Digital Camera Info has posted a review of the Canon S3 IS and there are some unusual and notable items in it. The review has some nuggets:

For the sharpest images, use a focal length of 16.8 mm (3x zoom) and an aperture of f4.5. The camera has the best dynamic range at ISO 100, not 80 as you might expect.

And some errors and odd comments:

Shot to shot is listed at 1.6 seconds in burst mode. It's actually 2.1 shots per second. The review claims that manual focus through the EVF is "nearly impossible", but I've done it and it is certainly usable. My hummingbird pictures were done that way. The complaints in the review that the power button takes "too much energy to turn" and that "it takes some serious effort to turn it toward the playback icon" make me wonder if the reviewer had a dud unit or if he/she didn't realize that you have to depress the tiny button on the control to unlock it. No mention at all of C mode. That's odd because it is a great feature. It remembers every setting, so when you turn the camera on you have a completely predictable set up. The conclusion includes "poor battery life", which is very surprising. I get easily 500 photos out of a set of 2300mAh batteries. The spec page lists the fStop min and max as 2.7 and 3.5. Surely 2.7 and 8.0?

Tags: Canon, S3, Review

I rebuilt my Aperture library today, and you can too.

It's easy to do: Quit Aperture, hold Option and Command and launch Aperture with a double click on the application icon. Answer the dialogs to allow the rebuild.

14,000 images took about half an hour. Now selecting Projects, selecting Smart Albums, scrolling, everything is much faster than it was. My guess is that this rebuild redoes all of the files that reference the structure of the projects and their contents. This makes the accesses sequential and uses files that have been defragmented, so speeding what I see.

I'm waiting a while on installing 10.4.7, but have heard that it improves Aperture as well.

Tags: Aperture, Library

The 419 Eater web site features Nigerian online scams, but not the usual ones. On this site the scammers themselves are scammed, often hilariously. For a sample try the shrinking artwork, the church of the red breast, and the hitchhiker's guide to handwriting. Try not to neglect your children and pets as you work your way through the many letters.

Tags: Fun, Scambaiting, Interesting Stuff

I use the Smart Album feature of Aperture to create the galleries on this site. Here is the top of my projects list:

The Library item includes predefined (and fixed) Smart Albums. It has star ratings that only includes one and five stars, so I added three more covering two, three, and four stars or better. Clicking on the little magnifying glass next to 3 stars or better brings up this settings window:

Note the heading. It says (Library). That means that its scope is the entire library. It will find all images with a rating greater or equal than three stars whether or not they are in a stack across all projects in the Library. Although I have it at the top level of the library, I could drag that Smart Album anywhere and it would work the same way. A duplicate would do the same.

I have my gallery Smart Albums organized into a Blue Folder.Theey can live anywhere, but this was a nice central place to put them. I have put spaces before some of the names I have used, because Aperture arranges things strictly alphabetically. One space will sit at the top of a list. Two spaces will sit above that, etc.

Everything I want to show in the gallery I keyword with Bagelturf Gallery. I have a keyword set called Actions that I use to select which images I want to appear in which gallery and which I want as (metaphorically mixed) wallpaper on my desktop. The Macros Smart Album picks out images I have tagged as Macro for their type. Rejects just looks for ratings of X.

To export to a gallery I select the gallery Smart Album, sort by Image Date, select the images I have recently added, and export either the masters or the versions to a local folder. Then I fire up Photosite Timesaviour and regenerate the gallery folder locally. That done and checked, I start Transmit and use its synchronizing feature to make the .Mac version of the gallery look like the local one. By exporting only the new images and syncing I save a great deal of uploading.

Why not use the Aperture gallery feature? It is just not flexible enough. In particular I cannot have a three-level gallery where the third level is the original. Also there is no Home button to let me go back to the main gallery index page I have set up.

When I export images destined for the S3 gallery, I export masters and use a preset export called GalleryS3 IS:

This helps me remember how I did the export last time. Clicking on the pop up list and selecting Edit... allows me to choose the export type:

In this case I have a custom export that just uses the version name. In that way, any image that goes to the gallery can have a meaningful name and I can use that name in the thumbnail page.

