Jason Weddington Photography

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2010-07-04T13:17:00.000+09:00

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Japan Photos

Miyakojima (宮古島) - Part 3

2010-06-12T13:56:00.000+09:00

The next morning we went snorkeling. Visibility was great. I saw thousands of beautiful tropical fish and some amazing coral formations. Unfortunately I still don't have an underwater digital camera. I've been meaning to get one but keep putting it off. So this time I took some crappy (probably) pictures with a disposable underwater 35mm camera. If any of them come out OK I'll post them here when I get back the prints.

That afternoon my wife wanted to make a Siisaa (シーサー), one of those clay dog, lion, monster things. There are a few pottery shops on the island where people can go and learn how to make one of these things. We found one and she went to work. The guy there walked her through making the body, adding the legs, head, etc. He was really fast. She was not.

I don't have the patience to sit for 3 hours making something, but it was fun to watch her and take pictures of the beast slowing taking shape.

I spent the time looking around the pottery shop and watching a man make clay cups on a pottery wheel.

As an added bonus it was raining off and on. In Miyakojima, like Guam and many other pacific islands, the rain comes down in short spurs, rests for a while to catch its breath, and then falls again. In these brief periods I ran outside to catch some shots of rain drops resting gently on the petals of the flowers outside the pottery shop.

There was also a spider in its web just under the overhang of the roof. The rain wasn't hitting the web directly, with each shower a few more random drops hit the web. I was pretty sure that if I waited long enough I could get one of those cool rain drop spider web shots that you see from time to time. After about 2 hours of off and on rain, I got it.

After she finished making her monster we still had about 3 hours to kill before our flight back to mainland Japan. We spend the time driving around the other side of the island, the side we hadn't seen the day before. There's amazing lagoon on the southeast coast that I would love to dive in one of these days. With only a small opening to the ocean, the water is calm, clear, and still. From the top of an outcropping of rock next to the lagoon, you can see along the coast for miles in both directions.

It was a short trip. We left early Saturday morning and returned late Sunday night. But in that short period of time I fell in love with this beautiful island. We'll definitely visit again. If you ever get the chance, go to Miyakojima.

All images © 2010 by Jason Weddington, All Rights Reserved. No Use Without Written Permission. Contact me at the_wandering_eye [at] yahoo [dot] com for usage or licensing requests.

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Miyakojima (宮古島) - Part 2

2010-06-08T23:28:00.000+09:00

Back at the hotel... Amazing room, flowers on the balcony, the ocean in the distance... We paid for the whole trip as a package deal 3 months or so ago. This is the way to do it. By the time you get there you've forgotten exactly how much you paid, and the pain of paying has long since faded. Yes, I know this is irrational, but you should definitely try paying for a trip in advance. Trust me, it feels better that way. If you don't think this makes any sense read "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely and then we'll talk.

That night we went to this open air village thing. They had a weird system where you sit at a table, look at the menu, and then walk to the booth to order. Than you sit back at your table until they call your number. Then you go get your food. And when you finish you have to take back your own trays. But the food was great, and Okinawan Orian Beer is great on a warm evening after a hot day. I had my 50mm f/1.4 which is wonderful for turning mundane scenes into beautiful photographic backgrounds.

The band was good too. They're call Harvesta (ハーバスタ) and you can find them on MySpace here. Apparently these guys are playing Osaka and Tokyo in the next few weeks. Check them out if you're in the area.

All images © 2010 by Jason Weddington, All Rights Reserved. No Use Without Written Permission. Contact me at the_wandering_eye [at] yahoo [dot] com for usage or licensing requests.

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Miyakojima (宮古島) - Part 1

2010-06-08T07:32:00.000+09:00

Miyakojima

A few months ago I signed up for the annual Tour Du Miyakojima, a 100km cycling road race on the Island of Miyakojima. Miyakojima is about 300km southwest of the main island of Okinawa.

The plan was to ditch the kids with their grandparents and to have a nice weekend getaway with just the two of us. And to race 100km on a bike somewhere in there. But as the race got closer the weather forecast looked worse and worse. It seemed like it was going to rain all weekend. The plan tickets and hotel were already paid for, but it was starting to look like a miserable weekend for a bike race. So I decided to leave the bike behind, and just spend a weekend on an island with my wife. I figured a weekend of relaxing would do me good, even if it was rainy. And of course I was hoping to make some good photos.

