Time in the wind

It has been a busy summer and it took a while to get these posted. Photos are from our family trip to Ireland in June of 2008. If you've never seen Ireland, have a look. Then, if you've never been there, go. It is worth it.

The photos are in the gallery in an Album named Southwest Ireland

We're soon off to Ireland for a family vacation. Staying in Kenmare and traveling around by rental van on various day trips.

We'll see the Ring of Kerry, Dingle Penisula, Cliffs of Moher, Cork, Tra-lee, Kenmare, Kilarney and probably Waterford and Blarney.

Story and photos to follow, probably by end of June.

It took a long time to sort through 2000+ images and pick the ones worth sharing. I got down to about 600 that were worth putting family and close friends through. I then selected about half for sharing online. Have a look in the gallery in the Russia Gallery

Though it took me a few weeks to find time to post this story, some of you will surely identify with it. Ever been somewhere worth visiting but had very little time to see it? Did you pick a few things and really explore them or try to see it all in a short time?

My mom and I went to London to visit my sister who is living there for a few years and to see London. My mom had not been outside North America previously. We didn't anticipate how much of London she'd see on her first big trip. In what amounted to a 4 day weekend, we saw Buckingham Palace's changing of the horse guard and changing of the guard, we rode the London Eye, we took a boat to Greenwich and toured the observatory and park, we took the tube to Kew Gardens and saw most of the grounds and glass houses, we saw Westminster Abbey, Big Ben and the House of Parliment, we wandered around Nob Hill and walked over to Hyde Park and Kensington Palace, strolled through the park and gardens and had a lot of great meals. I arrived a day later than my mom so she also had high tea and rode the Big Bus double decker bus tour before I showed up. Whew! Since we rode the tube and walked almost everywhere, it was a good workout as well as a ton of seeing London at a walking pace (though we walk at a pretty fast pace).

It wasn't a normal weekend in London. Besides the pace and variety, it was hot and sunny the whole time and I got sunburned. That doesn't happen in London very often.

Plenty of pictures in the Gallery

If you read other entries in my blog, you'll note that I am a Linux operating system user. As a digital photographer, I've had to hunt a little harder for good image management and image editing software but I've found that I can do everything I need to on Linux. Well, almost. I have a Canon i960 Photo printer that is capable of some really great printing. However, there didn't seem to be any drivers that really let me take full advantage of this printer from Linux.

Today I found TurboPrint from ZEDOnet, GmbH. TurboPrint provides drivers for many printers and some handy utilities for setting up and managing printer configuration. There is a free downloadable version but it adds a very annoying logo and text to each print. For only about $30 US, you can buy a key to register TurboPrint and get rid of the reminders on your prints.

Of course I wish Canon or Linux distributors would make Linux drivers for this printer. Until they do, this solution is working quite well for me.

Just back from a warm winter getaway in Saint Thomas. We had great weather, great views and great fun. There was beautiful flora and interesting fauna. Some samples below and more in the gallery.

I recently discovered that Lightzone is available in a Linux version. Though not as supported as the Windows version, this version is currently free. I have it running and will be testing it more thoroughly in the coming weeks.

I have not worked out the overall workflow yet but it looks like the basic software toolset is Picassa for general sorting and viewing with Lightzone for RAW processing and more detailed editing.

The completeness and ease of Photoshop Elements for processing NEF/RAW, managing images and outputting in a variety of fun formats is still pretty appealing. The counter-balance is that I use Linux as my primary desktop and would prefer not to deal with three operating systems (Windows for Photoshop Elements, Linux for almost everything else and Mac OS X for my iTunes which is on an old Macbook).

I've been looking for a way to keep my bookmarks synchronized across my machines for a long time now. There have been some Firefox add-ons that do this but they usually use someone else's server or are part of a social bookmarking system. I just wanted to keep my machines in sync, not share my bookmarks with others.

The best solution I had found was to put my Firefox profiles directory into a directory in my Novell iFolder. On Windows this is pretty easy. On Linux, you don't move the profiles, you just create a soft link to the bookmarks.html in the iFolder from the profile directory. So far so good but I also have a Macbook. It's main purpose in life is to maintain my music collection for my iPod, a hangover from a bad decision I made when I first got an iPod. Not that Macintosh doesn't work well but that forced my iPod to an Apple filesystem instead of a FAT filesystem. I've regretted that many times since I'd like to try my iPod with my Linux desktops but they all look for a FAT formatted iPod.

