Chuqui 3.0

Hippo New Year!

Mother and Child
Originally uploaded by chuqui

hope you all had a very merry christmas and have a Hippo New Year!

Winter In Yosemite

Winter In Yosemite
Originally uploaded by chuqui

Here's a classic view of Yosemite valley and half dome from tunnel view. There was a winter storm overnight that left a few inches of new snow on everything, and lots of clouds and fog the next day. This one may look B&W at first glance, but it's not, I left the color on El Capitan -- the rest of the monochrome is as it was in real life.

Coyote on the Prowl

Coyote on the Prowl
Originally uploaded by chuqui

While shooting on the valley floor, we came across this coyote mousing in one of the meadows. Turned out to be rather habituated to humans, as his audience grew, he finally stopped and then sat down and watched us for a while -- and then decided to wander up to the road and see if he could convince one of the cars driving by to give him a handout for his performance. No, to my knowledge nobody fed him, but it was clear he was -- not begging -- but hopeful.

Gorgeous beast, though.

While we were there, a family drove up and got out to shoot pictures with their point and shoot. The teenage daughter kept asking if she could follow him, and her family kept telling her no. Finally, she asked if she could go pet him, and everyone within earshot (myself included) all yelled out "no!", after which she petulantly shut up.

That was somewhat amusing, but a number of years ago I was in Yellowstone near the lodge and ran into a feeding moose -- and an eight year old girl without any visible parents who kept insisting on trying to pet the damn thing. I finally grabbed her and hauled her away and chewed her out a bit after verbal warnings were ignored -- which she didn't appreciate, but she stopped trying to visit the moose.

Far as I can tell, the moose looked vaguely disappointed, but I wasn't particularly looking forward to finding a ranger with a bit stranger girl in tow...

My first close up view of coyotes for any length of time, and it was fascinating to watch; when he cocks his ears forward to listen under the snow, his face looks very much like an owl does -- the fur shifts to turn into a bit of a funnel into the ears (which are huge, especially compared to a dog). This one never caught anything while we were watching, but he clearly isn't suffering from winter hunger.

Yet Another Aperture 2.0 keyword wish

(see my complete set of Aperture 2.0 wishes:

All I want for Christmas is Aperture 2.0
What I wanted for Aperture A FREAKING YEAR AGO
Better Set Handling
A few more "need to have" things
more keyword wishes

)

I'm just full of Aperture 2.0 wishes...

Okay, imagine this keyword hierarchy:

North America
California
Yosemite National Park
Tunnel View
Hetch-Hetchy Reservoir

now, to access this, I can either open North American, then Open California, then open Yosemite...

or I can search on keywords, using "yos" which brings up Yosemite National Park.

But -- the sub-hierarchy isn't accessible, because it doesn't match. Which means if I want to keyword a picture "Yosemite National Park", "Tunnel View", searching is useless, unless I want to do multiple searches and selections (ugh). So back I go to wandering the hierarchy the navigation way...

and of course you can't use keyboard hints, so you can't open up "California" and type "y" to get to Yosemite. You have to mouse or arrow key to it.

augh.

Winter In Yosemite

Winter In Yosemite
Originally uploaded by chuqui

Working a bit on the photos taken during the trip, with fresh snow and a full overcast, I found it fascinating how the color got sucked out of Yosemite -- it was there when you looked at things close up, but everything went this fascinating monochrome at a distance. It also turned into the world's largest softbox; no shadows anywhere.

So it was obvious to convert some of the photos to black and white. I haven't touched black and white photography since my days on the high school newspaper, but I think this one turned out reasonably well.

