Strobox is a place for all types of photographers to share how they set up that amazing photo! The easiest way to learn is to look at photos and their lighting diagrams so you can see for yourself how they were created.

Strobox is an iPhone App that allows you to record a diagram of how you set up your lighting in a particular shot or shoot. It also provides a community where people can share information about how they took a particular image in terms of lighting. This might be a way for me to learn about artificial lighting – as I have little experience in that (I don’t even own a flash at present).

• Barcelona (travel)
• FC Barcelona (sports, fans)
• Antoni Gaudí (architecture), but even
• Barcelona Metro (whatever around the corner).

It should attract the types of audience that Wikipedia.org attracts, but possibly even more because images are compelling for almost all topics. [yes, I will add more images to this posting]

The company stresses in interviews that its founders are ex-Apple employees. This is a bit of marketing and name dropping – but surprisingly it does show: there is something clean and elegant in both their concept, design and execution.

Fotopedia is growing rapidly and, on its first anniversary, had over half a million photos on 30,000 topics. Its ease-of-use, track record, and its recent launch of a high-profile iPad/iPhone app suggest that it will find its way into the short list of Web 2.0 household names. In fact, their planned series of free “coffee table books” for iPad/iPhone apps appear to be attractive enough to further entrench the iPad (largely a coffee table device) as a ubiquitous device class.

What is Fotopedia?

As the name suggests, Fotopedia is a hybrid between

1. Wikipedia – the concept of a community-driven encyclopedia.
   Fotopedia incidentally extracts summary text for “articles” from Wikipedia.
2. Photo sharing sites like Flickr or Picasa with massive amounts of user images.
   Fotopedia, however, is obviously only for “serious” pictures – and not your vacation, pet or party.
   And, again, Fotopedia can interface to Flickr to easily import photos that allow the material to be freely reused.

Fotopedia states it wants the permanence of Wikipedia (articles and photos remain available but gradually improve), but with the ease-of-use of Flickr. So the challenge is to mobilize significant numbers of content providers, each with their own interests and expertise, while not straying too far from the of Wikipedia. I will come back to content reliability later.

At present, despite the name, it is doubtful whether there are any formal ties between Fotopedia and the Wikipedia organization. In fact, Fotopedia directly competes with Wikimedia Commons because both are collections of high images about topics in Wikipedia. I can, however, imagine that the “fun” ingredient of Fotopedia may ultimately attract a lot of attention and thus make it an interesting partner for Wikipedia.

What is it used for?

Fotopedia itself stresses the encyclopedia side, with the slightly bombastic slogan

Images for humanity

Encyclopedic articles obviously benefit from a small number of well-selected or even custom illustrations (e.g. a photo’s of Winston Churchill). And nowadays, a larger number of browseable backup illustrations is also welcome. But Wikipedia already has inline illustrations as well as a larger collection of browseable illustrations per topic. But the power of Fotopedia might be that it can mobilize a broader audience than Wikipedia: it is easier to submit a few “nice” photos about an article than it is to write a cohesive, balanced, accurate article.

The founder of Fotopedia, Jean-Marie Hullot, indicated that he got the idea while helping his children find photos for school reports. So you could see Fotopedia as a (relatively) freely accessible source of images. And thus as a free competitor to commercial stock photography sites where photographers offer photos to those looking to purchase a specific image for a specific purpose. Note that Fotopedia supports and encourages the use of images up to 1920×1080 (HD or 2 MPixel) resolution – which is actually lower than what stock photography sites require.

There are also signs that Fotopedia can be seen as another photo-enthusiast site (like Photo.net or Photosig.com) where amateur photographers display their best work (in small format) for peer review. Fotopedia is, however, not ideal for this because it is very per-topic focussed and because it wants the images to be readily reusable. The latter means that the image shouldn’t visibly contain the photograph’s name (“watermark”). Which in turn increases the risk of photos with licensing restrictions being “borrowed”.

And finally, some people see Fotopedia as a travel book. Especially when the “articles” are directly liked to geographical locations (as in the collaboration with UNESCO for the iPad where photos, Wikipedia topics and Google maps are seamlessly integrated): you get high quality pictures of faraway places. It will undoubtedly cause companies like Lonely Planet or National Geographic to rethink their long-term and Internet strategies. Although this offers a service similar to Google’s own Panoramio (5 million images that are linked to Google Maps locations), Panoramio “just pins photos to the globe”: there is no machine readable information about what the photo is really about, and locations can be imprecise.

Although Fotopedia’s link to Google maps gives significant extra value to the scenario “Fotopedia as travel book”, you could also create other combinations of Wikipedia topics that are photographically interesting but where location plays a secondary role:

• an architecture encyclopedia: buildings, architects, architectural styles, cities, definitions
• clothing, street fashion, regional costumes, haute couture
• airplane (or train or ship or car) spotters: planes, airports, airshows
• birds (etc): male and female pictures, natural habitat, images in different locations, feeding habits
• musicians: band members, concerts (photos are probably OK until they earn big money), fans

You could see the above as Web 2.0 counterparts of existing photo book categories: You can buy photo books on many topics. You can make your own photo book based on your own material if you have enough. But with Fotopedia you are collectively creating an ever-changing online photo book on a grand scale.

Business models and copyrights

The Fotopedia service and any support software is currently free. The company runs on venture capital (see web site): unlike Google or Facebook or WordPress.com, there is no visible advertising or paid service to cover the developers, computers and organizational staff. Presumably the idea is to first become big, and then add a service that does generate income.

The risk is that the people who provide and review the images may see themselves as co-owners of collective Fotopedia assets: even if you donate material to the public domain, you may not like it if someone else manages to earn money on this. So there might be a cultural pitfall ahead.

How photos are reviewed

Like Wikipedia, anyone can upload images to the site, anyone can link images (not just their own images!) to existing encyclopedia topics and can help in the quality control. In fact, as an experiment I linked a photo that had been previously uploaded for one topic to a relevant second topic: this works, and it is not even easy to tell that I did this (because the photo rightly credits the photographer, but doesn’t mention who made the link).

The Fotopedia model has the same mindset as the proven Wikipedia model, but works slightly differently. Registered users can rate (thumbs up/down) suitability of an image in the context of an encyclopedia article. Essentially the general public is asked to help by judging whether a photo of, say, the Colosseum in Rome

• is technically acceptable (e.g. correct exposure, reasonable resolution, sharp)
• adds value to any existing images. Today, there were 31 accepted or “Top” or approved images of the Colosseum. In addition there were 30 “Candidate” images that had been submitted, but were awaiting further endorsements.
• indeed shows the Colosseum (which can be hard to judge if you only see a small detail)
• is on-topic enough (what to do about a hypothetical “skinny stray cat in Colosseum” or “street performer in gladiator costume performing outside Colosseum”?)
• isvisually pleasing?

