It still is.
I blame my dear friend Mark Soltero. He has been exhorting me to make my work big. A0+. At least. This may be because his paintings are themselves big works (2-4m sq), but I don’t think so. Because of him I have another picture-making issue, which runs alongside but is attached to this; near and far. A few years ago the pair of us went to view a retrospective by New Zealand realist painter, Grahame Sydney. Grahame’s works are themselves big, but so is his subject matter. I had always viewed them from a distance, and for the first time I was able to get up close and observe every brush stroke, fine, perfect, exquisite. I could immerse my self in a micro-view then step back a few metres and take in the whole. I was entranced. I still am. And I wanted to be able to do the same. At the time I was working in film, and the only answer was 8 x 10. But it has always seeemed to me that large format photography can easily become stilted and lose its spontaneity (or at least that has beem my experience of it, working with 4 x 5). So I never went there.

Then I moved to digital, and the possibility was there. recently, frustrated by the substandard work of the labs available to me, I took on a 24″ printer, had it installed and calibrated and went to work. and the holes in my technique became immediately apparent. You see, here is the thing. At A5, or A4 or even A3, subtle deficiencies in shooting technique are not apparent. At A2 and larger they become rather glaring. A subtle amount of camera shake becomes obvious. A less than stellar lens makes its deficiencies known/seen. and it simply will not do. I have been told that a viewer will never see it. Perhaps. But I will. And that matters to me.

What make  matters worse is the increasing pixel count in our sensors. The bigger the sensor, the less room for error. Images that looked fine on my 1Ds Mk II now look …wobbly when shot on my 1Ds Mk III. It is a hard taskmaster, which is driving me to do it better. Not a bad thing, really. Perhaps our frustrations are really challenges and opportunities putting their hands up. so once again I am working my technique harder, going through it bit by bit, looking critically at ways in which I can sharpen up (literally and metaphorically).

Allow me to share what I have learned.

Firstly longer lenses are unforgiving. My EF 100-400/4.5-5.6 is good at up to 200.  At 400 it will not let me away with anything. The slightest tremor and it is all over, Rover.

1. So I now use a remote release, and mirror up. The 1Ds III allows me to set it so the mirror stays up for successive exposures. I fire the first one to get the mirror up and eliminate mirror slap. I wll throw the file away later. Then I fire a second and third to reduce the vibration and get one which is pin-sharp at 100%. I look for the small details in the file ( grass, branches etc).
2. I have been using heavier and heavier tripods. I hate working on a tripod.  I would much rather shoot hand-held and spontaneously. But I use them. Lately all my landscape work has been done using a Manfrotto 058B Triaut and a Manfrotto 229 Head ( combined weight 8.1 kg. My back hates me).
3. I am also using Moose Peterson’s long lens technique. It makes sense to me. Looking through the viewfinder as  I trigger, I have noticed with long lenses (> 300mm) that I was still getting a subtle shake. Hence moving to this technique. Whatever I can do to dampen that is important.
4. If I do handhold, I use the 1/focal length rule, but triple it. That is, If I am using a 50mm focal length, I treat 1/250 as the minimum. Preferably faster.
5. I avoid apertures higher than f/11. On FF sensors like the 1DS Mk III, diffraction sets in earlier. f8 is better.

As I review this piece, it obviously makes me appear pedantic. And your point?

What I have learned is that you never master anything.

You only refine.

Thank goodness.

Kia ora tatou:
Lightroom 2.0. I love it!
The list of cool things goes on, and while it is slower than 1.4.1, the new features justify the slight slowdown. I have converted to using .dng, ie importing and converting my .cr2 files to dng. After a conversation with Adobe Ambassador John Doogan (look for some joint workshops in the future), all my doubts have been allayed. And the main reason? The new dng 1.2 standard, which allows you to import the picture styles in your camera-specific software and use them inside LR2.0 and finally have a reason for using the calibration tab in the Develop module. Not only that, you can create custom camera profiles. It is so damn good, it was worth the upgrade price just to get this. I am not going to explain it; others have done it sooner and better. Have a look here and here and here. Then go and download it. Awesome!

