Catch them on MyToons, or YouTube. The official site has a making of movie and other information.

Tags: Movies, Fun, Octopuses

Porch: 1/20s f/8.0 ISO400 10mm 0ev, Canon 30D, Canon EF-S 10-22mm

A week and 2474 photos later, and I have some material to process. One of the lenses I rented was the Canon EF-S 10-22. It's an interesting lens, but takes some getting used to. You've got to have something to fill the expanse of space it can cram onto the sensor.

I used it for 288 of the 2474 photos I took, 146 at 10mm and 59 at 22mm. 196 were less than or equal to 17mm.

I rented from Borrow Lenses, taking advantage of pick up at a San Jose camera store.

Tags: Canon, 30D, Lenses, Photography

An odd change was included in Aperture 2.1.1. No longer does the Return key take you into Compare mode. Now it's Option O (that's letter O).

The Edit menu still says that it's Return. And once you're in Compare mode, Return does make the currently selected comparison the compared image. So I think this is a bug.

You can get the old behavior back by changing the mapping of the keys with Aperture > Commands > Customize...

Tags: Aperture, Bugs, Updates

Nobody likes Mojave.

Tags: Pigs With Lipstick, Microsoft

I've been looking into the practicality of making photo books. There's no single winner as far as I have been able to make out, and I have not yet actually tested any of them. But here's what I believe the practical options are:

Lulu is optimized for text: books with words and some pictures. You send them a PDF and they print you a book. But not any PDF will work: in particular Pages PDFs are shunned. There are ways around this restriction but they cost money and/or are fiddly. Lulu's prices are OK.

Blurb is optimized for photos: books with photos and some words. Their prices are very good, and the quality is good. You have to use their tool, BookSmart, to create the book and upload it. It's template-driven and drag and drop. However, it's written in Java, is incredibly slow, and has enough interface and font quirks to drive a person batty. The templates are large in number, but ultimately limiting because they are it. These are not starting-points. Either the photos go exactly there, or they don't go. The good news is that it can only get better, but to date progress has been slow.

Aperture's and iPhoto's books are expensive and the tools limited, so I didn't seriously consider them.

Everyone else's solution is either aimed at a specific market. MyPublisher is extremely dumbed down and doesn't match what I want to do. But they have a great native Mac application called BookMaker.

I'll probably go for Blurb if I do make a book, but it will be on my terms. I'll design my book using Pages or something and then only as a last step put it all into BookSmart. Another option is to upload full-resolution JPEGs of pages designed outside of the application, so I may use that technique sparingly.

But first I need content.

Tags: Photography, Books, Aperture

Lucas Martell shows how he made Pigeon Impossible, an animated short. You can see the making of on YouTube, the blog, or the web site. The videos on YouTube are great, and show just how much work even a short feature takes.

Tags: Movies, Animation, Pigeons

The Gallery of Sawn In Half Cameras also includes lenses. Now I know why my 70-200 f/2.8L IS is no darn heavy.

Tags: Photography, Hacking, Lenses

4th July Fireworks: 2.5s f/8.0 ISO100 80mm, Canon 30D, Canon 70-200 f/2.8L IS

I have a small selection of fireworks photos in my Canon 30D gallery now. My style is to use a long lens and record the detail of the display rather than try to capture the whole thing. I used ISO 100, f/8 for all of them, varying the exposure time according to how much movement I wanted. I used a tripod of course, one of the few occasions that I do, and turned IS and AF off. JPEGging them for upload loses a lot of the detail, and that's unfortunate because they are very sharp.

Tags: Fireworks, Canon, 30D

You heard it here first. Apple will buy Tesla Motors. Yes, it's a crazy idea, but actually not so far off as you might think.

Apple has the cash. They also have the design and operations know-how. God knows they have the marketing acumen. An electric car is a pile of electronics and they have many engineers. The car industry, at least in this country, is out of touch with its customers, so ripe for the Apple touch. It's high-profile, begging to be integrated with practically everything, and all very glossy. Start high-end, move down-market, and create a whole new class of vehicle.

Can Steve and Jonathon resist? It would certainly be an amazing third act for Steve Jobs.

Tags: Wild Guesses, Apple, Cars

100 products: what you paid for on the left vs. what you got on the right. See the English write-up at Fantasticus, or go to Pundo3000, the original German site.

Tags: Food, Reality, Pigs With Lipstick

Illicit footage from WWDC on YouTube: James Dempsey and the Breakpoints singing Release Me, I Love View, and Designated Initializer.

It's probably the best-kept secret of WWDC: all the sessions are set to song. I hope someone posts Bertrand Serlet's crooning.

Tags: Cocoa, WWDC, Objective-C, Breakpoints, Video

I'm back from WWDC 2008 and catching up with real life. It was fun, busy, tiring, informative, interesting, and packed with people engrossed in their laptops. I met a whole bunch of people who I knew online, as well as seeing many of the regulars from Cocoaheads. I've posted 94 photos at SmugMug, several of which are posted here.

Keynote

The keynote is of course very popular. I arrived two hours before the start and was about halfway back on the right. Here is the view I had of the procedings:

Seeing the real thing was great, but unless you have a good seat there is much real but not very much thing. Lots of excitement, but I was more interested in the state of the union talks that occurred later in the day.

Al Gore was at the keynote, and I snapped a photo of him in his way down on the escalator:

Room and Board

I kept the cost down by not staying in San Francisco and spending >$250 a night. Instead I commuted from the south bay, which, while inexpensive at $10.50 for a round-trip BART ticket, took out four hours from each day, much of which came at the expense of sleep. Finding parking at Fremont BART can be hard if you don't get there before 7am, so that pretty much controlled my timetable. By Thursday I was way too tired and went home early, so missing the bash.

