Author Archives: Michael

Yes, We Can | Barack Obama and the Next Generation

November 7, 2008 – 10:10 am
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="900" caption="Congratulations Obama - Photo from AP News"]Congratulations Obama - Photo from AP News[/caption]

I am not a political analyst, so take what I say here as simply my opinion on the amazing and exciting 2008 Presidential Election.  The fact that Barack Obama won this momentous election states that the USA may be getting past the crux of race vs. the issues, even when electing to the highest office in the land.  The breadth of his win is amazing and it states that the United States is evolving in a new direction.  Senator John McCain is a true patriot and I truly admire him and his unending service to our country; however, this election was not his time.

This event is so historic as it changes the way the citizens of the United States see itself, but also for people throughout the world as they will see the USA as being able to do what was thought impossible - to elect a liberal, non-White President.  This election win is certainly a celebration and a high-point for many Americans, but especially for all African Americans, and for any colored person in the United States to see that the USA truly is a place where all things are possible.

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Art | The Difference a Frame Makes

October 29, 2008 – 3:35 pm
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="900" caption="Image #1 | Give your print a place to shine"]Give your print a place to shine

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Although most of my business is to capture weddings and special events, I do enjoy taking portraits when I can. One couple arrived at my studio to have some photos taken of their toddler and of all of them as a family. When they were shown the proofs from their portrait session, they were excited and ordered a number of custom finished enlargements.

I really enjoyed the photo session, and was happy with the images that they selected.  Many times, a great photograph is begging for a nice frame to turn itself into a fine art piece for a customers wall. I needed to make a custom built frame to give these images a place to shine in their home. The frame has multiple photo spaces in the matte to allow a collage of images to be displayed.

The end result was two 25″x25″ custom gallery style frames fitted with a custom archival mattes. They look great even without the photos inside them. Once the photos were placed and the backing was installed, they now had a nice piece of art that they can hang on their walls. Along with these two custom frames, there were four standard 16″x20″ gallery frames used to show some smaller images. These will look great placed inside their home, and now they can have some long-term images of their newborn son especially as he grows over the coming years.

If you have some nice images that look great on your computer screen, take some time and get an appropriate frame for it. I’m sure you will be pleased with how great that image now looks hanging on your wall.

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A Slow High-Speed Internet Connection?

October 14, 2008 – 8:30 am
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="900" caption="My old ISP can't find my lab"]My old ISP cant find my lab[/caption]

Yes, I did think about the above title for a couple of minutes before I finally typed it in. Really, it does make sense. I used to use an internet service provider with a company near where I live. For the most part, it was fine. The service only went down a few times in the 1.5 years that I used it. The downloads went fine, although uploads were slow. Even though I wasn’t planning on changing, the whole system went wack a few weeks ago, and I couldn’t connect to many URLs - one being the lab that I use for my custom prints - not good.

After trying for a few weeks to get the problem resolved with no resolution, and no promise of a future solution (this in my mind is crazy - who would stay with no solution in sight?) I decided I needed to look elsewhere.  So, since my brother works for Comcast, I thought it would make sense to try them out. They have a high-speed internet connection and of course cable HDTV.

Now, let me make it clear, I have a very good understanding about network speed and reliability. Reliability is paramount, and speed a close second. My wife on the otherhand, doesn’t really care about the specs, she just knows that when the internet goes down, there’s no Word Scramble to play on Facebook. Ha! Well, she wasn’t happy when our internet went down, and said, “make the switch, and let me know when it’s back up.” So, with the help of my brother, Comcast was slated to be installed along with their expanded cable tv setup.

As soon as Comcast was installed, I wanted to see what the improvements would be regarding speed. WOW. I have to say that the difference was incredible. Here is a sample of the speed test I ran after it was installed:

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="314" caption="WOW! That's fast."]WOW! Thats fast.[/caption]

This is a huge improvement over my previous ISP, and you can really feel it when you see web pages load faster and see the file size indicators running up so much more quickly. This is great once you connect to the site, but why does it take so long to connect? Hmmm…I’ve dealt with this before a few years ago, but not recently. Can it be that the Domain Name Servers (DNS) are not working well? Are the Comcast DNS servers being too heavily used, or not running on the latest and greatest equipment (of course I do not know, but I felt that it was reasonable to consider this)? Aha! This may be the culprit.

The DNS exists like an internet “yellow pages” so that you can type in yahoo.com or google.com in your browser, and then be directed to their websites without having to know that the real Internet Protocol address is 68.180.206.184 (yahoo.com) or 74.125.19.99 (google.com) This of course makes our lives so much easier and essentially makes the web functional to use. When the DNS servers are not built on a strong or robust system, it takes them a while to figure out that google.com is 68.180.206.184 and hence, “slows down” your internet connection since you have to suffer through this latency.

Just like the yellow-pages, there are other ways to get the number you need from alternate places. The solution, use a high-speed DNS server. In my case, I used another DNS server instead. The difference - amazing. Now, my high-speed internet connection was really that, high-speed.

If you feel that your DNS servers are slow, try out another one. There are many DNS servers that you can try. One of the local businesses here in San Francisco is called OpenDNS who service this problem directly. I have used them in the past and they do deliver on their promise to give you a robust, high-speed DNS server. For home use, their service is free. They also have a diagram on how to setup your home router to use their service.

I gave this recommendation to another photographer friend, and he said that the difference was incredible and felt bad that he’d been using the slow DNS servers up to this point. If you have a slow, high-speed internet service, try it out and let me know what you think.

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Lightroom or Aperture?

October 10, 2008 – 3:15 pm
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="900" caption="Aperture or Lightroom or Both?"]Aperture or Lightroom or Both?[/caption]

I have to say that I’m pretty comfortable with Adobe Lightroom™ which I’ve been using since the early betas; however, I just received a legal copy of Aperture 2™ as a gift from a friend who works for Apple. At first, I wasn’t sure if I would even install it since my internal hard drive is pretty full already. Then I started wondering, what benefits would I gain by using it?

So, after thinking for a few minutes, I loaded it up on my Mac, and Aperture found some images that I had sort of forgotten about. Cool. These are some of my earlier photos that were stored away in iPhoto in an album that is not easy to find using the regular Finder in OS X. I also found that I can integrate Aperture with my Apple TV that I use to show slideshows to my clients instead of trying to build it all in iLife and iTunes. This seems like it would be easier to do although I haven’t tackled it yet.

Lightroom will still be my primary tool and maintain my image library and metadata, but to be honest, Aperture will see some use as well in displaying slideshows. Do any of you use Lightroom or Aperture? Do any of you use both? I’ve decided that Aperture has gained a place on my harddrive and during the slower upcoming months I’m going to try to see how I can integrate it into my regular workflow. Let me know what you think.

Posted in Macintosh, Software, Technology, Workflow | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (2)