Clueless in the UK

I accidentally took the following picture on our recent trip to Hawaii.

We were in a dark lava tube at Volcanoes National Park in Hawaii and set my Canon Digital Rebel Xt on aperture priority mode, attached my 50mm F/1.8 lens, turned on the flash, and presto!

The thing is, The camera selected 1/6 second shutter speed for this shot and I was very puzzled by this because I thought, “Hey the flash is on so expose the kids in the foreground and be done with it!” I expected the camera to select 1/60 second shutter speed like it usually does for flash shots, properly light up the subjects in the foreground and leave the background black because the flash can’t reach that far.

Instead, the camera did something really smart: it selected the shutter speed based on the ambient light, coming up with 1/6 second for that, and then fired the flash for exactly the right amount of time in order to properly expose the subjects in the foreground. The result was a naturally exposed background and a properly exposed (via flash) foreground. And had I known this was going to happen I might have held the camera still, but the shot came out really well anyway.

It’s important to realize that the camera was this smart because it was in aperture priority mode, and this would not have happened in Green or P mode.

I had no idea that this was how my camera worked. The whole thing reminded me that despite all my thousands of digital photos over the last few years, I still don’t understand how flash photography works, so I went to google and immediately found the following article:

http://photonotes.org/articles/eos-flash/

If you are at all wondering how your flash works on your modern, Canon digital camera, check out this article. It’s fascinating. I liked it so much I donated $10 to this guy’s website.

TTL flash is an amazing concept. I never realized that Through The Lens flash meant that the camera fires the flash for as long as it needs to accomplish proper exposure, by looking at the light as it comes back into the camera through the lens. But that doesn’t work for digital cameras for technical reasons that are mentioned in the article, so E-TTL was invented instead. This works by doing a very quick pre-flash that the camera Evaluates to determine the flash duration that will be required for the actual shot. The pre-flash happens so quickly that I think most people don’t even notice it. I certainly never did but I have always been on the other side of the camera.

This technology also explains how a flash can tell you, after the fact, whether or not it actually worked! My external flash blinks a red or green LED after the photo is taken, depending on whether the flash was able to properly expose the shot, and I just couldn’t bring myself to believe that it could tell whether or not it worked! Amazing.

BTW, Canon isn’t the only one with this technology! Actually I think most of the clever ideas were invented by Olympus. But I am sure Nikon flash photography works in much the same way. Some of the details of the Nikon implementations, or how individual camera modes respond, will be different I am sure, but the main concepts are the same.

Anyway, read up on this if you’re interested. It’s amazing technology created by very smart people. I love smart people! Always wanted to be one myself …

When I first heard of Aperture I thought it would be to iPhoto as Final Cut is to iMovie. In other words, a huge step up in capability and performance. What I found with Aperture 1.0 was something very capable but a huge step down in performance. Considering iPhoto 5 was a huge step down in performance from iPhoto 4, yet is still blazingly fast in comparison to Aperture, I was really disappointed to put it mildly.

I wrote about Aperture’s dismal performance here in the Apple discussion groups. In this Apple discussion post I actually recorded clock times for what I thought would be common operations. You can ignore most of the responses because they were wrong or did not have reasonably sized iPhoto libraries to test with. Remember, we’re trying to decide if this is a replacement for iPhoto.

So we’ve established that Aperture 1.0 and 1.0.1 were disasters but how does Aperture 1.1 compare to 1.0.1? The short answer is, Extremely favorably, but it still has a very long way to go.

I started by importing my entire iPhoto library again. Took several hours like last time, but the performance after it was done is a lot better. A lot better. Is it good enough? No, but it is getting there. For example, there are no delays bringing up the filter dialog. Second, I was able to unstack all 1100 * 2 images from the “iPhoto Editing/iPhoto Original” pairs after the initial import, in fact, able to unstack them all at once! If you remember from my 1.0.1 review (see discussion links) I couldn’t even unstack 10 of those images at once without my CPU hanging for more than an hour before giving up and killing the process. This is a huge leap forward. Still, it took several minutes to perform that operation which I think should have taken just seconds.

In fact, the single biggest factor in performance after the 1.1 upgrade is: how many thumbnails images are displayed in the thumbnail pane. If that’s 10k, then it will take 20 seconds to do that. If it’s 1000 it happens pretty quickly.