As it turned out, the weather was perfect! But I don't regret skipping the race. It was pretty hot, and those guys looked miserable. And since I didn't have the race to worry about we had a great time touring the island.

We arrived around 10:30am and had several hours before checking into the hotel. We spent the time driving around in a rental car and taking in the sights. Misakojima is beautiful. And unlike most places in Japan that are worth visiting, it wasn't crowded at all. The roads were empty, the parks were empty. After 4 years in Tokyo, I felt like I could finally breath again.

One of the first places we stopped was Sunayama Beach (lit. "sand mountain beach"). Surprisingly enough, it's a big mountain of sand that drops down to the water. We saw butterflies, pretty flowers, beautiful green plants, and the amazing emerald green of the Pacific Ocean. Truly island paradise stuff.

All images © 2010 by Jason Weddington, All Rights Reserved. No Use Without Written Permission. Contact me at the_wandering_eye [at] yahoo [dot] com for usage or licensing requests.

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First Wedding Shoot - Part 3

2010-06-08T07:31:00.000+09:00

Planning for the Wedding Day (continued from here)

The Wedding Photographer's Handbook really opened my eyes to the amount of planning that the pros put into a wedding shoot. Hurter recommends talking to the flourist, the caterer, DJ, etc before the event. He also suggests studying the wedding gown from a fashion and design perspective to achieve an awareness of what details to shoot. And perhaps most importantly, visit the location prior to the ceremony at around the same time of day to get a feel for the lighting. This is serious stuff!

I didn't have time for the detailed in-depth prepartions recommend in the book, but I did visit the setting about 24 hours before the actual wedding ceremony. I took pictures of locations that I thought would work for group shots, and I made mental notes of how the shadows were falling, and where to place my flashes. I also studied the lighting using Lighttrac for iPad to see where the sun would be a different times in the day. Read more about this cool app [here].

That night I reviewed my test photos, and organized my shot list. My mom had kindly provided an impossibly long list of requested group shots. My sister and I hacked away at it for a while to make it more reasonable, and I tried to organize the final list by location, hoping to decide ahead of time which shots to take where. This helped a little, but I ended up making several changes on the wedding day because of people camped out in the background of my planned shot areas.

Next: Backing up photos onsite

First Wedding Shoot - Part 2

2010-06-07T10:19:00.001+09:00

Group Shots (continued from here)

I'd been to enough weddings to know that there would be a need for lots of group shots. I was sure this would be a challenge. You always see the photog referring to a paper shot list, and in addition to that, there's always someone yelling at the last minute "oh, let's get one with uncle Bob!"

And that's before you get to the technical issues like having enough depth of field to keep everyone in sharp focus, making sure no one's face is in shadow, and making sure uncle Bob doesn't have his eyes closed in the shot. Kelby's book has a couple good tips for these issues too. For groups of people he recommends shooting at f/11 and focusing on the eyes of the person in the first row. Perfect! Practical advice I can use right away without having to trial-and-error my way to the same conclusion. Kelby also mentioned that in group shots someone always has their eyes closed. He recommends telling everyone to close their eyes at the outset, count to 3 and then tell people to open their eyes and smile. This trick works great and has the added benefit of being funny and unexpected - so the smiles are genuine.

Another book that was very helpful was the Wedding Photographer's Handbook, by Bill Hurter. If you're shooting your first wedding, you need to read this book. It's full of practical advice, sample photos, ideas for album layouts, etc. The constant "watch your DoF" reminders were especially helpful. I often use shallow depth of field for creative effect, and I really did need to be reminded of the situations were I'd need to stop down to f/11 or so to get enough DoF for the group shots.

Next time: Planning for the Wedding Day

First Wedding Shoot - Part 1

2010-06-02T08:40:00.001+09:00

Back in December my sister asked me to shoot her wedding, which was about 6 months away.

At the time I knew just enough about wedding photography to know that I was completely unqualified to shoot a wedding. So of course I agreed. In the next series of posts I will recount my journey over the last several months and the steps I took to prepare for the wedding.

