Twelve Black Code Monkeys

By way of Gizmodo, there’s news of a new portable device by Epson that can display pictures, download them from Compact Flash or SD cards, and possibly play music and videos. The only information available right now is in Japanese, so I’m not even sure when or if this will make it to market outside of Japan, but it looks pretty exciting as a kind of convergence media device. Also, because this is in Japanese, I can’t really be sure of what the device is supposed to offer. What’s included below is just guesswork based on the few non-Japanese words and the pictures, so take what’s below with a grain of salt! And if anyone reading this knows Japanese and do a bit of translating, that would be great help!

The device, called the P-2000 Photo Fine Player, looks like it is designed primarily to view and download images. It looks like one possible feature may be to allow the user to zoom in to a smaller area within a picture and move around, as well as getting a kind of contact sheet of multiple images so that one can quickly move to the an image and display it. Apparently the device can display RAW image files from a series of Nikon and Canon cameras, but no Fuji or Olympus RAW, at least not listed. It looks like one can also hook the device directly to a TV or monitor for displaying pictures or other media, as well as hook the device to a printer (at least one that uses Epson’s USB Direct Print protocol) for printing things without involving a separate computer.

As far as this “other media” goes, all I can see is the mention of MPEG-4, a type of video format that allows for very good compression rates, and QuickTime, which MPEG-4 is based on. There’s also a mention of “motion jpeg” which displays full jpeg images as movies, thus is compressed only to the point that individual jpegs are compressed – it’s not a scheme in use nearly to the extent that QuickTime or MPEG-4 are.

The device also plays audio. MP3 is mentioned as well as AAC. AAC is a file format that like MP3 is lossy, but whose compression scheme is better, allowing for higher quality audio even with higher compression rates. The other big advantage to having AAC support is that this is the format Apple uses for it’s iTunes downloadable music files. However, I’m not sure whether simply supporting AAC also means that one can play such files on this device, since the AAC files that Apple provides have a copy-protection mechanism built in which may not be supported by the device.

While there are other “PMP” (Personal Media Player) devices out there that serve those who want to want to both listen to music, watch movies, and view pictures on the go, this is the first one that I’ve seen that also seems to add the functionality that is critical for serious digital photographers – the ability to directly download pictures from memory cards. The large capacity can hold over 6,000 of the largest files my 6-Megapixel D70 can produce, making it a pretty long-term portable storage device if one can’t take an actual laptop on location or load up on hundreds or even thousands of dollars worth of storage cards. Also the ability to hold the files on a more portable device than the camera itself with what looks like a larger screen and the ability to manage the images to some extent would just make this all the better.

A couple of pertinent questions come to mind other than the most obvious ones of whether it will actually be sold outside of Japan and if so when. First, the rate at which various other card reader/storage solutions like this can download images seems to vary quite a bit. Belkin makes a couple of devices for the iPod that will do basically everything this will but without any viewing capability. The main problem with it and the reason I haven’t bought it is that the speed they transfer images is exceedingly slow, upwards of a half hour for a 512MB card with 80 pictures. This may be ok for a lot of people, but if you are doing some moderately heavy shooting where hundreds of pictures and several 512MB cards are necessary, this sped just won’t cut it. Aside from which apparently transferring even one 512MB card depletes the iPod’s battery so much that you really can’t use it for more than this without then charging it for a much longer period of time before the next card is downloaded. Other dedicated devices, such as the Flashtrax, are said to be a lot faster.

Then there’s the little question of price. If this thing is priced at a hefty $700 or more, which isn’t beyond the realm of possibility given all its capabilities, this could put it out of reach for a most people. Of course professional photographers will probably not be as fazed, since it’s easy to pay twice this for a really good lense, let alone a DSLR camera body. But the average consumer could get just as much use out of this as a professional or serious amateur photographer, since a huge number of people now have digital cameras and it only takes a long vacation to demonstrate how quickly memory cards can be eaten up unless you take your laptop and do daily dumps of your images onto it.

