Just saw this story on Reuters about a new "bionic" hand for amputees. Great piece of engineering, etc. - but couldn't they have come up with a less corny name: i-Limb? How long before every word in the English language succumbs to the parasitic "i" prefix?
One piece of essential equipment for the digital darkroom is a pen tablet. Wacom are far and away the leaders in this field. Years ago, when I was a graphics designer, I had an A4 tablet. For photo retouching there is no real need for such a huge (and expensive) piece of kit,. Until recently I was using a Wacom Graphire 4 tablet. When the pen finally stopped working I decided, rather than order a replacement pen, to update to a new tablet: the clear plastic surface of the Graphire was looking distinctly scratched and ugly.
Looking on the Wacom website, I was intrigued to see a new model, priced below the Graphire, called the Bamboo. The blurb aimed it squarely at "office" users for the exploitation of the pen features now built in to Vista. The text carefully avoided mentioning its use for photo editing, but a quick study of the specs showed that it is functionally (almost) identical to the Graphire and more or less the same size. At half the price of the Graphire, I thought it was worth a try so I ordered one.
Wacom must be trying to win an award for sexy packaging - the Bamboo comes in a matte-black box that wouldn't shame a diamond necklace. The tablet itself is also very handsome, with a "piano black" strip across the top of the matte-black pen surface.
As I suspected, it works just like the Graphire. The only "missing" feature I can identify is that the eraser on the top of the pen is not pressure-sensitive: I never used the one on the Graphire anyway. In fact, the Bamboo has features that the Graphire doesn't: four large buttons and a circular touch-pad. These are all programmable so you can make them do pretty much anything. I've altered the default assignments on mine to give myself some handy Photoshop aids.
All in all, I like the Bamboo much better than I did the Graphire. It looks better, has those programmable buttons, is cheaper, has a better stand for the pen than the Graphire and is half the price of the Graphire.
The only "silly" in the design is the USB cable. The Graphire had a permanently attached wire: the Bamboo has a miniature USB socket on the top edge at the left. Why would you ever need to unplug it? I don't understand why they added to the manufacturing cost in this way: it just doesn't make any sense. And worst of all, the plug on the USB cable sticks out just enough to make it vulnerable to being broken, as well as making it impossible to butt the tablet neatly up against the bottom edge of my keyboard.
The driver appears to co-exist amicably with my Logitech MX Revolution mouse (another GREAT piece of kit). I have a dual-monitor setup, so I've mapped the tablet's surface to the main monitor only. When I'm Photoshoping, I have all my palettes on the secondary monitor and use the mouse to click on that screen and the pen on the main screen. You quickly develop the knack of "parking" the pen by swivelling it in your fingers so you can use the mouse without needing to put the pen down. The technique is impossible to describe but completely intuitive in practice.
If you're serious about editing photos on a computer then you NEED a tablet. Even the simplest of retouching is made easier and more pleasurable. And the pressure-sensitivity of the pen is a boon when retouching, ensuring much better and more controllable results than the on/off nature of a mouse button.
Unless you're into painting or heavy-duty graphic design on your computer, save big-time on the cost of any of the "professional" models in Wacom's line-up and buy the humble little Bamboo!
When I'm with clients, I'm often asked about my cameras. The usual first question is "How many megapixels is that?" In fact, that's often the ONLY question they ask. If I tell them it's 10 megapixels (a Nikon D200), I risk getting the response "Oh, my wife has a 10 megapixel [insert any Japanese brand here] in her handbag!"
Maybe it's my insecurity, but clients seem to want to hear a bigger number - much bigger than anything their wife/son/brother has. The perception (to those that don't know) is that "more megapixels equals more quality" and that the more megapixels a camera has, the "better" a picture it's going to take. Which is, of course, nonsense - from both technical and creative standpoints.
I'm not going to go into the technicalities here, but I will sum it up with this statement: not all pixels are created equal! There are numerous factors involved - the sensor size, the pixel receptor size, the internal processing electronics, the lens resolution, the lens distortion, and so on. Then there's the post-processing - what you actually DO with the pixels the camera gives you. I shoot RAW exclusively: meaning I bypass all the internal jiggery-pokery in the camera and feed the "raw" pixel data from the sensor into a big, powerful computer and some fabulous software which actually improves on what the camera gave me. The resulting picture is NOTHING LIKE what you'd get from even the best 10 megapixel pocket camera.
Of course, for some jobs you really do need as many pixels as you can get - like when you're going to print a full-length portrait double life size. When I need to do that, I'll go out and buy a Hasselblad H3 with a 39 megapixel digital back. Until then, I'll struggle along with 10.
But the consumer world is obsessed with numbers - how many cylinders your car's engine has, how many watts your hi-fi has, how many inches your TV has - and, now, how many megapixels your camera has! Bigger is better, more is better! Give us more! More! More!
Of course, you, my rational reader, are not swayed by such marketing hype, are you? You understand that quantity is not the same as quality, right?
As much as I admire Nikon's products, their marketing is beginning to get a little irritating. I use a Nikon D200 most of the time and it's certainly a great camera. One of the great features I use frequently is the ability to fire off 9 bracketed shots (up to 1 stop apart). When I'm photographing houses this gives me plenty of material to work the HDR magic. In fact I even use it when there's no intention to use HDR techniques - it's a lazy way of ensuring that I have the perfect exposure: one of them will be right ;-)
When I'm firing off 9 shots, it's necessary to keep my finger on the shutter release. A few times this has resulted in some camera shake, or at least movement in between shots. In the old days, cameras had a universal screw-in fitting in the top of the shutter button for a remote release - cheap and easy. But these new-fangled D200 digital cameras don't: they have an electrical socket elsewhere on the body. The gadget that Nikon sells to plug in there is an "MC-36 remote cord" - an overly fancy gizmo that has an LCD screen, lots of buttons and (apparently - I haven't worked it out yet) allows me to set a delay timer, an interval timer and the number of shots I want. Great stuff, but I just wanted to trip the shutter remotely. So I have to have all this other stuff that I didn't need. And I have to pay 222.49 Euros (about US$306) for it!
To my mind that's just plain silly! Sure there are cheap knock-offs available on eBay. I could even have searched for a second-hand MC-30 (the older version that IS just a shutter release). Come on, Nikon! That's just taking the piss!
There's never enough hours in the day or days in the week. Yet many of the tasks that burn up my time could be done by someone else. Hence I've been on the lookout recently for a good assistant. Anyway, to cut a long story short, last weekend a half-starved kitten stopped me and my wife by the roadside to ask for some food. We offered her some boiled chicken at a nearby restaurant. During the meal she expressed an interest in photography so I immediately offered her a job: general office duties and some occasional modelling.
Her name is Tiger Lilly Jasmine Esland Ferrão, Viscondessa de Sesmarias (apparently there's more, but it wouldn't fit on the application form), but around the office we generally just call her "Puss-cat". I'm suspicious that she lied about her dictation and typing speeds but on the modelling front it's looking promising, although I've told her she must put on a little weight before we can really go for it.
I'll be publishing some shots from her first studio shoot very soon.
 
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