Absolute Blogmusings from an absolutely blank mind Night and Day – and SerendipityNovember’s picture-of-the-month is actually two. I spent transition into November on a business trip to Las Vegas, during which I carried my trusty Canon S95, and had a little time to wander the strip and try to capture the essence of this unique city.  
Las Vegas - Day ... Las Vegas - Night
Click here to view the images in the Gallery. The challenge, of course, in a town full of tourists with cameras, is to find an image that is not obvious and over used – and which is also recognizably my style. The geometric composition of textures, shapes and sky (left) is an example of my attempt do do this. It shows the always renewed and modern angular skyline dominated by the clear blue desert sky. Las Vegas, however, is known mostly for it’s appearance by night. There are lots of opportunities for great night photography, with bustling sidewalks, neon, and party people everywhere, but my other LV image (right) was the result of accident! While walking down the strip, with the camera set for long exposure, I inadvertently pressed the shutter and captured this fascinating impression of the movement, color and vibrancy of the experience. So, the secret of photography? Always carry a camera, be there, …and trust to luck! Making The Move To Mac (Part 3: Movin’)Out of the box, the first impression of the Mac Pro is of a class of engineering I’ve seen only in enterprise class systems intended for data centers (something I’m familiar with though my day job). Instead of the usual flimsy sheet metal and plastic and a bird’s nest of wires, the Mac has an almost cable-less design, using connectors directly on the system board and an all-aluminum chassis. An ingenious latch flips to allow removal of the side panel to reveal an interior which is clean and simple with modular aluminum clad sections. Hard drives slide on metal carriers which include captive screws (Nice. No parts to lose). Memory slots are easily accessible. IO slots are accessed by removal of a metal bar secured with thumbscrews. 
Before - PC 
After - Mac Pro I mounted my SSD in an unused CD drive bay, which is contained in separate module which slides out as a unit – the empty bay even includes the four mounting screws ready to install your drive! All I needed was a 2.5-to-5.25 bracket – the SATA connector was already in place. Same thing with the hard drives: screw them to one of the slide-in brackets, insert and go. The last thing was to replace the memory DIMMs with the 4GB modules – very straightforward. The Drobo external disk array was just as easy to set up. I added the eSATA card into the Mac Pro (no tools needed) , slid the drives into the Drobo chassis, connected the cable and turned it on. That’s it. The Drobo recognizes and configures the drives automatically and the control software on the Mac can change the configuration – I set mine up to be able to survive up to two disk failures (this reduces available capacity, but I can always change it if I start running out of space). 
Before - PC 
After - Mac Pro plus Drobo Data transfer from the PC was simply a case of mounting the old drives (taken out of the PC) to one of the Mac brackets, sliding it into the Mac, and then copying – either to the internal drives (set as a RAID 1 pair) or to the Drobo. Copying the external USB drives data across was just as simple – if a little slower. I used a free utility (Carbon Copy) to clone the OS the SSD and make it my boot drive, installed the applications (primarily Photoshop and Lightroom) and setup my email using the email folders copied from the PC. Finally I installed VMware Fusion, with Windows XP and then Qimage. All-in-all it was an incredibly smooth process. The hardest part was recreating all my old settings and preferences. 
The Aftermath
Making The Move To Mac (Part 2: What to Buy?)I have a very specific requirement for this system: - it’s a photo workstation that needs to run just a few programs well – primarily Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom. I’m never going to play games or edit video. Macs are available with various combinations of CPU cores and speeds – but what is the best configuration for my use? I’ve learned that it is best to get the fastest you can afford without paying a premium for the bleeding edge – upgrades rarely happen in practice, and you want to extend the lifespan before advancing technology makes it obsolete. However I still don’t want to pay for capabilities that my programs can’t make use of. Fortunately there is a great resource on the web, explicitly for photographers with Macs! It contains all the benchmarks and advice you need to configure your ideal system. It turns out that those Adobe applications are unable to make much use of greater than four CPU cores, but having large memory capacity and fast disks really makes a difference. A faster CPU speed does benefit many photo tasks though it’s not worth paying the huge premium for the very fastest. The middle of the range Mac Pro offers 15% more speed for 15% more money, so is a reasonable option, but not essential. Given all this, and the need to support my existing high gamut monitor (Mac displays look nice, but they are not the best for pro photo work) also ruled out laptops and iMacs. …I was definitely looking at a Mac Pro. What about memory? It seems there’s no such thing as “too much” for Photoshop! Apple memory is very expensive, but Kingston (a well known and reputable memory manufacturer) offers Mac Pro compatible memory for a third of the cost – so I decided to go for 16GB – Apple’s limit for the four core model. (It’s possible to go beyond