Category Archives: Photography

Photographs – 10 years

10th Anniversary, Photographs

Ten years and ten million readers.

I started writing here ten years ago today, ten million hits ago. When titling this journal I had three topics in mind.

‘Photographers’ would address pieces about photographers whose work I like and which in some way influenced my way of seeing. The most influential by far is Henri Cartier-Bresson whose work I first chanced upon in the public library in London, when I was 10 years old. It immediately captivated and does so to this day.

‘Photography’ would address technical aspects of the craft, including both cameras and processing hardware. At the start of the last decade the latter had come to irreversibly mean no more film or chemical darkroom, but rather a digital image and a desktop computer. And thank goodness for that. The amount of time spent on the production process has never been lower. Just download, click a couple of things in LR then push Print. Done.

But the most important of those three aspects of the image captured in the title of this journal is ‘Photographs’ and that means photographs taken by me. This journal is like a television set – if you don’t like the content, switch channels. I have dozens of large prints of my snaps on the walls here, their daily examination reminding me what an absolute blast I have taking pictures. I enjoy my ‘channel’.

My primary interest is street photography and it does not hurt that America’s most photogenic city, San Francisco, is at my doorstep. To illustrate my street work of the past decade I have selected just two rolls’ worth of ‘film’. 72 snaps. Hundreds, maybe thousands, have already appeared here.

What HC-B taught me at the tender age of 10 is that good street photography is much more than just pressing the button at the right moment. Sure, you cannot produce a good image from a poorly timed snap. But the other key attributes abundantly found in HC-B’s street work are a sense of drama, enhanced by an absence of clutter. Accomplishing the latter in street snaps is one of the more challenging aspects of our crowded urban environment. Drama is not an issue. There is a lot to go around in the eternal human comedy.

The other attribute which pervades my snaps is something of which the master’s work is totally devoid. Humor. The sheer pleasure, joy and frequent hilarity the streets of a great American city bring to the eye are the sublimest of pleasures. A life without humor is no life at all.

And there’s one other variable, one about which HC-B was clueless. Color. I have little interest in monochrome snaps, which mostly say to me that the photographer was trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. We live, as Eliot Porter reminds us, in a world of color.

A quick peek at the bottom of this journal’s page will show how those three major categories addressed here were favored over the past decade:


10 years of snaps and writing.

If the ‘Photographers’ category is light, it’s no surprise. There are few out there of note.

The decade since the first entry here on June 15, 2005 has seen this journal bring me tremendous satisfaction, lasting friendships, the joy of both learning and teaching and a wonderful outlet for whatever was in my mind on any one of those 3,000 plus days. If there have been frustrations – resulting solely from trolls who will never contribute anything useful to civilization – then these were quickly forgotten, courtesy of the Delete key and secure in the knowledge that no negative person has ever accomplished anything of value.

I hope you enjoy the slideshow I have put together of those 72 images. Every time I gaze at these snaps I enjoy perfect recall of how each was made and remember the thrill of seeing the moment come together. What other hobby can compare?

Some were sheer automated reaction as a situation presented itself, like the bike-taxi rider (#1), the selfie couple (#9), the joyous street scene (#42), the lady with the raised knee (#64), or Superman entering his car (#65). Others were carefully premeditated, like the lone snapper below the Golden Gate Bridge (#3), the solitary, seated figure outside the CJM (#13) or the lady in the Balenciaga outfit (#54). Three were actually posed – the bell ringer (#7), the unhappy pair in The Saloon (#22) on Grant Street and the glass treader in the Castro (#32). Many were simply magic, like the little boy in the window (#34), the sack carrier (#45), the man with the finger (#47) or the child chasing the bubble (#49) – these last four being snapped in the Mission District, my favorite part of the city.

The flamenco music accompanying the slide show is by Nova Menco, full of that same joie de vivre I experience on the street. Where EXIF data is spotty that’s because the related image was made with an ancient MF Nikkor before I had added a CPU to properly record everything. The occasional hiccup in inter-slide fades is thanks to Adobe’s Lightroom 6.

