Photoshop turned 20 yesterday – so it’s time to bring out a couple of quick stories.
I first started using Photoshop back with version 2.5. It was on a Windows PC in 1992 or 1993. Back then, if you bought a mid-level or higher scanner Photoshop was often included for free and that’s how I came to own it. While I didn’t dive in head first, I played with it for many years and initially used it as a tool to clean up and prep scans. It wasn’t until the advent of good digital cameras in the late 90’s, early 00’s, that it became integral to how I work.
I have two brushes with Photoshop greatness in my career. The first is indirect and occurred when Adobe Camera Raw came out. In spite of the all the hoopla over it I found it to be challenged at best when working with Nikon raw files. My comments led an extended email correspondence with author Bruce Fraser and to spending lots of time photographing a MacBeth ColorChecker so that Bruce could test the files and pass information along to Adobe.
The second was much more direct. One of the successive versions of Adobe Camera Raw had a bug or two in it. I found them and posted them on an Adobe forum. Shortly after I got an email from Thomas Knoll, co-author/developer/inventor of Photoshop, with an invitation to be a beta tester for Adobe Camera Raw. I did that for a couple of years, Camera Raw versions 2.2~3.3. After 3.3 the beta program seemed to fizzle out. Releases went right to public betas or whatever part of the program I was in was asked to do less. It was never quite clear since communication was often one-sided (from Adobe outward.)
By the spring of 2006 I was starting to use Apple’s Aperture as my main raw processor and it was time to move on. Regardless of all the shifting about with raw processors over the years (Nikon Capture, MacBibble, ACR, DPP, Aperture) as digital capture matured from an infant to a pre-teen (?), the one constant has been Photoshop for almost all work beyond the initial raw conversion.
San Francisco, CA, 1/27/10, 12:28PM EST – Apple Inc. surprised the world today unveiling its newest device, the iCaplet – a small pill embossed with the Apple logo. Media and fans were sent into a frenzy of excitement and confusion. The world had expected the iTablet – a thin netbook sized computer which would revolutionize print media the way that iPods and iPhones had reinvented music and smart phones.
Apple's iCaplet (actual size.)
With the crowd at the Yerba Buena Center both cheering and booing, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, held sway saying, “Now, this is the coolest thing I have ever done! This device is amazing and it will change your life! I know you expected a tablet based computer but the more we studied it the more we couldn’t see the value in something bigger than a cell phone and smaller than a laptop. I mean, come on, WTF?! You don’t need that, trust me, I looked into it. What you need is the iCaplet. You swallow this, wait a minute for it to boot up your system, and then the whole world opens up. It enables you to read books and magazines, it helps you turn pages. Music, what about music? Yes, it does music. All the music you have ever heard in your life, brought with you, where ever you go. You can sing it at the top of your lungs or if in a crowd and discretion is advised the iCaplet will enable you to hum it inside you head. That’s right, I did just say that – it creates a world where you can hear music inside your head without others around you hearing it. Amazing, and only from Apple. That’s the iCaplet, our first product that lets you take a bit of Apple inside you, where ever you go.”
Jobs then brought out Jonathan Ive, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Industrial Design, who explained how Apple was able to get all of its technology and expertise into a device the size of a pill of aspirin. Won over, the crowd couldn’t wait to get out and get a taste of this new device. But, as is usually the case, there was Jobs’, “… and one more thing.” What was it? The iCaplet not only lets you leave your computers, interact with people, and go out into the world, it also can cure the common headache.
The iCaplet is available immediately at all Apple stores. It will be sold in blister packs of two, six, and eight. It will also be available in bottles of 50, 100, and 250 next month.
I have posted reports on both of Canon’s new TS-E lenses (aka tilt/shift), the 17mm f/4L and the 24mm f/3.5L II, and I have been using them full on since receiving them earlier this year. They’re great optics. It’s clear how much of an improvement they are and how much they stand out the first time you use them.
Now, architectural photographer Rainer Viertlböck has posted two tests comparing them with his medium-format digital back, a 33mp Sinar e75, coupled with Rodenstock’s high-end view camera lenses; the 23HR, 28HR, and 35HR. Rainer used the Canon lenses on a Canon 5D Mark II.
Many are in agreement about how great these new Canon lenses are but I don’t know that anyone, myself included, expected them to compare so favorably against a medium-format digital back when used with view camera lenses. In the 17mm TS-E test, the Canon doesn’t have quite the detail or resolution of the medium-format kit but it comes awful close. This holds true even when the Canon files are res’d. up to match the Sinar e75 resolution.
In the 24mm TS-E II test, the Canon does a much better job than the Sinar/Rodenstock combo in controlling flare from tungsten light sources.
Every digital kit is a compromise of sorts. With a DSLR you have flexibility but loose in sharpness; with a medium-format digital back you gain in sharpness and resolution, but are more limited in workflow, operability, and the cost of entry is orders of magnitude higher.
It used to be that one of the main factors in digital architectural photography tipping the scales toward medium-format digital backs was the ability to use view camera lenses. This combo offered a photographer image quality which a DSLR with SLR style lenses could never attain. Well, never is broken and that compromise is looking less like a compromise and more like a choice based on style and needs.
