I was washing the windows in the living room this afternoon, and happened to glance out to see a small troupe from yesterday's movie shoot for "Mother Water" 「マザーウォーター」 setting up shop just below my balcony, to get a short scene of the water flowing over a waterfall (the very tiny... two or three inches... waterfall seen here). I put the Windex™ down and grabbed my camera, hoping to get a better look at theirs.

I was able to see that it's a Panavision 24-275 T2.8 11X Primo Zoom, which is apparently quality of the highest order. Despite extensive searching, [...]

When I started to take photography somewhat seriously (circa January 2006 when I got a Nikon D200), a long-time friend who happened to work at Apple extolled the virtues of Apple Aperture, which had just been released. It was, he said, still a bit buggy, but even so was so much better than working with files one by one in Photoshop. He had a hard time constraining his excitement of the new workflow paradigm, even if the current implementation still needed the kinks worked out.

I wasn't sold on the whole new-paradigm idea, but when Apple announced their new line [...]

Apple has just released the first major upgrade in a long time to Aperture, its photo-workflow application that fights against Adobe Lightroom for market share in the pro / advanced-amateur photographer market. This is great news if you're into photography, even if, like me, you've never used Aperture.

The list of features in Aperture 3.0 shares many things with what Lightroom already has, but includes plenty that Lightroom doesn't have (geoencoding, video support, and face recognition are a few of the headline features, but it's actually in the small details that one often finds salve to a workflow irritation).

People [...]

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, the participants in the eclectic musical ensemble are all acquaintances of one guy, who thought it'd be nice to get them together. Some of them belong to a camera club together, so advanced amateur photographers were plentiful in attendance, both on stage and in the audience.

The central acquaintance, Nishimoto-san, had a Canon 85mm f/1.2, a beautiful, robust lens, that we all ogled. Nikon has nothing comparable, though there is a Nikon 50mm f/1.2. Zak used to have one, which I've borrowed to good effect to get artsy-fartsy with the shallow depth of field, [...]

As soon as I switched to a Nikon D700 from a Nikon D200, I started getting corrupt memory cards. I brought the camera to the Nikon Service Center in Osaka, but they said that it's probably the memory card that's the problem. I used only Transcend compact flash cards, which are not on the official supported list, so they suggested that I move to an officially-supported card.

In those early days, the problem manifested itself with a scrambled view of the image on the D700's screen, but they downloaded fine and I never had other problem with the images. In [...]
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