Not quite a year, or is it?

I suppose, given that we got a free day this year (Feb 29th), it might be considered a year since I last posted, but as it's not the 9th until tomorrow, I'm saying it's not quite. ;)

Anyway, yes, I've not been posting.  As usually happens, work has been getting in the way (not that I'm complaining, I've shot some beautiful people over the last year and produced a good number of images I'm rather proud of).

I've been teaching some workshops too, and have also recently relaunched an old site under the new guise of learning photography, so I will generally be posting there from now on.  I'll also be rewording and updating some of the stuff on here and shifting it over there in the form of new posts.

So, head on over to http://www.johnaldred.com/ and start following there instead. :)

Goodbye iPhone OS3, Hello iOS4!

So the day has finally arrived that my iPhone 3GS can look a little sexier for a few days before the iPhone 4 gets released.

The iOS4 update hit about 90 minutes ago, so obviously I was cool, calm and collected it and downloaded it immediately. :)

After a little initial bandwidth problem (it was stuck on "2 hours remaining" for about half an hour), I closed iTunes, restarted the download, and it took about 90 seconds.  Another five minutes to backup iPhone OS3, install and verify iOS4 and I'm now up and running.

Now for a pair of quick comparison screenshots : iPhone OS3 on the left, iOS4 on the right.

Obviously I don't have Apple's new Retina Display with the 3GS, but I am noticing that things seem to be displaying a little clearer than they did, perhaps due to new software to recalculate how resizing and font smoothing is done on the fly?

Not had much of a play so far, but the new "Folders" for organising the icons on your desktop into groups is looking rather nice. :)

D300s Replacement/Firmware wishes

After having read Philip Bloom's article Which Video DSLR to Buy, I've been having a bit more of a think about the video aspect of my D300s.

Please note that this article is based solely on the video capabilities (or lack thereof) of the D300s and while some of the features might be useful for stills photography too, that's not my focus here.

I've used the D300s alongside Sony EX1 and Z7 cameras for a few different projects now, and I've started to get a wishlist together of features it doesn't have that I personally feel are pretty essential.  Some (all?) of these could probably be implemented as simple Firmware updates, and perhaps one day Nikon will wake up and implement them, but some may require hardware updates in order to be able to maintain processing speed.

The first one for me is a biggy.  If no other feature were ever implemented, PLEASE Nikon, I beg of you, give us a live histogram on the liveview display.  If this were added, I could continue to deal with the fact that the D300s has no manual control other than the aperture.  At least with a live histogram I can zoom in on my Lastolite XpoBalance, let the camera meter, dial in some exposure compensation if necessary, then lock my exposure and know it's about right - I'd be a happy bunny, I'd be able to check via the histogram that my exposures are fairly consistent from shot to shot under different lighting conditions.  Without this feature, it's pretty much hit and miss, and I'm only taking the camera's word for it that it's metered my 18% grey consistently from one situation to the next (and if I exceed the limits of the auto-ISO in video mode, then I know it's going to be underexposed - even if I can't actually tell that until I get the footage back onto the computer).

Leading on slightly from this, given that I'm currently having to use the 18% grey section of the XpoBalance to get the D300s to produce a (relatively) consistent exposure between shots, please let me spot meter in video mode.  Being stuck in matrix metering mode means that I have to take my camera off the tripod, zoom in completely to my grey card so that it fills the screen, lock the exposure, and then move my camera back to its original position.  Not a huge pain in the arse, but a pain none the less.  Being able to spot meter an 18% grey card that's only taking up about 1/8th of my shot would be lovely, thank you.

Then there are the obvious ones.  Only 24p?  Come on now, not all of us live in the film world.  Having to transcode 24p into 25p to burn out to DVDs is a step in my workflow that I'd rather not have to be honest with you.  It never turns out as well as it would have if I simply had the option to record 25p in the first place, and trying to composite 24p footage with 25p motion graphics in a 25p composition in AfterEffects is just a nightmare.  Please give us other framerates.  25p would be awesome and, to be fair to the Americans, let them have 29.976 too (my wife is American, so it'd be great if I could record 29.976 footage, and not have to run 24p footage through Twixtor or something to be able to mail her family a DVD).  50p and 60p are other obvious framerates that many of Nikon's competitors at similar and lower price points can already achieve,

720p.  Ok, for some this one is massive.  For me, it's not such a big deal (although it may become one by the time the D300s & D3s are replaced in Nikon's lineup).  The vast majority of my projects for clients still end up on a PAL format progressive mode DVD, which are standard def.  As such, shooting and editing in 720p and then scaling the final project down to 720x576 with a 1.42 pixel aspect ratio is not a huge issue.  But, the future is just around the corner.  Blu-Ray is actually getting affordable to the general population, even Youtube now supports 1080p high definition video file uploads, and monitors that are capable of 1920x1080 resolution are becoming increasingly more available in the local computer stores.  It also means that even if I am still ending up with a DVD project, scaling down from 1080p instead of 720p will still provide a better end result.