I for one love to see such devices and hope more companies come out with them. One wonderful feature I can think of would be a keyboard so that one can either rename images easily, or change metadata for a given image. The ability to hook the device to a cell phone (via wires or wireless) to upload your images online would be great, although even for one 6MB file, this might take an excruciatingly long period of time with current mobile phone speeds. Eventually, I would hope one could go into a Blockbuster or other such place and download any movie one desires via a kiosk. But I guess such kiosks could be placed anywhere and could also offer any music as well as movie or tv show. Pairing such a device eventually with a smartphone and giving it the ability to communicate via Wimax and/or Wireless USB would enable buying and downloading media virtually anywhere. This is all pretty far away, but maybe not as far away as it seems. The technologies all exist in one for or another and except for the expense in creating such a device and the need for it to be relatively small, it could be created right now, more or less.

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Nikon recently announced its flagship 12MP DSLR, the D2X, close behind Fuji’s S3 Pro. Now Canon has gotten into the fray with it’s latest and greatest, the top-of-the-line professional EOS-1DS Mark II. The highest priced of these cameras it is also one with the highest resolution in terms of pure pixel elements – a whopping 16MP, which should be enough to equal or surpace that of 35mm film, maybe even some medium format film. The CMOS sensor is a new one, and with a full-frame 35mm size it promises to have minimal amounts of digital noise, but it otherwise is does not use any innovative new designs like the Fuji S3’s or the Sigma’s Fovean models. Like the D2X, the 1DS has new WIFI capability. At a cool $8,000 retail, this camera is not for the amateur. Well, unless the amateur has lots of disposable income! Lots of sports photographers use the EOS-1D Mark II as it is very competitive in terms of fast frame rates, but the 1DS actually has a lower frame rate, at least at the high resolutions, so I wonder whether such photographers or magazines will want to invest in something the main benefit of which (higher resolution) comes at the loss of speed. And let’s face it, the highest these images are going to be printed for the vast majority of applications is 8×10, for which a 6MP camera is perfectly acceptable…

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In the professional Digital “compact” (meaning sensor sizes up to 35mm but not larger) SLR market, Nikon, Cannon, and Fuji have been battling it out for a few years now. Earlier this year, Canon took the lead, some would say, with its EOS-1D Mark II, which matched the 8+ frames per second of Nikon’s D2H, but doubling the resolution to 8 megapixels, plus a CMOS sensor that yields much less noisy images. The highly anticipated Fuji S3 Pro, supposedly coming out next month, will up the anti with a more advanced sensor that alledgedly pushes dynamic range a lot closer to the capability of film. Nikon’s D2H, which came out prior to the Mark II, has been Nikon’s top-of-the-line DSLR for professionals since then, but its 4-megapixel sensor has been superceded by most DSLR’s in the past year, even those costing a fraction of the price, and even most prosumer models as well. The Mark II is a much more expensive camera, but for newsrooms, that’s not much of an issue considering cameras with much less capability were being purchased not very long ago for $25,000 a pop!

So finally, Nikon has come out with the predecessor to its D1H and D2X – the D2H. It now incorporates a 12-megapixel CMOS sensor for less noisy images and three times higher resolution. At the full 12MP, it will only do 5 frames per second, but it has a special 6.8MP mode that pushes the frame rate back up to 8, so in this sense it is both better and worse than the Mark II – able to take higher resolution images, albeit at a slower frame rate, and lower resolution images that the Mark II can take at the same 8 frames/second.. Nikon is also touting a new advanced image processing system that is supposed to enhance white balancing accuracy. Another new feature I haven’t seen in any DSLR yet is a multiple-exposure option. One other neat feature is compatibility with GPS devices, which one can connect via an optional cable and which will encode meta data in the image file that not only says when you took it, but exactly where! Finally, one of the other big features that Nikon is talking about is the D2H’s wireless capabilities, which include support for an older WT-1 wireless transmitter as well as a newer WT-2, which is able to communicate at the higher speeds (54mbps) of 802.11G. Nikon also just announced a new wireless file transfer protocol called Picture Transfer Protocol over Internet Protocol (PTP/IP), which will make these devices much more plug and play, as well as increase their transfer speeds. We’re not quite at USB 2 speeds of 480mbps (let alone firewire 800’s 800mbps), but this is a good deal better than USB 1.0, and is bound to just increase. So far, though, Nikon is leading the way. Hopefully other camera makers will take notice not only for digital SLR’s but prosumer models as well.