Most popular postings for December

Something I'm going to try to start doing here is taking a second look at what postings and photos generate the most interest -- it'll help me better understand what the readers are finding worth their time, and also help give some of the better writing and photography a second look. So, without further ado, here are the most popular blog postings in my feedburner feed (i.e., subscribers) for December:

See like Ashok, Shoot like Ashok: in which I talk a bit about my working to become a better photographer -- a classic case of the more you learn, the less you know. It's also a very public Thank You to Ashok Khosla, who's really been huge in encouraging me over the last year or so and helping me understand what it takes to be a good bird photographer (so has Bill Walker -- who decided to throw his own pelican into the mix to keep me humble... grin)

If your proprietary RAW workflow dies: where I join a discussion with Fraser Speirs and others about issues involving digital photography and permanency. In reality, I think we're over-thinking the issue to some degree, we don't have to worry about negatives degenerating in storage, and as long as you keep your backup situation reliable (that's it's own discussion), you can get your images back. Out of this has come the idea that RAW is not an archival format, and that's also another discussion -- but if you want to make sure you can print out a photo as you created it later, assuming you can do so with a RAW and any set of metadata is a bad assumption; you need to create a "virtual print" of the finished product (I am now using uncompressed TIFF), because there are too many variables going on to trust anything else.

What Apple Could Do with it's cash on hand: in which I suggest Apple buy Adobe and Yahoo, and why both might make sense.

First Year Apple TV Sales fall below expectation: in which I bitchslap "analysts" calling this product a failure. Compared to what? Who's doing better? This is a market still emerging, so how can it have already failed? (also on the list, this followup post on the topic)

SFWA -- the more things change, the less things change: in which I more or less bitchslap SFWA for again screwing up the online privacy issue and proving itself to be pretty worthless at helping the writers the organization is supposed to be helping; instead, it prefers to argue within itself about what it should be when it grows up and shooting itself in the foot in public. Heck, the "what should SFWA be when it grows up" fight as old and tired a decade ago, but it's a great way for an organization to think it's accomplishing things while actually making sure it never actually grapples with anything difficult or substantive...

Wikis and Spammers: in which I, well, bitchslap (nicely) someone for ignoring 20+ years of history here on the net and putting up a writeable web site that doesn't require authentication, and then whining the spammers moved in and ruined it. Like, we haven't figured this out yet?

man, lots of bitchslapping this month...

California Gopher Snake: but heck, who can not love a picture of a snake and a story about girls who can't decide whether to pet it or run screaming...

The worst product in the world: in which I find myself defending the Taser as not being a product of Satan....

And we'll close with two pictures: an American Bittern, and a Leucistic Coot.

My 2008 Calendar

One thing I've always liked doing is creating gifts for people I care about -- one of my frustration the last number of years is always feeling too busy to actually DO it. It's easy to spend money on someone, it's meaningful to DO something for someone.

So this year, I committed to actually getting it done. It didn't hurt that this year, I felt my photography was finally up to snuff enough to be able to use it as the basis -- so I created a calendar for 2008 and had a number of them printed up, and I've been giving them out to family, friends and others that I wanted to do something a bit special for.

Here are the 13 images I chose for the calendar, and why....

Anyone who's looked at my flickr stream won't be surprised to see some egrets in the calendar -- I've done a lot of photography at the Palo Alto rookery the last couple of years, partly because it's an easy place to get to, partly because the egret and the heron's the roost there are rather difficult subjects that have forced me to work on my photography, and partly because I'm fascinated watching the process of the birds going through the breeding and raising cycle. I could live without the smell, but you can't have everything.

This was the cover of the calendar, because I wanted a vertical shot, and I think it's technically quite good and really shows off the great egret in all of its glory. The Great Egret is, in fact, the only subject repeated in the calendar (by design).

January: Cooper's Hawk

I was exploring Ulistac Natural Area, a small protected area here in Santa Clara along the Guadalupe River that's being allowed to naturalize. I was chasing warblers and sparrows, practicing locating and identifying them in the shadows and generally working on my stalking skills when I heard this rustle. Turning around, the Cooper's was sitting maybe 8' from me in a branch about 5' above me, just watching. It was cooperative about sticking around for some photography, and it's one of the most beautiful hawk images I've captured to date. This is an image I've used to create business cards I pass out when I get questions on my photography while out shooting.

February: Essence of Silicon Valley

Shot at Palo Alto Baylands, it's a shot of a Northern Harrier in flight while hunting with the Blimp Hanger of Moffett Field in the background. To me, this image sums up why this area is so good to live in; we have so much open space and wild areas to explore, literally steps from the high tech and other industries that drive this area. This shot is really a core image of the change in mindset I've had in the last couple of years as I've tried to decouple defining my life in terms of my job and instead starting to think about the quality of life and not just how many hours I put in....