Finally, please give us full manual control.  Canon have several bodies at a similar or lesser price point than the D300s that offer full control over the aperture, shutter speed and ISO.  Why can the D300s not do the same?  Why has this not already been fixed in a firmware update?

Edit : Maybe not "finally".  I know there was something else, but off the top of my head I don't recall quite what it was. :)

I know that the D3s does overcome some of these inadequacies in the D300s (live histogram and full manual control, for example), but I shouldn't have to go out and spend almost three times the price to be able to get these two minor, but essential, features, especially when the D3s still only records 720p.

At the moment, I'm debating my video future.

Do I continue to struggle with the D300s as merely a support camera for the EX1 with which I normally shoot?

Should I forget shooting on a DSLR entirely for now and just get the Letus Ultimate 35mm adapter so I can put my Nikon glass on the EX1?

Should I hold out and see what Nikon have to offer in the inevitable D400/D4 bodies?

Or do I just pick up a 5DMk2 & Nikon lens to EOS mount adapter and be done with it?

I'm thinking I'll just wait until the D400/D4 are released and see what they offer, but if Nikon can give me a D400 with 1080p, 24/25/30fps, full manual control and a live histogram, I'll take 2 please - if not, I'll probably be in the market for a couple of second hand 5DMk2 bodies and lens adapters.

Blogging vs. Real-Life Part 2

I seem to be failing miserably at all this blogging business these days, but it has unfortunately had to take a back seat to the real world for a little bit longer than I had planned.

For those that were curious, shooting with Dirk Benedict at the Who Store went great, and he's a thoroughly nice chap (when he's not reading reviews of the new "A-Team" movie, or somebody reminds him of the fact that Starbuck's female in the new "Battlestar Galactica").  I must remember to bring along a bottle of Glenmorangie if I ever have the opportunity to meet him again.

I should be back again there next month to shoot the 7'1" monster (and I say that in the nicest possible way) that is Ian Whyte.  For those of you who don't know, Ian was the predator  (hence the "monster" reference) in the two Alien vs. Predator movies and, oddly enough, a double for Madame Olympe Maxime in "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire".  Currently featuring in the new remake of the film "Clash of the Titans" as Shiek Sulieman.

I'm not going to end this post as I did my last one, seeing that I charged all my batteries last night for this weekend's frivolity at the Yorkshire Game Fair, but I will certainly make an effort to try to keep things a bit more updated when I get back.

I've had a lot of ideas for posts and articles that I really want to get on here; Not only to help you lot out, but also so that 6 months down the line I can remember it myself. :)

Real-Life always seems to get in the way

I really must apologise for my absence of late.  I started off this blog with all good intentions of posting regularly, at least a couple of times a week, but that pesky "real life" stuff always seems to change the order of my priorities when I least expect it.

Last week or so I've spent down in Suffolk working with some great people (Steve Cheshire, MrsC, MegaanC, JaneB and Paul Minus).  The whole week was fantastic with some incredible locations to shoot.  Hopefully I'll have enough time to get those ones processed relatively soon and post some up for you  (Yes, I know, I still need to get the Manchester and Liverpool group shoot images up.  This week, I promise!).

Tomorrow is a day I'm very much looking forward to.  I get to shoot one of my childhood heroes; Dirk Benedict.  Yes, that's right, Templeton "Faceman" Peck, Liuetenant Starbuck, and now starring as the scruffy, bumbling Lieutenant Columbo in the stage production "Columbo: Prescription Murder" currently touring its way across the UK.

Speaking of scruffy, bumbling types; I don't talk politics in public, but I just watched Boris Johnson's interview on BBC News 24.  This guy really needs to get a stand up comedy act together. :)

Anyway, I need to switch out the next set of batteries into the charger for tomorrow's shoot, and I probably should start going through last week's images and begin the elimination process.

Enabling Colour Profiles in Firefox

Up until recently I've been calibrating my monitors (HP LP2475w) with the Spyder2Express.  Now, this is quite an inexpensive unit, and when I first bought it, I didn't really know much about calibration.  It doesn't (officially) support multiple monitors, although there are pain-in-the-ass workarounds that can make it happen (although the whole process can take up to an hour to sort it out each time you need to recalibrate).  So, I only ever calibrated my main monitor regularly, the one on which I edit my photos and watch video previews while editing, the other screen being resigned to simply displaying palettes and other program info.  But it's also the screen on which I browse the web.

