One part of the debate about the usefulness of Final Cut Pro X—if you can call the swirling mass of commentary a debate—is whether or not the new application is useful to pros. Too often, I see pundits write that, “real pros need this” and “real pros need that” in their tools. Then they go on to deride anything that doesn’t meet their bar as amateur.

Often, it seems that what they really mean is: ”pros like me need this or that”. Unsaid is the next line: ”If you’re not like me and not doing what I do, then you’re not really a pro”. Then, there’s the use of amateur as a derogatory statement.

It irritates me when people use the term pro as a hierarchical status flag. After all, the definition of a pro is simply that you’re getting paid to do what you do. That doesn’t make you better or worse than the amateur. Yes, you should be good at what you do if you’re a pro. That’s up to you, however. The pro label won’t give you superpowers or entitle you to anything.

As far the tools go, a real pro should use whatever tools are appropriate to get their job done. Evaluation, consideration, and discussion about tools and how to use them are all part of the process. Yes, there’s lots to talk about with both the radically new application and how Apple handled—well, botched really—the launch. Just remember: it’s a means to an end. It’s what you make that counts, not the tools you use.

After making my lists and checking them twice, the affair of packing for Edinburgh yesterday was straightforward enough. Over the years, I’ve picked up a couple of essential strategies for getting myself and all of the gear I’m taking sanely from place to place.

The first thing I do is figure out how many bags I’m going to take. Not only does every airline have different rules, but those rules vary quite a bit depending on where in the world you’re going. Frequently flier status also plays a role in this. You also need to consider any limits that are placed by ground transportation once you are at your destination.

It’s one thing to show up with 200 pounds of gear in an American city where you are going to rent a car along with a companion. It’s another to hump a bunch of bags from city to city across Europe on the train by yourself. It took me a long time to figure out that thinking about how I was going to move all the bags together from point to point would make everything go more smoothly.

The second thing I do might sound counter intuitive. I unpack everything. I mean everything. My Think Tank Airport International bag. My laptop bag. Everything. This helps me jettison anything I don’t need. It also gives me a chance to inspect and clean gear as well as to identify anything I need to pick up from the camera store. Inevitably, I always make a quick run to Pro Photo Supply—my local store—before every major trip, even if it’s for some small $10 part. Of course, it’s never just a $10 part… but I digress.

After everything is gathered and checked, it gets packed up. Camera bodies and lenses go into the carry-on Think Tank. Everything else, including tripod, monopod, light stands, and so forth, goes into checked luggage. I’ve learned the hard way that carbon-fiber monopods are especially attractive to baggage handlers. Because of this, I now make sure to put everything to one kind of packing sack or another before it goes into the suitcase. Then I put clothes on top of the gear. This seems to have helped reduce the impulses of would-be Gitzo-tax enforcers and their kin.

Finally, all the bags get weighed to prevent any surprises at the airport. In my case, my biggest bag was 5 pounds over weight. This lead to a healthy discussion with myself over whether I really needed that pair of hiking boots.

You might laugh, but it took me years to figure out that the right kind of footwear can make or break my mood during a trip. It’s tough to make good photos when your feet hate you. Alas, as much as I wanted to bring ’em, the hiking boots had to stay. Hopefully my trainers will suffice for exploring whatever Scottish countryside I find myself in this next week.

After two uneventful flights, I arrived bright and early this morning into Edinburgh, Scotland. Good travel karma stayed with me all the way to the hotel. Instead of having to wait on a room until the early afternoon, the super helpful front desk clerk was able to check into my room right away. Always a good thing when traveling across eight time zones.

Edinburgh Castle as seen from the west. Photo credit: James Duncan Davidson

Once I settled in, I spent quite a bit of time during the afternoon scouting around downtown Edinburgh. My hotel is just to the west of the castle, so naturally I headed that way. Since it’s my first day of jet lag—rarely a good combination for careful photography for me—I left the big cameras packed up, just shot with the little GF1, and enjoyed the day.

Tomorrow, I head north to meet up with my friend Patrick Lenz who just so happens to be vacationing in Northern Scotland. Here’s hoping the big plate of pasta I just ate does its job and knocks me out for the night so that I’m in good shape tomorrow.

This morning, after managing the effects jet-lag well enough to sleep a full six hours, I hopped on a train north out of Edinburgh to Pitlochry to meet Patrick Lenz and family. Even though the clouds had rolled in and solidly covered the sky, the views from train were stunning. The first stop was the Falls of Bruar for a hike. More impressive than the waterfalls to me was the verdant green forest they were surrounded by.

