Life is grand

And so, in conclusion, the P5000 is a product that - like so many we look at - has an achilles heel that we feel is important enough to reduce its rating, because it has a serious effect on the overall usability of an otherwise excellent camera.

- DPReview of the Nikon Coolpix P5000.

The Nikon Coolpix P5000 sounds like exactly what I have been looking for. I have a Canon EOS 20D which is fantastic but hardly portable. For a long while now I’ve been wanting a pocketable camera that produces good results, has manual controls and is fast to use. The P5000 ticks every one of those boxes except the fast to use one.

Apparently it can take up to two seconds to focus.

I don’t sit still that long, never mind my future kids.

I cannot justify it. Every situation that involves the words “pocketable”, “chance”, “unplanned” etc. require a reasonable focus speed. Party photos, kid photos, out-the-window-of-a-car photos, birthday and Christmas photos, Sunday walk photos. You don’t want to be yelling to your girlfriend “Don’t move for 2 seconds hun, it’s focusing!” You pay models good money to stand still for photographs, you don’t get your kids or wife to stand still.

DPReview does their best to justify it and say it is usable when doing landscape photography. But folks, you’d have your DSLR when you are doing your landscape photos. Not a pocket camera.

Argh! I am frustrated. Nikon, P5001 please with fast focus. Leave everything else alone.

Strange situation I find myself in on Mac OS X. Photographic management was, of all things, what I thought Mac OS X would be better at than Windows XP. But it isn’t. At least not for my situation.

iPhoto is proving to be largely useless (as you can see above) for what I want while Apple Aperture and Adobe Lightroom are too expensive and too complicated. Finder fails to beat even Windows Explorer.

My situation is that I use a Canon EOS 20D to produce RAW files which I use Adobe Photoshop to edit. I store my photographs on an external hard-drive in my own folder structure. I have close to 500gb of photos now from several years of photography.

The camera is great, Photoshop is still brilliant and my folder structure works well for me.

Where I am having problems is when I want to choose what photos I want to edit. Windows Explorer on Windows XP with the RAW plugin was strangely good. It loads directories of files quickly, caches thumbnails intelligently and lets me send a RAW file to Photoshop with two clicks. It provides both thumbnails and full-screen previews for finer detail.

Finder on the other hand provides thumbnails but when you want to do full screen previews it loads the Preview app. which is dog slow with RAW files. It takes a few seconds to flip between two files and doesn’t cache meaning a flip is always slow, not just slow the first time.

iPhoto on the other hand does cache and does it well. The new compare feature in the full-screen view is excellent. iPhoto handles 9000 files with ease.

But it has two major problems. To send a file to Photoshop you have to exit the full-screen view, back into the normal app view and right-click and Edit in External Editor. Why not just right-click in the full-screen view?

The other is that the cache is static and is stored on your local disc. A thumbnail cache of 500 gigs of photos is itself large, about 20gb.

iPhoto made that cache on import but I thought that if the cache was deleted it would repopulate it as you loaded photos. But no. It doesn’t. Once you delete the cache iPhoto just sits there showing a view like above and doesn’t regenerate thumbnails or full-screen previews. It does go off and fetch a preview of the file you are viewing in the full-screen view but it doesn’t cache that preview, making flipping useless.

iPhoto is obviously for much smaller photo libraries though I can’t see it remaining like this with people totting 10 megapixel pocket cameras.

Aperture and Lightroom are brilliant applicatons except they try too organise your files too much. I found far too much data was stored in Lightroom and it was a chore getting it out. That makes it a poor choice for long-term photo management. Aperture is just too expensive.

So I am left with no workable way of going through a few hundred photos I may have taken in a day.

All I want is a fast, intelligent RAW previewer app. Something that doesn’t try to tell me how to arrange my photos and makes sending files to Photoshop easy. Too much to ask?

I am really happy as Earth Shots has included one of my photos in their 100 Days of Earth Shots video slide-show.

To be honest my photo pales in comparison to many of the photos in the list. Here is mine:

A co-worker brought a Samsung NV10 over to my desk today and let me have a quick hands-on.

It looks great, the blue ring set against the brushed dark-grey skin works well. It feels even better, probably the best feeling compact camera I have held. The body feels like all metal and the whole camera has a nice weight to it. The mode dial operates smoothly and with a nice snick-snick as you enter each mode. Power-on is fast enough and everything I tried was pretty quick. The innovative interface on the back works. It took me half a minute to get used to it and then I was flying through the menus, setting ISOs between shots and generally changing settings a lot faster than even on my Canon EOS 20D.

I like the feel and operation of this camera. Now I just need to figure out if the picture quality is good enough and I may have found a compact camera I like.

The weak US Dollar and the strong Euro is making my credit card itchy. For just US$686.35 (518.928 EUR) one can get, including shipping to Ireland, a Canon EF 70-200mm f/4L lens, Canon 67mm UV filter and a Hoya 67mm Circular Polariser. That is a bargain (and about 300 EUR less than the same on the usually cheap Pixmania.ie)

Late Christmas present to me? Must resist!

While away my Flickr pro. account expired. It isn’t serious as they keep all your data until you renew. It is frustrating though as I have a few gigs of photos to upload from my travels but I dare not as I fear they will be subject to non-pro. account restrictions (like no original version kept.)

Sadly the renewal process is flawed. It uses PayPal which while very useful has some policies that may be in the interests of safety but are in the path of utility. I have a zero sending limit on my PayPal account. Flickr says it can process credit cards without a PayPal account but if your credit card number is in PayPals database then you have to use your PayPal account. Except I cannot because of the zero sending limit. Removing my credit card number from PayPal does not get around this problem. Obviously PayPal are still tracking all cards even if you have removed them.

To increase the sending limit PayPal debits your account with US$1.50 and in your credit card statement prints a code that you then enter into PayPal.

As we all know though credit card statements either take a month to appear or, if you have online access, about 4 days.

So for the simplest act of wanting to renew my Flickr account I have to go through this 4 day process with PayPal. Not happy.

Interesting. In the past month or so I have had 4 hits from professional publishers wanting to use photos of mine they found on Flickr. I am not a professional photographer, don’t advertise my photos and have had fewer hits in the past year than the past month. I wonder if Flickr is becoming a viable stockphoto choice for publishers?

Songs From Black Mountain

Originally uploaded by coda.

Glickr is hilarious. Give it a tag, your Flickr screen name and then select the photos. It will produce an animated GIF. Lots of fun with tags like the above which is my One A Day set.

Balconies

Originally uploaded by Jim Moran.