The March 2006 meeting of the Camera Owners of the Bay Area (COBA) user group will be held on Wednesday, March 8, 2006 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) from 7:30-10:30 pm.

PMA Roundup

Uwe Steinmueller will give us a quick update on everything that was announced and displayed at the Photo Marketing Association conference in Florida this week.

California Earthframes

Uwe Steinmueller of Outback Photo will discuss the making of his latest photo book, “California Earthframes”.

“Our photos of the last 5 years were taken about 95% in California. On the other side these photos are not typical for travel guides or even introductions to California. In early 2003 we started calling some of our pictures Earthframes.

Originally we limited the term Earthframes to abstract nature photos. Over the time we felt that most of our pictures could be called ‘Earthframes’ and also include urban elements (the name was our creation anyway). So we came up with a title ‘California Earthframes’. We think the title does not mislead expecting a travel guide and yet gives the book a context. Overall we feel that this book is a homage to California.”

Sports Photography

Brian Jackson of Action Athletics will teach you the latest tips and techniques for capturing great sports photographs.

Based based in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, Action Athletics covers a wide range of sporting events in Northern California, including, but not limited to, baseball, lacrosse, rubgy, swimming, softball, water polo, and soccer.

Lots of buzz in the press about the products that Microsoft and Apple are going to release tomorrow, February 28th. People suspect Origami is a new device that’s bigger than a handheld computer yet smaller than a laptop.

Leaked video of the device suggests that it can play movies, show pictures, offer web browsing (presumably with WiFi support, but rumors also talk of 3G wireless), and function as a tablet PC for the purposes of note-taking and other pen-based applications. Too see the movie, one needs to visit Digital Kitchen, then follow this path after “entering” the site: Work > Brandtheater > Microsoft Origami.

This all sounds suspiciously like a computer I’ve been using for over a decade: the Newton! I’ve been using my MP2100 at work to take down all of my notes. Despite having an Ambicom Bluetooth card, it’s still a bit tedious to transfer data from the Newton to my computer. Relativity, Paul’s idea to bridge the gap between the Newton OS and new hardware is the key to bringing NOS to the 21st century. If Origami can be made to run Linux — which it should since it presumably runs Windows — we’ll be able to get Einstein running in short time!

As for what Apple is up to, rumors point to a larger screened iPod (fake videos notwithstanding), Intel iBooks and MacMinis, and the perennial Apple Tablet. All will be revealed tomorrow, so stay tuned!

Apple is showing off Aperture 1.1 at PMA this week. MacWorld has a good article detailing some of the new features.

Better RAW decoding, sharpening, and noise reduction algorithms are the ones that I’m most interested in. I’ve been using Aperture for several projects the past couple of months. In the studio, the results are not bad. In shooting conditions with good light, Aperture’s results are perfectly acceptable. Where the program breaks down is in high ISO, low-light environments. Aperture’s 1.0/1.0.1’s noise reduction sucks.

There’s also a report from InsideAperture that has additional details. Rob Galbraith has positive initial thoughts on Aperture 1.1’s RAW conversion results:

The real news of v1.1 is something we knew Apple was beavering away on, but we didn’t expect to see results this soon: RAW file decoding that at first blush appears to have none of the improperly sharpened and somewhat smeared look of Aperture conversions today. Instead, what we saw when we got in close to the monitor was Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II photos that had the finely detailed, photographically natural look we’ve seen in our own EOS-1Ds Mark II workflow in which Canon’s Digital Photo Professional 2.0.3 is the converter and converted files are optimally sharpened in Photoshop to compensate for the softening effect of the camera’s optical low-pass filter.

Felix has a great story about Sierra Road, the 3.8 mile, 1800 feet climb that pro cyclists raced up earlier this week during Stage 2 of the Tour of California. Having discovered the painful pleasures that is Redwood Gulch Road, I shudder at the thought of a climb twice and long and steeper!

My winter hiberation is nearing an end. I expect to be back in the saddle and shedding Calories shortly!

