Keys Corner

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And here, “The making of…” or how they set up the camera to take it.

(Via Dark Roasted Blend)

When we were in Spain, we took our i-Blue 747 GPS track logger with us and left it running most of the time when we were out with the cameras. I was expecting that it would be a simple matter to geocode the photos when we returned.

But it turned out that there were a couple of snags to overcome first.

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One hassle with using a digital camera is that you have to transfer the photos to your computer to process them. There are two ways, usually, that this is done:

• use a memory-card reader (often attached by a propriety USB cable which the camera manufacturer sells at a high price, if you ever need to replace it)
or
• by connecting the camera by cable directly to your Mac or PC

Both methods involve fiddling around: with either a cable or with the memory card from the camera.

So its nice to see that manufacturers are starting to offer SD memory cards which can communicate from within the camera to the computer using Wireless LAN. For example, Lexar, who have just announced a 2GB WLAN SD card for exactly that purpose. I haven’t seen a WLAN SD card for sale in Germany yet, but I hope it won’t be long before they are available here.

On a similar note, its nice to see that a similar approach of making life more convenient is starting to appear in other areas. For example, Mark/Space have just announced that their latest software can automatically synchronize data between your PDA and computer wirelessly each time they are within 10 meters of each other.

I bought an i-Blue 747 GPS track logger recently. You can pick one up, new, on eBay for around 40 – 50 Euro. The idea is to use it to tag photos with their position – our cameras don’t have GPS receivers built in, and often when we get back from holiday, its difficult to remember where exactly we took which pictures. If you set the clock in the (digital) camera before you set off, the time-stamp from the GPS log, together with the position data allow you add the exact position of each photo to the EXIF data that the camera stores when each picture is taken.

The problem is, few GPS loggers come with any software for downloading and processing the track data on a Mac. I’m not aware of any that supports OS X “out of the box”. However, there is lots of third party software around which can be used to read out the scans and process them on the Mac. It takes time to track them down, however. So here’s what works for me:

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A few days ago Microsoft and Nikon announced a patent sharing deal. At the time a Microsoft employee was quoted as saying:

This agreement is another great example of how industry leaders are coming together to collaborate through intellectual property licensing, and by doing so enabling innovation which that will ultimately benefit the consumer.

However all is not sunshine in Nikon-land. The latest camera announcement (the Coolpix P6000) contains a statement that the RAW format used is not compatible with Nikon’s existing format and is tied to Microsoft’s Window Imaging Component, which only runs under Windows XP SP3 and Windows Vista. Moreover, Nikon has no plans to support non-Windows operating systems. Not surprisingly, Nikon camera users do not like being tied into using only Microsoft software:

The Coolpix P6000 looks like a very sweet camera. The advanced controls, the built in GPS and the ethernet port, and compatibility with i-TTL flash, are just the features I’m looking for in an advanced compact. But if Nikon is arrogant enough to not let me access my own camera RAW data except through a system that makes me a hostage of both Nikon (bad) and Microsoft (worse), I think I’ll pass on this one.

Even if I hadn’t just bought an new Olympus camera last week, a Nikon camera with the new RAW format wouldn’t make it onto my short list either – who wants to be tied into a completely proprietary format on anything as permanent as digital photographs? (Yes, I know RAW is anyway non-standard, and differs from manufacturer to manufacturer, but this is the first time that I am aware of, where it has been restricted to one platform).

Apple is using the Olympics to market it’s Macs and professional image processing software, Aperture, to the press photographers attending. They’ve set up 50 workstations with 30” Cinema Displays and all the necessary software (Photoshop, Aperture, and more) for the pros to use in the Kodak Photographer’s Center. The set-up is being managed by Joe Schorr, Senior Product Manager of Photo Applications, who is also learning a lot about how the Apple applications can be improved by watching the pros working under very tight deadlines.

Sounds like a great idea – gets the best possible quality feedback on their photographic applications and the photographers get excellent support using the Apple set-up from the Apple experts.

Incidently, Kodak are publishing the Olympic Picture of the Day on thier web site – their take on the best photograph processed in thier center on each day of the Olympics.

We have just installed Aperture and switched to shooting our serious pictures in RAW format with the goal of using Aperture to organize the 1000’s of images we have on the Macs and to optimize the pictures when we upload them to the Macs. I’m currently working my way through Apple’s “Aperture 2 – Professionally Manage Digital Photographs“, which is a learning by doing course which involves you managing and manipulating several hundred digital images on the accompanying DVD ROM. I’m finding it an excellent way to get familiar with Aperture, depite the book containing a number of typos (mostly wrong command short-cuts).

I noticed a link to this article in Handelsblatt (I think, today I can’t find it again) the day before yesterday. The article is very detailed with lots of photos and I’m sure that if you are good with a very small screwdriver, you can indeed save the 260 Euro that you pay to have a professional fix dirt in the focusing mechanism. But I was still pretty gobsmacked at the statement with the original link, that using this article you would have the camera fixed in a matter of minutes – some people must be a lot better with their fingers than I am.

This week’s Economist has a report about the new Nikon D40 – a 6 megapixel digital SLR camera which undercuts its rivals by several hundred dollars. Their main point in the article subtitled Nikon’s new camera favours quality over quantity is that they think Nikon has recognized that chasing an ever-increasing number of pixels on the image sensor is not the way to go. Thank goodness – I have recently bought a Canon Ixus 60 (which you can deduce has 6 megapixels) and noticed it is becoming quite difficult to find a decent compact camera which doesn’t offer 8-10 megapixels and correspondingly low sensitivity / high noise CCD image sensors.

This 160 Megapixel (!) camera from Seitz Phototechnik AG (in Switzerland) takes panorama or conventional digital photographs and uses a optional 1.66 GHz Mac mini with 2 GB of memory connected via Gigabit Ethernet for storing and processing the pictures. Not for the weak-armed (it weighs in at 2.8 Kg without the Mac mini, which adds another 2.6 Kg), nor for those with weak wallets – it costs a touch under 30 000 Euro including the Mac mini.

(via HardMac.com)