So registered users are thus responsible for promoting “candidate” images to approved ones. This incidentally requires more 5 thumbs-up votes than thumbs-down votes (and you get one thumbs-up for free as soon as the photographer links a picture to an article). So users are also involved in demoting images. And users can explicitly reporting bigger issue (like “inappropriate content” or “this photo simply doesn’t match this article”).

Quality challenges for Fotopedia

Here are some issues that I saw when adding some pictures of my own (Egypt and Helsinki) and checking pictures of others (Colosseum):

1. Various photos show the Colosseum reflected in a puddle of water. Amateur and professional photographers like to make their photos special. But the puddle doesn’t tell you anything about the Colosseum except that it may rain there.
2. One photo shows a bronze statue of two women with a fuzzy Colosseum in the background. How to judge whether there is a relationship between the two, or more generally, whether a particular emphasized detail is significant? What one person assumes to be obvious can be obscure for another. I would recommend adding a caption to any photo where it is needed to judge the value or relevance of the photo. But captions are not prominently displayed by the software, and can thus be easily overlooked.
3. Incorrect photos. The Colosseum series contained a snapshot of Roman columns on the nearby Forum Romanum. Sure, accidents happen. But it is likely the error was a result of the process: imagine a photographer uploaded a series of photos to Flickr using the keywords (“Forum, Colosseum, Rome”) for all images on that outing. Imagine someone else who had never actually visited these sites selects images from Flickr (Fotopedia makes this easy) tagged with Colosseum and adds them to the article. In this particular case, the error is easy to detect. But I have seen images of statues and inscriptions tagged “Luxor Temple” that were made at other temples in Luxor, Egypt. It takes an expert, or at least a careful tourist, or likely the original photographer to know that “Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut, Luxor, Egypt” is not the same thing as “Luxor Temple”.
4. How many pictures do we want to see of the Colosseum? Fotopedia might stop at displaying 50 pictures with the most votes. If you select photos for a book or slide show, you will probably try to avoid multiple similar images (even if they are all pretty good) because it bores the viewer.

The iPad and UNESCO connection

On August 14th 2010, Fotopedia and UNESCO jointly released an app called “Fotopedia Heritage” for the iPad/iPhone that allows you view Fotopedia images in conjunction with (“mashup of”) Wikipedia and UNESCO information about the site, along with precisely placed pins in Google Maps  and travel information. There is an extensive, but good interview with the Hullot about this app on YouTube.

You could see this as a coffee table quality photo book about the 900 UNESCO Heritage site. The look and feel resembles browsing through a copy of National Geographic containing 900 locations or groups of locations illustrated using 20 thousand pictures. But obviously all this is very interactive, and the set of pictures you find can be slightly different if you come back another day.

The app doesn’t allow you to upload new material. That requires a real computer (although you might be able to do much of what you need on an iPad running Safari).

Note that the database of UNESCO locations as used in the app is not quite at the level as the official data: some well known sites (Luxor, Yosemite) have internal locations. For others, the UNESCO data shows subsites some of these subsites are missing, even though they exist in Wikipedia. Example: Aswan, Egypt has various UNESCO heritage subsites, while only the Philae Temples are shown.

Fotopedia projects

In the near future Fotopedia apparently plans to launch numerous app-like products similar to Fotopedia Heritage. These will be electronic coffee table books on important travel destinations such as major European cities (like Lisbon). These are currently being prepared as “projects” whereby Fotopedia sets up the table of content and a target for the number of required pictures.

How you can help

Obviously, you can help Fotopedia in general and the UNESCO Heritage app in particular by adding any high-quality material you might be willing to share.

You can help me by signing up at Fotopedia, and checking out my photos there: they could use some more votes, and I would like to see at least some of them get into the world’s first Fotopedia-based coffee table book. I am fine if just the best ones make it, so feel free to issue a thumbs-down as well. Fotopedia surprisingly suggest using your social networks to compaign for votes. So to anyone that reads this: this is your invitation to help out so that I don’t have to wait for weeks to see what happens.

The “backup iPad” function in iTunes backs up only one or two files per second. This is no problem for large files (which may take longer), but particularly applies to very small files. Some applications have hundreds or even thousands of such small files. One application consisted of 80 MBytes made up of 6000 small files. It thus took 1-2 hours to backup those 6000 files – despite the fact that only 80 MByte were being backed up.

Furthermore, the backup progress bar may seem to freeze during specific parts of the backup process (when large series of small files are being processed). Apparently the progress bar show what percentage of the data that needs to be backuped has been processed. This is normally acceptable, but in this extreme case user is likely to conclude that the process has crashed. In my case backing up only 80 MBytes (out of a total backup of 1.5 Gbytes) took the majority of the time.

Symptoms

Before updating the iPad’s firmware using iTunes, Apple backups any user data on the device.

The main symptom is that this backup process takes very long: hours. And that it takes much longer than it originally took when the iPad was brand new. And much longer than one would expect for the amount of data being moved across the USB cable to the PC or Mac and to a local or network drive. Suggestions in forums to use better USB cables are incidentally unlikely to really help.

On a PC you can watch this backup data accumulate in a directory (used by iTunes) named, for example,

C:\Users\Peter\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\a40DigitHexNumberProbablyIdentifyingyourDevice

There are utilities available by m4ko.de that automate the analysis of what files are being backed up (but you need to find the iTunes backup directory manually anyway).

The above has been observed back in April 2010 (and the issue is still not resolved in iOS 3.2). They also concluded that many applications generated hundreds or thousands of files, and that this essentially makes it look like the iPad backup process hangs. In my case one application (Granimator) consisted of least 6000 files with graphical elements. I can tell because the .mdinfo files contain the orignal file names like “Documents/packs/GP_moving_brands/shapes/white/4/shape_0445.png” which happens to belong to one of the Granimator shape packs. And the m4ko utilities can tell because they look at a domain name inside the .mdinfo files. Granimator is incidentally creating its own workaround for this problem – but this doesn’t help other applications.

Technical analysis

The cause seems to be:

• every file that needs backing on the iPad up results in two files on the PC: the backup file named [hashnumber].mddata and a file with metadata named [hashnumber].mdinfo
• there are a few log and manifest files that list the hash values of all backuped files – but these are not relevant here
• somehow, only a few files per second can be backuped in this way – even if the files are only 1 kByte each
• particularly the application AppleMobileDeviceService.exe and AppleMobileService.exe respectively read 1 MB/s and write 0.5 MByte per second to the local device (127.0.0.1) according to the Resource Monitor. Note that 127.0.0.1 may have a strange web address depending on the content of your hosts file, but this is just a distraction. This detour of the writing of the data via the TCP/IP network stack within the PC may explain some of the performance overhead.

Way forward?

Various Apps have been discovered that exhibit this problem – so the issue is clearly a design problem that makes the iPad (and iPhone and iPod Touch?) pretty much incompatible with applications that install hundreds or thousands of tiny files. Apple can solve this by either changing their backup method, or by adding an extra rule that developers need to adhere to get their App accepted into the App Store.

