tools
I've never shot a roll of Kodachrome in my life - In fact, the closest I've gotten to Kodachrome is loving the Paul Simon song. But I still have a lot of respect for how groundbreaking Kodachrome has been over it's 74 year life. The numbers person in me is sad they didn't press on for just one more year so they could say that it was around for an even 75 years. Anybody want to take bets on how long Canon's CR2 file format will be around???
Great news out from Eye-Fi today! A new version of their card allows transfers of RAW files! You can read about it at Rob Galbraith. In addition to RAW support, you can apparently transfer files directly to your computer using an ad-hod wi-fi network now, instead of having to transfer to some web service like Flickr. So, for $150 you can transfer your RAW files to your laptop while you're shooting, with no need to pass them through the Internets or somebody else's service. This is getting closer and closer to Canon's $900 wi-fi accessory.
Now I wonder which will happen first: Eye-fi coming out with a Compact Flash version or their cards or Nikon and Canon dropping CF altogether. Mybet is on the second, even though I really like Compact Flash as a format for it's speed, larger physical size, and durability.
My tech-savvy friend Philip with his Digital Rebel (with SD card slot) is probably going to be loving this.
In other news, this Photography Bay article details how easy it is to make a stop-motion video using a Nikon D5000, because it has an interval timer function built in. Stop motion videos are fun to make and having an interval timer mode built in to a dSLR is pretty much a no brainer. Too bad that with Canon you have to buy a bulky, expensive $140 accessory to do this. Why? Canon, why?
Sorry for the quick entry without all the hyperlinks I normally put in, but I'm about to have breakfast in Hawaii and I just wanted to get this off my chest. First off, let me say that I'm a huge Lightroom fan. I use it for almost everything. I'm thrilled that Adobe has made it easier to use Lightroom with third-party software through their "plug in" architecture. I use Photomatix myself and I like the ease of integration.
But these so-called "plug ins" are not really plug ins - they're more like "export presets". You select an image (or images) in Lightroom, select "Edit In Photomatix", and then Lightroom renders TIFFs of your images and sends them to Photomatix, and then imports the resulting TIFF that Photomatix creates. I presume the newly announced Nik Silver Efex "plug in" does the same thing.
But what if you want to change something about the source image? What if you want to change the crop, or do some dust removal, etc? Then you've got to start from scratch with the plug in with your new source images.
I'd really like to have a true mechanism for adding new functionality to the develop module in Lightroom. I wonder how the layer/plugin architecture of Photoshop could be re-used to pull something like this off.
I'm working on another book project that involves editing a lot of photos in Lightroom and importing them into InDesign. There are lots of cycles of importing into InDesign, looking at the images, deciding on an edit, making the edit in Lightroom (brightness, contrast, etc.), reimporting into InDesign, etc. It would be really cool if you could export a photo from Lightroom as a Smart Object into InDesign. You can export as a smart object into Photoshop. Why not InDesign?
After playing around more, it looks like the Smart Object communication between Lightroom, Bridge, and Photoshop doesn't exactly work the way I was expecting. I've got some learning to do here but I think this could be really cool.
I'm finally thinking of getting around to buying a photo printer. I do most of my printing at Mpix.com but I'm getting frustrated with the slow cycle time of the print - ship - see results - adjust colors - reprint cycle. I think it's time to bite the bullet and bring printing of small images (probably only as large as 8x10) in-house. I look forward to tweaking colors and printing endless 4x6's until it looks right and then taking the resulting file over to Picture Element and saying "make me a big one like this". I've heard such great things about Epsons and such horrible things about Canons that I think I'm going to go with an Epson. After shooting a Canon SLR for a couple years I can only imagine the anti-photographer workflow their printers must have, and the original experience of Michael Reichman over at The Luminous Landscape seems to bear this out. (Note: He did have a much better experience with the newer iPF6100, but still...)
So the next questions are:
1) How big? 8x10? 11x17? 16x20?
2) What quality? Each brand seems to have at least two choices in each size.
3) Is Epson going to announce anything for PMA next month?
I'm currently thinking of an R1900, a 2800, or maybe something as extravagant as a 3800. I'm doing all sorts of spreadsheet calculations to figure out what the break-even point on each of these printers is (based on usage) and trying to do as much research as I can.
One nice little nugget of web info is Eric Chan's excellent Epson 3800 FAQ.
You can check it out for yourself! Update: That only lasted about an hour...
I'm still very on the fence about this camera. I'm sure it's inevitable that I'll buy this camera - it's just a matter of timing.