Family, Photography and other misc news
General computing with a bias towards Unix, OS X, Apple products, for use in Music and Photography
Its only been a few weeks since the last firmware update, which I have only got round to installing; and now we have another update. This just fixes a minor underexpose issue that can sometimes occurs that was introduced in the last previous update.
Here at home we are now in our third year of home energy production. Over the last few years despite the efforts of some governments backed by the fossil fuel industry the writing is on the wall for traditional energy production. Solar and wind are now cheaper then coal.
If every home had its own solar, each village a wind turbine, large wind farms out at sea with tidal and wave generation and storage systems, the grid would be much cleaner and flexible.
Currently about a third of our carbon pollution comes from transport. Its with a lot of interest I have been following the developments of the electric car. Despite the general perception of the public, electric cars are more then suitable for the majority of us who need cars. The cheaper electric cars whilst only having a range of around 100 miles are more then suitable for the typical commute that is generally under 25 miles a day. With most families having a couple of cars they could easily replace one with a short range electric car.
If your an electric car doubter and think they lack performance, range and practicability, I suggest you check out the YouTube videos for the Tesla S P100D.
The reason for this post is that on Friday the Tesla Model 3 went into production, the first ‘affordable’ mass produced electric car that can travel over 200 miles, charge up over night, so always a full tank when you start your journey and it has a network of superchargers across Europe allowing your to recharge while you have your lunch break. With very low running costs and low emission (none at the tailpipe), even if you factor in a dirty electric grid which keeps getting cleaner, even on financial grounds not to mention air purity grounds, making our cities cleaner its hard to not think that green is the way to go.
Our car is now over fourteen years old and we will definitely be looking at a car with a plug for its replacement. What I am really looking forward to is an affordable electric BMW GS, now that would be fun.
You have probably heard that its the ten anniversary of the iPhone.
It now hard to now to remember what a revolutionary product it was. I bought the first iPhone and was very pleased with it. While it lacked many features of my previous Windows Phone, the ease of user and the ‘internet in you pocket’ was the killer feature.
Its also worth while remembering that in these ten years we still have not had a significant malware attack on iOS.
While people critic the locked down nature of the phones and the restrictions of the app store process it has succeeded to keep us safer.
I currently have the iPhone 6 which I am very happy with but might upgrade this year if the ten anniversary edition is something special.
Obsillescence is always an issue with computing and now in digital photography. I used to Nik software for a while, the black and white module that plugged into Lightroom was very affective. Now that Nik has been bought by Google we get no more updates and as Adobe continue to update their products the old plug-ins get broken.
I suppose that is life now, and why I am trying to do most of my editing now with just Lightroom and Photoshop and no other third party software.
I generally update my laptops fairly quickly but my main desktop only gets updated after lots of testing.
This year MacOS gets two significant updates under the hood. The new file system which I am very excited about but possibly more critical for us users is the fact that support for 32-bit applications gets dropped in this version.
You might want to review your critical software before updating.
Apple started their World Wide Developers Conference today and there was some exciting announcements for Mac’s and iOS. The MacBook Pro got some nice updates as did the iMacs. Hopefully we will see a new MacPro next year.
I was hoping to see the little MacBook updated. Its been getting more powerful for light work since the last update, but it only has the one USB3.1 port, it really needs two Thunderbolt 3 ports to make it more useful for those wanting a small laptop to do occasional real work.
Saturday was the annual village duck race to raise money for the local primary school.
I was busy in the studio testing out my Leica M10, so Caroline and Timmy the Greyhound went. Caroline took her Nikon D200 and a wide angle zoom to take a few shots of the event.
The village has quite a good community atmosphere and does well in coming together for events like this.
I see we had an update to Photoshop CC. Of interest to Leica shooters is now added support for more third party lens.
This week Apple made the unusual step of having an informal chat to the press about future plans for professional users.
The lack of internal expansion was a major criticism of the new cylinder shaped MacPro. While I make good use of mine, I do have a lot of cables coming out the back linking to external cages of drive arrays for my storage and backup needs.
The old tower unit would likely have been more suitable for my expansion needs.
Apple have also seen a surge of orders for the old style laptops with the traditional ports and F key arrangement at the top.
According to rumours there has been a bit of a fight going on inside Apple about their professional products. Its well know that it is a small segment but its traditionally been viewed as important. Over the last few years though professional users have felt ignored, with few updates for the professional user and a focus on the iPhone and iPad, and more portable lower powered laptops.
It now seems that Apple are going to refocus on professional users, so I look forward in a couple of years replacing my MacPro with a far more expandable version.
I don’t have an Leica M10 yet but have been downloading lots of RAW files that various people have been posting. If you have been looking at Leica M10 images and think the skins tones look wrong then its because the person processing the images has not used Lightroom 2015.8. The Adobe profile built into this version of Lightroom fully supports the M10 and gives wonderful images with no work. If the skin tones are still wrong then its likely your using the old embedded profile which you can change in the calibration section in Lightroom’s develop module.
With the RAW’s that people have kindly posted I have been able to get in lots of practice processing the images. This has also given me the opportunity to develop my own presets and a personal default setting for the images when they are first imported.
The camera is proving to be very popular and I have no idea how many days or months it will be before I receive it. So until then I have the time to perfect my Lightroom workflow and decide on what accessaries I want.