To view those ‘two rolls’, click the image below. All these snaps were taken in San Francisco. The running time is six minutes, or 5 seconds a slide.

[iframe src=”https://player.vimeo.com/video/132615344″ width=”1000″ height=”563″ frameborder=”0″ webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen]

For those of you who have been around for the journey, some 4,000 readers daily, I extend a hearty thanks.

The GTX980 GPU for the Mac Pro – Part XXX

Macintosh

An extraordinary piece of engineering.

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

Upgrading from the GTX680:

This writer, a graduate mechanical engineer, has one extraordinarily sensitive device built into his constitution, one missing from liberal arts graduates. It’s a BS Meter and when I saw this on the box of the EVGA GTX980 my BS Meter went off the scale:


And you thought only Apple did this sort of thing?

But while I cannot attest to the percentages nor see how on earth any of this BS can be tested and proved, read on and you will agree that the GTX980 is an extraordinary engineering accomplishment.

When I wrote about the Nvidia GTX680 graphics card for the Mac Pro 18 months ago it was the fastest card out there and ran natively with drivers provided by Apple with Mac OS X. The reason no separate drivers were needed is that Apple had offered the GTX680 in a ‘Made for Mac’ edition which showed the full boot screen at start and, accordingly, was obliged to include the drivers to maintain the ‘Apple supported’ story. Maximum power draw is 195 watts.

Driven to ever greater performance by computer users who devote what few brain cells they have to gaming, Nvidia rolled out the GTX780 card a while back but that was a poor choice for the Mac Pro user as at full power draw it needed 250 watts against the maximum spec of 225 watts stated by Apple for aggregate current draw from the PCI slot (75 watts) plus 2 x 75 watts from each of the PCIe boost sockets on the Mac Pro’s backplane board. Sure, 25 watts was not exactly much of an overdraw, but why tempt providence, backplane boards with fried traces costing some $450 + labor to replace.

Then Nvidia recently announced a technical tour de force, the GTX980 which claims to draw just 165 watts at maximum draw, or 15% less than the GTX680 while simultaneously offering much better performance and running much more quietly. While my measurements suggest the power savings are ever so slightly overstated, the performance boost and noise reduction are remarkable. Working video pros can benefit from upgrading to this card thanks to the brain dead gamers who pushed its development.

The reduction in fan noise in the GTX980 compared with the GTX680 is not simply attributable to a cooler running card, meaning lower fan speeds. In the case of the EVGA case design (I cannot speak for others like Gigabyte, PNY, Zotac, etc. not having tried them) attention has been paid to the design of the fan blades to provide quieter running. Recall how Apple made a big deal of this in their rollout of the cylindrical Mac Pro? Apple has long majored in claiming credit for invention of what are existing, decade old technologies and this was one of the more irritating examples. Remember the vaunted ‘Superdrive’? A dirt cheap Hitachi or LG CD/DVD reader-burner with the escutcheon removed (a 5 second job). Or the banishment of ‘vampire draw’ from its battery chargers? Please. Or want to go back to the early days of the Mac with its graphical interface and mouse? All stolen from Xerox.

GTX980 cards which come with two dual-link DVI sockets:

In my piece on the Apple 30″ Cinema Display I mentioned that there are at least five variants of the GTX980 which provide the optimum connections for two of the big dual-link DVI Apple Cinema Displays (and similar Dell, etc. 2560 x 1600 displays) without having to use the unreliable Dell powered Dual-link DVI -> MDP adapter. (Apple makes a dual-DVI to MDP adapter with an equally poor reputation).

That GPU information is repeated here:

All other versions I have examined from many makers offer just one dual-link DVI socket along with various mixes of HDMI, DP and MDP.

Having had nothing but great experiences with EVGA products in the past, I bought the EVGA P/N 04G-P4-2986-KR for $530 + tax:


The EVGA GTX980 model P/N 04G-P4-2986-KR.
Amazon’s illustration wrongly shows one DVI socket.