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DPReview.com just posted a hands-on preview of the new Fuji Pro S3 that I’m aware of. Fuji has become one of the top makers of digital SLR’s (and prosumer models), and many professionals are using Fuji S2’s. Fuji has been innovators in CCD technology, so that there DSLR’s as well as some of their prosumer models use what they call “super CCD’s.” The individual picture elements in these are not the standard square shape but octagonal, and the extra surfaces are touted to increase the image’s accuracy.

The Fuji S3 was originally announced in February with a release date of the second half of the year. However, Fuji hinted at releasing the camera in August, then September, and finally October, so it is nice to finally see at least a preview of this camera which means that it is hopefully very close to mass production.

The S3 is an 8 Megapixel camera (the S2 is 6MP), but this step up in resolution is not why many professionals have been eagerly awaiting this camera’s arrival. There is a quality of digital cameras which until the S3 has not really been addressed in all the upgrades from one camera model to the next. In the consumer/prosumer models, you see bright decals on the camera proclaiming “6 Megapixels!” or “10X Optical Zoom!” But no matter how high the resolution (and actually if you keep cramming more onto the same size of CCD you run into increased digital noise), one of the big limitations of digitals over film is something called “Dynamic Range.”

Film can capture many fine levels between the blackest black and the whitest white – around 11 stops to be more precise. Each stop in photography is twice as luminous or half as luminous as the last, so 11 stops means the 2 to the power of 11 or 2048 – light is 2048 times as bright as black. Current digitals have only 6 stops at most of dynamic range, which comes out to a piddly 64 times brighter. The S3 is the first camera to directly address this issue by another CCD design innovation that actually already exists in one of its prosumer models, but has been enhanced for the S3. The newer CCD actually has a separate set of picture elements specifically for handling the highlights (brightest parts) of an image, with which digital normally has a hard time avoiding overexposure. The claim is that this new technology adds a couple of stops of dynamic range, so the brightest parts can now be 256 times brighter than the darkest.

For those who aren’t big photography hobbyists or professionals, dynamic range may not seem that important. But for those in the know, it makes a huge different because it means that one can take a much wider range of images without fear of overexposing or underexposing. Any image with a huge amount of contrast is currently very difficult for digitals. An event as common as a wedding will see groomsman in dark suits and the bride in a white that can turn out to be hundreds of times brighter than the dark suits. Without complete control of lighting as in a studio, it become extremely easy to get one of those extremes off enough to where either shadow detail is lost or highlight detail is lost.

Unfortunately DPReview did not actually take any images, so that was disappointing. I really want to see that difference in dynamic range in a photo – and it would be easier to understand to see it visually for most people. A few other things I noticed from the preview: The S3, while able to take continuous pictures faster than the S2, still is no match for my D70, a camera that costs only $1000 compared to the S3’s $3000 or more. Also, the S3 still does not take a rechargeable lithium ion battery, something that many prosumer and digital SLR cameras have at least as one option. I’ve always been partial to these over multiple AA’s, as they are easier to handle as just one piece and tend to give much longer battery life. Other than these two items nothing really caught my eye. There are some interface improvements, but since I’m not intimately familiar with the S2, I may not pick up on some of the new stuff that S2 owners will.

There still is no word on exactly what the price will be for the S3. It was originally going to be $4,000, but since prices have come down in the digital SLR Market over the last year or so, it seemed likely that this price would drop to $3,500 or even $3,000. Also no further word on when the camera will hit the streets, although the latest quoted date as far as I know is “late October.”

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You would think that having been blogging for over a year and using a Treo 600 and before that a Sidekick I would have caught onto moblogging already. Perhaps its because I don’t go on a whole lot of trips and when I do go on trips I often bring my laptop and can post blog entries.

For those unfamiliar with the term, “moblogging” is short for mobile blogging and involves posting blog entries, often with images, but not necessarily, from your mobile phone, which is much more portable than even a laptop. Then again, taking pictures on your digital camera, downloading them to the PC, then emailing them, especially if you normally take them in RAW format, can be a very time-consuming process that works against the whole idea of blogging while on travel.