The NAS and its drives

The equipment:

• the NAS is a small Linux-based ARM9 box with 64 MBytes of memory
• the drives in the NAS and in my desktop PC are all:
  • Samsung Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ
  • drive specs: SATA-300, 7200 RPM, 32 MB cache
• the NAS is connected to the client PC via a switch. The router, the NAS and the PC are capable of running Gigabit Ethernet.
• the relevant partition is formated as RAID 1 (although I don’t recommend that any more) meaning that each file is simply stored on both drives for safety

Basic drive performance

I benchmarked one of the Samsung Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ drives mounted inside a desktop PC using HD Tune Pro. This test thus tests what the drive can do under normal (non-NAS) conditions.

Detail: I restricted the part of the drive under test to 0.75 Terrabytes because the data on the NAS was confined to a 750 GB RAID 1 partition on each drive. This doesn’t change the measurements significantly.

Samsung Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ performance

The average transfer rate is thus 84 MB/s while the average latency was 13.5 ms. In other words, the drives themselves can sustain read speeds of 5 GBytes/minute if the files being read are big enough. I am ignoring write performance because it gives similar results and is less relevant for my usage (“read mostly”).

Usage of the NAS

I currently have 26,000 digital photos (JPG, RAW, occasionally other stuff) requiring 225 GBytes of space. In RAID1, this takes 225 GBytes per drive.

The average size of a single photo is roughly 17 MBytes (a mix of recent JPGs and two types of RAW). A worst case photo (Raw, full resolution, depends on compressibility) can exceed 30 MBytes.

NAS performance across the network

Copying a 16 GBytes directory consisting of 902 photos (Egypt) from the NAS to the local disk:

• took 26.5 minutes = 11 MBytes/s = 0.6 GBytes/minute = 34 photos/minute
• generating an average network traffic of 10.1 MByte/s (received). Note sure where the 10% discrepancy comes from.
• CPU load on the NAS (log in with ssh, top command) is about 50%

To check this, I copied the same directory from the NAS to the NAS (to a non-RAID partition):

• took 53.5 minutes = 4.9 MBytes/s = 0.3 GBytes/minute = 17 photos/minute
• generating network traffic of 5 MBytes/second per direction

This is consistent (enough): the NAS now needs to read the data and write the data. It incidentally shows that the time needed to store data on the local hard disk in the 11 MBytes/s test case was apparently negligible.

So the problem is that the drives can read (or write) data at 5 GBytes/minute, but the NAS is only reading at 0.6 Bytes/minute. The “34 photos/minute” also implies that the NAS performance can easily limit the performance of browsing of photos that are not stored in the cache.

One reviewer, however, measured 21 MBytes/s rather than my 11 MBytes/s. So this gives hope that performance can be tweaked.

Optimizations and errors found

• I found I had 100% CPU load on the NAS, even when running on a 100 Mbps link: 50% went to samba, 25% to inotify_itunes and 25% to inotify_upnp. Disabling iTunes and univeral Plug-and-Play using the Web interface thus got the CPU load down to about 50%. Apparently this is a bug in older versions of the CH3SNAS firmware that causes these two processes to eat all remaining idle time. Apart from wasting power, they undoubtedly don’t help performance.
• The NAS was still configured to run at 100 Mbps, despite having a 1000 Mbps Ethernet link to the router (and beyond).
• Adobe itself just announced that the imminent version of Lightroom would fix “Library: Sub-optimal preview rendering performance could impact application performance“. Whatever that means, it is always welcome.

Checking the NAS performance locally

[ coming ]

So where is the bottleneck?

[ coming ]

Upper Egypt

In March 2010, our family went on a one week Nile cruise. The cruise covered the main sights in Upper Egypt from Luxor down to Abu Simbel (on the border with Sudan). The trip covered the highlights of Egyptian antiquity – with the notable exception of pyramids and Great Sphinx which are both in the Cairo area. These highlights will certainly be familiar to all who have visited Upper Egypt and sound familiar to all who haven’t:

• Luxor (aka ancient Thebe) – this is perhaps the 2000 BC equivalent to visiting Washington DC
  • Temple of Queen Hatshepsut
  • Valley of the Kings
  • Colossi of Memnon
  • Temple of Luxor
  • Temples of Karnak
• the Temple of Edfu
• the Temple of Kom Ombo
• Aswan
  • the Unfinished Obelisk
  • the Temples from Philae
  • the two dams
• the Temples of Abu Simbel

There was also the option to take a hot air balloon (yup), drive quads in the desert (yup), sit on a camel (nope), visit lesser known temples (yup), visit a mosque (nope), cross the Nile in a small traditional sailing boat (yup), and tip almost every Egyptian you ran into (no thanks).

I originally had a bit of apprehension about cruises: those were for old folks and you don’t get the freedom that you have when you are on your own. This sounds especially scary if you are into photography. But this cruise (and the weather) was great: you get the benefits of somebody taking care of the logistics and food, you get a guide explaining the historical basics (an Egyptian who spoke a bit of Dutch), but we actually did get enough time to roam around and take pictures and occasionally even head out on our own.

The book

First page of the chapter on the Temple of Kom Ombo (click to view larger)

This is the first page of one of the chapters. After a bit of introductory text, the rest of a chapter is only photo’s. Captions with photographic and historical information are in an annex.

It was quite a bit of work to research the texts in order to get them accurate, interesting, and concise. The colored words are respectively the names of gods and pharaohs. Essentially every temple was commissioned by a pharaoh in the honor of one or more gods as well as the pharaoh himself/herself. Typically a pharaoh claimed to be direct descendant of the gods in order to justify their role in society.

Cover for Egypt photo book (click to enlarge)

Egyptian History for Beginners

The last page of the book contains a time line that I designed to visually summarize Egyptian history. An engineer’s way to see history, if you will:

Time line of Egyptian history (click to see larger version)

The horizontal axis simply marks off the fifty (!) centuries of recorded Egyptian history. The vertical axis shows degrees of latitude and are aligned with the map of Egypt on the right. Egypt spans between 21′ North and 31′ North. Given that the Nile is roughly vertical on the map, and that major historical sites were never far from the Nile (the rest is desert), you can more or less locate any event in Egyptian history with just two coordinates: time, and location on the Nile. Thus the graph (actually an Excel scatter plot) allows you to see how far apart any two events are in time and roughly in space.

The final page also contains a companion table listing the historical 32 events included in the time line. The list is somewhat biased towards antiquity and the places we visited, but it does include British rule in Egypt, Egyptian independence, the building of the dams at Aswan.

Thus the diagram shows that the role of Thebe, as the capital of Egypt, spanned from 2000 BC to roughly zero BC. It shows that major monuments in Thebe were however primarily built between 1500 and 1100 BC (in the “New Kingdom”). In a bizarre episode in Egyptian history, the pharaoh Akhenaten essentially rejected established religion and government and created a new capital in Amarna, quite some distance North of Thebe. Unfortunately his “reforms” were undone and Thebe became the capital again shortly after his death. The dotted purple line links the Amarna episode to the rediscovery of Amarna by the German scientist/explorer/map maker Lepsius in 1843. Amarna is, incidentally archaeologically interesting because it was only inhabited for a few decades. The dotted cyan line links the golden age of Thebe to the discovery of tomb KV62 of Tutankhamun by Howard Carter in 1922 and the discovery of the next tomb, KV63, in the Valley of the Kings in 2005. Actually KV63 itself isn’t really that important (unless you are an egyptologist in search of funding), but it shows that new discoveries are still occurring.

