Family, Photography and other misc news
General computing with a bias towards Unix, OS X, Apple products, for use in Music and Photography
If your anything like me then you make your camera’s last. Back in the film days, I bought high end secondhand SLR’s, saving my money towards good glass. I expected them to last at least ten years.
Now with digital SLR’s the manufacturers seem to push you to upgrade every couple of years.
With the high cost of digital SLR’s I expect to get a minimum of 5 years out of them.
As technology moves on Compact Flash cards get bigger and faster. The latest cards include UDMA high speed technology, and have capacities reaching 64GB.
The question that often arises is do the newer cards work in older camera’s.
Well I thought I would buy some new cards this week for an upcoming trip.
A bit of research seemed to indicate that cards up to 16GB would work in my five year old Nikon D200’s, if I had the latest firmware but I could find nothing about the speed or if they supported UDMA (they don’t I have since found).
I keep my firmware up to date, but I decided to get some 8GB cards. Having lots of small cards is always better then a few large cards. I have only had a card corrupt on me once, and I only lost the last few images, but its not a risk I want to take.
Well today they arrived, and I am pleased to report they work.
Incase your wondering, the Nikon D200’s are running firmware, A2.01 and B2.01 and the cards were SanDisk Extreme 8GB 400x UDMA.
The Adobe Lightroom companion application, PhotoSmith announced pricing details the other day.
A very reasonable $17.99/£10.99 which if it lives up to the promise is well worthwhile.
Off now to check my camera gear and batteries as I have a fashion shoot tomorrow in the studio.
Well yes for you Apple/iPad nay Sayers, we bought the hype, been deceived by the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field; we now have an iPad.
We took delivery yesterday together with the camera connection. So far it’s lot of fun. Our favourite apps are:
Comics – fun
Evernote – productivity
FTP On The Go – productivity
iBooks – reference and fun
iSsh – productivity
WordPress – productivity and using it on the iPad now to write this
NYTimes – information
Flipboard – information
Pulse -information
WeatherPro – information
Wikihood – information
As we play and use it for real work I’ll recommend some apps that we enjoy.
Posted from our iPad, using WordPress
Well for those iPad and Adobe Lightroom users, the iPad mobile companion app has now reached version 1.0 and has been sent to Apple for approval.
Hopefully Photosmith will be with us soon.
While I do not have an iPad yet, I like many other photographers can see the use they can be put through.
While some consider it useless, and label it a toy, unable to be used for real work, a joke for professionals, many people think its great for when you cannot take the trouble to carry a laptop.
To be honest when travelling I sometimes take Medium Format Camera equipment, 35mm equipment, lighting equipment and heavy tripods and light stands. Sometimes the last thing I want to add is a laptop.
Yesterday I spotted a posting from Adobe about a beta Photoshop App (see Chris Bennett’s Blog Post).
Photoshop is not one of the key apps that would make me buy an iPad but if someone released the Library Module of Adobe Lightroom then I would be buying an iPad like a shot.
Well that day may well be nearly here. Check out the Photosmith Blog. This seems to offer what I want.
For heavy image work then a laptop in the field in not really the tool. Heavy image work is a job for back in the office/home with a powerful computer and controlled lighting conditions in the room, and a calibrated monitor. No, in the field its evaluating your work, making picks, keywording, metadata and quick adjusts to help you evaluate the shots.
When this gets released, together with some of the tethering apps that are coming out; Elinchrom’s and Hasselblad’s remote control apps then the iPad will be coming with me, out in the field and in the studio.
I just found out that its the Mac OS X Operating System’s 10th Birthday today.
Its certainly come a long way. While at work I use Windows, Solaris, Redhat and AIX, at home I stopped using Windows as my primary operating system not long after Windows XP was released.
Working my way through various versions of Linux before finally settling happily on Fedora Linux.
Well that changed when I decided to buy Caroline a Wedding Present of an Apple Powerbook. OS X was just so easy to use, never getting in the way and just letting you get on with the work at hand.
While Apple users may like to claim Mac’s never crash this is not true but they certainly do not crash often, certainly an improvement on Windows, NT4, 2000, XP and 2003.
Through what little I have used Windows 7 it to looks very good now but I think i’ll stick with OS X for a few more years.
We are members of both the National Trust and of English Heritage.
Now the National Trust have for some time had an excellent free iOS app for finding places to visit nearby and getting information about them.
Finally English Heritage are also joining the 21st Century (that’s nearly funny) and are releasing their own app, due in April.
Hope it’s free like the National Trust App.
Just a quick note to let you know an update for WordPress for iOS has been released
Using it now to post this. Interface is improved and I look forward to trying it out in anger. The previous version did crash fairly often and once even lost me a post that I had previously posted.
When it comes to standards and companies not following them, I could have a good old rant about many top companies, computer and software companies being the worse.
The other day a photographer friend of mine was demonstrating his new photo editing software.
While key wording and adding other important metadata, we wondered where it was writing this data.
As I suspected, it was using a sidecar file to accompany the jpg’s and raw’s.
What really rilled me was instead of using an xmp sidecar file (an open standard developed by Adobe) which many other software programs can read, not just Adobe Lightroom or Camera Raw, it uses it’s own proprietary format.
Why! Lock in, thats why, but the worry is, will the companies own future software support their own proprietary formats, past history suggests not.
From Wikipedia:
XMP sidecar files. For file formats that have no internal support for XMP data, the data is stored in separate .xmp files with the same base file name. Many photo cataloging applications have support for this file format.