While I’m sure people have been doing this for a few years now (that is sending images and blog entries from their phone), it really hasn’t caught on until this last 6-12 months due to camera’s on phones either not being very good, or not even existing! In fact, my Color Sidekick’s camera, even though it was much better than the old one on the Black and White Sidekick I had initially, still produced a pathetically bad picture. It was only when I obtained my Treo 600 a couple of months ago that I had at my disposal a camera that I could actually bear to look at its 640 x 480 images (0.3 megapixel). Even so, they are pretty darn small and poor quality compared even to my first 1.3 megapixel camera that I got back in 2000. Suffice it to say I can’t wait until then next version of the Treo comes out which rumor has it contains a real 1 megapixel camera. I would be happy with just a half a megapixel (or 800 x 600), but I’ll take a full MP, as long as it doesn’t seriously tax the processor. I’m just afraid that pushing up the resolution too much may require many more seconds to record an image, thus making it hard to take very many pictures in a given period of time, so you could miss out on a bunch of great shots. A secondary issue for some may be the text entry process. Most phones are horrible at this and it will take you forever just to write a sentence. More specialized devices with keyboards like the Treo, the Blackberry, and the Sidekick, have keyboards that allow for much easier typing, although still not as easy as a full-sized keyboard.

In any case, after getting my Treo and starting to explore the wide world of applications out there, I came across a category of blogging tools. I tried a couple out, but didn’t get all that far. The ones I tried out really only let you send plain text and maybe upload an image, but you couldn’t submit html which would allow you to create links. Of course, I’ve only played with a couple of these, so I still need to do a lot more searching. In the mean time, I heard about these moblog sites that are specifically set up for mobile blogging. I found probably a good half dozen of these sites and culled this number down to a couple that looked like they were nicely polished, slick, and had lots of features and which you didn’t have to pay for – or at least there was a free account option in addition to payed premium account options. Those two moblog sites are Buzznet and TextAmerica.

My idea was to pick one and take pictures on my recent trip to North Carolina and send the pictures. Of course, things were just too busy before the trip and during to figure out which site would work best, so I ended up just deciding to take a few pictures and then wait till I got back and had a bit of free time to explore these sites more. Now that I’m back, that’s just what I’m doing:

Buzznet – So far, Buzznet is free, but will supposedly be unveiling a paid service in the future which will affect what they offer for the free account. Their interface to me is a little more intuitive and it’s less JavaScript-intensive which just means that I might be able to access it via the web browser on my Treo as opposed to TextAmerica which might not work. Their user pages (where your photos show up) look a whole lot nicer than the default you get with (the free version of ) TextAmerica. The one problem I’ve had with Buzznet so far is that it seems to be slow, both when you go to their site, but more importantly in actually posting images. When I posted a test image to both sites via email, the one TextAmerica image came up immediately whereas I had to wait a couple of minutes for Buzznet to display it. Then I tried a couple more and nothing happened! Eventually – like 20 or 30 minutes later – I got replies from Buzznet with some error messages, but then when I checked the images were finally visible. Another downside is that Buzznet only allows you to post 10 images per day and 200 per month (for now), The other not so great thing about Buzznet is that there’s very little in the way of support. They have an FAQ and some help information on some of the screens, but this doesn’t amount to much. There are no support forums or a support page, or even an email for support. This is really important in my opinion and a company that doesn’t set up a support infrastructure to help their users and for their users to help each other is, I think, shooting itself in the foot. The one thing that makes Buzznet usable for me, though, is that they let you syndicate your content very easily. They provide feed files in a bunch of different formats and also provide a JavaScript tag that just lets you embed the content. Here, though, we again come to the weakness in not having adequate support info: apparently you can customize how your content is formatted where it’s being syndicated, but there’s no information on how to actually modify the feeds or the JavaScript. Nevertheless, the default is decent enough that I have added it to the right side of my blog here. If you don’t see it, scroll up or down a bit and you should see the last 5 images from my Buzznet moblog (I’ve only put two in so far as of this writing). You can click on these images to get a title and more detailed description. What I would like to customize is just to be able to include the title with the image here on the right…