The diagram also shows that Edfu, Kom Ombo, and Philae (Aswan, 285 BC) are not only relatively close to each other, but were built in the same (Greek pharaoh) period.

The diagram also shows that original activity in the Cairo area started slightly further South (Memphis, 3000 BC; Pyramid for Djoser, 2630 BC) before getting really close to where Cairo lies (pyramid for Khafre, Giza, 2560 BC). The dot at 969 AD is the actual founding of Cairo by the Islamic Fatimid people.

Want more information?

The current plan is that anyone can

1. view the entire content of the book online (http://www.blurb.com/books/1556622, click on Full Screen, and click to turn pages)
2. or even order a hard copy of the book from Blurb.com (same link, costs cover only what Blurb charges)

A warning in case you order a book: the 160-page photo book contains roughly three thousand words of text in Dutch. That is not a lot (this text is a bit over one thousand words), but there are no plans to translate it into English or Urdu. But here is a copy of the text in case somebody wants to decode what it says.

If you want to use material to create a “derived” work of some sort, please contact me first: note that the text and photos are copyrighted! I am likely to react supportively. If you want to order the book, feel free to do so as long as the group permits this (but please consider contacting me first, comments below are fine).

Footnote on copyrights: The map used with the timeline graphic is by Wikipedia contributor Lanternix who generously made it available to all without any restrictions.

• expert reviews. This includes checking the user interface against the company’s general usability guidelines.
• monitoring seven users trying to execute tasks on the iPad. Six of these users had no prior iPad exposure.

Given the positive reception of the iPad - mainly due to its perceived ease-of-use and “fun factor” – the report contains a surprising amount of critical notes. Implicitly the report suggests that Apple has sometimes chosen for good looks (like typographic clarity) at the cost of usability. A rough summary:

1. It not always easy for the user to know whether touching something on the screen will trigger an action. Read: more cross-application user interface conventions would be helpful.
2. It is not entirely predictable what will happen if you “click” on such an object. It may do just about anything: what happens if you click on a photo. Read: more cross-application user interface conventions would be helpful.
3. Some important navigation features are missing for non-browser applications. In particular there is no convention on how to achieve “undo” or “back”. And consequently many applications just don’t provide these operations. Read: more cross-application user interface conventions would be helpful.

Ironically Apple is often accused of being too prescriptive and protective – which Apple then ritually justifies by saying that such rules and restrictions are needed to provide the superior user experience that its customers expect.

Obviously many of the issues discussed in the report are not the result of sloppy design: they are part of an ongoing struggle of how to design interfaces that can work intiuitively across dissimilar devices (desktops, iPads/TVs, handhelds) and dissimilar applications (passive content viewing, active content browsing, content creation, gaming). One example mentioned in the (pretty readable) article: using a mouse you can click on almost anything that you can see. With a “fat finger” however, clickables need to be correspondingly large targets. Another example of a fundamental issue is that you can standardize the controls used by applications in a particular environment. But, once a web site opens up in the browswer, you are confronted with a likely different set of conventions.

[ This posting is incidentally here for 2 reasons:

1. A comparable posting on installing Windows 7 on an ancient Dell gets more visitors than any other page on this site. These 7+ visitors/day are apparently people searching for solutions to a comparable PC problem.
2. I may need these notes myself if I ever need to repeat the process. ]

What went wrong

The laptop is quite reliable. In fact, believe it or not, we have owned 3 different Toshiba tablet PCs and they all behaved admirably. But in this case the copy of Windows Vista that came with the machine in December 2007 became ill. The suspect is Microsoft: the machine was running a 50$/year Microsoft anti-virus service (Microsoft Live Onecare) that protected 3 home machines. Recently Microsoft discontinued the Onecare service (after ample warning). Thus Onecare automatically tried to uninstall itself – which is reasonable because it gets the message across that once virus defintions stop coming, you are at significant risk

But this uninstall process never completed – despite reboots, running a Microsoft cleanup tool for Onecare, booting in Safe Mode, reregistering msiexec, etc. And the hung uninstallation slowed down or stopped many applications (Internet Explorer, Windows Live Main, etc). It looked like an inter-process communication service was messed up, and that’s too hard to diagnose and fix. So a reinstall of Windows was needed – if only to be sure the problem was entirely fixed.

RAID driver

The first problem in getting Windows Vista to install from a generic installation DVD was pretty fundamental. A Windows Vista Pro RTM 32-bit DVD couldn’t proceed because it didn’t know how to use the laptop’s hard disk. Apparently this is because the HDD controller depends on a special RAID driver that isn’t (or wasn’t) part of a generic 2006 Vista installation disk. So, I learned from the website of a certain Tim Heuer that I needed to download a RAID driver from Toshiba and tell the Vista installer to load the KR10I driver (from e.g. a USB stick). The driver probably got updated during later steps of the process, but this worked and got Vista running on the machine.

Repeat “install update, reboot, check for updates”

But.. that got me to the level of Vista as it looked like back in November 2006. And it lacked drivers for some of the special Toshiba hardware.

So by now, the stylus, CD/DVD, Ethernet, USB and audio were up and running. But notably not the WLAN, the “Biometric Coprocessor” (fingerprint reader) and a Mass Storage Controller was supposedly still unhappy.

Microsoft Update wanted to install 104 updates at once (including a few massive ones like Microsoft .Net 3.5). This required downloading 250 MBytes. Particularly trying to install 104 different things at once sounded rather ambitious. Indeed 26 of the updates failed. But repeating updating / rebooting / scanning for updates / updates… got the number of updates (temporarily) down to zero.

The main benefit so far was that the Intel-based WLAN now worked. The general tactic, if you want to get the updating over with, is to keep checking for updates until the stream dries up: installation of some updates tends to trigger the need for subsequent updates.

It said: “An important choice to make”

Despite having already installed Internet Explorer (version 7.0.6002.18005), Microsoft asked (at the “request” of the European Union) whether I wanted to download and install an alternative browser. As the dominant browser is currently Firefox, I decided to go with FireFox. Interestingly this got me the latest version of Firefox, although even that caused its own mini-avalance of 2 or 3 updates of its own. FireFox has its own updating tool and methodology.

Optional updates

There were 8 “optional” updates. These were essentially for hardware that Windows recognized, including audio, mass storage, WLAN, graphics, ethernet. Arguably these patches are as least as important as those that Microsoft classifies as “important”.

