I used a flash just like this all throughout high-school and part way into college (when I finally got a system flash for my Minolta). It really was a workhorse.

If you’ve ever ridden the Resolution Trail at Skegg’s Point in San Mateo, you may have heard that it’s named after a plane crash that happened there in the ‘50s or even seen some of the wreckage which still dots the area. KGO is running a story about the crash, which happened in 1953. Interestingly, it’s the largest (and last) major air accident at the airport.

Here’s the Wikipedia article about the flight.

Leica has finally come out with a true digital predecessor to the film-based M-series in the Leica M8. Of course, it’s hideously expensive, but is compatible with all that (more expensive) Leica glass everyone drools over.

Don recently mentioned that he was playing with fill flash, so I thought I’d post the best online photo site I’ve read in a long time, Strobist.

It’s a blog, but has a lot of tutorial from the owner, who is an editorial photog for the Baltimore Sun. It’s a really great resource. Make sure to peruse the Lighting 101 links. It’s all about using off-camera strobes to light photos. I haven’t done the tuts myself, but I’d love to when I get some time.

They’re finally shipping, and there’s a pretty complete look at it available. 50 hours of HD, and an overall decent review so far.

Apple’s going to ship Rails by default in Leopard.

Rails will be installed through RubyGems. So updating Rails will be as easy as ‘gem update’. They’re really, really getting it. And we’re working with them to ensure all the details get right.

Nice! It’s already easy to set Rails up on the Mac, but this can’t be a bad thing.

One of the complaints about Rails has been spotty free documentation (there are a lot of good books out, but you have to pay for them). So a prominent member of the Rails community started the Rails Documentation Project to raise money via donations to fund hiring professionals to document Rails. They were shooting for $5000, and got over $13,000 in less than 24 hours. That’s amazing.

So, podcasting as simply an audio file that is advertised and downloaded as part of an RSS or Atom feed. You can do the same thing with any binary type, and folks also do this with video (sometimes called vlogging). TiVo is now allowing you to get this and other internet-based video content with its new TiVoCasting service. This is a good thing; I’d much rather watch such content on my TV with TiVo controls rather than on my computer. Now, they just need to get the Series3 out, so I can get a TiVo again….

Details are out on Sony’s new camera, the Alpha. It’s obviously derived from the late Konica-Minolta line, and takes K-M lenses. It’s got some cool stuff, like eye-start autofocus. $999 with a kit lens (18-70) seems a bit much, but maybe it’ll be great. It’s got a 10.2 MP sensor, which is good for that price.

Not the MBP, but the confusingly similarly named iBook replacement. It’s quite a step up from the iBook, since it still has a Core Duo and up to 2 GBRAM and iSight. The catch is the video, which uses Intel’s on-board graphics that share RAM with main memory.

I’m hoping it’s just normal contract negotiations, but there’s a story out that the upcoming 3rd season of Deadwood may be its last. Creator David Milch says that he envisioned it going 4 seasons, and intends to quit after 4, and HBO has decided to let the lead stars’ contracts lapse before season 3 even airs (it starts in June).

I hope they figure it out—Deadwood is a great show.

I'm going to try to make it. Anyone else?

From crew leader Berry Stevens:

This Sunday will likely be the last work at Water Dog Lake for new trail construction. If we get enough people to come out we can finish the last trail segment and complete the build out of the City of Belmont's Master Plan. Be there!

We've cut all vegetation back to a 10' width, so there is no risk of P.O. The soil is drying fast and it will likely be too dry on the next scheduled work day so we need to get the bench cut this weekend. Please come out & help.

Many people have helped out over the seven years we have been working this project; I'd love to have some of the veterans be there to see the completion of their efforts. This has been a rare project for mt bikers as we've been able to lay out & construct the trails as we would like them to be. Bring a bike & ride after the work day. With a big turn out we could be done by noon.

We work from 9 AM sharp 'till ~2 PM with a break for lunch. Please reply to this post if you're coming. I need to know how many willing volunteers will attend so I can provide tools. Those that reply will get meet location & other details. There will be a little schwag (two tires) after the work day. Fill my inbox with your desire to see the Golden Spike driven at Water Dog Lake.

I put Aperture 1.1 through its paces over the last couple of days while editing the shooting that I and two other guys did on our trip to Gooseberry Mesa.

There were about 300 images from 4 days of riding (still one batch from day 4 still pending). They were all JPEGs, which doesn’t help test the new RAW functionality, but we were all shooting small cameras with no RAW mode because they are convenient to take riding.

The first thing I noticed as I spent time in Aperture was the enhanced speed. I’m sure it’s a combination of being on the new Intel Mac as well as general 1.1 improvements, but Aperture has crossed the line from being pokey to being a generally useful tool for me.

Importing images from 3 different cameras was a snap, as was assigning metadata on import—who shot the batch, adjusting the cameras’ internal timestamp from Pacific to Mountain time zones, and assigning captions. I made extensive use of the Stacks feature—which I consider to be the single biggest innovation Aperture brings to the workflow of sorting and reviewing pictures. Since mountain bike photos tend to be shot in bursts around a particular moment, the stacking was incredibly helpful in editing the shoot.

One niggle here: I’d frequently select a stack and expand it (Shift-K on the keyboard is one to learn quickly), organize the stack in order of preference (left most in the stack being the “pick”), and shift-K again to collapse the stack. The problem is that after the last shift-K to collapse, Aperture would sometimes lose focus on that stack, meaning that no image was selected in the Browser after closing the stack. When I’d then hit right-arrow to move to the next image in the Browser, Aperture didn’t have the context anymore, and would focus on the first image in the Browser—often way far away from the one I was just working on. That’s really annoying, and I couldn’t determine why it doesn’t happen all of the time.