TextAmerica – TextAmerica seems to have a lot of strengths where Buzznet is weak and visa versa. As mentioned, the initial image I posted came up immediately after it was sent. The main pages and the admin pages are very slick looking, but individual moblog pages seem very plain in comparison. For some, this may actually be preferable, but not for others. Unlike Buzznet, TextAmerica has extensive help information in their user guide. In addition to this they have an FAQ, and moblog hosted by their technical support person which includes updates on features and fixes as they are made. Finally, they actually have someone you can IM with questions to get immediate help (although when I looked this screen name was not logged in. The free service comes with 25MB of storage, enough for at least 500 small images, and a lot more if they are compressed enough. Unfortunately, going up one level to the paid service will jump you up to $7/month. This provides a bunch of additional features, twice the storage and additional bandwidth. The main thing that I wanted to do, though, has eluded me so far with TextAmerica. They say on their FAQ that there is code available that will let you syndicate your moblog, but they don’t provide it there and a search in their userguide also turned up nothing, so for now this pretty much eliminates TextAmerica as far as I’m concerned, but I am going to try to get in touch with them to see if I can get this code from them to syndicate here.

There’s something else that these sites offer for some people which is just as important as the functionality of posting your pictures – a community. People get to link to each other, label themselves as friends of another user, comment on their entries, etc. – genuinely picture-sharing sites. While definitely an interesting function, and very useful for some, it isn’t really something I want to use it for. I have a blog here at blog city and do all my writing here, so why have another just for photos? My inclination is to basically stick to one host for everything. I know people who have blogs, Livejournal journals, moblogs, and more where you can find their various kinds of content. To me, though, it’s a lot easier if I have a central place to go to for everything and I think easier for others as well. So why would I then go to another service for moblogging? Well, while Blog City, my blog host, does have SOME of the functionality of a moblog. I can email text entries from my phone and have the show up in my blog. I can also email an address at Blog City with an attached image and it will show up in my photo album. But unfortunately so far you cannot post an entry with both text and an image in it via an email with an attached photo and some text, which is what you would need to emulate the functionality of a moblog. I’ve contacted Blog City and as usual they were very receptive about the idea, but who knows how hard it is to implement and thus when (or if) it will. All I know is if it is offered then I can actually ditch the separate moblogs and use Blog City exclusively, which would be a whole lot simpler!

As you can tell, I am still really feeling my way through this whole phenomenon, and I may be missing a lot of things that some moblog veterans out there may be shaking their heads at. All I can say is – please correct me! Anything that I don’t have right, or that’s incomplete, please enlighten me (us) as to what the real deal is. If you have additional suggestions or corrections, I want to hear them!

Update: I finally got ahold of the TextAmerica support person via AIM and they said that syndication was only available on “upgraded” (read paid) accounts. Free accounts do not provide this, so I think it looks like Buzznet for now unless I come accross another moblog host that was previously unknown to me that provides even more for free…

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Wouldn’t you know it, just as I am starting to get a handle on my new Treo 600, my wife goes and buys me a new digital camera! Well, part of one anyway. It’s the Nikon D70, and I’ve been lusting after it for a while now! I’ve previously rambled on about my experiences with photography in general and digital in particular. This will be my fifth digital camera, which is hard to believe, since I got my first one only four years ago. I guess I’ve averaged a new one once a year! My last digital, the Canon S50, was bought with the hopes of pushing me to take more photographs, since it is a good deal smaller than the previous cameras I had and so more portable. I think it did help me take more, but not significantly more. I will probably hold onto the S50 as something that I can just throw in my pocket when I don’t want to lug a big camera bag and an expensive camera and lens. All my other digital cameras I ended up selling to friends in order to buy the next one, but this one, which is the most expensive one yet, I am getting without that benefit – although as I said my wife is helping me out.

I’m always amazed at my wife’s photographs, which she’s taken primarily on SLR’s – first a 35mm film Nikon F1, and more recently on a digital Fuji S2. Most of this is due to her skill at capturing things at the right moment, framing shots perfectly, and doing all the technical meatering stuff that I’m still too lazy to do. But also, part of it is the lenses she uses, which give her much wider leeway in terms of zooming and especially depth of field than are possible with the S50’s small lens.