Vista Service Packs 1 and 2

The next episode was that Windows Update wanted to install Vista Service Pack 1 – meaning another 50 MB of download, installation and reboots. By now my laptop had progressed to the state of the art in February 2008.

This was followed by another 50 MBytes for Vista Service Pack 2 – bringing me to April 2009. Interestingly SP2 stated that it “may take an hour or more”, but it took closer to 10 minutes.

.Net 4

The next big update was 30 Mbytes to bring Microsoft .Net up the level of v4. That brought me to May 2009, or still more than a year in the past. Surprisingly the next 5 patches (30 Mbytes) were mainly fixes to Microsoft .Net version 3.5. This is presumably because .Net (which is, believe it or not, essentially an operating system running on top of Windows) allows older applications to run older versions of shared libraries. This is Microsoft’s famous solution to dilemmas about how to upgrade middleware without breaking compatibility with older software (keyword “DLL Hell”).

At this point, Windows Update no longer has more updates in store. But Control Panel > System and Maintenance > Problems and Solutions indicated that the Bluetooth, SD Flash card and power management hardware of the Toshiba laptop required updates – despite not having crashed.

Activating Vista

Activation was done using the original Product Key on the sticker at the bottom of the machine. After all, at purchase, the machine had included a copy of Windows Vista, so that was the main reason not to install Windows 7 instead. But I am pretty sure installation of Windows 7 would have been a lot faster because it would have required much fewer updates, and would have left the machine cleaner (fewer legacy files that were replaced by newer versions or alternatives).

As a colleague noted, the fact that Microsoft had demonstrably trashed my laptop might be enough to convince them to give me a free upgrade as compensation. After all, the upgrade doesn’t cost them anything.

Essential add-ons

The list of add-ons will ultimately be rather long, but here are the essentials that got installed quickly – along with the reason for the choice:

• Microsoft Security Essentials – Microsoft’s free virus/malware scanner. It has pretty OK reviews, although there are said to be better solutions available. Onecare (its predecessor) was enough for me, despite its very nasty uninstall surprise.

• Firefox browser – the current market leader and is actively updated (unlike Internet Explorer). It also has a lot of adjustables. I need to keep Internet Explorer installed to check whether my websites are displaying properly for the main browsers. Users of the other top browsers (Safari, Chrome, Opera) will typically have explicitly chosen to be different – so any glitches are their problem.
  • The Brief feed-reader plugin for viewing RSS feeds. Firefox itself has “Live Bookmarks” that shows the latest news – regardless of whether you have read it before.

• Windows Live Mail beta – I actually tried out Mozilla’s Thunderbird (the sister of Firefox) but that didn’t support full Hotmail and Gmail functionality. In particular, it couldn’t handle extra folders on the server. So I went back to Windows Live Mail because it is easy to use, the successor to the e-mail client that comes with Windows Vista, integrates better with Hotmail and can send Photo Mail.

Nice to haves

• Adobe Flash – although Apple is on a crucade to convince the world that this plug-in for browers in unreliable and evil, it is used by a lot of web sites. Notably some of the adminstration plug-ins in WordPress used it for graphs.

• CCleaner – freeware for removing unused files and registry entries. It also removes browsing history and many cookies. Arguably whether it does any measurable good, but in theory it helps keep your system clean(er).

• Adobe Reader – for reading PDF files. This kind of functionality should be distributed with operating systems nowadays.

Remaining issues

The driver and software for the fingerprint reader (Protector Suite QL 5.8) didn’t work well. Need to check if that is the latest version. The orignal version did run reliably – although I didn’t really use it much.

DxO‘s products are interesting – especially considering the modest size of the company. Their best known product, DxO Optics Pro,  is a sophisticated raw converter. It automatically corrects lens errors (distortion, vignetting, chromatic aberration) and provides sensor noise reduction based on measured noise characteristics of the sensor. It thus provides (since 2004) the lens correction features that Adobe just introduced in Lightroom 3 and Adobe Camera Raw 6.1.

It also provides a wide range of common image enhancement functions – notably including “DxO Lighting” which does automatic tone mapping on a single raw image to make it fit the limited dynamic range of a JPG, screen or print. In more photographic terms, you might use this is as automatic highlight recovery. Again this overlaps with Lightroom 3, and in fact the user interfaces of both products look a bit similar (in this case Lightroom was first).

DxOMark for raw review data

DxO also provides a free web-based service called DxOMark whereby they provide detailed image quality measurements of (SLR or high-end compact) cameras. You can see DxOMark as a “raw” version of a product review: DxO does the geeky part of measuring camera performance in a well-defined and objective way. DxO leaves the “back-end” of the review process to either its readers or to other review sites. Thus, in DxOMark you won’t find the subjective but useful opinions like “how solid does it feel?”, “are the buttons in the right place?”, “is it good value for money” or sometimes even “here is what the shutter sounds like”.

Why DxOMark?

I expect that DxOMark data is just a spin-off of the measurements which the company does to enable its DxO Optics Pro product. Incidentally not all equipment supported by DxO Optics Pro is currently in the DxOMark database. DxO writes:

Initially covering about 540 cameras-lens combinations, with dozens to follow each month

So although the extra costs of the service may be relatively limited if you have the data anyway, the business model of giving high quality unique data away for free is still not quite clear to me. The collected information goes both to high-end readership and to websites that use the data in their reviews (but requires the source to be clearly identified).

Possibly DxOMark is partly intended as a way to advertise DxO because it generates web traffic and brand awareness. I certainly think it is a healthy move for a company that hasn’t gotten too much attention in the past years. The actual terms of use of DxOMark are available via this link.  They indicate conditions for fee of charge for what they define as “Fair Use” and they offer forms of partnership if you need more. As far as I can tell, my usage of some of their graphs below falls under “Fair Use” because it is non-systematic, because I don’t modify the content, and clearly attribute the data to DxO. But if I would create an entire review site using their data (even while acknowledging DxO) that would be considered “systematic” use of the data and would require a special license.

DxOMark Sensor versus Lens-with-camera

Previously DxOMark only covered the sensor and some aspects of the image processing pipeline. This mainly provided noise data (important for low-light situations) and dynamic range (high-contrast situations).

But they recently added a second service to view performance of lenses. In accordance with DxO tradition, DxO measures each lens on multiple camera bodies. This is reasonable because that is ultimately what the user cares about. And furthermore the resolution of a lens, for example, depends on the “analog” lens quality and the “digital” sensor resolution. This also applies somewhat to vignetting, but not to distortion. The drawback for DxO is that they need to perform more measurements. DxO tries to maintain a balance between making all this data available to advanced readers, while trying to summarize the data (at the cost of some accuracy) in simple metrics.

Lens measurements and data complexity

DxO measures pretty much the same information about lenses as www.PhotoZone.de (which is in English despite being based in Germany). This means that it shows measurements for

• resolution (c, f, A, r)
• distortion (c, f, r)
• chromatic aberration (c, f, A, r)
• vignetting (c, f, A, r)

whereby c means “per camera body”, f means “per focal length = zoom setting”, A means “per aperture setting”, and r means “depending on distance from center of the sensor”.

