North Beach candids

Photographs

Did you catch that?


North Beach, San Francisco.

If the streets of North Beach, San Francisco are always interesting, the people are fascinating. Two dozen favorites:


Sharp pup.


Chinese in Italy.


Sharp kid.


Celibate.


Young and old.


At the hatters – thinking of Degas.


Beautiful girl.


Million dollar fixer upper.


Working out.


Yeah, right.


Shadow man.


Stair man.


Skeptical man.


Cooks – soon to be deported.


North Beach artist.


Antiquarian map seller.


Nuts.


Chihuahua and coffee.


Strip club bouncers.


Passing.


Toothsome.


Helpers.


Cobbler.


Fitting.

Mostly snapped on the Panasonic GX7 or the Nikon D3x, many with the fabulous Sigma 35/1.4 Art lens.

North Beach street scenes

Photographs

Eclectic.

During the five years through 2015 I visited San Francisco weekly from my home in the Bay Area peninsula. Looking at the catalogs in Lightroom two areas have the most images from those trips – the Italian North Beach and the Hispanic Mission District. It’s almost impossible to take bad pictures in this eclectic city and North Beach makes the task even easier.

Here is a baker’s dozen favorite snaps:

Mostly snapped on the Panasonic GX7 and the Nikon D3x.

For people snaps in North Beach click here.

Studio Dogs

Photographs

Three dozen formal portraits.

Once I got my home studio set up with an elevated platform I set to collaring local dog owners for a session with their dog. The platform places the animal at eye level so that no neck craning is involved, and the cement breeze blocks supporting the sturdy plywood and steel base permit easy height adjustment. Sturdiness is key, with the largest animal portrayed weighing in at 150lbs! I have a variety of backgrounds to suitably set off the animal, and a supply of squeaky toys and quality treats to keep the dog involved. Most of the direction is by the owner. After all, who knows the animal best?

Dogs are far harder to photograph than humans. They have short attention spans, are easily distracted, often disregard instructions and can be quite unruly. I have found that, after letting the animal roam my home for a few minutes to get settled, the first ten minutes of the session are vital. In that time I typically take 40 images and a free large matted, mounted and framed print is given to the owner after a favorite is picked on the wall mounted display.

Because dogs tend to be active, I use a zoom lens on the Nikon D800 to permit easy framing of both full body shots and big head close-ups. Lighting is by my three decades old Novatron strobes which have never failed me. Look at the image below and you will see I use three strobes – the top one for the ‘Hollywood glamor’ effect, the right one for catchlights in the eyes (essential to bring the dog alive) and the umbrella one at left for fill lighting. The model in the picture below is my teddy bear who is as old as I am but unlike me has glass eyes. That allows me to check that the main light at the right is delivering good catchlights.

To keep cabling down I use an inexpensive RF trigger on the Nikon with the receiver plugged in to the Novatron power supply. The Nikon is tethered by a physical cable to an old repurposed MacBook Air running Lightroom and connected to a wall mounted monitor, permitting viewing of the images a couple of seconds after pressing the button. This is an invaluable tool in helping the owner select favorite images. Instant gratification and there’s at least one image in each session which generates the “Wow!” reaction. Because the connector for the USB cable in the Nikon is flimsy I reinforce the attachment with a cable tie around the cable and through the left strap eyelet. Otherwise it will typically fall out right in the middle of a session.


Click the image for the gallery.

This project took nine months. All photos were made using the 28-300mm Nikkor AF-S zoom, mostly at f/9.5-f/11 at ISO 100-200 with the strobes on half power. With stepped muzzle dogs where the nose is distant from the eyes – and you ideally want both sharp – I spot focused on a point half way up the muzzle. An 85mm f/1.8 AF-S Nikkor and a Nikon Micro-Nikkor 105mm AF-D were used for a couple of images. The blue rug is far more than decorative, serving to cover the power cables to the strobes, making for one less tripping hazard.

Degas revisited

Photographers

A fine early photographer.

Some two decades ago I wrote about Degas not just as one of the greatest painters of the 19th century but also as a fine photographer.

His ‘L’Absinthe’ painting of two denizens of the late night crowd zonked out on the poisonous drink had a significant effect on my seeing:


L’Absinthe, 1876.

When photographing North Beach in 2013 I very much had this painting in mind when I snapped a modern version in The Saloon, one of the oldest buildings in San Francisco and a rare survivor of the 1906 earthquake and fires:


North Beach Absinthe, 1913. Nikon D3x,
35mm f/1.4 Nikkor AF-S.

To learn more of Degas’s photography you can download the catalog of the Met’s 1998 show by clicking the image below, as intensely a photographic painting as you will find:


Degas. Place de la Concorde. Click the image for the catalog.

Mac Mini M4 – Part III

Mac Mini M4, Macintosh

Performance.

My primary use for the Mac Mini M4 is for processing and printing still photographs from either my Nikon D800 (36mb lossless compressed RAW files) or from my iPhone 12 Pro Max (32mb Apple Pro RAW) using Lightroom Classic. If video processing is your focus I suggest your research what your applications of choice require in terms of machine hardware.