Sometimes editing operations can be as slow as before, depending again on how many thumbnails are currently displayed. So, to adjust the brightness of an image when there are 10k thumbnails displayed may take 30 seconds to respond to the mouse! But edit in a single project or album where there are only 500 or 1000 images, it’s much faster. It seems to re-populate the thumbnails after you make a change to an image, every time you initiate a change.

So, if you find the application being extremely slow, check out the number of images displayed, and if that’s large, consider creating a temporary album with the images you’re interested in and operate in that album for a while. It’s not great but it works.

Let’s compare this to iPhoto: iPhoto happily displays all the thumbnails of your entire database and when you click on an image there are no delays when you try to edit it. And if you do a basic text/keyword search in iPhoto it happens incrementally, as you type, in real time, like the Spotlight technology Apple included in Tiger. For Aperture to be several orders of magnitude slower than Spotlight, despite it’s very limited domain, is just really surprising and disappointing especially in contrast to the awesome capabilities of Spotlight.

So that’s where Aperture 1.1’s performance is at. Way way better and still way too frackin’ slow. But it’s almost usable. So, if you’re using the new and improved iPhoto 6 and are wondering about the pros and cons with respect to Aperture, here they are as I see them:

iPhoto pros

• ilife integration
• speed
• simplicity

iPhoto’s minuses

• destructive image editing
• RAW image model is completely hopeless
• limited image editing capabilities, especially white balance and highlights/shadows, my two favorites
• weak filtering/search

Here are Aperture 1.1’s pros

• non-destructive editing
• RAW image conversion
• strong image editing capabilities
• ability to have multiple versions of an image
• quick switch between master and current version
• export with meta data
• strong filtering/search
• many other features I haven’t yet discovered

Aperture’s minuses

• horrible performance
• lack of iLife integration
• single image store

Obviously this is not an exhaustive review of either iPhoto or Aperture, but it should give you an idea of what to expect if you want to start using it as an iPhoto replacement. I am still undecided. I think the ultimate performance gains will have to wait until Aperture 2.0 which might be a very long time.

In retrospect I think Apple has responded properly by reducing the price of Aperture by $200 and offering early adopters a $200 Apple store gift certificate. This, in my opinion, is recognition of that fact that Aperture 1.x fell far short of expectations. If Aperture 2.0 or 3.0 is anything like Final Cut or Adobe Photoshop in terms of quality and design, then it will again be worth $500 in my opinion. Right now I think it’s worth about $100.

Check out http://www.jajah.com/ to make long distances calls from the US to other countries. I gave it a try and it worked perfectly. You specify your number and the remote number, Jajah dials your number, you pick up, then dials the second number. I think the rate was $.017/minute or even less to call Massachusetts from California. USA to the UK ought to be pretty cheap as well. I wonder how USA to China is? Let me know if you give it a try especially if the other party is faaaaaaaaaar away …

Ever since the energy crisis in 2001 I have been obsessed with the cost of electricity. You would be too if you were paying $.16/kWh! Some of you might be paying that much. Actually I think I am paying more. Ouch it’s way worse than I thought:

Baseline Quantity 390.00000 Kwh
Baseline Usage 390.00000 Kwh@ $0.11430
101-130% of Baseline 117.00000 Kwh@ $0.12989
131-200% of Baseline 273.00000 Kwh@ $0.21788
201-300% of Baseline 262.00000 Kwh@ $0.29920

When I lived in Seattle in 1995 I paid $.02/kWh, just in case you’re wondering …

So naturally I was quite saddened when I bought my dream machine, the one I told my wife would last me for years and years, a dual cpu, 2.5 Ghz PowerMac from Apple and saw that it drew 200 Watts on a good day. There goes my visions of a media server on all day and night.

Meanwhile, the new MacBook laptop is a dual CPU 2 Ghz processor in a nice and portable package, and guess how much power it draws? 30 frackin Watts! That’s when it’s busy. When it’s idle and the screen is off it’s more like 20 Watts.

But is it any good you ask? Well, one of my buddies at Apple says that the MacBook does some things better than my dual CPU 2.5 Ghz G5 PowerMac. OK, almost as fast in some ways, faster in others, uses 10% of the electricity - please tell me why my G5 is not completely and utterly obsolete? Or please tell me what to tell my wife!