The other use for Smart Albums is in collecting images automatically with a scope that is smaller than the entire Library. The Smart Albums I have shown so far were created with the Library selected, and they reference the whole library. Nice, but slow, and often not what is wanted.

I have a Blue Folder that contains all my Projects for 2006 called, unsurprisingly, 2006. If I select that it shows me the contents of all the Projects inside it. If I create a new Smart Album with that Blue Folder selected then I get this:

Its scope is all the Projects inside the 2006 Blue Folder. I can now set up all the options I need and close it and it will always reference just those projects that are in 2006. If I add more projects it will find those too. And it will be faster than a Library-wide Smart Album. And this works at any level in the Blue Folders and at the Project level.

Here is one for my June 2006 Project that lives inside the 2006 Blue Folder.:

The joy does not extend to Brown Folders, however. If you select anything inside a Project and create a new Smart Album, then the Smart Album is created where you selected, but its scope is always the enclosing Project. Still, this is not too shabby.

The moral therefore is to use small projects for speed, and large Blue Folder hierarchies to support browsing and Smart Albums.

Tags: Aperture, Smart Albums, Gallery

You can take some photos of an environment and turn them into little planets like these:
  
There is an HTML version of the page that has links to large images here.

Tags: Planets, Photography, Interesting Stuff

Intel has sold a part of its communications processor business to Marvell for $600m, admitting that it made a large error when it bought the businesses for $3b to $5b.

The thing is, and Intel may now realize this, is that it's not about the chips. It's about the software. Anything that increases time to market (writing or porting mode code for instance) has got to buy its purchaser a very significant advantage in the market; and Intel's chips could not overcome this barrier.

XScale is rumored to be on the chopping block as well.

Tags: Pigs With Lipstick

Just announced today. With a zillion engineers, why do that?

Tags: iView, Microsoft

There is an interesting message coming out of Cupertino these days. Apple is positioning itself as good enough. Good enough for what? And why?

Good enough is how minicomputers felled mainframes. Minicomputers didn't have all the bells and whistles and support that mainframes did, but, hey, they were good enough to get the job done, and demand for the high-end fell. Then minicomputers were good enoughed out by microcomputers.

Familiarity with technology always lowers costs because it requires less training, reduces errors, and simplifies selling. But that is counter to the systems that the pioneers of the technology set up around it. The money-making systems cannot be allowed to die. At the same time that the pressure on prices occurs, the technology starts gathering cruft and its costs rise inexorably. Lower volumes complete the vicious circle.

As the technology ages, a new generation of people and businesses are familiar with the technology and know better what they want and don't want. They don't need the support systems that are built in to the cost of what has recently become the high end. They do need simplicity and ease of use.

Microsoft used to be the new good enough. That was one of the ways that they dominated the market and pushed out competition. Their software was not the best, or the fastest, or many other things. But it was good enough and it provided a way around the high-end, costly competition. Apple, offering perfection and features that the mass market did not need was left out. Niche markets held onto Apple with an iron grip, however, and Apple survived.

But now Apple is positioning itself as the new good enough. Just look at the I'm A Mac ads. Apple is not only positioning themselves as the only choice for a home computer, they are also actually rebranding PCs as what your dad uses at work and fixes at home. Spreadsheets. Pie charts. Viruses. Set up time. It's work vs. fun. The message is that whatever the business world thinks of it, the Mac is the new good enough for what you want to do at home.

Finally, why? Because Apple is going after the mass market in a big way.

Tags: Apple, Good Enough, Interesting Stuff

A simple way I have found to speed up Aperture for many operations is simply to work with smaller projects. So I have an Import project and import only into that. After the images have been processed (culled, rated, keyworded, etc.) I then select all of them and drag them to my month project. That moves the Masters to the month project.

Within the Import project I can filter by import session to make the number of images more manageable. The speed-up of a smaller project is quite noticeable: much less spinning cursor and other delay.

Tags: Aperture, Performance

A half-reasonable picture of a jumping spider about 1/8 inch long I found today in the grass. I took this with my Canon S3 in natural light with a reversed 50mm SLR lens fitted. It's been cropped and enhanced in Aperture.

Tags: Canon, S3, Macro, Spider

WinFS, the all-singing, all-dancing object storage system that was supposed to be delivered with Longhorn/Vista and was then removed, to be a separate product, is dead.