In the last year or so there have been a lot more prosumer digicams coming on the market with longer lenses that have at least much more powerful optical zooms, but most of these are almost as expensive if not more so than the D70′s body (lenses of course can mutilply it’s price by leaps and bounds), and the lower priced ones simply don’t have half the control and functionality of the D70. When the Canon Rebel digital SLR came out last year and was the first digital SLR for under $1,000, I started salivating! Here was a camera within reach, at least theoretically, but an actual SLR. Reading the reviews, I was a bit disappointed. It seemed that Cannon had intentionally crippled the camera’s capabilities by simply turning off certain functionality that was available. This was done for marketing reasons as their higher-priced pro DSLR, the 10D, would have been outclassed at least in a lot of ways, and the 10D is a lot more expensive. Even some of the functionality that I’d had my small S50 would not be available on this SLR. So, I used that as a good excuse to not get too serious about looking to get one. Then the D70 came out this year, and according to the reviews it not only had many of the things that the Rebel lacked, but it was even superior to more expensive cameras in some ways – like in lag time. I decided that the D70 would be my next camera. I didn’t expect to get it by the summer, but figured that with some luck I’d have it by the end of the year. Well, as it turned out, the summer isn’t even halfway over and the D70 is in my hands, and while I’m very happy, I’m also a bit overwhelmed! It’s one thing if I could spend 30 hours a week playing with this thing, but with a new house, a full-time job, etc., I’ll be lucky to spend a quarter of that time playing with it!

Not only am I going from a compact prosumer digicam to a full-sized SLR, but I am also going from one brand, Canon, to another, Nikon. I’ve used Canons exclusively now for almost 3 years, so this is going to be as much of an adjustment as going to an SLR, since menu items are different, buttons are different, and of course the software is different. I’ve just started playing with the D70 and it feels so much more solid than any of the prosumer digicams I’ve had. It weighs more, of course, especially with a larger lens, and this just makes it feel less like a toy and more like a professional piece of equipment.

Other than the sheer size, the additional functionality, and all the different menus and buttons, I also have to deal with new software, or at least I may. For most of the time I’ve owned Canons, I’ve been using a program called Breezebrowser, which is highly regarded image management program built primarily for Canon digital cameras, although it does support other brands to a lesser extent. It has more features than Canon’s own software, particularly when it comes to RAW files. The canon S50 is a 5 megapixel camera and the Nikon is 6 megapixel, so one wouldn’t think the files would be that much bigger with a 1 megapixel jump, but they are. According to the D70, a 512MB compact flash card will only allow me to take about 47 pictures in its RAW format, while the S50 will give me twice that number! So I’m not sure whether to continue using RAW as I had been exclusively with the Canons. RAW is definitely the most flexible format, but if each raw file takes up over 10MB of space, I just don’t know if I can manage that on the storage devices at my disposal, and I don’t feel like laying out yet more money for gobs more storage or blank dvd’s to hold the results of each time I go out to shoot! So I may have to go back to Jpeg. Breezebrowser is a very nice program not just for converting but also for viewing, organizing, etc., and a companion product called Downloader Pro is the only one I’ve seen that allows you an incredible level of control over how images are downloaded and saved from a camera. I store my images in folders that coincide with when they were taken, so /2004/07/18/ would hold the files I took on July 18, 2004. Maybe not the best way of organizing, but I’ve gotten used to it. Nikon’s Picture Project, which comes with the D70, seems like a decent piece of software for making different sets of albums, allowing one to make different logical album categorizations without actually creating multiple copies of the images in those albums. Nikon Capture is a highly rated piece of software, but I’m not sure exactly its purpose yet. It only comes as a trial for the D70. Looks like it is maybe mostly for converting RAW images and editing images. I need to do some serious research and narrow down what the best software to use is so that I don’t have to go about learning half a dozen different packages!

Thom Hogan has an eBook about the D70 and I’ve ordered it because while the D70 manual is ok as far as digicam manuals go… it is a digicam manual! It gives you the basics, explains certain things that really don’t need explaining, and then shows you lots of LCD diagrams that make no visual sense. It doesn’t go into great detail on more advanced functionality either.