Apart from the dramatic size and weight comparisons –

  • Mac Pro – 54lbs, self contained.
  • Mini – 1.5lbs, drive enclosure 10 lbs, DVD reader/burner – 2lbs, the last two external

– the CPU and GPU comparisons are also striking:

  • The 2010 Mac Pro sports two 6-core 3.46gHz Intel CPUs, an Nvidia GTX980 4gb GPU and 80gbs of 1333MHz RAM.
  • The Mini uses a 10 core 4.4gHz CPU, a 10 core GPU, all Apple Silicon and 16gb of 7500MHz LPDDR5X RAM.

Both machines boot from SSDs and data storage is on traditional spinning disk HDDs.

CPU performance: The Geekbench comparisons are instructive:


Mac Pro on the right.

Simply stated the Mini is 42% faster on single core tasks but 27% slower on multi-core tasks. Now Adobe claims that Lightroom Classic is optimized for Apple Silicon and uses multiple cores when processing. Who knows? I find it hard to believe anything from this poor integrity business. The same one that sold me a ‘perpetual’ license for LR6 only to make sure it did not run on Apple Silicon.

Disk speed: The Mac Mini’s internal SSD is far faster than the SSD in the Mac Pro:



Mac Pro below.

This five fold speed increase contributes to the Mini’s fast start and application loading performance. LR takes 4 seconds to boot on the Mini (my picture catalog contains some 29,000 images) compared with a lengthy 20 seconds on the Mac Pro.

GPU performance: The Mac Pro used a very capable 4gb Nvidia GTX980 card which cost more back in the day than the Mac Mini M4! LuxMark comparisons show that the GPU in the Mini is 15% faster when rendering a complex scene:



Mac Pro below.

Performace with Lightroom: I’m no fan of subjective evaluations when it comes to processing speed but am finding that the Mini is pretty much identical in performance to the Mac Pro when processing images from the relatively large Nikon and iPhone files. With 1:1 previews you can fly through images by holding down an arrow key and when you cease the sharp preview pops up instantly. So the use experience is much the same, you have a minuscule box doing what a monster one did the past 15 years and power consumption is negligible by comparison (one small fan compared with 7 large ones (two of those in the GPU) and a power efficient CPU/GPU). The power supply section of the Mac Pro is alone maybe twice as large as the Mini, which also sports an integrated power supply unit which is tiny.

Security: Perhaps the greatest gain, as mentioned in the opening of Part I, is the availability of up to date security to fend off the bad guys. Yes, Ivan and Boris, I’m looking at you. Cost wise, while Apple continues its habit of ripping you off on disk storage ($200 extra for 256gb more – really!) the sub-$1000 package price (I had to add external disk drive and DVD enclosures to the $745 base price of the 512gb Mini) is a fraction of what the Mac Pro cost for much the same performance. Based on just a few days’ experience the Mac Mini M4 is recommended. The new computer takes up negligible space, costs a fraction of the 15 year old Mac Pro and is equally speedy on most operations. On disk read/write operations the Mac Mini M4 is far faster.

Internal SSD upgrades: Early teardowns of the Mac Mini M4 disclose that the NAND storage resides on a removable card. However, components on that card make it impossible to simply plug in a larger storage one as the Apple design ties the card to your particular machine. However, hackers with micro-soldering skills have unsoldered the two existing NAND modules from the card, replacing them with much larger ones for very low cost, and things work well. So you can bet that an aftermarket business will shortly arise offering this service. When you realize that Apple charges $200 for the jump from 256gb to 512gb, and $600 more to go from 256gb to 1tb, there’s money to be made from competing with Apple’s greed. So if you want a 1TB drive or greater it might make sense to buy the base 256gb $600 Mac Mini and wait for the market to offer upgrades.

If you cannot wait but still want to avoid Apple’s gouging, buy an external Thunderbolt SSD of large capacity and make that the boot drive. This 1tb Thunderbolt 4 example sells for $150. For best performance, be sure to plug it into one of the three rear sockets as the front ones are not Thunderbolt capable.

Location: My M4 Mini hides in the rear of the keyboard tray. The DVD drive is at the monitor’s lower left, along with the camera CF/SD card reader. The disk drive enclosure is in the footwell of the desk:


It looks pretty ugly with cables sprouting out in all directions,
so hiding the M4 Mini at the back of the keyboard tray makes
sense. Ventilation is adequate.

The front connections include a mouse, keyboard and loudspeakers. The three rear Thunderbolt 4/USB-C sockets connect a laser printer, the disc drives, the DVD drive and the camera card reader, the latter two through a two into one splitter. Then there is the HDMI cable for the monitor and the power supply cord.

Time to upgrade: If you’re thinking of upgrading your Intel Mac to the M4 chip set now would be a good time to do that before Pig’s cretinous tariffs kick in on January 20, 2025.