Category Archives: Photography

The Hackintosh for 2013

Hackintosh

More attractive than ever.

Apple’s MacPro is now seriously obsolete. Memory is a slow 1333Mhz, USB 3 is not supported, Thunderbolt is not supported and the best video card option is the ATI Radeon 5870, now a generation behind and sporting but 1GB of memory. With 32GB of CPU memory and the 5870 GPU, along with one 1TB HDD, the rig will run you just shy of $4,000. Displays are extra.

Here’s the current Hackintosh build, not bleeding edge, just leading edge, which uses Intel’s i7 IvyBridge CPU, easily overclocked under warranty from stock:

That’s some $1,060 with no HDDs and no displays, keyboard, speakers or mouse. A keyboard, speakers and mouse of choice will add $100 and the rule here is anything but an Apple keyboard (foul chiclet keys) or mouse (the carpal tunnel special). Add $20 for OS X and $70 for a 1TB HDD to make things comparable and the all in cost becomes $1,250. Unless heavy video editing is contemplated, the $200 GPU can be omitted with the Hack using the excellent Intel HD4000 onboard GPU which comes with the CPU. Perfectly capable for LR and PS use. Further, 16GB of RAM is more than adequate, bringing the price down to $940. The power supply used is massively over-spec’d at 850 watts, but the marginal cost over a smaller power supply is so modest that there is no reason to compromise. You can spend as much or as little on storage and displays as you like, whether Mac or Hack. An exceptional value.

Apple has hinted that a new MacPro is in the works for 2013 and if this is true I expect that it will be far costlier than the current MacPro, Apple knowing that these are mostly used by design and video professionals spending someone else’s money. I also expect the new MacPro to be much smaller thus compromising cooling and it will, of course, use many proprietary parts meaning that when something breaks chances are the whole box will be out for repair. Meanwhile, the hospitalized Hack needs but a trip to Amazon or your local electronics store to fix what ails it at very low-cost in very short time indeed. It is a great comfort knowing that Fry’s Electronics is a 30 minute drive from my home though, like the umbrella never seeing rain, nothing ever breaks in my Hack.

Best of all, while there is still a need for a tinkerer’s mindset as Hacks can have quirks at the software – if not hardware – stage, the free tools available for today’s builder have never been better. It’s still not a plug-and-play experience, but it’s getting close.

The Hack build above sports a very quiet case (recommended by a reader – thank you PB) with superior cable management, adds two Thunderbolt sockets, front panel USB3 support, 32GB of memory which is more than anyone needs, an outstanding GPU ideal for still photographers and the best wifi in the business.

My slightly earlier SandyBridge i7 CPU Hack uses many of these parts and the only time it is restarted is when an OS X upgrade dictates that. Otherwise it’s on 7-by-24 and runs as cool as the proverbial cucumber no matter what it is tasked with. Used very hard, it is, in a word, as reliable as a brick.


Massive, silent cooling fans inside Corsair’s Obsidian case.

For the first time builder, the support community is so broad and so helpful that the risks of DIY are negated. Your sweat equity will total 1-3 hours of fun assembly time and another 2-5 hours installing OS X. What’s not to like?

Intel’s CPU for 2013 will be the yet to be released Haswell which will have lower power consumption (irrelevant for a desktop machine) and maybe the usual 7% or so speed increase. Integrated graphics will again be improved and a new motherboard will be required to accommodate the new CPU. I do not see any of these enhancements as a valid reason for delaying a Hack build.

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.