March: Willet in Flight

Technically a really nice shot -- taken at Shoreline Lake, the Willet was sitting on a rail, and I knew at some point it would take off. After that, it was just sitting back and staking it out, and having the gear set up right -- and getting a bit lucky, but I think he's a heck of a catch.

April: half dome at sunset

Heck you have to do half dome. For me, Yosemite is a lost love that I've been reclaiming in the last couple of years; I visited it a lot as a kid, then stopped for about 20 years. Now, in the last couple of years, Laurie and I have started exploring it again and enjoying it during the off-season, and I've been using it as a challenge to improve myself as a photographer, since it's impossible to really do a "new" photo of Yosemite, it's been more about technical quality and creating a personal style.

We just (literally) finished a winter trip there, where I took the same shot just after a storm dropped a few inches of new snow on the park:

but to be honest, my best shots of Yosemite are of three brothers:

Those may be my best shots, period.

May: Sea Otter and Friend

Shot at Morro Bay harbor, another place I've been really falling in love with (and a great weekend trip place for those trying to get away from Silicon Valley) -- I mean how can you not love sea otters? Especially when they're trying to eat lunch and pimping over an over-enthusiastic friend trying to share the meal?

June: Evening Commute

Shot at sunset at Palo Alto Baylands, it's a picture of swallows returning to the nests for the evening at the interpretive center there. I love the texturing of the shadows (check the larger image version, it's not a silhouette), but it also speaks to me as symbolic of a slower speed of life, and a simpler and better life to live. Another one of my favorites, period, and one of the three images I have framed and up on my office wall as inspiration of what I'm trying to become as a photographer -- the spring shot of Three Brothers above is another).

July: Sunset at Los Consumnes

Off chasing geese and sandhill cranes at Los Consumnes River Preserve near Galt, I stayed around for the sunset, and was blown away. The photo didn't turn out badly, either. Again, it's somewhat symbolic of my wish to slow down and savor (how many silicon valley geeks even see a sunset these days, much less stop and savor one?) -- but I just think it's a hell of a shot.

Another shot I almost used instead is this one:

August: White-Tailed Kite hunting

Blufftop Park in Half Moon Bay became bird photographer central for a while, because there was a population explosion of voles, and the hawks moved in en masse to hunt. I spent a number of days there while I was taking my sabbatical between jobs, and took a lot of really nice hawk photos. This one stuck out for me becuse of the action and detail. What you might not notice at first glance is that the hawk's right claw is up underneath the tail -- and holding a vole which the hawk took off and had for lunch. I found the white-tailed kites fascinating to watch and a real challenge to photograph well because of the contrast differences between the light and dark areas of the body and the black around the eyes -- getting the eyes to show up properly like I did here without blowing out the feathering can be tough, but to me, it's the key to making a good photo of this species.

September: Multnomah Falls, Oregon

Another favorite area, the Columbia River Gorge area near Portland. I spent a fair amount of time while we were on this trip experimenting with working on the blur on the water; this shot was actually taken using both a circular polarizer and a 4x ND filter to give me a really slow shutter speed; I think the results are quite good.

October, 2008: Baby Bonobo

I love zoo photography and trying to make photos taken in those situations look natural; this shot of a baby bonobo amusing itself while mom slept just really stuck with me for how it brings emotion to the face of the animal.

November: Hetch Hetchy Reservoir

Caught during my spring trip, my first visit to Hetch Hetchy in 30+ years (maybe ever, it gets fuzzy back in the ancient days, although I do remember when the Ahwanee hotel had a golf course, because I played it). I just loved the reflection and the tonality of the shot.

December: Great Egret in flight

another shot from the palo alto baylands rookery. I love how the morning light falls on the bird, which is showing just a touch of the green lores they wear during courting season. Technically a great shot with good feather definition, I just love the composition and detail of this shot.

I could have used any number of egret shots, and I considered one of the many baby shots I've taken at the rookery, such as this:

or

but heck, I could have filled a calendar or three JUST with egrets. Don't believe me? check out my snowy egrets and great egrets on flickr....

oh, heck. one more:

I'm not selling calendars, although a couple of folks who've seen them have asked. I suppose if you really want one, we can talk -- but I'll likely have to do another printing, since I only have one left at this point. Or you can grab the calendar photos on flickr.

