Category Archives: Photography

Serial failure

Macintosh

The jury has left the building.

It is a good rule in life never to apologize.
The right sort of people do not want apologies,
and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.
P.G. Wodehouse, The Man Upstairs

The old saw in banking has it that when you owe your local bankster $1,000, he owns you, but when you owe him $1 billion, you own him.


The last great iMac, the G4. Conceived at a time of great crisis.

It’s a lesson that the Serial Apologizer passing as CEO at Apple has never learned. When the Chinese make an organized propaganda attack aimed at Apple for allegedly poor warranty terms and service – ridiculous however you look at it – what does Cook do? He goes cap in hand to his main provider and apologizes. He has fallen into the $1 billion debtor trap, mistakenly believing that the Chinese own him. They do not. Apple owns the Chinese. Concentrating so much production in the hands of one man – the fella in charge in Beijing – was never a wise strategy, any more than concentrating retail lending in the hands of a few US mega-banksters extending credit based on fraudulent loan docs, the while contending that they are too-big-to-fail,is wise. With such concentration comes the need for courageous and robust leadership. The banksters were far smarter than Cook. They used walk away power and totally pulled one over on Uncle Sam. We own you, they said. Let us fail and you go down with the ship.

What is Cook thinking? That Foxconn will lay-off two million Chinese workers if he tells Mr. Xi where to stick it? Please. Maybe Cook needs to bone up on The Man with No Name. Go ahead, make my day. How about a spot of civilian insurrection, pal, should we walk?

Cook, having set three miserable precedents in his dreary catalog of apologia, is now a pushover for any number of bullies who smell fear and weakness. The right response here was “Go ahead, Mr. Xi. Make my day.” You do not bend over to a despot. Now Cook is stuck with that old military acronym. BOHICA. Bend Over, Here It Comes Again. He probably knows more about that than I want to think about.

Now I’m beginning to pine for that old SOB who was Apple, Steve Jobs. When did Jobs ever apologize for anything? When Dot Mac failed miserably he did not go around cap in hand beating his chest and chanting ‘woe is me’. No. Rather, he excoriated the development team for ‘…. letting down everyone at Apple ….’ then fired the guy in charge. Then he fixed it and we got iCloud.

Great businesses do not run on niceness policies, respect for your fellow-man and gentility. They become great by fostering internal and external competition – remember Jobs’s early hatred of IBM? – and inculcating a ‘cream rises to the top culture’. Successful businesses do not crave love or respect. All expect excellence and have at the core of their genetic makeup a protocol which demands winning. Being nice in competition is for losers. ‘Show me a good loser, and I will show you a loser’ as Vince Lombardi bluntly put it.

As a photographer, I very much want to see the likes of Scott Forstall driving Apple to greatness, even if it means his face appears on many dart boards in adjoining offices. People who threaten a CEO accomplish one of two things. The CEO either rises to greater heights, as did Jobs, or the threat is fired as was Forstall’s fate when Cook decided the usurpation risk was too much to bear. Churchill’s struggles to return to power in the 1930s are an apt precursor, weak leaders in Downing Street forever threatened by the firebrand who was finally only appointed at the moment of greatest crisis. An irritant is a requisite for success, not an obstacle to it.

And that’s what Apple needs today. A leader, an irritant, who is prepared to see that the company is already in crisis and a leader who places scant value on popularity. And one who will fire the losers, not the winners. Starting at the top. What Apple needs is …. Steve.


The last great piston engined fighter. Conceived at a time of great crisis.

The seed of Apple’s problems lies in the design office and it’s named Jony Ive, the much applauded designer of all that is thin, thinner and thinnest on Cupertino’s drawing boards. Hence the overheating iMac G5. The overheating iMac Core2Duo. The overheating iMac notebooks. The overheating MacMini. The hard and costly to make iPhone 5. The long time to market and to volume production. The high production costs. And Apple’s problem with China is also Apple’s problem with Ive. They have made him so famous, so indispensable, so adulated that instead of owning him, he now owns them. How do you get rid of an icon and Steve’s best buddy? Meanwhile Apple’s innovation is a day late and a dollar over, damned by ridiculous designs when what most buyers want is function, not form. Like the PowerMac and the MacPro. In other words, machines using reliable, cheap PC parts and the best desktop OS in the business. For more, check out ‘Hackintosh’ in the Sitemap.

