The Unreasonable Man

In digital cameras, there basically is no “focus issue” - other than people not understanding how the AF system works. The manufacturers do not make this easy by using confusing terms and symbols, e.g. the AF point select symbol looks just like the metering mode symbol… then they use terms like “AI”, which few mortals can decode (AI means “Artificial Intelligence”) - I never cease to be amazed at such user-confusing issues.

For beginners, here is a simple (simplified only a bit!) summary:

AF becomes easy once you realise:

1. There’s a setting for WHERE you focus, and a setting for HOW you focus.
2. WHERE is all about the focus points:
3. “All points” means the camera chooses the closest object covered by a point.
4. That may not be what you want so it is OK to use just one point, move that over the object you want to have sharp, and then focus.
5. As a refinement of that, you can keep your finger on the shutter after the focus beep, then recompose a bit, and then shoot. (we call this “focus-recompose-shoot”).
6. HOW is about how the camera behaves when trying to focus (regardless of the ‘where’):
7. This can basically be set to “stop when you have achieved focus” (terms like “One Shot” or “AI Focus are used for this) or “keep trying forever” (terms like “AI Servo” are used for this).
8. The former is best when you want control, but the latter is usually best when you are shooting moving objects like sports.

Basically, that’s it. Nothing to it - except after understanding, you need to practice. Yes, there are subtleties beyond this of course, but they are subtleties. Using just what you read above, you can achieve focus where you want, when you want.

If you use a digital camera, do you use the manual (”M”) mode? If not - you probably should.

Why? For several reasons.

One is to correct errors in metering. A reflective light meter like the one in your camera assumes that it is looking at an 18% grey reflective surface - otherwise its metering is off. So if you take a picture of a finnish bride in the snow, or of a gorilla taking a dip in a tar pit, your meter will get it wrong - the bride will look grey not white, and the gorilla will look grey not blacl. Manual is a way out of this (as are spot metering off a gray card or using exposure compensation).

Another reason is to consistently control exposure parameters and not leave it to the meter. Whenever I shoot with flash at an event in the evening or indoors, I use manual only. And if using a Nikon, I set my camera to “Slow flash”. By using manual, I can set exposure to get some light into the background. I might use, for instance, 1/30th sec at 400 ISO at f/2.8. By using manual, I guarantee I get those settings every time, and I avoid the shutter drag that Av mode would give me , which could go to very long times (think seconds) and spoiled photos.

And the last reason for manual is to obtain creative control. I might just want to turn the entire page white, or black. With manual, I am in control, not some computer that second-guesses me.

An American study in the news shows that “Virginity pledges”, a hot item with the religious right, do not work.Teens who sign these pledges are just as likely to have sex than teens who do not.

No sh*t, Sherlock. Of course they don’t work - in fact the study appears to show that due to lower condom use amongst “pledgers”, they cause more harm than good. As one commenter on Digg eloquently put it:

“This is why religion has no place in the modern world. A program that straight out taught kids about sex and proper sexual habits would be far more effective [than] basically just telling teenagers to deny their most basic instincts so as not to enrage the gaint invisible magician who dwells in the clouds.”

Hear hear. I just do not understand why religion still exists. It shouldn’t, any more than astrology or “homeopathic medicine”. Enough said. America, let’s move into the 20th century (yes, the 20th I would settle for).

Between “us” and “them” - “us” being reasonable-thinking people, and “them” being the UK Labour government as evidenced by people like Culture Secretary Andy Burnham, who in a recent interview said some interesting stuff. Among his rantings, he wants the UK and US governments to coordinate in setting “tight rules” for English-language web sites, and he wants to censor sites according to these ratings.

“If you look back at the people who created the internet, they talked very deliberately about creating a space that governments couldn’t reach. I think we are having to revisit that stuff seriously now”, he says, showing a disconcerting lack of understanding of the role of government. He adds: “There is content that should just not be available to be viewed. That is my view. Absolutely categorical. This is not a campaign against free speech, far from it; it is simply there is a wider public interest at stake when it involves harm to other people.”

Seems that the UK government shows no signs that it is slowing down its drive to impose Total State Control Over Everything.