Back to the bookmark problem. There is no iFolder client for Macintosh. Enter Foxmarks, a nice little add-on for Firefox that lets you sync your bookmarks to a server via ftp or WebDAV. By default, Foxmarks uses an install wizard that will set you up with the foxcloud.com servers. A bonus is that you can then use your bookmarks from anywhere just by going to my.foxmarks.com where, I presume, they run your xml bookmark file through a stylesheet that lets you see it in your browser as links.

In my case I didn't want to use their server so I passed up their great add-on for a long time. This week I ran across an article on one of the news sites about how to skip the install wizard and setup Foxmarks with your own server. I've lost the link to that article but the process was pretty simple:

On your server, create an account and a directory with the same name. Secure this account with a password and the directory with this account.The directory could be outside your normal web directories as long as you have ftp access to it with the account and password you choose.

Download / install Foxmarks.
Restart Firefox
Cancel the Wizard, checking the box that says not to run the Wizard again.
On your Bookmarks menu, choose Foxmarks
Enter username and password you created on your site
Go to the "other" tab
Choose FTP (unless you know you have a working WebDAV implementation)
Put your server name and the path to the directory you created in the server and path fields
If this is the first time you've set this up, choose upload now to create the intial file
Choose OK -- if all goes well, it will copy your file to the server; otherwise you'll see an error message

Foxcloud also has information on this configuration in their FAQ

I saw a post today that had RIM's co-CEO saying that Apple's iPhone wasn't a threat to RIM's Blackberry market.

As someone that routinely travels with laptop, iPod and Blackberry, I think RIM may be playing down the appeal of the consumer oriented devices to the professional market. I'll have to see Apple's soft keyboard in action before I can know if I'll switch but the idea of my iPod and PDA/Phone being all one device with a much better browser is pretty appealing. Backwards compatibility with my iPod and all my iPod saved music is far more important than backwards compatibility with my Blackberry so the Pearl and the new 8800 are not options for me but the iPhone may be.

I've been searching for something like FireFTP for a long time. This plug-in for the Firefox browser brings a useful, interactive FTP client into the browser. You can access from the tools menu and, optionally, configure it for all ftp links. Drag and drop files, store accounts to connect to and generally make dealing with ftp file transfers much easier without needing a separate ftp client outside the browser.

You can download FireFTP from Mozilla's plug-in site.

I just added an online photo gallery to this site.

I've only uploaded a small number of photos so far. Winter has finally arrived here. I look forward to making interesting images in the snow, ice and cold but I don't enjoy going out in the cold rain and sleet and that's what we're having now. So much for that 70 degree weekend I wrote about last time.

To say our weather has been unusually mild doesn't really paint an accurate picture. We have had no appreciable snow, 20% lower than normal heating costs and, yesterday, it was 70 degrees around here. Today it is 15 degrees cooler which is still 15 degrees above average for this time of year.

We took advantage of this weather and got out for a hike yesterday at Drumlin Farm in Lincoln, MA. Drumlin Farm is a nice mix of working farm with gardens and animals and walking trails with birds and other wildlife. There are a few animals in captivity that are not farm animals. For various reasons, they cannot go back to the wild. There's a pair of owls that are each blind in one eye, a red-tail hawk with a bad wing, two red foxes, one that is a rare black and white "red" box. Since they are all behind fences, they don't make great pictures. The larger farm animals are the exception since they're in pens and fenced in fields, not cages.



I also got some extra exercise and fresh air today by going for a hike in Sarah Doublet Forest in Littleton, MA and a second, shorter walk in the Cobb Trust conservation land nearby.



I'm finding that, for some shots, I'm pleased with the camera's choices. For some of the farm shots yesterday, the cloudier weather seemed to fool it into not picking daylight when it should have and I had to adjust the white balance to get a satisfying image. In fact, white balance is the setting I most often disagree with the camera over.

The moral of the story? Know what your camera is doing for you and help it make the right choice by getting out of automatic mode when you think it will be fooled. That or shoot all RAW all the time and make the right choices later in the computer. I don't want to work that hard on every casual image.
I'm saving to NEF and JPEG right now so I can be lazy with casual shots but not have regrets when the perfect picture presents itself.