The ways of representing all this data different between both sites. DxO has colorful interactive graphs, and the numbers from both websites are not directly comparable.

One representation of lens sharpness ("resolution") at the DxOMark.com site.

The above example graph shows that, at 1/3 of the distance between image center and image corner, this lens/camera combination performs pretty well (“greenish”). That applies even when used wide open (f/4). At extremely small apertures (f/22) one can see lens performance decreasing (thanks to basic physics, “diffraction”). And one can see that this lens is a bit softer at f/4 towards the 105 mm end of the zoom range.

So, admittedly this particular representation is a bit nerdy and may remind some of your school days. But there are also simpler views (color representing resolution across the 24x36mm sensor) as well as significantly nerdier ones (MTF graphs for both vertical and horizontal resolution).

Visualization of resolution (for f=24mm) at www.PhotoZone.de

The PhotoZone.de representation of the same lens on the same body shows comparable information, but as a 2-D bar chart per focal length. The results along the vertical axis are, however, in terms of line-pairs displayable across the long dimension of the sensor. So if we divide the PhotoZone.de results by 36 (mm for a full frame sensor) you get numbers between roughly 50 and 100 and lp/mm. For basic lenses (Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 II), the numbers drop down to 800 or 800/22.3mm or 35 lp/mm in the corners.

Although film-based photography has a history of lines/mm rather, values for lines/image can (in theory) be directly compared across different digital sensor sizes as long as they have the same aspect ratio (like full-frame versus APS-C).

Can’t I just get a single rating number?

To DxOMark’s credit, users can get as much or as little information as they like. In fact, in an “Overview” tab, those that want to see a single number, get a single “simple” number. For the lens/camera in the figure above, the answer is “59″ (line pairs per mm). Simplicity, however, often means that the complexity has just been moved out of sight: the value “59″  is an average of the resolution over focal length and aperture. And multiple such averages are then averaged (after weighing) to account for the final dimension: differences in resolution between center and edge of the image.

A quick attempt to derive a comparison number from PhotoZone.de results in roughly 78 lp/mm (2800/36). This 30% different compared to 59 is enough to assume that the two measurement techniques are not directly comparable. This is to be expected: the measurements are complex. Thus, for example, as the resolution of the test target goes up, the contrast of the resulting image gradually decreases (see DxO’s MTF representation). This alone could cause a numerical difference. And two different copies of lenses will also give somewhat different results when measured in an identical way.

Transmission benchmark

DxO provides one extra metric that PhotoZone doesn’t have. DxO calls it “transmission”.

This tells you, for example, whether a 50mm f/1.4 lens is really going to give you f/1.4 speed. Thus Canon’s EF 50mm f/1.4 USM and Nikon’s AF Nikkor 50mm f/1.4D are both about 1/3 stop slower than a f/1.4 lens should be according to DxOMark. Thus “transmission” is thus comparable to vignetting: vignetting shows how much darker the edges of the image are than the center; “transmission” shows how much darker the center is than specified. Likely, transmission also impacts depth-of-field slightly.

Note that the sensor benchmark of DxOMark also shows whether a camera’s sensor has the right ISO value. Sometimes (read: generally) a manufacturer overrates its ISO value by a fraction of a stop. I am not sure how DxOMark distinguishes between a discrepancy in the ISO calibration (“exposure is slightly dark”) and aperture calibration (“exposure is slightly dark”).

High-level fun with Peak Score

DxOMark resolution scores for 103 full-frame lens/body combinations

The above graph shows 103 lens/body combinations in the DxOMark database that all have full-frame bodies. The vertical axis shows “Peak Score” which is supposed to represent how much visual “information” (resolution and bit/pixel) the camera captures. It is called “Peak” because the value corresponds to the most optimal setting of focal distance and aperture. From left to right, the four columns correspond to:

• a mix of the Nikon D700, D3 and D3s: 12.1 MPixel
• the old Canon 5D: 12.7 MPixel
• a mix of the Canon 5D Mark II (21 Mpixel) and Canon 1Ds Mark III (21.1)
• a mix of the Nikon D3x (24.5) and Sony A850/A900 (24.6) – these all use the same Sony sensor, and both Sony’s are virtually identical

As the mix of lenses across the brands is more or less comparable, we conclude that the 12 MPixel Nikons in the first column have the same image sharpness as the older 12.7 MPixel Canon 5D. The 6% difference in resolution is small compared to other factors that cause spread (such as difference between Canon and Nikon lenses). The 21 and 24.5 MPixel sensors clearly outperform the 12 MPixel sensors, but the score doesn’t scale linearly with the MPixel value. DxO writes in the explanation of “peak score”:

[Peak score] grows linearly with resolution, for a perfect optic and a noise-free signal

so apparently at 20+ Mpixel, the lenses can no longer be considered ideal, and the PeakScore(Mpix) curve is already saturating. This is consistent with the fact that, for example, the Canon EF 24-105mm f/4L IS lens shows chromatic aberration at such resolutions – albeit that Peak Score deliberately flatters the lens by measuring its performance at the setting where it performs best (e.g. 70mm f/8).

Interestingly, the two 21 MPixel Canon models match the Peak Scores of the 24.5 MPixel Nikon and Sony models. The 16% difference in resolution doesn’t really show up. This is not because the sensor vastly outperforms the lens (24.5 MPixels sounds like a lot, but these are still 5.9×5.9 µm pixels – compare that to the 4.2×4.2 µm pixels of a Canon 7D).

The DxOMark site also allows you to put the price of the lens on the horizontal axis. Or alternatively the price of the lens/body combination. Those graphs stress that the 1Ds Mark III and especially the D3x are much more expensive than some of the alternatives. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they are overpriced: there are obviously many other relevant parameters than just resolution – and in fact, maybe for your application, extreme resolution may not have the highest priority.

DxOMark versus PhotoZone.de

Based on my own exchanges with both sites in the past, I basically trust both. In particular, both have a healthy safety margin of technical expertise (in-house in the case of DxO, or partly by using 3rd party software – Imatest – and a few expert friends in the case of PhotoZone). You can also tell (in the case of PhotoZone) by looking for remarks like “this looks strange, but I got similar results when I retested”. Or by reading the white papers about their measurement approach and what it all means at DxOMark.com.

As stressed at the start, PhotoZone is real lens review site: it tells you an engineer/photographer’s opinion of the lens. This includes equal parts “hard data” (a few bar charts), sample photos,  and hand-written text (about one page).

DxOMark, on the other hand, is not really a classic review site: there is no real hand-written text explaining what is good or bad and when/why you should care. DxO tries to fulfill the need for simple answers by using clear color schemes (green is good) and generating a handful of simple ratings so that you can see “who wins” and by how much. They even generate ratings (for what it’s worth) for the suitability of the lens/body combination for landscapes, portraits, journalism, sports and family use. These ratings are based on specifications and measurements only: they do not include value-for-money, or other subjective things like “build”, “bokeh” and “focus speed”. Or the inevitable statements about weather-sealing or what does/doesn’t move when you zoom/focus. DxO knows this, and has reserved space on their site to link to “human-written” reviews.