Two Bodies

The first thing I did was look for a few good photography books to learn more about wedding photography. One of the books I picked up was The Digital Photography Book, Vol. 1, by Scott Kelby. It's more of a tips and trick book than a detailed how-to, and there are a lot of little gems in there. On of the first things I noted in this book was the importance of shooting with two bodies at any event that has lots of action happening in various locations. You put a wide angle on one body and a telephoto on the other and you're all set to catch the whole scene, and grab candids of people in the kind of natural happy moments that happen at weddings, sports events, etc.

But I didn't have two bodies. I had one. The Canon 5D Mark II. The 5D is big and heavy, not really a take-anywhere camera. I'd been wanting a cheap lightweight SLR for a while, and now I had my justification. So I started trolling the used camera shops in Tokyo and eventually picked up a brand new Canon Kiss X2 (aka 450D, Rebel XSi) still in the original packaging for great price. The Kiss doesn't shine a candle to the 5D, but it takes reasonable pictures in good lighting conditions and would have to do as a secondary body.

The next step was to learn how to shoot with two bodies. It's easy when you get used to it, but it does take some getting used to. You need a system. I'm sure there are many techniques, but here is what I came up with. I decided from the beginning to keep the long lens on my right shoulder, and the wide lens on my left. This was completely arbitrary, but I figured it would be good to develop a habit of grabbing the camera on my left for wide shots, and the one on on my right for long ones. Then I started practicing.

IMHO, the best practice for for shooting fast moving events is to shoot kids. So I grabbed both bodies, put a wide angle lens on one and a telephoto on the other, and took my kids to the park. After two hours of shooting my wife and our two kids (5 and 2 years old) running wild at the park I was tired, physically and mentally. I'd missed several shots by getting confused and grabbing the wrong body, I'd banged my cameras into each other and into playground equipment, and somehow I even got sand in my eyes. I got home and looked at the 300+ shots. There were some pretty good ones, but it was clear that I needed a lot more practice.

Over the next few months I repeated this exercise several times, with different lens combinations. Eventually I improved, and also settled on lens combo that I thought would work for the wedding:

Left shoulder: Canon Kiss X2 w/ EF 24mm-70mm f/2.8L
Right shoulder: Canon 5D Mark II with EF 70mm-200mm f/2.8L IS USM

I thought briefly about doing it the other way, to use the 1.6x effective focal length multiplier on the Kiss give me a longer lens, but I decided against it. I was pretty sure that two thirds of my shots would be with the long lens, and I wanted that lens on the superior body. Another technique I worked on before the wedding was remote flash. I'd used continuous lighting in the studio, and on-camera flash with omni bounce out of the studio. I often bounced the flash off of walls or ceilings, but that was as advanced as my flash lighting went. For the wedding I knew I needed more, and I found it on Strobist. Read more about my remote flash experience here.

Next time: Getting Ready for Group Shots

Looking up in Toranomon

2010-05-31T21:20:00.000+09:00

Lunch break photo walks are hard; almost nothing looks good with the midday sun directly overhead. I started doing these because I think I need more time behind the camera and finding a good photo in a limited amount of time in difficult lighting conditions with only one lens to choose from can be good practice.

(I bring only a single prime lens for my week-day practice shoots. Usually it's the EF 24mm f/2.8 because that lens is small and light and fits in my bag nicely, but today I brought my EF 35mm f/1.4L)

But I've already walked all over Akasaka, and taken pretty much every photo that can be taken within walking distance from my building on a one hour lunch break. The images are starting to blur together and I'm beginning to hate myself for taking so many pictures of flowers.

So I decided to hop a train and go somewhere close and within the range of my commuter pass. I took the Ginza line to Toranomon. I never go to Toranomon these days, but it sounds cool so I decided to give it a try.

I wandered off the main drag and into the side streets. The stories of a city are told in the side streets. And even in the middle of the day, side streets are dark - hiding in the shadows of tall buildings. If there's a cool photo to be found in the middle of the day, you can bet that its hiding down a side street.

But this time I really couldn't find anything interesting. And then I looked up. Apparently, some of the most interesting views in Toranomon are straight up. There are all kinds of options for playing with geometric shapes and lines when you have tall buildings, and a cloudless sky. Cool.

