A look back at 2010

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2010 has come and gone and it was a pretty good year, both personally and professionally (both the day job and the photography business.)   Here are some of the highlights:

  • My folder for 2010 weighs in at 235 GB.  That includes all the raw files I've chosen to keep plus all the photoshop versions.  That number is up from 195 GB in 2009, 145 GB in 2008, and 120 GB in 2007.   There's a trend here...I'm being a little more selective about when I press the shutter and throwing away more bad photos, but the files are getting larger.   Luckily I revamped my photo editing workstation with a two-way RAID stripe for speed and got a better backup solution, so I'm able to deal with the surge of data pretty well.
  • I did some aerial photography this year, including some formation flying and shooting from a helicopter in Hawaii with no doors.   I love flying and I love photography so combining the two is great.
  • I did a nice location shoot and some product stills for Osocalis Distillery.  They're based out of a cozy little barn in the Santa Cruz mountains and they make small batches of brandy.  It was a real challenge to try to find angles to accentuate the atmosphere of the small space and make it really look like the craft distillery that it is.   Their website is still under construction but you can friend them on Facebook to keep up to date on them.
  • I had fun shooting the Maverick's surf contest.   I was almost not going to go to this, due to the lack of information and having never been out there before.  I finally decided (at 5:00 am) to go for it and it turned out to be a good decision.   It's hard to stand in one place for 8 hours straight but in the end there were some great performances by some talented surfers and some monumentally bad planning on shore by some people who apparently know very little about how the ocean works.There are three ways to shoot an offshore surfing contest:  from land, from a boat near the surfers, and from a helicopter.   I think I did pretty well for shooting from land, (which means shooting through about a half mile of haze and sea spray) but there's nothing that's going to blow up to poster size art.  Next time I'll try a boat or a helicopter.
  • I moved my blog to Wordpress.  I finally gave up on maintaining the home-built blog solution I was working on and switched to Wordpress.  I'm pretty happy so far and I've migrated more than half of the old posts to the new system.The main challenge I have now is to get a good gallery system working so I can show some more photos here.   I've had a couple plugins recommended to me but I haven't had a chance to play with them yet.  (NextGen Gallery and Lightbox2)
  • I had a couple trips to Florida to shoot some private parties and one convention.  At the convention I was really the digital tech and "second shooter" instead of being the primary photographer.   This was a good trip for me and it let me concentrate on the workflow and keeping the main shooter working at a fast pace, while dealing with a huge volume of incoming images, making prints, etc.  Situations like this remind me that photography can be a team effort and when the team works well the results can be great.I did manage to get some photography in, notably of some rescued animals from Busch Wildlife Sanctuary.   I also worked on my travel skills and accumulated a bunch more mileage on United.
  • No football games in 2010.  :-(  I missed the whole season and Cal Poly had another "rebuilding" year.  I'll be shooting the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl next weekend though, so that'll be fun.
  • No good lava shots from our trip to Hawaii this year.  :-(  The volcano was relatively active during our visit this year but there was no active ocean entry which makes for a great photos, and I couldn't quite make my schedule line up with a guy who was going to go out on the lava with me for a night time lava shoot.   We'll be back to Hawaii though, so there's still hope.
  • On a personal note, my daughter was born this year.   I couldn't be more thrilled about being a parent and I look forward to everything the next couple decades will bring on this front.   Being a parent will probably make it harder to jet off around the world for photography but I'm betting it'll be a net-win overall...  ;-)

2011 is off to a great start so far and there are a lot of possibilities:

  • There's the aforementioned football game next weekend.
  • I'm thinking about a big trip to Dubai in March to Gulf Photo Plus, but we'll see if that pans out.  It's a part of the world I've never been to and it would be a huge cultural win to go see.  It's a lot of time away from the new baby though, and not the cheapest place to visit.
  • I'd like to do second editions of some or all of the three books I've done.  As time goes on my eye gets better, I accumulate more images, and technology gets better.   I think Blurb is still printing with the Indigo 5000's, but I haven't had a chance to try their PDF submissions yet, which should yield much sharper text than I got before.

That's all that comes to mind right now.