One change with new web site and blog is the ability for both to format themselves on the iPhone and on other touch-type smart phones. This makes for quicker loading and painless viewing of both sites when seen by those on the go.
JonRoemer.com on the iPhone:
Learning to See on the iPhone:
For JonRoemer.com this is a feature built into the web site’s structure. It replaces my hand built, hand maintained, iPhone site which ran concurrent with the old JonRoemer.com.
For the blog, being on a Wordpress platform, flexibility is the name of the game. I tried three mobile versions of the blog, each promised a simple design, but only one delivered on design, ease of use, and worked out of the box. The mobile theme I’m using is WPtouch iPhone Theme. It has many options built-in, all accessed via WordPress’ settings menu, it couldn’t be easier. If I had to change one thing with WPtouch iPhone Theme, I’d want the ability to not have the calendar month and day as an icon with each post on the homepage. That’s it. This Wordpress Plug-in is incredibly well made and well documented.
The two other iPhone mobile themes I tried were Carrington Mobile and Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin. The former looked to be even simpler in feel than WPtouch but it did not reformat blog photos for smaller phone screens leading to half of each image being cropped out. The latter promised to automatically create a site that mimicked Learning to See but other than orange links it looked nothing like Learning to See and it too had image problems. It dropped many images when viewed on the phone leaving placeholder icons instead.
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Apologies to Eric Carle and Bill Martin Jr. of children’s book fame. If you have kids or grandkids, if you ever babysat kids who are in the board-book stage, you know their work. Hopefully, I won’t have an angry author and illustrator looking at me.
I may be a bit late to the table on this but I thought I’d relate my experience shifting a few services over to Google.
Two months ago, awash in spam, seeing no end in sight, and having had about a year and a half of managing all my email twice (once on my iPhone and once on my desktop) I decided to give Google a shot. Google via Google Apps offers *domain name email services. Regardless of where your web site is hosted, you can run your domain name email through Google for free or for a small fee (the fee gets you better customer service and guaranteed service uptime.)
The advantages in doing this are numerous. First your email is via an IMAP service (as opposed to POP); this means that your email lives out there on Google’s servers. So, whenever you view it, delete it, move it around, or reply to it those changes are seen on every device you use to access it. Any changes you make only have to be done once. If you use multiple computers or a device like an iPhone then there is no more multiple management. Apple offers a similar service with its MobileMe email but they don’t offer it for domain name email.
The second advantage is that Google has some of the best spam filters ever invented. You don’t have to set anything and there is little to manage. They work, plain and simple. Who knows what they do but you got to love it. I get 150-300 spams per day and it is such a relief to no longer have it in my face. Once in a while a solitary spam may make it through the filter or once in a while legitimate email gets tagged as spam, but it’s rare.
Prior to this I had used Apple Mail’s spam detection and had set up many filters but it was never good enough. Spam in foreign languages always got through as did spam with no text but with image files attached and spam masquerading as email I had opted into.
*Domain Name email is email tied into your web site domain name. Email for www.mydomain.com would be email@mydomain.com. Using domain name email for your business is a no brainer. It looks professional and it’s easy for clients to remember. To not use it in this web driven world is to do your business a disservice.
Google Analytics are web stats. To use the service you create a free account and then put a small bit of code on every web page that you want to track. This is easier than it sounds and works well for web sites and blogs. Most web site hosts provide some sort of web stats but I’ve found their offerings to be rudimentary at best. My shift to Google Analytics has highlighted those services weaknesses.
My web site is hosted by Dogbark.com, their stats are included in the hosting via software from Webalizer. According to Webalizer, last month I had over 5000 unique URLs view my site, an average of 422 pages viewed per day, and an average of 83 visits per day. Sounds great but how accurate is it? On a simple ticker count I’m sure it is accurate but it’s also misleading in terms of the activity on my site. It includes everything – robots or spiders visiting my site, a client who may access a file on the site but not view any web pages, and it even includes me double-checking my site or working on my site. How does it compare to what Google Analytics is reporting? For the same time frame, May of 2009, Google Analytics reports that I had 258 unique URL’s visit my site, an average of 187 pages viewed per day, and an average of 10 visits per day. That’s a big difference.
The discrepancy is because Google Analytics knows to filter out robots and spiders cataloging my site, it doesn’t include files downloaded or accessed which are not part of my web pages, and I have filtered it to not include me in the stats. So, what I’ve learned is that my site’s overall popularity is much lower than I had been led to believe. A bit of a bummer but Google Analytics also provides much more information and on that front things are looking wonderful. While my traffic is less than assumed the quality of the visits is extremely high. This is information that Webalizer never made clear. For example, during May the average visitor viewed 20 pages on my site and the bounce rate was under 15%. This means that over 85% of the visitors went beyond my home page.
Google Analytics has many more features and is extremely flexible in what it can report and how it presents the information. One feature is benchmarking where it will compare your site to all sites in its database of a similar size or to all sites in its database within the same field. On these fronts my site is doing very well, too. Compared to all sites my site is doing over 2,000% better on visits, over 18,500% better on pageviews, almost 1000% better on average time on site, and the bounce rate is over 60% lower than the benchmark. All very very good. Similarly, if I benchmark against other photo sites things still look good: over 230% better on visits, over 2000% better on pageviews, about 150% better on average time on site, and the bounce rate is over 50% better than the photo sites benchmark.
