The Photography Business | NEW YORK PHOTO BLOG / DAVE BECKERMAN

NIK More Than Fixed

Apr 012013

So NIK / Google sent me a link to download the full suite – and after loading it – there were no problems. Not only that – but as JPH said – no questions about my KEY NUMBERS, plus instead of only working just in Lightroom – it works very well in Photoshop as well. I’m about to write back to Google / NIK and tell them that all is well and to thank them.

I don’t understand what happened to the Key Numbers (I was so used to them) or why they simplified things so that the same program worked with Photoshop and Lightroom.

Anyway – now I’m going to start checking into getting more RAM for my Mac Pro.

Mac OS X, Version 10.6.8

Processor: 2.66 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, Memory: 6 GB 1066 MHz DDR3 (let’s see what they story is – and esp. how hard is it to change memory chips.)

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Pano with 50mm

Mar 122013

First pano with my Canon 50mm f1.4 lens. Now isn’t it nice to have something that’s actually rectilinear. No stitching required. Put it together on the first try. So I’m getting somewhere. Didn’t want to do anything too serious because I was running out of disk space. But…

I received the 3TB interior Barracuda drive – and one thing you’ve got to say for the Mac Pro – they couldn’t make it any easier to put a new drive in. Now all four interior drives are filled, and I have two external drives, and the whole thing is being backup with CrashPlan (which I like very much). The one they advertise on t.v. all the time (name just slipped my mind) for doing backups throttles down after it reaches a certain point.

CrashPlan does not throttle down. At a certain point you may need to make some changes in the your mac setup (that happened to me once where CrashPlan support helped me add more memory to the cache or something) but that was only one issue and I’m obviously uploading tons of data. And it’s all there… i.e. I’ve tested small restores.

Anyway — here’s the back of the MacPro. A real work of art.

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82nd Street (Pano Color)

Mar 092013

As I mentioned — this is day three of Panoramic experiments. I messed up the shots I did this morning by not allowing enough overlapping. Nevertheless, you can begin to get an idea of what’s possible. This is composed of 30 vertical shots. Three rows of 10 shots each.

Next time out, I simply need to increase the number of shots per row, and lessen the amount of the “yaw.” I’ll also be ordering a 3 TB drive tomorrow as I’m already close to running out disk space. I have one internal slot left in the MacPro.

And even with all the mistakes in this shot – I like it. Also, there are so many ways to present the pano – this is called, Equirectangle… and there are about 17 other ways of “projecting” the image. I happen to find this one the most interesting. You are looking at both sides of 82nd street as well as seeing what I guess is a split-horizon. Click on image for larger view. But the full size would print at about 30,000 pixels x 8,000 pixels. (That’s without any interpolation). This is from a camera with native raw file of about 3500 x 5100 pixels. Gives you ideas – doesn’t it.

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The Google Chromebook

Mar 082013

My neighbor came by to show me his new Google Chromebook. It goes back to that old idea of having all the apps and documents in the cloud. Cost: $249. First thing I tried to do when I put it on my lap (it’s a laptop after all) was to touch the screen. What? It’s not a touch screen? It reminded me of the story of these nursery school kids who were given laptops to learn their lessons on and they all immediately touched the screen expecting it to react.

Funny, but I felt the same way. I’m just so used to the Nexus 7 where everything is done via touch screen. It just made me feel like this idea which had once been the hottest thing – and that Oracle was pushing like crazy – might be a good idea – but it needs a touch screen. They make one with the touch screen but it’s about $1700.

Anyway – the tablet is the watershed. I bought a bluetooth keyboard – a small one – for the Nexus 7 tablet – but I don’t like typing on it at all. I need a full size keyboard. I expect it won’t be long before someone comes up with (or maybe it exists already in some lab) a piece of plastic that lies flat, but that becomes 3 dimensional once it’s turned on. And gives you nice clicky sounds and feelings. You’ve already got something like that with the hepatic feedback on some phones.

Anyway – the Chromeback was surprisingly fast, but it’s just hard for me to figure out what I’d use it for. You can download Googles Open Office. You can certainly read stuff; though not all movie formats play on it. It just seems like the half-sized or full-sized tablet is much easier to use. And you can’t really do any heavy-duty processing on either.

I don’t see the MacPro or the high-end computer going away anytime soon – i.e. will you be able to run the Adobe suite on a tablet? That would be the ultimate. Especially interesting – the ability to use your finger to draw and trace stuff and do masking on the tablet. But man – I’m working with giga files, and heavy-duty processing programs on the Mac Pro – lots of disk space and quad cpus — but maybe one day – you’ll be able to do this sort of thing on the tablet and people will think back to the personal computer – and it will be another relic.

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Panoramic City

Mar 042013

It all began when an art buyer asked if I could do a 20 foot x 8 foot shot on commission. And that got me thinking. I don’t want to go into specifics of place or scene yet – but it was outdoors and lets just say more flora than fauna. As I stumbled through conceptualizing how many shots / what lens would be best / how to try and make sure that the stitching process wouldn’t be too arduous… I came up with the calculation that you’d need a 100mm lens (more or less) on a full-frame dslr, and in portrait mode you’d be somewhere in the vicinity of 25 horizontal pictures per row.

How many rows were needed – maybe 6.

These calculations were done simply enough by figuring out the printing dpi – and since the mural would be approachable I decided to shoot for 300 dpi if possible (that’s pretty high for this sort of work). Boring to go into the details but the point is that I began looking around for more robotic ways of taking the pictures… and came across this GigaPano head (motorized head for moving and taking pictures) but there were a bunch of things about it in the reviews that almost all pointed out some manufacturing defect.

And the more I looked into it, the more I saw there was an entire sub-industry devoted to producing pano equipment (you have to call it Pano after four days of calling it Panoramic) and pano software.

