I sit in my car waiting for someone. While I wait I peck out this post. It certainly not as fast nor comfortable as real keyboard but I find the more I do this the faster I get. Currently I can stab out at least 30wpm. Which when compared with my efforts on a qwerty phone keyboard is substantially better. When you compare it to a standard phone it’s unbelievable.

The way thongs are going I think Jobs talking about the iPhone being a revoltionary vs. Evolutionary product is true. I have started to see products unrelated to Apple iPhones appearing with remarkable similarity of interface. I predict that the fixed button is going to very soon vanish from all but the most basic of phones. Also very shortly I expect to see a host of new machines which are a cross breeding of the current ‘netbooks’ and a touch screen device like the iPod touch.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a set that updates every day and contains all images with the tags “kid” and “school”? There is a way. In fact one can create sorted sets based on many criteria. Random, most interesting, least interesting, newest, oldest are a few of the ways one can sort the sets. These parameters are updated to your flickr.com sets every day (if you choose) or you can create a ‘one-off’ set that stays the way it is.

You need go to an external site for this, but once you authorize with flickr.com your good to go. You create the sets at the website and the website creates the set for you on flickr.com. They are very easy to use and create.

The power lies once you have your sets created using tags. They update every day, or you can manually update them from the site (see below). Now all you have to do is upload your images to flickr.com and ensure they all have appropriate tags. For example all of my black and white work is tagged “B&W” and then “film” or “digital”. One dynamic set is built with all images containing both “B&W” and “film” and another with images tagged “B&W” and “digital”. When I upload and tag my images via the flickr.com uploader they all appear in the correct set automatically at the next refresh! This makes maintaining your site very easy.

www.dopiaza.org/flickr/

The love affair is only a few months old. It may yet turn into a snarling mess. I installed the Yahoo built browser Flock on my machines looking for a solution that was more stable and sophisticated then Microsoft’s Explorer7. Normally I would have used Opera, which has multi-tabbed browsing and a whole list of cool features including skins. However, I found opera to be slow and crashed enough to be noticeable. Plus, I do a lot of Blog stuff, flickr.com, smugmug.com and many other sites where logging in is required.

Flock promises to be a ’social’ browser. Likely trying to cash in on the ‘facebook’ sensation as well as myspace and even flickr users being so common. In any event, the browser in question performs marvelously. The modernized 50’s motif aside it’s very powerful and well thought out browser. You have a very useful ‘my world’ page as well as active accounts (flickr,etc), a web clipboard, and a few others.

Flock is a multi-tabbed browser which works seamlessly.  I’ve yet to over-tax it with too many tabbed windows open, also, you can open a whole new window and have that multi-tabbed too!  This may be a feature elsewhere, but Flock seems to be reliable enough to surf without the constant “by clicking this will it all go away” fear that explorer generates.

Another plus is that it will run firefox plugins.  Recently I installed a web converter plug-in for firefox right into Flock and it worked like a charm.

To me, Flock seems to be a smoother, gentler and more stable firefox with some pretty cool time saving mechanisms for those dealing with a lot of online accounts.

Trying out Flock is very highly recommended.

Visit the Flock website.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t care much for Acrobat reader. I love the PDF format, and have since it’s introduction. The idea and execution of the format seems really rich and very useful. Thus it confuses me how the inventor of the PDF can make a reader that is so slow and buggy. Don’t get me wrong, Acrobat professional is the best thing since digital sliced bread for creating .pdf documents. It’s the reader I hate.

Luckily I have finally found a replacement. So far so good. It’s fast and has reasonable features. It can open huge 100MB manuals almost instantly. Pagination is almost instant as well. Overall I find it useful and outstrips the real artifact in speed by quite a factor. Be my guest and test it out. If you have different or even the same result please post your experiences here.

drum roll please. The product is Foxit reader.

Here is the download.com link.

I stumbled across Artrage about a year ago. At first the low price of $19.99 (now $25) actually turned me off. But I was looking for a simple, easy to use painting tool for my 12 year old daughter. She has a little tablet and loves to paint. However, Painter is very complex and Photoshop really doesn’t do oil paint very well.