In the past week I added Google Analytics reporting to my blog. It’s too early to report stats on that but I’m finding parallels between it and what I’ve learned from adding Google Analytics to my web site.
What can you learn from all this information? It can be a bit of a black hole if you let yourself get lost in the numbers and the data. It’s not my desire to get sucked in. In the reports, I’m looking for confirmation of my how my site is doing and general trends – that the reports I am working with now are better tailored to the information I need only helps.
I’m now on my third iPhone in one-and-a-half years. Sounds like a lot. It’s not really. iPhone #1 lasted until it got wet (more on this later), Apple replaced it with iPhone #2, and then I upgraded this past June to the iPhone 3g, iPhone #3. A big question all along has been what to put the iPhone in and how to carry it. It’s nice and sleek without a case, but sleek and slippery are pretty close in feel, and a dropped iPhone with no protection is not going to last long. Running around on assignment, well, accidents happen.
Which brings me back to iPhone #1. I’ve seen many iPhone cases and the one that I’ve liked the most and used the most has been the Case-mate Signature Series Leather case. It’s soft leather so it feels great, it looks great and while it adds some bulk it has protected my iPhones from many a fall. The leather is wrapped around a plastic form fitting shell. Very nice and it looks professional. You’re not going to feel like the guy in that American Express ad who tries to pay for a client lunch with his personalized cartoon-hero credit card thereby killing the deal.
Case-mate Signature Case, Photo: Case-mate
So, how to carry the iPhone around? Short of a man purse or happening to be wearing a jacket, I’m not crazy about putting it in my pants pocket. Is that an iPhone down there or you just happy to see me?.. It needs a holster. Case-mate makes a holster but similar to the iPhone I’ve been through a few of these. It’s a nice concept and allows the iPhone to rest on a belt. It should work. The problem is Case-mate uses a large plastic clip which doesn’t last long. The clip breaks off or the spring in it (a doubled over piece of thin metal) looses its resistance so the clip no longer holds. Their holster also does not keep a firm grip on the phone.
Which brings me back to iPhone #1. I’m on assignment photographing architectural interiors, working in a renovated bathroom space. It’s tight, not too much room, working with 14mm and 20mm lenses. I’ve got to be by the toilet to get the right angle and shoot through the doorway. Getting to the tripod requires a move out of Cirque de Soleil. If you don’t know where this is going I’ll give you a hint, I should have put the lid down on the toilet… I’m doing the move, twisting to get behind the camera, the clip on the iPhone holster doesn’t hold and down it goes, right into the commode. I fish it out, wipe it off, turn it off, wash my hands, later wipe off the phone with some cleaner, turn it back on after a long time and for a week or so it still works. But then the top line of the keyboard stops working. No qwerty for me. Luckily, Apple replaces the phone under warranty, no questions asked.
So, long story short, finding the right holster that will fit my iPhone with the Case-mate sleeve on it and which has a secure clip has been a googling hobby of mine. I just found it. I had to go to the ends of the earth, okay, I didn’t but my browser and my credit card info did. It just arrived and it’s great. The holster case is made by Nutshell of New Zealand. They make leather cases for all sort of phones, pda’s, cameras, gps’, and more. For the iPhone alone they offer fifteen case sizes each of which can be customized further. The icing on the cake, they offer a case made to take an iPhone with the Case-mate Signature case on it. Too cool for school. I ordered two in black, one with a clip for me, one without a clip for my wife whose iPhone lives in her purse. You can add a full-flap or a security strap, either with velcro or a magnetic clasp. Nutshell has even measured to make sure the magnet they use is shielded. The belt clip is a clip with a capital “C.” It is steel and it is not going to break. Your belt will break before it does.
The inside of the Nutshell case is very soft, it won’t scratch your phone, it has a great new leather leathery smell, and the Nutshell holster is very comfortable to wear. Much less bulky against your hip than the Case-mate holster. Two thumbs up. I think this combo, the Case-mate Signature case with the Nutshell holder, is about as perfect as it can get.
Nutshell Holster Case, Photo: Nutshell
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Updated 1/13/09: New Nutshell photo and additional information.
Back in July when I wrote about MyWeather Mobile I said, “In a future update I’d like to see the ‘Trend’ forecast expanded from twelve hours to twenty-four or thirty-six hours – with that change this app would be perfect.” MyWeather Mobile has done just that in version 1.1 adding thirty-six hour trend data into a full screen window. They’ve also added detailed current conditions to the mix.
This is a very handy app for planning weather related assignments and for getting current weather information while on location.
Current Conditions detail:
36-Hour Trend:
Selecting a time will give you an icon showing conditions:
sunny, partly cloudy, cloudy, rain, etc.
As is often the case I’ve thought of one more thing that could be added – sunrise and sunset times. MyWeather Mobile are you listening?…
Selecting a time will give you an icon showing conditions: