‘all metal’ finish of the classic era, the AiS uses rubberized focus and aperture rings. Both lenses are manual focus.

Despite the high price, Nikon does not fit a CPU to the lens so the user has to manually dial in the aperture and focal length on the Nikon body if any lens profile is to be automatically recognized in LR or PS; the CPU I have fitted to the UD dispenses with this need. You can always tell LR which profile to use if you forget to dial it into the body or dial in the wrong one.

The owner of the 20mm f/2.8 AiS shown here advises that Lightroom CC (the cloud version) no longer permits profiles to be dialed in manually, but Photoshop CC does. So if you are solely a Lightroom user and need to manually input profiles, I recommend you use the stand alone Lightroom 6 desktop version, still available. Adobe really does no want you to do that, preferring to steer you to the rental model of the CC version, but follow my guide here and you can download it easily. Given that PS and LR are pretty much stalled and at the end of their development cycles, there’s little justification for buying the CC version with its purported ‘constant updates’. A disingenuous business model if ever there was one, but that’s Adobe for you.

CPU on the UD is arrowed.

Given the narrow rear flange of the AiS, installation of a CPU would be a trivial process, and I describe that here.

I created the lens profile for the AiS using Adobe Lens Profile Creator in the usual way, at f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6 and f/8. After f/8 nothing changes. Here is the profile invoked in the Develop module of Lightroom 6 – LR 3-5 will work just as well. The profile is placed in the User’s Library directory as explained in the above link. To ‘see’ the directory in Finder be sure to hit the ‘Option’ key when in Finder->Go as the fools at Apple have seen fit to hide it in recent releases of OS X.


Profile invoked in LR.

While the profile says ‘D3x’ in the title it is non-body specific and will work with any Nikon digital image, FX or DX (APS-C). In practice the profile does an outstanding job of correcting the fairly pronounced vignetting at wider apertures, as well as correcting the minor but very complex linear distortion which is of the ‘wave’ or ‘moustache’ type common in Nikkor 20mm lenses – both my UD and my (now sold) 20mm f/3.5 Ai lens exhibit it. The vignetting is slightly less pronounced – uncorrected – than in the old UD, but there is little in it between the two and after applying the respective profiles there is no difference in this regard.


Top right corner at f/2.8 – no profile.


Top right corner at f/2.8 – with profile.

The profile cannot correct for chromatic aberration and the AiS exhibits red fringing (the UD displays green fringing, by contrast):


Red fringing in the AiS at f/2.8.

A quick tweak in LR removes the fringing:

Here are the settings:


Removing the AiS’s red fringing in LR6.

How does the extreme corner definition compare with the UD? As my earlier UD review discloses, the UD is optimized for center sharpness at full aperture (f/3.5) so the corners suffer. Yet despite that the UD is clearly superior in the extreme corners as the image below shows. This would make a 72″ print and was taken in very overcast, low contrast conditions, a very challenging environment for any lens:


Extreme top left corner – AiS on the left, UD on the right. Both with lens profiles and color correction applied.

So maybe not all progress is forward. You get two thirds of the bulk and weight but lose corner resolution at full aperture with the newer lens. The UD maintains an advantage in corner resolution at all apertures, though the difference falls as the lenses are stopped down. While I do not publish them here, center resolution of the UD is 1 stop better than for the AiS through f/5.6, after which the two lenses are identical.

You can download the lens correction profile for the 20mm AiS Nikkor by looking for it here.

Here’s a far better illustration of how the ‘wave distortion’, seemingly common to 20mm Nikkors, is corrected. These were taken by the lens’s owner:


No profile – see how the lintel drops then rises – top right hand corner.


With profile. Red chromatic aberration remains to be corrected but the ‘wave’ is gone.

OS X – the new Windows

Mac Pro

QC out the window.

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

There was only one reason I dumped Windows in 2002 for OS X (10.2 – Jaguar, but not like the car at all as regards reliability). The value of my time. The instability of Windows and the constant blue screens had long ceased being a joke, becoming a massive time sink, and I moved on.

And this proved a sage move all the way through Snow Leopard – 10.6 in 2009 – which was the last version to include Apple’s superb Rosetta emulator. Apple had switched from power hungry IBM G3/4/5 PPC CPUs to Intel’s more capable hardware in the interim and had crafted Rosetta before the switch, to permit seamless use of PPC apps with the Intel CPUs. Rosetta was a masterpiece of coding, completely invisible to the user and never failed me, remaining essential to this day if you want to use the online printer management utility for the no less superb HP 90/130 wide carriage dye printers, as HP never upgraded that utility to work with Intel CPUs.

Then things started going off the rails. Sheer inanities like Launchpad (added in Lion – 10.7) and extremely buggy iMessage support (10.8 – Mountain Lion) only detracted from the user experience. Library directories started disappearing unless you knew where to look and ‘Save As’ in common applications had disappeared from the drop-down menus and required you to remember to hit the Option key to enable these. What was Apple thinking?

Mavericks (10.9) added little, mercifully, other than bug clean up but with Yosemite the ADD-afflicted programming team in Cupertino was back at it, adopting Jony Ive’s truly awful ‘flat’ icons for everything and adding Handoff so that you could take phone calls on your computer – one of the most irritating intrusions in any professional’s work day. Steve must be spinning in his grave. But Yosemite added one more borderline criminal ‘feature’, a switch in fan management from keeping it cool to keeping it quiet and hang longevity. You can see my test data here. Suffice it say that if you are involved in heavy duty audio or video processing that an aftermarket fan management utility is de riguer if you use Yosemite.