that, up to 32GB, with third party memory. There’s a high premium though, and the benefit is limited.) For disk, I decided on a three tiered strategy: A fast SSD for boot and loading applications, a pair of 7200rpm SATA drives in RAID 1 (mirrored) for my main working storage (With another drive for “Time Machine” backup internally) and a “Drobo” RAID enclosure to give me secure external backup (up to two of the Drobo’s five drives can fail without data loss.) So with that decided, I placed my order… NEXT: Making the Move. Making the Move to Mac (Part 1: Why?)I’ve been building my own PCs for many years and, through much pain and heartache, become something of a expert on the subject. As well as every version of Windows, I have also have owned and used many Mac and Linux systems (I’ve become quite a fan of Ubuntu) – so I understand the relative merits of the technologies quite well. My main “digital darkroom” system just passed it’s 5th birthday (quite a milestone for a PC!) and was overdue for replacement. Not only that, but the main application programs I use were old and needed upgrading to the latest versions – not a small expense just for that. Windows had become increasingly annoying – systems need to be re-built every year or two as they become clogged up with unused files and settings and slow down. Because of the stupid Windows registry (urgh!), this means re-installing all your software from the original media and re-applying all the patches and settings. The final straw was when my system refused to shut down, and I discovered there is no way to debug the problem. Windows 7 is an improvement, but all the core problems are just the same. So, what about the usual objections? 1) The “Mac Tax”. It’s true you can buy (or build) a Windows desktop PC for very little money compared to a Mac tower (that’s the “Mac Pro” line), but investigate a little and you’ll find prices are not as different as they may appear. Dell lists a desktop PC for less than a third of the price of the cheapest Mac Pro, for example – but configure it to match the Mac, and you are soon very close on price. The Mac Pro is definitely a high end box – but if that’s what you need, then the price is not out of line for what you get. (Another reason brand-name PCs are cheaper is all the “crapware” that come loaded on them to help defray the cost. Something Mac owners don’t have to put up with – that’s gotta be worth something!) 2) Choice. PC builders like me have long enjoyed being able to choose the “best” component for each part of the system: motherboard, power supply, memory, etc. This makes sense compared to brand name PCs designed to minimize cost by using the cheapest commodity parts, but the Mac uses many custom engineered parts and is designed from the ground up as high end system. I can still choose third party discs, memory and add-on cards but since the Mac unique parts are engineered to a higher standard than most PCs, the choice concern is really moot. 3) Software lock-in. Switching platforms usually means re-buying expensive software packages – if they exist at all on the other platform. In fact, in my case, my software probably cost more than the hardware! A unique ability of the Mac, however, is its ability to run Windows programs seamlessly alongside native Mac programs using software such as Parallels or Fusion. Although I can buy Mac versions of most applications, one of my key programs, Qimage, runs only on Windows and I wouldn’t leave it behind. On the Mac I don’t have to. OK Then. It was now or never … time to go Mac. (NEXT: What to get.) SPARK! Round 9 CompleteI sat out the previous round – Round 8 – of SPARK, but I was back in the writer-artist fray for round 9, which finished a few weeks ago. The results are amazing and varied, as always, and I encourage you to check them out. For those of you who don’t know, SPARK is an Internet project which pairs writers with visual artists of all kinds for mutual inspiration. You can see ALL the work here. This time around I was paired with writer Kristen Luft – here’s the inspiration piece I sent to her: 
The Great Affair Read Kristen Luft’s response: The Cost: A History. I chose that particular image because I felt it asked so many questions that could lead to stories. Who’s vehicle is this and what are they like? What happened in San Francisco to make them paint their van …or is it about something in the future? As always, the most interesting part of the project is to see what other people make of it - Sci-Fi monsters and nuclear Armageddon were not exactly the first things that came to my mind! Obviously I think too literally! I tried hard to not be literal with my response to Kristen’s inspiration piece. The imagery certainly drew me to water, but I wanted to illustrate the mood or emotional center, rather than just one of the scenes in the story. My title, “This Day Of Ideal Weather” is a phrase from the story, although the “ideal weather” is only visible in the very farthest periphery, reflected in the water. The focus of the viewer is not directed at the obvious subject (the boat) either, but rather into the rather gloomy ambiguity of reflection and shadow at the water’s surface. It’s as if the observer is turning her gaze from the blue sky and pretty boat to something darker and deeper – perhaps more introspective – that matches her thoughts. Anyway, that’s my interpretation…! (Of course, I liked the symmetry and reflections too!) Here’s the image: 
This Day Of Ideal Weather Read Kristen Luft’s inspiration piece: Annals of an Arctic Tern. Anyone interested in participating can simply sign up at the SPARK website – see you in Round 10! |
|