We've had wet weather and I haven't been able to get out to take many photos with the new camera. Instead I've been trying out a lot of software. I've tried Photoshop CS3 beta, Photoshop Lightroom beta, Photoshop Elements, all from Adobe and I've also tried Nikon's Capture NX, Capture Editor and Picture Perfect. I tried Corel Paintshop Pro Photo and Snapfire. I tried Lightzone from Lightcrafts. Since I use Linux most of the time and these are all Windows and / or Mac products, I also tried a combination of F-Spot, The Gimp and Google's Picassa to see if I could stay all Linux all the time.

F-Spot and Picassa as well as Snapfire and Picture Perfect seem best for casual editing and cool print options but lack the high-end tools for good RAW handling and automated batch processes for repetitive workflows. On the other hand, Capture NX and Photoshop, et al have all kinds of powerful features but no fun print templates, photo albums, etc.

Photoshop Elements may be the choice for now since it handles NEF (Nikon's RAW files) and has fun output options like calendars, photo album pages, bordered prints, slideshows and video CD. Stay tuned for updates as I try out all these programs for the next 30 days. If you have found the perfect solution, please add a comment or send me an email.

I got the Nikon D80 that I mentioned in my last entry, charged the battery and headed off to Springfield, MA for dinner with my brother and his family and my Aunt and Uncle. My nephew is 3, very cute and loves to make funny faces: a good subject for trying out the indoor performance of the camera. I had only the built-in flash.

First observation is that the focus assist beam is very noticeable. I kept worrying the people a few tables behind my subject when they'd notice this horizontal beam of light across their table. It did make for fast focusing in low light though.

I've heard reports that the automatic white balancing of most D-SLR's leaves something to be desired. In this case, the white balance with the flash was fine since the flash was providing much of the light for the main subject.

The 18mm-135mm f3.5-4.5 zoom that came in the kit (my compromise while trying to find an 18mm-200mm VR) actually performs great for my indoor needs. I'll want the extra telephoto range when I get outdoors.

As I mentioned in my last entry, I'm more interested in convenience than when I used to be willing to carry 5 or more lenses and 2 bodies to even the most casual occaision. The D80 does not dissappoint. With that 27mm - 205mm equivalent zoom range, solid built-in flash performance and alleged 2,700 shots per charge (without the flash, I'm sure), it can handle places I've settled for point and shoot digital as well as go places I was still bringing the whole 35mm film kit for lack of a better digital camera.

In some areas I've always been an early adopter. Photography hasn't been one of those areas in a long time. I've stuck with 35mm film for serious picture taking while using small point and shoot digital cameras when convenience was more important than quality. No more. I've decided to make the leap to Digital SLR Photography. I've given most of my 35mm cameras to a local school's photo program.

My 35mm cameras have always been Pentax and I have a good selection of their lenses. As such, I really wanted to love the new Pentax K10D. I read the dpreview.com review got discouraged, mostly over the sharpness or lack thereof. I am moving to digital partly because of convenience and I don't want to have to work at each and every picture doing my own RAW conversions to get good images.

Since Pentax started looking less interesting (and then the Hoya-Pentax merger got announced, creating more doubt), I looked next at Canon. My point and shoot digitals are Canon and I've been pleasantly surprised with the image quality and color handling. I took a good look at the new Digital Revel XTi and almost bought it. It came up short on a few features I was interested in so I also looked at the higher end Canons but none was the perfect set of features. The 5D lacks a simple built-in flash -- I know the pro models usually don't include this but convenience is important to me, remember -- I won't always have a separate flash unit with me.

I finally settled on a Nikon D80. It got great reviews and I liked the balance of ease and capability when I tried it out. It was easy finding one right after the holidays but I will be picking one up tomorrow. Nikon also offers the perfect single lens for most of my needs but that is sold out everywhere and it looks like it will be for a while. I'll always want a few great lens for when the quality is that important but this 18-200mm AF DX VR lens is vibration reduction equipped, light, covers a huge 27 to over 300mm equivalent range and makes it possible to get most of the D-SLR quality without a bag full of lenses. This is especially important when I'm travelling on business and need to fit the camera gear in with the tools of my trade (laptop, cellphone, etc.).

Since my love of photography is being rekindled, I plan to post images and write about photography more on this site. Check back for hands on reports on using the D80 and general digital photography tips and tricks.