This comes with one DVI-D and one DVI-I socket (both dual-link), one DP and one HDMI, regardless of what Amazon’s confused listing states.

Preliminaries:

Before rushing out and upgrading to a GTX980, a couple of preliminaries:

  • You will need one 6 pin to 8 pin mini-PCIe power adapter cable (not two, which I bought, owing to errors on Nvidia’s web site), in addition to two standard 6-pin cables for the model I bought.
  • The card is long (no problem) and wide, the latter making fitting anything in PCIe slot two challenging, but possible.
  • Mine had one loose alloy cooling fin rattling around in the casing when received, even though the card was shrink wrapped. I dismantled the card, removed the errant cooling fin – one of dozens so no material effect on cooling – and all was well. You may be lucky. If your mechanical skills are limited and you get one like mine, be prepared for return and exchange delays.


    Loose end cooling fin extricated by the writer.

  • You cannot use the stock drivers Apple ships with OS X, and must download the Nvidia drivers. The Mac Pro will not boot with the stock OS X drivers.

Here’s how it compares with my GTX680:


GTX680 top, GTX980 below.

The PCI connector for the GTX680 still has its rubber protector in place. 10.7″ vs. 10″ in length, no fit issues, but remember to retract the (grey) PCIe fan when removing and refitting to properly engage the base ‘claw’ at the bottom rear of the card, visible on the GTX680 above. The GTX980 has a like claw, hidden in the image by the shipping protector.

Here’s the 6-pin to 8-pin adapter cable:

And here is the card installed in my Mac Pro:


Illuminated script, no less! The green diodes are on the Addonics mSATA boot drive.

To make sure you have properly installed Nvidia’s drivers, check System Preferences->NVIDIA Driver Manager, which must appear thus before you install the GTX980:


Nvidia drivers installed and activated.

You must have current Nvidia drivers for this card to work:

Nvidia has been doing an excellent job of updating its drivers as Apple endlessly and unnecessarily futzes with OS X changes, but what this means in practice is that as every OS X change upgrade breaks the Nvidia driver, so you must not upgrade your OS X installation until Nvidia has announced the related upgraded driver, or it’s a black screen for you. Irritating as all heck, and typical Apple maliciousness and small mindedness as they continue favoring ATI for GPU chips in their machines.

Start up your GTX980 with OS X drivers installed in lieu of the required Nvidia drivers and, in my case, you get a lot of screen flashing, a jerky cursor, a slow boot cycle if it boots at all (a ‘grey screen of death’ is not uncommon – I got it) and no selection of display definitions in Sys Prefs->Displays->Scaled. I could only get 2560 x 1600 on my 30″ ACD whereas I like to use 2048 x 1280. A curse on Apple for not including the enhanced drivers with OS X. How small minded is that? Am I likely to rush out and buy a dustbin Mac Pro just because they are adopting the petulant behavior of their founder? Especially when the nMP cannot hold a candle to the cMP?

Be aware that if you do a PRAM reset OS X will revert to using the stock OS X drivers, meaning a very unresponsive cursor and display in my case. Go into the Nvidia menu Bar icon, switch to Nvidia drivers, reboot and all is well. If you can’t even get the display working, keep and old GT120 card around (see the end of this article) install it and connect your display to it while you elect the Nvidia drivers. A real pain.

With that out of the way, you still get no boot screen, and the nice people at MacVidCards – real experts at this sort of thing – can upgrade your card to show that screen for $180. They have an excellent reputation in the industry. Those unfortunates who use Windows can DIY, but Windows is a strict no-no chez Pindelski and I prefer to trust my costly card to a professional rather than turning it into a brick.


Click the image for the MacVidCards site.

Mine is off to MVC. I have no financial interest in their business.

