Author Archives: dara

SSDs and Lightroom: Bitten by Amdahl’s Law

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Spinning pizza of death

I’ve been using Adobe’s Lightroom image processing software since pretty much the very first beta release to organize and edit my photos.  On the whole, it’s a well laid-out application with a number of very useful features and it’s capable of producing excellent quality output.  That said, using Lightroom has always been an exercise in patience.  It’s simply not a very fast program.  For bulk tasks like exporting JPEGs from RAW images, that’s not a problem – you get it started and go off and do something else.  But when editing individual images starts to bog down, it’s a lot more frustrating.

The sluggishness has been particularly noticeable since I got my (16MP) Olympus E-M5 this summer.  The files aren’t that much bigger than those from my older 12MP cameras, but for whatever reason, editing them has been a lot more painful.  So in a fit of frustration, I finally broke down and ordered an SSD (solid state drive) for my main computer.

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The lens waiting game

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Schneider

The biennial Photokina photography trade show is underway this week in Cologne, Germany, so quite naturally there have been a lot of new products being released, including camera lenses.

Or rather, there have been a bunch of announcements of products, many of which will not actually be released for months (or in a few cases, not for a whole year).  Take the Schneider Optics for example.  They announced 3 new lenses, to ship some time in ‘the fourth quarter’ of 2013.  At the show what they displayed were essentially mockups (incapable of actually taking photos, or doing much of anything else for that matter).

Schneider was hardly the only one doing this.  Panasonic ‘released’ one lens (official ship date unknown) and announced plans for two more, to be released in 2013-2014.  Olympus released one lens, the 60/2.8 macro, that had been first announced in February of this year (projected actual ship date of October).

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iPhone 5 – Hooray for refinement

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iPhone5

 

So according to the pundits, Apple’s iPhone 5 is a massive disappointment because it doesn’t offer a completely new body design. And uses a different dock connector.  And doesn’t make toast.  Or something.

Look – I understand that the press can’t just go around saying nice things about Apple constantly.  There is a rather vocal legion of people who have a visceral dislike for the company and are liable to make lives unpleasant if the press is insufficiently ‘critical’ of new Apple products.  That said, it all seems a bit thin.

What Apple did is more or less what they have a history of doing since the beginning of the Steve Jobs era – taking a successful product and improving it (or trying to).  They’ve never followed the approach of competitors who change their designs 180 degrees every two years.  Does this mean that they’re getting lazy and uncompetitive?  I guess that’s one way to read it.  But as a consumer, I find it refreshing not having to relearn everything each time I update. Familiarity is (generally) good.

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Apple’s missing xMac

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Mac mini

One of the big complaints about Apple’s computers is that they’re expensive.  In fact, this is often not true – comparing like products with like components one tends to find that Apple prices things reasonably closely to where their competitors do.  What Apple does do however is choose not to compete in certain segments of the market.

In most cases, this makes sense.  They don’t really have an entry in the cheap desktop and cheap laptop areas, and it’s hard to see how they would do so without offering a product with serious drawbacks.

There is one lack that I find fairly annoying however – a mid-priced expandable desktop machine.

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Nikon’s D600 – perfect camera – wrong time

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Nikon D600

Timing in the world of electronics is a hard thing to get right.  Be too early and your product is liable to be an expensive oddity to most.  Be too late and you’re a ‘has been.’  And of course, it’s not as if it’s clear ahead of time where the rest of the world will be when you start working on a product.

This latter problem seems to be quite prominent in the case of the D600, Nikon’s newly announced full-frame digital SLR.  On the one hand, it is, almost point for point, the camera many people, myself included, were demanding 2 years ago.  24MP full-frame sensor with good noise control.  Check.  Near $2k price-tag.  Check Smaller, lighter body other full-frame cameras.  Check.  100% coverage optical viewfinder.  Check.  Ability to capture high quality HD video.  Check yet again.

So what then is the problem?

Progress.

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VNC on an Ubuntu VPS

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VNC viewer

Although I do most of my server configuration and administration from the command line, occasionally it’s helpful to have access to GUI applications.  Since the machines are remote, and tightly constrained in terms of memory, it makes sense to use the lightest option available.  My current setup use the tightvnc VNC server in conjunction with the fluxbox window manager.  It’s not very pretty, but it does work.  Using SSH tunneling, it’s also quite secure.

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Olympus E-M5 Initial Impressions

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E-M5

So I broke my self-imposed rule on Olympus products (no camera gear over $500 – they depreciate too quickly) in July and ordered the E-M5.  My excuse to myself was that I had some trips scheduled where I really didn’t want to lug my 4 lbs+ DSLR on, but wasn’t quite comfortable with the quality and handling of my smaller Olympus Pen.  Or something like that.

In any case, when the E-M5 arrived last week, I immediately put it to work, carrying it to a friend’s wedding and then on to Niagara Falls.  It’s seen more than 1k shots now, enough at least for preliminary impressions.

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Setting up the Olympus E-M5

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Olympus E-M5

General Tips

The Olympus E-M5 is a very slick little camera. Indeed, the size is deceptive considering the large range of capabilities for the camera. As with most DSLRs and ILCs (Interchangeable Lens Compacts), the body is only half the equation when it comes to making images. The other half is the choice of lens. There are quite a few choices (more than 30 micro 4/3 mount lens models are currently available). That said, when one takes range, size, price and convenience into account, it shouldn’t be too hard to find a suitable option. Note that because of the size of the pixels (3.8 microns roughly), most lenses are sharpest between f/5.6 and f/8.0 and quality drops dramatically past f/11.

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Micro 4/3 – the missing lens list

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Olympus 45mm lens

While the micro 4/3 system has gotten off to a good start in terms of lenses (35 at last count – full list here), there are still plenty of gaps in the lineup.  Worse, Olympus and Panasonic seem to have decided that iterating over the same ho-hum designs is just as important as filling in important gaps.  The end result is that while for instance there are 6 different 14-4x mm standard kit zoom lenses (3 from each manufacturer), there is not a single fast lens past 100mm.

So below I have listed the top 10 missing lenses for the system, in order of importance (greatest to least):

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