Jackbaty.com

Stuff I Use

Wed, 1 Jul 2009 22:09:00 -0400

Since I like to see what stuff other people use I thought maybe others would like to see what I use. So I wrote it down on a page called Stuff I Use.

Medium Format with the Bronica SQ-A

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:13:00 -0400

As a kid, I would notice when someone on T.V. was taking photographs with a Hasselblad. I had no idea what it meant, just that it looked cool and I wanted one. Medium format photography is one of those things I've always regarded with respect, but not much interest. The gear is terribly expensive and everyone is using digital now anyway. The Hasselblad was something rich landscape photographers used, but now they all have 5Ds instead.

A funny thing happened. I was browsing around Flickr when I found myself in the middle of a 6x6 pool of photos. Loved them. Something about the the square format is interesting to me. And how nice to not have to decide if the shot makes more sense in portrait or landscape orientation.

I spent a couple hours looking for used Hasselblad kits and though much cheaper than they used to be, it's still a $2000 investment. On a whim I took a look at Craigslist and spotted a used Bronica SQ-A kit. An hour later I was back home with an SQ-A, 50mm, 80mm, 150mm lenses, waist-level and prism viewfinders, extra focusing screens, a few filters - all in a waterproof, custom Pelikan case. Total cost, $500. Pretty cheap way to get my feet wet in medium format photography.

Bronica SQ-A

I love the idea of a big, high-quality negative, even if I'll only be scanning them and printing digitally. And the shooting style of looking down at a focusing screen to compose is new and interesting as well. This should be a fun experiment! Yes, I could drop a lot less and get a Holga, but those are stupid and I find the whole Lomography thing irritating.

I burned through a roll of Neopan Acros 100 as a test, then processed it in D76 since I'd exposed it at box speed. The next roll I shot at 200 ISO and will be seeing how Diafine works with it.

Developed roll of Acros 120. It's BIG!

Now the only thing left is to find a scanner. My Nikon Coolscan 5000 can't scan medium format and the 9000 is way to expensive. I ordered an Epson v750, which gets great reviews and was only a third as expensive as the Nikon. I'll find out on Tuesday how this all turned out.

I have no idea what I'm doing, but it should be fun.

My 30 Day Social Media Fast

Tue, 2 Jun 2009 17:01:00 -0400

Let's call it an experiment. For the next 30 days I am going to avoid as much online consumption as I can. It's a social media fast.

Lemme 'splain.

I spend a lot of time consuming things online. By the time I've read all my feeds for the day and caught up with 500 people, 140 characters at a time, there's little time left, and I still can't stop. The social media addiction is so very strong, and I'm all in. A junkie.

Time for an intervention.

To fix the problem I could reduce the amount of time spent social networking. Easy, right? Easy yes, but the problem with simply cutting back is that it doesn't last. It's too vague. Have I cut back enough? I can trick myself into anything, so to avoid any mamby pamby ambiguity, I've decided to go cold turkey. As of right now, and until the end of June, I'm shutting off every time-sucking, attention-grabbing bit of computer distraction that I can reasonably live without. No more Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, RSS Feeds, Forums, or other things where too much time is spent aimlessly consuming whatever it is they're feeding me.

So what now?

I enjoy writing, drawing, and taking photographs, yet I barely do any of those things. With all of my new-found time I should be able to something, right? I recently bought an easel, some acrylics, brushes and canvases. So far I've succeeded in painting one of the canvases blue. It's been almost 2 months. That can't even be considered a good start. So more painting would be nice.

Writing doesn't come easy for me, and I'm not getting better by not doing it. To that end I've decided to write no fewer than 500 words per day for the next 30 days. It doesn't matter what I decide to write about - it's all part of the exercise.

And photography? We all know that I love taking photos. And yet, my cameras can sit idle for days at at time. That's just silly. How about shooting 2 rolls of film per week? That sounds easy, and much more fun than reading 1000 inane comments on Techcrunch.

What then is acceptible? Email, of course. Movies I consider life-sustaining, so those are okay. Posting to Flickr and my Blog are fine, since that's a form of creation. Also posting to Twitter is fine, but only using Birdhouse. With Birdhouse I can broadcast updates just fine without being forced, or tricked into reading everyone else's tweets. It's only selfish temporarily. If you DM me I'll get an email, so feel free.

At the end of the 30 days I hope to have created a few things instead of blindly consuming them. Should be fun. In the meantime, I'll be where I always am: jbaty@fusionary.com and (616) 723-0910. Talk to you soon.

Another Photography Workflow

Thu, 21 May 2009 19:42:00 -0400

I thought I'd share the latest iteration of my photography workflow. I recently bought a nice used Leica M8 (which is awesome by the way,) rendering my Nikon workflow obsolete. Here's how it looks today.