If you are wondering what the future of photography of photography looks like, then there are 2 words you need to get to know; RED and Scarlet. The movie industry already know about them. We will need to do so as well. Read about it here and here

The deathly silence (whatever sound a deathly silence doesn’t make) for the last week or so is because I have been in Tauranga at the the NZIPP (New Zealand Institute of Professional Photographers) conference, where I was invited to be a judge, to join four others and assess the work. It was an incredibly hard three days. The judging is open ( i.e. members of the public can watch it), and it is nerve-wracking to pass comment when you know the author may be in the room! FYI, the New Zealand Photographer of the Year for 2008 is Jackie Rankin, from Queenstown, who scored two of her awards with some amazing images shot on Acros 100 (anybody remember that?)

There were some fine speakers, including Jack Reznicki from New York (www.photoworkshop.com) and the usual tradeshow with some very cool toys tools (say after me: Tony, you do not want a Sinar Hy6). But it was about the company, the opportunity to be among and to be judged by your peers. It was a real joy to see Stewart Nimmo from Greymouth ( they were going to call it Jubilee City, but they changed their minds and got the name right) gain his Masters, and his daughter Lydia get a bronze award. A big shout out, guys.

And yes I did enter. And yes, I did do reasonably well.

Mark Racle sent me this link about the perils of street photography in Britain. Blimey! It’s not that bad here, but getting that way…feel free to share your own stories… it is worth mentioning that you are allowed to photograph in a public place, you are not breaking any laws and that you are within your rights to use the images for exhibition or publication. Commercial use is another matter. And for those of you who are horrified, look at this! ( thanks, Meg Back!)

Those of you with an eye to the ‘Net will know that Canon have announced the EOS 50D. Specs include 14-bit imaging, a 15Mp sensor, ISO to 12800, 3″ 920 000px LCD, and a few other goodies. Read more about it here…

I anticipate being around a lot more in the coming weeks, so I intend to keep the post up to date.

Ka kite ano

PS: for the three of you who shoot Nikon: Nikon today announced the D90. A 12.21 million image pixel CMOS sensor, 4.5 fps still photo shooting rate, LiveView and 720p video capture. Oooh, that’s cool! Are you reading this, OSG?

Check it out here…

A ghost town, a town of ghosts

“Heaven wheels above you, displaying to you her eternal glories, and still your eyes are on the ground”

-Dante Alighieri

I said ‘mama I come to the valley of the rich
Myself to sell’
She said ’son this is the road to hell’

-Chris Rea

Somewhere back in the 1860’s they found gold in Central Otago, in a little place called Gabriel’s Gully. Of course the word got out and in no time, towns had sprung up all through the area, staffed by the hopeful, the industrious, the greedy, and the foolish. A steady stream of prospectors poured across the hills from Dunedin, all come to make their fortune.

Such are the ways of men.

Some settled in St. Bathans, in the armpit between the Cambrian and Dunstan Mountains. They began with a hill 130m high and sluiced it away, digging ever deeper in search of gold. By 1934  the pit had got too deep, the walls too close to the township and mining ceased. The natural drainage was allowed to fill the pit and soon the scars were gone and the waters closed over.

But the kehua, the ghosts remained, the disaffected, the anguished, the duty-afflicted, and the perennially-attached.

The hotel is haunted. Just ask the publican. Just ask people who have stayed there, especially in Bedroom 1. But they have got used to each other, and now Rosie, the wandering prostitute, has mostly come to accept that visitors will wander across her patch. She doesn’t take credit cards.