After installation, all is sweetness and light with the Nvidia drivers in place:

The card is properly recognized and memory is 4GB compared with 2GB for the GTX680:

Comparison with dual D700s in the new Mac Pro:

Let’s cut to the chase. Here’s Unigine Heaven running on a 1680 x 1050 display in the new Mac Pro using the top-of-the-line dual ATI Radeon D700 GPUs (dual GPUs being one of Apple’s quite especially dumb moves in recent years when hardly no software uses them); my Mac Pro is on the right:

The GTX980 is 22% faster than the very costly dual D700s in the new Mac Pro.The D700s command a $600 premium over the stock D300s (specified at purchase only) whereas the upgrade from a used GTX680 to a new GTX980 runs $300 (can be done at any time).

As for noise, the fan in my EVGA GTX680 is loud – if not roaring – when the stressful Unigine Heaven test is run, whereas in the GTX980 it is silent. Impressive.

Performance at different screen resolutions in the Mac Pro:

2560×1600 compared with 2048×1280 Unigine Heaven results.

Performance holds up well at 2560 x 1600 (the highest resolution available in the 30″ Apple Cinema Display) as well as at 2048 x 1280 which my eyes favor.

At the commonly used 1920 x 1200 the result is as follows – quite extraordinary:


Unigine Heaven at 1920×1200.

All excellent statistics, especially in view of the card’s quiet running.

Power consumption:

I was unable to quite replicate the claimed 15% drop in power use with the GTX980 compared with the GTX680, but the good news is that total power use is well within the capabilities of the Mac Pro’s massive 980 watt power supply.

In this image you see the current draw of the GTX980 in the left column at 1680×1050, and at 2560×1600 on the right; the three measurements in each column are for the PCI slot, and for each of the mini-PCI booster sockets – recall each of these three sources is individually limited to 75 watts (6.25 amps), and all are in compliance:

These data compute to power use of 140 watts at 1680 x 1050 and 150 watts at 2560 x 1600, all well within spec, and all measured with Unigine Heaven running at full bore – a very stressful test. When I tested the GTX680 the 1680 x 1050 test required power of 157 watts, so the GTX980 saves 11%, close to the 15% claimed, if not matching the marketing. Still, that is very impressive, and like percentage savings accrue at higher screen resolutions.

LuxMark data:

The jump in performance with LuxMark is extraordinary – this is a test which requires a complex scene to be rendered:


Luxmark for the GTX980 compared with the GTX680.

The gain in performance is no less than 266% (“more than 3x as fast” would be Apple’s breathless marketing prose), suggesting that video producers doing complex rendering in apps which make good use of the GPU should upgrade to the GTX980 immediately. Time is money and renders take time.

Heat:

None of my measurement apps accesses thermal sensors in the GTX980 but at least one statistic is of note. At idle, the PCI fan in my Mac Pro (the large grey fan mounted on the backplane board) ran at an elevated 1425rpm, whereas with the GTX980 installed it idles at the stock 800rpm. That can only be good news and the combination of the new chip architecture along with two fans (my GTX680 has one) does the trick.

4K displays:

I continue to defer upgrading to 4K as standards are, well, anything but standard, with much confusion about 30Hz vs 60Hz, boot screens or no boot screens, SST vs. MST, Windows compatibility (like I care), and on and on. But the 4K display user should benefit significantly from the added performance offered by the GTX980 provided he can get 60Hz refresh rates in OS X.

Who should upgrade?

Heavy video renders using CUDA? Upgrade right away if your app uses the GPU well and is CUDA dependent. The gains are easy to see and the price is under $600 with your old GTX680 selling for $300, so $300 out of pocket. A few hours work will see your cost recovered in faster render times. Popular CUDA apps include many in the Adobe CC suite (AfterEffects, Photoshop, Premiere Pro), FinalCut Pro, Maya, Avid Motion Graphics and Media Composer, DaVinci Resolve, Cinema 4D and Redcine-X.

Lightroom users? Meh. The GTX680 was already immensely capable, and while the GTX980 allows me to page through full size previews at blitzkrieg speeds and I never see any wait delays for rendering, it’s overkill. The same applies to Photoshop.

