Rannie Turingan is a completely kick-ass photographer in Toronto. He was one of the Zap Your PRAM crew, and spent a whole lot of time chasing down the other attendees and taking our pictures. He’s now finished up processing and posting the formal portraits on his website: Zap Your PRAM portraits. It’s a really nice record of the event, so @Rannie: many thanks for taking the time to do this. You rock.

One of the earliest discussions to emerge during the Zap conference centered around the what seems to be a growing drive to record everything and every moment (by twittering it, Plazing it, photographing it, etc.)

The questions that emerged were: Does recording the moment change it? In recording it, are we essentially mediating it for ourselves, taking a step back and observing rather than simply experiencing? Are we stepping outside the moment in the act of recording (or thinking about recording) it, essentially separating ourselves from the experience to a certain degree?

Opinions were mixed. Thinking about it more, I believe that recording a moment does, in fact, separate you from it to a certain extent. And I think that the more you record or think about recording, the less present you actually are.

A few years ago I was in Amsterdam to attend a conference. Naturally we went a little early and stayed a little late so we could take time to experience the city, and during that time I took hundreds of photographs, most of which were just terrible. In spite of taking all these photos, however, my most memorable moment in Amsterdam was when I encountered the works of Vermeer at the Rijksmuseum. They are absolutely breathtaking. Looking at prints in books just doesn’t come anywhere close to the experience of seeing the originals. It was overwhelming and deeply emotional and really quite astonishing for me. I have never had so visceral a reaction to art before, and it was entirely unexpected. I will never, ever forget that experience. And I didn’t take a single picture while I was there. Not one. And my other memories of Amsterdam are of moments where I wasn’t bothering to take photographs. Dinner with friends and coworkers. Having drinks with Rob at a small side street cafe. Talking to some locals while exploring the city’s nightlife. Almost getting killed by a ravaging horde of cyclists before I figured out how traffic worked. Sitting in the lobby watching people walk by the hotel in the morning, drinking insanely good coffee.

The photographs I took? I don’t remember experiencing the thing in the photo, I remember taking the photo. Recording the moment separated me from it, and it now feels almost fake.

We’re going to France soon. We’ve never been before, and I’m really excited about the trip. While I expect I will take my camera with me wherever we go, I am going to be much more deliberate and thoughtful about what I photograph. Rather than taking hundreds of photos of everything, I’m going to take only a few — and only if they’re worthy of being photographs — and spend more of my time actually being in the moment, paying attention, experiencing. What I learned from Amsterdam is that the strongest memories are made this way, not by flipping through a shoebox of pictures when you get home.

I got my first camera around 1985 or so. It was second-hand Fujica 35mm with a 50mm lens that I purchased for $110. I ran a lot of film through that camera, and used it constantly through all of high school and university, going so far as to process my own film, do my own prints, and work as the photo editor for the school paper. I finally replaced my old Fujica with a second-hand Nikon FM2n (and a handful of used prime lenses) in 1997 or 1998. Since then, of course, I’ve been a digital camera junkie, starting with a 1 megapixel Kodak DC240, then moving up through a host of various Nikon and Canon point-and-shoots until finally scraping together the cash for a proper DSLR, the Nikon D70s. I’ve upgraded once since then to the Nikon D80, and I think this is all the camera I need until Nikon puts out a reasonably priced full-frame sensor model. In short, I’m a bit of a photography enthusiast.

One thing that has always irritated me about looking at pictures on the web is that browsers don’t seem to display photographs properly. And by “photographs” I really mean “colors”. I spend a lot of time tweaking pictures in Photoshop, but when I upload them to my Flickr account and look at them in Firefox 2 the colors aren’t the same — they’re more washed out, dull, and lifeless. It’s a subtle thing, but annoying nonetheless.

Here’s an example of what I mean. The following is a split-photo created from two screenshots — one of my Flickr photos displayed in Firefox 2, and the same photo displayed in Photoshop:

It turns out that these differences are because of something called “color profile support”. Firefox 2 does not include support for color profiles, so the browser renders colors as best it can without doing special tweaks based on your system or custom color profiles.

The good news is that Firefox 3 does include full support for color profiles. The bad news is that color profile support will be turned off by default when Firefox 3 ships. I’ll explain why this is the case a little later.

Here’s a three-split photograph created using screenshots of another of my Flickr photos in Firefox 2, Firefox 3 (with color profile support enabled), and Photoshop. As you can see, the Firefox 3 photo matches the Photoshop photo exactly. This is happy news for photographers.

There are two ways to turn on color profile support in Firefox 3. The easiest is to install the Color Management add-on (which will work with Firefox 3 Beta 5). After you install the add-on and restart Firefox 3, color profile support is enabled, and you can specify a custom color profile by going to the Tools menu, selecting “Add-ons”, and clicking the Color Management add-on “Preferences” button. If you do not specify a color profile, the system default profile will be used, which should be OK for most people.

