Did a fun little blogpost for Shelfari today – a peek into Neil Gaiman’s personal library.  Read all about it here.  

Extremely cool that Gaiman allowed us to do this, and I certainly spent a whole lot of time looking over his books and saying to myself “Hey, I’ve got that one!”  Good fun.  

Gaiman (well, his buddy photographer Kyle Cassidy, actually) sent over quite a bit more than I posted over there, but the original blogpost was getting a bit long.  So as a special bonus for readers of this blog, here’s a few more photos from Mr. Gaiman’s collection, this time featuring some of his reference books (and, oh yeah, a friggin’ Hugo Award  too).  Nice!

Click on any of the images for the larger version – you should be able to read the individual titles on the fullsized shots.

Picked up a rather awesome book the other day – The Art of the Modern Movie Poster.  It features movie posters from around the world (but for well-known movies) and it’s fascinating to see how some of these films are ‘translated’ by artists from different countries.  And as I was paging through the book I realized that I’d have a hard time even guessing what movie some were from.  So, with that in mind, here’s a little quiz.  Several posters from the book are shown below but with, in many cases, identifying information obscured.  Name the movies that go with them.  (Yeah, there are several unobscured/obvious ones too that I just added because I think they’re cool!)

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UPDATE: Here’s all the same posters with the obfuscation removed:

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Just got done troubleshooting a problem I had with installing the update to Office 2008 for Mac and figured I may as well write up my fix and toss it out into the webz, just in case someone else finds themself in the same predicament.  In other words, unless you got to this post after searching for how to fix your Office install, don’t bother to read any further because it’s not going to be even slightly interesting.

(This is also for people that are savvy with a bit of UNIX – if you don’t know what ‘vi’ is, don’t bother to read any further because I’m not going to want to explain things to you beyond what I’m writing here).

So here’s the problem – Word tells you that there’s a new update of the software – version 12.1.9 in my case but I suspect that subsequent updates may have this same problem.  So you click on the ‘update’ button and it spends time downloading and then gives you an error that says

You cannot install Office 2008 12.1.9 Update on this volume. A version of the software required to install this update was not found on this volume.

No further information is available.  Nice.  Poked around a bit and found out that it was actually due to a rather overaggressive disk-space cleanup I’d done a while back to remove a bunch of foreign language stuff that I’ll never need, using the tool monolingual.  Languages were removed from my Office directory somewhere and the updater thinks something important is missing and won’t let me go any further.  So yes, mostly my fault.  Still, annoying.  

Here’s the fix that’s seemed to work for me:

1) Download the actual update from here: http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.mspx

2) Copy it out of the DMG and onto your desktop. 

3) Open a shell and cd into the ~/Desktop/Office 2008 12.1.9 Update.mpkg/Contents/Resources directory.

4) vi the package_updatable file.

5) Find the line that says found_valid_version=False

6) Change the ‘False‘ to be ‘True‘

7) Remove everything after that line, up to (but not including) the line that says if not found_valid_version:

8) Save the file.

9) Go back to a Finder window that’s looking at your desktop and then run the modified update installer by doubleclicking on the Office 2008 12.1.9 Update.mpkg file.

… and it should now run the update and install properly.  If not, well, you’re on your own.  No warrantees, guarantees or contracts are implied.  Use at your own risk.  Lather, rinse, repeat. Flush after using.

In other news, Word for 2008 still sucks, is still buggy, and they still haven’t fixed the bug that’s been there since they first released Word 2008 where the state of what you’ve got collapsed in Outline mode doesn’t get saved when you close the document.  Which is annoying, very.

There’s a spot on my regular bike-ride route where I often take a break – a couple of benches set up along the banks of one of Los Angeles’ concrete rivers.  And when summer rolls around I’ve often noticed these awesome giant bumblebees buzzing around the flowering bushes there – bumblebees that a bit of research told me were Valley Carpenter Bees.  So on a recent ride I went ahead and grabbed a few photos (using my Panasonic LX3, which continues to prove itself as a handy carryaround macro camera). 

Now here’s the interesting thing about the Valley Carpenter Bees – they exhibit a fairly significant sexual dimorphism.  Here’s a shot of a female – jet black and rather ominous looking.  

But the males – ahh, these are truly stunning.  Honey-colored fuzzballs with dappled greenish eyes, I still remember the first time I saw one.  Definitely a “What the ?!?!” moment.  Here’s a couple of shots.

Like I said they’re pretty big – about the size of the first joint on my finger – and in fact here’s one with my thumb in the photo to try and give some scale:

A few more shots are up on flickr.