Worse than not delivering is that Microsoft is showing generations of software engineers and designers what cannot (or should not) be done. As these people move on, this knowledge spreads to competitors and the successful implementation of the ideas is more likely elsewhere. Part of the Microsoft malaise is that it is stuck in a pattern of Grand Thinking that requires a small number of really big ideas to succeed for the company to succeed.

Tags: Microsoft, Pigs With Lipstick

Photos of a flock of about a million starlings in Denmark. Click on the picture at the link for a full-sized image.

Tags: Photography, Starlings, Interesting Stuff

An update to Aperture is now available, taking it to 1.1.2. 14MB in size.

Tags: Aperture, Updates

A John Lasseter production from 1979.

Tags: Video, Fun, Interesting Stuff

A more efficient way of getting a lot of images into Aperture than using the Import dialog is to simply drag the folder in. My example photos are in a folder called Photos and open up to a complete hierarchy that looks like this:

Dragging and dropping into the project pane, or onto the Library results in this:

Now all the hierarchy of the folder structure is maintained and Albums automatically created. In each Brown Folder there is an initial Album that contains the images that were not in any sub-folder, for example Images from: Animals. Exactly the same result can be achieved by using the menu item File -> Import -> Folders Into A Project.

if you want to add more images to that Project by dragging, then it is easily done. If a folder called More Photos that contains four images is dragged onto the Photos project then this results:

Notice the new album called More Photos and the increased count of images in the Photos project. Dragging a folder to an existing project does not create a new project with the top-level folder name, just an Album. The disadvantage with this way of importing is that the Project can be huge. So the best way to import an existing library is probably to drill down to a lower level in the folder hierarchy and drag those into separate Projects, then organize the projects with Blue Folders.

On top of this, because the folders (both types) can hold Albums, Galleries, and Light Tables from anywhere, you can create these wherever they make sense. And images from one Project can be shown in any Album, Gallery or Light Table.

Tags: Aperture, Importing, Hierarchy

The first time you meet Brown Folders in the Aperture library is when you import existing images. Brown Folders organize content inside Projects, so they are always under them in the hierarchy. Contrast this to Blue Folders that organize Projects and other content above Projects.

For this example, I'll work with a single folder that contains images and folders. The folder itself looks like this:

Inside it are three folders and three images. If I open it I get this:

And if I open all of the subfolders I get this:

There are several ways to import this content into the library and the results differ, sometimes quite radically. In all cases, however, you can either import to a new Project by selecting Library, or into an existing Project by selecting that Project.

First lets do an import using the import button (down arrow in the top left of the Aperture window). That opens the Import pane. By selecting the drive you can navigate to the Photos folder. You see just the top level three images. Click Import All. Here is the result:

Only the top level images were imported. You can now rename Untitled Project and repeat to import more images from lower-level folders, one at a time. This will create individual Projects each with just images inside. Or you can leave the project selected and keep adding the folder content to it. This makes sense if you want to flatten your image structure because you have everything well keyworded. Doing this a few times results in this:

Still one Project, but more photos now. You would think that to divide those up into some sort of hierarchy Brown Folders could be used, but you would be wrong. Right click on the Project and add a new folder:

Drag some images from the Photos Project in and --- it does not work. That is because you cannot have photos in the library not inside some sort of container: an Album, Light Table, or Gallery. Lets try again, and this time put an Album in there and drag some images in:

This time it works. All the images are still in the Project, the Album just has a subset of them. You can add each image to as many Albums as you like. And once you have a few Albums, you will want to organize those using Brown Folders:

That's what Brown Folders are used for. Notice that Brown Folders don't display their content like Blue Folders do: clicking on one will show nothing except an icon that says Folder.

Tags: Aperture, Folders, Library

Several hundred photos later with some decent light and I have some more content for the macro gallery. Not many good ones, but I'm getting better at it.

That's the head of a fly that landed nearby at about 50%. The depth of field is the biggest challenge. If the light is good then the movement blur is not a problem. I'm doing all of this hand-held, resting the SLR lens on my hand or something if I can. The magnification is very good: by using water droplets on leaves you can see individual plant cells.

