Jared Polis is featured on CNN today in an article on Freshman Congressman. When I was photographing the final week of his Congressional campaign, I asked him about the possibility of documenting his first 100 days of his Frosh year. The biggest stumbling block I saw was getting access to the real meat and potatoes of life on the Hill. For a single photographer, that would have posed a big problem, but if you’re CNN, I guess you can get the access you need!

Documenting Jared’s journey to the Capitol was an extremely rewarding experience. The trip came together very quickly at our friend Dave’s wedding a few weeks before the election. Sitting at our table, I asked the best man, “So, who’s documenting your election?” Jared responded that they’ve been so busy, they haven’t had anyone really doing it. I jumped at the opportunity to say that Rae and I should come up to Colorado to help out. Soon enough, I found myself in Colorado for a whirlwind week!

Read the rest of this entry »

The first meeting of 2009 for the Camera Owners of the Bay Area (COBA) user group will be held on Wednesday, February 11, 2009, at SmugMug headquarters in Mountain View from 7:30 pm to 10:00 pm.

New Location

After several years meeting at Stanford’s SLAC and Cordura Hall, COBA is moving to where it all started, Mountain View! This month, we’ll be meeting at the SmugMug offices near downtown Mountain View.

SmugMug
67 E. Evelyn Ave, Suite 200
Mountain View, CA 94041

Agenda

• 19:00-19:30: Sign-in and mingling period
• 19:30-20:30: Emerging Trends in Digital Photography
• 20:45-21:30: Camera Bags

Emerging Trends in Digital Photography

Lloyd Chambers will discuss emerging trends in digital photography, followed by practical tips for attaining maximum image quality via appropriate choices in cameras, lenses, tripods, and post-processing, along with tips and tricks and “gotchas”, especially with today’s high resolution digital cameras. Lloyd will bring his suite of Zeiss ZF lenses, and if time allows, discuss the reasons you might choose alternative lenses to the standard Nikon and Canon offerings.

Lloyd Chambers’s diglloyd.com offers a wealth of material on advanced photographic techniques, and his Zeiss ZF Lenses is a reference work on those fine lenses. Lloyd is a lifetime photographer, having used a variety of formats including 35mm, 4X5, 6X7 and 617 film, as well as numerous digital cameras.

His web site, diglloyd.com, is targeted at photographers seeking objective and high-quality information which can be trusted to make buying decisions, to learn or enhance skills, or to find best-practices for a smooth photographic workflow. He also is author of the MacPerformanceGuide.com, a site dedicated to choosing a Mac and enhancing productivity.

Camera Bags

If there’s one constant in a photographer’s life, it’s that one can never have enough camera bags. Two and a half years have passed since our last showcase of COBA members’ bags. Be prepared to bring your collection of camera bags to the meeting. Bags come in all different shapes and sizes; some are best used for transportation while others are great to work out of but hard on the shoulders or back. Is there a perfect camera bag out there that can do everything for everybody? We’ll find out!

This morning, Dardy, Rae, and I went to the official Grand Opening of the new Red Mango yogurt shop in Valley Fair. Yul Kwon, winner of Survivor: Cook Islands, has opened four shops in the Bay Area. Yul and I were classmates at Stanford (and fellow Symbolic Systems grads). I still fondly remember the many nights we worked together at the now-closed Teahouse in Wilbur Hall.

We enjoyed the free yogurt they were handing out as part of the grand opening. So far, we’ve tried out two of the three yogurt shops — Red Mango and Blondies — within a few miles of our house. Pinkberry in Santana Row is the only one we haven’t been to yet (it also just opened recently).

Following our fill of yogurt, we returned back to the house, where I cooked Dardy some nice steamed tilapia fish for lunch. Afterwards, Rae and I headed to Matt’s house to finish off our final ADR session with Preston. From here on out, it’s audio mixing for Matt and final picture lock for Autumn Gem!

Weeks after I updated the firmware on my Seagate 1.5TB hard drives, I learn that the previous model, the 1TB 7200.11 Barracudas might also have a firmware bug in them.

Great. Just great.

I have several of these drives, most of them being used as my main drives or as backup/offsite backup drives. Four more drives will be used in a RAID 1 array by a client at an upcoming conference. Having any of them fail would not be a good thing to happen.

