I decided to give it another go this Thanksgiving weekend. I’ve been watching, with interest, Anita’s writings about her experience with the iPad, though she has an iPad 2 and I am still kickin it old school with the first generation Also, Earl went to Europe using his s90 and iPad, so I figured that I wanted to at least give it one more go.

I’m in south Florida, carrying nothing but the S90, an iPhone, and an iPad. Thus far, I’ve only taken time to write this one post, but I have taken a hundred or so photos, stored them on the iPad, and processed a few of them with Snapspeed and Photoshop Express, this has been pretty effortless. I’ve had no issues on file sizes.

The apps work well and make things easy to process. The files download into the iPad from the SD card fairly rapidly.

The only major problem that I’ve had consistently is that I keep missing the space bar and keep hitting the ‘n’ key, which ends up with words like: inkeepnmissingmthe space bar. I guess that I just need to get used to two finger typing for now. There are plans for a MacBook Air in my immediate future as soon as i am the sole owner of my M9, some time in January.

For posting with WordPress for iPad, I think that I will need to size my photos specifically to exactly what I want and use ‘original’ as the upload size rather than the vague: small, medium, or large. I still need to work on the workflow a bit, but it is doable, though much slower than with a laptop.

Anyway, I’ve not given up thanks to earl and Anita!

Generally, I’m not one to upgrade just to upgrade; however, on occasion, I’ll make an exception so as not to get too far behind the curve. I noticed that Apple had an upgrade to the operating system. They are going from Snow Leopard to Lion. Well, I’m still on Leopard.

A couple of weeks ago, I ordered Snow Leopard, which was released on August 28, 2009, and it finally came in the mail on Monday, taking nearly a full two weeks to get here. So, this weekend, I’ll do a backup of my system, a little cleaning, and then install Snow Leopard. “Everyone” says that I should do a clean install, though the update works just fine.

I remember doing Windoze upgrades of the operating system and found that they never worked and I mean NEVER, for me. I always ended up doing a clean install and then reinstalling all of my programs, only to find out that some of them didn’t work with the new OS.

Early reports of Snow Leopard, when it came out, had some compatibility issues, but those applications have since upgraded, so it should be fine. It has been out there for a while.

I’ve been reading reviews about Lion, but think that I’ll hold off on that one until perhaps the next cat makes an appearance. For now, I guess I’ll remain one cat behind.

Anyone upgrade to Snow Leopard or Lion?

I wrote this post back in November 2009, right after I came back from New York City. The camera had failed right before I was to leave for NYC. I sent it to Nikon, spent $224, it was repaired and worked well for almost 18 months. Now, it’s failing again. Sigh.

Again, right before a key moment. I guess that this time it decided to go on strike because I had the Leica M9. The last time, it was because of the M6. I guess that it doesn’t like Leicas!

I noticed that it started acting up a week or two ago. I had the 90 mm Tamron lens on it and it constantly showed f7. No matter what mode or which dial I turned, F7. It still did the proper exposure, but always at the same aperture. I tried a couple of other lenses with limited success:

1. 50 mm Nikon lens. Showed F7.
2. 90 mm Tamron. F7
3. Nikon 18-70 – Works properly.
4. Tamron 11 – 18 – Works properly.

Further, now when I shoot more than about 6 shots in quick sequence, about 1 second apart, the camera locks up on about the 7th shot. The mirror stays up and the shutter open. The only way to get it to work correctly is to turn off the camera, and shot another sequence of shots. Forget about high speed shooting.

I’m not sure what its issue is this time, but it is rather annoying. Sometimes I miss my D2x; it was flawless. Perhaps I just got a lemon of a camera. I’ve had the camera about 3 years and it has failed twice in that time.

Looks like I’ll be sending it for repair again, I think. Sigh ….

Seeing this behavior, I decided to rent a Nikon D90 for the wedding. I looked at a few cameras in the Nikon line and this camera used the same image processing engine and sensor, it just doesn’t have as many bells and whistles. It performed well and I was able to set it up in no time flat as all of the menus were the exact same, save for a few omissions.

Overall, I am pleased with the Nikon cameras that I’ve owed, but this seems a bit ridiculous. I don’t use the camera that hard and it’s failed twice. The saga continues.