PROS:

1. It’s fast. LIGHTNING fast. There is almost zero delay when you make a stroke. Even with complex tools like watercolor and various 3D paint effects. I’m using it everything from my laptop (P4 1.8ghz/nvidia 5200 portable) to my workstation, (P4 3ghz/RadeonX800) and on everything it’s equally as responsive.
2. Convincing tools. Paint looks a LOT like paint. Pencil responds exactly like it should. In fact everything it does it does very well.
3. Cool artsy features! Loaded with very useful tools, like the ability to easily rotate the canvas to very easy to make and use stencils/masks. You can pin a reference photo to your screen just like you would in real life, or import an image into the background and paint using the color right from the image. You can even export the bump map for rendering in another package like Lightwave, or output to devices that take Z information.
4. Size doesn’t seem to slow it down. Very large paintings like 3000×5000 seem very responsive. The only thing noticeable is the difference in saving time.
5. Price. This software would be a steal at $100. For $25 it’s downright crazy. The low price actually hides how good this software really is.
6. Quick hide moves all the palettes out of the way for unencumbered painting.
7. Interface.  It’s clean, slick and makes sense.  Everything is designed to be learnable for a child, thus for a growed up artist it’s like a second skin!

My congratulations to the developers. I am a huge fan of your software. I haven’t touched Painter or Deep Paint since!

CONS:

1. The lack of a dedicated blending stomp. This is a vital tool for editing/modifying actual imported drawings.
2. The 3D aspect sometimes gives you trouble with imported images, that is, the brush will create a depression in the painting. Small quibble. The blending stomp however is a major oversight. You can use the paintbrush with the settings tweaked but then you can’t also use it for painting.
3. Would be nice to create your own tools and have a custom tool shelf.  This way one could switch between various settings on the paintbrush to maintain consistency and speed painting.
4. Set your own quick keys. (this may be possible, but I haven’t found a way)

check it out. ARTRAGE home >>

Is film dead? On many forums the debate currently rages. New entries into the photographic ring don’t understand the debate or why anyone would want to take pictures where you couldn’t immediately see the image or quickly and easily upload the photos to your computer and share them with the world. That’s a good question. As a photographer who originally learned on film I am intimately familiar with the incredible flexibility of digital photography compared to that of film.

Can a digital camera, even a $150 Canon rangefinder take the place of my once cutting edge Nikon F3. In a word, no. However it’s sheer ability to take easy pictures means it’s a valuable addition to any photographer’s tool kit. Oddly I have yet to meet any photographer who freely admits to using such a camera, as if there were some stigma attached to it. It’s no longer true that the image quality is unacceptable for all situations, and with a little experience and creativity the lowly $200 digital camera can’t be used by serious artists. In fact, I find the size, simplicity and wide angle macro to present certain photographic opportunities one would never see otherwise.

I decided to do some actual ‘work’ with my daughter’s Canon Powershot A540.
info about the A540

A summary of my findings:

• the form factor vs. an SLR is much better for odd angle and special effect type shooting. It’s very easy to get the camera and it’s little lens within inches from the subject buy using your arm as a stand-in boom. An SLR with it’s bulk and (save a couple models) needs to be glued to your eyeball.
• The nature of a rangefinder and the short focal length of the lens as well as the lack of a flapping flip up mirror lowers the usable shutterspeed by several stops. I have gotten very sharp images hand held with the Canon at 1/8 while at the widest zoom.
• In a public social setting a small rangefinder is very inconspicuous where an SLR would make the subject very nervous.
• The consumer digital camera has evolved quite substantially. The current crop of $200-$400 are capable of producing incredible images if you are willing to take control and think creatively.
• The small size and power consumption make for some pretty nice battery life.
• Shooting black and white allows for incredible low light stuff.

That’s all cool, but for professional photographers, can a $200 camera really be used for anything?

I think yes, but not for everything. A little tiny camera with a built in zoom and decent wide angle. Some can shoot RAW files. Some are even aimed at pro users. The Canon G9 for example is a camera after a photographer’s heart.

View example photographs here:
flickr.com gallery – Canon Powershot A540

More details when my test drive is complete.

I signed up to my first web-based email service a few months ago, that is, one that was actually going to use in my daily life.  I wanted something that wasn’t tied to my email server.  I was missing emails or getting them with much delay simply because my mac-based email server was in the basement and my laptop where I work a good portion of the day is not.  The Mac works very well, and it’s nice to be able to download and store stuff that people send you.  Being a user of email since the mid 90’s it’s perhaps important to note that now there seems to be little reason to stick with the traditional POP account where downloading occurs, except, if you wish to have files locally available for backup.  Or perhaps if the end of the world comes and you wish to read your emails one last time before your power also goes out.

