Morning Coffee
Its always good to meet a friend for a cup of coffee and a catchup.
Fujifilm X100
So are we staying with Flickr?
I must confess, I was horrified at the changes wrought on Flickr this past week. Even more horrified when I see that in spite of the mass of negative feedback, both from the beta test group and subsequently from users, Yahoo/Flickr are as usual ignoring it all and making no noticeable effort to change what they have done.
Flickr is now unusable on my iPad unless I add
?details=1
to the URL of any of my contacts photostreams, or my own. The banner remains but the view is like the previous version. I dont get out of memory errors on the iPad if I use it. Sadly that workaround doesnt work for sets or anything else. Just the photostream.
Time to look for something new. I’ve been trying a few since the 20th..
1. Ipernity
2. Mejuba
3. Smugmug
4. Zenfolio
5. Photobucket
Only ipernity gives a Flickr-like experience and it carries, in its free version, the same restrictions as the free Flickr did… upload as much as you like (but no more than 200 a month, and only 200 of your photographs will be visible. You’ll get ads as well). To get full access with no restrictions, its around 40EU a year. On the exchange with AUD that makes it more expensive that either Zenfolio or Smugmug, and less appealing than the free Flickr which carries ads, but gives you 1TB of space. Guess I’ll stay put for now and consider the others.
oh yeah, Mejuba has not yet made the cut: it seems to have lost all my flickr imports… they appear to be there but you cant actually see them. It might have been my Flickr replacement and may still be if I can get some notion of where my imported shots landed. And Ipernity is trying to find out for me why it rejected a photograph of a lens I tried to post.
These things are sent to try us.
Photographic Discontent?
I’ve been an enthusiastic photographer ever since I was a kid, holding my Dad’s Zeiss up to my eye and shooting, then marvelling at what came back from the printer’s. I’ve had a gazillion cameras, and taken as many photographs over the years, and find that the genre I seem to do best with is the sunrise/sunset variety. And yet, I am sick of it. Been there, done that. I no longer get excited when I see someone else’s great sunrise or ocean shot. The joy has simply left me. And yet, I still carry a camera wherever I go.
Perhaps its just a slump, or perhaps its the sameness of the shooting that is really getting up my nose. I have taken so many photographs of the Newcastle beaches at sunrise, and Lake Macquarie at sundown, I am simply fed up with it all. It bores me absolutely witless. So, what next? I need to shoot (yes I do) so what… macro? Nope, bored with that too. The cat? Yes, I will always find time to photograph Tom or whoever follows him into my life.
I think its going to have to be people. I am going to have to bite the bullet and do some street photography. I have done some, in the past, and in the distant past actually did quite a lot but back then, people didn’t want to punch your lights out if you dared shoot them, and there wasn’t this rampant paranoia if you happened to photograph a kid. So generally, I’ll stay away from kids (I dont much like shooting them anyway, I am not kid friendly these days)… but I think I am going to have to start walking the streets with a compact in hand (not the DSLR: how to scare people off in one easy lesson).
Here’s some stuff I have done in the last few years… I just don’t maintain the momentum… but I must.
Here’s Tom: Best I have ever done
I don’t think any of the shots I have taken of Tom in the past, have been as good as this. Its been taken with my Pentax K-5, and the DA35mm f/2.8 Limited lens. Until the last firmware update, I liked the lens. Now, I love it. Autofocus is suddenly really speedy, and I am nailing the focus every time. I like the bokeh in this shot, also.
Dragonfly in Flight
I’ve been watching a couple of dragonflies in the yard, lately, and waiting to see where they might land, so that I could… again… try to get a decent shot. (Its something I have failed at, for a number of years.) Yesterday, I only had a 55mm manual lens on the camera (Pentax K-5) and did not expect much, the dragonfly was flitting here and there and barely remained in any location for very long. However, he took pity on me (thats what I like to think, anyway) and hovered nearby for just long enough.
The shot is cropped, resized and post processed, it looked a little less, straight out of the camera 
James Potter and the Hall of Elders’ Crossing
Nobody was more surprised than I, when I decided to read this ebook, written by G. Norman Lippert, and based, fairly obviously, on the Harry Potter universe, that I would actually like it. I’m not a fan of fanfic, but in the case of Lippert’s writing, I have made an exception: I’ve already begun the second book, plan to read the third (and fourth when its released). We cannot expect Lippert to write exactly as J.K.Rowling does, but he makes a decent job of it. Lippert’s Potter books are free to read in their ebook format and the links here go to Goodreads, where they have been published.