At The Peaceful Dragon, in preparation for tournaments, we are taught not to worry about our form. Just practice and practice. On the day of the tournament, if you miss a move, who will know? Most of the judges don’t know our form, so if you make something up, are smooth, and look like you meant to do something, it will go unnoticed.

Sometimes, in photography, I have to do that. Let’s look at these two photos. The one at the top, a high-key portrait, is a ‘rescue’, because, quite frankly I botched the first attempt. You can see the extreme dynamic range. Her face is underexposed and the dress is blown out!

While doing this dance,
you might hurt your back.
Just look at the crowd and say:
I meant to do that!
~Joeski Love – Pee Wee Herman Dance

So, what did I do to rescue this? First, I converted it to B&W, cropped it into a square, as you can see. Nest, I actually INCREASED the exposure by 3 stops. This, of course, totally obliterated any detail in the dress, but it brought out her face and hair wonderfully. Then, I went in and darkened selective portions of the shot like her hair, shoulder, arm, and flowers to make them stand out even more. Lastly, I added a bit of grain and a simple black border around the edge. I think that, effectively, this saved the shot.

Of course, I wouldn’t want to ‘make a living’ doing this shoot and hope, I would use flashes, but the point here was to see how well I could do with available lighting.

I think that I saved the shot. What do you think?

Like Pee Wee Herman says: I meant to do that!!!

OK. I’m ready to face it. The iPad is a very limited device. It’s great for listening to music, browsing the Internet, and checking e-mail. It falls short in some areas … such as the way that I would like to use it, as a traveling companion onto which I would like to load photos and post blog entries.

My friend Robert suggested that I try Photoshop Express for iPad from Adobe. Fair enough. I downloaded it from the iTunes App Store. Total cost: $0.00. It’s a free application. You’ll have to pay an additional $3.99, I think to get the noise reduction module.

When I first downloaded it, I edited some simple pictures that I had on the iPad that I had taken with my iPhone. I was happy that I was able to adjust exposure, crop, color saturation, brightness, tint, change to B&W, sharpen, etc. It had quite a few features for a free app. I was excited. I decided to risk $30 and buy the iPad Camera Connection Kit. My dongles came today.

Eagerly, I grabbed up the M9, went outside and took a few pictures. I remembered having read that the iPad was able to read RAW files as well as JPG. I wondered if it would read DNG. After taking a few shots of clouds, I came back in, removed the card from the camera, placed the dongle into the iPad and lo and behold, it read the card. No muss. No fuss.

I opened the PS Express application, clicked on the import album and attempted to open one of my DNG files. I was greeted by a dialog saying:

The photo is too large to be opened.

Hmmmm. OK. I’ll go back out and shoot with JPG. I’ve shot with JPG before and I ain’t scared of it! I switched to JPG Fine, went back out, took some more photos. Repeat.

The photo is too large to be opened.

Hmmmm. I don’t like this, but I’m going to try JPB Basic (I never shoot this as there is a remarkable difference between this and RAW, but not with fine.). Clouds, here I come. Repeat

The photo is too large to be opened.

Can anyone see a pattern here? WTF? This is the worst image that I can get out of this camera. Let’s have a look-see and see what sizes they are on the hard drive.

DNG (Compressed) 6.8 MB – 5212 x 3468
JPG (Fine) 4.5 MB – 5216 x 3472
JPG (Basic) 2.8 MB – 5216 x 3472

Now, the compressed size is not the ‘real’ size when it comes into memory, so lets just look at megapixels: JPG = 18 MP, DNG = 18 MP. Sure, the JPGs will come out a little less because of compression. So, when these are expanded into memory, they are certainly almost full size, or about 18 MB. There’s probably a way to find out, but for the purpose of this, I didn’t need to know the exact size, truthfully.
A quote that I found on another Adobe forum that explains the problem:

JPEGs may only start out being a few megabytes, but when they are decompressed and converted to a bitmap for display, their size increases dramatically. A 3456×2304 pixel image that’s 4.5 MB as a JPEG is 10 MB as a RAW file type, and becomes almost 23 MB as a bitmap. .

Well. That told me one thing, an important thing: This would not work with the M9. The files, even at their crappiest, are too large. Just for fun, I decided to see if the S90 files would fit. I imported a RAW + JPG Fine and it worked. The major difference here is that the size of the Canon’s photos are 10 MP, about 55% of the size of the M9 files, 3648 x 2736 (9.98M). Now, those pictures of clouds had turned into thunderclouds!