Here’s the brief explanation from Seagate:

Welcome, Seagate hard drive owners. A number of Seagate hard drives from the following families may fail when the host system is powered on:

Barracuda 7200.11
DiamondMax 22
Barracuda ES.2 SATA
SV35

Once a drive has failed, the data is inaccessible to users. Seagate has isolated this issue to a firmware bug affecting drives from these families manufactured through December 2008. Please use the following tools and instructions to determine if you have one of the affected products. If you do, we recommend that you update the firmware on the disk drive.

…

If you have one of the models listed above, Customers can expedite assistance by contacting Seagate via email. Please include the following disk drive information: model number, serial number and current firmware revision. We will respond, promptly, to your email request with appropriate instructions.

Or you can call Seagate Support at 1-800-SEAGATE. Please be prepared to give the serial number of your drive as the solution depends on knowing the exact serial number.

Since some of my drives are stored offsite, I’m going to have to grab them before sending Seagate the email. I hope that the firmware update doesn’t affect that data already stored on the drives.

For the past several years, I’ve purchased Seagate drives exclusively, due to hard drive crash experiences with other drive manufacturers such as Maxtor, IBM, and Quantum. Maybe it’s time to switch companies again. Readers, any recommendations?

This year, Rae and I anticipate we’ll be traveling a lot as we screen and promote Autumn Gem across the country. Because of this, it will be critical for us to have Internet access wherever we go and whenever we need it.

Over the past twelve years, I’ve had periods where I had the ability to access the Internet on the run. Initially, it was through the Metricom Ricochet wireless modem. The Ricochet was great because I could hook it up to my PowerBook or Newton and have 56Kbps or 128Kbps access to the Net way back in 1998! Later, I used the Palm VII for quick wireless access from the palm of my hand. The downside to the Palm VII was that you didn’t have full access to the Internet, only access to scaled down Web Clipping applications from select content providers. A few years later, I tried tethering my Sony Ericsson T68i to my laptop, but the speed was very slow. Today, I can use my iPhone to do pretty much all the basic Internet tasks that I require on a daily basis: email and web browsing. If AT&T were to offer a tethering option, I would consider it, but I probably wouldn’t like the slow Edge speeds and the short battery life that would invariably follow.

With that in mind, I’ve been looking for a solution to getting persistent access to the Internet while on the road. From Ziv, I’ve learned of a number of people using the Cradlepoint CTR-350 EVDO/Wi-Fi router ($139) and the Verizon USB727 EVDO modem (free with 2-year service contract). Alex has been using this solution (with Sprint EVDO) successfully since the end of 2007. I picked up these two components along with a BixNet 5V Li-ION battery ($80). This allows me to use share my EVDO Internet connection over Wi-Fi for up to 8 hours on a single battery charge.

So, instead of having my EVDO modem connected only to my laptop, I share the Internet connection through Wi-Fi, meaning my MacBook Pro, iPhone, and iPod touch can access the Internet at the same time at EVDO speeds. As the title of this post suggests, I can also bestow the gift of the Internet to other people.

With an Eye-Fi wireless memory card, I can use this setup to automatically upload photos from my digital camera to my SmugMug account. I wanted to use this at Macworld 2009, but the battery had not come in yet and the keynote room did not have any AC outlets. I ended up manually uploading selected photos to SmugMug for use on John’s live blog posts of the keynote.

I wonder how many photojournalists are using something like this to transmit their photos while on the job. It seems like an excellent way to get photos immediately to the photo editor, provided that the images are small enough. I don’t think I want to try transmitting 21MP images, even if they are JPEG compressed!

Update April 11, 2009: I had a problem with my initial Bixnet battery where the USB cable had to be wiggled in order to provide proper power to the router. I RMA’ed the battery, but I’m not sure if the battery is supplying the router with enough power. At several recent shoots, I’ve noticed that photos were not being uploaded either (1) in a timely fashion or (2) not at all. I’ve got an order in for another battery, the Tekkeon 3450i, which is approved for use with the Cradlepoint CTR-350. The Tekkeon is bigger and heavier than the Bixnet battery, but if it’s more reliable, it’s a better deal. I’d rather have something that works and is heavier than something that only works intermittently. I’ll provide an update when I have tested the Tekkeon. Stay tuned!

Update April 19, 2009 The new BixNet battery does not appear to supply enough current to continually power the Cradlepoint and USB EVDO modem. The connection comes and goes, making the combination useless. BixNet has been selling an “updated” version of the battery, one with a mini-USB port for charging the battery. This version does not come with an on-off switch.