Skype for iPhone works on 3G networks!

2010-05-30T15:58:00.000+09:00

I just installed the updated Skype for iPhone and got a nice surprise. You can now make voice calls over 3G networks! This was clearly stated in the details for the update, and a pop-up message in the app gives more info.

I installed the update and made a test call to the Skype call testing service. Flawless!

This never used to work. In fact none of the VoIP apps worked over a 3G connection, only on WiFi. What's going on here? I assumed this was a restriction that Apple placed on the device to keep the carriers happy. A quick Google came up with nothing on this recent change, only old articles on how to jailbreak and get VoIP apps to work.

Clicking on details reveals the page below. It seems that Skype-to-Skype calls will be free "at least" until August 2010, and after that there will be a fee. Fee for what? Skype-to-Skype calls are already free, but never worked on a 3G network.

Just speculating wildly here, but maybe Skype will give some of the mentioned monthly feel to Apple, who will then toss a stipend to their carriers to get them to stop crying about VoIP calls killing their (already crumbling) business models?

I logged into my account online and couldn't find any details on the mentioned "mobile subscription." Comment if you know something.

iPad First Impressions

2010-05-30T15:18:00.003+09:00

Ok, I've had an iPad for just over two weeks now, so I guess it's time for some first impressions.

Let's start at the very beginning. The very first thought than ran through my mind when I pulled the thing out of the box was "oh, that's heavy!" I'd seen the keynote video of Steve Jobs flipping flipping his iPad around like it's a feather. He either practiced that, or they made a special lightweight version for him to play with. It's not like it's super heavy, but a little to heavy for comfortable reading while standing up on the train. I suppose that half of the weight is battery though. And I'm not sure I'd sacrifice the amazing battery life for a lighter device.

But on to more substantive concerns... The iPad is basically a big iPod Touch right? How come the iPod Touch comes with so many built-in apps that were just plain left out of the iPad?

Apps that come with iPod Touch but not iPad:

Stocks
Weather
Voice Memos
Clock
Calculator
Uno (just kidding, I bought that one. Cool game though)

So what gives? I'd gotten used to these as staples of iPhone OS. I'm used to seeing them on my iPod Touch and iPhone. Why did Apple leave them out of iPad? I suppose you could argue that with a fuller web browsing experience, you don't really need these apps, or that they spent all their time working on the new YouTube app and didn't have time to re-vamp these once.

But I suspect something more sinister. I suspect that Apple would rather have us route around in the App Store and try on a dozen different stocks and weather apps for $2.99 a pop than to provide a more complete experience out of the box. I guess time will tell. It will be interesting to see if any of these are brought back in future OS updates.

Onto the device itself. It is, in a word, beautiful. Images look incredible on the clear, bright screen. And the hardware screen rotation lock switch is a welcome addition. An annoying problem with iPod Touch / iPhone is that the screen rotates on you when you don't want it to (like when laying on your side in bed and trying to read an email).

The large on-screen keyboard takes a little getting used to. At first I couldn't type on it to save my life. I think the problem was partly psychological. But also, there's no where to rest your hands if you try to type while holding the thing on your lap. After a couple weeks I'm going a little better. Still not keyboard speed, but enough to get some basic stuff done.

The built-in mic works well. I made a Skype test call with the device just resting on my lap. I spoke in a normal voice and when the recording was played back it sounded perfect. (OK, it sounded like a perfect recording my my voice.)

As with many users, I've experience WiFi connection problems. It only happens on a WEP network though. On WPA or WPA2 networks the thing works fine. This leads me to believe that this is a software issue, not a problem with the hardware. As such it will probably be fixed in a future update. And if you're serious about security you should avoid using WEP anyway.

Most of the built-in apps are a big improvement over their iPhone siblings. The iPod app itself is quite nice and the ability to create / edit playlists other than the "on the go" playlist is a welcome addition. The YouTube and iTunes apps are also fairly well done. The App Store is probably the worst implementation of the built-in apps. You can't really do anything in there except search and flip through "top ten" style listings. I feel like I'm being herded towards the apps that Apple wants me to buy. Hopefully this will get better in a future release.