Off I went to Google to see if anyone else had had this problem. Sure enough, people shooting a Canon G10 had similar issues. Sigh. I found this thread on Adobe’s forum. Long story short … it’s not going to work with the M9 or the D300. The Canon S90 would be just fine. OK. Back to the drawing board.

I’m pretty sure that I’m asking too much from the iPad.

Before you assume that the Leica M9 is the ‘perfect’ camera, let me assure that it has a few small warts. One of them is the automatic white balance. The M9 cannot seem to really make up its mind as to which white balance to use. For example, in these two shots, which were taken sequentially, about 4 seconds apart, same vantage point, same camera, same lens, same photographer.

Of course, I noticed this right away when I got the camera and decided not to shoot JPEG because of the dramatic color shifts that I see, sometimes in the same room under the same lighting as is the case here.

As I am shooting DNG, not RAW (*wink*), I can change the color to my satisfaction and get it too look right. I do have a solution, though. I’ve been experimenting with it this morning. Long, long ago, I bought and Expodisc. It is used just for this purpose. Put the disc in front of the lens, point it at a source that is supposed to white, take the photo, and presto changeo, custom white balance for that source.

Fortunately, I was able to find this disc that I bought long ago. I tried it in my apartment and it appears to work quite well. I really never used it except once because the white balance feature on the D300 was so damn good that it rarely got fooled. Not so with the M9. Oh well. Nothing’s perfect. Perhaps they’ll figure it out with the next firmware release. Maybe they should hire someone away from Nikon to write the software to get the white balance right!

As for those photos, from memory, I think that the top photo is a bit more accurate in color, but seems a tiny bit warm. The second one is a bit cool, but not too bad. I suppose that the correct color temperature was somewhere in between.

I was pretty excited to finish the first roll shot with the rental lens. Sure, there were not any award winning shots on the roll, nor even any good ones for that matter. I was just out snapping away, happily, shooting at f/1.1.

After I developed the film, using my normal process, I let the negatives dry, cut them up, then scanned. Unfortunately, there was a lot of ‘stuff’ on the film. I removed the negatives, gave them a good bath with some film cleaning solution that I have and … nope, still there. What went wrong in the process?

Well, the topic of this post is “Points of failure”. It could have happened anywhere. There could have been something on the film from the beginning (doubtful), something on the felt that scratched the film as it existed the canister, dust in the camera, particles in any of the three solutions (developer, stop bath, fixer), lots of dust where I let them dry, anywhere. Mind you, I’ve never seen this issue before, so I don’t know where to start to fix it.

My first thought was that the fixer was exhausted, but I’ve seen that before. The negatives just end up looking cloudy, but that wasn’t an issue. They looked very clear and clean. I posted a photo on APUG and one of the users answered right away and said that he thought that it was particles on one my solutions. I wondered about the length of the ‘particles’, but then thought that the length could have been extended by my squeegee dragging across the emulsion.

I didn’t have a loupe or a magnifying glass so I couldn’t actually see the particles in the emulsion, but I will have a look when after I purchase one this afternoon. I’m curious. I have mixed a new batch of fixer and will use developer from the new bottle that I have. It’s all one-shot anyway, so that should not be an issue.

Well, no relationship is perfect. Film certainly has its points of failure, probably a few more than digital, but no reason to stop using it. It just makes me a better detective. I’m sure that my next roll will be back to normal, though, if it is, I will have no idea what change made it work, but I won’t really care … as long as it works.

That said, I did get some shots that I liked, save for all the crud, from the Voigtlander. This one of Hobbs was shot at f/1.1 at about 1/30 of second. It was pretty dim in the room.

As a software developer, by trade, I know how much time it takes to do software and how frustrating, and exhilarating it can be at the same time. When I leave my office, the last thing that I’m thinking about is writing more code. As a matter of fact, it doesn’t even come into the thought process …

The current price of Adobe Photoshop CS5 is $699 for a full version. Quite pricey. Given, I think, that most photographers don’t need all of the power available in CS5, Lightroom will do. It’s what I use for 99.95% of my editing, though I do own a copy of CS4.

