This weekend makes twice in the last year I’ve been painfully bitten by bugs while doing photography.
I was first bitten by a wasp last summer wile standing on a beach at Lake Tahoe at 11:00 pm. What kind of wasp bites people in the middle of the night? The resulting picture is here:
Stars and Milky Way at Lake Tahoe
Then just this past Sunday while I was lying on my belly in a field I picked up a tick that burrowed into my torso. I was only on my belly for one photo so I’m pretty sure I know exactly which picture I was taking when I picked this guy up:
The tick that bit me
That picture was taken after expert extraction by my lovely wife. Her comment was “are you going to pass out now?” (I didn’t) I find it ironic that I was on a field trip for a class on shooting macro photography when I picked this up, giving me the perfect opportunity to take a picture of something very small! The picture above is really just a snapshot taken quickly in the kitchen – not a lot of setup involved. It’s not exactly professional quality, but I wasn’t really in my right frame of mind at the time.
The picture I was taking while lying on his home is here:
Yellow Flower
Also not really top-rate but I’m including it here for completeness’ sake. I guess this is all the more reason to spend $200 and pick up the Canon angle view finder attachment – because sometimes kneeing is way better than lying down on your belly…
My friend Philip commented in the post I made about losing my GPS that I should just get another Garmin Legend HCx, since they have gotten more affordable. I looked at the newer Oregon/Dakota models but I ended up taking Philip’s advice and just getting another one of the exact same thing I had before.
I went to a store and played with the newer Colorado and Dakota models and came to the conclusion that they weren’t really improvements over the eTrex line.
The eTrex line is proven as a good tool. Sure, they’re not perfect but they’re pretty good. The only real complaints I have are the screen is dark without the backlight on and the joystick sticks up too far and keeps moving around when I put it in a pocket. Other than that, it’s pretty much fine.
The newer models show quite a bit of “improvement” from the “slickness” department. The main change is the touch screen and the new “friendly” UI. You know how there’ Lego blocks, and then there’s Duplo for the younger kids? The eTrex User Interface is Lego and the Dakota is Duplo. The touchscreen is very “eh…”. I have an iphone so I know what touchscreens are supposed to be like. This is not responsive or accurate like that. I have no idea what would happen if you were wearing gloves.
Then there’s the new and improved larger, bulkier size. And the crappier battery life.
Wait – It costs more too?
You see where I’m going with this… I hope they never discontinue the eTrex. You should buy one. (as long as it accepts a micrSD card for recording tracks to.)
Posted in tools
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Tagged Garmin, GPS
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I’m looking forward to attending a photo workshop at Keeble and Shuchat this weekend about close-ups, macro, food, flowers, etc. The workshop will be led by a guy named Dave Henry, who I haven’t met before. It’s sponsored by Canon and there will be a lot of Canon gear there to borrow but I’m hoping the content will be mostly brand-agnostic.
More info is available in this PDF here: http://www.kspphoto.com/files/macro_henry.pdf
You can see other classes that Keeble and Schuchat hosts here: http://www.kspphoto.com/photo_classes.html
Anyone else planning to attend?
Migrating archives from old blog
Things are moving along well with the blog here at Brian Johns Photography World Headquarters. One month in and I’m pretty happy with the new WordPress setup. It beats the hell out of the old custom pile of code…
I’m making slow progress on transferring old blog entries from the old system into WordPress though. The old system was totally proprietary and all I have from it is a mysql dump file, so I’m entering the blog entries into WordPress one at a time. I’m taking the time to edit here and there, as well as add some pictures. I’m transferring articles in some approximate priority order. The articles I feel are most important have been moved.
I find the media library in WordPress to be a bit slow to use. I was embedding links to Flickr and Photoshelter in the past but I’m trying to get away from that and become more self-reliant. That means exporting pictures from Lightroom to my hard drive, uploading to WordPress, and then placing the picture in the posts. I wonder if there’s a WordPress plugin for Lightroom…
Dubai
I was thinking of going to Gulf Photo Plus in Dubai this week to catch lectures by Joey Lawrence and a few other great photogs. Unfortunately the cost of the conference has really gone up so I didn’t end up making it. There are various other plans for international photography brewing though, so stay tuned for more on that front.
