I just exited the holding pattern.

This is the 2TB LaCie Little Big Disk, Thunderbolt Edition. Based on the nods the drive has gotten from trusted folks so far, I picked it up so that I can have a fast, huge, and portable place to store and work with tons of data while in the field. The 500GB drives I’ve been using will still be useful for backups, but they just weren’t going to cut being primary work drives for the things I’m looking at doing in the very near future. And since all of the equipment I’m going to use in the near future in the field—my MacBook Air as well as a loaner iMac or the like—has Thunderbolt, this drive makes a lot of sense.

For what I need this drive for, speed is a priority, but so is capacity. So I went with the 2TB HDD version instead of the version with twin 120GB SSDs. Still, it’s pretty damn fast. How fast? Let’s let Blackmagic Disk Speed Test answer that:

Not shabby. Not shabby at all. Obviously, this is straight-line performance on an empty drive and not a measure of how fast the drive is for random access. It’s also slower than the SSD version, which Patrick Lenz is now using for his iMac boot drive. For storing photos and video files on the road, however, this should work just fine.

So, what’s not to like? Three things:

1. Having to use an external power cable is annoying and potentially limiting when using on the road with a laptop. There’s probably a power limitation somewhere that forces this, but still. Sub-optimal. Very sub-optimal. If I find myself on a long plane ride without an AC outlet—which happens all of the time—I won’t be able to work with data on this drive.
2. The drive isn’t as quiet as I’d like. There are two spindles in there and absolute quiet isn’t going to happen with traditional hard drives, but this drive seems a bit more noisy than I’d expect based on my time with other portable drives.
3. There’s only one choice in Thunderbolt cables: 2m long. Great for the desktop. But on the road, I could certainly go for a 1m cable. And for daisy chaining devices, a 0.5m cable would be even better. Of course, this is Apple’s problem to fix, but it’d be really nice not to have all this cable gunking up the works.

Obviously, none of these issues are deal-breakers. The benefits the drive offers overshadow them, especially since LaCie is currently the only game in town for this size Thunderbolt drive. And long term, none of these issues will be a problem at all when it’s time to crack the enclosure open and drop a couple of SSDs in it for use with a desktop.

Posted by James Duncan Davidson.

Copyrights, fair use, clip length, sampling, and a whole lot of other things are hard… But credit, that’s not hard. It’s not hard at all. Neither is accurately portraying what a piece is and what it does.

Credit is easy. Well, mostly easy. It might have been hard to get the format of citations right at first in school when we were writing papers, but the act of citing is easy. You just do it. At least you do it after getting your knuckles rapped for plagiarism a few times. Yet, people all over the Internet don’t. A huge portion of new set of amateur (remember, that’s not a bad word) creatives that are—for the first time in human history—publishing to a huge worldwide audience just aren’t doing it. And many of them when confronted with the problem, just shrug and don’t see the issue.

Furthermore, as more of these amateurs pass into the ranks of pros—such as has happened with the explosion of the Web—their habits and attitudes seem to go with them and are now spread throughout the new media sphere. I’ve dealt with this many times before and have been perplexed not only by the fact that my work has been used without attribution, but also by the attitude that comes back from those I contact about it. I blogged about an example of this last October when Michael Arrington used an image of mine distributed under the CC-BY license without attribution on his blog, and then removed it with snark when I simply asked for him to attribute the use. While Arrington is well known for being the way he is, my experience with him is one experience out of hundreds I’ve had that have followed the same path.

Why is this? I wonder that all the time. I especially wonder it when I have discussions with myself about how I want to license my work. I’m a fan of the Creative Commons, but I’ve seen so much work misused even with CC licenses that I keep hesitating in using them even though my own position on copyright and photography lines up quite nicely with CC-BY-NC.

This morning, a thought occurred to me. It’s a thought from left field, but stay with me. Maybe the people on the Internet that aren’t giving appropriate credit are just following social norms as established by a lifetime of commonly seen commercial media use. After all, you don’t see credits for creative works used on advertisements. You often don’t see credits in lots of other works that are creative compilations around you. Even where credits appear, such as television shows and movies, they are often incomplete or squished off to the side of the screen on TV so that video of what’s coming up next can be shown.

Maybe that sets a template. A template of expectations about the right way to do it. And—fully consuming the everything is a remix Kool-Aid here—since we emulate what’s come before, maybe what we are seeing here are people who think they are doing the right thing because it matches the majority of what they’ve seen in the world. All these people who are just using stuff willy-nilly without credit are emulating the visible part of what media has shown them is the right way to do things for a hundred years.

