*scottstuff*

I took this last month when I was on vacation. It’s not perfect, but I’m happy with how it turned out.

NewNewsWire just informed me that Microsoft has bought iView Multimedia, makers of iView Media Pro. I’ve used iView as my primary image cataloging program for over 4 years, so I’m a little disturbed by this. Microsoft claims that they aren’t going to kill the Mac version off, but, well, they’re Microsoft. They have a long history of buying companies and bending their future products towards Microsoft’s strategic needs, ignoring their existing customers.

All in all, I’m really not very worried. I’m still running iView Media Pro 2.x, because I couldn’t see the point in paying $100 or so to upgrade to version 3.x right now. I’ve been using Adobe Lightroom for most of my recent image manipulation needs, and it has enough overlap with iView that I probably won’t end up using iView much longer.

Anyway, congratulations to the iView team on their acquisition, and good luck to iView users everywhere. Hopefully Microsoft will be good for iView and its users.

One of the really amazing things about Silicon Valley is that there are so many amazing computer-related things happening here. Today’s example: Donald Knuth speaking at Café Scientifique. Knuth is The Professor of the Art of Computer Programming at Stanford; he’s basically a living legend. As much as anything, he’s famous for his 7-volume The Art of Computer Programming series. The first book was published in 1967 or so and was rapidly followed by volumes 2 and 3. He’s still working on volume 4.

Today’s talk was really more of a question-and-answer session then a prepared lecture. I was too busy taking pictures to write down all of the questions, but people mostly concentrated on “what is the biggest accomplishment of…” and “will … ever happen” questions. A couple of the more interesting ones:

• “What do you think the 10 biggest accomplishments of the software industry are?” (He listed Emacs, Google, and Mathematica as things he likes, but didn’t have any real opinion on the top-10 list.)
• “Do you think the singularity will happen?” (No. Er, probably not any time soon, and not like that.)

I just finished uploading the pictures to Flickr, which amazingly didn’t have any Knuth pictures tagged. It was almost too dark for photography; I had to pull out my 85/1.8 and shoot with it wide open at my camera’s highest ISO setting in order to have a chance of getting any decent shots. I shot all RAW files this time and used the opportunity to experiment with Adobe’s new Lightroom application; I’ll write up my experiences with Lightroom tomorrow, but I’m fairly positive about it, even though it’s missing a lot of important features.

I did a bit more shooting today. I’m going to spend more time processing today’s shots then normal, because I shot mostly panoramas. Here’s the first one, of San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge from one of the overlooks on the Marin Highlands road.

This one started life as 11 JPEGs; the full version on Flickr is 9902x2615. I’ll probably order a big print of this, if I can find someplace decent that’ll print 30+ inch panoramas for a reasonable price. Leave a comment if you have any suggestions.

Over the past five years, my view on traveling has shifted; before I really took up photography as a hobby, sightseeing was something that I did for fun, and took pictures to document the sightseeing so I could remember things better and share the trip with others. Now, sightseeing is purely an excuse to go someplace new and take pictures.

So, between November and December, I spent over three weeks in California. How many pictures did I take? None at all, because my camera’s shutter died at the end of October, and I delayed sending the camera back to Canon for repairs until after my first paycheck, just to make sure that I could actually afford the bill.

As usual, Canon surprised me; the repair charge was about half of what I’d expected, and they got the camera back in my hands just in time for me to fly back to California last week. So, yesterday was my first day off of work in California with a working camera. It’s a big state, and I had a hard time deciding where to start, but in the end I decided to drive down the coast a bit and see how it went, without any real plan. In the end, I ended up driving from Mountain View down to Santa Cruz, then along the coast to Monterey, through Carmel, along the Big Sur coast all the way down to San Luis Obispo, CA. All told, I put around 400 miles on the car yesterday and took around 250 pictures. I would have taken more, but the light was bad for the first half of the trip, and then as soon as the light started getting good, my battery died. I left my spare battery in Washington, oops.

Still, I ended up with a few decent pictures of the land and the sea:

The best part of the drive was Piedras Blancas beach, just north of San Simeon. I was driving along and noticed the nice sandy beach out of the corner of my eye, and wondered what geologic process produced a beach with so many big, round rocks:

Oh, wait–those aren’t rocks, they’re Elephant Seals. Piedras Blancas has developed a huge Elephant Seal colony over the past 15 years; the first pup was born there in 1992; now they estimate that there are nearly 2,000 pups born there every year. The pups look kind of like this:

January is birthing and mating season, all wrapped up in one.

Unfortunately, my battery died about halfway through Piedras Blancas, so I didn’t have a chance to get a shot of the whole beach with hundreds of seals, or any pictures of the rest of San Luis Obispo County, with its rolling hills and massive volcanic stone outcroppings. I’ll probably do the drive again in early February and concentrate on the south half of the coast.

I just uploaded my photo montage software to my Subversion server. It’s still a bit rough around the edges, but it’s usable. I’ll upload it to RubyForge when I have time, but for now I just want to have it out in the public eye before I start at Google.

I’ve been working on a cool new toy–a Ruby script that sucks up all of the images from a Flickr photo set and turns them into a random montage. The results are surprisingly pleasing, at least to me:

Once we’ve pushed the next Typo release out the door, I have a few ideas for cool and useful things to add to Typo, but you’ll have to wait to see what they are.

