I was reading about Lastolite’s KickerLite recently. It’s essentially a softbox that goes on the floor and angles upward, allowing to fill a subject from beneath. Great for portrait. It folds up nicely (a bit like the Hilite) and I’m sure it’s a joy to work with. It’s $265 (CDN). Well worth it I’m sure. But still…

So anyway… I was cleaning up my studio yesterday, trying to organize things a bit better. It’s a small studio, with space at a premium, and I was thinking of folding up the two Portalite softboxes that came with the Elinchrom BX500ri kit I bought a while ago. They’re fine but a little small and I don’t use them all that much (I usually prefer the 60″ Softlighter). I put one down on the floor while trying to decide what to do and noticed its angle: more or less 45 degrees. And stable. I also thought: “hmm… an SB-900 would fit perfectly through that Elinchrom speedring.”

I was right. And now I have my KickerLite:

In fact, I can even have two of them if I want :-)

This diagramed shoot shows the effect it has. It works really well for a clamshell lighting look,  and since it’s used as fill the SB-900 doesn’t even flinch at the job: I’m at 1/128 power, shooting at f6.3 with the BX500ri as key. I could go way up with this setup.

New gear is nice. Finding uses for the gear you already have: priceless.

Just received my brand new iMac 27 Quad-Core i7 – yay!
I haven’t plugged it in yet, which is completely out of character for me. I’m usually like a kid at Christmas with this stuff. But the poor thing is freezing cold and I figured it might be a good idea to let it warm up first. So tonight’s the night!

I won’t move it into full fledged production until I’ve tested it for the now well-known problems that have made the rounds on the net these past few weeks. Can’t wait to try out Aperture on this machine though – 2, 3 or X!

And yes – it’s really beautiful, even when it’s turned off :-)

Quick reaction: I’m an iMac guy. I know I should be Mac Pro given what I do but I’ve always been a sucker for design and the combo of 24in iMac with an added 20in screen for less than the price of a Mac Pro well… it’s hard to resist. Add ultra-silent operation to the mix and I’m there. But my machine has been showing its age for a year now and I’ve been itching for new gear. Well folks, change is upon us!

Apple introduced new iMacs today and the changes are pretty spectacular. They’ve dropped the 24 inch model for a new 27 inch display at 2560-by-1440 resolution. And at last: quad-core has landed! I had skipped the last round of updates because I was holding out for this. So color me happy.

The specs for my new iMac will be the following:
2.66GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5
8GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM – 4x2GB
1TB Serial ATA Drive
ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB

That’s right: 8GB of RAM! It comes stock with 4. I might also get the 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 for $200.00 more. If I do the grand total will be $2500 CA which is less than what I paid for my Core2Duo 2.1 machine with 2gb of RAM.

I’ve been looking into the differences between i5 and i7 processors and the biggest one is support for hyper-threading which I believe allows for 8 virtual cores – which means running more tasks in a more efficient manner. Does this allow for real-world performance boosts? Probably depends on the application.
Aperture 3 could use that quite well dontcha think? C’mon Apple, might as well take all my money…

Other features of interest:
- In-plane switching (IPS) which apparently increases the viewing angle while minimizing color-shift.
- The new Magic Mouse  looks pretty sweet. Just in time too: my Mighty Mouse finally gave up three weeks ago.

The biggest unknown for me is the glossy LED display and color accuracy. I’ve never had color problems with my current machine (matte screen) and the spyder3pro. I’ve heard of problems with screen brightness on the previous generation LCD displays but I’ll need to look into this. Apple states that “LED backlighting also gives you greater control over screen brightness. So you can finely tune the iMac display to suit the ambient light in even the dimmest room.” It’s nice to hear. Now it needs to also be true for day-to-day operation. I’ve bookmarked ColorEyes Display Pro just in case.

This doesn’t fix the problem with Aperture printing though….

UPDATE:
I’m having serious printing problems with my Epson R2880: when trying to print from Aperture (2.1.4) any paper I choose is apparently stuck at roll paper, giving a wrong source error when it reaches the printer. I now have to hit preview, select the correct page setup and profile and print from there. So far this seems to work. But it’s a pain and not what I want to be stuck doing for very long.

I had this problem before but only when printing to Manual-Roll. Now even Sheet Feeder options don’t work. This would all be fixed if we only had a proper Page Setup option in Aperture as in every other OS X application…

There’s also a color shift problem with all my Ilford and Hahnemuhle profiles. Fortunately this is fixed by disabling Black Point Compensation as discussed  in this KB article.

But I’m now considering going back to Leopard. Not sure yet.

UPDATE 2:
I’ve now tested and confirmed that when using the Preview option the generated temporary PDF file contains the Aperture print dialog’s sharpening setup. So for now it’s a functional workaround – not elegant but functional. I’ve created presets for all my paper sizes and profiles in Preview so I don’t have to recreate them each time I need to print. Of course, they don’t appear in Aperture’s solitary little world (!!!!!). I also need to add that I hadn’t printed since the 2.1.4 update, so the culprit might be that particular update and not 10.6.

For those wondering how Aperture 2 plays with the new Snow Leopard update: on the most part it seems fine from here. In fact, it feels a tad faster on my machine especially when loading projects and launching the adjustments pane. This is with the 2.1.4 update applied when it came out last week.

I say on the most part because Full Screen mode feels a little flaky: in testing the waters I had a repeatable instance of a pretty long delay when switching in and out of it. And Expose no longer functions while in this mode either (nor does command-tab but I think that was the case before). Same goes for Spaces (which I’ve just reactivated to test under the new OS). Keep in mind that I’m running all this on an aging 2006 iMac 24 – your mileage may vary. Interestingly, I’ve just read a few reports of users with decked out recent iMacs complaining of serious slow-downs when making adjustments under 2.1.4 and 10.6. So as always make sure you have a solid backup plan if you’re installing on a production machine.

Now for those still clinging to the 1.5x iteration: sorry, time to move on. And given the immense difference in both functionality and speed between versions 1 and 2, you’ll probably regret not having made the move sooner!

Now… can we get that shiny new box with a big 3 on it?

I’ve said it before: Zack Arias’s blog is a must-read for me. I love his pictures and I love how much he shares with the community. This week he posted a series he shot with the band Living Things where he used the Multiple Exposure mode on his D3 which also happens to be available on my D300 :-)…

It’s the kind of thing that can easily be dismissed as gadgety – which is pretty much how I had classified it after having played with it for about 3 whole minutes when I first got this camera. But his use of it made me rethink that position. It can become a pretty exciting tool and the reandom aspect of it is actually something that gets me excited. Here’s one of his pics:

Living Things - by Zack Arias

Technicalities
You’ll find this mode under the Shooting menu. It’s pretty sparse on options:
- You can select the number of shots that will be used (from 2 to 10).
- You can set Auto-Gain on or off.

This last setting turns out to be quite important actually. By default, Auto-Gain is set to On, meaning the camera averages every shot for a final blend that won’t blow out too much. Which means you get no control over the composition. Not good in my book. Setting it to Off definitely opens up the real power of  this feature by allowing you to blend as you go simply by controlling your exposure. Shoot your main subject at full exposure, then shoot something you want less prominent a couple of stops lower and things start to get interesting. It’s all about imagining the final result in your mind as you shoot.

Following are a couple of pics I took – Isn’t it darn nice to discover new stuff in something you already own?