The GTX980 is a remarkable engineering accomplishment and, if you must know, Nvidia somehow manages to get over 5 billion transistors on the die which makes a top-end Intel CPU look about as crowded as Iowa.

Update June 26, 2015:

I sent the card off to MacVidCards to have the ROM modified to display the boot screen and the Option-Start boot drive selection. The card was back in my hands in a couple of weeks and MVC told me this was the first dual-DVI card they had modified. Most 980 cards have one DVI, one HDMI and one or more DP or MDP sockets.


Boot drives using Option-Start in Yosemite with the MVC modified GTX980.

I get proper function on both the DVI-D, DVI-I (both at 2520 x 1600) and DP ports, with the latter limited to 1920 x 1200, as I do not have the required Dell powered adapter. I did not test the HDMI port as I do not have the right cable.

I noted two anomalies – a singe line of code appears for maybe half a second when starting, right before the Apple logo appears. MVC confirms there’s no effect on function and I agree. It’s a cosmetic blip only.

The other is that on cold start, restart or wake from sleep, the card’s fans run up to a noticeable ‘whoosh’ which dies to silence after completion of the boot or wake cycle. Once again, no effect on function, though a change from the stock unmodified card. The speedy fans effect lasts but a few seconds.

Finally, OS X’s System Profiler displays a link speed of 2.5GT/s (PCIe 1.0) whereas I was expecting 5.0GT/s (PCIe 2.0). MVC confirms that the card is actually running at 5.0GT/s, and the only reason for the slower displayed speed is that they have not dug into the code to make System Profiler display the correct speed – the return on effort is not justified, as there is a lot of code to search through. They have a detailed technical blog entry you can read here.


Incorrect link speed shown in System Profiler – the true speed is 5GT/s.

The performance of the 980 with the Apple Cinema Display at maximum resolution of 2560 x 1600 is unchanged – there is no penalty from the upgrade.

Here are the before and after Unigine Valley speeds at the full 2560 x 1600 resolution of the 30″ Apple Cinema Display:

Luxmark shows a small 2% gain to add to the already stellar gain in rendering speed over the GTX680 noted above.

This is a good investment and I recommend the MVC upgrade.

A boot screen for less.

You can buy a used Apple Nvidia GT120 card for $80 and this will show the boot screen. While dated and slow, that’s a lot less than the custom fix above and this old but trusty card has many advantages, including:

  • Takes a single slot only
  • Low power consumption
  • Quiet
  • Requires no auxiliary PCIe power cables, deriving all the modest power it needs from the regular PCIe slot
  • Option-Start will show you all bootable drives in OS X
  • One MDP and one DVI socket – can drive two displays at the same time
  • DVI socket will drive up to 2520 x 1600 displays (tested, functions correctly) using a dual-link DVI cable (such as the Apple 30″ Cinema Display, Dell 30″, etc.) – no powered DVI->MDP adapter required with DVI socket use

The pain is that you have to move your display’s connector to this card to see the boot screen, do your thing, then revert the connection to the GTX980. But it’s $100 saved.

Further workarounds to driver problems:

Click here.

Xmenu

Software

An elegant menu bar utility.

Xmenu is a handy menu bar utility which allows you to place your favorite apps in a menu dropdown box for rapid access. With two 30″ Apple Cinema Displays in use, along with the seeming acres of space they provide, I find using the Dock is less easy than accessing the drop down box provided by Xmenu.

Xmenu can be downloaded free form the AppStore here.

By default it shows every app on your Mac which makes it useless:


Just one of many pages in the default view – useless.

However, a quick peek at the help guide discloses that Xmenu is easily tailored to show just your favorites.

My User directory is named ‘Tigger’ and after you first start Xmenu you navigate to this directory:


The directory for the aliases of your favorite apps.

Back in your Applications directory you make aliases of your favorite apps (right click the mouse and click on ‘Make Alias’ then Control-drag these aliases to the Custom directory above. That will move (rather than copy) them over to the Xmenu Custom directory. You can then rename these aliases anything you want, mine looking like this:


Xmenu favorites in the Favorites directory.