Time and again I have returned there, drawn by something, perhaps by someone. I am never sure why it is, what or who it is that calls me. There just seems to be something that makes me want to stay, to make images, to lose myself in the timelessness that is there. The Blue Lake pulls me each time I visit, and I find myself once again beside it, using a long lens, compelled to approach the Eternal that seems to be present in the waters, to  respond to whatever talks to me…

This time was no different. I stared into the waters, made images, lost myself in the reflections and the timeless beauty of the place. My compositions grew ever more abstract, moved further and further away from any sense of the objective, although I clung to it where I could. Then we took a break and climbed up to the pub for a coffee. As we were waiting for our coffees to be made, I wandered along the bar, to look at the old photographs of the township and the mine. There. In the middle of a noticeboard, among the visual records of hotels, people and horses was an image that shocked me. There, raw, scarred and bleeding, was a photograph of the Pit, with the sluices, the ladders and the gloomy orthochromatic skies so typical of nineteenth-century photography.  It was if I had descended to the first level of Dante’s inferno, as if I was on a down-bound train…There they stood, the miners, in their collarless shirt sleeves, pinned by their hubris, by their sense of purpose, of destiny. The ladders clung to the land, looming over them with knowing leers. Signposts, memorials to the temporal.

I said ‘mama I come to the valley of the rich
Myself to sell’
She said ’son this is the road to hell’

I shuddered in horror and moved away.

Then we went back down to the Lake. This time I saw it differently. This time I sidled around it cautiously. That one fading photograph, stuck to the signboard with a slightly-bent pushpin, had allowed me to see past its Cheshire-cat smile, to see into its heart. And it wasn’t something I really wanted to see.

Down there, beneath its smiling surface, something lurked. History lay in its depths, the shadows of the past, the fossilised and frozen grimace of human endeavour. Down there lurked the broken remains of dreams, the decaying and blackened teeth of pit props, the snapped ends of ladders, the oozing remains of sluicing equipment. There was no romance in the Pit, only failure and frustration and half-achieved dreams.

Little wonder the ghosts would not leave, little wonder they clutched this place to their bony chests.

And I began to see it in a new light. I noticed the scarring on the cliff faces; I saw the clay mounds differently. The outcrops above me took on a different expression. Their death-grin drew me. The sullen organic shapes demanded my attention, compelled me. I moved closer and responded to the hieroglyphs on the wall.

I photographed on. My cards filled and overflowed; my histograms drew themselves to the right in a danse macabre. Time stretched obligingly out. Then the rubber band snapped, and I was catapulted back into the Present. It was time to go. We packed up and drove back up out of the pit, away from the lake and its mesmeric beauty. I did not look back. But I knew I was being watched.

There is a saying; while you are looking into Hell, Hell is looking into you.

Later that week we returned to the town, to the ghosts. The others headed happily down the hill to the lakeside, to photograph. I stayed in the pub, to have a beer, to chat and sit by the fire, to be with the living.

For it was nearly night time. Soon the light would go, the shadows would fall, the stars would rise and the shades would gather just beyond the light spilling from the hotel windows.

Time enough to see the dark moving in the dark.

An unashamed plug for a workshop..

MY friend Mark Racle sent me this email, advertising a framing workshop in Rangiora, New Zealand. I have included the guff he sent me and suggest if you are interested, you contact him.

Tony

Hope all is well with you

I wonder if you know any that would be interested in the following

Date 20 - 21st September
Where - Rangiora High School
Tutor - Lance Trolle

This is a great opportunity to frame up as much as you like/can at very cost effective rates.

The weekend costs $65, plus materials used.

I have been on three previous workshops with Lance, two here and one in Hokitika.

Lance brings all the gear - and it’s good - he even brings his ‘two person to carry’ guillotine which ensures those perfect mitres, all the gear and materials for framing, matting, backing and hanging. (Of course if you want to guarantee sufficient moulding of a particular type… you can bring your own). Lance is a most helpful and enthusiastic tutor.