Verdant forest near the Falls of Bruar in Scotland. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

The forest was cool and damp and filled with ferns, moss, and pine trees. The air was humid with moisture and the greens were just amazing. It was like layer upon layer of every different shade of green, all amplified to the point of sensory overload. Or maybe, it was just enough to overload my jet-lagged eyes. Either way, I’ll take it.

Day three in Scotland took Patrick, his family, and myself up into the Highlands to visit Loch Ness, and the Cairogrms National Park. It was incredibly beautiful and—no big surprise to anybody who has been to the Highlands—wet. It wasn’t just a wee bit wet, either. We spent most of the day under quite heavy rain with only very occasional breaks where the rain dialed back a bit to something a bit lighter.

Heavy rain-laden clouds over Loch Ness in the Scottish Highlands.

Unfortunately, despite my preparing for it as best as I could, the rain was heavy enough to interfere with most of what I wanted to shoot. Most of the time, normal lens hoods weren’t enough to shield from windblown rain for long enough to make a time-lapse that wasn’t streaked with water dripping down over the frame. Even while shooting stills, I was constantly wiping off my lenses. More than a few times, this meant using any dry bit of t-shirt I could find. Eeek! Don’t tell the serious camera gear fetishists!

Fields on the Glenlivet Estate in the Cairngorms National Park, Scotland.

I really wish I had some more time to spend in the Highlands on this trip to Scotland. I’ve got fantasies now of renting a car and spending a week or two—maybe three—toodling all around the north and checking everything out, sipping Scotch, meeting people, and having the time to wait out the weather to shoot a great location. I’ll be back for sure. Plan on it.

Yesterday evening found me up on Calton Hill in Edinburgh making time-lapses of the sun setting over the city. As I worked, two women came up to check out the view and ended up hanging out for a while. Meet Garance Louis and Brooke Sharkey.

Garance Louis and Brooke Sharkey enjoy the sunset on Calton Hill, Edinburgh, Scotland.

Garance (in the foreground) and Brooke are musicians who had been busking in Edinburgh for a couple of days. They were on their way back to London and were playing tourist for a little bit before they had to go. It was the third conversation of the day that started, “What are you doing taking so many photos of the same thing?”

Usually socialization around photography—even out in nature—is all about cameras, apertures, and so on. It makes me so happy when it can be just be about making friends and trading laughs.

In the days before the TEDGlobal team moved into the EICC to set up for this year’s conference, I had the chance to make several time-lapses around the Edinburgh. While most of the data is sitting on hard drives waiting to be processed after I get home, here’s a quick teaser:

It’s work in progress and it remains to be seen how it comes together either as a short or part of a larger piece. I certainly need to find a nice bit of Scottish bagpipe music to go with it. In any case, I hope you enjoy this little sneaky peak.

Last year, I produced a time-lapse for TEDGlobal in Oxford of the stage build out. The result was a simple single-position video that was a lot of fun to make and watch. That was then, though. I’ve learned a lot about making time-lapses since then. When TED asked me to make one this year, I decided that it was time to push myself and take things up several notches. Here’s the result:

As you can imagine, a lot went into making this. Several cameras, a motion-control dolly, and not a small amount of processing time crunching frames into 4K resolution video and then editing it together in Final Cut Pro X. My collaborators were Mike Femia—TED’s photo editor—and the brilliant Imogen Heap who sat down with me for a while to pick just the right snippet of her music to complement the piece. I also benefitted from some expert coaching for the cut from TED’s brilliant video crew. To say it was an awesome experience to make this is an understatement.

The Maisel vs. Baio Incident has created an ugly, ugly scene. Various groups online and off have exploded with vitriol. Truths have been spun into half-truths and then into fiction. Hateful things have been said. Some have gone so far as to affix protest art to Maisel’s house. And that’s just what was going on on public.

If my own private communications are any indication, it’s been a absolute shitstorm behind the scenes. Most people who reached out to me via email have just wanted to talk things through in a friendly manner. Some of those conversations have been fascinating. A very few others, well. Let’s just say it’s been interesting. Given that my own involvement was to write a post about the situation from the sidelines, I can’t imagine the kinds of things that have been said between parties that are more involved.

Publicly or privately, the malfeasance all around destroys any ability to use this case to talk about the conflict between copyright and creativity. It’s an important conversation that we need to have and keep having. Disagreement is part and parcel in this conversation. Unfortunately, at this point, it’s like pig wrestling. Everyone gets dirty and the pigs like it.

I did a really good job of packing for my trip to TEDGlobal. I had everything I needed, almost everything I wanted, and used everything I brought. From a logistics standpoint, it was almost a total success. Sitting in the lounge at Heathrow after having managed over 120 pounds bags and gear for three weeks, however, I’d really love to take a radically different kind of international photography trip soon.