Next in the menu bar drop down, go to Xmenu->Preferences and check the boxes as shown:


Now when you click the menu bar dropdown icon (which will have changed to a small cogged wheel) you will see just your favorites, with a click booting the app of choice:


Xmenu favorite apps in the dropdown menu.

Elegant, fast, accessible …. and free. What’s not to like?

The Leica Q

Cameras

Leica may finally have done it right.

The Leica ideal was always about street photography. Fast, quiet (well, OK, reasonably quiet), with great lenses and fairly robust bodies. And none of Leica’s digital M film clones has managed to capture the spirit of the M2/3/4 which were the definitive rangefinder film cameras. The digital variants were either silly and deeply flawed, like the M8 with it’s half frame sensor which rendered wide angle lenses useless, not to mention its host of technical issues/random lock-ups/purple casts and so on, or the cameras simply started getting fat. An M9/M240 body is nowhere near as svelte as an M2 and still retains a clunky, bog slow optical rangefinder with manual focus only, not to mention a far from silent shutter. Every time I read some hack going on about how quiet his M’s shutter is I laugh. It’s not remotely quiet, and only a mirrored DSLR user could accuse it of being so.

However, it rather seems as if Leica may have finally got it right with the Leica Q, announced yesterday. Sure, not cheap at $4,250 with a fixed 28mm f/1.7 Summilux lens and not especially small, but it’s full frame, reviews suggest the sensor/software are excellent and it has autofocus. Further, there’s a silent electronic shutter mode, no optical rangefinder to go out of alignment as soon as you look at it and the whole thing rather harkens back to those compact and capable Leica Ms of yore.

The top plate is surpassingly simple and the street snapper can disregard the movie mode and the LCD rear display. There’s a high quality EVF, finally, and the autofocus is reputed to be snappy and accurate. Why, there’s even wi-fi capability and an iPhone app for remote operation and the like. Leica’s association with Panasonic is beginning to bear fruit.

Automation follows the approach seen in the Panasonic LX100. Turn either the aperture ring to ‘A’ for shutter priority, the shutter dial to ‘A’ for aperture priority or both for program automation. The test shots I have seen from the lens suggests it’s a crackerjack and while it’s not exactly small, the overall price becomes more palatable when you look at what a 28mm Summicron or Summilux for the M runs. There’s a handy macro mode and up to 10 images can be machine-gunned every second for those of the video generation incapable of capturing the decisive moment.

That ‘not exactly small’ lens shows that not even the optical geniuses in Wetzlar can alter the laws of physics. You want a fast aperture and full frame coverage, this is the result and it’s why I am not getting a Q. You get a camera which is not exactly small with an outstanding optic, one that appears to be as good as it gets at any price. For this street snapper the right answer is Panny’s LX100 where you get the same ergonomics and f/1.7 in a far smaller body with one signal advantage. The lens zooms from 24mm to 75mm. Yes, the frame is one quarter the size so there’s more depth of field than you want (PS and the Magic Lasso tool easily fixes that) and at the extreme gargantuan prints from the Q will be easier to make, but the trade offs are all in the wrong direction – bulk and weight. And 4x the sensor size also means 4x the cost. Steal my LX100 and I buy another. Nab my Q and it’s debtors’ gaol. 

Finger loops come in three sizes and allow the carrying strap to be dispensed with. As for the objectionable ‘look at me’ red dot on the front, a spot of electrician’s tape will put paid to that.

A very exciting development and if the camera lives up to the early reviews Leica is to be congratulated. Now let’s hope they come up with a fixed lens 90mm f/2 variant for an ideal two camera street outfit. Why, like my two GX7s with 35mm and 85mm lenses ….

The factory’s web site is here.

Technical articles – 10 years

10th Anniversary

Specialized guides.

Click on ‘Technical’ atop this site’s home screen and you will see:

Over the years several topics have captured my interest and as I believe that if you want to do something well you need to understand it at a fundamental level, I explored these in depth and, once I had meaningful data, wrote about them.