Of course, those people are blissfully unaware of the fact that arrangements were made to use a lot of content without attribution. Money was paid. Even when money wasn’t paid, discussions were—for the most part—had. But, that’s invisible. That isn’t part of the visible template.

It’s just a wild ass hypothesis. I’ll be the first to admit that it’s the random start of a thought. But, maybe there’s something to it? On the other hand, maybe it’s full of bunk. After all, newspapers credit photographs under images all the time—though often with corporate names like AP which leads others to try to credit photos to Flickr. Films have huge rolls of credits at the end. It’s not like the commercial world is a totally uncredited mess where money has totally bought off everyone’s right to be credited.

What do you think? Has somebody already ventured into this territory and chased this thought experiment through? I’m seriously interested. Please chime in at Google Plus if you care to share your thoughts.

Posted by James Duncan Davidson.

Since a lens aperture is a mechanical device, it has tolerances and some lenses are better than others about repeating apertures. Most lenses don’t get it exactly the same every time and the result is that the circumference changes ever so slightly between exposures. The difference is almost always so small that you wouldn’t notice in side-by-side images but when you combine them all into a movie, it can be downright infuriating.

There are a few ways to eliminate aperture flicker, such as the twist your lens slightly off the mount trick that you do on Canon cameras. You can shoot wide-open, but that can introduce other problems by forcing you to use short exposure times or stack ND filters. Or, you can shoot with lenses that don’t integrate at all with your camera so that the aperture doesn’t cycle between exposures.

In the spirit of experimentation, I decided to take this thought a bit too far and try modifying a few old used Nikon Series E lenses to disable the mechanical linkage used by the Nikon F-mount to hold the aperture open between exposures. Here’s a short little video I made while modifying a Series E 135mm 1:2.8 lens.

It’s not for the mechanically faint of heart, and if you have any question about doing it, I would recommend that you don’t. The tiny screws that you’ll find inside lenses strip easily—yes, I speak from experience—and you can quickly make a mess of things. Furthermore, every lens is a bit different inside and you shouldn’t consider the above a definitive how-to. Instead, you should view it as an illustration that it’s possible. And last, you should know that you’re in serious manual mode territory when you use a lens like this.

That said, I’ve found modifying these lenses works rather well and, considering that I started with rather old and inexpensive used equipment and can always reattach the part I removed, the risk involved was really quite minimal. You’ll almost certainly see some examples of time-lapse footage made from these lenses in the weeks to come.

Posted by James Duncan Davidson.

An instant landmark, the “Go By Streetcar” sign hangs at the intersection of Northwest 11th and Lovejoy and joyfully encourages people to use Portland’s awesome transit system. It’s also an homage to the “Go By Train” sign on Union Station. Shot using my Nikon D3S and new Lensbaby Edge 80 Optic at ISO 3200.

Posted by James Duncan Davidson.

I made this photo standing in the ActiveSpace parking lot at the intersection of Northwest 17th and Quimby. I was using my Nikon D3S and new Lensbaby Edge 80 Optic and shot it at ISO 6400. All the effect is in the lens with basic color correction and adjustments in Lightroom 4.

Posted by James Duncan Davidson.

I should say that there’s the most meager attempt at attribution at 3:34 in the video where Luc says, ”On each clip presented in this video, you can see the number that refer to list below”. He obviously means below in the sense of below the video on the YouTube page. Of course, below means nothing when you embed the video somewhere else, like when Maria Popova links into it on curiosity counts.

Ok, so when you’re on the YouTube page looking at the caption, there’s a link to this Google+ page. Go there and you see a list of links—links to the source videos. OK, so that’s credit of a sort, but I’m sorry, that’s not good enough even if the creators of those videos are totally cool with this usage either through permission is given via a Creative Commons license or other arrangement made by the parties.

Proper attribution would have listed names in the video in the commonly accepted place for such attribution: the credits.

End. Of. Story.

I see this happen all of the time and I think that this is something that so many people that are in the free and remix culture movements miss on. As much as the proponents of those movements agree that attribution is important—it’s a core requirement of every Creative Commons license, for example—there’s so very little push to make that happen. And it’s something that drives anybody who is in the middle ground of this debate screaming away from the idea of letting people use their stuff.

