I’ve been using Sony CycleEnergy rechargeable batteries in my speedlights at $20(CAD) a pair. These promise the same minimal loss of charge while idle, a 10 years lifespan and the whole kit costs $29 – charger plus six fully charged NiMH batteries. Hard to resist.

Oh… there’s some other new stuff as well ;-)

Leaf Capture Remote 2.0

]]> http://diode.tv/blog/2010/07/13/leaf-capture-remote/feed/ 0 http://diode.tv/blog/2010/07/13/medical-marijuana-pusher/ http://diode.tv/blog/2010/07/13/medical-marijuana-pusher/#comments Tue, 13 Jul 2010 12:59:26 +0000 Patrick http://diode.tv/blog/?p=977 Another great shoot from John Keatley:

John Keatley Blog » Blog Archive » Medical Marijuana Pusher.

Nikon President Says Photography Needs Redefinition.

I’m back.

I’ve dusted off the road from my eyes, settled back in with the family and sifted through most of the pictures I took on my month-long canadian journey. Ours is a big country where lakes are inland seas and mountains reach the sky. Miles and miles of deserted roads and empty landscapes, time enough to reach inside myself and take a good look around.

I’m back.

Time to get to work.

I can’t move.

For the first time in my life I’m completely, utterly paralyzed and empty. It’s a rut that’s been building and has now taken on epic proportions, affecting me not only creatively, but physically and psychologically. My studio feels like a cage where everything has gone dark and silent. Days are both fleeting and never ending. I turn around and a month has gone by – but I have nothing to show for it. I’m like Allison Janney in American Beauty.

This has to stop.

I had a talk with my girlfriend about a month ago. We’ve been together a long, long time. She knows me more than she should. She basically told me to pack my gear, get in the car and drive. Find whatever, out there somewhere – fill my head again.
She’s pretty great.

And that’s exactly what I’m doing. I’m heading west ’til I reach the edge of the continent. The Rockies, Vancouver, Tofino, the Pacific. An ocean to kickstart my soul.

I’m taking an old Powerbook along but I won’t be doing any real work with it. I’ll process everything when I get back.

I know I’m going to miss my family terribly – just thinking about it already fills me with this crazy sense of loss. But hopefully they’ll be getting back a better father/husband/person.

So I’m off to seek The Canadians. I’m off to scratch open my eyes on 4000 miles of road, through the glaciers and plains of this Great White North.

Catch you all later.

Just to let you guys know I’ve solved the RAW Fine Tuning bug I was having.

After hearing about several users who didn’t have this problem on their machine, I decided to create a new OS X user and run Aperture from there: lo and behold, the problem was gone!

So it had to be something in my specific user folder. I took everything out of User/Library/Application Support/Aperture and started adding files back one by one. The culprit? A plist file called Raw Decode Presets.plist. What’s odd is that this plist contains specific information on every camera I’ve used since Aperture 1.5 but does not contain my RAW presets. It’s also not part of the new user’s folder so it’s either something that’s no longer used in AP3 or it’s created when importing with a camera for the first time.

Anyway, trashing this has solved the problem with zero ill effects; I even still have all my presets.

I think this version of Aperture might have a few issues with legacy files. It would certainly explain a lot of the seemingly random problems we’ve been seeing.

But after two pretty swift updates, things were starting to settle. I still had crashes here and there but they were becoming less and less frequent. I was slowly beginning to see light at the end of the Aperture 3 tunnel/mess.

Until yesterday.
Now, I just don’t know what to say anymore.

The latest chapter in the saga? With the 10.6.3 update Raw Fine Tuning no longer saves my changes between restarts. Sometimes. On some pictures. We’re talking same camera, same memory card, same lens (!!!!). Here’s a video of the  bug in action:

This is pretty huge. Especially when combined with another post-update incident where certain files from yesterday morning’s import session lost ALL adjustments I had made – brushes, crop, curves, everything. And they hadn’t just reverted back to their RAW state: the contrast slider had been set at -0.1, making the pictures completely washed out.

I have no words. I’m now scared and having serious trust issues with Aperture. And don’t get me started on print presets… I’m just too tired to get into that right now.

Anyone else seeing this bug? Or am I one of the lucky random few?

UPDATE: Another video trying to make sense of it all: