Steve Jobs – RIP

I’m just one of many whose life was utterly changed by this guy. It was 1987 when it happened for me. That was the first time I sat down in front of a Macintosh computer. Before then, I was just “a brain”, which is what they called smart kids in school in the 80′s. That first experience with a little old Mac Plus changed me from “a brain” to a “computer geek,” and that’s basically what I’ve been ever since. I had used computers before, but none of them made the impression on me that a simple little Macintosh Plus did. More recently, I’m sure I’ve spent more time bitching about Apple computers than most people spend bitching about anything at all, but even so, I wouldn’t use anything else. Steve Jobs taught us all what we have a right to expect from technology: It should just work, and it should be beautiful. It should enrich our lives.

So, thanks Steve. I’m quite saddened by your passing. The world needs more people like you.

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Some links to things of relevance:

Apple’s Steve Jobs Remembrance Page

Steve’s 2005 talk at Stanford University commencement – 15 minutes long, but well worth the time. It’s not often in this day and age that we get to hear a wise man speak the unvarnished truth.

Discussion and remembrance at The Online Photographer (including a most excellent portrait).

And, of course, his Wikipedia page.

Lion set to maul PowerPC apps

If you want to get a new Mac that is capable of running PowerPC applications, ACT NOW. It won’t be much longer before all new Macs come with “Lion” preinstalled, meaning those PowerPC applications WILL NOT RUN. This is, in my opinion, a mistake on Apple’s part. They should have waited at least another couple of years to do this, but I suspect their rationale is that some large developers are dragging their feet and the only way to get them to fall in line was to force the issue. Unfortunately, this means that anyone who NEEDS an older, PowerPC-only application that is now out of development is out of luck. Got some cool old game or toy that’s fallen by hard times and hasn’t been updated in the last six years? Too bad. MAYBE someone will write an emulator. Frankly, I think Apple should just start including emulators as part of the system, maybe for an extra charge. I’d seriously consider paying extra for a set of Mac emulators that would allow me to run old 68000 and PowerPC applications.

Just taking a look at applications on my system that would be broken if I upgraded to Lion today:

iCab 3
Filemaker Pro 7.0
Creatures 1.1.1 (a neat artifical life simulator that I go nuts over from time to time)
AppleWorks 6
Quicken 2004
Ptah (a neat little image viewer that I really like)
Graphic Converter 5.9

I’m sure some of these would be upgradeable. Some I wouldn’t care about. But a couple I would really miss if I lost them. Nothing Apple has come up with in recent years compares to AppleWorks 6, for instance. I’ve tried iWork, and found the spreadsheet module, which is the part I use the most, to be so tedious and frustrating that I’ve taken to setting up tables in TextEdit using tabs instead of enduring the hell of “Numbers”! Creatures, I’m pretty sure, would be lost entirely. That would suck, as it’s fun to play around with on rainy November Saturdays. According to it’s website, it’s gone open source, but that was over five years ago, so who knows what the status of it is now. Ptah is one of the two most elegant JPG image viewers I’ve ever encountered (the other being JPEGView, a nifty little program released back in the Macintosh LC days). It operates on a very simple principle, and that is, if you press a single key on the keyboard, it will replace whatever image is currently being displayed with the NEXT ONE. You and double-click on the first pic in a folder, then just keep hitting the “n” key to view every single image in that folder, one by one, all conveniently resized to fit on the screen (another keystroke will zoom it up to 1:1 size), and with minimal distractions cluttering up the screen. Does Preview do this? Maybe–I actually couldn’t tell you. Preview, to my way of thinking, is a pain in the ass. Essentially, Preview is to Ptah as iWork is to AppleWorks: buried up to the neck in design, and generally insufficient in functional elegance. In any case, Ptah was $5 shareware that I paid for in 2002. It hasn’t been available for years, from what I know.

I have discovered some good news today, though. My all-time favorite Usenet news reader, Thoth, has received an upgrade making it Lion-compatible, provided I re-register it (meaning pay an additional shareware fee). Since this is one of the finest applications I’ve ever used, and since I’ve been using it for quite a long time now and have never had to pay for an upgrade at all, I consider an additional $25 to be well worth the money. Quite frankly, Thoth has never been equaled by any other newsreader I’ve ever tried. I was starting to resign myself to eventually switching to Unison, which is an ok program (and definitely improved over earlier versions), but frankly, I just like Thoth better. It’s a good app for control-freak power users like myself. ;)

iMac or Mac Pro?

Out of curiousity, I was looking at specs on Apple’s website recently and noticed something interesting. When comparing features and prices between their current top of the line iMac and bottom of the line Mac Pro (default configurations for both), a person is better off buying the iMac, unless they already have a high-end monitor available for the Mac Pro, or (perhaps) have a specific need for some key feature that’s only available on the Mac Pro.

Why?

It’s actually pretty simple: The iMac is spec’d higher, it’s $500 cheaper, it includes a high-end monitor for no extra cost, and it’s power consumption is substantially less. This is just a ballpark figure, but I generally allow my Mac to run 24/7, idle most of the time with the screen dimmed, and, comparing the wattage figures for that usage between the two models, I estimate I’d burn through about 75 kilowatt-hours more per month with the Mac Pro.

Is a 3.1GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5 (iMac) better or worse than a 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon “Nehalem” processor (Mac Pro)? Many people will simply not care–either one will be fast enough. The question is actually somewhat important to me, though, given my ownership of a Nikon D7000, which produces some rather large and slow-to-process RAW image files. Some extra speed would be helpful with that. I am too lazy to bother looking up the answer to the question right now, however (am I the world’s lamest blogger, or what?!?!).

Graphics cards: I admit I neither know, nor care, about the difference (if any) between them. (I suck at video games, and what else do you need that kind of hardware for, anyway? Generating Bitcoins? LOL Good luck with that.)

Firewire: The Mac Pro has two FW800 ports. The iMac only has one, but also has the new “Thunderbolt” ports. These are useless at this point, but will be quite nice once Thunderbolt peripherals are available. Those who, like me, have a lot of external hard drives, will perhaps be ambivalent about the prospect of upgrading lots of enclosures. I am also a bit concerned that I may actually have more drives than are allowable on a Thunderbolt bus. When you figure a 3 terabyte limit on drive size, multiplied by the small number of Thunderbolt devices allowed on one system, you end up with a limit on total system storage that’s substantially lower than you’d get using Firewire devices. It also gets more complicated when you realize, from a practical standpoint, that if you max out the drive size on all of the devices, you are going to run into backup issues, so the practical limit is even lower. Obviously it will be more than enough for all but the most dedicated hoarders (heheheh), but some of us may get a little cramped, especially once those 1080p video files start to pile up! (This is actually an interesting theoretical question. Let’s say, for instance, that for some crazy, insane reason I needed a petabyte of storage space on my iMac system, and, through some miracle, had the money to pay for it. Is that amount of storage even possible on an iMac system, and, if so, how could it be accomplished? Food for thought. Heheheh.)

On the whole, with the noted reservations, I suspect the specs are a win for the iMac, at least for now. Apple will get around to updating their Mac Pro line sooner or later, and at that point, the situation will presumably change.

iTunes 8: RIP

When trying to access the iTunes store today with iTunes 8, it simply presented me with a single page, offering to upgrade to iTunes 10. Previously to this, usage of iTunes 8 on the iTunes store was a bit glitchy, but functional, overall. It allowed searches, browsing, purchasing. Even the old shopping cart still worked, which was the primary reason for staying with iTunes 8. The only catch was, you couldn’t get into the store simply by clicking on the iTunes Store link in the iTunes sidebar, you had to “sneak” in through one of the many little search arrows that show up throughout an iTunes library. As this was only slightly inconvenient, I never bothered to complain about it.

But now, there is nothing. Apple, in its typical, Nazi-like fashion, has decided that users are required to upgrade, or we’re shit out of luck.

(As a side effect of this, my old post about nuking iTunes 9 in favor of iTunes 8, a decidedly non-trivial process, is now totally obsolete. Honestly, I wasn’t sure if it worked with iTunes 10 anyway, since I never bothered to upgrade.)

Apple is in dire need of new leadership. And, as of today, I am in need of somewhere else to obtain music online.

Variable ISO – a useful exposure tool

Thom Hogan posted some interesting ideas on his site yesterday, pertaining to the question of how we, as photographers, deal with setting exposure. Basically, in the film days, we were stuck with one ISO rating for an entire roll of film (and some of us habitually used only one type of film), so at that time, ISO was essentially a fixed value. To adjust exposure, we then had to adjust shutter speed and aperture.

Today, ISO can be varied from frame to frame, and on some cameras, there is quite a wide degree of choices available. Hogan’s idea, then, is that having a selection of finely adjustable aperture settings may not really be necessary. We pick one of our two or three preferred apertures (wide open, optimal sharpness, or maximum depth-of-field prior to diffraction), then vary the shutter speed and ISO (if needed) to get the exposure we want. The point then is that we don’t really need a whole slew of apertures to choose from.

This talk of varying the ISO brought to mind something similar that I’d been considering writing about. I got a longer lens late last year, a 300mm, which on my reduced size sensor equates to a 450mm field of view. That’s long enough to make it a significantly different animal compared to other lenses I’ve used. Furthermore, it does not have vibration reduction. On the other hand, while it’s a somewhat hefty lens, it’s weight is well within reason for hand-held use. The problem then becomes ensuring that the shutter speed doesn’t go down far enough to result in problems. In practice, I discovered that I was most comfortable keeping it around 1/800 of a second or higher. That speed allows me some leeway, meaning I can get away with sloppier shot discipline, basically. If I went down to 1/500, I would have to be very careful to hold it steady as I released the shutter, and the overall percentage of blurred shots would be higher regardless. Another thing I ran into relates to a peculiarity of my camera (a Nikon D40): higher shutter speeds sometimes seem to result in weirdness. This is sort of hard to describe, and I’ve never really been sure what the hell is going on when it happens. I suspect it has something to do with the electronic shutter that this camera uses, in that it can sometimes create some weird artifacting effects at higher shutter speeds. The anti-aliasing filter may also be a factor, or possibly the lossy compression, even though it makes no sense at all that shutter speed would interact with either of those things. I don’t honestly know what it is. However, the practical implication of it was that I realized it would work very well if the shutter speed was at 1/800 all the time, at least for hand-held shooting with this lens. Well, there’s an obvious solution to that, isn’t there? Shoot in shutter-priority mode.

The one question was what would happen when the lens opened all the way up. It’s only an f/4 lens, which is not fast enough for shady conditions or heavy cloud cover at 1/800. So I turned on AutoISO, a feature I hadn’t used on my camera in a couple of years, and which I had never ever tried in shutter priority mode. I actually wasn’t even sure it would do what I needed it to, which was to keep the camera at the base ISO of 200 until the lens was wide open, then raise the ISO upward if there wasn’t enough light. Turns out, this is exactly what it does, and it works very well. I totally recommend it, at least for Nikon bodies with this type of AutoISO, and similar non-VR long lenses. It would work with VR lenses, too, if I had some particular reason for not wanting to use the VR, such as bokeh optimization.

On other camera bodies, such as the D7000 which I will have in the not too distant future, it wouldn’t be necessary to do it this way. The D7000 has more flexible AutoISO settings. On the D40, when using AutoISO in the more typical aperture priority mode, the highest setting allowed for “minimum shutter speed” is 1/250th of a second, which is not fast enough for a lens like this. On a D7000, I am not sure what the “maximum minimum” is, but I know it’s at least 1/1000th of a second. So on a D7000, I could just leave it in aperture priority mode, set up AutoISO to allow a minimum shutter speed of 1/1000th of a second, and viola!, I’d be set to go. That camera also does not have an electronic shutter, so that particular weirdness would presumably be gone, meaning I’d have no reason to avoid very high shutter speeds.

In the mean time, though, I have accumulated quite a collection of 1/800 second shots, many of them at f/4 and weird ISO values like 520 that result from the AutoISO setting. I’ve so far only run into one instance where the camera maxed out at ISO1600. The resulting shots were about one stop underexposed, but actually looked pretty good anyway.

That, of course, leads to the other big consideration with this, which is how high can you push the ISO? There was a time when I would not have been willing to use ISO1600 on a D40. However, more recently, I’ve come to realize that the noise inherent in that setting is really not all that bad. The amount of detail lost is pretty minimal, and the noise reduction in Lightroom 3 does a pretty good job at keeping the noise under control. As long as the photo isn’t extremely underexposed, the result is a somewhat grainy looking picture, sort of like Ektachrome 400, back in the day. (Although, frankly, a D40 RAW image at ISO1600 has better color than Ektachrome 400 ever did.)

Is Nikon equipment *EVER* available?

Since the new D7000 camera body was announced last fall, availability has been a problem. The camera has great specs, and reviews have been very positive, so demand has outstripped supply from the begining.

But it’s been several months now, and this delay is starting to get pretty old. The problem seems to be mushrooming to other cameras, too. Just taking a look at all currently for-sale Nikon DSLR bodies (as well as body-lens kits) on a popular camera store website, we have the following:

D3x body – nope!
D3s body – nope!
D700 body – in stock
D700 kit – nope!
D300s body – in stock
D300s kit – nope!
D7000 body – nope!
D7000 kit – nope!
D90 body – in stock
D90 kit – in stock
D5000 body – nope!
D5000 kit – in stock
D3100 kit – nope!
D3000 kit – in stock

So, out of 14 choices, fully eight of them are currently not in stock. That’s more than half. Furthermore, three of the in stock items are the D90 body and kit, and the D3000 kit, all of which have already been replaced by other models, namely the D7000 and D3100. That means, really, there are only 11 “current” choices, and (still) eight of them are out of stock. Meaning, if you want a current Nikon camera body, your choice is either a D700 body, a D300s body, or a D5000 kit. Anything else, and you’re out of luck.

By comparison, I checked availability of Canon models on the same site, and, out of the 18 choices available, only three of them were not currently in stock (I am not aware of which Canon models are “current” or not, so I’ll skip that part). As for Pentax, of the 21 choices listed, two were out of stock, and two were new arrivals not yet available. So this isn’t just an after-Christmas inventory problem, it’s particular to Nikon.

Manfrotto 055xprob and 488RC2

A good user review of the Manfrotto 055xprob tripod, with lots of detailed pictures. It basically answered every question that I had except for, “how is the center column secured when in the sideways position?” I haven’t yet seen a photo that covers that, and nobody ever mentions it, which I suppose means it maybe isn’t something to be concerned about. I am interested, though, due to wondering how sturdy that center column is while mounted sideways.

That review also covers the Manfrotto 488RC2 ball head, which I hadn’t been considering, but maybe will now, as a cheaper alternative to the Really Right Stuff ballhead/clamp setups I was looking at. Those are very nice (hell, I found one review of a Really Right Stuff ballhead that called it “perfection incarnate” and “so good you want to lick it”), but that level of quality doesn’t come cheap.

Time Machine nightmare…but with a happy ending

It all started on Friday night when I was doing a secure erase of the Trash. My first mistake was in not realizing one of the folders I had trashed must have had a LOT more stuff in it than I realized. The secure erase was obviously going to take a while. OOOPS.

However, for some inane reason I decided to let it run, rather than clicking the stop button and trying to sort through the Trash and only secure-erase the few files I really wanted to wipe. That was mistake number two.

At some point during the wipe, Time Machine started up. I had previously noticed that my Time Machine drive was almost full, and, having just moved around a lot of stuff, I also knew that what little space was left was not going to be enough for the next backup. Time Machine was going to need to do a pre-backup “thinning” procedure in order to make room for all the stuff I had moved.

So, Time Machine was cranking away with its thinning process, while at the same time, the Finder was trying to do a secure delete on a whole mess of stuff. Theoretically, it’s supposed to be possible to do these two things at the same time. In practice, something went haywire. After Time Machine had been running for a ridiculously long time, I decided to stop it, turn it off, and allow the wipe operation to complete. I would then turn Time Machine back on so it could do its backup in peace. I suppose this was another mistake, although in retrospect I don’t know if stopping the wipe operation would have prevented the subsequent problems, given that it was already obvious that something was wrong.

My Time Machine drive is an external 1 terabyte Firewire 800 drive, which, as I said, was almost full. After the wipe was complete, I turned Time Machine on again and initiated a backup. It did the backup, and went into the thinning process again. It thinned and thinned and thinned, until it had deleted over 600 gigabytes of files.

Shit.

I could see no legitimate reason for why it would delete that many files. I also figured that, with 2/3 of my backups deleted, I was basically fucked and the only thing to do was reinitialize the Time Machine drive and start over. However, it was already very late that night, so I put that off until Saturday.

Saturday evening, I reinitialized the Time Machine volume (not the whole drive, just the volume, which is a subtle but, as it turns out, crucial distinction–i.e., mistake number four). I allowed Time Machine to start up again, telling it this time to ignore all but my internal drive and one small external with about 80 gigs of material for backing up. It did the external drive first, and everything worked just fine, apparently. Then it started copying files from the internal drive, and something seriously wrong started to happen, again. Progress slowed to a glacial pace. I would estimate it took two or three minutes to back up 100 megabytes of data, and since I had another 250 to 300 gigabytes to go, this was not acceptable. My only possible saving grace at that point might have been if the slowness was a result of it getting bogged down in the thousands of teensy little files in the depths of the System folder. I decided to let it run overnight.

On Sunday, however, after a lengthy night’s sleep (truthfully, I did not want to get out of bed and deal with this shit), only 40 additional gigabytes had been copied. The backup had been running for over 12 hours and wasn’t even half done. I soon decided that more waiting was pointless. I did a bit of Googling and found some tips that looked like they might help.

Here’s what worked: I stopped the backup again, and turned Time Machine off. I went into my Spotlight preferences and discovered that Spotlight had somehow not bothered to exclude the Time Machine drive from its indexing process the way it did the previous times I had set it up. That was undoubtedly a factor. However, it didn’t prove to be the primary factor. I also reinitialized the drive, and this time I told Disk Utility to redo the entire partition map, not just the partition itself. More importantly, I had it format the partition using a “GUID” partition map, which is the default for Leopard, and which Time Machine supposedly prefers. Previously, it had been formatted with an Apple Partition map, presumably left over from my previous Tiger system. I then sacrificed a chicken, prayed to all the gods in Valhalla (Loki in particular), and told Time Machine to make another go at it.

Well, the GUID partition map really seems to have been the magic bullet. Not only did the initial backup work perfectly, the remaining drives backed up without a hitch as well, at the point when I re-included them. What’s even more amazing to me, though, is that Time Machine is now performing at about six times the level of efficiency it was before all this started. It’s substantially faster, and it uses only about 1/6 the RAM it did before. Before this, backups were an irritating drag on the system, so annoying that I would often turn them off to alleviate the frustration. They would also hog close to 350 megabytes of RAM, meaning that every hour some idle application got shunted off into virtual memory. This was a severe annoyance with programs that utilize a lot of RAM. Now it uses a mere 55 megs, it’s backing up the same amount of data, and doing the whole shebang in about 30 seconds, unless there’s a bigger file that needs to be backed up. Note that it’s backing up four drives, totaling about 750 gigabytes of data, with what must be half a million files at least. In less than a minute. That, in my opinion, is how things ought to work. ;)

So, even though this whole experience was rather nightmarish, especially when I began to wonder if my internal hard drive was on the verge of failure, I ended up learning a thing or two about Time Machine optimization. If you’re having Time Machine problems, seriously check the format of that partition map and make sure it’s GUID. If it’s not, and if you find Time Machine backups to be an incessant bother, it will probably be worth your while to nuke that partition and replace it with a GUID partition. Also, double check to make sure Spotlight isn’t indexing your Time Machine drive. Normally, it will not index that drive, however if something gets messed up, it’s possible Spotlight will not “realize” it’s attempting to index a Time Machine drive at the same time that Time Machine itself is trying to do its initial backup.

Support: A genuinely gnarly subject

I am in the midst of trying to figure out what in the world I really need in terms of a support upgrade for my camera. A while ago, I purchased a lovely 300mm AF-S f/4 Nikkor lens, and, although the lens isn’t heavy or long enough to mandate tripod/monopod use in all circumstances, I am definitely running into some common situations where it would be helpful. One in particular is shooting out the passenger side window of the car, when I’m in the driver’s seat. Doing that hand-held quickly proved to be totally impossible at any shutter speed, due to the need to cross my left arm all the way across my body, to the point where that shoulder has virtually no leverage at all, and that’s the hand that supports the lens, in Nikon’s decidedly non-ambidextrous design. My left arm just shakes too much in that position. If I twist in the other direction, though, to shoot out the driver’s window, that works fine because now the left arm has plenty of leverage, and I can even brace my elbow on the armrest on the door. Unfortunately, there are about ten times as many good shots out the passenger side as out the driver’s side. (And if I lived in the UK, Australia, or some other country where people drive on the left, then this would not be an issue at all, because the passenger window would be on the left, not the right!)

For lack of a better immediate solution, I’ve been using an old tripod as a makeshift support, in order to alleviate the problem. It’s not stable enough to qualify as a “real” tripod support, because it’s not sturdy enough for that, but it can function as a substitute “arm”, meaning I still need to keep shutter speeds above 1/500, as I would for hand-held shots. It’s better than nothing, but I am still having problems. I am unsure of the source of the problems, but I suspect engine vibrations being magnified through the car seat, and further through the flimsy, wobbly legs of the tripod. These vibrations then cause problems for getting the lens focused correctly in some circumstances, due to the image moving enough that the focusing sensor is unable to get a perfectly accurate reading. At least, that is my theory.

I’m not sure what to do about it, because I need to be able to shoot that way, and it’s also very useful to be able to creep along in the car without having to start and stop the engine multiple times. I question whether any amount of money spent on a tripod setup would solve the problem. It might, if I was able to set it up so that one leg wasn’t braced on the passenger seat. If the springs in the passenger seat really are acting as an amplifier for the engine vibrations, then yes, a different tripod, one with more configurable and sturdy legs might actually help, so I can brace all three of them on a solid part of the car. Such a tripod would be useful for other things as well. If it doesn’t do the trick in the car, though, then I don’t think any rigid solution would work. I would need something that would directly compensate for those vibrations, such as some kind of steady-cam gimbal setup, or other type of shock-absorbing device. Maybe a great big pillow would be the thing. :) I actually did see one person using something like that with a big-assed telephoto (looked like a 400mm f/2.8) several weeks ago, while shooting from his car. I’d have to prop the pillow on top of something. Hmm. Come to think of it, what I was initially doing was using the tripod as a brace for my elbow, rather than setting it up all the way. I’d extend one leg to rest on the floor or some solid surface, then angle the top end of the tripod so I could brace my left elbow against it, thus providing the support that I couldn’t get from overextended shoulder muscles. Maybe I should just go back to doing that! However, the problem was that it was extremely clumsy, and I would often spend so much time messing around with it that whatever bird I was seeing was long gone by the time I got the tripod/elbow combination situated correctly.

I probably need a more workable solution, so I have been thinking of acquiring some kind of fairly normal tripod that would be suitable for bird shots with the 300mm f/4. It’s not a huge lens, probably comparable in size and weight to a standard 70-200 f/2.8, meaning it’s actually somewhat small compared to the big telephotos. I may add a 1.5x or 1.7x teleconverter someday, for shooting either from inside the car or out. I’m also going to want to use it for closeup shots next spring, although not from the car. I am unsure at this point if a monopod would be better for use when I’m outside of the car. Luckily, from research I’ve done so far, the main expense appears to be the head, clamp and plates, which can be interchanged between a monopod and a tripod.

The head would have to be a fairly nice ball head. I’m considering the Wimberly Sidekick to go with the head, although for the time being I’ve decided to wait and see how well a regular ball head works. The main reason for this is that I found a demo video of the Sidekick, and the thing is larger than I expected, making me think it might be overkill for my lens. Another option would be a panning ball head as opposed to a simple ball head. The panning ball head allows panning on the top part of the head, right by the clamp, which means that the tripod legs don’t have to be level in order to pan horizontally. That seems like it would be extremely convenient, however a panning head is substantially more expensive. Also, I am unsure whether that feature would be necessary if I got the Sidekick, which means I need to go watch that video again. ;) I’d also need to get a lens plate and an L-plate for the camera, both for mounting onto the ball head (or the Sidekick). I’m only considering ball heads that feature an Arca-Swiss style clamp.

For the tripod itself, I am a bit torn. I was looking hard at the Manfrotto 055XPROB, which is definitely within my price range and seems to be a pretty nice piece of equipment. I do have some reservations about the sideways capability of the center post, though. Supposedly, this can create stability issues, and there’s also the question of whether I would even need that sideways leaning feature. Manfrotto has a similar tripod with just a traditional up-and-down center post, the 055XB, but, unfortunately, the retailer I was planning on using doesn’t carry that model! That would be a minor quibble, except there’s enough variation in prices between retailers that having to go elsewhere would (apparently) cost me an additional $20, even with the simpler design! I may also need a shorter center column. Those can be had for about $30, if I remember right.

For the ball head, I’m looking at the Really Right Stuff BH-40, either with the panning clamp, or with the substantially cheaper, but less convenient full-sized screw-knob clamp.

So, what’s that boil down to in terms of cost?

For the legs, if I manage to find the Manfrotto 055XB carried by someone who’s asking a good price, it should come to roughly $155. That’s about $20 cheaper than some places are asking. Then the ball head would be either $356 with the standard clamp or $515 (!) with the panning clamp. The plates could also be obtained from Really Right Stuff. An L-plate for the camera would come to $125, and a plate for the lens would be $55. If I wanted to skimp a bit, I could initially skip the L-plate and just get the one for the lens….actually, since I’m thinking about upgrading camera bodies, I could save some money and just wait to get the L-plate for the new body. In fact, I could skip all of this plate stuff for now and just get a ball head with a platform (no clamp), then add the panning clamp later. That’s one nice feature of the Really Right Stuff heads–the clamps and platforms are interchangeable.

However, assuming I go with the regular style clamp ball head, I’m looking at $566, including the tripod and a plate for the lens.

That’s pretty steep, considering just a few hours ago I blew more than that on car repairs. :(

The “ByThom” D7000 review is out

Thom Hogan’s much awaited review of the Nikon D7000 body was posted on his website last week. If I was only going to read one review of the D7000, that would be the one (although in reality, it’s smart to read a variety of reviews, no matter how good you think one of them is). Overall, it’s a very positive review, but more importantly, I think it helps to cut through some of the hype and rumors surrounding this camera body. Given the advertised feature set, and the low number of people who were able to initially obtain one, talk about it basically ran wild, with everything from people suggesting they were going to “upgrade” their D300s bodies to the D7000 (truth: that would not be an upgrade, although it’s true that the D7000 does exceed the D300s in a few respects), to people panning it due to “overexposure” or “hot pixels”, neither of which represent actual, real-world problems with it. As far as the exposure issue goes, the D7000 does seem to carry on in the footsteps of the D80 and D90, namely, when matrix metering is being used, additional “weight” is assigned to the active focus point, although not to the degree found in the D80 (and whether it occurs also depends on what settings you are using), but aside from that, the overall metering performance of the D7000 seems to be a big step up from the previous mid-range Nikons. The hot pixels issue seems to appear only in extreme circumstances, and, on the other side of the coin, there are some areas in which the D300 and D300s both substantially surpass the D7000, the most notable being the buffer.

I could go on for quite a bit, but what would be the point when someone else, specifically an expert who actually has access to a D7000, has done it already, and more thoroughly than I would anyway? Just go ahead and read the review.

A new D7000 review

Shutterfinger blog has posted an excellent, brief, two-part review of the Nikon D7000:

Part 1, Part 2

There are some particularly interesting tidbits of information in Part 1. For these, he’s talking about changes he’s made compared to the default camera settings:

Moving focus activation from the shutter button to the AE-L/AF-L button on the back of the camera.

This is very cool. Not only was I not aware that the D7000 had this capability, but it’s one of the key features I came up with a couple months ago when I was questioning whether a D300s body would be worth the extra few hundred dollars. Having autofocus separate from the shutter release button would come in very handy on landscapes and scenics—it means that, basically, the camera is in manual focus unless I press the button. The primary drawback of the D7000, with respect to my needs, is therefore eliminated. (I should also check and see if my D40 can do this. Who knows! Maybe I’ve been a dumbass all this time, wearing out the focus switch on the lens to accomplish the same thing!)

Changing the release priority from focus to shutter. In its default mode, the D7000 will allow the shutter to release only if something is in perfect focus.

Another little bit of trivia which may turn out to be very handy at some point.

Then, continuing on to part 2:

My experiments indicated that matrix metering tends to be overly influenced by heavy shadows, with the result that skies and clouds are overexposed.

This is unfortunate. I have the same problem with my D40. In fact, if I had to make a prioritized list of stuff I don’t like about the D40, this problem would be either #1 or #2 (with poor focusing performance being the other). However, it is possible that the D7000 does not exhibit the problem to the same degree as the D40, and the review also goes on to discuss ways to work around it. In practice, it doesn’t seem to be an insurmountable problem, but I’ll have to remember to keep an eye on other reviews to see if other people notice it as well.

One commenter also discusses the metering issue:

[T]he one thing I always hated about Nikon still remains, then: matrix-metering that doesn’t understand simple 1+2 or 1+4 sky:landscape compositions. It was for that reason I *always* shot my D200 in manual+spot mode.

I know there’ve been many Nikons passed under the bridge since then, so I’m surprised it’s still an issue.

So am I.

There’s more, of course. He’s particularly complimentary regarding the responsiveness of the camera.

It’s a good review, well worth reading for anyone interested in a D7000 body, and substantially more readable than, say, a Dpreview.com review. ;)

Whooping Crane Migration

Some good news:

237 whooping cranes arrive at wildlife refuge; more expected

The refuge in question is Aransas National Wildlife Refuge in Texas. More details:

The return of the whooping cranes is well under way, with 237 birds back at the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services whooping crane coordinator Tom Stehn said Friday that 199 adults and 38 juvenile birds, were spotted during a flyover on Wednesday.

The birds began the winter migration to the refuge in October.

Stehn and refuge biologist Brad Strobel counted the birds, finding 211 in the salt marsh habitat, 18 in the shallow open bay, five on uplands in areas rooted out by feral hogs on Matagorda Island and three on grazed pasture oak savannah uplands at Welder Flats.

The cranes are feeding heavily on blue crabs and wolf berries. Both of these food items were abundant in November, Stehn said.

I had the privilege to spot a small group of four whooping cranes during their migration in October, 2009 as they passed through Wisconsin (the bulk of the population lives west of here, so numbers here are typically not very high). It was an amazing thing, I could almost not believe my eyes.

Then, earlier this year when the big oil spill happened in the Gulf of Mexico, I became concerned due to how many of these, and other birds, spend their winters in marshes along the coast. Even with a successful cleanup (which I am highly unsure of, after all, when does the press ever tell us the truth?), there still would have been substantial damage to those ecosystems, potentially impacting food supplies for these overwintering birds. Not just whooping cranes, but herons and egrets of all types, and others I can’t even begin to list. Many species also stop in that area to rest, prior to continuing their migration across the Gulf to Central or South America. It’s really a key spot in terms of the ecology of migratory birds for a substantial part of North America, and perhaps one of the worst possible locations for a major oil spill.

But, in any case, a few hundred whooping cranes have at least arrived safely, so for those we can at least hope they manage to tough it out this winter safely.

D7000, more

Dpreview.com has published their official review for the Nikon D7000. This is basically a must-read for anyone remotely interested in this camera body. Their reviews, while pretty oriented towards the tech side and focusing a lot on empirical data more than user experience, are nevertheless among the best available online.

I just wish there was an option to read it in “black-on-white” instead of their typical “white-on-black”, which I tend to find pretty eyestrain-inducing.

D7000 or D300s?

I’ve been meaning for a while now to upgrade my camera body (a Nikon D40), and had pretty much decided on a Nikon D300s body. Then the D7000 body was announced, and the specs turned out to be so close to the D300s that it raised the question of whether the extra few hundred bucks for the D300s would be worth it. Prices on the D300s seem to have come down just a tad since then (or maybe that’s my imagination), and the D7000 body is still hard to get a hold of if you don’t want the kit lens. I had actually been leaning towards the D7000, since it does have some nice features that seem to improve on the older body, such as higher ISO capability, and better video function. This was in spite of the fact that right now I make do with a camera with a practical limit of ISO1600, and that I know nothing about video at all.

So it was a welcome development today when I encountered this review which is actually somewhat critical of the D7000. There’s a lot there worth reading, including the comments. In particular, this comment, does an excellent job of cutting through all the hype and bullshit surrounding the newer camera, taking it down to just a quick, simple summary of the advantages of each body.

What it boils down to is that the D300s is better built, has a better grip, a better autofocusing system (in fact, its CAM3500DX system, shared with the D700, is considered an industry leader at this point), “more professional buttons” (in particular, the AF-ON button, which I think would be useful for my purposes), and can use compact flash cards. The best points in favor of the D7000 are better metering, and better high-ISO capability. It’s also lighter. On the other hand, there has been some question surrounding the shutter release button on the D7000, with some claiming that it’s too sensitive, and can’t be used with gloves. This is important, due to the fact that I do a fair amount of outdoor shooting in the winter, and have no desire to freeze my fingertip off. :) Some have also criticized the grip, saying it’s too slippery, and smaller than earlier cameras like the D90.

Anyway, it’s some food for thought. I wonder how the D300s replacement (D400?) will stack up? Rumors are that it’s due for release sometime next year. In theory, it should blow the D300s out of the water, but things like ergonomics and button-pressure are precisely the sort of changes which really can’t be predicted. In those respects, the newer camera may not be as good as the old. (In general, technology is like that. “Upgrades” always focus on marketable characteristics, and not on vague, fuzzy concepts like “actual usability.” This is why I gave up being a gearhead. It was too frustrating.)

Today’s Musical Blast from the Past

“Music Box Dancer” by Frank Mills.

I still remember when this was a hit–I was 10  years old!  I could never get enough of it back then, and can’t now, either.

I heard it in passing a couple of days ago on a video I was watching (it was an episode of The Sopranos), and, not having heard it in years, I completely spaced on whatever the dialog was in the scene.  Then, early this morning I had a dream where this song was the soundtrack, where it was somehow encrypted/embedded in some kind of odd video presentation.  I never did get to figure out what the deal was, though, because the stupid alarm clock went off.  But it was sufficient to implant the song in my brain, where it’s been repeating pretty much all day long.

Luckily, it was available on iTunes.  Listening to the actual song is much nicer than the earworm.  And, I believe I may be breaking my previous record for greatest number of plays in the first few hours of having the song…let’s see:  bought it at 5:53 p.m. tonight.  It’s now 7:12 p.m. and the play count is 22.  And no, I did not cheat! :P

It’s a totally delightful song. :)  And here is the Wikipedia page.

The fact that this song became popular at all is really the result of a lucky accident:  In 1978 it was re-released as the b-side of a single which was sent to a bunch of easy-listening radio stations in Canada.  But one copy was sent to the wrong station by accident–it went to pop station CFRA-AM in Ottawa, whose music director liked it so much that he added it to the station’s playlist.  Response was very positive (not surprisingly, considering how neat and completely endearing the song is), and the song’s popularity spread from there.

Poland: The Warsaw Concert

Currently listening to: Tangerine Dream, “Poland.” This dates from 1984, and is a live double-album (two CDs, for the version I have), recorded in Warsaw, complete with Polish-language introduction at the beginning. Tangerine Dream at this point in history constituted Chris Franke, Johannes Schmoelling and Edgar Froese.

This period in the early 1980′s was, IMHO, the high point for this group, although they did some stuff in the mid-70′s that I liked too. They have changed so much since their inception that they are basically unclassifiable without specifying what the time period is. In fact, I recall an argument a number of years ago between a well-intentioned fan of their earlier work and a self-appointed topic-nazi who insisted that Tangerine Dream belonged solely in the “new age” category. He was apparently unaware of some of their early work, which is more appropriately placed in the “electronic” category than just about any other music. Try “Atem” or “Rubycon” for instance. Yes, they have used some conventional instruments on their albums, but it’s done in a way that compliments the electronics so well that the “normal” instruments are often unrecognizable, unless you know what to listen for.

In any case, here are my favorite works by this group. I considered putting them in most- to least-favorite order, but then realized that, really, my favorite is whichever one I happen to be listening to at the time. This, then, is just alphabetical order:

Hyperborea (1983)
Poland (1984)
Ricochet (1975)

I also recall, from way back then, quite enjoying their soundtracks for the movies Wavelength and Risky Business, which are what initially drew my attention. I never did get around to purchasing those soundtracks, though. I suppose the problem was that, during the time I was most actively buying compact discs, which was five to ten years later, those two hadn’t been re-issued on CD.

Incidentally, this version of Poland is one of the complete versions: Relativity 88561-8045-2. There are apparently a number of incomplete CD versions out there. This one features five tracks total:

Disc 1:
1) Poland [22:37]
2) Tangent [15:53]
3) Finish [4:02]

Disc 2:
1) Barbakane [18:05]
2) Horizon [21:10]

(That adds up to about an hour and twenty minutes.)

Some versions don’t contain Tangent, which is really unfortunate because that’s not only the best track of the five, but possibly one of the best tracks they’ve ever done. Barbakane is also quite excellent in its full length. I’d hate to lose part of it.

The third track on the first disc is kind of a “surprise” track. It’s NOT listed on the box inserts, nor on the surface of the disc itself. It’s not even listed in the CD booklet. Because of this, I never knew the name of it until today, when I finally ripped the discs into iTunes and the Gracenote database told me. (Of course, given the number of mistakes in the Gracenote database, it’s entirely possible that the title is wrong. It’s an OK track, but not as good as the other four in my opinion.)

More Wind

(More on the Wayward Wind, described in the previous post…)

What’s really odd about the wind today is that sometimes it seems like it’s finally dying down, and then a while later, it doesn’t.

It’s been blowing over 24 hours now, so it seems like it’s got to end sooner or later. As if in anticipation of this expectation, for most of the day we’ve been getting periods where it actually seems like it’s over.

Then, a little while later, the wind will pick back up to full strength again, which I’d guess is about 50 or 60 mph (it does seem to be stronger than yesterday).

And then it’ll die back down again. It seems to be on some kind of regular cycle, maybe every 10 minutes or so, as if a large portion of the atmosphere is compressed into an absolutely colossal, ultra-low frequency sound wave. As the “peaks” and “troughs” of the wave pass over us, the wind picks up and dies down.