Ingest

I still use the terrific Photo Mechanic to ingest photos from the card. I tried giving it up but it's the only thing that moves and renames files exactly how I want them, which is...

Copy RAW files from card to the Capture One session folder (I'll get to Capture One in a minute).
Copy duplicate RAW files from card to a second external hard drive.
All files are put into directories by date (e.g 20090521) and renamed with date and sequence (e.g. 20090521_001.DNG)
Photo Mechanic automatically applies whatever IPTC template I choose to each photo.

Cull and Convert

Once the files are off the card and named properly I fire up Capture One. This is new to me, as it came with the M8. At first I dismissed the idea of using yet another app in my process, but then I compared the RAW conversions of Capture One 4.8 with those of Lightroom 2.3. Out of the box it was no contest, Capture One's conversions were cleaner and the color was better. It's subjective, but there you go.

I then use the nifty Capture One workflow, deleting the junk and moving the keepers to a folder for processing. Once things are reasonably culled, it's process time. The only things a RAW file get you are exposure and white balance. I tweak each keeper and set a white balance and adjust exposure as necessary. After that, RAW doesn't get me much, so I output either JPG or TIFF files, depending on if I expect to do significant additional processing. These are output to a folder called, you guessed it, "Output." I then delete the originals. (Remember I have another copy of each)

Catalog and Archive

I use Adobe Lightroom for cataloging, tweaking, printing and uploading to Flickr and SmugMug. The Capture One output folder is configured as the auto-import folder in Lightroom. All I do now is launch Lightroom and the latest processed images are imported automatically. I'll move them around into folders from there, either by date or by event.

After any final tweaks, crops, etc. I'll usually export one or two images to Flickr and several more to SmugMug right from Lightroom using the handy plugins from Jeffrey Friedl.

Backups

I delete the original RAW files from the processing folders of Capture One, but still have all of them on the external hard drive. I have 3 external drives. The first holds my Lightroom Library consisting of processed keepers. The second holds every RAW file ever pulled off a card. The third is a Drobo which acts as a backup of each of the first two. I copy everything from both of the "media" drives to the Drobo daily using Chronosync. I also occasionally buy an additional external drive and copy each of the backups to it, then store that drive offsite. Whew!

Too Much?

This all sounds very complicated, and perhaps I am trying too hard. After all, I could easily just import right from the card into Lightroom and be done with it. Who knows, that's exactly what I might end up doing, but for now, everything is how I like it, file handling, RAW conversion and cataloging are all nearly perfect. Today, it's worth the effort. I like that I don't save every single raw image to my Lightroom library now. I might have a card with 300 images on it and only convert 20 or 30 for import into Lighroom. I still have the secondary backups on the other drive, but the library stays nice and clean. Clean is good.

Thumbs Up grip for the Leica M8

Mon, 11 May 2009 17:56:00 -0400

The Leica M8 is hard to hold. It's basically the same size and shape as earlier film-based models, but it's a little bigger and a little smoother. It feels as great as other M cameras, but doesn't inspire the same confidence when holding it. It may be the covering. On my M4 the covering has more texture and feels a littler stickier than that of the M8. The M8 also does not have a film advance lever to snuggle your thumb under. This all adds up to a problem, and Tim Isaac has solved it with a terrific little device called the Thumbs Up.

Thumbs Up by Tim Issac

The Thumbs Up arrived packaged very nicely.

Nifty box, eh?

The Thumbs Up is milled from a single piece of brass and then laquered up nicely in black. I don't love the choice of type used for the logo, but that's a pretty minor complaint, considering that within 10 seconds of putting it on the camera I knew I would never want to take it off. The difference is amazing. It completely changes the way the M8 handles - for the better.

Using the Thumbs Up

Thumbs Up on the M8

I ordered the Thumbs Up Model 1 from Tony Rose at PopFlash Photo and it arrived in just a couple of days. Fast turnaround, as usual from PopFlash. Cost was $126.

Highly Recommended.

The Leica M8 - First Impressions

Fri, 8 May 2009 17:57:00 -0400

After 3 years of pretending I didn't want an M8, I now have one. Much has already been written about Leica's first digital M so I will stick to a few personal observations based on first impressions using the camera.

I've been shooting with Leicas for while now, most recently with a nice M4. I get along well with the way rangefinders work. Leica also makes some damn fine lenses. Having 70 years of lenses by Leica, Zeiss and now Voigtlander to choose from is nice. I went back to film so that I could use a Leica M camera and 50mm Summicron. The size, feel, and build, (also admittedly, even the legend) made the Leica M a perfect camera for me. Too bad it wasn't digital so I could stop swearing at dust and scratches and the tedium of scanning negatives.