That prince among men, my dear love Bert the Border Terrier, demonstrates a large screen Seiki TV attached to one of my Hacksters. I miss that pup more than I can say.

When I got tired of watching my various Macs melt down – three G4 iBooks and three iMacs (a G5 and two Core2Duos) – I said “to heck with Apple” and built a Hackintosh. The machine was infinitely upgradable, very fast indeed and while its insides looked like the engine compartment of a Fiat it was a lot more reliable. My constantly upgraded Hackster saw me through many years of happy use and was eventually remaindered when lightly used Mac Pros became affordable. Issues? Just two. It got really old when, with every OS X upgrade, something in the Hack broke and needed …. new hacking. And Sleep never did work correctly without endless kernel panics. But the Hack community is large and vibrant and it helped keep things running. Just do yourself a favor and don’t make a Hack for income producing uses. There’s too much risk something will break when you need it most and, let’s face it, this is for guys who like English cars and motorbikes with the constant attendant care and feeding dictated by these beasts. You want’s a Lexus? You get a Mac Pro.


The best computer from Apple. Ever.

And my burgeoning series of Mac Pro articles contains not only everything you need to know about the care, maintenance and upgrade of the 2009 and later machines, it’s also superbly written and profusely illustrated. Based on solid practical experience you will never find me using words like “…. it seems that ….” or “…. it feels like ….”. These are the writings of an engineer not a ballet dancer.

At one time I published a comprehensive guide to CPU upgrades in the 2009 dual CPU Mac Pro, a high risk process, but after various cretins disclosed they had poor reading skills to accompany their grade school educations and started writing me threatening Comments I did the only two things possible: I removed those articles and I closed this site to Comments. I should have known better than to assume that my level of intelligence prevailed in the population as a whole and as for closing Comments, that was the single best thing I did since starting this journal a decade ago. Gentlemen (?), you cretinous wankers who wrote me those rude outpourings of undistilled vomit, I have but two words for you: “Up yours”. Your poison ruined the playing field for thousands.

Dozens and dozens and dozens of working Pros who know better than to tinker have availed themselves of my Mac Pro CPU upgrade service since then and not a one of them is unhappy with his investment. And nor is my educational charitable foundation which receives 100% of the net proceeds to fund scholarships for poor but bright mechanical engineering students. The last thing this world needs is more liberal arts graduates.


Just two examples of the many old MF Nikkors updated by the author.

The third technical area which absorbed me during the past decade was the updating of Nikon’s superb pre-Ai lenses to modern specifications by conferring Ai functionality and, more importantly, installing CPUs to properly record EXIF data to the related digital image files. This series is recognized as the definitive piece on the topic, is extensively read and referenced and when you read what I have written you will see why. In all cases my work was illustrated with images taken with these great Nikkors which remain mechanically the best thing Nikon ever did (that and the original Nikon F film camera). As with my Hackintosh and Mac Pro articles, you will find zero subjective claptrap with regard to the mechanical processes involved. Just hard data. This is a simple engineering exercise, not the New York Review of Books. My work brought with it tailored lens correction profiles for use in PS or LR for each of the lenses I upgraded. These are all free downloads here.


Still one of the very best printers ever made – the 18″ DJ90 or 24″ DJ130.

Finally, the HP DesignJet 30/90/130 wide carriage ink dye printers captured my attention and another set of definitive artciles on maintenance, fault diagnosis and repair put in place what the miserable management at Hewlett Packard could not. They remain widely referenced and I have had much fun time resolving issues with other users.

Sceptical about my claims? Here’s today’s visitor data for this journal:


Bots, crawlers and other trash excluded from the above.

The above constitute the core of the technical writing here and while the topics are very specialized, aficionados of great engineering may well find themselves migrating to a Mac Pro driving their DesignJet to print images from 50 year old Nikkor manual focus lenses. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that technical chain and it’s one I enjoy daily.