Anyway, after going to the Focus on Imaging show last month, and picking up several 100-sheet packs of Ilford Galerie Smooth Pearl and Harman Crystaljet Luster paper I decided it was about time I got a bit more serious about my calibration (and I really wanted something that would allow me to calibrate a multiple monitor system without all the farting around).

So, I went ahead and I bought the X-Rite Eye One Display 2, and how sexy it is.  I bought it from a company called Native Digital, on the recommendation of a friend who had used them in the past.  When you buy the Display 2 from them, they also throw in two free printer profiles (normally £15 each), so as I'd just got new papers for the printer, it sounded like a great deal to me.

Unit arrives, bit of screwing around to figure out how the software works, and I have two beautifully calibrated virtually identical screens sitting on my desk.  I save an image out of Photoshop, using the sRGB colour profile via "Save for Web and Devices", upload it to Flickr and... hold on a minute... why does it look different to the image in Photoshop?

So I did a little digging, because I could've sworn I read that FireFox 3 supported embedded colour profiles within images.  Turns out, it does, although it's not enabled by default, which means that everything is being shown with your standard calibration, and not necessarily how the photographer intended it to be viewed.

After a little more digging around, I discovered that there are a couple of plugins that claim to enable this feature for you, as there is nothing in FireFox's "Options" dialogue, nor any of the menu options.  The plugins didn't seem to do a thing for me, so I deleted them, and I can't really tell you what they were, you'll have to hit up Google if you're curious. Eventually I did manage to find a solution (which is a lot less hassle than downloading and installing a plugin to be honest with you), which I'm going to pass along right here.

WARNING : You can seriously screw up your FireFox configuration if you change something in here you're not supposed to change, so I take no responsibility for anything YOU do with YOUR computer. :)

That said, this is what I did, what worked for me, so here it is.

When facing the Firefox browser window, you want to enter "about:config" into the URL bar.  You will be then confronted with a warning as shown in the image below (remember, I told you, not my fault if you screw something up.  If you're not sure what you're doing, don't do this!).

Clicking the button to continue into the configuration presents you with hundreds and hundreds of ways to screw up your settings...

So, let's narrow things down a bit.  You'll want to start by entering "gfx" into the "Filter" box shown at the top of the page, and the option we're going to be editing is highlited in the screenshot below.

Simply double click on this line to bring up the dialog box.  When the box comes up, enter a value of "1", and click OK.

Now, your list should look lke this.  The "Status" till change from "default" to "user set" to show that the default value has been edited by the user.  If you do screw something up, this could help you to find those settings you changed and assist you in resetting them.

Now just restart FireFox (although, I'm not even certain this step is required) and you're all set.  Your images with embedded sRGB colour profiles (as the vast majority of photos on the web are) will be displaying their correct colours on your beautifully calibrated screen.

Could this be considered regressing?

So, I've been keeping an eye on some of the "Through the Viewfinder" (TTV) groups recently over on Flickr (like this one, and this one), and I thought "that looks neat, I'll have to give it a go sometime".

While hunting around for a suitable camera to use, I've been astonished at the prices some of these old cameras are still fetching over on eBay in the UK, averaging anywhere from £100-200 a piece.  Most of the American TTVers I've seen rave about the excellence of the Argus 75 (aka Argoflex 75) for this use, which seem to sell for a mere £10-20, although with about a £60 shipping cost to the UK as they only seem to be for sale in the US.

Still a little more than I want to pay for an experiment and a little bit of fun.  Whilst browsing the auctions last night I ran across a Kodak Brownie Reflex like in the image at the top of this post (which isn't mine, it belongs to Purple Monkey Dish Washer and is used here in accordance with the CC license - he's got a few cracking shots if you dig through his photostream, you should head on over and take a look.  Thank you Roy!) for only a tenner; just under £13 with shipping included, bargain!

Anyway, the example I bought isn't quite as pristine as Roy's on the exterior, although it should suit my needs just fine.  I will have to build a "contraption" (yes, that's the technical term) in order to be able to shoot from my D300s through the Brownie's viewfinder, but I have an idea of how I'm going to be putting it all together (which I'm sure will fail in no time at all).

Once it arrives, I might see if I can get a couple of rolls of film to put through it before I start to wrap it with foamcore and gaffer tape; If I don't get too impatient and just start at it right way that is. :)

Edit : on a completely unrelated topic, this is brilliant. Translated by a DJ at Radio 1, this had me laughing the whole way through (thanks Lenz!)