I seem to have lost my beloved Garmin eTrex HCx, which I use for geotagging, as well as driving directions and other useful things. I love geotagging so much that I’m going to have to replace it. I’ve got a Garmin fitness watch with a GPS (the Forerunner 305) and I can extract .gpx files from it in a pinch, so I’m not totally out of luck. But I see a new Dakota 20 in my future soon.
Keep in mind that if you’re going to do geotagging with photos after the fact, you need a GPX (or similar) file. The easiest way to get a GPX file that I know of is to use a Garmin GPS with a microSD card. There’s a mostly-hidden feature you can enable that just writes .gpx files to the microSD card whenever the unit is on. These files are invisible to the unit’s UI and aren’t related to the “path” memory, and can’t be erased via the UI. The unit just silently creates a track of everywhere it goes, and then you can copy this file to your computer later.
The only downsides seem to be cost and size/weight. The cost is steep: about $300 for the unit. I’ve seen GPS units way cheaper than this but it all boils down to convenience here. The constant-logging to the GPX file is a really esoteric piece of functionality that not many people are probably interested in. It’s hard to shop around for that feature since most people don’t even know that feature exists. Garmin doesn’t even advertize that feature of their own product!
As for size/weight, I’m ambivalent about this point. Part of me thinks the units is just small enough and part of me is still annoyed that I have to add 6 more ounces and fill one more pocket. Part of the weight and size comes from the fact that it uses 2 AA batteries and I think that’s a Really Good Thing. As I’ve said before, I love standards like AA batteries. Sure, portable electronic devices can be made smaller by using integrated, proprietary battery systems. (Look at Apple’s laptops, which are getting smaller and smaller, partially due to the decision to drop replaceable batteries.)
But I really like AA batteries because in a pinch you can find them anywhere. You can buy AA batteries in the middle of the jungle in Vietnam. (I know, I’ve been there.) I’ve stepped out of a wedding reception for 2 minutes to walk across the street and buy a pack of AA batteries at a liquor store before. For these reasons, I’m willing to accept the slightly larger weight and form factor of the Garmin GPS, since I know I can grab spare power anywhere.
In conclusion, I’ll probably be picking up a new GPS soon. If so, I’ll let you know how it works out.
2010 has come and gone and it was a pretty good year, both personally and professionally (both the day job and the photography business.) Here are some of the highlights:
- My folder for 2010 weighs in at 235 GB. That includes all the raw files I’ve chosen to keep plus all the photoshop versions. That number is up from 195 GB in 2009, 145 GB in 2008, and 120 GB in 2007. There’s a trend here…I’m being a little more selective about when I press the shutter and throwing away more bad photos, but the files are getting larger. Luckily I revamped my photo editing workstation with a two-way RAID stripe for speed and got a better backup solution, so I’m able to deal with the surge of data pretty well.
- I did some aerial photography this year, including some formation flying and shooting from a helicopter in Hawaii with no doors. I love flying and I love photography so combining the two is great.
- I did a nice location shoot and some product stills for Osocalis Distillery. They’re based out of a cozy little barn in the Santa Cruz mountains and they make small batches of brandy. It was a real challenge to try to find angles to accentuate the atmosphere of the small space and make it really look like the craft distillery that it is. Their website is still under construction but you can friend them on Facebook to keep up to date on them.
- I had fun shooting the Maverick’s surf contest. I was almost not going to go to this, due to the lack of information and having never been out there before. I finally decided (at 5:00 am) to go for it and it turned out to be a good decision. It’s hard to stand in one place for 8 hours straight but in the end there were some great performances by some talented surfers and some monumentally bad planning on shore by some people who apparently know very little about how the ocean works.
There are three ways to shoot an offshore surfing contest: from land, from a boat near the surfers, and from a helicopter. I think I did pretty well for shooting from land, (which means shooting through about a half mile of haze and sea spray) but there’s nothing that’s going to blow up to poster size art. Next time I’ll try a boat or a helicopter.
- No football games in 2010.
I missed the whole season and Cal Poly had another “rebuilding” year. I’ll be shooting the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl next weekend though, so that’ll be fun.