On this dream trip, I’d take two carry-on bags. A small roller for clothes and chargers and a small shoulder bag with just enough room to fit a 13" MacBook Air and a small mirrorless camera. I’d prefer the 11" MacBook Air, but the built in SD card slot in the bigger one swings the equation. It’d be silly to go a bit smaller and then have to keep track of a SD card reader.

As to the mirrorless camera, I could take my GF-1 along with a few lenses. As much as I dig my little Panasonic, however, my dream has a Fuji X100 in it. I’ve only handled the X100 for a few minutes, but something about it calls. It’s high-iso performance and dynamic range figures are nice, but more important are the lovely images I’ve watched others make with it.

It’s a good dream. I think I’ll have to work on making it happen sometime. Sometime soon, even if I do use the GF-1 along with a few choice lenses because the X100 isn’t in stock anywhere.

When first announced, the shift away from unlimited data plans by US wireless carriers was seen by many in a fairly negative light. Given that the telcos have a long history of charging odious fees when a customer used more of a service than was purchased, it was fairly understandable. Nobody wants to be in the position of having an unexpected ultra-large bill at the end of the month. In practice it hasn’t turned out bad at all. In fact, this latest shift in pricing models turns out to be pretty rational.

Instead of a large fine—the kind you expect to be levied by the state when you break a law—the net result of using up a purchased block of data is that you simply get charged for another. Don’t get me wrong. There are still things to quibble about. For example, AT&T effectively requiring the purchase of another 2GB of data to enable tethering seems pretty silly to me. I currently pay $40 per month for 4GB of data, of which I normally don’t even use half. But, that doesn’t take away from the point that the way overages are handled is rational and and comprehensible. The customer is treated as a consumer who wants to more of a product, not as a criminal who broke a traffic law and needs to be punished.

Go overseas, however, and this newfound rationality goes right out the window. Sign up for AT&T’s 100MB international data roaming plan and what costs a penny per MB in the states suddenly is valued at over just a buck per MB. That’s one hundred times the going rate of domestic data. Furthermore, go over the limit and you get charged $5.12/MB. That’s over five hundred times the domestic rate. $5000/GB. It’s unbelievable.

Wireless data isn’t any more precious in Europe than it is in the states. It’s about the same price, really, if not a bit cheaper. On my latest trip, I picked up a T-Mobile SIM in Edinburgh and paid £5 for a month of data capped at 1GB of usage. The fact I can do that without a contract is astonishing to me. Certainly, if I can buy data at that rate from T-Mobile directly in the UK on the street without a contract, AT&T can do even better in bulk.

Now, I don’t mind at all the idea of paying more for my data usage when I travel internationally. It’d be worth something—actually quite a bit—to me to be able to just use my iPhone with my AT&T +1 number anywhere in the world and not bother with finding a local SIM and juggling two phones like I currently do. How much would I pay? That’s a good question. Whatever the price, however, it’s time for the simple and rational system for buying blocks of data that we have domestically to make its way to the international plans.

Of course, I don’t expect this to happen anytime soon. Now that they are available in the US, I’m planning on buying an unlocked iPhone when I next upgrade. On the other hand, who’d have expected the latest plans to be as rational as they are today?

The news about the shootings and bomb explosion in Norway is shocking, sad, and hard to comprehend. It’s a tragedy. As I read about it—and as much as I try to keep my thoughts focused on the present—I can’t help but remember other tragedies of terror. Most notably what comes to mind is the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City by our own homegrown terrorist, Timothy McVeigh.

Truly insane and massively incomprehensible.

For quite some time, I’ve been getting sporadic reports from readers like you about a character encoding problem in my Atom feed. Here’s what it looks like in Reeder (thanks to Chuq von Rospach who sent this sample):

My feeds—along with all the generated text on this site—use the UTF-8 character encoding. What’s happening here is that a client application is decoding the non-ASCII characters in the content, such as smart quotes and em-dashes, assuming some other encoding like ISO-8859-1. The result is a chunk of gibberish wherever the text contains one of these characters. The one thing that appears to be common is the use of Google Reader or an application that uses the Google Reader API, like Reeder and NetNewsWire.

Unfortunately, this only seems to happen to some people and only some of the time. For example, I use Google Reader and occasionally NetNewsWire and have only seen the problem once. This makes it hard to get a solid fix in place. From my perspective, it seems that some fractional percentage of Google’s servers aren’t stashing or otherwise storing the character encoding properly to send to downstream consumers of the data. Frustrating.

