Family, Photography and other misc news
Well for those waiting for the first maintenance release of Mountain Lion the latest OS for the Mac, it was released at the end of last week.
http://support.apple.com/downloads/
For those who need to download it to update multiple computers and not use software update you can find it on the link above.
I needed to check something this morning on the Royal Mail Tracking Website, and found according to them the Mac OS and Browser is not supported.
Come on Companies, in this day and age I would expect at least support for common internet standards allowing any standards based OS and Browser to work over the internet.
That means supporting Windows, OS X, and Linux.
It never fails to amaze me how inventive some people can be.
A hundred years ago camera film was not the plastic and celluloid of today but plates of metal or more commonly glass.
Well what is the bag of an iPhone 4 & 4s made of? Glass!
Yes you guessed it, some very clever people have cleaned up the back glass, coated it in a photographic light sensitive solution and used the iPhone as a piece of film to produce a original works of art.
Developing the image must have been fun, working in total darkness painting developer onto the back of the phone with a paintbrush.
Looking back over my photographs this last month, its been an interest mix. The shot above is one of my current favourites, its was a quick snap with my iPhone4 while walking back to my hotel.
Its also been a month of variety in cameras. I have been shooting with my phone, mirror-less interchangeable camera the Nikon 1 Series, SLR, but also with film.
I have images that I am pleased with each of my cameras, and unless you print big, apart from lens perspective and dynamic range; if your posting on the web they all look equally good.
This last week we having been getting back into the fitness, running and the gym, which we have been letting slip recently.
We also had a serious look at what we eat. We are pretty good on the whole, we cook most things from scratch, even going as far as making bread, bagels, pizza bases and are own tomato sauce.
No the issue is while we eat healthy, we do eat too much.
We always said we would not calorie count, but the weight is not coming off very much.
So starting this week we are recording everything we eat and drink, making a conscious effort to have more salads and less of the starchy food we love.
To help us on our way we have treated ourselves to the Hairy Bikers new diet book, and a calorie counting app for our iPhones and iPad.
Keeping this up for a week will be pretty easy I expect, but next week we will be away for a few days staying in hotels/bed & breakfast accommodation.
With lovely cooked breakfasts and evening pub meals it’s going to be touch.
Oh and Don’t mention the cheese board.
In an attempt to tick as many boxes in my categories list as possible, todays blog posting is a bit of a summary of the day.
Its been a busy day at work, and it has been a tempting time because of all the cakes that seem to be around at the moment. Until the afternoon I had managed to resist, but then after a lunchtime trip to Nandos (yes so much for the diet, but I did have only a 1/4 chicken, rice and corn), I found on my desk a Chocolate muffin.
Thanks Bill!
After a busy afternoon doing 3PAR Admin, (doesn’t Exchange 2010 eat disk space), we went straight to the gym. Nothing in particular, just a bit of general weight work, and 30 minutes cardio, spent between the Cross-Trainer and the Rowing Machine.
This evening has been far more fun. A rather nice real ale, and a bit of time split between playing bowls with my lovely wife Caroline on the Wii, and sorting out her data on her external hard drives.
Her old PowerBook just had a 60GB drive so most of her data was on a mix of old hand-me-down firewire 800 drives that I no longer required.
Well with her shiny new MacBook Pro Retina, I also bought her a new 1 TB usb3 drive to hold her iTunes and Lightroom Libraries.
So between beer, the Wii and moving data around, tonight has been rather a fun night. It was great to finally get my hands on her new MacBook Retina. I was amazed at the speed it could backup and optimise a Lightroom V4 library. Very impressive.
While sorting out her data I also took a few moments to look through some of the photos she has took of me, I thought you might enjoy this one, its me and Chris Bennett shooting Herons. With cameras of course not guns!
Chris with his Trusty Nikon D3s and me with a Nikon D200.
Anyway, its getting late and its time for bed. Now that I have Adobe Lightroom on her Laptop, i’ll be finishing sorting out her data then getting Photoshop installed and trying that.