Of course he has no chance of actually implementing these plans, and his idea to coordinate with Barack Obama’s government is far-fetched to say the least (and why do only the UK and US rate English-language sites? Is he not aware that others also speak English - say, Canadians, Australians, Zimbabweans, and even English-speaking Germans?) The practical issues are immense. But the unquestioned “we know what is good for you better than you know it” is scary.

Read the original interview, which contains Mr Burnham’s Internet- and other comments, here [link]. Even the New York Times has picked up this story.

In Mono, due to the storm:

And soon, this one too:

Playing. What else to do at Xmas. Whenever my life is not moving at jet plane speed, I am dead in the water. So I keep moving. I am spending the afternoon taking some macro shots, including:

And the appropriate-under=-the-economic-circumstances:

(Clickf for larger, as always).

Printing from a Mac or PC is hell, and I am in that hell.

• Many paper types, all of which produce different print results (none of which match the screen, even when you use a Huey etc).
• Paper that never matches the paper available in the printer driver.
• Settings in the application AND in the printer driver that comes up afterwards, and these settings are overlapping or exclusive. So for my HP printer, for instance, I see “Premium paper” as the option in the profiles in the application (Lightroom); “Advanced paper” as the only choice that comes near in the print dialog, and “Advanced Photo Paper” on the box. Come on - get it together! All manufacturers do this: HP, Canon and Epson (Epson’s paper works with an HP Paper setting on a Canon printer - but it is not available anywhere).
• Dozens of other settings. You want to simply print a picture - so why do you have to tell the application whether you want your “rendering intent” to be “perceptual” or “relative”?
• And do I want the printer to handle color rendering, or want the application to do it? How the hell do I know? How about, tell me?

With all these settings and contradictions, there are literally millions of permutations. So no two prints ever look alike, and none look like what you see on your screen or what reality looked like. After a morning and a stack of paper

This is all like setting up TCP/IP or email in 1980. Not at all ready for the public. No doubt eventually they will get there, but sometime - not yet. My advice is to not print at home unless you are very willing to spend very significant time, and money, sorting out a workflow that works - and then never update your PC or Mac and buy 1,000 sheets of that paper while it is available.

Meanwhile I have a large stack of of prints, and all still have unnatural red skin tones. Great.

Winter weather fun. My new car is superb in the snow: the AWD system works better than in previous ML’s I have owned. But the wipers are useless. Ice freezes on them immediately:

Leading to visibility like this:

Cleaning them does help - but only for45 seconds and they freeze again. Mercedes has no other wiper type, and no advice other than to turn the blower on the windscreen. Which does not help greatly, alas.

One storm over (25cm); the next storm just starting now. And it is not even winter yet. It starts 7:04AM tomorrow.

I found that using Canon Pro paper does not work on my all-new Canon Pro9500 printer. Not glossy, and muddy blacks.

Correct. Canon explained:

• Because it is a pigment (and not dye-based) printer, you cannot use the Photo Paper Pro range with this printer. (Now I find out, after I buy packs of 13×19″ paper. Grrr.)
• Ditto for the new Platinum range: cannot use.
• The glossiest good paper you can use is semi-gloss. If you want very glossy, use the 9000 (a dye-based printer).
• You can use only the types indicated in the “managed by application” driver dialog. These profiles, which are preceded by “Canon Pro9500″, include GL (Glossy - 1 is superior quality, 3 is good), SG (Semigloss, 1/3 ditto), SP Photo Paper Plus Glossy (1/3 ditto), MP (Matte Paper), and especially the four “Fine Art” qualities.
• You do have to tell your application the correct image size (13×19), otherwise most of the above will be greyed out.
• Also, if you select borderless, the Fine Art papers are greyed out - select a margin if you want to use those.
• If you use Fine Art, you get a margin; use the generic MP (Matte) to avoid this.
• I have found that Epson Ultra Premium Photo Glossy works fine (but the largest size is 8.5 x 11).

So. I just used a sheet of Photo Paper Plus semigloss with the iMac set to “printer manages color” and SG1 profile, and the print is great. Not glossy, and the Pro paper I bought is wasted, but hey, all a learning process.