If I do this for 2009, it'll only be shots taken in 2008 (although I may cheat on some of the shots I just took in Yosemite, since they came after this was done). For me, it was a way to evaluate the quality of my work and how it's progressing, as well as to do something personal for people I know. All in all, I'm quite happy with the results, and so seem to be the recipients, which is what really matters...

And to those of you reading the blog, consider this a bit of a "Merry Christmas" to you all, also. Maybe next year I'll look at doing a PDF version of the calendar as well to share with everyone. But at least I can share the photos and why I chose them with you all.

a few more Aperture 2.0 "need to have" things...

(see my complete set of Aperture 2.0 wishes:

All I want for Christmas is Aperture 2.0
What I wanted for Aperture A FREAKING YEAR AGO
Better Set Handling
A few more "need to have" things
more keyword wishes

)

A quick follow-up on my posting of stuff I want to see in Aperture 2.0....

Here are a few more things -- mostly missing items from Smart Albums that I've just bumped into the hard way...

First, you can create a smart album based on "has any or all of these keywords", which is great. But what about "does NOT have this keyword" or "has NONE of these keywords?"

Case in point: I've started a project to re-process and re-caption, re-headline, and re-keyword all of my key images, and then migrate those changes off to sub-images stored in a set. With 10,000ish images in my library now, that's going to take a while. The way I started this was to add a keyword "to be redone" to every image. When I'm done reprocessing it, I can remove the keyword.

but -- how to tell what I've done already? I can't create a search based on a LACK of the "to be redone" keyword. So I guess I get to add a second keyword "redo finished" to it, or something like that. But, of course, that starts creating the chances for manual errors and the like. It's going to take a lot more tracking than this really should... I suppose I could do something like remove the rating" from the files and re-rate when I'm done reprocessing... But you can see how no matter what I do, logistics is going to get in the way, and some simple things Aperture ought to do are missing. If it can find all of the photos WITH a keyword, why can't it also find the reverse of that search? It's not that tough.

Secondarily, another way to try to do this -- which Aperture can't do -- is to create a smart album that includes images not in another smart album, or not in some set of smart albums, or not in any album at all. But Aperture doesn't support that.

Flickr does. So does iTunes; like my suggestion for fixing keywords by grabbing the code from Mail.app to turn keywords into objects, they can fix this by grabbing the code from iTunes and adapting it. These are things already solved by Apple, they don't need to be invented from scratch...

HD DVD: End of Week 1

bbum’s weblog-o-mat » Blog Archive » HD DVD: End of Week 1:

It has now been nearly a week since we added an HD DVD player to the home entertainment system.

Some impressions.

We watched Serenity this evening. It is visually stunning. I’m sure the audio is pretty amazing, too, but I don’t currently have the 5.1 pre-amp / speakers hooked up.

By “visually stunning”, I mean: It looks better than it did in the theater. As an added bonus, I make better popcorn, have vastly superior beverages for far less money, and can watch a visually stunning movie while sitting in front of a fire.

No wonder the theaters are running scared. Hell — we paid $19 for Serenity on HD DVD which, accounting for the evening’s expense, is about 1/3rd to 1/5th the cost of actually going to a theater (depending on babysitting expenses).

Anyway — HD DVD really delivers in terms of the visuals when paired with a decent TV; 46″ 1080p Sony LCD, in my case.

The Planet Earth really drives it home. I have watched it on DVD, via Satellite, and on HD DVD. At 1080p, The Planet Earth is an awesome — a moving — tour of the awesome breadth of life on this planet.

As well, we watched the remastered HD DVD version of Blazing Saddles. The difference between it and the DVD is quite noticeable, but mostly in that HD DVD so clearly displays the noise and imperfections found in the original production process.

And, of course, if the discs do so, the extras on HD DVD can be considerably richer and more deeply integrated with the primary content than regular DVDs. Speaking of regular DVDs, the player does an awesome job of upscaling legacy content (though, honestly, I have no idea how it compares to the various $30 to $70 upscaling DVD players that are commonplace these days).