And how about the 3rd party apps? It's still early and there's not quite the selection in the app store that one might hope for. But that will change in time. In fact the selection is getting better almost daily. There are still enough decent apps to get you started. Here are my top 5 picks so far:

SmugMug - nice interface for browsing SmugMug albums. There's a slideshow feature, and you can cache albums for offline viewing. Nice
Photo Pad - simple app that syncs your Flickr stream, including sets and tags, for offline viewing. The interface is a little clunky, and at the time of this writing there is no slideshow or pinch-to-zoom support, but caring my Flickr stream around with me is still very cool.
LightTrac - shows the sun angle at a given location on a specified date and time. Very cool. I've already blogged about this one, read more here.
FlickStackr - really ugly icon, really great way to browser Flickr. Better then the website actually. Allows you to "stack" photos for offline viewing and gives almost full functionality. You can fave, comment, and view EXIF data.
SonataNote - sheet music for iPad! Comes with several classical selections. I suspect a future update will allow in-app purchase for more music. It also plays the music.

In summary, I'm happy with my iPad. As a photographer it's great to have a portable electronic portfolio that does my images justice, and there's enough techie stuff to keep the geek in me happy too. As with all Apple releases there are weird things missing, and a few things that are not up to scratch. But these kinds of things usually get better with time.

Ikegami Honmonji (池上本門寺)

2010-05-30T12:09:00.007+09:00

This morning we jumped on the bikes and took a ride to Ikegami Honmonji (池上本門寺). My goal was to make some good photos, but it was also a family outing of sorts. I dragged along the 5D Mark II and two lenses: 24mm-70mm f/2.8 and 70mm-200mm f/2.8.

Japanese temples are interesting places. In Tokyo they are an oasis of peace in the middle of a crazy, crowded, and sometimes insane city. We went early enough in the morning that there were still very few people there. It was a nice break from the crowded trains and tired people that I see on a daily basis.

I'm never sure about taking pictures in cemeteries. I've been here long enough that I no longer feel like a tourist. When you're a tourist you point your camera at anything and everything, and think nothing of it. Everything is new and foreign, and photo-worthy. And the locals just think "stupid tourist" and go about their lives. But once you're not a tourist anymore you start to worry about things like "is it OK to take pictures here?" And I assume that the locals, instead of thinking "stupid tourist" instead think "why is that guy taking pictures here?" I don't know, probably I worry too much. People tell me I'm too serious.

But Japanese cemeteries are fascinating places. First of all, people are cremated in Japan, not buried in the ground. So these are not grave markers per se. I'm not sure if tombstone is really the right word either.

If you look up 墓 (haka) in a Japanese-English dictionary, you get gravesite or tomb. But for some reason those words to me feel like there should be a dead body in there somewhere. The important thing is this is a memorial to those who have passed, and people come here to remember them. So in that sense it's not that different from a western graveyard. Actually I often think that cultural differences are in the details. It's common to see cups of sake placed on graves in Japan for example.

I have a hard time photographing wide open spaces. I don't know why, but I'm not good at it. I get confused, and perhaps stop applying the fundamentals of framing and composition that I use when shooting a detail or closer subject.

Instead I flip into tourist mode, and just start recklessly snapping away.

This image came out OK, but most of my attempts at shooting this open courtyard look like vacation snaps. Oh well.

There is a 5 story pagoda at the temple site. Most of the buildings here were destroyed in the war, and rebuild afterwards. But the pagoda survived. It's over 400 years old. I couldn't fit it into the frame from without going all the way out to 24mm, and the lens distortion was terrible. So I tried a detail instead. I think it works well:

The temple is on a hill, and there's an observation tower that gets you ever higher. It's interesting to see crowded Tokyo ugliness on one side, and then turn 180 degrees and see Japanese cultural beauty on the other side. These two photos were taken 35 seconds apart, from the exact same location:

On top of the observation tower, I sat down and changed lenses. I wasn't getting very many good shots with the 24-70, and I figured that rather than accepting responsibility for my lack of creative vision, I would just blame the lens.

So I slapped on the 70-200 and decided to get closer to everything on the walk back to the bikes. I'd seen several nice flowers blooming on the walk up, and you can't go wrong with flowers and a long lens. It's cheating, in a sense.