I also split the gallery into three and created a new main page for the gallery.

Tags: Canon, S3, Macro

Now I have the male-male 49 mm ring, I have completed my macro set up. The camera on the right is connected to the 52 mm Lensmate adaptor tube. The smooth ring and the ribbed ring adapt that down to 49 mm male, and the SLR lens on the left screws into that.

Another picture of the same set up:

That's a 50 mm f1.8 lens on the end, an old Olympus kit lens. So how did it perform? I got one good picture in the fading light of the evening (click for full-sized image):

The circle is what you see with the S3 zoomed out. I had the focus on manual, set to infinity. Focusing consists of moving the camera closer or away from the subject. In theory I can zoom in on the above 12x using the camera zoom, but reality is more harsh. As you would expect, the main difficulty is light and depth of field. Most of my shots came out like this, especially when zoomed:

That's a leg. Here is a picture of my monitor screen, hand held:

My next challenge is fixing up a flash diffuser to see how much I can get out of the built-in flash. I plan on making some sort of light pipe with a diffuser on the end, but we'll see what comes out of the design process.

Tags: Canon, S3, Macro, Lenses

Theme Park Review has a scathing look at Fantazy Land in Alexandria, Egypt. It's more of an abandoned building site than a theme park, and much, much worse than Jim Bakker's attempt.

Tags: Pigs With Lipstick, Fun

I received a black 52 mm adaptor for the Canon S3 today from Lensmate. I also included a 52 to 49 mm step-down ring. When my male-male adaptor arrives I will be able to connect the S3 to an old reversed 50mm SLR lens and try it out as a macro photography tool.

Tags: Canon, S3

In the last installment of my project looking into latency, I took a turn into statistics and chance, trying to diagram rolling a die and other things. The topic is gate latency, the time spent waiting for things.

We ended with this:

The blue area represents the chance. So this means that we have to integrate the density function between two values to get the likelihood of whatever we are measuring falling between those two values, in this case the time to rewind a video tape.

Now look at the die probability chart from before:

If you view this a a probability density function then you find that we are in trouble. Using the area rule and counting the score as continuous, this says that I have 1/12 chance of scoring between 2.5 and 3. That's 1/2 times 1/6. Look at this diagram:

(Notice that I did move the numbers along the bottom, since I have to label actual locations along that axis now) But this result is nonsense for a die because it only scores whole numbers. So we change the diagram to look like this:

Those arrows represent an infinitely high spike that is infinitesimally thin, but not so thin that the whole spike has no area. In fact its area is given by its height. Never mind that it is too weird to think about -- it actually works for our purposes. Add up all the area that is between 2.75 and 3.25 (blue above) and you get nothing before 3, exactly 1/6 at 3 and nothing after. Add up all the area from 0 to infinity and you get 1 (six spikes times 1/6 area each). Add up the area from 2.25 to 2.75 and you get zero. It works just the way we want a die to work.

It didn't make those spikes up. Those spikes have a name. They are called Dirac Delta functions, shown as ∂(x).

Back to gate latency. Here is the problem. We want to understand and express the chance that the bathroom will be busy and we want to understand and express how long we will have to wait for it if it is busy. If we assume that four other people keep it busy for a total of one two hours a day then we can easily see that there is a 11/12 (that's 22 out of 24 hours) chance of it not being busy and so having a wait of zero. If those two busy hours are consecutive (what a wait!) then the probability density function looks like this:

That looks very ugly. But if you examine it you will see that it is correct. 11/12 chance of there being no delay (purple spike). The area of the rest of the graph (green rectangle) is 2 x 1/24 = 1/12, so the total area is 1. You can never wait more than 2 hours or less than zero. The chance of waiting an hour is the same as waiting two hours, depending on when you start waiting in the two-hour period.

How about a household that keeps it busy for two hours, but in four half-hour chunks instead of one two-hour chunk (a much more pleasant place to live)?

Now you have a four-times more likely chance of waiting a quarter as long. What about one hour-long busy period and two half-hour busy periods?

The graphs are pretty ugly, but they do work.