I signed up to gmail thinking it would be a good alternate or ‘junk’ mail stop.  To my surprise I find myself using it exclusively.  I have a few workstations, a couple laptops and a whole world of online PCs that I could not read my email from.  To suddenly have complete access to email from any workstation without using pathetically unstable software to download my email (outlook) was a complete revelation.   My old ways were transformed.

The only negative I can see to gmail is it’s inability to actually organize your inbox.  You can create ‘categories’ and show only those categories, but when in your inbox everything that has not been deleted is there in a big everlasting stream, much like a blog.  I suppose blog format, a stream of chronological data is the new paradigm for data management.  I’m getting used to it, but I guess I’m still a hierarchical dude at heart.   Science fiction has been touting the idea of a central data link where all users don’t actually have local data but log in and access data live over a network link.  This model seems to be what is actually occurring in data sharing.  Freaky.

The original idea to write this post was because I just checked my email and noticed that my ‘free space’ has more then doubled since I signed up a few months ago.  Google seems to have the idea that rewarding you for continued use is a good thing. Who am I to argue.  My personal email storage capacity has grown from around 1900MB to 4631MB.  Yes, that IS over FOUR gigabytes of space… for emails!  The need to have a dedicated home based email system is evaporating, if not completely gone.

On the other hand, if you decide later to move back to a POP server model you can use this with gmail!  There seems to be very little in the ‘downside’ department.

the converted.

SmugMug, though sounding like a cheap portrait site is actually a very well designed and excellent photo storage and delivery site. I have signed up for the basic account which means I can start uploading images. Once the process of uploading and organizing is complete I will be able to offer printing and products based on my work!

The link has been added to my links section.

I’ve created a resume section for those wishing such info. Located to the right in the Pages widget.

Please note, my gallery section is currently being uploaded to flickr.com Any link will likely have less than the full compliment of chewy goodness. If you wish to see something specific please give me a shout.

Thanks

Well, maybe not friend in the traditional sense, but certainly an accepted flavour and character of photography. More then that though, noise was a symbol of art, danger, sports, spooky night scenes, police actions, and much more. In short, noise meant ‘things of the night’.

Before we go any further I’d like to mention that by noise I refer to anything generated at the time of exposure or development, not whatever shmoosh ends up on your film after that.

So, When does one get noise?

• Using fast film with nice big breadcrumb-sized grains to soak up all the juicy light. Where would anyone ever need such raw photon vacuuming muscle?  Why, out in the jungle at night, or walking around the city at night, or only ambient light to shoot a rainy nighttime football game. Are we seeing a pattern?  The idea that grain equals danger and action lies here.  Verdict: Cool.
• Laughing at your meter and exposing three reckless stops under or even over what you know is correct, then either under developing or over developing to balance the ‘light equation’.  Either way, why would anyone in their right mind do such a thing on purpose. Well sporty film fans, it’s either to get a cool ‘look’ or to use up some of the Tmax400 you have sitting in the freezer, but instead of the measly 400ISO you achieve the super heroic sensitivity of 3200ISO.  So this kind of grain though looking a little different then actual grainy fast film, usually is associated with the same kind of activities as described in the first point. Verdict: Cool.

So what happened?  Why has noise become a symbol of a bad photograph?  Noise is banned from photographs being submitted to many high end stock photography websites.  It has become impossible to sell images which have clear noise.  Well, to be specific, clear digital noise. Film grain is noise.  It’s a chemical process, like pretty much everything happening of interest on earth.  Now we take photographs with an electronic process which we all know is a pretty binary system.  Achieving noise in this world involves math.  So, I suppose it makes sense that noise in this new digital landscape would become demonised.  I mean, it is true,it’s actually quite distracting.  I have to admit, I often have little recourse above attempting repair in Photoshop. When all of my efforts result in my accepting that the electronic din of noise was not going anywhere, I then hop to channel mixer and make myself a nice black and white.

So digital noise is bad.  I get it. How does one now express themselves and be dangerous.  Not that I’m any of that, but I have in my photographic endeavors already run into the technological limits of CCD film.  I often shoot with my camera on 3200.  The thing is great normally, and my work will show how much more prolific and both technically and artistically I have grown in leaps and bounds since switching to digital, but, I can’t do the creative stuff anymore.  The results need to be messed with before anyone will accept them as actual ‘photographs’.    I’m a defiant guy so I have decided that my cult-like mind programming needs to be questioned.  NOISE IS GOOD.  Noise represents the infinite complexity in nature and I actually love a good noise every now and then.