In any case, here are a few of the first pictures I’ve taken with the D70:

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We went to NYC for the 4th of July this year again. I’m not sure if it was because of fear of some terrorist incident or more people taking advantage of the extra day to take vacation, but the city was pretty empty, or at least the traffic was nonexistent! That was nice, and made getting in and out of the city a lot easier than even on a regular weekend.

As a kid, we used to go to the East River to watch the fireworks launch from big barges. We lived right near the 34th Street Heleport and so would watch from around there or occasionally as far down as the Waterside apartment complex in the 20’s. The view was spectacular so I got spoiled early in life as far as fireworks are concerned.

Not wanting to struggle through thick crowds this year, we took advantage of the fact that where I grew up and where my mom still lives, Kips Bay Towers, is only a block or so from the river. Although in between Kips Bay and the river is NYU Medical Center (or Tisch Hospital as it’s known now), you can still see a lot. Kips Bay consists of two big buildings with a courtyard in between. There’s another courtyard just east of the northern building, and that’s the area that’s closest to the river and thus has the best view.

We headed downstairs only 15 minutes before the fireworks were set to start, bringing just our lawn chairs and some cameras. Other residents had spreads of food and drink, but we had come from a party at my brother’s just a couple hours earlier at which we had stuffed ourselves, so of course did not need to even look at any food for quite a while!

I took a bunch of pictures with my Canon S50. I did not have a tripod with me, so had to try to hold it steady on the back of my chair, which was itself sitting somewhat unstably in spongy grass. I started off with some longer exposures trying to get more artistic (as opposed to realistic) shots, and then eventually punched up the sensitivity (ISO) and opened the aperture up so that I could get shots that were short enough to provide more realistic images. Here are some of the ones I think look the best:

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Brood X, these guys are called. I’m sure you’ve heard of them on the news, if you haven’t actually seen them in person. They come out every 17 years to breed, and thank goodness it isn’t more often. We don’t even have it as bad as some other folks I know. A friend of ours has piles of dead cicadas or their molts on his curb, like fall leaves! Nothing like moving into a new house only to be inundated by huge bugs. At least they don’t bite or destroy your plants, but still! There is also the sound they make. To me it sounds like an old Star Trek phaser. But it is constant. They seem to make this sound only in the mornings and maybe early afternoons, but not at night. It can get a bit much especially if there are a good number fairly close by.

I definitely have thought about eating them, because they are likely to be excellent sources of protein, vitamins, and minerals, but even though I can be somewhat adventurous, somehow I can’t see actually bringing these things into the house. Some guy tried some and ended up in the hospital, but unless you have food allergies, the worste you will probably get is nausea or indegestion.

Last night we went out into the back yard and the grass was literally crawling with the things, which were heading toward the nearest tree. It was too dark to take any good shots last night, but I finally got around to taking a few this morning. I’m going to try again tomorrow maybe, since these were taken in a hurry, and are not the best shots. Also, I don’t have the software here at work to get anything other than the imbedded 640×480 jpeg, whereas most of the shots I have available for viewing are 800×600, so once I get the chance I will get these replaced by larger shots.

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Me and my wife decided to take a quick stroll around the neighborhood today since it is an unseasonably warm 65 degrees on this leapyear day. There’s a small park in our neighborhood which we go to far too seldomly, and this proved a nice place to relax and take a few pictures. I thought I’d post a few here:

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Back a few months ago I was on a hunt to find a better site to host my digital photos and let me share them with others. I have used a couple of sites for years:

Imagestation.com is a site started by Sony that I subscribed to because it was free and because my first digital camera back in 2000 was a Sony. Doing research later I found it to be one of the most sophisticated sites at the time and probably the most likely to stay in business during what turned out to be the begging of the dot bomb (dot com crash).

Pbase.com is a hopegrown site developed by one person that was initially free. Other than the difference between an individual owning the site vs. a massive corporation, a few others were as follows: Imagestation offers prints and unlimited downloads, Pbase offers a Bulletin Board system, and is more geared towards professionals, with display of exif info, incredible flexibility in display, etc. Pbase was initially free, but eventually started charging a fee.