When the M8 was introduced I wanted one, naturally. Unfortunately, $5000 for the body made the notion of buying one unrealistic. But, over the past few years I've kept buying gear, a little at a time. I noticed recently that if I sold a few things I might be within range of an M8.

So that's what I did; sold my M6TTL and all of my Nikon digital gear and bought a nice used M8. I chose the chrome version because I think it's beautiful that way. I've only had the camera for a few days, but here's what I know so far...

Cons

Size and Sound. It's bigger and louder than the M4. That doesn't mean it's big and loud, but there is a noticeable difference in size and sound. Also, the M8 is more difficult to hold. I think this is due to the lack of a film advance lever and possibly the covering. To compensate, I've already ordered a Thumbs Up. That should help.

Sensor Noise at higher ISOs. Image noise at higher ISOs is more prevelant than with the D300 I just sold. Significantly higher at anything above 640. If you're looking for baby-butt smooth files at IS0 3200, look elsewhere. I convert 90% of my shots to black and white, and I'm used to noisy high speed B&W files, so this isn't nearly as important to me.

Crop. The M8's sensor is not quite full-frame, meaning it has a crop factor of 1.33. I tend to like wider rather than longer lenses so the crop factor limits my options. I only have 2 lenses, the 50mm Summicron and the Zeiss Biogon 35mm. With the M8 these are now effectively 66mm and 46mm lenses. I'll be shopping for something wider soon.

Magenta Shift. Sensitivity to infrared light causes the M8's sensor to render black fabrics as magenta. I've already seen this in a few shots and it's a problem. Fortunately, it's easy to fix by putting an IR Cut filter on lenses. Not ideal, but no biggie.

That's a lot of cons, now for the good stuff.

Pros

It's digital. That may sound obvious, but if you're happy with film and prefer rangefinders, there's no reason to buy an M8. Go grab an M7 or MP and be done with it. I like film just fine, but mostly because it was the only way to shoot with a Leica rangefinder. With the introduction of the M8, that is no longer the case. I now have all the juicy goodness of a Leica M paired with the convenience and flexibility of digital capture. Bliss.

It's simple. Seriously, the value of having analog shutter speed and aperture controls with manual focusing is underrated. Even the M8's menus are simple. They could be better, but with only a few choices there's not much to do there anyway. I enjoy not having to choose between 4 metering modes, 9 shooting modes, 42 focus points and so on. I can just pick up the camera, set the important bits, almost by feel, and shoot.

File quality. The files directly out of the M8 appear to be very good, especially at IS0 640 and under.

Handling. It's an M. It feels great in my hands. Framing and focusing with a rangefinder is terrific. It's compact, quiet and thinks the way I do. In other words, the M8's handling is just about perfect. Put an ISO switch on the body and we're all good.

Conclusion

It's too early for a real conclusion. I'll need time to get over recency bias, but my first impression is that the M8 is flawed, but awesome. It handles like an M should, and is capable of producing outstanding images. I can put the camera and some lenses in a very small bag and produce images on par with what the best DSLRs have to offer. And I can do it using a smaller, quieter and prettier package. I'm in.

Leica M8 Pending

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 17:34:00 -0400

Enter the M8.

Well almost. I don't have one yet, but it's in the works. But why an M8? Mostly because I want a quality digital option and love my film Ms so much that the M8 seems a natural progression. I ran into a gentleman online who is looking for an M6 and has an M8. Convenient, no? We're going to trade my M6 and cash for his M8. Might be a few weeks before it all happens, but it looks to be a done deal. Can't wait!

Things I didn't install on my new Mac

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 20:39:00 -0400

When I wrote last year about the first things I install on a new computer I forgot what seems now to be another important list... the things I don't install on a new computer.

Appzapper Icon by Jasper Hauser

Things - I'm a GTD junkie and I thought Things was like the second coming of David Allen. I just find that, as tweaky and addled with features as it is, OmniFocus still wins.

Textmate - This one surprised me. I switched to Textmate early on, and like many developers, found it to be a flexible, refreshing change from whatever it was we were using previously. We got along just fine for quite a while. As I started doing less programming and more text editing and manipulation, I became less fond of the way Textmate went about things. Multi-file search is horrible. Character based undo is still the dumbest idea ever. Large files are not handled well. And so on. I'm also getting lazy, and I don't want to keep everything my editor is capable of wedged in my head. I went back to BBEdit, where there are palettes and menus and icons all right there in plain sight. Seriously, if you try the multi-file search in BBEdit you'll wonder how Textmate ever became so popular. I even like the ridiculous HTML palette.