If you’re like me you often carry around a point-and-shoot even when you’re primarily shooting with a larger DSLR.  A lot of times it’s just there as insurance in case your big camera suddenly has problems, or is buried deep in the bag and not worth pulling out for the sake of a quick snapshot.  Or maybe you just keep your little P&S handy because you use it to shoot short video clips.  But there’s one more use that a lot of people may not think of at first – using your P&S as a handy ‘macro’ camera.  

One of the nice things about the smaller sensor you get on a P&S (and the equivalently smaller lens assembly that goes with it) is that your minimum focusing distance is often drastically shorter than you’ll find on a DLSR.  Which means you can get a lot closer to your subject.  This, coupled with the deeper depth of field that comes with having a small sensor, means that you can get surprisingly good macro shots using your little point-and-shoot.  

Here’s a quick comparison, shooting the cover of a book I pulled off the shelf.  Using the normal ‘walkaround’ lens I keep on my 40d – a Canon 17-85 that theoretically has some ‘macro’ capabilities – this is about as close as I can get to this book and still keep it in focus.

But using my Lumix LX3, I can get much closer.  In fact the bottom of the lens was touching the surface of the book for this shot:

And the detail’s still in there if you need it – here are direct 500×250 pixel extractions from each image so you can see exactly what you’re getting.  DSLR is on top, P&S is on the bottom.  (Both shots were hand-held, f5.6, by the way).

Now I’m not saying that your point-and-shoot is going to give you better results than a dedicated, expensive macro lens setup, but I would suggest that you take a minute to get familiar with the tradeoffs, so that the next time you’re out wandering around you’ll know which tool is the best/fastest/easiest/mostconvenient for the job at hand.

After many many years of working with digital data I’ve gotten to be pretty careful and conscientious about doing backups.  I’ve had plenty of data lost over the years when I was young and naive but for the last several years I would run a nightly script that would clone my computer to a backup drive and I felt pretty safe.  Safe, that is, until the one day that the hard drive on my laptop decided to fail spectacularly right in the middle of the clone operation, spraying bits&bytes all over both drives as if they had been ejected from an active volcano.  It wasn’t a complete loss – I had some additional backups in place that were only slightly out-of-date – but it was enough to make me realize that I needed to have at least one more backup plan in place.   It was time to put on both suspenders and a belt.

Clearly the ideal backup situation is to make sure that your data is not just located on more than one disk drive but also located in a couple of different geographical locations.  So I went about exploring what my options were for some sort of cloud storage.
And after a bit of looking around I ended up trying out Mozy.  It seemed to offer what I wanted – a decent price for unlimited backup capability and it would continually run as a background process, making sure that anything new that showed up on my computer would get backed up in reasonably short order.

And it all seemed to be working fairly well, at least for the small drive in my laptop, and so I paid for a year’s worth of service and wrote a blogpost about how I was using it and also set it up to start backing up my big macpro (which has a lot more stuff on it).

But… then things got ugly.  For one thing, Mozy just couldn’t quite seem to handle the bigger machine.  And it was really slow – throttled bandwidth that meant it was going to take weeks, if not months, to get uploaded.  But that was almost a non-issue because it would keep timing out and/or just plain failing with the uploads anyway.  And Mozy would issue software updates that wouldn’t fix the problem and I would send off emails to their customer service and I wouldn’t get any decent responses and I would complain about them on Twitter and they’d contact me but then wouldn’t follow up and eventually I lost all confidence that they were every going to get their act together.

And for several months now I’ve been meaning to write a follow-up blogpost to that last one.  Because that post still gets decent traffic and I’ve been concerned that it’s misleading people into believing that I’m happily cruising along with Mozy as my backup solution.   Because I’m not.  Not even close.  Nope.  Mozy = Dead To Me.  Maybe they’ve since gotten things straightened out (though a bit of googling will show that my experience with them was far from unique) but after paying them $100 for what amounted to an exercise in Raising Ron’s Blood Pressure, it was very satisfying to uninstall the application from my systems.  [Note:  Technically I'm still 'using' them since I paid for a full year of service before I finally gave up and that year doesn't expire for a few more months and I don't feel any need to actually delete the files that I did manage to get uploaded... but nothing new has been put up there since I pulled that plug.]

Fortunately this story has a happier ending.  Another company came across my radar a couple of months ago – www.backblaze.com.  Backblaze offers much the same scenario as Mozy.  $5/month or $50/year for unlimited backup.  Automatic background-process uploading of data to keep the backup as up-to-date as possible.  Local encryption prior to upload. Etc.  Beyond that, Backblaze (unlike Mozy) doesn’t throttle upload speeds unless I tell it to.  So instead of waiting for weeks/months for all of my stuff to get uploaded, I could take advantage of a fast network and get my data – lots of data – safely backed up in a matter of days.

