A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way

The Samsung NX200 is my 2nd try at moving to a mirrorless camera for my main camera. I previously tried a recent Olympus PEN and it is ok but feels cheap. And with all of Olympus’s corporate woes, hard to feel good about settling on it.

The Samsung tho feels rock solid, a great body. The flash unit is slick. I am still grinding thru all the controls and don’t have an opinion yet on them. But one feature stands out — the AMOLED screen is gorgeous. Great contrast, vibrant, good in daylight. Really beautiful.

Now I just need to pick up some lenses for it — like the long zoom lens

Johnz recently asked me about photo backup and sharing strategies.

I’ve settled on two basic schemes for the moment.

• My “autonomic” choice is backblaze tho you could just as well use carbonite or crashplan or any of the other N choices. This is a “set and forget” system — I tell it to backup my hard disk, and it just chugs away all the time and keeps me backed up. If my machine ever explodes or my house burns down, I have a recovery option. Now I’ve never had to test the recovery, so fingers crossed, but I have a plan. And this provides me great backup, but provides no sharing features or even remote use for myself.

• For more intentional sharing and remote use, I use smugmug. A little overkill for amateur photographer, but provides great viewing and sharing features. And integrates well with Aperture or Lightroom. And has a decent iphone app.

An alternatives I’ve considered: Dropbox would be super easy to use if I just cared about my own remote access, and is pretty appealing. But no sharing. But I could dump intentionally shared images up to facebook or flickr. This would not be an unreasonable combination to use.

Mix and match all these as you wish…but I hope you are using something, because it would suck to lose all your photos to a machine failure.

• Cutting the Cord on Cable. Wish I could get there but live HD sports still keeps me stuck to cable/satellite provider. I’ve tried the streaming options and they are weak — poor selection of games/sources (I need ESPN/ABC channels + BTN + Fox Sports channels + upcoming Pac12 network), lots of stutter, not HD content. I will probably be one of the last cable subscribers in the country.
• Men with deep voices lack sperm. I was a tenor in choir.
• Do programming puzzles in interviews work?. I don’t think I’ve ever asked these kinds of questions, or at least not in 20 years.
• Gamification sucks. Respect your users.
• The Verge and The Wirecutter — good tech sites.
• If you are busy, you are doing something wrong.
• 10 new-ish programming languages. WOuld like to learn more about Chapel, haXe, X10, OPA.
• DSLRs are a dying breed. Not another “camera phones are going to win” article, but a smarter take on the mirrorless trend.

Available February/March next year. The Lytro features a technology they call “light field” — they grab sufficient photon data at capture time to allow refocusing, zooming, etc as a post-capture option. The Lytro is a simple step on the way to a full software-defined lens — I first wondered about such a lens in 2003, should have filed a bunch of patents. Other people are pushing the idea ahead, see for instance Software Defined Lensing.

As the writeup points out, you can view a traditional glass lens as a kind of quantum computer with a single fixed purpose, established at manufacture time. The lens captures all the incident photons, does some photonic/quantum computation, and spits an answer out on the CCD. But if we can replace the lens with something that has much more dynamic, programmable behaviour, well very cool things could be done — arbitrary refocusing and zooming being just the simplest example. A much broader set of incident radiation could be captured, spectral analysis of the image could be performed, filtering of the image, incredible levels of zoom, etc.

The Lytro is a very modest step in this direction but exciting.

OK so I am diving into photostream. I’ve enabled on my iPhone 4 (don’t yet have a 4s), iPad 2, my MacBook Pro, my Win7 PC. So the dream was — some set of my photos would be magically replicated across all these machines. Magically.

I have two photo points of entry — the iPhone, and my DSLR (usually a Canon, sometimes an Olympus PEN). The DSLR photos enter through Aperture on the Mac where I manage my photo collection — filter out the good and bad, touch up, organization, etc. So the first challenge was getting Aperture to play with Photostream — needed to let software update patch Aperture, and then it was just a setting to turn on. Now a magic Photostream folder appears in my library, yay. And a test photo I took with the iPhone magically appeared in the folder, yay!

However…I shut the lid on the MacBook at this point and moved locations and thus wifi networks. Post move, I added a bunch of photos off the Canon into Aperture. Sadly the photos did not appear on the iPhone, Aperture showed a little broken connection icon next to Photostream and was unable to connect to iCloud even tho my net was fine. I brought the net up and down but didn’t help. Seems like maybe Aperture gets stuck in a broken iCloud mode. So i quit Aperture and immediately photos started propagating to my phone — apparently the Photostream replication works without needing Aperture to run, some background process is handling the sync. So sync is working fine.

But a couple oddities:

• First, I don’t really want every photo from my DSLR to immediately jump into my photostream. One of the great things about DSLRs are that you can quickly take 10-20 photos of a scene and then filter out the best later. But all of these show up in the photostream, and so my photostream gets polluted with many many variants of one photo. Not really what I want.
• Second, photos don’t seem to be removable from the photostream? This is strange. I can’t delete them on the iPhone. I can’t delete on the Mac. They are just stuck there forever? Until they age out (Photostream shows the last 30 days I believe)? This seems really unfortunate.

So I conclude using Photostream with DSLRs is not a great experience and not really the intent. Which is too bad, the automagic sync is nice. I can also use the old-style sync of a folder of photos but this is really suboptimal — I have to configure what folder to sync in iTunes, and then sync only happens when I plug in my phone to my Mac, or using the new wireless sync, when I plug the phone into power. Not nearly as nice.

I’d really like to be able to specify which folders to sync, Photostream-style, from within Aperture, and have that sync happen all the time. And I want to be able then to edit the folder contents so that I can add and remove photos from the stream.