Edit 2 : Back to the original topic, also just got a Voigtlander Brilliance for an absolute steal, so I'll have a couple of cameras to experiment with now.  Also picked up some extension tubes to be able to make a shorter contraption using my Nikon 50mm f/1.8D lens.

Edit 3 : Ok, so I have a Kodak Duaflex II coming as well. I wish Royal Mail would get off their backsides, get back to work and deliver my packages to me.  Anybody would think it was a holiday or something. ;)

Spring Fair International 2010

Well, I'm back from the Spring Fair International at the Birmingham NEC.  Had an absolutely blast getting to talk to some of the people from companies I've dealt with in the past, and making soem new contacts.

There's really not too much to write about it, but I just wanted to say a big hello and a thank you to the guys from Epson & Fujifilm for spending far too much time with me chatting about the various pro printer range and the different media avaiable.  We'll see you guys again at Focus next month! :)

Also a huge huge thank you to the folks at Designline Systems for convincing me to even consider Canon hardware (just to be clear, I'm talking printers not cameras!).  Hopefully I'll be getting down to visit them in Poole sometime over the next couple of weeks to see their facilities and have a good chat about their range of Canon pro printers.

I'm not shifting entirely away from the HiTi dye-sub printers, but I need something for LARGE prints and canvas, and it would be nice to be able to print 4'x3' canvas in-house. :)

Dell Zino HD (Take Two)

As I type from my laptop while up in the bedroom, I'm watching my replacement Dell Zino HD (see previous post) go through its "Windows Experience Index" tests. I don't expect any spectacular results, but I am curious. I notice that in Windows 7, the maximum index has been upped from Vista's 5.9 to 7.9. So, have a watch of this again while it's running.

No surprise, it just finished and came up with a rating of 3.1, which is determined by the lowest score, which was the graphics card.

• 3.6 : Processor - Calculations per second
• 5.0 : Memory (RAM) - Memory operations per second
• 3.1 : Graphics - Desktop performance for Windows Aero
• 4.8 : Gaming graphics - 3D business and gaming graphics performance
• 5.9 : Primary hard disk - Disk data transfer rate

So, overall, a bit better than I expected, but still nothing amazing.  I don't expect it would handle something like World of Warcraft in its current state.

This article is really about the ease of setup and general information regarding my experiences and first impressions with this device.  I'll post again in a couple of weeks and let you know if I still think it seems like a neat bit of kit.  I'm treating this as a sort of "for dummies" exercise, as this is just going to be a media center, and will not really satisfy any of my usual PC needs (except to maybe play the occasional Youtube video full screen on the TV) so I don't want to have to go in-depth with this machine to sort out any of the troubleshooting issues that usually come with setting up a new PC.  I want this to be smooth and easy.

The box is very small.  It has a footprint of about 8"x8" and is only about 3.5" high.  Great looking little box besides the TV, and it's almost completely silent.  As the box is so small, there's no room for an internal PCI TV Tuner card, so I picked up an external Hauppauge WinTV USB stick, which is currently attached to the PC via a USB extension cable and gaffer taped to the top of the TV in order to be able to see the remote control (I'm definitely going to have to work on an alternative solution for that one).  Now to find out if the CD that comes with the WinTV is really as "Compatibly with Windows 7" as it claims.

Well, plugging in the device did fire Windows into life, and while it did not detect a driver available for automatic installtion, a screen popped up that sent me directly to a download from the Hauppauge website.  I didn't even have to go sifting through pages and pages of support; I just click the link from within Windows and it asks me to save a file.  Drivers extracted into a new folder, and Windows now tells me to click the setup file.  All good so far.  And there we go, drivers installed without even having to take the supplied CD out of its packet.

I'm going to assume that this has not installed Hauppauge's own TV software, which is perfectly fine with me as I plan to use Windows Media Center anyway.  The only reason it's been needed in the past on XP and Vista setups is in order to be able to utilise the IR remote control.  Let us hope that all goes to plan.

Batteries in the remote, point it at the TV, press the green button, and.. oh.  That was unexpected.  It told the PC to shut down.  Or, more correctly, it seems to have put it into sleep mode as pressing it again powered it back up without issue.  Let's try that again, with the "Go" button this time. Up comes Windows Media Center.  Success!

Setting up the TV section seems to be going smoothly.  It's detected the WinTV USB stick, has seemingly downloaded my 14 day program guide and is currently scanning for channels I can receive.  I must say that I have the device plugged into the aeriel on the roof, and not the little portable antenna that's packaged with the device (which has often proven in the past to be just a tiny bit worse than completely useless).