The key point here is that gate latency, just like transport latency involves measuring the area under non-trivial graphs: ugly integration. Minimizing transport latency involved changing parameters and figuring out which graph to integrate to get the total latency. At least it was deterministic! Gate latency is not, trivially at least, but gate latency does have one redeeming feature: finding the maximum latency is easy, at least for these simple cases.

It turns out that gate latency can, in some situations, be defeated entirely. In other words, in our busy bathroom example you would never, ever have to wait to get in. The trick is synchronization, making sure that the time that the bathroom is busy never coincides with the time it is needed. In everything up until now, I have assumed that there is no correlation between the two competing events (or pairs of die throws). Synchronization involves communication or control that assures correlation and so minimizes gate latency. You have done this yourself many times: driving somewhere at a particular time because the traffic is less busy, for instance.

Next, a better way of diagramming gate latency.

Tags: Latency, Probability

Apple has posted three new ads comparing the Mac with Mac OS X with Windows PC: Touché, Work vs. Home, and Out Of The Box.

Tags: Apple, Microsoft, Interesting Stuff

While making this blog using RapidWeaver 3.2.1, I have found that the site document gets large very quickly as I add images. This is because RapidWeaver stores all the text and all the images in one large site document rather than externally in pieces in a file structure.

So if I drag in a 3MB TIFF image and scale it in RapidWeaver to 30% of its size, the site document stores the whole 3MB, while creating a much smaller JPEG to upload. To reduce storage requirement this without any extra tools I have found that I can use RapidWeaver itself to do the image conversion. It works like this:

1. Create a blog entry and drag in images

2. Use the image inspector to scale each of them

3. Preview the blog entry and tweak until it is OK

4. For each image, drag it out of the blog Preview and onto the desk top

5. Delete each image in the blog, replacing it with the desktop version by dragging

6. Delete the desktop images

So now the blog has just the JPGs. They are just the right size, and take up minimum space.

RapidWeaver should have a right-click menu that gives the option of doing all of this in one.

Tags: RapidWeaver, Performance, Interesting Stuff

A kitten attacks a Mac with Front Row.

Tags: Video, Fun, Interesting Stuff

Having given up on network back ups some time ago, I have been experimenting with and formulating back up strategies for the various machines around here. The goal is to back up quickly and be able to recover quickly without spending too much money and without being forced into software upgrades due to OS changes (ahem, Retrospect, I'm talking to you here).

Here is what I have come up with. Note that it is for back up only, not archiving. In other words, the immediate goal is to recover from failure, not store data long-term.

Each machine has its hard drive partitioned into a boot volume and a Scratch volume. The Scratch volume is never backed up and is typically 20% of the drive. It's a place for big files, anything that is generated by software from backed up files, temporary items, DV captures, etc. This strategy prevents unnecessary backing up of large temporary data.

Each machine gets a Firewire drive that is at least 25% bigger than the amount of data on the boot volume. The Firewire drive has a single partition. The drive is left turned on all the time, but the volume is unmounted. The machine is set to wake up at 5:30am and SuperDuper is set to run a scheduled copy at 5:31am using a smart copy. What SuperDuper does is to mount the drive, compare the firewire contents with the boot drive content, copy and delete as appropriate, then unmount the drive. Typically this takes fifteen to thirty minutes once the initial copy of the whole drive is performed.

What this buys me is near-instant recovery from a hard drive failure. Recovery works like this: HD fails. Boot machine with Option held down and select the Firewire drive. Machine boots from Firewire drive. I know exactly up to when good data is available, and therefore what I have to do to fill in the missing pieces. I lose a maximum of one day's work. And I can lose less if I schedule more copies during the day, such as at lunch time. It is not that expensive because the Firewire drives can be small and old.

What this does not do is handle catastrophic failures such as as fires, so there is an extra step. For off-site back ups I could maintain an extra set of Firewire drives and switch them with the on-site ones periodically. I actually don't do this because a) it means a lot of drives lugged about, and b) I don't have that many old drives. So instead I have two large capacity new drives (750G each) and have at most one of them on-site at any time.