Expect to be able to frame at least 10, maybe up to 15, works if you’re inclined to, of any size up to about A1.

I have previously come home after two days with 12 or so framed pieces, of varying sizes from A4 through to A1, which for a weekends (easy) labour, and about $300 in materials (plus the course fee) - averages about $30 a piece. (The A1 alone would probably have cost me the weekend’s expense for a framing shop to do).

If any would like to see examples of the output there are several available at our place, as are the booking forms.

Book early - the school doesn’t do much advertising and the last workshop was cancelled due to low numbers.

Cheers

Mark

Kia ora tatou:

Sometime, while we were away in the Maniototo teaching the Wedderburn workshops, the blog turned 200..thousand hits that is. A big BIG thank you to all of you who pass by and have a look, and occasionally comment. An especial thanks to those who offer what they know as well.
The Wedderburn workshops are now over for the year, but we are working on new ones. More information as they become available. It was a real joy to work with such talented people. As soon as I work out how to do it, I will upload samples of the work from the workshops for the rest of you to see. Apparently it was the wettest winter in 40 years, but nothing compared to the carnage the rest of the country experienced. I am told that that the new architectural style in Greymouth is the bunker look.
Well it is finally out. Lightroom 2 is now available. I have downloaded it and begun using it. Unlike Beta 2, most of the bugs have been ironed out ( I say Most), and there are some very cool features in it. Things I like include:

• • support for dual monitors
  • referencing folders by hard drive number
  • the adjustment brush
  • smart collections
  • better sharpening and noise reduction
  • camera profiling

and more…. It may be me, but both my laptop ( T7200 dual-core, 2 Gb RAM, 2 x 250 Gb Sata drives) and my desktop ( Q6600 quad-core, 4Gb RAM, 8x 500GB SATA drives) find it resource-hungry. Can’t wait for the first update!

There is a cost to go from V1 to V2. An upgrade is around $NZ180, depending on where you shop. A full education version is around the same price . Shop around. I suggest Kiwis look here.

Apparently Britons find digital cameras the most difficult device to master in a survey conducted by Revoo.com. Curiously, washing machines come in a t #4, and microwaves at #10. Read more here.

I am currently sifting through the more than 3500 1DS Mk III files I shot during the two weeks. Stories and images to follow.

Ka kite ano

As many of you know, I will be in the Maniototo for the next two weeks, teaching my annual workshops down there. This means that heavy-duty posts will be few and far between (broadband pretty much isn’t down there). However… here are some links you might like to follow….stuff to chew on…

The Photographer’s Guide to the Eye

What science is learning about how we see can help you take more compelling pictures. Mary Jo sent me this link, and I offer it here. Over the next couple of weeks, in a quiet moment and armed with a glass of Central Otago pinot noir (Rabbit Ranch), I intend to start thinking this through…

PNG- The new Tiff/Jpeg?

If you have ever wondererd what .png stood for and why you might want to use it, have a look here. A lot of information and the start of a new hunt…

What do with that obsolete DSLR?

Simple. Convert it to shoot infrared… Find out more here.

Dynamic range beyond your sensor’s abilities?

HDRI (High Dynamic Range Imaging) could be an answer. This article (printable) gives the fundamentals of HDRI and how to approach it. Of course there is more to it. Much more…

The EOS 5D Mark II/7D/3D

Those of you interested in The 5D replacement might want to check out this link. Either way, I am picking the next couple of weeks for the announcement just prior to PhotoKina, with release in New Zealand shops around Xmas for the lucky few.

Lenses and filters- a primer

Kia ora tatou:

So which lenses should I buy?

I get asked this question a lot, so I thought it was time to do a rare/endangered species-gear post.

Let’s begin with lenses. I am not going to tell you which focal lengths you need. I have no idea, and anyway, you will find that the focal lengths you use will change over time, which is good. All focal lengths have their own characteristics and personalities. Like any good relationship, getting to know them takes time, understanding and perseverance.