In PhotoZone you will find hundreds of different lenses, but tested on a minimum number of camera bodies each. The limited number of camera bodies has benefits (less data, less work), but also drawbacks (readers would prefer to see the results for the body they would use). Thus in PhotoZone you will find 3rd party lenses (Sigma, Tamron), famous specialty brands (Zeiss, Leitz), but also exotic lenses like a Russian fish-eye or Korean wide-angles. In DxOMark you will find most relevant camera bodies, but currently “only” about 14 lenses per major camera brand. In contrast, PhotoZone has over 100 Canon-mount lenses (from Canon or others). It is hard to say which strategy on allocating testing budget/effort is better – they are just different. I suspect that the kind of person that does research before choosing a lens will end up using both sites for complementary information.

I simply kept using LR 2.7 during the beta testing period as the beta version didn’t allow you to easily import LR 2.x databases, and I didn’t want to run any risk with my existing catalog data. So, even though official releases are still have some bugs, I upgraded to LR 3.0 as soon as the final version was available.

For an overview of what’s new in Lightroom 3.0, see for example Adobe’s own site.

Upgrade process

Lightroom 3.0 installs itself alongside the LR 2.x version. When the software is first run, a new LR v3 catalog (=metadata database) is generated alongside the old version 2 catalog. This means you can go back to the old version if necessary. For my catalog containing 25000 images (and over 100,000 keywords), the conversion took about 15 minutes.

Lens correction modules

Lightroom 3 has the option to correct vignetting, lens distortion and lateral chromatic aberration for

• Canon (26 lenses and 2 point-and-shoots),
• Nikon (7 lenses and 1 point-and-shoot),
• Sigma (2 APC-C lenses and 3 full-frame lenses)
• Sony (Sony DT 18-200mm only), and
• Tamron (Tamron DI 28-75mm only)

This can be seen as a simple equivalent to DxO’s Optics Pro lens correction modules: the program automatically corrects these defects based on calibration data provided by Adobe (in some cases with support from the lens maker). I still hope that Adobe will acquire DxO’s technology – but this seems less likely now that Lightroom 3.0 does the low-hanging fruit part of what DxO does.

There are Canon lenses supported at present (2 of my 3 lenses; 100mm f/2.8 macro missing):

Canon lens support in Lightroom 3

The first lens is incidentally the Canon PowerShot G10/G11 point-and-shoot camera, but can also be used for the Canon PowerShot S90. The number of supported lenses will likely continue to grow: modules can be provided by Adobe, third parties, or even by end-users (Adobe provides software for this).

Support for managing video files

My directory tree containing all my pictures also contain a few dozen short HD video fragments made using my Canon 5D Mark II. It is a good idea to run “Synchronize Folder…” on the file system because this allows Lightroom 3.0 to find and import these videos. In my case, it also picked up some JPGs that my daughter had made with her camera and had manually placed in the directory tree. The support for videos is currently pretty basic: you can see a thumbnail, can view it using an external application (e.g. Windows Media Player), can add keywords, and can (obviously) export the file – which in this case just means copying the file as-is.

This isn’t much, but should be enough for now to prevent the following scenario that was easily possible with Lightroom 2 with a newer model camera:

1. you take hundreds of pictures (JPG or Raw) with your DSL, but also a video (.MOV)
2. you use Lightroom 2.x to import the pictures from your flash card. It warns that there are some movie files, but it doesn’t do anything with them.
3. you are eager to see your pictures, so you start running Lightroom (adding keywords, deleting the weak images, etc.).
4. you put your flash card back in the camera and… reformat the flash card: the video files are now lost.

Lightroom 3, in contrast, imports both the pictures and any file format that it recognizes as videos (I have seen .mov, .mp4, .avi work).

The 2003 versus the 2010 “process”

Adobe’s original image improvement “flow” or “process” was getting a bit out of date (it hasn’t fundamentally changed since Lightroom was introduced in 2003). So the Lightroom engineers needed a way to improve this without causing old photo’s to suddenly start looking slightly different. Thus by default, Lightroom 3 still uses the “2003 process” for existing images in catalogs and uses a new “2010 process” for anything that is newly imported. You have full control over which of process you want – these are just the defaults. The main improvement in the 2010 process is supposedly the handling of high-ISO images.

Below is a 100% crop of a raw image taken with a Canon 5D Mk II using a 24-104mm f/4L IS USM lens. The lens is good, but not great, so we can see some lens artifacts when we zoom in all the way.

Image EXIF data: ISO 200 with Highlight Tone Protection enabled (essentially underexposed!), 32mm, f/6.7, 1/250, tripod, raw @ 21 MPixels. In addition, the original image was by 1 stop too dark (probably due to spot metering). The HTP and the underexposure together mean that the dark parts of the image exhibit chroma noise – even at 200 ISO. Warning: the differences between the images is very small. I will point them out, but if you want to compare them, you can download the files and compare them in a slideshow-like tool.

100% crop of a 21 MPixel image using Lightroom 3.0 using 2010 process without lens correction

In this image (remember that you are seeing only 1.1% of the surface area of the full image – the full image is 10× wider and 10× higher), look for:

• the purple fringe at border between sleeve and Leigh’s arm. This is chromatic aberration. It is not too visible here because we are not too far from the center of the image and the image quality would have been visibly worse at 24mm.
• the purple color noise in the lady’s gray sweater and my blue sweater. Surprising in a 200 ISO image, but this is again because of the HTP setting and accidental underexposure.
• the moiré in the striped pink blouse. A resolution of 21 MPixel may sound more than high enough, but it is actually not too high by modern standards: it corresponds to the same pixel pitch as an 8 MPixel APS-C camera.

Test image using Lightroom 3.0, 2010 process and lens correction

This image is very similar to the previous one. But look for:

• There is less/no purple fringe at border between sleeve and arm. The lens correction module for the 24-105mm lens has automatically fixed this.
• When you compare this image to the one without lens correction, you see slightly different cropping on the left side. Check out the pearl necklace. This is due to the circa 1% distortion: you lose a few pixels.

Test image using Lightroom's 2003 process with lens correction

This image is again quite similar to the previous two – but things to look for:

• there seems to be less purple color noise in the lady’s gray sweater and my blue sweater.

Adobe obviously intends the 2010 process to outperform the 2003 process. In this case, the 2003 process does a better job (argggh; the first comment by a reader incidentally seems to confirm this). Adobe demonstrates the differences between the two processes mainly using high-ISO images.