On those drives I store sparse disk images, one per boot volume I need to back up. Sparse disk images grow as data is added to them, but do not shrink as it is deleted (but a Terminal command line can be used to shrink them back). Periodically I back up the machines, again using SuperDuper's smart copy, this time copying the hard drive to the mounted sparse disk image. In addition, to being convenient and not wasting space, sparse disk images give me the ability to encrypt the data. So all of my disk images are encrypted, ensuring that a lost or stolen back-up drive is no greater a loss than the value of the hardware. The large capacity drives get swapped around each time all the machines have been backed up.

Another convenience of this strategy is that the downtime on the machines is very small. The back up to the sparse disk images on the large capacity drive need not use any time at all on the machine it is backing up, since the Firewire drive that is sitting next to it can be disconnected (it is not even mounted most of the time), carried to another machine, the back up done there, and the drive returned.

Recovery from sparse disk images is easy too, but more time-consuming. Assuming that the machine and its local Firewire drive have been destroyed, the first step is to get a new machine or commandeer an existing one. Then that machine is booted not from its local hard drive, but from a boot partition on the large capacity firewire drive. I keep a small (10G) boot partition on each drive and make sure that the OS revision is low enough to boot any machine I want to recover. Now I can use Disk Utility to replace the machine's main hard drive contents with the contents of the sparse disk image I select (as long as I remember the password of course). Several hours later I can reboot from the internal hard drive of the new machine and I am back in business.

I have had two hard drives fail on me (before I adopted this strategy) and lost very little because of my back up paranoia. So I know there are other ways to achieve effective back up. However it took days to recover each time, and was a painful and disruptive process.

Tags: SuperDuper, Backing Up, Interesting Stuff

Now what do I do?

Folders of folders of projects of folders of albums and folders and books and images and galleries. That's what Aperture gives you to organize your photos; and it is very, very confusing at first. Worse, since anyone new to Aperture already has a lot of photos they want to import, they face having to make decisions about library organization before they do practically anything else. But this is Apple and things are not what they seem. Actually to get going, all you need is to understand a few simple rules.

Simple Rule Number 1: Don't Panic!

The reason you must not panic is that, as far as I can tell, it is impossible to get your library organized in a way that prevents you from later efficiently getting it organized into a different, more helpful way. In other words, you really don't have to make big, important decisions right up front, because they can always be changed. The only caveat to this is that reorganizing the library can take a little while, both for you to make all the right selections, and for the computer to do the work.

Simple Rule Number 2: There Are Two Types Of Folders And Yet Nobody Tells You

In an error or gargantuan proportions, the Aperture documentation fails to distinguish between Blue Folders and Brown Folders. Blue Folders live above Projects and Brown Folders live below Projects. So Blue Folders exist to help you group Projects together and brown Folders exist to help you divide individual Projects into smaller, named pieces.

Simple Rule Number 3: Each Master Image Exists In One Project Only

You have to store your negatives or originals somewhere, and since there is only one of each, each can only live in one place. Think of a shoe box full of slides. A Project is the shoe box. Master images are the slides inside it. Can you reorganize your master images into new Projects? Yes, just as you can reorganize your slides into new shoe boxes. But still, as you reorganize, nothing is duplicated. Each slide only ever lives in one shoe box and each master image only ever lives in one Project.

Simple Rule Number 4: Albums Are Just Collections Of Prints

When you make a real physical album, you never paste in the slides or negatives. If you did, they would be hard to see and would have to be removed from their shoe box to stick on the album. A dangerous state of affairs. You make prints of the slides and paste those into the albums instead. Prints made from a single slide can be used in many albums at once, even modified or destroyed, and the original stays in its shoe box untouched. Aperture's Albums are the same way. An Aperture Album is a collection of copies of master images.

Simple Rule Number 5: Smart Things Are Your Assistants

"Make me prints of all the pictures of Paris that I shot with a wide-angle lens at night". In Aperture, Smart Albums and their cousins operate like assistants. When you open a Smart Album, your assistant notices you doing so and quickly scurries about picking out all the relevant masters and making prints for you to look at in one place. If you add another photo to one of the projects he is aware of, he'll quickly make a print of that too and bring it to you.