Then along came El Capitan. Clearly the OS X crew is under daily threat of unemployment if they do not come up with something new weekly, and they managed to make El Capitan (10.11) the worst OS X release ever in the process.


El Crapitan. Pull the other leg – it has bells on for the festive season.

Most of my professional customers use RAID – generally RAID0 – which allows two HDDs or two SSDs to be paired, doubling the i/o channel width and thus doubling speed. The result is near-Thunderbolt speeds at non-Thunderbolt prices, all effortlessly achieved though a few keystrokes in Disk Utility. Only there’s one snag in El Capitan – Disk Utility no longer supports this feature. So you have to go into Terminal with its unintelligible ‘language’ and try things there. Good luck with that.


Utter mendacity from Apple – and it’s ‘free’ only if your time is worthless.

Want to repair System Permissions in Disk Utility? No chance. It’s been deleted. Again, what is Apple thinking of, dumbing down the OS in this manner?

But there’s another great new ‘feature’ in El Capitan which, three months after introduction, Apple seems unwilling/uncaring/unable to fix. Ask any user and you will hear that he only needs three things from an OS – stable Mail, robust internet access and support for his aftermarket apps which does not break with every iteration of the OS. Well, Apple has managed to impugn all three principles. I’ll dwell on Mail.

I had stupidly set System Preferences in my 2015 MacBook Air to automatically update the OS, having become sick and tired of the constant nagging from the OS to do so. The other day my MBA was running red hot at the pace of an Irishman at closing time leaving his local boozer. Hopping into Activity Monitor I saw that Mail was using 222% of the CPU. Yup, the ADD set at Apple cannot even compute percentages, let alone make a stable OS. As a result Mail, which has become more problematic with every OS X release, was slowing to a crawl, reboots fixed nothing, old deleted drafts and messages constantly reappeared and the whole thing was unusable. I installed a fresh El Capitan which proved as effective as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and finally resorted to erasing the Mail setup for iCloud completely and resetting it up. A two hour process with scant feedback other than that a barely readable message that Mail was recovering “30,947 emails”, which gave me lots of confidence. Check the chat boards and you will see this is a common problem.


User feedback, the Apple way.

I confess that for the first time since 2002 I have started thinking of switching back to Windows, which I thought I would never write. Meanwhile I will revert my MBA to Yosemite (sadly, I cannot go to Mavericks – or better still Snow Leopard – as Apple’s mendacity prevents that) and suggest you do too.

I realize that the money is in mobile, Apple, but lots of your mobile users – maybe a majority? – use Mac hardware. Enough already with the OS – just leave it alone.

My Mac Pros remain happy and as reliable as a hammer on Mavericks and Yosemite (with the requisite fan management utility for the latter) and that is not likely to change any time soon as they will never see El Capitan.

Update 24 hours later:

See what I mean? This after doing the reinstall and finding my reproductive organs were being yet again fricassée‘d by the OS X team at Apple:

It’s Yosemite for me. The instructions appear here. You cannot just connect an external drive with a version of Yosemite and clone it over – Apple in its infinite arrogance really does not want you reverting to an earlier OS. Follow the instructions in the link and your MBA (or whatever) will revert to the OS it shipped with, Yosemite in my case. Sadly I cannot go back any earlier, but anything beats El Crap.


Sanity restored with Mail activity back to zero again, and everything cool once more.

Stop the nagging:

To turn off Apple’s thoroughly obnoxious, disruptive and dangerous (you click ‘Upgrade’ by accident) periodic nagging to ‘upgrade’ to Yosemite, go to the AppStore app, click on ‘Upgrades’ at the top of the screen, select Yosemite upgrade, then right click the circled icon below:


Right-click the circled icon for peace.

At the Wharf

Dining, Photographs

Lovely colors.

Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco is much more than a tourist trap selling dumb T shirts to white trash which has travelled 3,000 miles from Noo Joisy for no other purpose.

Take the back roads and amble along the commercial fishing wharves and you are met with more subject matter than you can shake a stick at.


Dungeness Crab nets. The metal ring is to let out immature crab. Keep telling yourself that, environmentalists.


Alcatraz is always present ….


…. as is the Golden Gate.


Coit Tower.


Dungeness Crab ready for the pot.


Honoring sailors of yesteryear.


Season’s Greetings.

All snapped on the ancient Nikon D2x with a 35mm f/1.8G AF-S DX Nikkor. The early CMOS APS-C sensor in this magnificent body does all colors justice and the body can be found throwaway cheap in mint condition and will certainly outlast you.

With thanks to Keld Helmer-Petersen who taught me how to see in dockland.

* * * * *

After so exhausting a session there’s good food to be had and, yes, it is available among the hot dog stands and pizza parlors.

It comes by the name Capurro’s, has been here for ever and if you search out Paul Capurro, the former marine who owns it, you will be regaled with tales of the mob and Capone’s buddies, back when Big Al was cooling his heels in Alcatraz and Paul was hearing tales on his father’s knee.

Arrive early and you miss the crowds, and mercifully the prices here discourage T shirt shoppers:


Start with the Drake’s Bay oysters, locally caught and wildly flavorful.


Follow up with Sand Dabs, now in season.

Capurro’s snaps on an iPhone6.

Later at the fishmonger’s:


Ready for eating and Made in the USA!

I have the fishmonger break up the shells and then add some lemon from the garden. Delicious!