The second way to turn on color profile support is through the about:config page, which is a special page where a huge number of different (and usually hidden) Firefox options can be tweaked. This is not a recommended method for most people — about:config options should only be edited if you are very aware of what you’re doing. That said, if you do want to edit the options there, they are gfx.color_management.enabled and gfx.color_management.display_profile. For more about editing about:config, see the SUMO knowledgebase article, or the more detailed (if slightly out of date) content over on MozillaZine.

Here’s another example photo, this time just Firefox 2 compared to Firefox 3 with color profile support enabled:

Why wouldn’t you want it turned on?

So, if color profile support is so awesome (and it really is, in my opinion), why won’t it be on by default for Firefox 3? There are two main reasons.

First, color profile support causes a roughly 10-15% performance hit in many of our performance tests. If the images that you’re viewing are of a reasonable size, that’s probably negligible. If they’re large, it could be noticeable. We’re working on improving the performance of this feature so that we can turn it on by default in future releases.

Second, plugins do not currently support color profiles. What this means is if a plugin has been color-matched precisely with other parts of the page, it may no longer match when color profile support is turned on. As an example, here are two screenshots of a plugin displayed on the GuildWars game website, Firefox 2 on the left, and Firefox 3 (with color profile support enabled) on the right. You’ll notice that the background grey on the Firefox 3 screenshot is a lot darker, so the corners and bottom of the plugin no longer match it exactly. This is caused by color profile support being enabled — if disabled, Firefox 3 renders the background grey exactly the same way as Firefox 2.

So, there are currently some trade offs involved with enabling color profile support, and the Firefox 3 developers have opted to leave it disabled by default for the time being. That said, I have been using Firefox 3 with color profile support enabled for months and have never encountered any noticeable performance impact. It is likely that a future version of Firefox will see this feature enabled by default, which will be a happy day as everyone will then be able to see photographs on the web as they were meant to be seen. There will be great rejoicing.

For more examples of Firefox 2 vs. Firefox 3 (with color profile support enabled) screenshots, check out my Flickr set.

Rob and I went for a mini road-trip out to Balaclava, ON today. As we tend to do, we took a bunch of pictures. My set is here. Rob’s are over here.

A couple of weeks ago I took a whole week off (a whole week!) and visited my folks. Dad and I spent some time out taking pictures, some of the results of which are here.

Rob, Kev, and I went out to shoot at the Experimental Farm for a few hours yesterday afternoon. Gorgeous, unseasonably warm October afternoon. A few of my pictures are here.

This was my first trip out with the new Nikon 10.5mm fisheye lens — I absolutely love it and can’t wait to go shooting with it again soon.

Rob and I went for a drive on Monday and ended up wandering around Gatineau Park a bit (specifically, the Mackenzie King Estate) and took some pictures. Mine are here: Gatineau Park, Sept 2007.

Rob and I took an extended Victoria Day Weekend and booted down to Watkins Glen, NY for a quick mini-vacation. There’s a state park there with an absolutely gorgeous gorge that you can walk through. We took many, many pictures. I’ve posted some (not all yet, but most) here:

Dria’s Watkins Glen Roadtrip Photoset.

So after researching and reading and agonizing over which little point&shoot camera I wanted to pick up, I finally settled on the new Nikon P5000.

Major feature rundown:

• Weighs around 280g with battery and memory card. Super light.
• It’s 3.9 x 2.5 x 1.6 in. Tiny, but not so tiny that it’s awkward to hold/use.
• Excellent ergonomics/design. Controls are intuitively laid out, easy to access and use, and the menu system is very nice.
• 10 megapixel.
• Kick ass macro mode.
• Automatic, semi-automatic (Shutter priority and Aperture priority), and full manual mode. I used full manual mode for all the pictures I took this morning, and it’s dead simple to use.
• Drawback: no RAW support. This is a bit of a drag, but is the only drawback I’ve found so far.

All that aside, here are the shots I took while walking home from my doctor’s appointment this morning: May 11 walk.

Random note: turns out using the “Rotate picture” feature on Flickr completely hoses the EXIF data for those images. I’ll have to re-upload the ones that need to be rotated.

Nikon (I am genetically-inclined to Nikon products, don’t bother trying to argue this with me) recently produced the Coolpix S50 which is totally badass. While it’s tempting to pretend I’ll get a Leica D-LUX 3, I just don’t have the intestinal fortitude to drop that much on a camera. So, instead, I’m going to get an S50 and be alternately verklempt that it has more megapixels than my D70s and doesn’t support RAW format. I’m sure I’ll survive.

Update: apparently the D-LUX3 isn’t $5k (I was thinking of the M8).