Excellence in business is not tea and crumpets. It is war. America and Apple used to be good at that. And wars are won by the strong not by milque toasts who make a habit of bending over.

Nik Collection

Technique

Cheap if that’s your thing.

Having bought Nik Software a while back, Google now appears to be trashing all their desktop applications and focusing on mobile. The excellent desktop version of Snapseed is already dead and now they are offering the whole Nik collection of image manipulation apps for $150. Shop around and you can find further discounts down to $125.

Here’s the TechCrunch piece:


Click to read the whole article.

Readers frequently point me to SilverEfex Pro 2, the black and white app, but I have never been tempted to buy what was a very costly plugin as I rarely do monochrome. I see, and photograph, in color, mostly finding monochrome a crutch to make ‘good’ that which is mediocre.

Still, Google’s evil geniuses are making the whole bundle available for a free 15 day trial, so I downloaded the Mac Lightroom version which installed seamlessly and became available as a series of processing options, thus:

Mercifully the HDR component did not come over, for whatever reason, which spares me not using it to make garish chocolate box covers of my images. I gave the B&W plugin a run and it’s well engineered, decently speedy and the highlight for me is the localized adjustments where you can select a limited area to which effects are applied. Here’s a before and after of an image where the plugin has been used, with localized darkening of the fore- and backgrounds:


Nik monochrome plugin at work.

It’s easy to create very high contrast monochrome effects but, as I said, using the B&W crutch to save a mediocre color snap rarely works:


Crutch at work.

The Color Efex (sic) Pro 4 plugin provides a host of coloring actions, thus:


Color Efex Pro at work.

There are so many free versions of these plugins on the web that it’s hard to justify spending money on this, but as it’s included in the bundled price maybe one can live with that.

Dfine2 and the two sharpening plugins do nothing for me that Lightroom and Photoshop (the latter adds uprezzing in the Print menu) cannot, so once again it’s hard to see paying money for these if you already have Adobe’s applications.

Viveza 2 strikes me as a complete waste of money, adding nothing to the basic color processing controls already available in Aperture, Lightroom and Photoshop.

Bottom line: If you are into monochrome and need a capable, flexible tool which adds easily used localized adjustments, the Nik plugin may be for you. The other stuff is just fluff if you already have Lightroom and Photoshop. There are also Photoshop and Aperture versions of Nik’s suite, available for both Mac and Windows. I would look to buy these now if you are interested, despite Google’s protestations that they will remain available. There is no reason to believe anything from a company whose business is founded on the theft and resale of your private information and images. And I do believe they are lying.

All images on the Nikon D3x with the 35mm Sigma f/1.4 lens.

Back to the future

Photography, Short stories

Moving on.

I have sold all my Nikon and Panasonic digital gear and invested the proceeds in a wet collodion outfit.


My new gear.

The reason is simple. I believe we photographers need to return to the basics to rediscover ourselves and create original work once more. Vast undiscovered and rarely photographed areas of America, like Yosemite, the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone, are crying out to be documented in sepia tones for the world to see. I also have several computers I will remainder for very attractive prices, as I will no longer be needing that invasive technology. Drop me a line if interested.

My first investment was in a horse and cart, a true return to basics. I can harvest the manure for my organic vegetable garden – it’s good err…. manure – though I confess the smell is a bit much when I’m photographing Half Dome. The blamed horse persists in eating while I sleep, so thank goodness for the proceeds from my 500mm f/4 AF Nikkor and two D4 bodies. The Leicas fetched good coin from some fellow in Tokyo once I assured him they had never been used. Great buyer – he’ll never see that dent on the Monochrom body as he believes in displaying unopened boxes only. The proceeds should keep the Dobbinator in hay for at least four more trips to Yosemite.


My camera kit. Dobbin not shown – he was eating when this was snapped.

Life is a little slower when returning to basics. Ol’ Dobbin maxes out at about 10 per, and needs frequent water and potty stops, but there’s no denying the primeval attraction of this method of transportation. I’ve grown a long beard and whiskers, and the top hat neatly completes the outfit. I find that no one hassles me in this kit.

As for the gear, well, I made it myself. Always a skilled woodworker, the body was simplicity itself and my metalworking skills came in handy making the barrel for the lens, the glass coming from a couple of old Coke bottles in my collection. Definition is so-so, but the romantic glow the f/48 Double Coke lens adds to everything works jolly well on my 18″ x 24″ plates.