The food was pretty decent, especially considering that there were more than 5000 people there. Pre-packaged cold lunches were served at midday, and there were things to nibble on several evenings. Breakfast materials (doughnuts, bagels, etc) were there at 8am. The afternoons saw snacks and fruit arrive. Coffee and tea was available much of the time. I brought extra food and ate it all.

Sessions and Labs

The sessions themselves were very well done. The sound systems were excellent, so I could sit anywhere and hear perfectly well. Many of the seats had power strips attached to the legs so I could juice up my MacBook while I listened. The speakers, typically engineers and others working directly with the technologies, spoke and presented well. The product evangelists and other engineers were on hand for the Q and As that followed each session.

I didn't get a great deal out of the labs, but that was mainly because I didn't have specific questions or problems, and had no app to show. The User Interface lab was completely sold out. The people in the labs rotate each day, so I only found out too late that I had missed the experts for a certain subject in the Graphics and Imaging lab and those that were there could not help me. So it pays to ask exactly what their schedule is day to day.

Cocoaheads

Tuesday night was Cocoaheads in the Apple store and it was packed:

There were a selection of indy Mac developers present talking about their companies and applications. Scott Stevenson has more information on his blog. Unfortunately there were no recordings made.

Infrastructure

Wireless networking was everywhere and hard ethernet ports were in several areas. On only a couple of occasions could I not get a signal. The infrastructure could sustain an awful lot of traffic: the only time I had to wait for anything was when I needed a 1.6GB installer and found that almost everybody at my table was downloading it at the same time.

Everything Else

There were non-Cocoa happenings too. Juggling took place on level two most days:

and there were many informal groups getting together and chatting.

The Apple Design Awards went quickly as they had a lot to cram in: Mac and iPhone this year. The little cubes light up when you touch the top, as you can see in this photo:

It was a pretty good place for photography, but only if you like taking photos of geeks with laptops and have the equipment to contend with low light and busy backgrounds.

Light levels and color vary enormously. I lugged a backpack with 20 lbs of computer and camera gear with me all week and got some pretty good photos. However I was constantly changing lenses. My favorite lens was the 85mm f/1.8 (about 135mm equivalent). I can see why people with full-frame cameras rave about the 135mm f/2L: it's a very useful length and aperture. The only lens I took but didn't use was the 50mm f/1.8. I used the 17-55 f/2.8 instead. A longer focal length would have been useful at times, but probably not worth the weight.

Next Year

Will I be back in 2009? Probably yes. It's expensive (especially since I'm self-employed) and a lot of work, but it's definitely part of being serious about development with Cocoa and Objective-C. I've come back with all sorts of ideas and a head full of knowledge that I would not have had otherwise.

Tags: WWDC, Apple, CocoaHeads, Laptop, Photography, Juggling, Al Gore

Stripey Hat: 1/160s f/9.0 ISO200 120mm, Canon 30D, Canon 70-200 f/2.8L IS

I'm treating WWDC as a photography opportunity as well as a Cocoa opportunity. I'll be taking a collection of my own lenses, plus two that were leant to me for the week. I don't have a flash (except the one built into the Canon 30D), so I'll be challenged by low light.

The 80mm f/1.8 is equivalent to about 135mm, good for across the room shots of people, and the longest lens I am planning in taking. The 24mm f/1.4L is equivalent to about 38mm and will be good close up. Neither of these have image stabilization, so although they will give me low-light capability, it will be blurry if I can't hold the camera still enough. That's why the 17-55 f2.8 IS may be there as well: it's the widest and has IS. I'll also carry the 50mm f/1.8. It's plastic, very small, light, and inexpensive.

Since I'm commuting each day, I'll be able to switch equipment often, ditching the things I find myself not using. It's possible I'll lug the very heavy 70-200 f/2.8L IS around, but I'll need a very good reason. Other than camera and lenses I'll take nothing special. Maybe a tiny tripod, but otherwise just things like spare cards and a spare battery, download cable and a card reader. I'll be processing the images on my Macbook using Aperture and uploading to SmugMug when I get a chance.

Tags: Photography, WWDC, Lenses, Canon

Attendees were picking up their badges at Moscone West this morning. I bumped into Fraser Speirs there.

No Doubt Who Is Here: 1/2000s f/5.0 ISO200 24mm -0.3ev, Canon 30D, Canon 24mm f/1.4L

No word on whether there will be any sort of Aperture meet-up so far. There's plenty going an already actually. I planned my sessions the other day and it is packed with good stuff.

Blue and Purple: 1/250s f/5.6 ISO200 24mm -0.3ev, Canon 30D, Canon 24mm f/1.4L

Tags: WWDC, Aperture

I'll be at WWDC next week, commuting daily from the South Bay. My iChat handle is bagelturf@mac.com, so feel free to say hi. I'm likely to be wearing one of these shirts, so you might be able to pick me out from the crowd of five thousand or so attendees.

I'll be there with my camera gear, including two lenses that were loaned to me by a friend, so there should be plenty of photos that week. Check my WWDC 2008 gallery for updates.

Predictions? A tough call as always. I have an almost 100% record of being wrong, but here goes:

1. 3G not only in the new iPhone, but in all new laptops from here on

2. A switch to LLVM as a base for all code compilation

3. A paid software update service for developers -- just like Software Update, but with more bells and whistles

4. A new .Mac offering scalable back-end services to iPhone developers

Tags: WWDC, Photography, Wild Guesses, Apple