And there was a wonderful (is) a Google Group dedicated to this sort of pano work. I got some great friendly advise there.

And so last night I ordered my first piece of pano software – PTGui Pro.

If you’ve followed me for a while – you’ll remember this is how I fell into infrared shooting for a few years. And I can tell you that the pano aspect ratio is not what interests me so much as how you can Project 3D onto a 2D surface in so many different ways. Also the idea of having incredible detail in large images is something that I toyed with years ago with my own handheld montage stitching technique.

So the motors are starting to rev up again; and the Adobe Cloud has been installed and works fine; and we’ll see where this all leads. Whether I get the commission for the mural has become secondary. I’ll be doing it anyway.

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Two Men – No. Six Train

Mar 032013

View in the Photo Store

I expect that the blog will go through more changes as I mix up the old street photos which are popular, but unsellable with some of my recent work (color mostly) which does sell but isn’t anywhere near as difficult as the older work. It’s a strange thing, and I know I’ve written and talked about it many times before – but the “postcard” shots outsell the “street” shots by about 1000 to 1. I believe that’s because the audiences are completely different.

The street shots, even the best ones, need the approval stamp of a well-known curator, museum or gatekeeper. The scenic shots are popular with just about everyone – art buyers, farmers in the midwest, and people around the world.

When I get around to writing my book on photography, the title will be: Do Not Make the Face of A Stranger Your Subject (with the caveat unless they are famous). And there’s a real good reason for that. If you think back to when you were a kid – when you put posters up on your wall – you either put up pictures of the current teen idols, or famous people that you would like to emulate. In other words – you had to be able to strongly identify with images of people.

I’m not sure that that desire ever does change. It’s a little bit like we’re always living in the days of Van Goghs “The Potato Eaters.” The general reaction to painting peasants, and workers – after centuries of painting religious images – was why would anyone want to see Potato Eaters.

Today – there is a general upsurge in street photography. We want to see Potato Eaters. But we still haven’t reached the point of wanting to have them on our living room walls.

Street photography can express the wide range of human emotions – from sadness to irony to out-and-out humor. Someday – the very best of it will hang in living rooms (not just museums) just as Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters can be found in many a den – or even more astounding, his self-portraits with the bandaged ear posters sell like hotcakes…

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Adobe Cloud (Took the Plunge)

Mar 022013

Took the plunge this morning and signed up for Adobe Cloud. Cost for the first year (as an upgrade from CS3) with tax $32 / month. I’m downloading PS6 now. I have access to everything Adobe offers. I pretty much had to do it because my various Adobe programs were beginning to complain about not working well together – well they’ve been doing that for a year or more.

I’ll write about the experience as I go through it. The one thing that I liked was that for tax purposes – it seems like a simpler way of showing my expenses, i.e. $32 x 12 for this year etc. Whereas when I was upgrading whole programs etc. I often didn’t keep track of the expense. (That’s not the main reason).

Main reason is to be up-to-date with these myriad of programs, as well as some that aren’t offered separately. Also, there are some that I would like to use once in a while (like inDesign) but don’t want to purchase separately.

p.s. Programs I use fairly regularly – Photoshop, Lightroom, Dreamweaver, Fireworks. Every once in a while I’ll dip into inDesign.

I’m using a MacPro (a few years old); and doing downloads etc. through Chrome.

FIRST TIP: MAKE SURE ALL YOUR OTHER ADOBE PROGRAMS ARE CLOSED BEFORE YOU INSTALL THE NEW STUFF. Rather than checking in the beginning to see what else is running – the Adobe Installer downloads about 1/3rd of the new install and then tells you to close other programs.

DREAMWEAVER 6 DID NOT PICK UP MY OLD SITES AUTOMATICALLY.

DREAMWEAVER 6 HAS STUFF FOR CREATING WORDPRESS THEMES – What? That would’ve been good to know. I’ve been doing all that sort of thing manually. At any rate – I’ll need to look at what they’ve done there.

THERE ARE 4 APPS I’ve never heard of available in the cloud.

Edge Animate (wonder what that will be?)

SpeedGrade (how fast is your code?)

Touch App Plugins (not a clue though I guess they’re making it possible to write for touch screens now)

Muse (hmmm…. always need a Muse… but seriously no clue right now)

And as you can see, I’m writing this as the programs are installed.

All together, there are 17 Apps. Yikes.

* * *

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Cloudy Adobe

Feb 212013

Tell me the truth now. Have you upgraded to the Adobe Cloud? Does it seem like a good deal?

You can upgrade from an existing Creative Suite for $30 a month, or for the full price for $50 a month – and you get everything that Adobe offers.

BUT

None of these CLOUD packages will work if you stop paying.

BUT

When Adobe raises the price, you what option do you have? If you don’t pay the rental for the software – you are left with nothing.

BUT

They say that you have a 30 day grace period for times when your internet connection is down, or you just don’t have an internet connection but their boards are filled with people who are being asked every few days to SIGN IN.

So is it scary to you? It is to me. If they said that after you’ve paid off a year of rentals or something like that the programs you’ve been using and have downloaded are yours. Fine. But they don’t say that because they’d lose money.

BTW – the idea is not that you actually work from the CLOUD. Too slow. It’s just that if some new feature is added, you get to use it once it goes into production.

I currently use LIGHTROOM, PHOTOSHOP, and DREAMWEAVER. Lightroom is about one version behind. The others go back quite a way. They call these things CS for CREATIVE SUITES which there used to be, but CS PHOTOSHOP is not exactly a suite. Is it.

Like I say – I don’t. Yes – I do know. I don’t like it. Maybe I’ll just use what I’ve got, old as it is, and wait for some push back from refugees from the cloud.

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