So I downloaded it and installed it and told it to get to work doing backups.  And, well, that’s pretty much the end of my story.  Because after that, I really didn’t think about it much.  Because it just worked.  It just happily kept shoveling files up to the Backblaze storage area and eventually everything I wanted was up there.  Everything, as in about 1 terabyte’s worth of my important files, documents and, in particular, photos.

And, finally I’m getting around to writing a good follow-up blogpost that makes it clear what my offsite backup solution of choice is.

There’s one other really nice thing about Backblaze.  It actually keeps a 30-day archive of incremental changes that you’ve made.  Sort of a mini time-machine.  So if you overwrite a document with a new version and then a few days later realize you need that original version, you can do a very quick, single-file download of last week’s version of the file.  I’ve already made use of this a couple of times.

But the bottom line for me is that Backblaze just seems to behave exactly as advertised.  Exactly as expected.

(Update:   One of the cool things about doing a reasonably-popular podcast like This Week in Photography is that we sometimes hear back from people and/or vendors that we talk about on the show.  I’d mentioned Backblaze a while back – recommended it to our listeners as a good service that I was happy to endorse – and recently got an email from Gleb Budman, the Founder & CEO of Backblaze.  We chatted a bit and he thanked me for mentioning his product on the show and I thanked him for creating a product that was worth mentioning.  And I offered to help get the word out a bit more by giving away (on their behalf) some free subscriptions.  Backblaze didn’t paying me for that nor did they give me anything for free – I’ve happily paid my $100 for my two computers and will continue to do so every year as long as the service continues to deliver what I need. But, in the spirit of ‘full disclosure’, I thought it was worth mentioning.)

I’ve been saying for a long time now that cameras need to evolve to where they’re an open computing platform.  To where all of the hardware on the device can be programmatically controlled by onboard software applications. Unfortunately we haven’t seen a whole lot of movement in this area from the big camera manufacturers, other than a bit of SDK support by Canon and (finally) Nikon and some interesting but cumbersome hackish options.  

I know that part of the reason for this is that the software/firmware on a camera isn’t really designed with this in mind – it’s not necessarily an easy change to develop an architecture that would support 3rd party applications.  Which is why I’m starting to think that this will end up being solved in the other direction – by dedicated computing platforms that also happen to have camera capabilities.  Platforms like, for instance, the iPhone.

Now clearly the title of this post is intended to be a bit ridiculous.  I’ll be the first in line to talk about how crap the current iPhone camera is.  But the limitations are primarily due to the hardware.  And camera hardware, at least up to a certain point, is a really cheap commodity.  

So let’s talk a little bit about what I could do if I had a device with decent camera hardware (a reasonably good sensor, onboard flash, maybe some other worthwhile stuff like GPS, WiFi, etc.) along with full access to that hardware via a real programming interface like the one available for the iPhone.  Here’s just a few ideas:

-Timelapse.  This is such a simple feature from a software perspective yet many (probably most) cameras don’t support it.  For my DSLR I need to buy an external trigger with timer capabilities.  Why?  (Other than the obvious answer, which is because it allows the camera manufacturers to charge a ridiculous amount of money for such a remote trigger.  Hint – buy an ebay knockoff instead).  

-Motion detection.  It’s a simple enough algorithm to detect movement and only trigger a photo when that occurs.  Yes, this would make it easy to set up a camera to see if the babysitter or the house-painters wander into rooms they shouldn’t, but it would also be very interesting to use with, for example, wildlife photography.

-Allow me to name files sensibly and according to whatever scheme I want.  Right now I rename my images as soon as they’re loaded onto my computer (based on the day/time the photo was taken) but why can’t my camera just do that for me automatically?  And do it according to any scheme I care to specify.

-Let me play with the shutter/flash timing.  Allow me to do multiple-flashes over the duration of a long exposure, for instance, to get interesting multiple-exposure effects.  

-Give me programmatic control over the autofocus and the zoom (if it’s servo-controlled), so I can shoot bracketed focus-points or animate the zoom while the shutter is open for interesting effects.  

-Overlay a reticle on the image, so I can see the framing on different aspect ratios before I shoot the photo.

-Add a nice touchscreen display to the camera and then I’ll be able to easily choose my focus point(s) or choose a region of the image that I want to meter on.