If there's one thing all cities have in common, it's pigeons. As birds go they are on the less majestic side, but they seem to be evolutionarily perfect for city life. I was watching these pigeons and got the idea to startle them and then try to catch them taking off. So I set the camera to ISO 500 and f/2.8 on Av, which gave me a shutter speed of 1/2000. Then I composed the frame, stamped my foot, and the grabbed the shot just as the bird took off.

I was a little slow on the shutter, and the bird has almost flown out of the frame. But still I think it's a cool photo. Would be cooler with an eagle, or a whooping crane though...

I've missed several shots messing around trying to get things perfect. A few minutes before I took this photo, there was a much more interesting photo available. An old woman was bowing in front of the statue, and a man was walking down the path toward her.

It was almost perfect, but the trees were not framing the statue like I wanted. I moved a little bit to the side to fix that, and then some guy walked in front of me. As I was waiting for him to get out of my frame, the image fell apart. The lady finished bowing and wandered off, and the man exited stage left. So this is the photo I got instead. But imagine the other one on your mind's eye.

All in all, it was a satisfying visit. My daughter chased pigeons, my son put rocks in his pockets, and everyone enjoyed themselves.

Read more about Ikegami Honmonji at Wikipedia or at the official English site. 池上本門寺の日本語のサイトはこちら.

LightTrac for iPad

2010-05-27T06:59:00.001+09:00

LightTrac for iPad is a simple application that shows the sun angle at a given location at a specified time of day. Colored lines showing sun angle at sunrise, sunset, and the specified time are superimposed onto a Google map. The map can be toggled from regular to satellite mode.

This is a great tool for anyone shooting outdoors or indoors with available light. I recently used this to plan ahead for a wedding shoot. I knew the time and location of the wedding, and pulled the scene up in LightTrac to get a feel for where the shadows would be, and where to place my strobes. Of course I also visited the site before the wedding, but getting a top-down view of the setting before going onsite was very helpful.

At USD $3.99, outdoor shooters can't go wrong with this app!

Canon Speedlite Transmitter ST-E2

2010-05-26T18:56:00.001+09:00

I couple weeks ago I bought the Canon Speedlite Transmitter ST-E2. I'd just finished reading Lighting 101 over at Strobist (which if you haven't read, you need to stop reading this and go read that instead) and was itching to get my flash off the camera and start lighting stuff remotely.

I have an old Speedlite 420ex from about 8 years ago.  So all I really needed was the transmitter.  Pocket Wizard definately offers more flexibility, but I decided to go with the ST-E2 as a cheap way to get started with my existing flash.  (the old 420ex has no manual mode, though its replacement, the 430ex does)

Also, I was shooting my sister's wedding the following weekend and I was not comfortable learning manual flash in the time I had to prepare.  I wanted to leave it up to ETTL flash metering and tweak the power with the flash ex comp controls on the camera.  While a little hit or miss, this is a technique I am comfortable with, and a wedding is not the place to cut your teeth on a new lighting technique.

The ST-E2 unit itself takes one CR5 lithium battery which is not included in the box. This was annoying because I didn't figure this out until I got home and tried to test the thing.  There is support for two channels, A and B, and you can set ratios between the channels from 8:1 to 1:8. This means you can do cool things like make your fill flash less powerful than the main flash, or  vary the intensity of backlighting and stuff like that.

The ST-E2 uses IR to tell the flash to fire, and I was a little worried about the line of sight requirement.  In the manual Canon has a cute diagram of two flashes lighting a penguin.  (don't ask me why they chose a penguin)  The diagram makes it clear that you need line of site from the transmitter to your flashes, and that your flashes can't be more then 8 meters away. But they do mention that indoors the IR signal can bounce off walls so line of sight might not always be required.  I'm happy to report that this is accurate, actually it's an understatement.

In my tests it seems that you can put the flash pretty much anywhere in the room, and point the camerea in pretty much any direction in the same room. The flash always fires. I have even had good success shooting into a room from down a long hall, even though the flash was completely hidden from the camera.  At the wedding, which was outdoors, I put two flashes on opposite sides of the dance floor.  The dance floor was outdoors under a large white tent, and the same IR signal bouncing off of stuff rule applied. While under the tent I was able to point the camera in pretty much any direction and the flashes still fired.  Cool!