So for a long time I was actually storing my photos on both of these sites. I would upload the original image to Imagestation because I got unlimited storage, so it was a sort of extra backup scheme. Then I would upload a 640×480 or 800×600 reduced image to Pbase. The other thing that Imagestation has going for it is that you can create a list of people, even by importing your address book from Outlook or other application, so that you can quickly send out mass invites to see a new album. I would sometimes use this feature, but eventually Imagestation made it so that you had to register on their site in order to look at images, and some of my friends just did not want to do this.

I got married in October of 2003 and my wife has a side business in photography which I have been starting to contribute to at least in a minor way. She did not host her photos anywhere and I really felt like the double work I was doing posting my shots to two separate sites was wasting time. Furthermore we wanted a site where we could also upload all our wedding shots so that the guests at our wedding could look at them and even order prints if they so chose.

So I started doing an exhaustive search. I started with a great resource that lets you compare different sites based on a bunch of different criteria. Some of the information is not very complete and it’s really hard to get a handle on exactly how a site is going to work until you actually go to it and try using it. So I started subscribing to many of these sites, posting some sample images, editing, deleting, changing the display properties, and so forth. Other than wanting to have prints as an option, other things I looked for were display flexibility (different resolutions, customizability of the layout, password protection, hierarchical structure of albums within folders, ease of moving images around, deleting, etc), how stable the company looked, how responsive they are to customers, whether they are geared to professionals, and many others.

I created a big spreadsheet which I unfortunately don’t have anymore, and after starting with probably 30 sites (after eliminating some almost immediately because they didn’t have some basic feature or just looked really amateurish, nascent, or scammish), I finally got it down to 5 sites. These sites were Clubphoto.com, Printroom.com, Fotki.com, Fototime.com, and Smugmug.com. All of these sites have different strengths and weaknesses in their interface, features, etc. I was having a hard time paring it down from here, so I figured this was a good point to actually compare the print quality. We ordered about 6 or 7 prints (the same ones) from each of these sites and compared them. My wife, who has a much better eye for these things than myself, picked Smugmug as having the most realistic color reproduction. So after a little further looking to make sure there weren’t any serious deficits, we took the plunge and went for one of their professional level subscriptions.

Boy, am I glad that we made that decision! They have been nothing but a pleasure to work with. Admittedly we have not ordered any other prints, nor have any of our wedding guests as far as we know, but otherwise, I have gotten extremely fast responses to any of my questions, suggestions, or an occasional spotting of a typo or other minor bug. Smugmug is run by a whole family. Chris MacAskill, his wife, sons, daughter, daughter in law, etc., created and manage the site. They do it with the pride and attention that shines through. They are extremely responsive to customers’ suggestions, going so far as to change their printing partner based on feedback from customers. It’s actually a bit funny that they did this, since we had based our decision off of their old printing partner, which happened to be the Clubphoto! Luckily, though, their new partner is the same lab as used by Printroom.com, EZprints, and this came in a close second to Clubphoto when we were comparing them. The apparent advantage of EZprints is that they provide proofs and ICC profiles, which are invaluable for photographers wanting to really make sure the end product matches what they see on their screen as closely as possible. They even wrote up a very thorough explanation of why they switched Ezprints. In other words, they really base their decisions on feedback from customers and totally keep those customers in the loop at every stage of the process! Since we’ve joined they’ve made some fairly significant additions to the features on the site (watermarking and the ability to customize your print prices just to name a couple) and you really get the impression that they are constantly working on new ones. They have also been active responding to questions posted in the forums on dpreview.com, where more and more photographers are repeating the good reviews I’m giving them here.

I definitely would recommend that you at least include them as one of the photo sharing/hosting sites that you look at when doing your own comparisons. Everyone has different requirements and priorities so they may not be the perfect host for everyone, but they will be for many. Here’s a link to my own galleries on the site – just note that none of these images are edited in any way. One of the things that is on my very long list of things to do is to get more skilled at Photoshop so that I can start editing my images in a competent way! If you do end up signing up for an account, I would just ask that you give my “coupon code” in the referral field. Of course it’s completely up to you, but it will at least give you $5 off the membership if you decide to go with them, and it will also compensate me for taking the time to write all this out ($10), lol! My coupon code is KBtZHuH46Crcw. Whichever host you end up with, good luck, and send me a link!

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