You’ll notice that I’m staying silent in this rant on the rest of the copyright implications with this video. That’s because I don’t know if Luc got permission or not from the creators of all 179 sources. Maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t. But this rant isn’t about any other copyright implications. It’s about one thing: Giving credit where credit is due to the people who created the stuff that this video was cut from, and doing it the right way.

Listen, regardless of the rest of the debate around modern Copyright practices, attribution—crediting where ideas or parts come from—is essential. It’s the right thing to do. It makes creative types a lot more friendly towards the whole idea of letting others build off their work instead of feeling ripped off. So do it. And press on others to do it. Kick their butts and call them out when they don’t do it or they half-ass it, even on something as beautifully edited as Luc’s video.

One more thing I should mention: I’m know I’m picking on Luc here, but I wouldn’t be writing this if this were the first or even hundredth time I’ve seen this problem. Noticing the issue this time was simply the straw that prompted the post.

UPDATE 2/20: Since I posted this, Luc’s video has been removed due to a copyright claim. Apparently, as one would easily suspect but which I didn’t want to accuse without knowing, Luc did not get permission to use the clips. Discussion continues on the Google Plus page where some of the people whose clips were used have weighed in and others are trying to defend Luc based on fair use. Messy stuff that’s playing out about as one would expect if you’ve seen this sort of thing before.

Posted by James Duncan Davidson.

Breaking Reminders out of iCal and Notes out of Mail are syncing them up with their iOS counterparts is perfect. More iCloud support is great. Twitter integration and Game Center will be great for some, but I could take or leave those two. Gatekeeper, on the other hand, is extremely important and I’m really glad that Apple went for a solution that isn’t simply tied to shipping applications through the App Store. I think they’re finding the right balance with that.

As minor as it sounds, I think AirPlay Mirroring is huge. Not only does it make the desktop/laptop as functional as the iPhone and iPad when pushing images and movies to your big screen, the ability to mirror your desktop is great. It puts all the instances OS X on an equal footing when it comes to reaching out to the Apple TV and shows a level of thinking that cuts across individual hardware products.

Expanding on that thought a bit, I think the best thing about this announcement is that it appears that Apple is doubling down on actively moving OS X forward in all of its instances. Most other companies faced with the huge success of the iPhone and iPad would have totally put the desktop on a back burner. Heck, for a time, Apple did effectively that out of sheer necessity. Then they had to double back and get Lion out the door. If they’d kept that pattern up for a few more years, maintaining everything while making forward progress would have gotten really messy. Pulling the releases more in sync—even for a relatively minor one like Mountain Lion—can’t be easy. I’m sure it involves a lot of hard work coordinating teams and managing functionality across builds. It’s not only good for user-level features like messaging, however, it’s good for the OS X platform as a whole.

My only nag so far? I hope that they get re-ordering of items in Reminders working. Not being able to move an item up or down a list in the current implementation is a glaring oversight that I can only imagine is a leaky abstraction from underneath like CalDAV or something equally lame.

Posted by James Duncan Davidson.

After a full day of pretty important meetings for the future of Luma Labs, I came home to a box with a brand new just released Lensbaby Edge 80 Optic in it. So of course, onto a camera it goes and out the window I point it. Here’s the first frame I snapped.

My thirty second impression: I like it. It’s a bit less of a “stunt” lens than some of the other Lensbaby optics, and that’s a good thing. Don’t get me wrong, I love playing with the various Lensbaby optics I have. But I think this has a lot more potential. Time, of course, will tell. I do have a few ideas of where I might be putting it to use over the next few weeks…

Posted by James Duncan Davidson.

Just because he’s funded, however, doesn’t mean everything else is a slam dunk. Machining and then finishing something like fifteen thousand docks is an huge undertaking. The money in advance makes it possible—money in the bank has a way of making a lot of problems go away—but it doesn’t make everything instant. There’s no button that Casey can push and docks will start flowing onto UPS trucks tomorrow.

No, what comes next for Casey—and is surely already underway—is that he’s working with machine shops to get materials and scale up production. Speaking from personal experience and experience at Luma Labs, it’s one thing to make one copy of something. Making hundreds is hard. Thousands, harder still. Small little things that you think are no big deal to work around for one or two copies suddenly become roadblocks. It’s the nature of the beast when you move from R&D into production. Any company that makes it look effortless—such as Apple—has a mastery of doing so that comes from decades of experience and enough inertia and capital to take behind-the-scenes risks that you never see in order to make it happen.

