Lost Garmin GPS

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.

Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl Wrap-up

I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I was going to shoot the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl on January 9th, and indeed I did.   I'll spare you the blow-by-blow details but I want to give a quick summary about how it went and remind myself of a few things for next year.

I had a great time.   The traffic was light, the bowl was a sellout, the crowds were good, and it was a good game.  I got some nice shots and I didn't get hurt.  One fun thing about a football game at AT&T Park is the photo work area is the Ginats' dug-out. Let me rephrase that: the World Champion Giants' dugout.

What more could I ask for?

Well, I guess I could ask for the PAC-10 being able to field enough bowl-eligible teams to fill all of their bowl slots.  It would have been nice to have a PAC-10 team there, but I guess you can't have everything you want.

The Gear

I took a little bit more gear than I have in the past, including a 500mm f/4.0 lens that I was renting from local nature photographer Joe Decker.  Here's a  shot of the camera gear I took:

As you can see, there's a lot of stuff there.  I took 3 bodies and 6 lenses this time.  The larger pack on the right is the ThinkTank Airport International which I absolutely love.  The 500/4.0 just barely fits in there.   Next to it is the 70-200/2.8.   There's a 1-Ds mk III (Yes, that's the slower, larger sensor model instead of  the faster 1-D made for sports.)  There's a 5-D mkII and a 24-70 in there too.

In the middle is an old Tamrac backpack of some sort.  I almost never use it while shooting anymore but it's good for carrying gear around in. That bag holds the 300/4.0 lens, a 40-D body, a 17-40/4.0 wide-angle zoom, a 15mm fisheye, some lens hoods which I never seem to use, my compact flash wallet, etc.

To the far left is my ThinkTank modular belt system, which is what I actually wear when I'm shooting the game.  On top is the monopod which is permanently attached to to 500mm lens during the game.

I took 3 bodies but really only used the 1-Ds mkIII for about 95% of the shots.  Once you use the great focus system on the body you never want to go back to the old 9 point focus system on the other cameras.  There's enough time between plays in football to switch between lenses based on how far away the action of the next play will be, so I just kept switching lenses and always using the 1-D.

The 500mm lens was the longest I've used for shooting football before.  It's a pretty long lens and it really pulls in the action from far away.  Also, due to the narrow angle of view and shallow depth of field, the long telephoto really isolates the action a lot better.  A well framed photo taken with the 500 looks a lot nicer than a heavy crop from a narrower lens.  There's a trick to using a lens that long but when it works, it really looks nice.

The Results

Lightroom has a nice metadata browser that makes it easy to get some informal stats about collections of images.  I ended up with 136 photos of action during the game.  The screengrab on the left shows the lenses I used to take those images.  Although the 500 is the "sexiest" (and most expensive) lens I had it ended up not being the most used, producing around 15% of my "keeper" images.  The good old 70-200 turned out to be the most useful (producing more than 50% of my keepers), followed by the wonderful 300/4.0.

You can see a much larger collection of about 50 images from the game on my flickr page.

The question of Naming...

Finally, I'd like to ask one last question.   To what year do we attribute bowl games played in January?  Is this the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl 2010?  Or how about the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl 2011?  Sure, it happened in 2011 but it's the bowl game attached to the 2010 season.   Back when it was the Emerald Bowl and it happened in late December there was no problem.  I checked my photo passes from previous years and sure enough - they all have the year in them.  This year's official bowl title is simply "The Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl".  No year specified, so maybe they don't even know what to call it.   What's it going to be called next year?

One last thing...

Those of you who follow my blog know I've always had a thing for a good fisheye shot.  Ever since I started shooting at AT&T Park I've had a vision of a wide shot that included the whole stadium with a view of the field, the scoreboard, the bay behind, etc.   Now that I'm rockin' the full-frame camera and the fisheye lens, I could go ahead and get it.   There wasn't that great of a sunset that night, but here it is:

That's probably it for sports until next year!

A look back at 2010

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 a studio shoot for the photography for a friend's book and website, all about back stretching and posture management.  The website is called TakeBackYourBack.com and you can register on the website to log in and see the photos.

• 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.

• I moved my blog to Wordpress.  I finally gave up on maintaining the home-built blog solution I was working on and switched to Wordpress.  I'm pretty happy so far and I've migrated more than half of the old posts to the new system.The main challenge I have now is to get a good gallery system working so I can show some more photos here.   I've had a couple plugins recommended to me but I haven't had a chance to play with them yet.  (NextGen Gallery and Lightbox2)

• I had a couple trips to Florida to shoot some private parties and one convention.  At the convention I was really the digital tech and "second shooter" instead of being the primary photographer.   This was a good trip for me and it let me concentrate on the workflow and keeping the main shooter working at a fast pace, while dealing with a huge volume of incoming images, making prints, etc.  Situations like this remind me that photography can be a team effort and when the team works well the results can be great.I did manage to get some photography in, notably of some rescued animals from Busch Wildlife Sanctuary.   I also worked on my travel skills and accumulated a bunch more mileage on United.

• 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.

Shooting the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl

I'll be shooting the Kraft Fight Hunger bowl next weekend at AT&T Park.   This was formerly known as the Emerald Bowl but the sponsorship has changed from Emerald Nuts to Kraft foods.   I've shot the Emerald bowl a couple times before but I missed it last year in order to go freeze my butt of in Montana for the holidays.  :-)

The game is the afternoon of Sunday January 9th, and will feature Boston College and the Nevada, perhaps best know as the team that beat Boise State at the end of the regular season.  Normally there's a PAC-10 team in this bowl but there weren't enough bowl eligible teams in the PAC-10 this year.

The venue is AT&T Park again, the home of the World Series Champion SF Giants.   (The photo work area is the Giants' dugout, which is kind of cool.)   It's sort of a weird venue for football, but it works.  In fact, this will be Cal's home field for the next season as Memorial Stadium is closed for remodeling for the next year.   Getting there is really easy and there's plenty else to do around there, since it's downtown San Francisco.

I'll be stepping up the gear this year, bringing two full-frame cameras and both longer (500mm) and wider (15mm fisheye) glass than before.  I'm looking forward to a great game and making some great images this year.  Let me know if you're going to be attending.

Moved to WordPress

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!

Mac Pro: not enough ports!

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.

• Not enough USB ports! I generally have the following USB devices connected to my desktop Mac:
  • keyboard
  • mouse
  • Wacom tablet
  • HP printer/scanner/fax
  • Canon photo printer
  • docking station for Garmin bike computer

  That's six items that I would prefer to connect to the back, but there are only 3 ports. Yes, I can buy a powered hub but I'd prefer not to. It's one more thing to plug in and a ton more wires.

• No balanced audio. I'd like to see balanced audio in and out. I'm talking 1/4" TRS or XLR ports, which are industry standard on professional audio equipment. I realize there's optical audio in and out but the things I'd like to connect to (a Mackie mixing board, or my home stereo) don't have optical.Yes, I could buy an external firewire sound module with tons of balanced ins and outs, but a basic stereo in and out is all I'm asking for. I've never heard anyone else bitch about this so perhaps I'm the only one who misses this.

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.