Aperture’s speed increase is on display when making edits to the images. In 1.0, after applying even basic edits, display refreshes and other interface cues really slowed down. The interactivity of the histogram was really laggy, making on-the-fly changes to an image clunky. Particularly slow was the lift/stamp function—applying the lifted changes to other images was really slow. The MacBook/Aperture 1.1 combo fixed that, at least for this batch of images. I made exposure, sharpening and other changes directly to images during the edit, and Aperture always kept up with a good degree of interactivity throughout. They also corrected the “smoothing” of the histogram that sometimes hid detail about the editing one was performing.

One thing that bothered me a little: You can change how Aperture displays selected images in the viewer or full screen mode. I was editing on the road in the RV, with no big nice monitor to spread out on. That meant heavy full screen mode use with the “filmstrip” auto-hiding, which generally worked well. But I’d frequently want to use the Stack view in full screen mode (has the current pick on the left, and the current selection on the right), and then flip to just the current selection. The keyboard shortcuts are a bit weird (option-k and option-u, respectively, I think), and Aperture behaves a little strangely when moving images up and down the stack, giving no indication that the move took place and occassionally (but less so than the earlier issue) losing the focus of the current image.

The new user manual was a critical addition, and I hope (but doubt) that a printed copy is included with Aperture from now on. I spent time reading sections of it, and certainly intend to print it and comb through it more carefully. The manual helped clear up some of my confusion about what the different types of containers in Aperture’s Library view are capable of doing. There are folders, projects and albums, all of which seem to have some overlap until you really understand what they’re all for.

I ended up taking the edited shoot and making an album for the images I wanted to upload to Flickr and share with folks. The enhanced Export Versions command let me export this entire album, setting format, size and metadata options (Flickr had no problem picking up the metadata from the exported images). It worked very well…a big omission in 1.0 fixed here.

Now what do I want to see (aside from fixing the problems I pointed out above)? Well, a few things on my list betray my non-professional photographer status, but I still hope they happen.

• An easy way to add even more flexible export options, maybe through a plug-in architecture. I want it to be painless to export an album or other set of images to Flickr, .Mac or other web host. A plug-in framework is the best way to let the community make Aperture a friendly way to quickly share images.
• Plug-in-based access for developers to add tools to the Adjustment Hub. The new Sharpen and improved noise reduction tool was much-needed (and I used the sharpen tool with some success), but I want third-party developers to be able to port their excellent tools (like nik Sharpener and neatimage) to Aperture. This is likely possible through Core Image somehow, but formalizing access to Aperture’s innards is key.
• Developer access to the RAW conversion flow. Similar to above. I want third parties to be able to plug their RAW converters into Aperture’s flow. This is likely to be a tall order since Aperture’s ability to display images quickly depends a lot on the RAW conversion implementation, but I hope Apple provides a way. The RAW settings in the Adjustment Hub hint that there’s a way—a drop-down lets you select the 1.1 or older 1.0 converter to use on a per-image and per-camera basis.
• Better archiving support. The Vault is a fine system for making sure you don’t lose things if you lose a drive, but now I want Aperture to be able to archive to DVD (or other drive) and retain some search index of those images to point me in the right place without keeping the full images online.

Overall, 1.1 is a big improvement to Aperture, and combined with the Intel upgrade, makes Aperture a prime-time tool. I recently shot a wedding with my Nikon, so I’ll have a chance to edit that shoot (which I shot completely in RAW) soon, and I’ll report back on the RAW improvements then. I’m also planning on printing some of these images, both on my printer at home and possibly making a book (using Apple’s service), which will give me a chance to play with the as-yet-untested-by-me light table and book layout tools.

Alpha was the brand name that Minolta (and later Konica Minolta) sold their autofocus SLR system under. In the States, we knew it as Maxxum. Sony bought some of the assets when Minolta went under, and is launching their own camera and lens line under the brand.

Val and I joined mountain biking friends and recent RV converts Dave and Becky and new friend Brian on a mountain bike trip to Gooseberry Mesa.

Gooseberry Mesa is near St. George, Virgin, and Hurricane in Utah, just about 2 1/2 hours east of Vegas. Dave and Becky recently acquired an Airstream trailer (and the requisite truck to pull it), and we've been planning this trip (and some others) ever since.

We met up with Todd and Debra, who happened to be in Vegas when we were passing through (and gathering some folks who flew in for the trip). I managed to get killed at the poker tables, even though we were only there for a brief time (that's another story), but Dave won a single-table tourney. After bidding adieu to Sin City, we moved on to our RV resort stay in Utah.

The riding in and around Gooseberry Mesa is Moab-like, in that it's got a lot of slickrock and breathtaking vistas. It's generally a bit more technical, but has fewer long, grinding climbs than Moab does. It's also got quite a bit more singletrack than Moab. It's a great destination.

We spent two days on Gooseberry Mesa proper, and two on trails in the surrounding area. There were lots of folks with cameras, and I got copies of most of the pics and uploaded them. (This is an edited assortment. I used Aperture for the first time on a large quantity of pics for this project, and I'll write about that soon.)

Summary: The trip was awesome, and we absolutely have to get some guys from our group together and get out there. It was awesome to escape the gloomy weather we'd been having here and get on the bike (and nice to return to good weather here). The RV was great, as usual, and having our riding friends as neighbors at the RV resort was cool.