Here’s what I know for sure:

1. My feed properly validates at using the Feed Validator.

2. The XML declaration in the feed contains a UTF-8 encoding attribute.

3. As of today, I’ve made sure that Apache is declaring the UTF-8 encoding in the HTTP headers.

If anybody has any brilliant suggestions—short using entities (ick!)—or you know how to get a bug report to the right people inside Google, please feel free to get in touch. I’ve found two reports of similar behavior in the Google Reader help form, but no resolution. Otherwise, I’ll keep blindly poking at this with a stick and see what happens.

As the stage photographer at TED, my job takes me all over the auditorium. In the span of a few minutes, I’ll go from being under the front edge of the stage out to one side of the audience or the other, up to the back, around to the other side, and sometimes even onto the stage itself. If my job is to focus on the stage, fellow TED photographer Robert Leslie has the job of orbiting the entire event to capture moments in the social spaces, parties, gatherings, and more.

One of the moments Robert captured was of me working the stage angles from the crowd.

Duncan photographing from the crowd at TEDGlobal 2011. Photo: Robert Leslie

Hani Hong—director of marketing at Shutterstock among other things—helps us out as a photo assistant during the events. Her primary job is to make sure that flash cards full of photos quickly make their way from our cameras to the media room for processing and distribution. While in place to catch my next drop of cards, she made these two shots of me intently focused on what was happening on stage while standing on one of the side walls of the auditorium.

Duncan focuses on the TEDGlobal 2011 stage. Photos: Hani Hong

It looks like I was channeling a bit of Bond there. In reality, I was thinking, “Wait for it, come on… wait for it. Here it comes… There!” An amusing detail (at least I find it amusing): I was belly breathing in the left hand frame—probably because I had just ran around the back of the auditorium to get into place and was stocking back up on oxygen. In the second frame, I can see that I’ve pulled all my core into supporting the camera and that big ass 300mm f/2.8 lens. In fact, I’m probably exhaling slightly as I shoot.

Here’s where I should put a disclaimer in and say that you shouldn’t follow my example here of hand-holding a long lens like this. Use a monopod or tripod whenever possible. Being able to hand hold a lens this heavy and get good results takes years of practice. Even if you can do it, it’s only something you should do when using a monopod isn’t immediately practical.

What’s that thing wrapped around my camera? I call it a sock puppet, but it’s really called a Camera Muzzle. It’s designed to reduce the shutter sound and mirror-slap from the camera inside. I hate using them because it gets all kinds of hot and sweaty in there during a long day, but even in Q (or Quiet) mode, my Nikon D3S bodies make enough noise to be noticeable to nearby audience members and the various microphones used around the stage. The muzzle reduces that impact tremendously and is much appreciated by both long time TED attendees and staffers.

Do you feel it? That slight change of temperature? The breeze shifting direction ever so slightly? That moment when the skin tingles a bit and you shift your eyes up to the sky to see that menacing dark stack of clouds building up and turning that shade of weird blue-green that means real trouble is on its way? The smell of rain moistening the air?

I remember playing in a field as a child. It had been a long warm but fairly calm Oklahoma day. The kind of day that kids should spend outside a quarter-mile away from home playing in overgrown grass in a world before the arrival of cable TV. All the sudden, the temperature dropped. The temperature dropped off suddenly bringing a chill. Swirling clouds had replaced blue skies and you could see the rain dumping out of them.

A decade later, I was riding my bike down a two-lane road a dozen miles away from that field—a road that’s now in the middle of suburbia but at the time was way out in the sticks. Another blue sky day had suddenly turned cold and dark. The rain line swept quickly towards me. Heavy raindrops suddenly hammered my bare arms and legs. The spandex biking shorts and shirt I was wearing didn’t help the rest of me much. Then, hail came along with lightning. The chunks of ice started off barely visible and quickly grew to grape size and then bigger.

I needed shelter and needed it quickly. I spotted an entrance to a small farm with a nice broad tree that beckoned shelter. A single tree standing by itself. With lightning blasting all about, the shelter it offered felt risky. Too risky. I didn’t have much of a choice, however. I was getting beaten to a pulp by the hail. I was out of options and had to take the chance. I spent the next half-hour shivering under that tree praying that the lightning blasting out of the sky wouldn’t come my way while the ice built up on the ground around the reach of the tree.