Complicating this is that some number of Casey’s backers aren’t going to understand this. A small percentage of people will be expecting shipment dates and will get upset when planned dates are adjusted to meet reality. A small percentage of twelve thousand is still a lot to deal with, by the way, and they’re sometimes the noisy ones. It sucks having to give people news that they don’t want to hear.

At the risk of armchair quarterbacking, if there’s one thing I hope Casey does, it’s to communicate as well as possible what’s going on. Avoid promises, but show both the joys and setbacks of the process. I hope he does everything possible to show to backers that they are helping to fire up a new company, not just customers waiting around on an order.

If I had one thing to ask of my fellow backers it’s this: You may be a customer in that you’ve effectively ordered a product and paid for it, but you’re also part of a bootstrap process. Firing up a fresh manufacturing effort is not a linear process, despite what everyone would like to think. The only recipe for making it go smoothly, even with money in hand, is hard work and the right people. Even then, there are going to be a lot of hard days for Casey and his team in the weeks and months ahead.

Congrats Casey, on getting funded. Good luck! And I’m really looking forward to seeing how it all goes and to get my mitts on my own copy of your product.

Posted by James Duncan Davidson.

TED has put together a curated collection of talks for students, educators, and life-long learners and made them available through iTunes U. With topic areas like Creative Problem Solving and Climate Change, it looks to be a great way to browse TEDTalks. The big photo on the iTunes U page is one I made of John Hunter during the closing session of TED 2011 in Long Beach. It’s from a remote D700 that I set up and triggered.

Amusingly enough (to me, anyway), I’m actually in this photo. It’s not obvious as I’m in the shadows, but if you look for a little red dot to the top right of the stage, that’s where I am. Here’s an enlargement of the screenshot above with me highlighted (apologies for the blurry, I’d go back and snag the original hi-resolution file, but today’s kinda busy):

How did I get into this photo from above while composing a photo of John from in front of the stage? Simple. I was holding a PocketWizard to trigger the remote camera against my lens with my left hand. It’s less clumsy than it sounds, really. When I wanted a photo from above, I’d just push the PocketWizard’s button with my left thumb. Easy peasy. The red light you see is the PocketWizard’s transmit indicator.

For a bit more of a behind-the-scenes look, Rachel Tobias documented how we set up the remote camera on the TED Blog last year.

Posted by James Duncan Davidson.

Here are some snippets from conversations I’ve had about the new camera today:

I’m ready to make the jump to full frame. Should I get a D4 or a D800? First off, the price difference between the two cameras should answer this for a lot of people. If that doesn’t immediately answer it for you, the way I see it is that the D4 is a heavy, rugged, no-compromise camera that lets you work fast, get the image, and be able to use it for publication. The need for speed and grace in challenging-light conditions trumps the need for maximum resolution. The lighter D800, on the other hand, is geared for everyone else and trades off frame-rate and low-light prowess for resolution. Between the two, most people should get the D800.

But I wanted a reasonably sized full frame low-light champ and don’t need all that resolution! The ultimate noise characteristics of the D800 have yet to be determined and I won’t pass my own judgement till I see a lot of test results both on screen and in print. I’ll be surprised, however, if the resulting images don’t look as good as D700 images in the same light conditions when viewed at normal usage sizes from a noise and image-quality perspective.

That said, the D700 is still an amazing low-light camera and the introduction of the D800 doesn’t immediately stop it from making great images. If you can find a good deal on a gently used one, maybe you should consider one?

Those big files are going to stress our computers and storage, aren’t they? Yeah. They will. They’ll eat up space on disk faster and Aperture and Lightroom won’t move as fast as they do with 12 megapixel images. The sad fact is that while folks using word processors have already been taken care of for a while when it comes to computer horsepower, we photographers can still use a bit more help. Considering the impact to your workflow goes part and parcel with looking at a camera like this.

I downloaded a sample and at 1:1 it looks like… You really need to stop that thought right there. I know, the first thing many people do when we load up an image is zoom to actual pixels and peep. I confess, I do it too. But, do the math and you’ll find that when you zoom a D800 image to 1:1 on your screen, you’re looking at a small crop of a photograph that’s over 6 feet wide. The only person that is really going to ever see your images that way is you.

Furthermore, comparing 1:1 views of images from cameras with different resolutions will tell you different stories by definition. To really compare different cameras in terms of the kinds of images they make and how useful they are in different shooting conditions, you need to display or print at the sizes that you’ll use them at. Compare at them full screen or print ’em out at a decent size. That’s the only valid way to do it.