Outdoors in an open area is a different story though.  You really do need line of sight, and the angle from the transmitter to the flash can't be too sharp.  Canon's penguin diagram holds true here.

All in all, I've been very happy with the results. After sweating it out with hot lights in the studio for years, and using bounce flash on camera outside of the studio, I feel like I've been given a new lighting gift.  Why didn't I try this sooner?!

Penultimate for IPad - Just like real paper... Unfortunately.

2010-05-26T18:47:00.003+09:00

(this is a copy of an app review that I posted to the iTunes AppStore a day or so ago)

Penultimate for iPad is an amazing digital rendition of the traditional paper notebook. The on-screen writing is smoother than any other handwriting or drawing app I've tried, and I've tired several. This is the only app in which writing and scribbles actually look acceptable. No straight lines or blockiness, even when you write fast. Other apps seems to have trouble keeping up with the speed of on-screen writing or drawing. After trying several drawing and writing apps I thought that this was a hardware problem, but this app manages brilliantly so obviously this is a challenge that solid development can overcome. Really great job with the handwriting part!

The line thickness gets thinner when you write faster. The is a very nice touch and looks like real pen strokes on paper.

If I was rating the handwriting function alone, this would be a five-star app. But the overall usability is somewhat lacking, so I have to give it 3 stars. The problem is that this app functions just like paper notebooks, and replicates all the problems inherent in it's analog counterpart. This would be a 5-star killer app if the developers could combine the smooth handwriting with digital features like thumbnails.

Problems and Suggestions

1. The interface for switching notebooks is slow and clumsy. You have to scroll horizontally across your collection of notebooks, and every once in a while one of them flips open to preview the last page written, rather than scrolling by like I want it to. I want to use this for taking notes in meetings, and I created a separate notebook for each regular meeting, plus a notebook for non-regular meetings. But scrolling quickly to the notebook I want is difficult.

Suggestion: instead of the left-right scrolling interface with the title under each notebook, fill the screen with thumbnails of each notebook, and put the title on the notebook itself. This would make better use of the iPad screen space. Get rid of the flip-open preview since the left side page of the open notebook doesn't have any writing on it anyway. Instead, preview the notebook with a single-tap by just changing the thumbnail from the notebook cover to a picture of the last written page. Double-tap to open the notebook and jump to the last written page.

2. Just like a paper notebook, you have to flip page by page to find something you wrote in the past. But quickly flipping pages is easier with real paper than it is on the iPad screen. Also, with a real notebook you can flip several pages at a time. When you look for something you wrote several weeks ago in a real paper notebook, you don't flip back one page at a time. You start by flipping several pages, and as you think you're getting close you start flipping page by page. But there's no way to do this with this app, and actually there's no need for this limitation on an electronic device like iPad. I'm afraid it will be impossible to quickly find something written several weeks ago in a notebook that has dozens of pages.

Suggestion: Add a "thumbnail view" button in the toolbar when you are inside a notebook. Allow the user to explode the notebook into a screen full of thumbnails of each page and scroll quickly to the desired page. This would completely eliminate the limitation of real paper notebooks, and make this app "better than paper."

3. Wrist protection works great, but starts to fall apart toward the bottom of the page, especially the bottom right of the page. (I'm right-handed) I assume this is because my finger and my wrist get closer together as I try to squeeze text into the bottom corner.

Suggestion: Continue to tweak this, and and maybe make the tolerance greater towards the bottom of the page. Or give us a slider in the preferences to adjust the tolerance for ignoring the wrist.

All in all, this app is off to a great start. The next step is to keep the paper experience, but leave behind paper's limitations. For note-taking on iPad to really take off, the apps have to be better than the real thing (paper notebooks). This app is just as good as real paper, which isn't good enough. The iPad needs a replacement for paper that is better than paper, not just a digital copy of an analog notebook.

I've mailed the developers this review. I have high hopes for this app, so let's see what future updates bring.

(this is a review of version 1.1 of the app)

Aperture 3 Woes

2010-05-26T18:26:00.002+09:00

I started using Aperture 3 about two months ago. There were a few performance issues and quirks from the beginning, but in general the software worked, and the very attractive feature set kept me from going elsewhere.