And that is pretty much where the happiness ends. Click on through for a bit of a rant on the vasty stupidity that is next generation media….

In this first week, it has also becomes abundantly clear that HD DVD is doomed. Though I have no experience with it, I would bet that a lot of my relatively off-the-cuff observations would apply equally to Blu-Ray.

Great summary and overview of HD-DVD here. Pretty much re-affirms my decision to stand on the sideline and watch -- which I think many folks are doing, which is why both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are doomed.

I've had two reasons to avoid plunging into the "DVD upgrade" waters: first, I'm unwilling to commit to a format until the industry does -- the fight between the two formats simply means I'll buy neither until they figure it out. It's not JUST not wanting to invest in the loser, it's that I refuse to be part of a battle these folks should have solved before tossing it onto the market, and buying into it only encourages them to think they can suck out the consumer's money for the fight. Thanks, no.

But the second reason is that nobody in the industry is really doing anything to convince me why these things will improve my life. As Bill notes -- the HD format is much better, but nobody seems to be marketing that -- and the new DRM restrictions and other technical issues annoy me. DVD has DRM, but it really stays out of the way of the consumer; these new formats don't. I don't mind iTunes DRM for the same reason -- I know it exists, but it doesn't impact the way I want to use the material; until companies figure out that the market is a compromise between what the consumers want and what the industry wishes they could impose (DVD and iTunes get this; HD-DVD and blu-ray and RIAA idiots clearly don't), I'm going to not spend any of my money here.

I'm not in the camp of the "I can do anything I want, any way I want, any where I want, and how I want" consumer anti-DRM folks -- I understand the owner of content wanting to set some reasonable limits -- but what the industry is trying to do in defining "only how we tell you you can, only when we tell you you can" isn't in any way what I consider reasonable limits. The only way I can influence this is with dollars (or euros, or whatever), so I do so by not putting them into formats or industries that are pushing these unreasonable limits. DRM is not evil. How companies are using and abusing DRM to redefine the consumer's rights in using content -- that's evil. And so far, consumers keep showing they aren't as stupid as these industries seem to want to believe, they aren't buying into it.

So I continue to sit on the sidelines here, and will...

Oh, and I seem to be the only person in the universe unimpressed by Planet Earth. The photography is stunning, but (unlike, say, March of the Penguins, I found the narrative stultifying -- in the US, it's narrated by Susan Sarandon in what can only be described as an NPR drone, and the scripting of the narrative ultimately boiled down to "good lord, do we have some amazingly good video here, or what? And these guys sat in a desert for FOUR YEARS to bring you this 30 second clip of this funky beast!" I found her such a turn-off I more or less gave up on it. It just came across as self-indulgent to the point of being more annoying than stunning...

Fortune: Radiohead was dumb to ditch iTunes, make more money - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Fortune: Radiohead was dumb to ditch iTunes, make more money - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW):

But of course, Fortune has got it backwards-- Radiohead, as we noted earlier in the year, would only have earned $1 per album going through the record companies, and so they were still able to rake in twice as much at their average of $2.26 per album download.

But the question unasked is this: if Radiohead had published their album through iTunes, not via a record label but as an independent, thereby not having to split the money with anyone, how much would they have earned?

I'm willing to bet that if they marketed it the way they did their independent route, the answer would have been "even more".

We also need to remember that Radiohead is benefitting from having been a success within the music industry -- very few bands are getting traction going the indie route on their own. that's where the labels still have the advantage, if they only woke up and decided to take advantage of it: they're losing their ability to control distribution, but they still understand how to market and develop. Others will figure this out over time, too, but for now, the labels still know how to generate hype -- and a band just starting out doesn't. Radiohead is taking advantage of the work done for it by their former label and then heading out free agent afterward.

I'm not saying that's wrong, by the way -- free agency is a great option that bands should examine as their careers move along. But it seems to get lost that Radiohead had already "made it" before they went off on this experiment -- and a bit part of that "made it" was from the label everyone is ridiculing. Nobody's made the kind of success (to my knowledge) that Radiohead had without having a label involved yet -- so we better not kill them off until that's figured out.

On the other hand, it's the labels mostly committing suicide here, so maybe saving them isn't a choice we'll have...