Our web diary

Vancouver Visit

Sean and I just got back from a week spent in Vancouver. We had decided to postpone the Christmas trip to March so we could use up air miles and have a better chance of a sunny day or two.
It was a wonderful visit with family & friends -- and it only rained half the time.
Together with Tilly we wandered too False Creek and the Granville Island Market, across to English Bay and back over the Granville Street Bridge. We drove to Fort Langley, "the birthplace of BC" and took the Albion Ferry from Langley to Maple Ridge. We spent a very rainy day at the Vancouver Aquarium, and of course enjoyed countless meals at Mom's. We also enjoyed a couple of evenings spent with Theo & Tara, my brother and sister-in-law and at the Kischnicks house. As always, the week ended too soon.
Sean has posted pictures in the gallery. Hope you enjoy them.

New Camera(s)

I started into photography when I was 11 when my mom enrolled me in a summer class at a local art school. We started out with homemade oatmeal pinhole cameras and moved up to manual 35 mm black and white.

I moved to Copenhagen in 2001 and knew I would be travelling quite a bit around the world. At the time digital cameras were coming onto the market and I picked up an 1.3MP Olympus 460UZ. It was a good camera which I took to something like 8 or 10 countries. I have not shot a film camera since that time.

When Marlene and I were in Vancouver, we took a side trip to Fort Langley. This is a cute little town about an hour east of Vancouver. We never saw the fort, but we did go through a few antique shops. In one of them I ran across a beautifully mainted Rodenstock Folding Camera.

The Rodenstock Folding camera is a 1930s area manual camera in a 127 film format. I looked it over, worked the shutter, aperture, and film back. It looked really neat and I think it will still record light onto to film. So what the heck I picked it up. It was only $45 US and I figure I can get that back in Art images from it.

When I originally picked up the camera I thought it would take 120 film. I took it to one of the film places in Vancouver who also thought it took 120. However, they did not sell the film. They sent to me to Beau Photo at 6th and Granville. Neat place with good people. I picked up a few rolls of Kodak Tmax 120 BW. I also noted that they had some brand new Holga 120Ns in boxes. The Holga is a Medium Format point and shoot. I had seen one of these in an article at Luminous Landscape. So I picked up one of those as well. I think his article got me looking for something different. However, I went the film direction.

So now I have two film cameras. The Holga has almost no settings to use. You just need to make sure you have some pretty good light. The Rodenstock can be fully managed.

I have two rolls of film from these cameras going to processing today.

Here is a picture of the lens mechanism on the Rodenstock Folding Camera.

Vancouver

We have been in Vancouver last week. Here is a photograph of downtown Vancouver, BC from the Granville Street Bridge

New Project

I have been having trouble with Canaca for the last few weeks. I have two websites up for renewal in the next 30 days, so this has presented a good opportunity to move those websites to a new host.

When I had started my photography website, I had originally looked at using Dreamhost because Jason liked it so much. I could not use it at the time because they did not support the Zend Optimizer and this is used by my lightbox software.

Jason informed me several months ago that Dreamhost was now supporting the optimizer. So after about a month of trying to get Canaca to get their acts togehter I have finally decided to move to Dreamhost.

I have three tarballs for my old sites and I am sure that I will be spending most of the week trying to get everything migrated. My new project so to speak. Any volunteers to help with this stuff? HEHE

New Mac Items

I saw this on Jason's blog and was going to write a comment. Then I realized my comment was becoming a book.

To be fair, I think Macs are cute, sleek, cool, whatever. They fit a specific need for some users. The biggest drawback, in my opinion, is that they are too expensive for what you receive with your purchase.

Back to the new entries in the Mac world.

1) Until it can natively run all of the Windows based apps I already own then the difference in price is moot. The one thing that caught my eye as a photographer was Apple's Aperture. It looked to be the end and be all for the photography industry and could have been the ONE reason I switched. I could get everything done on one platform with only a $2500 (Macbook Pro/Aperture) investment in hardware and software vs. a $4000 (Mac book pro/Photoshop CS 2/Capture One Pro/Office, etc) investment. Then we found out, as a surprise to most of us, Aperture doesn't manage color profiles well. Mac has always been a dominate force in the graphic industry because they were the first to integrate management into their platforms. Now they release Aperture with bugs. Adobe may have smartened up with Lightroom. We will see when the final versions come out.

Back to the original bit about the Mini. I seriously considered getting a Mini for Marlene last year. They were cute and the price point at $499 was VERY attractive at first. However, and typical with every time I look at Apple, when you start adding extras that $499 price is way out the window. I felt like I was on a bait and switch car lot. $499 at the time got you an cute underpowered box. Then you have to add a keyboard ($70), a mouse ($40), and a screen (gazillion dollars. However, let's say you find a cheap LCD for it at around $250. All of the sudden you are $1000 for, albeit cute, underpowered PC. For a $399(
From Dell website today) I can a get a 2.53 GHZ Celeron. Tower with 512GB of ram and a nice LCD monitor. So I don't think the $599 will make that much of a difference to the average user. I think if you already own larger Mac then the Mini might be a cute addition. If you are in the PC world then go look at any of the thousands of PC deals out right now.

2) I am surprised they didn't do it earlier. However, I would never own one even if I had an Ipod. You might as well have stamped "Steal ME" on the side with the IPOD logo. All it does is advertised that you have a mutli-hundred dollar gadget to steal

3) HUH? I think Mac has some of the most aesthetically looking products on the market. How did there engineers come up with the idea of mounting the thing on the top? Heck, make it black and have it look like the monolith from 2001 a Space Odyssey.

Also, I would buy BOSE equipment any day over something put out by a computer manufacturer.