Canon announced some new products today in advance of the PMA conference. The 30D, not to be confused with their original consumer digital SLR, the D30, is a refinement of the EOS 20D. The 85mm f/1.2L Mark II lens updates the original 85mm f/1.2 lens with faster AF. Finally for 20D, 30D, and Digital Rebel owners, the EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS brings a fast, constant aperture zoom lens with image stablization to the EF-S lens mount.

Read the rest of this entry »

Day two of Mashup Camp is underway. I have brought the Sharpcast Photos demo in case anyone wants to see it in action.

At one point in the morning, there were three Adams and one Alex in the entire auditorium. Adam Suh, Adam Green, and Adam Tow joined together to form the Three Adams of Mashup coding group. Only together can our combined strength bring order to the mashup!

I’m blogging from Mashup Camp at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. I’ve created a Flickr stream of photos that I’m taking at the event. You can see other photos from the event here on Flickr.

There are so many good sessions, but they all happening at the same time! I’m currently in the mobile session, and there’s a spirited debate about getting apps onto mobile devices. Do you deploy your app to be viewed by a browser? SMS? Client application? The consumer doesn’t care as long as it works, but startups and small application developers don’t have the resources nor time to support these solutions. They choose one approach and hope that it’s the correct one.

At Sharpcast, we’ve decided that the rich-client is the right course of action. Browsers on mobile devices are not good enough to provide the rich application experience that desktop or Web 2.0 applications afford.

Been working on a WordPress problem that’s been vexing me for the past few weeks. Since I use WP to run the entire websites, I typically place the blog section as a separate sub-page under the website root. My site structure might look like this:

• www.example.com = the website’s home page
• www.example.com/blog = where the blog will appear
• www.example.com/wordpress = where WordPress lives

The problem that I and others were facing was that blog posts on the sub-page were showing the full post instead of the portion before the <!--more--> tag.

The function get_the_content (called within the_content function) will only show the post teaser if it’s not a single or non-permalink page. The solution involves making WordPress think that the sub-page is a non-permalink page. I accomplished this by setting the global $more variable to 0 in my page template. For example:

Now, when I execute the WordPress Loop in this sub-page, the posts that are displayed correctly show the teaser and not the entire post. Developers may want to store the current value of the $more variable in case other functions/plugins rely it.

Adobe released Beta 2 of Lightroom today. Some of the new and improved features include:

• Now available as a Universal Binary for compatibility with Intel-based Apple hardware
• Crop and Straighten tools included in the Develop module
• Ability to add music to slideshows
• White balance support for the Nikon D2X, D2Hs and D50 cameras
• Ability to create hierarchical keyword sets
• XMP Import and Export capabilities. (Please consult Known Issues list for details)
• Improved Edit in Photoshop capabilities
• Improved metadata handling

Our COBA meeting last week featured demos of Lightroom, Aperture, Bibble, Raw Shooter Premium, and LightZone. I’ll have some photos from that event up soon.

I’ve been using Aperture for several projects lately, and I have been happy and frustrated with versions. I want to create a separate version of a photo that exists solely in one project or another. When I drag a version from one album to another, it creates a link between the two. Thus, if I make a change to one of the versions — such as adjusting the exposure or the crop &mdash the change is reflected in the other album. While this can be a good feature, it can also be very annoying when you want to keep them separate. I’ll dig around the support forums later this week to find a solution to the problem.

The cat is out of the bag. I’ve been helping out the folks at Sharpcast for the past year, and at the beginning of this year, I made my relationship with them formal! My most recent project with them has been revising and launching the corporate website.

Members of the team are at DEMO 2006 this week in Phoenix, Arizona. I have good memories of going to DEMO in 2001 when I was working at Palm. Another former company of mine, DoDots, also made its debut at DEMO in 2000. If you use Yahoo! Widgets or Dashboard Widgets, you know what DoDots did. Sadly, much like the Newton, the company was four to five years ahead of the curve.

Speaking of the Newton, I just got an AmbiCom CompactFlash Bluetooth Card. Now, I can transfer files back and forth between my Bluetooth-enabled devices, including my laptops, desktop, and phone. The wireless driver for the Newton doesn’t support the latest wireless encryption standards, so I can only use my Skyline 802.11b card on open networks. Having a Bluetooth card will extend the life of my Newton until we get Einstein running fast on other devices.