While I was in Texas visiting my friend, Richard, he asked me about GIMP and how it compared to Photoshop. I had to answer honestly: I have no idea. However, I made him a promise that I’d check it out and get back with him about it. This is my attempt, in writing, to do that.

I didn’t want to spend a whole lot of time trying to do all sorts of cool things because, quite frankly, I don’t know how to do all sorts of cool things in Photoshop. Why try it with GIMP?

This morning when I got out of my car, I took a photograph of some light coming into the window of a bar close to the lot. I liked the photo and decided to spend a bit of time getting it to look like I really wanted. Mind you, this is an iPhone shot.

As you can see, the before and after are quite a bit different. I was going for an early morning feel, complete with somewhat mysterious and inky shadows. I like inky shadows a lot … just enough to make you wonder what’s in them. Here’s what I did with the photo:

1. Cropped out the ATM machine and the automobile reflections as well as my own reflection.
2. Changed aspect ratio from 4:3 to 3:2
3. Changed the levels to give the inky feeling.
4. Straightened the image.
5. Adjusted curves, slightly, to give more contrast.
6. Added another layer with Gaussian blur to give it that dreamy look. I forget what that technique is called.
7. Used the eyedropper to pull in the color of the wall near the vases.
8. Used the air brush to fill in those burned out areas on the wall, just a little bit and give it a warmer feeling.
9. Used layer masks to lighten the shadows in selected areas.

Now, that’s about as far as I will usually go when modifying a photo. Fortunately, I can do most of that in Lightroom, save for the air brush stuff.

All in all, it took me about 45 minutes. It wouldn’t have taken that long if I had known exactly where the tools were, how they worked, and how to set certain parameters that I wanted to set.

In short, these developers have done a fantastic job in making it pretty easy for a PS user to come over and use GIMP, a free product that gets the job done!

For you raw shooters: I shoot JPEG. So sue me! I don’t know, nor do I care, if GIMP supports raw files. Please, no flames. Can’t we all just get along??? LOL!

In the end, Richard, it’s worth checking out. It will get the job done and I’m sure that there is so much more that you can do with it that are far beyond my abilities or learning.

Evening Flight

Standing calmly near the edge of the Ashley River, waiting with eager anticipation as the sun began to drop below the horizon, I mounted my D300 on the tripod, framed up the scene before me and then a thought occurred to me. I’ve not used auto bracketing in a long, long, time. As the contrast was fairly high, I figured that this would be a good thing to do. Later, I could come back home and combine a couple of exposures using Photoshop and have a nice looking image.

For some reason, my mind would only bring up memories of how to do it on my D2X, which I sold more than a year ago. I hunted through the various menus and could not remember how to do it. Damn! I always carry my book with me, but I never want to waste time when the sun is sinking trying to thumb through a book and figure something out!

All of my simplifying left me a bit clueless. Suddenly, I started laughing out loud and thinking to myself: Dufus! What would you do if you had a film camera that didn’t have all of that cool technology in it? Of course, I’d change it to manual and kick it old school, which is exactly what I did.

Sometimes that guy behind the camera is so funny! What a knucklehead! Of course, when I got home, one of the first things that I did, while the photos were being copied to the computer, was look to see how to do bracketing. Maybe I’ll be ready the next time, assuming that it isn’t too long between those times.

Oddly enough, there were a few of the bracketed ones that I liked, but none quite as much as this one, which isn’t bracketed. I was looking at the clouds after the sun had dipped below the horizon and noticed this jet flying through what looked like a corridor between the clouds.

Although I am about a month late in hearing about it, I see that Nikon has discontinued the D300, in favor of the D300s. The main differences between the two are the the ‘s’ model has HD video and a Live View button. The sensor and, for the most part, the entire camera are the same. Oh, and the D300 supports dual card slots. One for a CF card, the other for an SD card. There’s nothing here that would make me want to trade.

There is an interesting feature, Quiet Shutter Release mode. From Nikon’s site they say:

Also added to the D300s is a Quiet Shutter Release mode, which substantially reduces the sound of the mirror while shooting. Quickly accessed by selecting “Q” on the release mode dial, this feature is ideal for the photographer who wishes to remain unobtrusive.

I wonder how much quieter it would really be. Certainly not as quiet as a rangefinder! Anyway, I’ll be keeping mine, after all, basketball season is around the corner!