I’ve wished for years that someone would come up with a software-defined lens. A surface that would capture all inbound photons and let me decide later about focus, depth of field, etc. 

It looks like Lytro has done it or something on the way towards it. Hope it is reality! Put my name down for one.

• Tilt-shift Van Gogh via Scalzi. Because tilt-shift makes everything better.
• 6502 simulated in javascript via adafruit. Freaking awesome, my first significant personal coding was on a 6502 (Apple ][), I wish I still had the code so I could test it out.
• Glass speakers. Outrageously expensive but oh my gosh cool.
• Carlashes. To be surreptitiously applied to your sibling’s car.

• Fold out shelving system. Wow this is just awesome looking.
• Kurt’s key list of propbuilding tools.
• Rich and Bob’s Tripod reco — Gitzo1541T and the Really Right Stuff BH-40LR. I actually need this.
• Hangman light. Awesome tho I think the rest of the family might object.

• Possibly the most ill-considered travel item ever — those TSA agents love a good joke. Ha ha ha, strip your clothes off sir.
• Vex robotic kit. Never had robot love, but if i did…
• Sticky tripod. No idea why but seems like I should have in my camera kit.
• I don’t know why I don’t have an eye-fi yet.
• Cooling bandanna. At less than $2 I should certainly get
• Dramm fogg-it hose nozzle. Doesn’t the name sound like a spoonerized curse phrase?
• Dynomighty wallet. If they had a buckeye one i’d be there
• Digital rachet wrench. Seems like a horrible idea.
• Traverse switchplates. Nice, I hate generic plastic switchplates.

This picture is downright scary, I think I’ve had this dream. From coolhunting

Had a great father’s day, got some cool photo tools, some books that look great, and a couple of games since I have played Left4Dead and Fallout3 to death. Here’s some stuff I didn’t get and probably for good reason.

Physical Stuff:

• Faux fountains via Scott Loftesness. Cool looking and an inspiration for Halloween.
• IP PBX tips for home. I was all excited about this several years ago but increasingly not so…having resident phone technology seems so backwards
• Projects Watches wristwatches. Cool looking but increasingly I have given up on wristwatches.
• Television emulator. I don’t know, I think the dogs would prefer to watch real TV.
• Olympus PEN. Having just hauled the Canon up and down a mountain Sunday morning, the idea of a smaller form factor camera with great lenses is appealing.
• Super Duper Denon pre-amp. Just can’t face all the cabling problems tho of disconnecting my current and connecting in a new.

Virtual Stuff:
* Mint.com. Like the idea of automated analysis of my financials, but I am just not going to give another party access to all my financial credentials. They should license these tools to financial service firms for use on their own websites.
* Cisco Network Magic. Nice review. Congrats to the former Pure Networks team.
* Filemaker Bento iPhone app. I regularly get sucked into thinking I need a database and this app is sucking me in again. I know tho I will enter 7 records and abandon the damn thing so I am holding off.

Cougar Mountain photos on Fotopedia – The Photo Encyclopedia — OK this is my first whack at this. I am not certain where Fotopedia will fit in my current suite of photo production and management tools (Canon Digital Photo Pro, Aperture, occasional Photoshop, Smugmug), but it is a great site and a veyr nice piece of client software. The integration with Aperture is nice. Hats off to the Fotopedia team (we are an investor).

Eleven Warriors » Sup Dawg
— more of these (like the one i am using on twitter @jhludwig). I’ll have to take my camera to the ‘shoe this fall and try to create some of these.

Really Right Stuff … Quick-Release Camera Body L-Plates. Smart photo friends recommend these.

One of my relatives recommends BetterPhoto.com for photography instruction. One of these days

Rich has done a good job scrounging up info on this camera. Now that I have one, time to take advantage of.

• Canon EOS 5d Mark II Tweaks | Tongfamily Website. Tips on noise reduction, resolution settings.
• Using Canon’s raw processor
• Lens recos. I will try to “limp by” with what I already have

• Prezi.com – The zooming presentation editor. Certainly a lot more visually entertaining than your typical PPT
• Animoto is a whole different way to go on presentations
• favorite mac apps per Merlin Mann. Skitch and Path Finder seem useful
• htmlsql. not sure why I care, just seems cool.
• TinEye. Reverse image search.
• Free MSFT downloads. A ton
• Starbaron, a quality time waster.
• Adobe configurator. At least this guy loves it.

• Hardcore Computer — fully submerged computer. So you can reboot more quickly and reliably.
• HighSpeedPC — on second thought, screw the case, who needs it.
• Innovative snow shovels — might need again in another 20 years.
• Magnetic iPhone camera lenses — cool idea. For the 3 pictures a month I take with my iphone.
• Lighted Garden Nozzle — I have no idea why but it is cool.
• Map Quilts — awesome, love maps.

• MAKE: Blog: 4 floor advanced engineering demolition toy set. This appears to be sold out, site is hammered. Way cool
• Kindle 2. Love my existing Kindle, still.
• Addonics NAS adapter. World’s smallest NAS. Probably has perf and reliability to match, but still cool.
• Sony VAIO CP1 picture frame — feature packed but hardly available and expensive.

• Clickjacking. Pretty ugly form of attack.
• Self-powered wireless light switches. Pretty cool, instead of running line voltage to every lightswitch, they harness ambient power and send wireless signals to outlets. Now if you just combine this with…
• …Dirt-powered lamps! Or bacteria powered lamps. Way cool
• Rich’s guide to your basic canon lens set, if you are willing to spend $4-5K on lenses
• Charging station designs to hide cables. Hate dangling cables.
• Combo phone/keyfob. Damn I wish this problem would get solved for real.
• Probably too little too late, but a nice home phone base station with web/wifi functionality.