I took a few more pictures on Tuesday, but it was a lot colder out so my walk was a lot shorter. Nothing spectacular to show for it (you can view the bits I’ve posted here), but I did learn quite a bit so it was worthwhile. The temperature appears to be above zero again today, but I think I’ll cater to my illness and stay indoors. Stupid cold.

The TV season seems to be gearing up again, which is good — reruns were starting to irritate me. Most exciting is that Rome (Season 2) starts soon. If you haven’t watched the first season, I strongly recommend it. I think the only TV series better than Rome is Deadwood, and even that’s a tough call. Both are brilliantly written, brilliantly acted, and just top-notch productions all around. Turns out HBO knows how to make stellar TV. Stupid cold.

Quiet last day of holidays before getting back to work. Made a big batch of beef stew (very yummy), puttered around the house a bit, and went for a walk to take some pictures.

One of my goals this year is to work on my photography a bunch, so I’m trying to get in the habit of actually taking more pictures. Today’s walk resulted in 97 photos, of which I’ve processed and posted 20 so far. You can look at them here, if you like. I might process and post some more later, but I’m not sure how many more are actually worth sharing.

Happy new year and all that.

In the mean time I messed around and took some shots using my awesome Nikon 60mm macro lens. The problem right now is that now I need to figure out how to embed the proper colour profile in the images for browser display. Hum. Anyhow, here’s one of the shots I took earlier:

General requirements: bulk upload from a Mac (ideally with iPhoto integration), must be Firefox friendly, the less Flash the better, autogeneration of resized photos and customizable thumbnail sizes, no upload limit (either per picture or total), reasonable bandwidth limits are OK, pay-for-service is OK, customizable themes would be ideal, proven reliable service would be nice, solid customer service track record would also be good.

I get the feeling I’m going to just stick with Gallery2.

I really am a big fan of wideangle shots. This and the 18-70mm will be my standard “walking around” lenses, and the telephoto and my fixed focal-length macro will be for special occassions.

I’m increasingly convinced that “summoning crap weather while on vacation or travelling” is my super power.

It stopped raining today long enough for us to get a few photos of the Annapolis Valley. You can see them here.

The following shot is one of the more presentable test shots. It’s a monochromed macro shot of a pigeon feather I picked up on our porch the other day. The feather is about 1.5″ long. I could have got closer, but not without losing more of the depth of field. All in all, I’m pretty darned happy with this lens. Hopefully tomorrow’s weather will cooperate and we’ll get out to take some pictures. Otherwise, I’ll be hitting the hardware store to get the basic gear for a home macro studio :)

• Edmund Leveckis
• MUTE

As it turns out, however, that’s OK. The reason I was even looking at it is because I’m replacing it. Posting individual photos was simply turning out to be a pain in the butt, so I just stopped doing it. I’m going to be using Lussumo Filebrowser instead. This is an extraordinarily slick little piece of php coding (no database) that basically builds a gallery of images (or whatever other file types you have), including, if you so choose, thumbnail previews. It’s…just neat. And tiny! Those Lussumo guys seriously seem to know what they’re doing.

Anyhow…the existing photo site is going away and will be replaced in the nearish future. I think I’ll start going through and organizing my photos right now, in fact…

Here’s the short answer.

I have started a photoblog for the following reasons:

1. I like photography a lot. I very much enjoy both taking and viewing photographs. I get a fundamental sense of satisfaction when I manage to take a decent photo, and I find viewing at other peoples’ photographs to be very rewarding. Photographs are akin to poems, in my mind, in that really good ones manage to capture a moment with an efficiency of composition that communicates volumes. I admire the craft behind these compositions, and I admire the discipline of the composers.
2. I want to become a better photographer. The only way to become a better photographer is to practice photography. My photoblog is intended to be a catalyst, driving me to be more disciplined about my photography. Wanting to become a better photographer is, as they say, easier said than done (demonstrated by the fact that I’ve been saying it for years).
3. I have been inspired by other photobloggers. In particular, daily dose of imagery (a brilliant Torontonian photoblogger), and chromasia. These guys are actually out there with their cameras almost every day. They demonstrate the sort of discipline I want.
4. I want to justify purchasing a high-end Digital SLR camera before I run off and drop a few thousand dollars on one. I would really, really like to buy a Nikon D70s kit, a couple of additional lenses, and a big fat CF card. Right now I do not use the gear I have nearly enough (or nearly skillfully enough) to justify that. If I can maintain a photoblog for six or twelve months, posting new photos on a more-or-less daily basis, I’ll have a much better reason to engage in that sort of rampant consumerism.
5. It will be fun.

Note: The photoblog RSS feed is still semi-broken. It validates, and it works fine in NNW, but Firefox and Safari both dislike it. Hrm.

Update: Photoblog feeds should work now. Thanks Vlad :)

Check it out over here, if you like. If you happen to know why the RSS feed isn’t working, let me know.