36 megapixels! That makes medium format digital obsolete! Not so fast. There are other aspects of medium format beyond simple resolution. The sensor size and the impact it has on the final image is the biggest. The great set of medium format lenses and their unique characteristics is another. Yes, the D800 stretches what a 35mm SLR format camera can do to a higher realm, but cameras from PhaseOne and Hasselblad will still have a place.

You’ll have to use impeccable technique to get good results, won’t you? Well, yes and no. It’s true you’ll notice the sins of your technique more when you zoom into a D800 image than one from a D700. Any camera shake blur will be much more noticeable at 1:1. But, again, 1:1 isn’t reality. Use equivalent technique on a D700 and a D800, print both images at 8x10, and you’ll see equivalent results. That’s not to say that technique won’t matter. It will demand very good shooting technique (not to mention incredible lenses) to get the maximum benefit from what the D800 sensor can give you. But shooting the same way as you always have, your images won’t suddenly get blurrier when you shoot with the D800. You’ll just have more headroom to improve your craft and achieve a sharper result than you’ve seen before.

Lenses? What about lenses? I’ll have to get… Stop right there. I know where you’re going with this. The same argument applies. While you’ll certainly be able to better see what your lenses are capable of when pixel peeping, the D800 won’t make your existing lenses any worse.

Look at it this way. There’s always going to be a limit in the equation. When digital photography first came on the scene in a big way, resolution was limited by what the sensor could provide. Over time, the gap has closed and now we’re at the point where lenses are quite often the limiting factor. With the D800, we’re probably going to see the limits of a lot of lenses. That’s not a bad thing. It’s just part of how everything interacts. It doesn’t require you to go out and replace all of your glass unless you want to win a competition of resolving resolution charts.

OMG, this camera is so much better than my 5D! Should I abandon my Canon kit right now? Probably not. The replacement for the 5D Mark II is certainly on its way and it’s certainly going to be in the same ballpark as the D800. I expect that while one will be better than the other in some ways, it’ll be close enough to be a wash. The only big question mark is whether or not Canon will finally stop putting a crippled AF system into the 5D.

Speaking as somebody who has made the expensive and time-consuming change over from Canon to Nikon, I gotta say that you need to have a clear and present need for it to make any kind of sense. If you have that kind of need, you know it. If you don’t know that there’s a specific reason to make a jump, then don’t ask the question.

This moiré stuff sounds scary. Should I get the D800E or stick to the regular one with the anti-aliasing filter? A lot of commentators are quick to point out the potential problem with moiré, especially with textiles, when there’s not an anti-alias filter in the mix. It’s true. Moiré can happen without an anti-alias filter. Talk to somebody with an M9 or an X100 if you want to hear from somebody’s experience about how often it happens.

If you don’t know much about this issue or don’t want to faff about with it, just get the regular D800. Seriously. Don’t worry about it. If, on the other hand, you’re well educated about what’s going on, then you know enough that you’re probably not asking the question.

But really, I just wanted a D700S with the D3S sensor! Ok, fine. Go talk to Nikon about it. Or, you could always wait and see what comes up next. There’s an obvious gap between the D7000 and the D800 that’s going to get filled. The question is whether that will be a DX or a FX camera. It’ll probably be a DX camera, but I could see Nikon start pushing FX further down the line.

Are you getting one? Why yes, I am. I put an order in for a D800E, if you must know. I adore the D3S, but there’s many a time have I longed for a D700-sized body again for travel. Especially when I’m hiking up a hill. I also look forward to putting that resolution to work making big prints. And yes, I’ll be sure to let you know what I think of it when it arrives.

All of that said, remember that gear is just one part of the equation. The person who uses it and their skill set is by far more important. Just as a super awesome knife won’t make you a competent chef, a fancy-pants expensive camera won’t make you a competent photographer.

Posted by James Duncan Davidson.

Then came the D3S in late 2009, a nominally minor update which brought an amazing full stop of extra low-light performance. If you needed a camera to make still images in the most challenging light environments on the planet, the D3S was the clear option. Many figured that the D3 to D700 pattern would repeat and a D700S would soon be in the works, but months stretched on and there was no D700S to be seen.

I think the lack of a D700S was a hint of things to come.

The common feature needed in both the D3 and D700 replacements was a set of video features that can compete with Canon’s cameras. After that, however, needs diverge. Making some broad generalizations, the kind of users that gravitate towards a D3 are, by and far, those that need (or simply want) a camera that can take both hard knocks and deliver publishable images in any kind of light. The D3S was a clear improvement in that direction from the D3. A D4 had to continue that mission with no compromise.