In addition to that, though, is a sort of “overtone”, that is, a higher frequency wave superimposed on the main wave. The higher frequency is about one cycle every 20 to 30 seconds. The wind will pick up to full blast, then slow down to a more ordinary speed, over and over, except this pattern itself will pick up and die down within the greater, lower frequency cycle.

I wonder what it would sound like if these cycles were somehow brought up into the range of human hearing? Would it sound like some sort of gigantic, low-pitched flute?

Wayward Wind

Earlier this week, apparently, a jet stream moved and set up a gigantic storm stretching across most of the eastern United States. A huge storm, I’ve never heard of one this big. Larger than most hurricanes, if judging it by the size of the front in this weather map (click to make it bigger):

And look at the size of that low pressure zone! Holy crap!

It’s just amazing. Tornadoes from Wisconsin all the way to the east coast, heavy snows up in northern Minnesota and North Dakota, and dangerously high winds throughout almost all of the eastern US. Also reported have been record low barometric pressures, comparable to a category three hurricane. Wow. Kind of reminds me of that cheesey movie from several years ago, The Day After Tomorrow. Or, from even earlier, a very interesting sci fi book called “Mother of Storms” (will have to look up the author–I think his last name was Barnes, but I can’t remember which Barnes he was).

Somehow, though, we’ve been lucky where I live. Winds topped out at about 51 mph yesterday, according to the local paper, and no major damage in the area. Just some busted tree branches, blown-over garbage cans and a few minor downed power lines.

How did we get so lucky?

The wind continues to blow today. Right outside where I work there’s a series of high-voltage transmission towers going by, with four power lines threaded along them. They make an eerie, beautiful howl when the wind gets strong, up and down as the wind speed fluctuates, fading into nothing if it slows down too much. The lines stretch sideways in the wind, instead of downward. I wish I could go outside and just listen for a while. For some odd reason, I want this weather to last for days. I’ll be disappointed when the wind stops.

Arches, Vaults and Buttresses

Learned last night:

That the “Gothic” style of architecture was actually invented by a Frenchman (and the French were obviously not Goths). The new style was initially panned by critics, who intended the term “Gothic” as an insult. The general public, though, loved the new style, and the “Gothic” name stuck.

The really interesting thing is the reason for the style in the first place. Gothic architecture is characterized primarily by pointed arches, compared to the semi-spherical arches which came before. The advantage of a pointed arch is that force is directed in a more downward direction, rather than outward, and this allows for taller structures. Witness the towering windows and so forth in any typical Gothic cathedral. You could not do that with a rounded arch, it wouldn’t be stable. The window would have to be either shorter, or narrower with thick walls on either side to support it.

Of course, once the new style caught on, all the towns in France (and soon in other countries) had to have their own super-tall cathedrals, and each had to be taller than the one in the neighboring town. The limits of the pointed arch were quickly reached, so another innovation had to be invented to compensate for even taller structures: flying buttresses. These are typically situated on the outside of the building. A flying buttress is essentially a brace that rests up against the bottom portion of the pointed arch, right where the arch sits on its supporting column. Putting a flying buttress on each side very simply prevents the whole thing from collapsing outward.

A building with lots of flying buttresses on the outside has a rather interesting, complex appearance, so these, together with tall, pointed arch structures (and a third innovation, vaulted ceilings) are what give Gothic structures their characteristic look. A look which is, to my eye, one of the finest aesthetic achievements in the history of humanity.

Many thanks to the folks at Public TV and NOVA for putting together such a fascinating program. Honestly, this show was one of the coolest I’ve seen. It makes me want to quit my job and just bumble around France for the rest of my life, looking at cathedrals. :)

Camera geekery of the day!

This is why I read Ken Rockwell:

Nikon D3100, D40 and D3 High ISO Comparison

Who else would even think to do something like that? And it’s a genuinely interesting comparison, too, not just because I am a D40 user, but for a more substantive and technical reason: If you do the math, it turns out that the individual photosites on the D40 and the D3 sensors are pretty close to the same size. That means what you’re seeing in these photos, if you compare strictly the D40 and D3 shots, is a pretty good comparison of how Nikon improved its sensor noise handling technology between those two generations of cameras. It’s really a striking illustration of how dramatic the improvement was, at ISO1600 and beyond.

It’s also a pretty good exemplar of how well the D40 handles itself at ISO 400 or even 800. (The colors do tend to be a little duller on the D40 shots, but I’m guessing that’s because the D3 and D3100 have Nikon’s Picture Control feature, while the D40 doesn’t. That would mean the D40 is using different JPG conversion parameters, so it’s not surprising that the colors look different.) The D40 ISO800 shot looks almost as good as the base ISO200 shot. This matches my own experience: I’ve found that ISO 400 is quite usable when an extra stop is needed for wildlife or what-have-you, and I can even use ISO800 to get acceptable results if I need to. Yes, there is more noise at that sensitivity, but as Rockwell says, it’s not just about the noise. Noise can be dealt with. The level of detail retained in the photo is the key issue, and it appears to be roughly the same at ISO400 and 800, with ISO200 having a bit of an edge. This supports my belief that, in terms of bumping up the ISO sensitivity, the D40 is the best of its generation of cameras (namely the D100, D70, and D50). I would also guess it handles those speeds better than its immediate successors (namely the D40x and D60…not so sure about the D3000, though).

Pro-D40 ranting aside, the other interesting thing about that page is how clearly it demonstrates that the D3100 is a step up from the earlier generation of camera. It’s only at ISO6400 that the D3 begins to look significantly better than the D3100. Compare this to the D40, which is essentially crap at ISO3200–in fact, it doesn’t actually have a proper ISO3200 setting, it’s actually “HI 1″, and it can’t shoot at ISO6400 at all.

Now if only the D7000 was out so it could be included…