This is the first in the series, and tells of Harry’s son, James, in his first year at Hogwarts. James struggles with his father’s reputation, and his own expectations of how school will be. There are the inveitable bad guys, new characters (and some old ones) and a few unexpected twists and turns in what has turned out to be a delightful story. No, I’m not going to give a critical review, I don’t feel I have nearly enough expertise. All I can say is that I am finding Lippert’s books enjoyable, and once I have finished his Potters, I will probably end up buying one or two of his other books, as well.
Reading in iOS
That is, on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod.
We’ve been reading on iOS since its very early days. My first ereader on my iPhone was, in fact eReader, which read palm (pdb) files. It was a competent little reader but if you didnt have books in that format already, there wasnt, back then, a way to read them. You can’t get it anymore, but if you happen to still own it and have it stored somewhere, it still works. Then came Bookreader and Books, if you had a jailbroken device, through “Installer”, the predecessor to Cydia. “Books” has gone through several iterations since then and is currently in the iTunes store as “Tomes”. Its a good reader if you like scrolling rather than flipping pages. I don’t, now there’s a choice.
I moved very quickly to Stanza on my iPhone2G, and abandoned Books and Bookreader, discovering that Stanza could do so much more than any other reader around. It was flexible, you could mould it to your own preferences and that made it so much more than the other readers which were pretty much set in font, style, margins, day/night and so on. You could also add your own catalogs to Stanza, as well as access those listed as a default. Amazon decided Stanza had to go, bought it, and killed it. I suppose they saw it as competition to their Kindle app… but they could not have been more wrong. It appealed to a completely different market. A market which has not got many alternatives. The last released Stanza, 3.2, still works, more or less, in iOS 6.1.1 but you lose access to some of the settings pages (freezes the app and sometimes the phone itself) which is a pain in the behind. I still use it on my phone.
There have been other incumbents. I’ll list them, but won’t dwell, because they just haven’t made the grade, or haven’t been updated sufficiently well (or at all), to even get close to Stanza in functionality… Bluefire, Megareader, Apabi Reader, Readme, eBooksMobi all seemed to be good replacements at various times, but failed the test of longevity. None were able to replace Stanza for me. In spite of its limited functionality now, it is still a better option for what I want to do.
On the horizon though is a new app called Marvin. An unlikely name for an ebook reader, and had Kris, the dev, not posted on mobileread.com I would probably never have given it a second glance. Its only for iPad right now, but iPhone version is coming. I have it on my iPad and if I am going to read on there, its the current best option. It has all the functionality that Stanza had, and then some.
Its best seen on its own website before you hit iTunes to take a look.
Its intelligent:
When Marvin has read your book, you can:
✔ Look up characters, places and names in your book to see their biographies, articles about them or their photos.
✔ See the first time names appear in your book to remind you who they are.
✔ Find articles about the book and its author. Was the book ever made into a movie, a play or a radio drama?
✔ Pin any review, article, video or website to your book.
✔ Build summaries. Marvin actually creates a new eBook that you can read, annotate and share separately.
✔ Save all your research and share it easily with your friends.
Its flexible:
✔ Warmth and tint in addition to brightness controls to reduce harsh lights especially when reading at night.
✔ 2 column layouts.
✔ Customizable gestures, swiping to control brightness and warmth, page turn directions, snapping to bookmarks and chapters, etc…
✔ Dropbox integration, OPDS catalogs and a built-in web browser.
✔ Text selections across pages.
✔ A reading timer.
✔ Faithful layouts, extensive formatting and customization.
✔ A selection of beautiful reading fonts.
✔ User-defined themes.
✔ A bottom-heavy, specialty font to assist users with dyslexia.
✔ An alternative to a missing table of contents.
✔ Resizing tiny links such as footnotes to make them easier to tap on.
✔ English, Spanish, German and French dictionaries.
✔ Metadata editing, including changing book covers.
✔ Calibre metadata support.
✔ And much more…
In short, its probably the most brilliant ereader to come out for iOS in a very long time. Get it while its still free!
Current main focus: photography and books. This may (or not) change at some time in the future.
