PixelatedImage Blog

I’m just about to leave on my current assignment; in 36 hours I will be in Quito, Ecuador. Between now and then I have a layover at LAX and then a short one in Miami.

I’m pleased to announce, before I leave, that GITZO has agreed to sponsor me and include me in their Local Heroes program. Gitzo joins LowePro and Lexar as my sponsors and I am proud to be connected to these companies - companies who are not only leaders in the industry but pioneers. Gitzo makes exceptional tripods and heads and I’m thrilled to have them join me in this adventure as I continue to look for travel and humanitarian images that tell compelling stories and change the world one image at a time.

For more information on Gitzo, see their website here: GITZO WEBSITE

I’m back on March 4th, look for updates then.

This morning I got wind of Lexar’s latest offerings. Rob Galbraith has an article about the details HERE but here’s the basics on the new products.

The Professional 300x CompactFlash Line - While the jump in speed won’t be something your camera can take advantage of it will be dramatically noticeable as you upload from card to hard-drive. The new UDMA technology looks exciting.

The Professional UDMA Firewire 800 Reader - An upgrade to their already great Professional Firewire CF Cardreader - now available with Firewire 800.

The Professional Dual-Slot USB 2.0 Reader - A new reader that combines both CF and SD formats - this one’s USB2.0 - I’m hoping they ramp that up to FW400 or 800 but have no reason to hope for that but raw optimism.

See the Rob Galbraith site for more information. I’d duplicate it here but to be honest I’m not as capable of discussing benchmarking and mb/s and the rest of the techy mumbo-jumbo. I’m a bottom-line guy and when I read the magic words “new”, “shiny”, and “way faster” I’m in, no questions asked.

I’m very proud of my relationship with Lexar, and as one of their ProPhotographers I might be a little biased, but I think that bias comes from the exceptional products I’ve used and the great service I’ve encountered. Their website is an excellent resource, take a moment to dig around there if you haven’t already.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom ships today.

If you get in on it within the next month or so there’s an introductory pricing that will save you $100USD. You have three choices on purchase - you can download it, have the discs sent to you, or download it AND have backup discs sent.

If you opt for the third may I suggest something that will save you $30.00? Just buy the discs and wait for them to come BUT in the meantime download the free trial which is complete in every way except it times out at 30 days. You’re welcome. Buy me a coffee or a pint of triple chocolate stout next time you’re around Vancouver.

More information can be found HERE at the Adobe site. Along with this release comes a mountain of great Lightroom resources, among them:

Lightroom Killer Tips
Lightroom Extra
Lightroom News
Sean McPhoto’s Lightroom Blog
Lightroom Resources
Inside Lightrooom
O’Reilly Inside Lightroom

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Finally, in the It’s About Freaking Time category…

Congratulations to my friend and colleague Kevin Clark who finally - FINALLY - got a Mac. And congrats to my friend April who just put in an order for her new Canon 5D and thus begins an illustrious career in portraiture.

I finally got around to getting a hardware-based calibration tool. I’ve been using the calibration tools in Apple’s OSX knowing I needed to get a hardware based solution at some point. After looking through a barrage of mind-numbing articles about ICC and colour management and related mumbo-jumo I was about ready just to sacrifice a gerbil on a the floor of my studio and beg the powers of darkness to do it all for me. If all it cost was my immortal soul I was beginning to think it was a bargain.

Then I caved in and bought the eye-one display 2 and got the best deal I could find in Canada through Studica.com - $239 CAD. The eye-one is made and marketed by Pantone/Gretag Macbeth, leaders in all things colour, which is the first reason I chose it. The second was for the reviews it gets - all excellent. The third was because the website is full of resources and tutorial kind of stuff.

After some serious ineptitude on the part of UPS I finally got the gear and prepared for what I’ve come to expect when stuff like this comes - a steeper learning curve than I like. I like playing with my gear and seeing results, not submitting myself to some kind of Navy Seals boot camp for geeks. The eye-one surprised me. Installation of the software was easy, installation of the hardware even easier. There is an easy mode and an advanced mode, both of which seem relatively intuitive. And there’s a reminder function in the software that will nudge you to re-calibrate/profile at an interval of your choosing.

If you’ve been dragging your feet to get a hardware/software based calibration and profiling tool for your displays, this is an excellent product. From what I’ve read it’s well worth the extra money spent over the Pantone Huey and for the average photographer, especially those of us who do not do a huge amount of printing and therefore need a printer profiler as well, the eye-one display2 is excellent. Kudos to Pantone/Gretag Macbeth for a professional product made for creatives not geeks with degrees in quantum mechanics and ties to Belzebub’s tech department.

As I get ready to go back out on assignment I thought I’d do some housekeeping on the blog and throw a bunch of things together into one post.
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Back on assignment:

South America- I head out this Friday, Feb. 23rd, to Ecuador for World Vision Canada. I will be gone a total of 9 days.

Africa - I am in Ethiopia, Uganda and Rwanda from March 15 to the 31st. Very excited about this assignment as it involves orphans and vulnerable children in some very out of the way places like Lalibela - an astonishing but remote town in northern Ethiopia, a place I visited a year ago and am keen to get back to - and Gulu, in northern Uganda.

