January 28th, 2006
Covering the African Nations Cup football here in Cairo has acted as a reminder of all those things necessary to cover the game comfortably and in all weathers - rain gear, monopods, laptop sleeves, and most importantly something to sit on. Long-lens cases have always done me pretty well in the past, but one of the photographers here has a nice tripod-like stool. Three-legged folding stools have been around for a while, but the Walkstool from Sweden goes one step further by having telescopic legs, so that it folds up really, really small and also comes in a number of different heights and seat sizes.
Update 30/01/06: It seems Mike Sturk wrote an article on the walkstool way back in Sept. 2004 on the Rob Galbraith website, and has some better pictures posted here
January 14th, 2006
Google has a very useful service for those of you in the field on low-bandwidth connections. Primarily designed for browsing websites on cellphones, it will also be of great use for those using laptops but with a very slow connection - e.g. standard GSM data connections and satphones. Even those using relatively fast BGANs will find it of use because the data transferred will be a lot less - thus saving on your satphone bill.
The ultra-minimalist Google site acts as a proxy that strips out all the fancy stuff and reduces the chosen website to either pure text, or text & images. Give it a try - you’ll find it here or click on the image above. Or to see how this site looks in pure text form - click here
January 14th, 2006
Rob Galbraith has posted his impressions of the MacBook Pro - specifically as a machine for photographer’s use. It’s a good article highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of the new machine’s hardware and processor architecture from a photographer’s perspective. He notes that “Dennis Walker from Camera Bits says that most of the work has been done to make the application [Photo Mechanic] a Universal Binary, though the company has not committed to a release date.” So hopefully there will soon be an Intel version of Photo Mechanic… which leaves the biggest question of all - When will Adobe release an Intel-native version of Photoshop?
January 12th, 2006
With Apple finally releasing the first Intel-based macs - the new iMac and MacBook Pro - those hoping to at last be able to have a machine capable of natively booting both OSX & Windows should have been pretty happy. There have been ways before - OSX for Intel Developer Preview on a standar Intel machine, Windows running emulated under VirtualPC - but this was hoped to be the first “proper” way.
But if dual-booting OSX/XP is crucial for your needs, you might want to hold off on throwing down your hard cash for the new machines - at least until a few issues are clarified. Some recent discussion on messageboards suggests that because the new machines use the newer & better EFI instead of BIOS as the low-level firmware interface and Windows XP (32-bit) doesn’t support EFI at this time, natively booting Windows might not be possible yet - at least until Microsoft Vista comes out. It seems likely this issue will get quickly resolved one way or another (i.e. officially or un-officially) but if such an ability is critical it might be wise to hold off - at least until matters are clearer.
Photographers in particular should also note the switch from PCMCIA slot to new-style ExpressCard/34 slot, and the magnetic MagSafe power connector designed to avoid damage when tripping over power leads. O’Grady’s Powerpage has a brief hardware-change summary.
Further discussion of the Windows-on-Macbook subject in this MacRumors thread, this Digg thread, this BetaNews thread and others such as the MacNN forums.
Update 13/03/06: Ars Technica has posted a very extensive review of the machine here
January 12th, 2006
The BBC as a public broadcaster has an interesting and somewhat unique position when it comes issues of copyright and digital rights management. One in a series of innovative ideas it is experimenting with, is to allow free online access for UK-based viewers to archive TV news footage - under a “Creative Archive Licence“.
“The Open News Archive” is currently a testbed allowing viewers to download any of about eighty historical news reports of significant events in either Windows Media, Quicktime, or MPEG-1 formats.
International (non-UK) readers should note that if your IP address is not a UK one, it won’t allow you access. In theory one might use some sort of UK-based proxy server, although that would contravene their usage terms
January 12th, 2006
Users of the excellent free & open-source email client Mozilla Thunderbird may like to know that the latest version of the application has just been released. Version 1.5 is a major update, with significant enhancements - a full list of changes are here. Thunderbird is a good client for photographers on the road I think, because of its very customisable offline storage and download options - which are crucial if you switch a lot between high bandwidth (office, adsl etc) and low bandwidth (cellphone, satphone) connections.
January 12th, 2006
We quickly forget how greatly fear of the nuclear bomb permeated life in the 20th Century during the cold war years and with so much talk about the acquisition and use of such weapons recently, it’s useful to be reminded of what they are, what they do, and what they look like. The book 100 Suns by Michael Light was published in 2003 but I just came across it. It contains some awesome [in the true sense of the word] images.
From the introduction: “100 Suns documents the era of visible nuclear testing, the atmospheric era, with 100 photographs drawn by Michael Light from the archives at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the U.S. National Archives in Maryland. It includes previously classified material from the clandestine Lookout Mountain Air Force Station based in Hollywood, whose film directors, cameramen, and still photographers were sworn to secrecy. The title, 100 SUNS, refers to the response by J. Robert Oppenheimer to the world’s first nuclear explosion in New Mexico when he quoted a passage from the Bhagavad Gita, the classic Vedic text, “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst forth at once in the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One… I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” This was Oppenheimer’s attempt to describe the otherwise indescribable.”
There’s a brief image gallery on the website, where you can also purchase the book.