This was one of those weekends where I practically lived with a camera in my hand; I took around 500 halloween pictures yesterday and then moved on to Christmas-card pictures of the kids today. Everything was going well enough until late in the day, when I was trying to get a nice black and white shot of my son. In the middle of shooting I took a quick peek at my camera’s LCD display and noticed that the last shot had been completely underexposed. So I scrolled back a few shots and discovered that I’d been shooting nothing but black frames for about 30 seconds. One second it worked, the next it didn’t. All of the camera settings were the same–same aperture, ISO, and shutter speed. Same light. But no picture.

I double-checked things, but I was still getting nothing but black. With a sinking feeling, I popped the lens off and took a multi-second exposure while staring into the camera. I could see the mirror flip up, but instead of seeing the sensor, I was left staring at a closed shutter, which strongly suggests that my shutter has died. The shutter on my D60 is rated for 30,000 exposures, and I think I’m around 25,000 right now, so it’s a bit earlier then normal, but not utterly unexpected.

So, I guess I’ll be packing it up and shipping it off to Canon for service this week. I’m not sure how long it’ll take to get back, but I was hoping to use it at Mind Camp next weekend. It looks like I’m going to have to make alternate plans.

Flickr has finally added photo printing. As of today, US Flickr members can get 4x6 prints for $0.15. They also sell other sizes (5x7, 8x10, wallet, 5x5, [458]xD, and 20x30), but the other prices aren’t quite as enticing.

By default, you’re the only one allowed to print your pictures; it’s a safe default for Flickr, but I don’t really care who prints my pictures any more then I care who looks at them. If I wanted them to be private, I wouldn’t have put them on Flickr. You can change the setting via your flickr preference page; I changed mine so any Flickr member can order prints.

Er, well, some Flickr members can order prints. For now, the printing service is US-only. Considering that Flickr was a Canadian company (until Yahoo snapped them up), I find the US-centric printing kind of funny. They claim that they’re working on adding more countries.

I’ll probably order a few prints to test it out, but I doubt I’ll use Flickr’s printing service much, for the same reason that I’ve never been willing to use any of the online photo-printing places: they don’t do color management, so there’s no guarantee that your prints will look anything like the images on your screen. Instead, I use the profiles from Dry Creek Photo, burn a CD, and take it to my local Costco. I’ve had very good luck this way–I’ve churned out batches of 300 images without any problems or rejects before. The only problem is that I need to burn a CD and then make a couple trips to Costco; one to drop off the CD and another to pick up the prints. Most of the time, I’d rather just click “print” and wait a few days for a package to show up in the mail. There are a number of professional photo finishers that will accept color-managed images via FTP, but none of them are even close to being price-competitive with Flickr or Costco, and for big batches of 4x6 or 5x7 prints, price matters.

Which brings me back around to Apple’s Aperture again. One of the minor features that they’re touting is color-managed printing from within Aperture. I’d love that. Unfortunately, I’m not about to run out and buy a PowerMac and Aperture just to make photo printing easier, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction.

On the other hand, while Flickr’s non-color-managed prints may not be quite what I’m looking for, they’ll almost certainly save me a lot of hassle–I get a lot of requests for prints from friends and family, and I hate doing one-off prints for people. Now I can just point them to Flickr and let them do it themselves.

Canon announced the rumored EOS 5D today, along with the EOS 1D mk II N, a new flash, and a couple new lenses.

DPReview has details:

• 5D
• 1D mk II N
• 24-105/4L IS and 70-300 IS
• Speedlight 430 EX

The 5D looks exactly like the rumors suggested–full frame, 12.8 MP, 3 FPS, 9 AF points. It’s essentially a cross between the original 1Ds and the 20D. Its buffer holds 60 JPEG frames or 17 raw frames. Canon has 4 sample images available, but their site is slammed and I haven’t been able to view them yet. It’s priced at $3,299.

The 1D mk II N (nice name, Canon) is a slight update to their top-of-the line sports body. It still has the same 1.3x 8 MP sensor, but they added:

• A bigger LCD (2.5” vs 2.0”)
• Slightly bigger and faster buffers – 48 JPEG images vs 40
• The ability to write RAW and JPEG to simultaneously to different flash cards, so RAW ends up on CF while JPEG ends up on the SD card, or vice-versa.
• A new “picture style” setting that presumably only matters if you’re shooting JPEGs in the camera and aren’t planning on editing them much.
• Slightly lower price: $3,999

I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of these features end up in a firmware upgrade for the current 1D and 1Ds mk II sometime in the near future.

There are also two new lenses, the 24-105/4L IS and the 70-300/4.0-5.6 IS. The 24-105/4L has been on a lot of people’s wishlists for years–Canon had f4 versions of their professional wide zoom (the 17-40/4L) and their long zoom (the 70-200/4L), but not their middle zoom (the 24-70/2.8L). They finally filled in that gap in their lineup, even adding image stabilization to the mix. I have the 24-70/2.8L, and it’s far and away my favorite lens, but the 24-105/4L is tempting, if only for the longer reach and IS. It’s slower, but that may not be a big issue for me.

The 70-300/4.0-5.6 IS is a replacement for Canon’s older 75-300 IS lens. The 75-300 was Canon’s first IS lens, but it had a reputation for lousy optics. So presumably the new model is a “sucks less” replacement using a more modern image stabilization system and better glass.

Neither of the lens announcement include pricing information. I suspect that the 24-105/4L will be around $1000 initially, dropping to $800 after 6 months or so, while the 70-300 will be around $550, dropping to closer to $400 next year. Those are total guesses, based on prior experience with Canon’s pricing. The 24-105L can’t be much over $1000 for now, because the 24-70/2.8L sells for around $1150, and the 24-105L is designed to be cheaper then the 24-70L.

Updates: Rob Galbraith makes some good points about the 5D, and points that it’s a bit slower then the 20D.