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New Stuff: Reviews

Canon 50/1.4 USM - I recently upgraded one of my favourite lenses - Canon’s 50/1.8 and traded it for the faster 50/1.4. The 50/1.8 is a great little lens whose image quality is surprising given it’s cheap build and low price, but the 50/1.4 is faster, sharper, has better build and arguably better glass as well.  I spent 10 minutes playing with the new 50/1.2L but for its extra $1000 it didn’t seem worth the layout. Yet.

Canon 200/2.8L - A year and a half ago I bought one of these on eBay and loved it. But thinking that I wanted the versatility of a zoom I sold it and bought the Sigma 70-200/2.8 EX. While i have nothing bad to say about the Sigma it was large and heavy and I rarely used it. When I did it was at the long end and the images were still not as sharp and saturated as those I got from the 200/2.8L. So I’ve come full-circle. The 200/2.8L is bright, VERY fast focussing, and sharp as a tack. It’s much lighter and smaller and there’s greater chance I will throw this in the bag. I’m a sucker for L glass and glad to have this lens back.

Kata Rain Cover - I know I’ve championed everything from plastic bags to hotel shower caps in the past, but eventually you get to a point that you want to carry something a little less ad hoc and a little beefier - the Kata Rain Cover is relatively easy to fit the camera into and gives me a measure of confidence shooting in the rain than previous measures.

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Book: Welcome To Oz, Vincent Versace

This is a great book that is greatly frustrating me. The content is excellent and the theory gleaned in bits and pieces is priceless, but the tutorials seem riddled with little errors which make following along more like a scavenger hunt or logic puzzle than a well-written tutorial. I think I also expected this to be more about photography than about photoshop, being a fan of getting an image right in-camera before resorting to Photoshop. But it isn’t and it’s still a goldmine of a book – but it’s tough slogging to get tthrough. The book comes with a cd with low res, 8 bit, and 16 bit versions of all files required to walk through the tutorials, and there are some freeby filter downloads that add to the value of this.

I think this will become a must-read classic, but then so is C.S.Lewis’ Mere Christianity and that doesn’t make it any easier to read.

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Submissions: Applied Arts and Communication Arts Deadlines approaching

Communication Arts and its Canadian cousin, Applied Arts, each have a Photography/Illustration annual and the deadlines to submit for either are approaching. Applied Arts’ deadline is Feb.28, 2007 and their website is HERE. Communication Arts’ deadlines is March 13, 2007 and their website is HERE 

Thanks to Matt Brandon for encouraging me to enter the Evrium Fluid Galleries photo contest - looks like my efforts to bribe the judges has paid off and they’ve given me first place - which means I get a copy of the Professional package I wrote about only this last week and you, my faithful readers, will get an ALL NEW (ok, mostly new) PixelatedImage website within the coming two weeks. You can see the results HERE and while you’re there sign up for the newsletter which will give you monthly chances to win free software and get great deals.

One of the ongoing challenges for photographers capturing or storing images digitally is that files sizes continue to grow and the need for storage grows with every image you shoot. I shoot exclusively to Lexar 8gb 133x CF cards and the only frustration has been the lack of an easy way to archive these cards once I have shot them. A 4gb card fits perfectly onto a 4.5 gb DVD, but an 8gb card is less convenient.

Enter the dual layer DVD, capable of storing 8.5gb of data. While the new Mac towers come with dual-layer burners, two of them if you like, my old G5 tower doesn’t. And it’ll be at least several months before I can afford a new tower. Enter the LaCie d2 dual-layer external DVD burner. I ordered one from my local dealer last month on my return from India. It came in today and I wanted to make a couple comments based on my initial uses.

1. I own several d2 drives and the build quality is excellent. I love these units and this external burner is no different. I almost bought the LaCie Porsche Design dual-layer external burner but I already own two of the Porsche Design drives and the build doesn’t impress me - they feel plastic, light, and cheap. For an extra $50 I got Toast and a tougher case.

2. It comes with Roxio Toast Lite. This is my first experience with Toast and I am a convert. What an excellent piece of software. Highly intuitive, easily installed and was burning dvds immediately. Makes me want to look into Toast Titanium to see what I am missing.

3. Comes with LiteScribe, giving you the ability to label your discs. I don’t plan on using this but for some people it looks great. But I suspect it’ll add to your time creating the discs. Which brings me to speed.

4. This is a 16x drive but only on normal 4.5gb DVD’s. On the dual-layer stuff it’s slower - much slower. That said, it seems very stable and for giving me the ability to burn over 8gb to a dvd I am willing to overlook the speed.

5. It also comes with some cloning and backup software which I plan to look into some other time. But if you’re into that kind of thing, an added bonus.

6. Back to the d2 build - these are large, tough cases but they’re big - over 10inches long by 6inches wide and 2 inches deep - these are portable but not the kind of thing you want to take on the road if you like to travel light. That doesn’t matter to me, but if you’re looking for a pocket-sized burner, this isn’t it.

7. Backed with a one-year warranty and tech-support. I got mine for $189 CAD.

Burn, baby, burn. Now each of my files sits simultaneously on 2 d2 500gb drives and a DVD. Until Blue-Ray becomes the standard and becomes financially accessible to us mortals, this is my solution. Check it out here.