On the other hand, the Tekkeon 3450i battery seems to work well. It’s much bigger, heavier, and pricier than the BixNet. I’ve updated the photos to show a side-by-side comparison of the two batteries. Another downside to the Tekkeon is that it has a huge AC adapter for charging the battery. I really like how the BixNet can be charged with virtually any USB AC adapter like my iPhone charger.

Tomorrow is being touted as Palm’s make-or-break moment. It’s poised to announce Nova, the company’s next operating system.

Despite being a former employee and knowing several people still at the company, I honestly no nothing about what Nova is or isn’t (that’s a good thing they haven’t been talking – secrecy in this case is good). I’ve been very down on Palm in the past and am still hesitant to think that they can rise from the ashes to relevance in light of competition from Apple and RIM. That said, I’ve been thinking about what Nova could be, and I want to throw my guess before the cat is out of the bag tomorrow.

Nova will be a new operating system that uses applications made with standard web development tools to access information on the device and from the Internet.

Software developers aren’t going to want to develop for yet another phone; they are busy making apps for iPhone and Blackberry. But, what if Nova software development isn’t aimed at traditional software developers but at traditional web developers? If developers could make native phone applications using Javascript, PHP, Ruby, Python, they might very interested in Nova.

I used to work at a company called DoDots, which made widgets (mini-browsers and micro-web content) years before Konfabulator, Dashboard Widgets, and Google Widgets became fashionable. Before that, I worked with Palm on the Palm VII, which used Web Clippings to break down web content into more manageable pieces for use on a handheld screen. What if Palm’s Nova is an operating system whose applications are written like standard web applications today? They could run on the device in disconnected mode, accessing information stored on the device in a MySQL or SQLite database, or access information on the web using the same techniques? A developer writing an application for the web could have an app that could conceivably also run on a Nova-powered phone.

Is this the fat middle of the market that Palm is saying they are targeting with their new OS and handheld device?

We’ll find out tomorrow!

Update January 8, 2008: webOS platform prediction was right!

Last night was a terrific evening for San Diego Chargers fans. It was even better for me, as I got to see one of my favorite players, Darren Sproles, break out for 328 all-purpose yards. At 5′6″ tall, the same height as me, Sproles made play after play throughout the game. He atoned for his fumble at the goal-line by running 22 yards for the winning score in overtime against the Indianapolis Colts. This was probably the most exciting Charger playoff game since the 1994 AFC Championship Game against the Steelers.

Since their wildcard loss to the Colts back in the 1995-1996 playoffs, the Chargers have always played the Colts tough. So, coming into Felix’s house, I felt confident that we would play well; I was concerned about LT’s groin injury but I knew that if Norv Turner committed to playing Sproles as the featured back (and kick/punt returner!), he would be rewarded.

Thanks to Felix and Johnny for hosting the party; I’m sorry that their hometown team, the Atlanta Falcons, could not come from behind in the fourth quarter like the Chargers to beat the Cardinals. They have a positive future ahead of them, with Matt Ryan and former-Charger Michael Turner leading the team.

Dan G and I both wore our powder blue jerseys. The Chargers have won their last eight games whenever they break out the powder blues. Next week, they’ll be playing an away game at either the Tennessee Titans or the Pittsburgh Steelers. I don’t mind which team we play; I’m confident that we’ll win to make it to the AFC Championship Game for the second year in a row. Go Chargers!

On New Year’s Day, Rae, Dardy, and I went up to Oakland to attend Somei Yoshino Taiko’s annual Open House. Ellen, Jimi, and Kallan opened up their studios for their friends. Guests brought delectable food items for the potluck lunch; we especially liked the various soup dishes that were served — perfect for such a chilly New Year’s Day!

After a few hours of conversing with everyone, Somei Yoshino held an impromptu taiko performance in Kallan’s studio space. I wanted Dardy to get up and perform, but he insisted that he is retired. I had brought my 5D Mark II with me, so I took the opportunity to record some HD video of the taiko performance.

Click on the photo above to watch the video at 720P resolution. I shot handheld using the 85mm f/1.8 with the camera resting on my knee. Real-time focusing is a little hairy, but overall, I’m pretty impressed with the quality of the footage. There are two pauses in the middle of the video where I took a couple of still photos.

Read the rest of this entry »