Shooting the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl

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I'll be shooting the Kraft Fight Hunger bowl next weekend at AT&T Park.   This was formerly known as the Emerald Bowl but the sponsorship has changed from Emerald Nuts to Kraft foods.   I've shot the Emerald bowl a couple times before but I missed it last year in order to go freeze my butt of in Montana for the holidays.  :-)

The game is the afternoon of Sunday January 9th, and will feature Boston College and the Nevada, perhaps best know as the team that beat Boise State at the end of the regular season.  Normally there's a PAC-10 team in this bowl but there weren't enough bowl eligible teams in the PAC-10 this year.

The venue is AT&T Park again, the home of the World Series Champion SF Giants.   (The photo work area is the Giants' dugout, which is kind of cool.)   It's sort of a weird venue for football, but it works.  In fact, this will be Cal's home field for the next season as Memorial Stadium is closed for remodeling for the next year.   Getting there is really easy and there's plenty else to do around there, since it's downtown San Francisco.

I'll be stepping up the gear this year, bringing two full-frame cameras and both longer (500mm) and wider (15mm fisheye) glass than before.  I'm looking forward to a great game and making some great images this year.  Let me know if you're going to be attending.

Moved to WordPress

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Well, I've finally gone and done it.  The old hand-made blog and website code needed to be put down.   I've moved to WordPress and so far it looks very promising.  It was clear that the old system wasn't very flexible and wasn't able to represent my world of photography in the professional manner I have envisioned.   The old system was a great experiment in hand-crafting HTML and php using Dreamweaver but the time for that experiment to end has come. I'm especially looking forward to more flexibility for editing posts, which should make it easier for me to create content for you.

I'll be working over the next week or so to import all the old content from the last couple years into this system and playing with the layout.  The only thing I'm not sure about being able to port over is the old RSS feed.   That means that people who were relying on RSS to get updates to my blog will probably never know there's a new site and will just think I've stopped writing.  Hopefully they'll check in here at the main site and re-bookmark the feed.

Welcome to the new and improved Brian Johns Photography!

Mac Pro: not enough ports!

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I'm moving my desk and computer around which means disconnecting the entire thing and reconnecting it in another room. So this is a fine time to think about the design of the Mac Pro, as it relates to ports on connectivity. There are some real nice features of the machine but a few disappointments. As usual with Apple products, remedying the downsides would be trivial and cheap so we must assume that Apple just didn't think about these things, or thought about them but decided they knew better than us how a machine should be designed. I should start off by clarifying that I'm talking about the Mac Pro desktop - not a laptop, and not a lower cost machine. This is the big machine that people buy when space, weight, power consumption, and cost are no issue. People buying this machine want the best, most powerful, most flexible machine available and they're will to pay over $3,000 to get it. Also, they're probably Apple fans.

First the good points:

  • USB and firewire ports on the front and back. I love the ports on the front, for things that I attach for short periods of time. Way better than having to reach around to the back of the machine for a quick connection.
  • Four internal drive bays. This is great for expandability. I'm using one bay for the boot drive and two bays for a striped RAID for performance. I use the fourth bay when I'm building up a new boot drive, which I do whenever a new major version of Mac OS comes out.
  • Two optical bays. This would be great for me if I cared enough to have a second optical drive. It costs less than $100 but I've only ever needed two at one time once. I REALLY like that you can install a SSD boot drive up there and regain another regular drive bay if you have lots of cash and need more space. I don't do this, but check out Diglloyd's Mac Performance Website for more info about that.
  • Lots of PCI slots. Now that more applications are taking advantage of GPU coprocessing I should get off my duff and buy a modern video card. It'll make some things in Photoshop faster, apparently. I like that I can put a few video cards in there and have a ton of monitors because often screen space is worth more than CPU speed.

Now let's talk about what I don't like.

  • Not enough USB ports! I generally have the following USB devices connected to my desktop Mac:
    • keyboard
    • mouse
    • Wacom tablet
    • HP printer/scanner/fax
    • Canon photo printer
    • docking station for Garmin bike computer

    That's six items that I would prefer to connect to the back, but there are only 3 ports. Yes, I can buy a powered hub but I'd prefer not to. It's one more thing to plug in and a ton more wires.

  • No balanced audio. I'd like to see balanced audio in and out. I'm talking 1/4" TRS or XLR ports, which are industry standard on professional audio equipment. I realize there's optical audio in and out but the things I'd like to connect to (a Mackie mixing board, or my home stereo) don't have optical.Yes, I could buy an external firewire sound module with tons of balanced ins and outs, but a basic stereo in and out is all I'm asking for. I've never heard anyone else bitch about this so perhaps I'm the only one who misses this.

That's about it. I'm very happy with the machine overall. It's a lot faster than my laptop and I love working with the full size mouse and keyboard, as well as multiple monitors. The built-in RAID stripe is big and fast with no external cables which is really nice.

I'm just sayin' that there could be a few more ports on it, that's all.

New Canon Stuff Tomorrow

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Canon is introducing a bunch of new mid-range and high-end photography gear today. Well, tomorrow really, since it's still Wednesday where I am. I'll include some links to the DP Review (owned by Amazon) press release pages. The list includes the new 60-D, a low-end L-series 70-300 variable aperture lens, a really neat looking 8 - 15 mm fisheye zoom, revamped 300 and 400 mm f/2.8 lenses, new versions of the 1.4x and 2x teleconverters, and an announcement that new 500 and 600 mm f/4.0 lenses are on the way.

Here are my quick thoughts on each of these, with a bit of a Product Marketing eye:

  • 60-D: It had to happen sometime. In fact, the 7-D should have been called the 60-D. After the 7-D, I guess this is now the bridge between the old 20/30/40/50 lineup and the Rebel line. SD cards. This camera might be popular, but it sure had better be a lot cheaper than the 7-D if they want to sell many of them.
  • 70-300 variable aperture lens: Is this just an upgraded version of the wildly popular 70-300 series? Is this for people who want an L-lens without really investing in top-quality glass? How much will it cost?
  • 8 - 15 mm fisheye zoom: Sweet. This lens is going to be really fun. I love my 15mm fisheye, which this is apparently replacing. It's obviously not as small and pocketable but it sounds like a great lens.
  • revamped 300 and 400 mm f/2.8 lenses: Who was asking for this? Why do this?
  • new versions of the 1.4x and 2x teleconverters: Seriously? Who asked for this?
  • announcement that new 500 and 600 mm f/4.0 lenses are on the way: I sure hope they don't have any backstock of these to clear out now! Again, who's asking for this?

I think all big white glass from Canon can be divided into two categories:

  1. The 200-400 mm f/4.0 zoom
  2. Everything Else

Is the new 200-400/4.0 zoom out yet? You know, the one that Canon should release to match the Nikon lens that is so popular people will sell their entire Canon setup to get? Not yet? OK, well, wake me up when that comes out.

Embracing the iPhone in small steps

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Thanks to a hand-me-down 32 GB iPhone 3GS, I'm giving the iPhone another try. Things are working out a lot better this time around, even though I'm still kicking and screaming while resisting being sucked all the way into the Apple Reality Distortion Field. I've got an iPhone but I haven't activated the phone service with AT&T so for me it's really just a little tiny tablet computer. In my last blog post I ranted against using the iPad as a content _creation_ device, but it's clear that it makes an excellent content _consumption_ device. And for the purposes of this blog, that means viewing photos. It turns out the iPod is a pretty cool little photo viewer. The biggest drawback is obviously the screen size but the quality of the photos (sharpness, color, etc.) seems to be pretty good.

I don't use iPhoto and the machine I sync my iPhone on is not the machine that my photos live on so there are a few little hoops to jump through but it's not bad. The saving grace is that Apple gives you the option of syncing a directory hierarchy of photos to the device instead of syncing from iPhoto: First I tell iTunes to sync photos from the "iPhonePhotos" directory on my laptop's desktop. Then I just mount that directory over the local network and export groups of photos from Lightroom in whatever structure I want and iTunes takes care of the rest. It's not as cumbersome as it may sound. Yes, MobileMe would probably make it easier, but oh well. I'm pretty happy with this solution.

Next time you see me, ask to see some photos on the iPhone!