In this post I am going to talk about quality for your dollar, or more crudely, bang for your buck. And there are a few things to take into consideration:

1.       Firstly there is the inescapable fact that a digital sensor is more demanding than a piece of film. Sensor photosites require the light to hit them at the correct angle. Film isn’t fussy as long as there is a result, Photosites are way more anal. They demand much more of the optics. If you want the best result, you will need to move further up the price range. On the other hand, if you only print 6 x 4’s from an E-Box, then the kit lens will be fine. Chromatic aberration that never used to occur with film now does so. There are software work-rounds (DxO Optics Pro, Capture One, Capture NX) but these are only cleaning up after the fact. The rule of GIGO applies here; Garbage in = garbage out.

2.       There is the issue of how large you will want to make the final print and how close you want your viewers to get to it. Will you only really ever make A4’s or the odd A3?  Will you really be satisfied with an A2 of that photograph of a cheetah downing an antelope in Africa? Plan for the biggest print you dream of making… and buy to meet that need…

3.       There is the size of your pockets. You get what you pay for in photography. In the old ( film) days, film was always trying to catch up with lens optical quality. With digital it is the other way around. Your lenses are the weak link. Your sensor can (generally) outperform what your lenses can deliver. So you need to choose with that in mind.

So, here are some guidelines to lens selection (read: $$$) choice

The major manufacturers make lenses in different qualities.

1.       Sony, Canon, Nikon and Olympus all do. Canon lenses come in 3 different quality levels. There are the “kit” lenses (18-55 EFS, for example) at around $NZ 200. They have plastic lens mounts. There is a reason for this. They are building to a price and a moulded plastic mount is much cheaper to produce than a milled metal mount. Kit lenses are known in the trade as get-you-started lenses. Don’t expect premium optical quality. You get what you pay for, remember….

2.       Then there are the mid-range lenses. Again Canon makes lenses which will deliver competent quality to a certain level. Generally these will be around $NZ 1000. There are some lovely items here for quite reasonable money.

3.        Then there is the premium glass. Canon ‘L’ lenses have red rings; the Nikon equivalents have gold ones. Prices start here around $NZ 1500. And up….the Canon 1200mm is made to order, and I have heard a figure of close to $100k mentioned! But this is the best glass you can get for the kit you are using. Note that it’s not all good. No one manufacturer makes a range that is uniformly perfect. You have to pick the eyes out of it…

4.       Zoom range has a big bearing as well. The Bridge Rule of Lens Selection (BROLS) says that the greater the distance between the ends of your zoom focal length, the more likely the quality will be compromised, i.e. an 18-200 will never perform as well as a 70-200. There are two reasons for this: the number of elements in lenses like this (more elements=greater image degradation), and the difficulties of designing a lens which will perform well at all apertures and at all focal lengths. My advice: keep the zoom ranges narrower rather than wider. There are no free lunches.

5.       Don’t overlook the aftermarket brands, such as Sigma and Tamron. They both make glass that is generally comparable in quality to the main manufacturers’ products.

6.        Finally, if you have the opportunity to test a lens, try doing this: carefully tape a sheet of newspaper to the wall. Put your camera and lens on a sturdy tripod, lock up the mirror if you can, and preferably use a remote release. Now make a series of exposures at different apertures. Download it, open and enlarge to 100%. Have a look in the corners, note sharpness and smearing of fine detail (‘mushing’). Be advised: doing this with one’s premium glass can be equally depressing!

7.       O, and one last thing. You would think that one lens would be the same from batch to batch. That isn’t necessarily so. Within a batch there can be differences in optical quality from one unit to the next. Sad but true.

Before you buy, do some pixel-peep er… research. There are good sites out there on the Net. Slrgear and the new lens review section on DPReview are two of my favourites. But there are others.

And now to filters.

Again quality varies. There are filters out there which appear to be made by microwave manufacturers. At the other end of the price scale are ferociously expensive filters from companies like B&W, Heliopan and Singh-Ray. Choose a filter to complement the quality of lens you have bought. A Heliopan is wasted on a plastic-mount kit lens; a Kamakuza brand is wasted on the best ED lens. Match the filter quality with the optical quality of the lens.

Remember: a filter is just one more piece of glass to get in the way of the light and distort it.

As they all do.

Releasing the dryad

A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.

~Edward de Bono

It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.

~P.D. James

It has been nearly two years, but I am still haunted. The moment has yet to unhappen. May it never do so.

It was one of those late autumnal days, when the elementals were throwing the sky around, when the wind was capricious and well-intentioned, but largely unfocused. It would stop, scowl uncertainly beneath its dark cloudy eyebrows, and ponder mightily. Then its face would brighten, a childlike glee would fill its face, and it would dash around, shaking the trees, giving the waves a clip behind the ear and then rush maniacally over the nearest hill for a moment. But it would come back for more. I love the random unpredictability of days like this.

The light was no less vague in its intentions. Puddles of lighter tone would suddenly appear on the land, wander round in a daze for a moment or two, and then blink out of existence. They would come and go like drunks staggering from a bar at 5am, blinking owlish and vacant-eyed, aiming in the direction of home (wherever that was). They were making it all up as they went along.

It was hard to know where to start, which focal length to use, how to frame. So I took the smart approach (helped a little by the fact that it was raining outside). I sat in the truck and watched it for while through the tears dribbling down the glass, trying to find its rhythm, trying to get the pattern, trying to find a way in.

It took a little while, and then it gave itself away. Well, actually it was the big smile that did it. The clouds parted and the sun beamed joyously. A great pool of light tumbled ungraciously out of the clouds and splashed onto the sea, spreading out in a silver pool. For a moment it gathered its thoughts, took its bearings, and then it made a beeline for the land and the valley I was looking across. It pulled itself from the ocean, shook itself yellow and ran up the valley. As it came, I watched it splinter and shatter happily on the folds and fence lines, breaking up into discordant and fading fragments. Then it was gone,

But now I got it. I could tell direction, intensity and quality. The spatial and tonal relationships had shown their hand. And I knew which lens to use. I would like to say at this point that I got out of the vehicle, took out my tripod, set up my camera and made the image using a remote release and mirror lockup, calculating the histogram carefully and framing both carefully and thoughtfully, working my way into the moment.

But it wouldn’t be true.

On days like this you don’t have time to think. This is when all the years of practice, the tens of thousands of near-hits and near-misses, cursed then celebrated pay off; the long years of practising my scales, of learning, polishing and then relearning to the point where instinct and subconscious take over. Ansel Adams talks about making Moonrise over Hernandez, NM, 1941. He only enough time to get on the roof of his vehicle and set up his camera. There wasn’t even enough time to take exposure readings. One shot was all he had. All the years of study, failure and success came down to this one moment where he was put to the test. Needless to say, he passed.

Confession time.

I wound down the window, rested my arm along the edge, turned the stabiliser on, and sighted. A ranging shot to check the histogram, adjustment of the histogram, and then lost myself to the moment. ISO 200, f9.0, 1/640s, -0.67 compensation, multi-pattern and….Program Mode. I have a simple adage for mode selection: if it moves, then it is probably Shutter Priority; if it doesn’t, the usually it is Aperture Priority, and if there is no time to think, thenI will tend to opt for Program Mode. It usually works.

Because the light was shifting about so much, I shot a lot of files. The moment stretched out until I knew I was done. I tend to keep working it until I shoot one too many. I have learned to recognise that moment. Then we moved on.

And there was another pressure on me. Nukuhakari Station lies on the West Coast of the North Island somewhere between Mokau and Marakopa. I was there as a special favour. I was being shown something rare,  a part of the country few people had seen or would ever see. I was on a fuss.  I was being honoured. And I was deeply grateful. We had crossed valleys and ridges on private land to get to this place, to this point in time. The opportunity to be here might never come again. I had only seconds to express what was within me and what was talking to me. I was being put to the test. And I knew it.

But shooting the file was only the beginning.

When I first opened the file, the memory was there, still unhappened. An initial edit made me think   I had it pinned.

Over the last two years I have revisited that file several times. There was a lot in it and, like a sculptor, I needed to release the image from the wood. All my attempts to realise it have come close, but never really freed the dryad from the tree.

Again and again I have returned to that file, looking to close the gap between memory and print. Again and again success has eluded me.

But now I am close.

Writing about it helps. Writing about it helps me see the dryad, gives it a voice to guide me. By visiting the evnt in text I sometimes get the clue I need to find a way in, to know where to apply the chisel.

So this week I came back to it, to walk around the tree and see if I could get the memory closer to happening.

Then I realised the key lay in a number of things; in the scale which gave me top-to-bottom, left-to-right and front-to back. The sharpness of the fine detail was the cue for these understandings. The mist-bedecked hills in the background further prescribed the space.

But the dryad wasn’t hiding there.

It was concealed behind the pools of light lying across the landscape. If I were to open them up, then I might see her revealed.

Firstly I opened the file and converted it to a 16-bit tiff to hold the bit-depth. I duplicated the layer (ctrl-J). Then I applied a curves adjustment layer to increase the contrast and drama.  On top of this I applied a saturation adjustment layer, selected the greens and boosted the intensity of the greens which have haunted me since I saw them.

Then I used a large soft brush to paint out the saturation on the hills in the background which had made the bush rather fluorescent (distance and mist lower saturation).

Then it was Wacom Time.

Using a large soft brush and the Dodge Tool, I brought out the pools of light that had been floating over the fields below. I used a little dodge to accentuate the bony anthropomorphic angularities of the paddocks.

Finally I used two sharpening actions; high-pass sharpening to bring out the texture in the paddocks and the hills at rear, and sharpening routine using the emboss filter to crisp up the trees on the lower left. I dialed back the opacity to ensure they didn’t get too sharp and therefore remove the scale from the image.

At last the dryad has come into view.

Now the moment is still unhappened, only less so.

1. I have just upgraded the essays page to make it a little less visually constipating. There is a new essay from French photographer Robert Demachy, who wrote many essays in the early 20th century. On the Straight Print contains issues still current 100 years later. A bonus is the wonderfully formal prose…
2. From the Department of VERY Big Boys’ Toys….Last week Hasselblad announced their new 50Mp digital back. Not t be outdone, Phase One came straight back with their 60.5 Mp P65+ back. My spies tell me that it was there anyway, and they were just holding off until PhotoKina in September. But Hasselblad flushed them out of the woodwork…go on, Andrew, you know you want need one…or does the iPhone come first???
3. If, like me, you use Firefox in preference to Safari or Internet Explorer, the upgrade to 3.0 is well worth it. Not only is it faster and less resource-hungry, there are cool plugins available for it. My favourites are Foxmarks ( sync bookmarks across computers), All-in-One Sidebar, Pdf Download, and Sxipper ( keep track of your form details and login/passwords..
4. Lastly a tip from the Department of Pocket Protectors. I have been trying to find a way to send and receive email from my laptop while on the move without having to use slow and clunky webmail. Receive is easy enough. Send is something trickier. Well, there is a way, if you have a gmail account. In the account settings, specify your default smtp server as Gmail and it works anywhere. More details here or google : free smtp.
5. Update: Focusing Fallibilities. Those of you interested in focusing and focus issues might want to read Dave Etchell’s article. At first I thought it was a sound argument for avoiding autofocus. Now I realise it is an even sounder argument for avoiding manual focus. Or is it?
   

Ka kite ano