Exciting Year!

2012 might not be a good year for some people. Financial meltdown, job loss, and there's the 21st December.
But not so for the photographic world, even at the start of the year, we're seeing D4 from Nikon, X-Pro1 from Fuji, and Lightroom 4 beta from Adobe.
Lightroom 4 now include a book module, and reworked sliders. A little bit confusing at first. You have to decrease the black slider if you want darker tone.

X-Pro1 is a particularly exciting camera, given the promise of higher DR from Fuji EXR sensor technology. It could be that digital will be able to produce film look at last.

Well.. come to think of it, some people will get poorer this year. Man.. I'd better not make any budget related resolution this year.. LoL

Back to work (or first post! (of 2012 :))

After a week of Christmas-New Year holiday I finally get back to work. I now practically have zero time for my personal muse. 


Two good books I recommend reading :

Who's in Charge?
Free Will and the Science of the Brain

Rational Optimist
by Matt Ridley

Rational Optimist
I've always been a pessimist, so naturally I have reservations about this book heheh. Early chapters of this book explains about the exchange of ideas, and later on, trade, which send me asleep. What can I say, I get bored easily, so I ventured to read other books, which brought me to the next book. Matt is sort of against the green movement, but given the facts, I think is justifiable. I must say this is a good book to start a year with optimistic outlook (hurry.. before 21st December LoL)


Who's in Charge
But after reading few chapters Mike's book, I can't help being fascinated on how our brain works and relate to Matt's explanation about how ideas exchange evolution. The fact that our brain consist of multiple processing centers working autonomously in parallel is rather amazing.


But as usual.. I haven't finish both books, and few others. So I'll write another time.


In other news, I got a new phone with my plan re-contract. Cost me $0, and it works great

First Print

Okay, so I finally unboxed and install the printer last night. Although after going through my picture collection again and again, I realized that I have little to print, I need to print something personal as a gift. A friend was leaving the country soon so I want to give her something nice.

So I print something from one of our dinner outings..
And....

The print was too dark...

At first I thought it was because my monitor setting was too dark. Then I recalibrate it using i1Display 2. Few problems arose. The calibrator said that green level is not high enough. The problem is that RGB setting was at their maximum value, I can't gauge it higher. The secret is that the value is all relative to each other. So I tweak down the red and blue a little bit, and voila! I also decrease the monitor brightness waaayy down. But the print result I had still too dark compared to the monitor, and the colors are somewhat muted.

Then I search for clues in the paper manufacturer websites and forums for some clue. I had a hunch that the paper setting in the print dialog is the key. But it doesn't have any custom paper option, while I'm using third party paper. After some searching, I set the printer to use Matte Black with Epson Fine Art paper.

I print the image once again, and... voila! Nice colors. I managed to improve the print only after one failed attempt. Not too bad eh?

Ok.. since I submitted my enigmatic cat picture for a print sale. I've been thinking a lot about what makes a good print. More so when I finally bought a large fine-art printer. I think now I have a grasp of what makes a good print and what is not, in terms of subject and composition. I had gone through around five thousand pictures from my collection, and found just a handful print-worthy photos. I haven't even set up the printer since I bought it last week.

I pulled the trigger

and budget....

Hollywood wants $$

So there is this.copyright law debate in the US. My view is that this is just a technological advance which Hollywood doesn't want to accept is not ready of.  I mean, the digital revolution has outdated the printing press. And the whole physical distribution chain. As much as I love printed books (and I just visited a very nice bookshop yesterday), I think it will be replaced by ebooks someday. I can subscribe 20 issues of NatGeo on iPad with 30 percent cheaper than printed magazine. Photographic book publisher Blurb now can publish your books to iPad too. Artists alike can publish themselves to wider audience. Youtube is a good example, a lot of unknown young artist record their own music videos and gain thousands of followers.

Anyway, I had a brief popularity yesterday because my picture was featured on TOP. Although I was excited that my picture is featured on a widely known photo site, I was also disappointed because it is not chosen as a print candidate. But now looking at the other photographs that also didn't make it, I'm quite relieved. I mean, obviously there are those which is better than mine.

Attended Google #devfest last week. I think that the web is becoming more like a platform, although I won't go too far saying its going to be the future. Which it probably will. :)
But I'm concerned that the browser becomes too bloated with. All those new JS API, CSS, multimedia extension, even SQL! Seriously....

But it will be interesting nonetheless