Test image using DxO v6.2 with lens correction (and black level and exposure tweaking to match the overall appearance of the Lightroom output)

The same file processed using DxO Optics Pro version 6.2. DxO specializes in noise reduction and correction of lens aberations. Using default settings, I would say it has gotten rid of the chroma noise, but at the cost of detail in the sweaters. This essentially means that when your image is too noisy, you use spatial low-pass filtering to reduce the noise – at some loss of detail. You can tune all these settings in both Lightroom and DxO, so you may be able to fix this by moving away from the default settings – after all it is a critical trade-off. Note also that the aliasing in the pink blouse is less than in the Lightroom images, suggesting more effective de-mosaicing filtering.

Lens correction benefits

The cropped image used above does show too much lens correction. So let’s look at another image shot using a Canon EF 24-105mm f/4L lens. This image with lots of straight lines and indirect lighting incidentally shows a hall where Belgian coal miners used to shower after their shift.

ISO 200, 24mm, f/7.1, 1/100, full image (move mouse over image to see result of lens correction)

If you compare the two images, you see clearly that the lens has quite some distortion at 24mm (and with a full frame sensor). The Photozone.de website even calls this 4.3% distortion “massive“. A direct comparison also shows that the light fall-off of 1.5 stops in the corners (this is at f/7.1; it would have been more at f/4).

100% crop of a corner (move mouse over image to see result of lens correction)

The cycan and magenta fringes are clearly visible (both around the roof and between the tiles) and are largely corrected using the lens correction module. In the crop, both images are distortion corrected for practical reasons. It is worth noting that although all of this is pretty advanced stuff, you only need to click on a checkbox to activate lens correction.

iPhone support

The iPhone 3G and 3GS are both supported with respect to the camera inside these phones. On the one hand these are popular camera’s and undoubtedly have medium quality optics. Possibly Adobe added this as a bonus for people with fancy cameras who also use iPhones. Anyone using the iPhone as a main camera probably doesn’t care too much about image quality.

I am also pretty sure that the Canon PowerShot S90 is also supported. In fact, the Adobe software silently did distortion correction for this model without informing the user or giving users the option to enable or disable the feature. This was a design decision by Canon: correct residual lens aberrations in Canon software and where possible also in major 3rd party software.

Tethering your camera

Connecting your camera via a USB cable to a laptop or desktop is easy and can be useful. Every picture you take is sent over the USB cable and shows up in Lightroom pretty much immediately. The picture that shows up in Lightroom can automatically be given some keyword or preset or get the same adjustments as the previous image.

You can either trigger the camera’s shutter using the camera’s shutter button(s), or trigger the shutter from the computer (using a mouse or keyboard). You can also see important camera settings like ISO/aperture/shutter_speed/white_balance, but you cannot adjust these from the computer. I didn’t manage to start a video this way, but that may not be terribly useful anyway.

So the tethering works (at least with a hand full of recent cameras) and is easy to use. But don’t expect the ability to really control the camera from your armchair. There are YouTube videos showing how this works.

Oddities and bugs

• Lens correction and image resizing. The lens correction module fixes distortion, resulting in a warped picture that is then automatically cropped back to a rectangle. You lose some pixels at the edges. The resulting image size in pixels is, however, identical to the original image size. I guess that choice is ok for casual users, but how about demanding users?Another way to explain what I mean: if you straighten the image using Lightroom (e.g. rotate it by 1 degree), you get a different image size and different aspect ratio. Distortion correction is somewhat comparable, but behaves differently.
• File count in the keyword hierarchy. I have a keyword hierarchy that includes Locations > Europe (1) > Belgium (32) > Brussels (61) > Manneke Pis (3). The numbers indicate the number of pictures. In Lightroom 2.x the number following Europe would show the total number of images classified as Europe, including images that had only Belgium as keyword. This is clearly no longer the case. I probably only have 1 image that is labeled Europe that is not attributed to any specific country. I can click to get all Europe images (11017), but how do I get the odd one? If I cannot find it easily, why show me the number?
• Tethered shooting. Turning off the camera while it was still connected to the computer for tethered shooting, gave a weird colored animation on the LCD on the back of the Canon 5D Mark II: essentially the camera thought it still needed to store a file. The animation looked like it might be designed for the WiFi adapter (which I don’t have) because something similar happens when the camera starts messing with FTP and HTTP protocols to push files to a nearby server.
• Editing video capture time. Lightroom 3 doesn’t claim to be able to edit the capture time of videos, but this is a bit of an inconvenience. I had previously (LR 2.x) adjusted the times of a set of images to match the local timezone in which they were shot. Now I wanted to do the same for the videos in LR 3.0. It can’t. So now my videos show up in the wrong locations when the files are sorted based on capture time. I guess the capture time can be edited: the time is stored somewhere in/with the file itself. And if absolutely necessary, you could edit just the capture time as stored in the database (and risk losing the change if you resynchronize metadata).
• Lens correction and freedom of choice. By default, lens correction will use the lens the image was taken with. Surprisingly, Lightroom 3 also lets you use the correction models for other lenses. Even lenses from other brands and for lenses that don’t have the focal length you are using. This is nice for playing around with (“what if I select a fish-eye”) or to use a similar modular if the one you need is not available. But there is no warning if you select a “wrong” module: it gets stored in your catalog.
• Deletion. When a single image is viewed within a directory, and the image is deleted, Lightroom loses track of where you were within the directory. This applies for both Development view and Library view. This behavior is different than Lightroom 2, and a bit of a nuisance.

All these photos were taken in the Eifel (the part on the German side of the border), but on multiple weekends. The Eifel is about 135 km drive from here, so when I go there I tend to walk quite a bit just to “justify” the long drive.

2010_Eifel_66

ISO 100, 105mm, f/5, 1/200 s

Many people can’t stand abstract photos where they cannot guess what they are seeing. Guesses mentioned at the photo club were: fabric, a nature macro, and a large man-made structure. If you have the need to know, see here.

The associated histogram is also worth a look: firstly this color (!) photo is almost black-and-white. Secondly, it is surprisingly smooth – almost Guassian. I deliberately didn’t stretch the histogram as the original was simply gray, and I didn’t need to turn the photo into a graphical design of some sort.

histogram of 2010_Eifel_66

2010_Eifel_41

ISO 400, 70mm, f/4, 1/60 s

In this case, people were fine with only kind-of-knowing what it was and what caused those stains. For more context, see here.

2010_Eifel_160

ISO 100, 70mm, f/4, 1/60 s

Although the hills in the distance look foggy, this was actually quite warn and this was actually nearby rain driven by a gusty wind. I didn’t really manage to visualize that. Even after some contrast tweaking, it still looks like fog to me when the movement is missing. I doubt there is a way to show that in a “still” without a really high-resolution print: motion blur would just increase the confusion.

2010_Eifel_166

ISO 100, 70mm, f/4, 1/100 s

My photo club theme is currently “special lighting conditions”. Maybe not a highly original photo, but here you go… Special Lighting Conditions!

The first, third and fourth pictures are within walking distance of Vogelsang – a large, eery former boarding school in the middle of a forest. It was built to turn young boys into bright and able Nazi’s. After World War II, Vogelsang served as barracks for the British and Belgian armies. Worth visiting.