A D700 user looking for an upgrade, on the other hand, might be the type that would appreciate or even demand a serious step up in resolution. Resolution may not be the only thing that counts, but all other things equal, it certainly doesn’t hurt. And, given that Nikon wasn’t sucking wind in the low-light performance department any more, well, diverging the primary mission for the two lines would make sense from a market perspective as long as they roughly met the bar set by the D700 at equivalent usage sizes.

Today’s announcement of the D800 following the D4 announcement in January is the crystalization of that divergence. The D4 is the clear successor to the throne for the best photojournalism camera on the planet. The D800 looks like it’s destined to compete head-to-head with Canon’s 5D Mark III (or whatever they end up calling it) on the resolution front. The addition of the D800E—which comes sans-antialias filter—is the frosting on the cake for those looking to wring the last bit of resolution out their Nikkor lenses.

Where does that leave a successor to the D3x, the previous Nikon high-resolution champ in a super-rugged body? I may be crazy, but I don’t think there will be one. There certainly isn’t a good place for one barring some big jump in sensor technology that’s not already on the table.

Posted by James Duncan Davidson.

There were two things I wanted to learn from this experiment. First, I wanted to play a bit with Final Cut Pro X’s new ability in version 10.0.3 to assemble frames on the timeline. I’ve run some other experiments with this new feature to line up stills shot at the same time as a video and it works well, but I wanted to see how a straight up time-lapse with a thousand frames shot at a regular interval would work. Second, I’ve been meaning for a while to do a direct comparison of accelerated video to time-lapse from stills. It’s easy to assume what the results of that comparison should be, but I wanted to calibrate those assumptions with a bit of reality. Here’s the result:

A few mea culpas right off the bat. First off, I set exposure based on the moon being behind a thin veil of cloud. When the moon popped out, the exposure went up and blew out on the first video I made with the blue sky. Oops. I was able to dial most of that back in the stills (shot in RAW) by applying a bit of highlight recovery in Lightroom. Having more dynamic range in the stills always is a win. My second mea culpa is that I shot the time-lapse stills at a 1/60th of a second on a 1 second interval. Usually, I’d shoot a longer exposure to get to a 90º or 180º shutter angle, but I didn’t have ND filters for my long lenses handy and I didn’t want to deal with aperture flicker, so I shot wide open and took the exposure equation I was dealt.

So, what did I learn about the things I wanted to try out? While I really appreciate the ease at which Final Cut Pro X can lay out stills into a clip based on creation time—in fact, I’m thrilled by the new feature for pulling in stills and matching them up with other video clips—I’m not really all that jazzed about how it works stitching 1000 full-size 12 megapixel frames of time-lapse taken on a 1-second interval. The result doesn’t behave as nicely or run as smoothly on the timeline as does a 4K resolution ProRes 422 file generated by stitching the same frames together in Compressor. Even after rendering out, the resulting video doesn’t feel quite as smooth. I can’t quite put my finger on it and more testing while being careful about shutter angles is needed to see if there’s really a issue there or what it might be. Given that taking an intermediate step through Compressor makes for a smoother edit experience, however, I probably won’t chase that rabbit too far down the hole yet.

As to comparing accellerated video with the time-lapse, I’m pretty impressed with how the 1080p footage looks retimed to 24x match the time-lapse frames played back at 24p. Yes, I blew the exposure and didn’t have the range in the 8-bit video file to recover that I did in the stills. Yes, the short effective shutter angle after retiming makes for a more choppy playback than I’d like otherwise and I knew that’d be the case. Yes, you can’t dive into it as well as you can the 4K file. But still, it provides a bit of expectation calibration of what the reward is for putting in the extra work for doing interval shooting of stills rather than just rolling video. I do need to re-run this test with a proper shutter angle on the time-lapse, however, to really show that part of the trade-off. That’s a task for another day.

Thanks to Greg Koenig for the use of his D7000 which has been appearing as a camera model for Cinch product photography. He probably didn’t expect me to use, but leave a camera around me for a bit and that’ll happen.

Posted by James Duncan Davidson.

Filmmaker and Mission Blue speaker Mike DeGruy was killed in a helicopter crash in Australia while working on his next project. Meeting Mike and hearing his enthusiastic stories of the deep on Mission Blue, including how octopus play and the teeming life around deep ocean vents, was a privilege and an inspiration. More in the Santa Barbara Independent.