Ready to take a snap.

Of course, there was a bit of a hiatus recently during my stay in the detox unit. Like many Russian oligarchs, I managed to accidentally inhale some of the poisonous chemicals when last at Yosemite Falls, and mercifully a young couple, chancing on my prone form, transported me to the local hospital. But I merrily accepted this temporary setback as a learning experience and got me one of those WW1 gas masks my grandad used when fighting the Germans in the trenches at Ypres. And speaking of wipers, I use a coupla those window cleaning rubber squeegee thingies to smoothe the chemicals just so on the plate. It’s my one concession to modernity and after the hospital stay I have learned not to use my handkerchief for the task. Plates gotta be wet when exposed, you see. Gas mask on at all times, natch.


I recover from silver nitrate poisoning. Snap by me mate Ansel.

Things are coming along nicely. Here’s one of my first efforts of the never before photographed Yosemite Valley. Took me a few months to get back home, not helped by Dobbin going lame on me and my own occasional fainting spells after the poisoning episode, so this one was actually snapped last year. Still, I’m sure you will agree it was worth the wait:


Yosemite Valley, home-made wet collodion camera, Coke double
anastigmat at f/48, one hour exposure.

The highlights are a bit blown out, true, but it’s a sight better than anything out of that second-rate Nikon gear.

Cool huh? Half Dome is next. That art dealer fella back East has offered me $50,000 for the image but I’m holding out for six figures. A buddy of mine in the hedge fund biz says that no self-respecting collector pays under six figures for photographic art. Plus, ol’ Dobster’s gonna need the coin for his next meal.

Goodness, am I glad to have sold all that tired Nikon digital gear. It represented such a total denial of the photographic art that I cannot think what got me into that technology in the first place. At least now my output is worth something as I return to basics and find my true inner self. I recommend the journey heartily to all true Artists reading this odyssey. Remember, it’s the journey, not the destination. And you only have to snag a few hedgies annually to clean up.

Upgrading: No sooner had I written the above than a friend sent over a snap of his rig. Now the upgrade bug has well and trully bitten and I will have to hire a crew:

Reader Gregg writes:

“I share the sentiment and have made my own moves! Reflecting back on my old Pentax Spotmatic, I missed it’s elegant simplicity. Now everything is so small and highly digitized, with tiny buttons and controls, that I’ve done a 180 and joined your move to the origins. However, even those Ansel boxes were just too small! A man-sized man needs a man-sized camera….. something that inspires awe. So, with the help of neighbors, a journeyman carpenter, and a tent maker, I’ve created the Greggon K20000000D, with a Super Hackumar 6 meter lens. (Post processing is done in my swimming pool.) The results have been amazing! ….. no actual prints have been made but the negative draws crowds. We’re now building an enlarger, with elevator adjustment…… using a real elevator.”

ʇsɹıɟ ןıɹdɐ ʎddɐɥ

An amusing review

Fuji

The competition neatly skewered.

Atlanta based music photographer Zack Arias has an amusing review of the Fuji X100S, well illustrated with excellent photography, on his blog. I think my favorite bit is about the two old duffers, Canon and Nikon, sitting in the corner, resentful of the newcomers, and perennially arguing.

Click the image below to go there.


Click the picture.

Mac OS 10.8.3

Hackintosh

One nice enhancement.

The best thing about Apple’s troubles – a CEO with the charisma of a sponge, a stock down over 30% from its peak, more cash than it knows what to do with, a tired cell phone offering, a lack of innovation and failure in the TV market – is that these many distractions mean fewer updates of OS X, the OS powering Macs and Hackintoshes. Because, let’s face it, every ‘enhancement’ since OS Snow Leopard (10.6) has been so much fluff and noise. SL (Intel machines only) can still be bought from Amazon for some $40 but will almost certainly not run on the latest Macs. It’s fine with Hacks and offers one huge feature missing from Lion and Mountain Lion – Rosetta, the PPC G3/4/5 emulator which allows it to run any old apps from your PPC days on an Intel Mac or Hack. You know, apps like HP’s DJ30/90/130 color management utility which will not run on anything later and is essential for debugging whatever ails your HP DesignJet dye ink printer.