Here is an example of the flexibility that the Blue Folders give you. You photograph buildings and structures all over the world (lucky you) and you have three very different types of client: government bodies that are almost always divided geographically, big companies who hire you for specific projects related to their facilities, and retail chains who are driven by fashion seasons. So at the top level, you set up three folders:

For commercial work, you divide by client and then put individual projects in there:

For government, you divide geographically where it makes sense, and then create projects:

For retail, seasons come first because the outsides of the stores are very different at different times of the year. Then to help distinguish regular projects, there are folders of years:

I'll delve into Brown Folders and the more complicated aspects of organization in a little while.

Tags: Aperture, Library, Folders

I took a couple of old SLR (Tamron) lenses with focal lengths of 50 mm and 28 mm and tried them out as macro lenses today. You take the SLR lens and put it in front of the camera lens backwards. The focus is about and inch and a half to two inches in front of the whole assembly. And the great thing is that you can use the S3 zoom to make the image bigger.

This is what the Supermacro mode can do (full frame, reduced to 21%):



The "e" is about 137 pixels high on the original. With a 50mm lens in front I get an "e" of about 740 pixels; about 5.4 times more magnification:



And with a 28mm lens, the "a" is about 1300 pixels, a magnification factor of about 9.5 times that of the Supermacro mode:



The way I got these big images was by zooming the lens on the S3 all the way in. The depth of field is very shallow of course. The light level was very low, so the images are of very low quality (and have been enhanced a little), but this was just a magnification test.

I have ordered a reversing ring and an adaptor so I can properly fit the SLR lenses to the camera. Once I have those I will do some outside experiments in better light.

Tags: Canon, S3, Macro

A Dark Reading article describes how USB drives were used to break into a credit union's systems by simply leaving them around.

Once I seeded the USB drives, I decided to grab some coffee and watch the employees show up for work. Surveillance of the facility was worth the time involved. It was really amusing to watch the reaction of the employees who found a USB drive. You know they plugged them into their computers the minute they got to their desks.
Social engineering at it s best.

Tags: Security, Hacking, Interesting Stuff

How do you stop the Canon S3 from refocussing between shots? You can use manual focus, but that is a pain to set up. Auto Focus Lock doesn't help because it's not remembered between shots.

It's actually very easy, and works with Continuous shooting mode too: simply keep the shutter partially depressed instead of releasing it between shots. In other words, press all the way to take a bunch of shots, then ease off the shutter button until the camera stops shooting. The green focus rectangle is still there. Depress the shutter to take more shots at the same focus. Repeat as needed.

Tags: Canon, S3, Focus, Tips And Tricks

I've been using Aperture to adjust some images. Adjustments are slow on my machine (iMac G5), but usable. I'm using JPEGs as the original, so I have a limited amount of dynamic range.

When I first tried Lift and Stamp it seemed almost impossible to use. Once you click on Lift and the HUD comes up, the cursor changes to stamp. But it is not possible to select images to stamp because the cursor is not the selection cursor. And you want to select the images to stamp because you want to see the effect. While image selection is possible via the arrow keys, this is not very practical.

Then I found that the Command key changes the cursor to the select cursor and you can select images. Option changes the cursor from Lift to Stamp or vice versa. Once you know this it is quite efficient to apply changes to one image and then make similar adjustments to others. In particular you can use the Apply Stamp To Selected Images button.

I am also experiencing a problem whereby the displayed numerical pixel value changes to ... for R, G, B, and L. It only occurs on adjusted images.

Tags: Aperture, Adjustments

I have added more photos taken with the Canon S3 IS to the gallery. There are now 60 full-size images available for viewing and download.

Tags: Canon, S3, Gallery

I set up a Smart Album and a Smart Web Gallery today and immediately ran into a problem.

I made the smart filter match the keyword gallery and ignore stack grouping. That way I can simply tag anything with gallery and it will appear as if by magic. And it did. But then I dragged an image in a project into my Wallpaper album. That created a new version, and that version inherited its metadata from its original, so it also had the gallery keyword and it duly appeared in my Smart Web Gallery as a duplicate.

The fix was to make the Smart Web Gallery match the keyword gallery and match the version name if it does not include "version". So now the versions are rejected by the filter.

Another thing that worked was to remove the gallery keyword from the new version, but that is something I would have to do for every image that has a version anywhere. Tedious and error-prone.

Tags: Aperture, Smart Albums, Duplicates