Posted by James Duncan Davidson.

Posted by James Duncan Davidson.

While I don’t make a fuss about what other people call the process, I’m fairly pedantic about this in my own words. I don’t take photos—I’m not acquiring something that already existed and I’m certainly not stealing anything—nor do I capture them like some kind of wild animal. When I pick up a camera and decide what to frame and how to expose it, I’m creating something that didn’t exist before and bringing it to the world. I’m making it.

Going deeper into the argument, words have meaning and shape the way we approach the world. If I pick up the camera with the intent of capturing something or taking it, then my actions are likely to follow. I’ll push the button and just be happy with what I get. On the other hand, if I put myself into the mindset of making something, well, hopefully my actions will follow and instead of getting lucky in capturing a moment, I’ll have a chance of being successful in creating one.

Semantics? Of course.

At the end of the day, you can approach photography with whatever term you like as long as you’re getting what you want out of it. Me? I make photos. That’s my aspiration and goal.

Credit where credit is due: Clay Enos is the guy who made me think about this with the name of his blog and how he signs off his posts.

Posted by James Duncan Davidson.

Even though this site is much smaller than Boing Boing and many other websites that are striking tomorrow, I’m joining them in “going dark” to oppose SOPA and PIPA. These proposals, if passed into law, would break the Internet as we know it. I’m in full agreement with Cory Doctorow when he says:

Even though a substantial portion of my living comes from the entertainment industry, I don’t think that any amount of “piracy” justifies this kind of depraved indifference to the consequences of one’s actions. Big Content haven’t just declared war on Boing Boing and Reddit and the rest of the “fun” Internet: they’ve declared war on every person who uses the net to publicize police brutality, every oppressed person in the Arab Spring who used the net to organize protests and publicize the blood spilled by their oppressors, every abused kid who used the net to reveal her father as a brutalizer of children, every gay kid who used the net to discover that life is worth living despite the torment she’s experiencing, every grassroots political campaigner who uses the net to make her community a better place — as well as the scientists who collaborate online, the rescue workers who coordinate online, the makers who trade tips online, the people with rare diseases who support each other online, and the independent creators who use the Internet to earn their livings.

If you have a website, I encourage you to join the strike.

Posted by James Duncan Davidson.

I’ve not had my hands on one yet, but if it lives up to its brag sheet, it’ll be a very worthy upgrade.

The D4 does come with a few obvious annoyances. The first of these is the incompatible battery and charger system that is a result of rule changes by the Japanese government. Obviously, regulation changes have to be taken into consideration, but it would be nice if the new batteries could work in the older D3S and the older batteries could be charged with the new chargers. The fact that this isn’t possible means trucking around more stuff when using multiple camera setups that cross generations.

The second is the double edge sword of the new XQD card slot. Faster cards are cool and managing the introduction of a new card standard is all about tradeoffs, but having two card slots that take the same cards has been really handy in the D3S. In a way, I was kind of hoping that this generation of cameras would go to SD cards to allow interoperability between all the different cameras and eliminate external card readers on the road. On the other hand, if the XQD cards are as quick as promised, I’ll wonder why I ever thought such a thing.

The only real open question I have at this point is around the new time-lapse movie making mode. There’s not much information on it yet beyond that it auto-stitches frames together into a 1080p movie. That’s nifty, but what I really want out of a time-lapse mode is a way to lock the lens aperture so that aperture flicker can be eliminated. What would be even better is a movie mode that you could smoothly under-crank down to a half or quarter frame per second. That’d be a time lapse mode worthy of crowing about.

Regardless of a couple of minor annoyances, the D4 looks to be a great upgrade to D3S, hands down the best photojournalism camera ever made up to this point. I can’t wait to get my hands on one, hopefully before a certain huge conference in Long Beach, California in late February…

Posted by James Duncan Davidson.

There’s no denying the politics of the country and traveling to the country requires consideration of those politics. For many years, from the mid 90’s till 2010, the opposition party called for a boycott of tourism to avoid helping to fund the regime and it’s favored cronies. However, it’s not clear whether the boycott was effective as the government has long funded itself through taking advantage of Myanmar’s natural resources, including the teak forest. Furthermore, many locals want foreigners to see their country, at least at a small scale that benefits individuals more than it does the bigger players. With the lifting of the boycott and the big improvements in political relations of late, that’s happening again.

Sunrise over Bagan, Myanmar.