I wonder what else I can volunteer to do, anything will do as long as it involves using this joy of a machine. The new MacBook Pro Retina with SSD and 16 Gb of RAM, fast hardly describes it!
Well after reading lots of reviews, trying one for myself in the local store, I have decided not to update my four year old MacBook Pro to the new model, but that does not mean we do not have one.
Caroline’s laptop, a late model 12″ PowerBook is now seven years old, so a few weeks ago I placed an order to get a replacement for her.
We were torn between the MacBook Airs and the bigger screen of the 15″ Retina models, in the end with us also having an iPad for light computer use (I am typing this on it right now), we decided on getting the 15″ Retina.
It arrived yesterday and we quickly migrated the PowerBook’s data, settings and apps over to it. This is one area that makes Macs a joy to use. Updating, backing up, restoring is all effortless and easy. Rumour has it that Windows 8 is going to be more like this, let’s hope so.
I have not had a chance to do much on it yet, as Caroline is yet to let it out of her hands but I’ll be getting Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop installed and really giving it a good test.
I have to say the screen is everything they say and everything looks fantastic on it, and everything is so quick, but then with 16 Gb of RAM and an SSD for storage it should be.
The only thing so far to catch us out is GateKeeper. This is a new feature in Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8), which prevents unsigned apps from running. For some reason it did not trust the BBC’s Desktop iPlayer.
Also some picture transitions using flash on a website were less smooth then I would expect, whether this is a coding issue on that site, Adobe Flash, or the graphics card struggling to keep up with things on the Retina display I do not know. It maybe that as we were just looking at a website the OS chose to,use the lower powered Intel Graphics instead of the high end discreet graphics card built in.
I have to admit I am dead jealous and I think I’ll be purchasing a SSD to put in my MacBook Pro to give it a new lease of life.
Well its that time again, the 5th Annual Photo Walk is on. Check to see if there is one near you, and if not see if you can organise one for your local area.
See Scott Kelby’s Website for more details.
On my lunch break last week I went into my local London Camera Exchange and got my hands on the new Sony RX100.
Small, compact but packing great ergonomics and a very large for a sensor for a compact camera, the same size as my Nikon V1 but with a resolution of 20MP.
As compacts go its possibly the best yet. Would I have one, well as tempting as it is, I still love my viewfinders, add an optical viewfinder like a Fuji X100, or X10 or a great EVF like the the Sony NEX-7 or Nikon V1, but manage to keep its small size then its the perfect carry everywhere.
Thanks to LCE for letting me test out the camera, and also thanks to the staff for putting up with me taking photographs of them.
The camera shoots RAW as well as jpeg, I set the camera to both and popped a 8GB SD Card into it. If you have ever used a Sony NEX then you will know what a mess they are. Every time I have used a NEX-7 I have found the menu’s difficult to navigate. The menu on the RX-100 is much clearer and easier to use.
With a simple mode dial on the top to choose auto, aperture or shutter priority, even manual if you wish, its easy to select the mode you want. The function button on the back means you can quickly and easily change key functions such as ISO and like the Canon S100 compact a customisable ring round the lens can be set to be an aperture control, shutter or even ISO or exposure compensation control.
All together a great compact camera. Until Adobe and the other major players update their RAW converts we will not know for sure about the image quality but with the size of the sensor, and from what I have seen from the jpegs it all looks good.
Whether it beats the Fuji X100 we will have to see, but for size, the fact it has a good zoom and the fast autofocus, its going to be close. I suspect for image quality the Fuji X100 may have the edge, but for many the other advantages the Sony has over the Fuji will swing it, and for those that do want the better image quality Sony have the NEX-7 which rivals the Fuji X100 and the Fuji X-Pro 1; but of course they will not fit in your top pocket.
I was discussing the new Sony RX100 with Chris Bennett today, and he mentioned that Nikon had released new software for the Nikon 1 Series.
I downloaded it and updated straight away, no new features just bug fixes. Come on Nikon, let me turn off automatic image review, it slows me down!