But I've hit a show-stopper. Actually, two. First, exporting edited RAW files takes a long time. Second, exporting a project to a new library from a library that contains referenced masters mysteriously fails.

I shot a wedding a few weeks ago, my first ever as the main photographer. I took just over 1000 photos with two cameras. I was away from home working on a laptop so I downloaded the files and imported into Aperture as a referenced library. The plan was to get as much editing as possible done on the laptop, and then move the project to my iMac at home and finish.

I normally do little tweaks in Aperture (exposure, white balance, black point) and then jump to PhotoShop CS4 for the heavy lifting. This process has a few problems but in general it's OK if you don't have too many files to deal with. But this time I had 1000+ photos to get through. I wanted to select the good ones, process them, and get them online as soon as possible. Aperture's lift and stamp feature is awesome for this kind of stuff; PhotoShop actions do not come close. So first I stamped a contrast and saturation tweak onto the files I'd selected to use. Then I noticed that the highlights on the dress were blown in some of the shots. No problem, these are RAW files. The highlights aren't really blown, they just look that way. So I stamped a recovery and highlights adjustment onto several photos. Then I did some simple retouching. Using Aperture for all the adjustments and never jumping to PS, I made it through 300+ files in a couple hours. Not bad. Time to export to a web gallery.

Oops.

It turns out that on anything but top of the line hardware Aperture 3 is dog slow at exporting RAW files when edits have been applied. I tried it on a MacBook Air that I bought last year. It's a dual core with 2gb RAM. I know this is under-spec, but I didn't expect it to be unusable.

It gets worse the more edits you apply to the files. I started an export of 376 files to a web gallery around 3pm. At 6am the following morning (15 hours later!) it had not even reached 25%. I cancelled the process, because I had a plane to catch and didn't have the luxury of leaving the laptop to sit for another 2 days. A quick google showed that many other photographers are having the same problem with slow exports.

When I got home I tried to move the project to my iMac to finish processing and do the upload. Then came show-stopper number two.

In Aperture on my laptop I option clicked (ok, I two-finger tapped) on the wedding project and selected export > project as new library. Since I was working with a referenced library, I checked that box that says "consolidate masters into exported library" so that the exported library would have my master RAW files in it and I could move the whole thing to the iMac. This is one of the great features of Aperture 3. Except that it didn't work.

The export finished quickly, and Aperture gave me a nice pop-up message on the screen to tell me it was done. It only took a few minutes. That's fast, considering how many photos I had in that project. In fact, it's oh-crap-something's-wrong fast.

I checked the newly exported library. It was 1.13gb. Weirdness. I had 24gb of photos, and a library exported with the "consolidate masters" command was only 1.13gb. Something didn't make sense. So I opened the new library on my iMac and found that only a few of the photos were actually in the library. The rest of the photos were still referenced files and only had reduced size previews. And Aperture was complaining that they pointed to masters on an unmounted volume.

I browsed to the library package in Finder and opened it. (option click > show package contents) Wading into the masters folder I found 12 files. That's 12 out of an expected 1056. Not good. So I tried the export again. 12 again. I was doing the export to an external USB drive so I could carry the library to my other computer. I thought maybe the USB drive was causing some weird behavior, so I tried exporting to the internal hard drive on the laptop. This time I got 21 master images into the new library. A little better, but not really what I expected from a $200 software application. No errors, no indication of a problem, just failing to perform as advertised.

In the end I had to export my edited RAW files to JPEG on the laptop, which took about 14 hours. That was the only way to salvage the editing and sorting work I’d done on the laptop, and transfer it to the desktop. So much for the supposed flexibility of working with multiple libraries.

Aperture is supposed to be a professional package. It’s not just for browsing your vacation snaps; you’re supposed to be able to get real work done. That means dealing with RAW files. That means dealing with multiple libraries. But if you use Aperture 3 to do any serious editing of RAW files, be prepared to spend the next 2 days getting your images out of Aperture. And be careful with referenced libraries. You may not be able to transfer your Aperture work to another computer without first dumping to JPEG and re-importing.

I've just downloaded Abobe PhotoShop LightRoom Beta 2. Let's see how it compares...