For me, Bagan was the primary destination. Finishing out 2011 and starting out 2012 in a valley covered with thousands of temples and a mist that turned everything into a painting through my viewfinder was amazing. It’s so very hard to describe in words and even the photos don’t do it any kind of justice. You have to see the place with your own eyes from on top of one of the temples to really get it.

Temples as far as the eye can see in Bagan, Myanmar.

If you want to go yourself, here’s what you need to know:

1. Leave time to get your visa. Mine took much longer than the 7-10 business days it was supposed to and I almost missed my trip because of it. I’ll be budgeting 4-6 weeks for it the next time which will probably mean I’ll get my passport back in less than a week.
2. Direct flights into Myanmar are more limited than many other places you might typically go. You’ll probably want to go through Singapore or Bangkok. This time, I flew through Singapore and took a Silk Air flight (Singapore Airline’s regional affiliate). If I go again, I’ll probably fly through Bangkok so that I can fly on Thai and take advantage of my Star Alliance privileges all the way to Yangon. Well, that and to spend some time in Thailand as well.
3. Flying in-country is preferable to traveling by car or bus. Myanmar’s major roads aren’t bad, but everything else can range from a bit rough to rugged. I saw nothing but well-maintained aircraft while I was there, but I’m told that Air Bagan is one of the better lines. Oh, and you’ll want to have your hotel reconfirm your reservations a couple of days before you take a flight. We got bumped to a later flight one day because of this.
4. Credit and ATM cards are a no-go. You’ll need to bring cash. Fresh uncirculated dollars. Somebody in the Myanmar central bank must have heard “clean and unmarked bills” from somebody and took it very seriously. If your bills have any kind of marks or creases, they’ll be rejected and you’ll be unable to pay for anything. Also, bring mostly big bills. The exchange rate is worse for $20’s than it is for $100’s. You will, however, want a few $1’s and $10’s—crisp and uncirculated—for various tourist fees that have to be paid in dollars.
5. Take the strongest bug spray you can get ahold of. Get the stuff with DEET in it to supplement any of that natural stuff you might be inclined to use and then will almost certainly abandon shortly after you meet the native mosquitos.
6. Use the same kind of caution with food as you’d use in India. Unless you’re at an extremely fastidious place, eat and drink only if cooked, boiled, or you can peel it yourself. I got sloppy and had a yummy homemade lime soda at one restaurant on my last day in Mandalay and paid for it. I should have stuck with the beer.
7. Speaking of beer, Mandalay brand beer is quite good. I’d be happy ordering it anywhere. So is Myanmar brand, tho it’s a bit more mainstream—like mass American beer—in taste. All the other beers I tried weren’t as nice to my palate, to put it kindly.
8. My favorite native food were dishes from Shan cuisine. The rest of the local cuisine I tried was a bit more hit and miss. All if it was interesting, but I found that my taste buds were happier hitting the dishes that were closer to Thai and Chinese cuisine.
9. Most locals at the touristy areas are there to sell you something, but they’re not nearly as pushy about it in many other countries and will usually be quite helpful with advice or just general conversation. On the other hand, do keep in mind that a normal “No, thank you” isn’t really firm enough, at least it wasn’t firm enough from me.
10. Wear flip-flops or sandals on days when you’re going to be around temples. Otherwise, you’ll drive yourself mad putting your shoes and socks on and off. Also, you’re going to get dirty and sweaty, even in the cool season. Dress appropriately and don’t stress over it. But, consider lightweight long pants as shorts are frowned upon in many places as well.

Finally, having somebody local that can handle all sorts of local arrangements for you is invaluable. Even if you are used to traveling widely, Myanmar isn’t a good place to just show up and wing it. If you need a recommendation, I do have a connection I’m happy to share. She usually caters to German tourists, but is certainly adept in English as well. When I go back, she’ll be the one that sets everything thing up for me.

Sunrise in Bagan, Myanmar.

Posted by James Duncan Davidson.

U Bein Bridge was built across Taungthaman Lake in the mid 1800’s out of teak posts. It’s said to be the longest teak bridge in the world at 1.2km long and is the sole link between Amarapura and Taungthaman village. Obviously an attraction, it’s also in heavy use by the locals including a stream of monks on their daily errands. If there’s one thing to see in Mandalay, this bridge is it. I wish we’d spent every sunrise and sunset there. If I make it back to Mandalay, you’ll know where and what time to find me.

U Bein Bridge in Amarapura near Mandalay, Myanmar.

Posted by James Duncan Davidson.