The Last Word

…and that’s a good thing.
Many years ago, I turned around while I was sitting and pushed a Nikon FM off a bench. It fell about a foot to a stone patio, and the light meter never worked after that. A few years later, my wife set a 35 mm Minox down a little too hard [...]

Yesterday, I attended Charles Cramer’s excellent lecture at the Sunset Center. Charlie asked me to say a few words about soft proofing. Some things occurred to me that I would have said had I more time and presence of mind. Fortunately, I have this blog.
Soft proofing is visualizing the final hard copy from an image [...]

In most of the last half of the 20th century, the weapon of choice for low-light candid photography was the 35mm rangefinder camera. There were lots of reasons.

The cameras were small and light.
The focal-plane shutters were quieter than SLR shutters (except for the tiny number of SLRs with pellicle mirrors), and not much noisier than [...]

When I talk to digital photographers about the nuts and bolts of the craft, there’s a topic that comes up unusually often: what size flash cards to use in your camera. There are photographers that say that you want to keep the card size small, so when there’s a file system error, you won’t lose [...]

I went to Monument Valley last weekend. It was just a quick trip, and with non-photographer friends along, I mostly just played tourist. I did take one camera, one lens, and no tripod. The camera was a 4000 by 6000 pixel 35 mm format digital. I amused myself by snapping off 6 to 12 picture [...]

Some History
In 1996 I decided to create a web site for my underwater photographs. I registered kasson.com with the InterNIC, installed Internet Information Services on an NT 4 server that was connected to my ISP over Basic Rate ISDN, and started to create html using Notepad. That got old real fast, so I switched to [...]

When I get a new computer I usually reinstall just about all the aps that were on the old one. This time, perhaps because it was an out-of-schedule upgrade that I resented having to do, I just installed the ones that I knew I needed. Over a couple of weeks, I added a few more, [...]

Now that it’s set up, I am happy with the new computer; and I’m even starting to believe it was worth all the trouble. Although air-cooled, it’s as quiet as any water-cooled machine I’ve owned. I’ve thrown a lot of photographic processing at it, and I’ve never seen memory usage above 60% (That’s still a [...]

This is the part I like: Unpacking the new machine. Hooking it up to the cheap mouse and keyboard that it comes with. Plugging in the power cord, hitting the switch, and breathing a sigh of relief as it boots into the setup screen. Configuring a few basic options. Right-clicking on the Computer icon, selecting [...]

I’ve enjoyed writing about the Drobo experience last month. I hope some of you enjoyed reading it. I’ve decided to keep posting about some of my tussles with the technology of digital photography. Jerry Pournelle used to call his column in Byte “Chaos Manor”. I think I’ll call mine “The Bleeding Edge.” It’s not that [...]