As I still have a ten year old PPC iMac G4 for DesignJet maintenance, the loss of Rosetta is not such a big deal, so it was with trepidation that I approached the latest minor upgrade of Mountain Lion 10.8.3. What else would now be broken by Cupertino’s policy of planned obsolescence?

When performing the upgrade I did so by downloading the complete (Combo) update from Apple here rather than the incremental upgrade which is what is applied if you upgrade through the App Store. Hackintosh community chat has it that a Combo upgrade is more reliable than an incremental one. I have no idea if that is true, but this approach avoids being forced to upgrade to the latest version of iTunes, an app which Apple has never got right.

After a week of running I can say it seems fine and there is one significant enhancement. Because one of the new 2012 iMacs uses the nVidia 660M GPU, Apple has had to provide native support in OS X for the nVidia 660 GPU family to run OS X on that machine. The GTX 660 is one of nVidia’s finest bang-for-the-buck mid-range GPUs, with the 660M in the iMac being – yup, you guessed it – a crippled version. The iMac 660M version has but 0.5GB of memory, compared with 2GB (3GB on some EVGA cards in the US for $30 more) for the aftermarket cards. I would bet the clock speed is lower too, heat being any iMac’s bugbear, but cannot confirm this. The Zotac GTX 660 I am using (not the 660 TI) retails for $215, which includes two powerful variable speed integrated fans which are exceptionally quiet. These aftermarket cards all support up to two 2560 x 1600 pixel displays and include HDMI and DisplayPort in addition to DVI sockets. The Zotac board is recommended over the competitors’ if you have limited space in your box. It is considerably shorter, making a major difference to the accessibility of the motherboard’s SATA sockets in my Antec Sonata III enclosure. Non-trivial.

To put the sophistication of these latest GPUs into context, the Intel i7 Ivy Bridge CPU has some 800,000 transistors. The nVidia GTX660 CPU has 2.54bn – three times as many! Little wonder nVidia is making serious progress in the world of supercomputers, where its graphics chips are delivering cost effective performance at state-of-the-art throughputs.

My three monitors remain the estimable Dell 1650 x 1080 21.5″ 2209WA IPS ones, now some 4 years old, because they are easily calibrated and the dot pitch is fine for my purposes. Plus I like the bigger default fonts these deliver. If you use newer 1920 x 1200, 1920 x 1080, 2560 x 1600 or 2560 x 1440 displays, a card like the GTX 660 will easily crunch through graphics which might leave earlier nVidia GT2xx, GT4xx, 98xx or 88xx cards running out of steam.

I wrote about updating my HP100 Hack to nVidia’s latest card here and that hardware and OS needed nVidia’s separate drivers to make the card work. Now, with 10.8.3, the drivers come with the OS, so no external drivers are necessary. The benefits are twofold. My Hack is now more stable – looking to be as good as in the Snow Leopard days of yore – and the CPU’s idle temperature has fallen from 104F to 94F. Nice. The start-up problem where 10.8.2 frequently refused to recognize my third display, driven through a DisplayLink USB dongle, is gone. And the i1 DisplayOne Lion colorimeter display profiling software continues to work fine.

The Zotac GTX 660 in the HP100. Lots of room.

The native GTX660 support works for all nVidia cards, whether Asus, EVGA, MSI, Gigabyte (all per chat boards), Zotac (mine), PNY (tested and owned by reader PB) or any other brand. The chips are the same. Once you upgrade your Hack to 10.8.3 you can delete these two lines from your Boot Drive/Extra/org.chameleon.Boot.plist file on your Hackintosh as the presence of native drivers no longer requires the Hack to be informed that a 660 Kepler card is installed (thanks to reader PB for the tip):


The above lines can be deleted.

nVidia also released an update to its CUDA driver, which you can download through the related System Preferences pane, after which you will see this:


Latest CUDA driver.

The System Information->Displays data is also updated to reflect the use of native nVidia 660 drivers:

Let us all hope that Apple remains seriously distracted with its other woes and leaves OS X alone for good and all, instead of adding dumb gesture support, hidden Library directories and poorly implemented voice recognition. They might like to start by fixing the joke that is Siri on the iPhone. I use Google search on my iPhone – it’s everything Siri is not. Fast, accurate, a joy to use for voice search with excellent speech recognition. Even if you speak English, like me, not American!