Another decade and some later, I was standing on a stage in Las Vegas giving a presentation about Java Servlets. The dot-com bubble was fully inflated and while I talked about setting HTTP response headers to a crowd full of developers looking to build the next hot website, I suddenly felt the chill breeze. As it turned out, the inflated stock price of Sun Microsystems—the company I was working for and was heavily invested in—was just days away from its inevitable peak and fall. I think we all knew it had to come, but the storm was still a surprise when it hit. The deluge was sudden and cold. It was shocking how fast the world we were in changed.

There’s another storm coming. The wind is picking up. The smell of rain is in the air. Thunder is starting to crack out in the distance. It’s still too early to tell for sure, but it seems we’re about to get really wet again.

Mac OS X Lion’s Core Storage filesystem encryption is pretty awesome. I’ve already enabled the new FileVault on my laptop so that if anybody gets their mitts on my machine, they don’t get access to the data on it. Even better, it’s now possible to enable encryption on portable Time Machine drives to get the same sort of security for backup disks on the go. Double awesome, and it’s easy to enable with just a checkbox.

I ran into one small detail today with all of this, however. I tried to setup an encrypted Time Machine volume on a new 500GB G-DRIVE slim, Hitachi’s new uber-thin portable drive. No joy. The setup panel indicated that there was a problem with the partition scheme. Away to Disk Utility I went. A run of the Verify Disk tool gave me a message that the partition map needed to be repaired because there’s a problem with the EFI system partition’s file system.

Repairing the disk didn’t help. Neither did repartitioning the drive with a fresh single partition and ensuring that the partition map scheme was set to GUID Partition Table. I put on my geek hat and tinkered with all sorts of things using the diskutil command line—and learned a lot about Core Storage along the way. Still no joy.

From a discussion on Apple’s support board, it seems that this is a problem that has cropped up on other G-DRIVEs and even on a new Seagate drive. This may indicate that something about newer drives is tickling Core Storage the wrong way. After spending too much time on the issue, I punted and set up an encrypted Time Machine on the older Western Digital passport drive I used with my Snow Leopard laptop installation. Finally, joy! I’m going to feel much better about my data on the road now.

Last night, after dealing with yet another failure, I tweeted about my continuing frustration with Drobos. In the discussion that ensued—ranging from “I love my Drobo!” to “Yeah! Drobos suck!”—there were some comments that conflated RAID, or RAID-like systems like the Drobo, with having a proper backup strategy. Seems like it’s time for the mantra again.

Repeat after me three times: RAID is not backup.

RAID is useful to accomplish some combination of three different things depending on the type of RAID system and how you configure it. First, it allows you to build a much bigger volume than you can get on a single spindle. Second, it can give you the ability to have a much faster volume than you can get out of a single drive. Third, it can allow your filesystem volume to survive even if one of the drives comprising the RAID has a mechanical or other low-level problem.

What RAID doesn’t do is help you with file deletion or corruption by applications, the operating system, users, or malicious code. It also doesn’t help with filesystem volume damage. When data is munged, it’s a problem no matter how many spindles it’s spread across. Furthermore, RAID and RAID-like systems introduce another layer of complexity. When the software and hardware guts that make a RAID system tick work don’t work flawlessly—as was the case again with my Drobo last night—then it’s just like having an extreme failure with a single drive at a level that volume repair utilities, such as DiskWarrior, can’t help you with.

A backup is a complete and recoverable copy of your data on a separate volume that is located on a disk—or set of disks, possibly even a RAID—which lives in a separate enclosure, closet, cabinet, a safe deposit box, or somewhere access across the network. Because RAID is about making a single volume some combination of bigger, faster, or more fault-tolerant, it doesn’t meet this definition. Never has, never will.

As for my Drobo, it’s the second one I’ve owned and had repeating issues with. I’ll be the first to admit it could be me and how I use them that’s tickling whatever issue seems to be at play. It doesn’t matter, however. It’s permanently retired and I won’t be replacing it with another.

Every release of Mac OS X seems to bring some amount of change to the printing system. The upgrade to Snow Leopard was particularly painful for some printers, if I remember. So, it was with a little trepidation that I fired up my Epson 3880 today to make some test prints from my recently upgraded Mac Pro.

Things were wonky right out of the gate. On my first attempt, the driver didn’t let me turn off Epson Color Management—a sure sign that I wasn’t going to get good prints. A quick run to Epson’s Mac OS X Lion FAQ page gave a solution path, however. Following Epson’s step-by-step guide, I removed my printer from the Print & Fax panel in System Preferences, downloaded and installed the 10.6 drivers and print utility, and then added the printer back in System Preferences.

It sounds really strange, I know. After all, I already had the 10.6 drivers on my system before I upgraded to Lion. But, following the instructions like a good little user paid off. A few minutes later, I was cranking out prints without a problem.