-Activate the microphone to do a voice annotation or capture some ambient sound with every photo.  Or for that matter, allow me to voice-activate the shutter.  (There’s a whole world full of sound-activation possibilities I suspect…)

-Allow me to reprogram the buttons and dials on the camera in any way I see fit.  Any of the buttons/dials, not just a couple of special-case ones…

Some of this hardware control could go down to a very deep level.  Let me play with the scanning rate of the rolling shutter, for instance, to give me super jello-cam images.

And then there’s a whole huge variety of general image-processing operations that could be applied in the camera, from custom sharpening algorithms to specialized color-corrections to just about anything else you currently need to do on your computer instead.  HDR image creation.  Tourist Removal.  Etc.  Are some of these better done as post-processes rather than in-camera?  Sure, probably.  But you could make the same claim about a lot of things – it’s why some people shoot RAW and others are happy with JPEG. Bottom line is that there are times where you just want to get a final photo straight out of the camera. 

(of course the cool thing would be to have the camera create the processed JPEG while also storing the original RAW file.  And then output a metadata file that, when read into Aperture or Lightroom or whatever your RAW processing package of choice is, would duplicate the image processing operations you’d applied in-camera but then allow you to add/remove/modify as you see fit).

And if your camera includes additional useful hardware like GPS or network access or accelerometers then you’ll have even more functionality you can access. Take a look at the iphone app Night Camera which uses the accelerometer to measure when the camera reaches a relatively stable position before taking a photo.  A really smart idea and one that will almost certainly show up in other ‘real’ cameras relatively soon.  (Incidentally, it’s worth noting that the main difficult with algorithmically removing motion blur caused by camera shake is due to the uncertainty about exactly how the camera moved while the photo was being taken – if we were to record accurate accelerometer readings over the duration of the time that the shutter was open, it becomes much easier to remove the blur as a post-process). 

Now, before I get a bunch of replies stating “my camera can already do that” on some of the items listed above, let me reiterate my original point – a camera with the ability to run arbitrary camera-control software would be able to do all of the above items.  And a lot more.  The real fun will start when when lots of people are brainstorming about this and then churn out features that nobody has thought of yet.  Who knows what this might include?

Some of these feature may not feel terribly important or may even seem ‘gimmicky’, but all it takes is a single special-case situation where you need one of them and you’ll be glad they’re part of your software arsenal.  

Back to the iPhone, it’s worth mentioning that we’re already seeing some of these sorts of applications show up.  There are panoramic stitchers and the aforementioned accelerometer function and multiple-exposure resolution enhancers and even a very nice timelapse application.  We may also end up seeing a sort of hybrid solution, with a portable device like the iPhone is tethered to the camera to give the desired capabilities.

I’m convinced that this is where the future of the camera is going, at least from a software perspective* and the features listed above are just a small subset of what we’ll end up seeing.  But you tell me – If you had full software control over your camera, what would you do with it?  

*The future of the camera from a hardware perspective is a whole other ball of wax but I’ll save my thoughts on that for a later post.  For now I’ll just say that I’m betting that the current paradigm of single (expensive) lens + single (expensive) sensor will eventually be replaced by multiple lenses and sensors and some sophisticated stitching software.  Some sort of Redundant Array of Inexpensive Lenses and Sensors (I call it RAILS).  I’ll try to get a post together on that topic as soon as I get a chance.

The sister of a dear friend of mine has been missing for some time now. Marilyn Bergeron was last seen in Québec City nearly a year ago and my friend and her family are organizing an effort to try and jump-start the search and to turn up any new information that may be available. Please visit www.findmarilyn.com (English) or www.trouvermarilyn.com (French) for more details. They’re planning to put up flyers in several of the larger Canadian cities on Sunday, February 15th, and if you’d like to help with that effort please get in touch with my friend at contact@findmarilyn.com.

I met Marilyn several times when she came to visit California and every time I talked to her she was sweet and full of laughter and full of life. Any information on her disappearance, no matter how small, might be the key to finding her so please take a minute to look over the website and to see if there’s anything that you might be able to contribute to the search.

Thank you so much for helping.

-ron

Not that I haven’t done it myself a few times (helped along by overzealous spellcheckers) but I find it rather amusing to see published books that somehow manage to confuse image-combination with organic decay. Here’s a couple of favorites:

(a few more are here)

And of course that’s why I figured I’d be better off if I owned both www.digitalcomposting.com and www.digitalcompositing.com :-)

Youtube user AgraphaFX has collected and curated a whole lot of visual-effects related videos into one place. Behind the scenes ‘making of’ stuff on everything from Star Wars to Doctor Who – lots of classic old stuff in particular. Worth checking out! www.youtube.com/user/AgraphaFX