LaTeX - It turns out that no matter how badly I want to need LaTeX for something, it just never comes up. I just don't see myself writing a long academic paper with all sorts of end notes, references and complex math formulas. It's just not worth the effort.

Quicksilver - Sorry, but LaunchBar is faster, simpler, and more stable than Quicksilver ever was.

MacVim - I'm a Vim lover from way back, and I still do a ton of quick editing in it, but there's no longer a need for the full Mac-lovin' version of it.

Aperture - Tried it, liked it, but Lightroom has all the momentum, resources and extras I'll ever need for photo management.

Photoshop - I've always hated it. Now that Lightroom has local adjustments, and the Nik plugins are being developed for it, I just don't need Photoshop.

Most of the Everything Buckets - I've left behind Curio, Journler, Notebook, Together, EagleFiler, Evernote (see Yojimbo by Accident) and so on. My life is now in Tinderbox, Yojimbo and DEVONthink.

I'm sure there are more, but these are the things that at one time I felt I needed on a daily basis. Times change.

Yojimbo by Accident

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 13:24:00 -0400

Several days ago I couldn't find some bit of information that I just new I'd jotted down somewhere. If you know me at all, right about now you'd snicker and suggest that I maybe look into one of those nifty new note-taking, information-capturing, everything buckets.

After poking you right in the eye for being a smartass, I'd realize that maybe I do have too many places to put things.

You'll be happy, and probably a bit skeptical, to know that I've settled on a pretty good system of capture and storage.

The Problem

No single everything bucket works for everything. This is where I went wrong. I've tried nearly every option: Notebook, DEVONthink, Curio, Tinderbox, Yojimbo, Evernote, Together, EagleFiler and others. Each of these have one or two killer features, and one or two deal-stoppers. I'll use one for a while, then become frustrated and find something else to play with.

The Solution

Separate capture from longer term storage. The difficulty I run into is that the application I find indespensible for long-term storage and retrieval is DEVONthink. What I find frustrating is that capturing with DEVONthink is cumbersome, even in the newest version with its Sorter thingy. While trying to solve this problem I reevaluated a few of the other choices. Evernote is closest, but its capture facility is buggy and there's no good export feature. I fired up Yojimbo a couple weeks ago also, knowing that it's great for capture, but limited for longer term storage.

The interesting thing is that I've kept Yojimbo running ever since. I capture everything I might want to read or visit later using the quick entry panel. The thing I've learned is that only about half of the stuff I capture needs to be kept for any length of time.

What I do now is capture everything to Yojimbo, then during my weekly review I go through all of the new stuff and move anything that actually should be kept over to DEVONthink. This makes my capture process effortless and also helps keep the clutter out of my DEVONthink database. All at the cost of maybe 15 minutes per week.

Managing My Site With Tinderbox

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 23:40:48 -0400

When writing blog posts longer than a few sentences, I've always used Tinderbox. To post articles I would then just copy and paste into the HTML editor of whatever blog software I was using that week. This works fine, but considering Tinderbox's very capable HTML export capabilities it has always seemed an unnecessary step, so I decided it was time to learn the ins and outs of managing a site using Tinderbox.

It turns out to be both easier and more difficult than I expected. Easier because I had very little trouble with the templates, CSS, and export codes. I started with the Journalist Wordpress theme and simply sliced it up and put Tinderbox export codes where appropriate. The hard part was figuring out how to organize the content. At first I was collecting everything in several "topic" containers and exporting that structure directly. The problem was that didn't really lend itself to reorganizing things very well, and permalinks were fragile. I was trying to avoid the typical date-based structure used by most blogging platforms, but that turned out to be ill-advised. Instead I moved things into a year/month/title arrangement and that seems to be easier to manage. Here's what it looks like so far...

All posts go into a dated folder in /Archives. I also have agents which collect posts by the user attribute "topic." For example, the Photography agent collects all articles in which the Topics attribute contains "Photography." Pretty obvious. The agent query looks like this...

Topics(Photography)&#inside(All Articles)

"All Articles" is another agent for convenience which collects, you guessed it, all of the articles. This is done using the following agent query...

(Prototype=•Article)&(#descendedFrom(/Archives))

The •Article prototype is applied to all notes placed inside each monthly container and sets a few export attributes such as file naming conventions and which export template to use.

Writing a new article looks like this...

When it's ready to publish I move the note from Drafts to the appropriate container in Archives and export the HTML to my local drive. I then use a little shell script to sync any changes up to the web server.

What this gets me is a terrific local editing environment, a fast static web site with no database or complex server dependencies, and few limits on what else I can do with it. I love being able to write everything in Tinderbox, and with a couple of mouse clicks replicate it all right here on my site. I think I finally gotten the dog and the tail in the right order.