Now this is interesting.  Loading up the program guide shows that I can get Sky Player, let's give it a whirl.  Create a Sky ID, done.  Login, done.  Play some Sky News.  Nothing, black screen.  Click back, lots of flickering through different menus and confusion.  Nope, guess that's not working.  I'll have to do some digging on that later and get back to you.

Switch over to Dave, and there's...  Sorry, got distracted there watching Top Gear until Sun came up and asked me if I wanted to allow automatic updates to Java.  I imagine I'll be getting these for a couple of days as various things come to action and expect me to do something about it.  Well, never mind, it's repeated on Dave Ja Vu, so I'll just set it to automatically record.  Oh, new interface on the recording options since Vista Media Center.

The interesting thing so far, is that I've not had to touch a keyboard or mouse since installing the WinTV, except to enter my postcode when setting up the TV listings guide.

But anyway.  More on the Dell Zino HD in a couple of days.  The Top Gear show I was half-watching is about to start over on Dave Ja Vu, so I'm going to watch a DVD and let it record in the background.  Let's see if it can cope. :)

Tweeting & Stuff

At the request (some might call it nagging ) of a few readers I've finally gotten around to registering over on Twitter (and I do plan on "tweeting" as often as is useful without spamming the place) and I've also added social bookmarking icons with links to most of the major sites (yes, I know there's a couple missing).

I've got a few more planned to put up as soon as I find the time to dig up the appropriate code & URLs, so stay tuned.  Please post a comment on this blog entry if there's any specific site you want me to try and add support for.

Big thank you to Mohanjith's Blog for the links, and another big thank you to jwloh over at Deviant Art for creating his Social.me icon set. :)

I will also get around to changing the template for this at some point.  I've been having a browse around the various blogger template sites on the web, but I've not really seen anything that jumps out at me as something I'd like to use.  So, it will get done in my own time, and make something of my own, as I figure out how the blogger template structure actually works.

Dell Zino HD

I hadn't heard about Dell's new Inspiron Zino HD before, but while wandering the aisles of the local PC World to find a new PC for my wife, I ran across one on display and thought "Hey, that's a neat little box.  Could replace the PC that just died in the bedroom".  The PC in the bedroom is actually an HTPC, one of three PCs we run as HTPCs on the network, so that they can all access programs recorded by each other.

So I decided to go ahead and get one, along with the PC the wife had picked out, a wireless multimedia keyboard and a Hauppauge USB Dongle.

It wasn't the top of the line version with all the optional extras (Blu-Ray, larger hard drive, 8GB RAM, WiFi, etc), but it didn't need to be.  The TV in the bedroom is only 720HD, and it hooks up just fine through the HDMI.  It didn't have the TV Tuner card inside it, but a couple of aisles over I picked up the Hauppauge Win-TV USB stick with remote control (not the one shown on the site, we got the one that actually looks like a regular TV remote control).  Mass storage of recorded TV is all done on a central server so that all three HTPCs (as well as any other PCs wired into the network, or wireless laptops & devices) can access it all, so I wasn't too bothered about the fact that the hard drive was a mere 500GB.

I was so excited, I unpacked the base unit out of the box, along with the power adapter and started to plug it all in.  I had my own wireless keyboard and mouse for the bedroom already, so I didn't bother to unpack those.  I'm still using XP or Vista on most of my machines here so this was my first look at Windows 7 too.  As I said, I was quite excited.

I hit the power button and up it comes on the 32" Bravia mounted on the wall; It even detected it as 1360x768 resolution (which is near as good enough to 16:9) and not the 1280x768 16:10 resolution it normally detected (thus squashing TV programs and DVDs slightly) when hooked up to a PC via the VGA cable.  I was suitably impressed.

Shiny new loading screen from Windows 7, still impressed.  Then, all of a sudden, for no reason whatsoever, the system decides to reboot and I see the all too familiar "Windows failed to start correctly" screen (or words to that effect), and options to boot normally or boot into safe mode.  I figure it's just a fluke, and tell it to boot normally.  It gets halfway through the boot sequence again, restarts and no longer detects that there is a hard drive connected to the system.

So, to my dismay I package it all back off and trek back down to PC World, not a happy bunny.  I was even less happy when they told me they had no more in stock, only the display model.  So, now I have to wait until they can get a replacement machine into the store for me to pick up on Monday.

Not quite the post I was hoping to make when I handed over my credit card at PC World, but hopefully on Monday, I my will be faith restored.  This is the first time in about 15 years though that I've seen a Dell die so soon after coming new out of the box.

The wife, on the other hand, is currently installing World of Warcraft on her shiny new PC.  No doubt she'll be having me restore her system from the backup DVDs within a week or two. :)