- No good lava shots from our trip to Hawaii this year. The volcano was relatively active during our visit this year but there was no active ocean entry which makes for a great photos, and I couldn’t quite make my schedule line up with a guy who was going to go out on the lava with me for a night time lava shoot. We’ll be back to Hawaii though, so there’s still hope.
- On a personal note, my daughter was born this year. I couldn’t be more thrilled about being a parent and I look forward to everything the next couple decades will bring on this front. Being a parent will probably make it harder to jet off around the world for photography but I’m betting it’ll be a net-win overall…
2011 is off to a great start so far and there are a lot of possibilities:
- There’s the aforementioned football game next weekend.
- I’m thinking about a big trip to Dubai in March to Gulf Photo Plus, but we’ll see if that pans out. It’s a part of the world I’ve never been to and it would be a huge cultural win to go see. It’s a lot of time away from the new baby though, and not the cheapest place to visit.
- I’d like to do second editions of some or all of the three books I’ve done. As time goes on my eye gets better, I accumulate more images, and technology gets better. I think Blurb is still printing with the Indigo 5000′s, but I haven’t had a chance to try their PDF submissions yet, which should yield much sharper text than I got before.
That’s all that comes to mind right now.
Well, I’ve finally gone and done it. The old hand-made blog and website code needed to be put down. I’ve moved to WordPress and so far it looks very promising. It was clear that the old system wasn’t very flexible and wasn’t able to represent my world of photography in the professional manner I have envisioned. The old system was a great experiment in hand-crafting HTML and php using Dreamweaver but the time for that experiment to end has come.
I’m especially looking forward to more flexibility for editing posts, which should make it easier for me to create content for you.
I’ll be working over the next week or so to import all the old content from the last couple years into this system and playing with the layout. The only thing I’m not sure about being able to port over is the old RSS feed. That means that people who were relying on RSS to get updates to my blog will probably never know there’s a new site and will just think I’ve stopped writing. Hopefully they’ll check in here at the main site and re-bookmark the feed.
Welcome to the new and improved Brian Johns Photography!
Posted in administrivia
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Tagged WordPress
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I’m moving my desk and computer around which means disconnecting the entire thing and reconnecting it in another room. So this is a fine time to think about the design of the Mac Pro, as it relates to ports on connectivity. There are some real nice features of the machine but a few disappointments. As usual with Apple products, remedying the downsides would be trivial and cheap so we must assume that Apple just didn’t think about these things, or thought about them but decided they knew better than us how a machine should be designed.
I should start off by clarifying that I’m talking about the Mac Pro desktop – not a laptop, and not a lower cost machine. This is the big machine that people buy when space, weight, power consumption, and cost are no issue. People buying this machine want the best, most powerful, most flexible machine available and they’re will to pay over $3,000 to get it. Also, they’re probably Apple fans.
First the good points:
- USB and firewire ports on the front and back. I love the ports on the front, for things that I attach for short periods of time. Way better than having to reach around to the back of the machine for a quick connection.
- Four internal drive bays. This is great for expandability. I’m using one bay for the boot drive and two bays for a striped RAID for performance. I use the fourth bay when I’m building up a new boot drive, which I do whenever a new major version of Mac OS comes out.
- Two optical bays. This would be great for me if I cared enough to have a second optical drive. It costs less than $100 but I’ve only ever needed two at one time once. I REALLY like that you can install a SSD boot drive up there and regain another regular drive bay if you have lots of cash and need more space. I don’t do this, but check out Diglloyd’s Mac Performance Website for more info about that.
- Lots of PCI slots. Now that more applications are taking advantage of GPU coprocessing I should get off my duff and buy a modern video card. It’ll make some things in Photoshop faster, apparently. I like that I can put a few video cards in there and have a ton of monitors because often screen space is worth more than CPU speed.
Now let’s talk about what I don’t like.
That’s about it. I’m very happy with the machine overall. It’s a lot faster than my laptop and I love working with the full size mouse and keyboard, as well as multiple monitors. The built-in RAID stripe is big and fast with no external cables which is really nice.
I’m just sayin’ that there could be a few more ports on it, that’s all.
Posted in rants, tools
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Tagged Apple
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