How about (this would work, too) something like Pixelpost, only with catalogue pages that will display clickable thumbnails for a whole month. Something like that would be sweet. Like candy.

I’m starting to think I might just have to suck it up and build it myself, but if you happen to know of software that does stuff like this, please post a comment here. Note 1: I have a Mac desktop and a Linux server, so whatever it is has to run on that. Thanks! Note 2: If you happen to know of a WordPress plugin that does something roughly like what I’m describing here, please post a url.

My future camera will be a Nikon D70 or D70s or whatever the next proper Nikon DSLR turns out to be. I really, really want a proper DSLR. The time will come eventually.

Amsterdam. Tons of fun, met lots of great people, had a ton of good food, walked more in a week than I probably have in the past two months combined. Gorgeous weather, great hotel (facilities, at least…the staff was a bit off, but more on that in a moment), utterly phenomenal coffee.

Europeans seriously know how to make good coffee.

On service: I’m not sure whether it was just a bad week or something, but the staff at hotels and restaurants we frequented during our stay in Amsterdam was pretty universally sub-par. I’m not sure why this is, but we just got generally lousy service every where we went. Some folks were ok, and everyone was generally friendly, but, really, servers at decent-or-better restaurants in Canada are, on average, just much better at what they do. In one Amsterdamian restaurant our waiter was so in-your-face that I found it distinctly uncomfortable.

Whatever happened to Zen Waiters? The basic premise I work under is this: the less I notice the service I’m receiving, the happier I am. If a waiter spills wine on me (yes, this happened), or if I have to flag a waiter down for a second round of drinks (this also happened, multiple times), or if I have to physically back away from a waiter because he’s a total close-talker (also happened), or if I wait for my food long enough that I check my watch (happened), or if I have to physically walk around looking for someone to give me my bill (slight exaggeration, but close to truth)…guess what? The waiter sucks.

The best waiter I’ve ever had was at Acton’s Cafe in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. Quiet, efficient, unassuming, brilliantly experienced, and extraordinarily talented waiter. We sat and ate several courses happily, never once having to ask for anything (water, wine, food, dessert, coffee, bill, whatever). My soup, as I recall, simply showed up like it fell through a tiny hole in space-time. I never once noticed the waiter until we were finished and I realized, all at once, that I never once noticed the waiter. I love service like that. I also, I’ll have you know, tip extraordinarily well for service like that.

If I ever end up walking away from this whole interweb thing and go back into food service, I think I’ll make it my life’s work to be that good a waiter. Really talented waiters who take their vocation seriously can make extremely good money. The problem, I think, is that most waiters think that they’re too good for what they’re doing — most high end waiters probably fancy themselves as a maitre d’, or perhaps as an underemployed sommelier. My god, the in-your-face guy was just unreal. He put me off so badly in the first five minutes we were sitting at the table that I simply didn’t want to talk to him again, and avoided it as best I could. What a piece of work.

Um…anyhow, that rant aside. I had a great time in Amsterdam, waiters bedamned. Oh, and the bartender at the hotel. I mean, seriously dude, if someone asks you “what scotches do you have?”, it’s not an invitation to play 20 questions. WTF?

Unrelated, here are some more photos, but not of Amsterdam.

iTunes pleases me. In the same vein, iPhoto pleases me. Yesterday I decided to finally clear the SD card on my little baby Canon. I plugged it in to the USB port on the back of my keyboard (those are damned handy), and iPhoto automatically opened, set up the import, did the import, and cleared the card all with a single mouse click.

While in California, I picked up a copy of iWork ($79 USD). I haven’t looked at Keynote yet, but Pages is really slick. It’s a full-fledged desktop publishing system akin to Word, only without the eye-stabbingly bad UI. The default UI is all most people need for most word-processing tasks, and it’s just nice and simple. It also has some extremely nice templates, and exports to PDF very nicely. All good.

Oh, in related (ie: software) news, I’ve started maintaining my TODO list in OmniOutliner. Another very slick, very useful, very usable bit of software that just does what it’s supposed to do without getting in my way.

It says something about bad software when one of the defining factors of good software is that it “doesn’t get in my way”. It sure is neat when technology verges on being transparent. I think this is why I like FireFox so much — the default configuration is nothing more and nothing less than what most people need to get around on the web, but there are piles of extensions that allow you to easily add what you want or need (but nothing else).

We sure have come a long way, and yet there’s so much farther to go…

* (While writing up this entry, I’ve also ripped Tom Waits’ Foreign Affairs, and Beautiful Maladies. Not quite sure why they weren’t already in my collection, but they are now, hooray!)

Naturally, I want a D-70. I just have absolutely no way to possibly justify that purchase any time soon :)

This photo, for example, is available for use with no restrictions. Nice stuff. Yay for sharing and stuff :)